The Bradbury Chronicles (26 page)

The monumental week Ray finished
Fahrenheit 451,
he heard that John Huston was in Los Angeles for a brief visit. Since his dinner meeting with the film director two and a half years earlier in February 1951, the two men had exchanged more than just cordial pleasantries. Huston had made it quite clear that he wanted to work with Ray and that he would consider adapting
The Martian Chronicles
for the screen. Ray was hopeful that while Huston was in Los Angeles the director would contact him, perhaps even with a firm offer to write a screenplay. However, with each passing day, Huston neither called nor sent a postcard, and Ray grew more discouraged.

On Tuesday, August 18, feeling restless, Ray decided to visit one of his favorite bookstores, Acres of Books in Long Beach, with Ray Harryhausen. As usual, the two childhood chums were looking for dinosaur books. It was a pleasant reprieve for Ray, who was spent from his last-minute work on
Fahrenheit 451
and the subsequent days of fervently hoping for a message from Huston. That evening, after Harryhausen drove him home, Ray learned that his wait was over. Maggie had taken a message from John Huston: Ray was to call him the next morning before 10:30.

The next morning, Ray phoned John Huston and plans were made to meet that evening for cocktails at a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Huston was staying. Recounting the fateful meeting was one of Ray Bradbury's favorite stories to tell. In fact, over the years, he had recalled the events of the meeting with scripted precision, and when he told the story, Ray always donned a gruff baritone when imitating John Huston. “I walked into his room. He put a drink in my hand. He sat me down and he leaned over and said, ‘Ray, what are you doing during the next year?'

“I said, ‘Not much, Mr. Huston. Not much.' And he said, ‘Well, Ray, how would you like to come live in Ireland and write the screenplay of
Moby-Dick
?' And I said, ‘Gee, Mr. Huston, I've never been able to read the damn thing.'

“He'd never heard that before and he thought for a moment and then said, ‘Well, I'll tell you what, Ray. Why don't you go home tonight, read as much as you can, and come back tomorrow and tell me if you'll help me kill a white whale.'”

Stunned, Ray left the hotel. “Later,” Ray said, “when John Huston described the moment when he made the offer to me, he said my jaw dropped ten feet to the floor.” On his way home, Ray stopped in a bookstore to buy a copy of
Moby-Dick,
though he already owned the book. His edition was unwieldy and slip-cased, and Ray wanted a smaller, more portable copy. In the bookstore, he mentioned to someone in the shop, possibly a clerk, that he had been offered the job to go to Ireland and write the screenplay based on
Moby-Dick
for John Huston. A woman browsing in the shop overheard Ray and approached him.

“Don't go on the trip,” she said adamantly.

Ray was completely taken aback. “Why?”

“Because he is a son of a bitch.”

The woman was screenwriter Peter Viertel's estranged wife, Jigee. Viertel had known John Huston since childhood and was Huston's co-writer on the 1949 film
We Were Strangers;
Viertel had also worked as an uncredited script doctor on the Huston film
The African Queen
. “John Huston will destroy you if you go on that trip,” she warned Ray, and identified herself.

Surprised, Ray pondered his response. “Well,” he said finally, and perhaps too cavalierly, “he's never met anyone quite like me. Maybe I'm different. Maybe he won't try to destroy me. I'll make do.”

With that, Ray left the bookstore and headed home.

“I went home that night,” Ray fondly recalled, “and I said to my wife, ‘Pray for me.' She said, ‘Why?' I said, ‘Because I've got to read a book tonight and do a book report tomorrow.'”

Ray was nervous. Of course he wanted to accept Huston's offer. But Herman Melville's book was infamously daunting, and Ray wanted to make certain he was up to the task. He hunkered down in his living room and read all night, but instead of reading from beginning to end, he leapfrogged through it, diving into the middle of the book, skipping to a chapter here, a passage there, absorbing the metaphorical components of the Melville classic. “It's an ocean of fantastic bits and pieces,” said Ray, in a 1972 interview. “It's Shakespearean pageant with flags and pennants and fleets of ships and whales. One minute you're examining the various colors of nightmare, panics, terrors, and the next you're studying whiteness. The whiteness of the Arctic and the Antarctic, the things born beneath the sea, that surface without eyes, and on and on. I finally got back to the scene where Ahab is at the rail, saying, ‘It's a mild-looking day and a mild-looking sky and the wind smells as if it blew from the shadow of the Andes where the mowers have lain down their scythes,' and I turned back to the beginning and read, ‘Call me Ishmael,' and I was hooked!”

