The Bradbury Chronicles (22 page)

Ray and Maggie stepped into the adjacent room and saw a larger painting titled
Modern Gothic
. After studying the painting for a while, Ray realized that he recognized the grotesque structure. It was the house that had stood across the street from the tenement owned by the mother of his former friend Grant Beach. In love with the painting, Ray desperately wanted to buy it, but Maggie would not hear of plunking down $250 for it. Dejected, Ray spun on his heel and then, on the opposite wall, he spotted yet another dark, haunting oil painting. Again by Joe Mugnaini, this work portrayed a carnival train traveling late at night over a towering, gothic trestle. Aboard the train were dozens of faceless, colorfully dressed celebrants hoisting flags and banners into the night sky. Most bizarre, the bridge on which the train ran abruptly ended at either side. The carnival train was going nowhere. Titled
The Caravan,
the painting stirred Ray Bradbury's imagination. It reminded him of his own carnival-inspired stories, in particular “The Black Ferris,” which would a decade later inspire the novel
Something Wicked This Way Comes
.

“It was a spooky moment when I saw that Joe's mind and my mind met somewhere out in space,” Ray said. He wanted to buy the artist's pieces right there on the spot, but that was impossible. Ray asked the gallery saleswoman for Mugnaini's phone number. “I called Joe and a friend drove me out to his house in Altadena and I saw all of his beautiful stuff and I said, ‘Mr. Mugnaini, I can't afford to pay the gallery prices, but you split it fifty-fifty with them, don't you?' He said, ‘Yes, that's right. The gallery keeps half the money.' I said, ‘I'll tell you what, I can't afford to pay the gallery price, but if those paintings don't sell, I'll buy them from you for the price you would have got. So therefore, I'm not cheating you, you see. I don't mind cheating the gallery because they're rich, and to hell with them.'”

Two weeks later, Joe Mugnaini called Ray to inform him that neither of the paintings had sold. If Ray was still interested, they were his and he could pick them up and pay when he was able.

Joe Mugnaini was an Italian-born artist who immigrated with his family to the United States as an infant. Eight years older than Ray, Mugnaini remarked that they were “joined at the hip.” Like Ray, Mugnaini was a Depression kid. He was in his late teens the day the stock market crashed, and he worked menial jobs throughout the thirties, like a lot of people, to survive. But he had lofty ambitions and enrolled as a student in the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, where he studied painting and drawing. California artist Mary Anderson, who studied under Mugnaini in the late 1950s, described him as “enthusiastic, skeptical, vulgar, exhortative, Italian, dedicated. He was an energetic wild man.” It was this energy that made him the perfect collaborative partner for Ray Bradbury: Joe Mugnaini painted like Ray Bradbury wrote.

“I had heard of [Ray Bradbury],” said Mugnaini, in a 1990 interview in
Outré
magazine, two years before his death, “because he was a very popular guy. I think a lot of GIs who came out of the Army were reading his books.” Mugnaini recalled the day Ray first visited his house: “He got very excited and told me I was doing graphically what he was doing literally.”

Ray made arrangements to pay the artist on an installment basis. “Years later,” said Ray, “I found out that he pulled the paintings from the show to give them to me. That's the kind of guy he was.” A lifelong friendship and partnership was born.

The same month Ray met Joe Mugnaini, he began a correspondence with Bill Gaines, managing editor and publisher of Entertaining Comics, more commonly known as EC. The comic book company had recently risen to prominence as a leading publisher of horror, science fiction, and fantasy titles. Ray discovered that EC, without permission, had taken two of his stories from
The Illustrated Man,
“Kaleidoscope” and “Rocket Man,” and combined them into the story “Home to Stay.” (Unbeknownst to Ray at the time, EC had lifted two more of his tales: “The Handler” ran as “A Strange Undertaking,” and “The Emissary” had been published as “What the Dog Dragged In.”) Ray wrote Gaines, but he didn't admonish EC for its trespass.

