The Bradbury Chronicles (2 page)

On other days, we drove to Ray's vacation home in Palm Springs. We dined on Mexican food, all the while clocking thousands of hours of interviews that surveyed all eras of this man's life story.

For his eighty-third birthday, my wife and I joined Ray as the Planetary Society threw a birthday celebration in his honor. The special gift that evening was celestial in scope. The planet Mars—mythologized in Ray's timeless book
The Martian Chronicles
—was drawing some 34.6 million miles toward Earth, the closest the Red Planet has been to us in nearly 60,000 years.

On still another night, Halloween 2003, I sat with Ray and his youngest daughter, Alexandra, and carved pumpkins well into the evening as a torrential rainstorm cooled the sunbaked streets of Los Angeles. Halloween was always Ray's favorite holiday, an appreciation he had developed as a child from his beloved aunt Neva—his greatest creative mentor. Even as an octogenarian, Ray still reveled in the ritual of All Hallows' Eve.

There were many other special occasions. We made annual summer pilgrimages to the San Diego comic book convention. During our first trip in 2001, Ray found and bought a comic book adaptation of Marcel Proust's
Remembrance of Things Past
for Maggie, knowing that she would roll her eyes and curse under her breath that her beloved Proust had been adapted into that most lowly of narrative forms—the comic strip. We brought it home and she had a good laugh.

From my initial meeting with Ray Bradbury in 2000, I have spent countless privileged days with this American icon, discovering the personal, human side to a man who has been a household name for decades in well-read households around the world. I discovered a few random Ray Bradbury personality traits that illuminate the very private side to the very public man.

He has an insatiable appetite for sweets; Clark Bars are his favorite. At restaurants, for dessert, he always orders vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce, even if it is not on the menu. One day while dining in a Paris café with Maggie, Ray ordered his usual. The waiter dutifully agreed to deliver the dessert, only to find he had none of the ingredients on hand. Panic-stricken, the waiter sent a restaurant staffer into the center of Paris to a renowned ice creamery. An inordinate amount of time lapsed, and, just as the Bradburys were ready to give up and leave, the dessert arrived, having traveled halfway across Paris, down cobblestoned backstreets and heavily trafficked thoroughfares.

Other interesting asides: Ray Bradbury has never driven a car, yet there is a chocolate brown 1971 Jaguar sitting in his garage; Maggie was the family driver. Ray resists taking medicine. When he has a headache, he favors self-hypnosis. He does not read other science fiction and fantasy writers. “I don't want to inadvertently steal from them,” he states. As for religion, he does not believe in anthropomorphizing God. “It's too limiting,” he says. “This universe is all such a great mystery. We just don't know how it was created.” But he does have his own theory. “It's always been here. Why not? That's just as plausible as the big bang.”

Though Maggie whispered on the side one day that his favorite book is
Dandelion Wine,
he claims not to have a favorite book from among his own work. “They are all my children,” he proclaims. “You can't pick favorites when it comes to children.”

Ray has a boisterous sense of humor—something that comes as a surprise to those who expect the author of
Fahrenheit 451
to be a brooding, dark, and paranoid visionary. Late one night, arriving home at two
A.M
., we got out of his limousine and Ray was, as usual, telling a story, all arms and hands and booming voice. He was laughing as he talked. Across the street, a neighbor's window cranked open and a dark figure peered out, yelling into the night, “Shut up!” Imagine, telling Ray Bradbury to shut up. Ray laughed and we went upstairs, noisy and clamorous as ever.

He doesn't much like profanity. He was raised in a household and a time when bars of soap were regularly inserted into foul mouths for sinful utterances. But as the years went on, he grew more comfortable with the occasional curse employed for dramatic effect. Even then, he only cursed in rare instances, such as the time he was lecturing at a local university and a literature class tried to tell him what
Fahrenheit 451
was really about. They were wrong and he told them so. But they insisted that they were right. “No, you're wrong,” he said. It went back and forth like this for some time, a lit-crit Ping-Pong volley, until, finally, incensed that the professor and his students thought they knew more about the work than the author who created it, Ray told them all to F-off. Afterward, angered, he stomped out of the room.

While he may not often curse, Ray Bradbury does cry. Often. Tears of joy. Tears of sorrow. He cries when watching the news; he cries when people say kind things to him; he cries when recalling fond memories. Sometimes he cries several times a day. He is not afraid to express deep emotion. He is an unabashed sentimentalist. He is also fun, generous, gregarious, temperamental, brilliant. In my estimation, he is a genius, one whose formal education ended at high school, but who went on to educate himself at the Los Angeles Public Library.