“I pretended they had taken my stories inadvertently; they had read them, and then subconsciously stolen them,” Ray recalled. He requested modest compensation for the plagiarism (a meager fifty dollars), but it was more important for Ray to open up a dialogue with the popular comic book publishing house, for he had an ulterior motive. Gaines responded to Ray, and while denying any plagiarism, he readily agreed to pay the author fifty dollars for the trouble. Ray, in turn, wrote back, thanking Gaines, and proposed the idea of working together on “official” Bradbury comic book adaptations. Gaines, excited, wholeheartedly agreed to Ray's proposal. EC Comics began adapting the stories of Ray Bradbury in an official capacity later that year. The stories were adapted by some of the top artists in the field, including Wally Wood, Jack Kamen, Joe Orlando, and Al Williamson. The EC adaptations introduced Ray to a younger group of comic book fans, thousands strong, who picked up the Bantam paperback editions of
The Martian Chronicles
and
The Illustrated Man
.

As the summer of 1952 neared, Ray had done much work on his Illinois novel, but it was still far from completion. Ray was feeling pressured, but Walter Bradbury was agreeable. The editor had read drafts of Ray's Illinois manuscript and had a sense that it could well be Ray's major literary breakthrough. Ray simply needed more time. Walter Bradbury released Ray from his contract to complete the midwestern childhood-inspired novel and, instead, agreed to publish another Bradbury short-story collection. In turn, Ray promised to wrap up the Illinois book as quickly as possible. So Ray began pulling together
The Golden Apples of the Sun,
but this time the book would be a collection of mixed fiction that well represented Ray's continuing inroads into the major market literary magazines. While Walter Bradbury had kept Ray within the confines of science fiction with
The Illustrated Man,
with this next book the editor agreed to a collection comprising not only science fiction and fantasy but also contemporary and literary fiction. Included would be four of Ray's realistic tales that had been published in the slicks to critical acclaim in the 1940s. The first of these was “I See You Never,” originally published in
The New Yorker
. The story marked Ray's sole appearance in the magazine over the course of his career. “I probably submitted three or four hundred short stories to them over the years and this is the only one that ever sold,” Ray lamented.

The other three mainstream stories Ray included in
The Golden Apples
were “The Big Black and White Game,” Ray's first tale about race relations; “Powerhouse,” a story about a woman coming to terms with mortality and spirituality as she travels to visit her dying mother; and “Invisible Boy,” a tale of a boy convinced he has turned invisible by the make-believe magic of an old woman.

Alongside these realistic stories, Ray included his lovesick dinosaur tale, “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms” (published in the June 23, 1951, issue of the
Saturday Evening Post
and later retitled “The Fog Horn”), and “The April Witch,” from his long-in-the-works vampire family novel, a fanciful story based on a character who was a thinly disguised incarnation of Ray's beloved aunt Neva. Rounding out the collection were five new, as yet unpublished tales: “The Flying Machine,” “The Murderer,” “The Meadow” (a short-story adaptation of his radio script of the same name), “The Garbage Collector,” and the title story, a science-fictional Promethean quest, “The Golden Apples of the Sun,” the title of which was taken from a poem by W. B. Yeats.

Of all the stories in
The Golden Apples of the Sun,
only one, “Embroidery,” had appeared in the pulps. With
The Golden Apples
of the Sun,
Ray was assembling his first true book of mixed fiction. He had signed with Doubleday to write for its new science fiction line, but Ray's latest collection reached well beyond science fiction, offering fantasy and contemporary tales alongside stories of the far future.

As his friendship with Joe Mugnaini blossomed, Ray became more determined than ever to work with the artist. “We got drunk a lot,” Ray recalled with a laugh. But well beyond being drinking buddies, they respected each other's art. “Ray has always been a very open, very enthusiastic sort of guy,” said Mugnaini. “It's impossible to talk to him without becoming enthused yourself.”