But more than anything else, Ray Bradbury was a child born and bred on popular culture who himself went on to leave an indelible tattoo on popular Americana. Short stories. Novels. Radio. Comic books. Movies. Television. The stage. Architecture and design. Arguably, no other twentieth-century literary figure can claim such sweeping cultural impact. This book charts that influence, and in the process, it answers the one question Ray Bradbury is asked most often: “Where do you get your ideas?”

This is the epic tale of a twentieth-century icon, a man beloved by multiple generations, whose fans number in the millions, myself just one of them. But because I
am
a fan, and Ray had given his blessing for this biography, the inevitable question arises concerning objectivity. The memories in
The Bradbury Chronicles
are Ray Bradbury's. On rare occasions, research contradicted his memories, and these instances are duly noted. In the course of my interviews with Ray, his family, friends, and collaborators, as well as the research that took me through the files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to university collections, to Ray's own private vaults, not once did he interfere, make suggestions, or insist on reading the manuscript. He knew and respected my commitment to telling the complete story of his life.

And here it is: the life of Ray Bradbury. Whether you are already a member of the fan club or you are just joining, it's an amazing rocket ride.

—
SAM WELLER
 

Chicago, Illinois

Summer 2004   

Ray Bradbury's most significant contribution to our culture is showing us that the imagination has no foreseeable boundaries. His skills as a storyteller have inspired and empowered generations to tell their stories no matter how bizarre or improbable. Today we need Ray Bradbury's gifts more than ever, and his stories have made him immortal.

—
STEVEN SPIELBERG,
Academy Award–winning director

“I
REMEMBER
the day I was born.”

With this Dickensian flourish, so begins the life story of Ray Bradbury. The birth recollection was one of Ray's favorite stories to tell. Not surprisingly, it often provoked audible incredulity from his audiences—whether one person or a room full of Bradbury devotees.

“I have what might be called almost total recall back to my birth,” he continued. “This is a thing I have debated with psychologists and with friends over the years. They say, ‘It's impossible.' Yet I remember.”

This much is certain: Ray Douglas Bradbury arrived in the world, in Waukegan, Illinois, at 4:50
P.M
. on August 22, 1920, with Dr. Charles Pierce presiding at Maternity Hospital, a few blocks west of the small Bradbury family home. Ray had overstayed his time in the womb by a month, and it was his theory that the additional incubation time may have heightened his senses. “When you stay in the womb for ten months, you develop your eyesight and your hearing. So when I was born, I remember it,” he insisted. And who is to argue?

“Born to Mr. and Mrs. Leo Bradbury, 11 South St. James Street, a son,” proclaimed the birth announcement in the
Waukegan Daily Sun
. Although the name on his birth certificate was spelled
“R-a-y,”
Ray said he was originally given the name “Rae” after Rae Williams, a cousin on his father's side, and that it was not until the first grade that, at a teacher's recommendation, his parents changed the spelling of his first name. The name was too feminine, the teacher said, and the boy would be teased.

The origin of his middle name, however, is not in dispute. Ray's mother, a great cinema fan who would soon pass this love on to her son, chose his middle name, Douglas, for the swashbuckling screen star Douglas Fairbanks.

Of his birth, Ray claimed to remember “the camera angle” as he emerged into the world. He recalled the terrific pain of being born, the sensation of going from darkness to light, and the desperate desire to remain enshrouded in the shadowy realm of the womb. Lending further Freudian fodder to skeptical developmental psychologists everywhere, Ray added, “I remember suckling, the taste of my mother's breast milk, and nightmares about being born experienced in my crib in the first weeks of my life.”

Two days after the birth, Ray recalled his first encounter with real fear. His father wrapped him in a blanket and carried him into downtown Waukegan. They climbed a dark stairwell and entered a second-floor doctor's office. Ray remembered the bright, otherworldly light and the cold tiled room and what he would later realize was the scent of Lysol. He distinctly recalled the milk-white ghost face of a doctor holding a stainless steel scalpel. And then he felt the sharp pain of circumcision.

Many years later, a friend of Ray's, the author, critic, and editor of the
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,
Anthony Boucher, remarked that Ray Bradbury had a “back to the womb complex.” Ray responded, with typical Bradburian aplomb, “Yes … but whose womb?”

 

T
HE BIRTHPLACE
of Ray Bradbury, Waukegan, Illinois, is perched on the edge of a gently rising bluff that overlooks the slate-green waters of Lake Michigan. The city stands some forty miles north of downtown Chicago, as the raven flies. Centuries ago, this land was densely forested. Carved at the end of the ice age by melting glaciers that scored the soft heartland soil, it is marked by deep ravines that scar the landscape, eventually opening out into Lake Michigan. While the land to the west of the city is level farmland, Waukegan, with these dramatic, densely forested ravines, coldwater creeks, and the bluff the city stands on, offers a gentle contrast to the popular image of table-flat American heartland.

Today, Waukegan is a city at a crossroads. The turn-of-the-century grandeur of this lakefront community has given way to a long economic decline. In Ray's childhood, the Waukegan lakefront, with its sandy beaches, was a popular destination, vibrant and crowded with people. On warm summer days, it bloomed with colorful parasols, and men, women, and children swam in the cool lake. But decades passed and the crown jewel of Waukegan, its beachfront, shriveled under industry and pollution. Though the factories are mostly abandoned today, they still stand, like rust-laden skeletons on cold winter days as the winds gust in off Lake Michigan. Downtown Waukegan has also changed. Storefronts stand vacant; For Lease signs are propped up in many window displays. While some of the wealthiest suburbs in the nation are nestled on the lakefront between Waukegan and Chicago, Waukegan remains peculiar in its decaying isolation, an aging town with a rich history and the high hopes of future revitalization.

Ray Bradbury's connections to fantasy, space, cinema, to the macabre and the melancholy, were all born of his years spent running, jumping, galloping through the woods, across the fields, and down the brick-paved streets of Waukegan. His lifelong love of comics was born here, along with his connection to magic and his symbiotic relationship to Halloween. Although he moved away from the Midwest for good at the age of thirteen, Ray Bradbury is a prairie writer. The prairie is in his voice and it is his moral compass. It is his years spent in Waukegan, Illinois—later rechristened by Ray as “Green Town” in many books and stories—that forever shaped him.

In his fiction, from
Something Wicked This Way Comes
to the semi-autobiographical
Dandelion Wine
and its unpublished sequel,
Farewell Summer
, Ray Bradbury would immortalize Waukegan as an idyllic slice of small-town Americana. And indeed, in the 1920s and 1930s it was idyllic. The barbershops, traveling carnivals, and electric trolley cars were all a part of daily life, as were the annual parades of aged American Civil War veterans marching through town. On summer days, there was the rustling of maple, oak, and elm—a canopy over the sun-dappled streets. There were corner drugstores and cigar shops with wooden Indians perched at their entrances. Ice-cream parlors with their snow-white marble tops and their thumping ceiling fans offered summer solace.

But as with most American towns, Waukegan was more than its apple-pie visage revealed. A city with a rich history, it had a palpable magic and a shadowy dark side—just like its native son, Ray Bradbury.

Peering beneath his hometown's romantic surface is paramount to understanding the mind of Ray Bradbury. It is as if the city of Waukegan, with uncanny prescience, had offered itself up as yet another metaphor for Ray's imagination. Indeed, the city's history is full of images and events that appear sewn through the subtle fabric of its most famous son's stories.

 

T
HE FIRST
people to settle in the region that would later become Lake County, Illinois, were a nomadic Native American group known as “Mound Builders,” so called because they buried their dead, along with pieces of pottery, agricultural tools, and weapons of war, under large mounds of dirt. The Mound Builders, the ancient ancestors of many tribes of Native Americans, flourished in North America for some four thousand years. For centuries, this region belonged to them.

Western European settlers arrived in 1673, when Father Jacques Marquette, a French Jesuit missionary, assisted by a band of Pottawatomie Indians, landed north of Waukegan Bay, seeking shelter from inclement weather. More French explorers followed in subsequent years, as a trading post was established in the region between the new settlers and the Native American people. This trading post became known as “Little Fort,” or, in the language of the indigenous Pottawatomie Indians—“Waukegan.”

More settlers arrived at “Little Fort,” to stake land claims, and on September 26, 1833, the Pottawatomie surrendered the area to the United States government and moved west of the Mississippi River. On April 2, 1860, one year after the settlement was incorporated as a full-fledged city, now officially christened Waukegan, a prominent fifty-one-year-old attorney by the name of Abraham Lincoln arrived by passenger train from Chicago. As urban legend has it, Abraham Lincoln received his last shave at a downtown Waukegan barbershop before growing his trademark beard.