Ray and Mugnaini discussed a picture book based on Ray's concept of a malevolent carnival arriving in a midwestern town. The book, as they envisioned it, was a precursor to the modern graphic novel. But the two men had other projects. Ray recommended Mugnaini to Walter Bradbury, and the artist was commissioned to illustrate the cover of
The Golden Apples of the Sun
. “I told Joe what the book was about and showed him some of the stories and asked him if he could do the cover for me. Maybe come up with one or two samples,” explained Ray. “He came back with twelve samples. He was that energetic. That was Joe. All the cover designs were so beautiful I couldn't pick one, but I finally selected the art that you see on the cover of the first edition.”

Walter Bradbury and the design department at Doubleday were equally impressed. Ray had high hopes to have Mugnaini do individual black-and-white illustrations for each story, and Doubleday agreed. While
The Golden Apples of the Sun
did not have a unified narrative thread like
The Martian Chronicles
and
The Illustrated Man,
it did have a visual uniformity through Mugnaini's stunning pen-and-ink line drawings; each story in the book opened with a black-and-white interpretation. As the artist recalled, he did all the work for $250. With this one book, the distinctive visual art of Joe Mugnaini became synonymous with the unique literary art of Ray Bradbury.

During the summer of 1952, Ray received a call from film producer Hal Chester to come for a meeting at Warner Brothers studio. Chester had a screenplay in development and had procured the talents of Ray's friend Ray Harryhausen to supervise the stop-motion animation effects. Like Ray Bradbury, Ray Harryhausen had been making dramatic career inroads, fast becoming a legend in the field of visual effects. From the beginning of their friendship, Ray Bradbury wanted nothing more than to work with his dear friend and best man, Ray Harryhausen. “We could talk for hours over the telephone,” recalled Harryhausen about the early days of their friendship. “We wanted to make a great dinosaur movie together. We would sort of pitch ideas back and forth. I was going to animate them and he was going to write the script. The ideas never matured, but it was fun.”

Ray now had an opportunity to work with his friend. He was eager to meet with Hal Chester and, on the day of their meeting, Chester handed Ray the screenplay and asked him to read it on the spot. He told Ray that if he liked the script, he could revise it or even rewrite the entire thing. Chester wanted Ray Bradbury in on his project, and Ray Bradbury wanted to team up with Ray Harryhausen. Ray agreed to read the screenplay immediately, and was shown to an adjacent room. After reading the first twenty pages, Ray was incredulous. The script featured a dinosaur encountering a lighthouse. It was straight out of his short story “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,” which had run in the
Saturday Evening Post
a year earlier. The screenplay had plagiarized Ray Bradbury. “After reading the script,” Ray said, “I went out and Hal Chester said, ‘What do you think? Would you be interested in working on this screenplay?' I said, ‘Yeah, I would, but, incidentally, there's a slight resemblance to my story ‘The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.'” Hal Chester was mortified. “His jaw dropped, his eyes bugged, his wig turned around three times, and then I realized that someone in the studio had ‘borrowed' my idea and written the script. Then they had called me in, forgetting where they had borrowed the idea, and asked me to rewrite it.”

Ray agreed to consider the offer to work on the script, even with the apparent lifting of his idea. As with his experience with EC Comics, at first Ray chalked up the entire incident to inadvertent plagiarism and let the matter slide. If anything, it showed that his stories were being noticed by other creators. Ray told Chester to be in touch, and left. “The next day I got a telegram from them asking to buy the rights to my story,” said Ray. “I didn't have to threaten them or anything. They got the hint when I dropped the safe on them.”

On July 3, 1952, Hal Chester's company, Mutual Pictures of California, bought the rights to “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms” for $750. Oddly, after selling the story rights, Ray had no further involvement with the production of the film. After making the initial offer, Chester never hired Ray to rewrite the script, and Ray never asked why he was passed over. “I think they called me in that day to test me, I guess,” conjectured Ray, “to see if I realized that there was plagiarism. I just don't know.” While he lost the opportunity to work on a motion picture with Ray Harryhausen, the two friends would still be linked in the credits of the film:
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
—Story by Ray Bradbury, Animation Effects by Ray Harryhausen.