Six weeks before the national convention, Lincoln was on the campaign trail for the presidency. In his speech, delivered in downtown Waukegan to more than 1,500 people at Dickinson Hall, Lincoln presented an argument regarding popular sovereignty and the growing national dialogue concerning slavery. A town member who attended the event recalled it several decades later in a 1909 interview in the hometown newspaper: “Lincoln declared that civilization had pronounced human slavery wrong,” said J. P. Hull. “He said that we alone, the United States, with our boasted freedom, gave it the standing of an institution and that we did wrong.”

A gifted orator, Lincoln mesmerized the crowd, but his speech lasted just twenty-five minutes before being interrupted by fire bells. The glow of flames could be seen through the windows of Dickinson Hall. A conflagration had ignited in an old warehouse near the lakefront. The crowd rushed out of the hall to the lakefront to battle the blaze. Lincoln followed the group, but as they neared the inferno, they could see the warehouse was lost.

Another noteworthy Waukegan event occurred in 1894, when resident Edward H. Amet invented the Amet Magniscope, later recognized as the world's first motion-picture projector. A pioneer in the film industry, Amet produced short movies in his backyard. It is fitting that one of the most important technological breakthroughs of Ray's lifelong love, moviemaking, was very nearly invented at his doorstep.

Waukegan, in 1920, the year Ray Bradbury was born, was a booming city of 33,499 people. Some fans of the Green Town novels,
Dandelion Wine
and
Something Wicked This Way Comes,
find this number sizable; Waukegan was, in reality, much larger than Ray's fictionalization of small-town America. In 1920, the city was a bustling industrial town; the harbor was busy with Great Lakes ship traffic; and the American Steel and Wire Company, where Ray's maternal grandfather, Swedish-born Gustav Moberg, worked, was thriving. In the late summer of 1920, the beaches along Lake Michigan were a popular retreat, and often the Bradbury family spent their afternoons there. Genesee Street, with its whirling barber poles and storefront display windows, was picturesque Main Street USA. Peace and serenity presided over this slice of the Heartland. The First World War had ended victoriously. The country was at the dawn of the Jazz Age. Indeed, it was a good time and a good place to be born, and throughout his life, Ray Bradbury returned to Waukegan again and again for inspiration.

Certainly, the Bradbury family tree extended well beyond Waukegan, Illinois. Bradbury genealogical records document the family's history to the year 1433 in England. In 1634, Thomas Bradbury, born in 1610 in Wicken-Bonant, England, was the first in the family to cross the Atlantic and arrive in the colonies. He quickly became an influential member of his new community, serving as Deputy to the General Court and later as an associate judge. But it was Thomas's wife, Mary, who would make family history. On July 26, 1692, Mary Bradbury was summoned to the Salem Town courthouse: She was charged with witchcraft.

The seventy-two-year-old mother of eleven stood before the magistrate. How fearful this elderly woman must have been. “I am wholly innocent of any such wickedness through the goodness of god that have kept me hitherto,” she proclaimed. But her plea fell on deaf ears.

Mary Bradbury—née Mary Perkins—was a prominent and respected resident of Salisbury, Massachusetts, in the county of Essex. In all, 118 members of the community signed a petition, testifying to her good character. Yet even with her reputation, the support of friends and neighbors, and her husband's influential position, she could not avoid the charge.

In 1692, a tempest of fear stormed through the Massachusetts Bay Colony, prompting what would become the infamous Salem Witch Trials. What began with two young girls experiencing convulsive seizures escalated into an unprecedented inquisition. From May to October 1692, nineteen convicted “witches” were put to death by hanging, one more was tortured, and at least five died while imprisoned; all told, at least 160 people were accused. The town of Salem was consumed by hysteria. A perceived malevolent outbreak of the “Evil Hand” had overtaken the colonial New England settlement and the townspeople would stop at nothing to rid themselves and their community of this curse.

The charges against Mary Bradbury stemmed from wild allegations made by two men who, while walking by the Bradbury home, claimed to have seen a blue boar charge out of her yard's open gate. More people cited Mrs. Bradbury as responsible for an outbreak of sickness aboard a seafaring ship bound for Barbados; she had made the butter for the crew and, it was alleged, the butter had made the crew ill (never mind that refrigeration did not exist). A man testified to have seen Mrs. Bradbury aboard the ship. The weather had turned foul, he recalled, and there she was, in the moonlight, perched on the capstan of the vessel, an apparition portending doom.