The next day, over lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Ray enthusiastically accepted John Huston's offer. For Huston, it was a gutsy move to ask Ray Bradbury to adapt this monumental piece of nineteenth-century literature for the screen. It would be a Herculean task. And Huston had offered it to a man whose reputation had been made on rocket ships, tattooed freaks, vampires, and dinosaurs. In fact, though, it was Ray's lifelong love of dinosaurs that landed him the job. When Ray had sent a copy of
The Golden Apples of the Sun
to John Huston, the film director opened the book and read the first story, “The Fog Horn,” which had appeared in the
Saturday Evening Post
under the title “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.”

“I had read a number of short stories by Ray Bradbury,” Huston wrote in his 1980 autobiography,
Open Book,
“and saw something of Melville's elusive quality in his work. Ray had indicated that he would like to collaborate with me, so when it came time to do the screenplay, I asked him to join me in Ireland.”

It was a staggering week for Ray Bradbury. No sooner had he finished work on
Fahrenheit 451
than Huston called with the offer to write the screenplay for
Moby-Dick
. But there was little time to celebrate. Huston wanted Ray, along with Maggie, Susan, and Ramona, in Ireland in three weeks. The problem was that Ray would not fly; instead, he would travel to Europe by boat.

Ray's contract for the film work on
Moby-Dick
was drafted on September 2, 1953. He would be paid $12,500 for the screenplay; six hundred a week for seventeen weeks, and an additional two hundred a week for expenses. He and his family would be put up in a Dublin hotel. Ray's parents, Leonard and Esther, who now lived in an apartment five minutes from the Bradbury house on Clarkson Road, offered to house-sit while Ray, Maggie, and the kids were overseas.

Before the Bradburys' departure, Ray's father, Leo, stopped by the house to say good-bye. Leo Bradbury had aged gracefully. At sixty-three, he was still svelte, with silver hair combed straight back and perfectly bronzed skin, a result of his afternoon passion—18 holes of golf. He and his wife had never been particularly emotional parents to Ray and Skip; after all, they were products of a more staid generation, but they loved their boys in their own quiet way.

So it was a sentimental moment when Leo said good-bye to Ray. Leo was carrying something small in his hand, and as his fingers opened, Ray recognized it immediately. It was a gold pocketwatch that had belonged to Leo's father, Ray's beloved grandfather, Samuel Hinkston Bradbury. It had a round, white face bearing Roman numerals and in the middle of the dial were the words “Waukegan, Illinois.” “I want you to have this,” Leo said, placing the watch in his son's hand.

“I looked in my dad's eyes,” Ray recalled, “and they were filled with tears and I suddenly realized, he was going to miss me.” It was a quiet, loving moment between father and son. In a matter of days, Ray and Maggie and their children would be across the Atlantic, where they would stay for more than half a year.

I have been in awe of Ray Bradbury ever since my brother introduced me to his books when I was a young boy. I remember distinctly the joy of reading
Fahrenheit 451
and
The Martian Chronicles
at that time in my life. In 1973, I had the pleasure of doing one of his plays,
The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit,
a production that turned out to be a major touchstone for my career. The circle completed itself when twenty-five years later I was able to reprise my role of Gomez in that piece for our filming of
Ice Cream Suit
for Disney. My idol as an author had now become a friend and an associate. Of all the joys my career has afforded me, my relation to Ray Bradbury will stand as one of the most shining aspects of it.

—
JOE MANTEGNA
,
actor

O
N
S
ATURDAY
, September 12, 1953, Ray, Maggie, and their two girls, Susan and Ramona, boarded a Union Pacific train bound for New York City. Joining them was a young woman, twenty-five-year-old Regina Ferguson, Susan's preschool teacher in Los Angeles, whom Ray and Maggie had asked to be the girls' nanny for the trip to Europe. Eager for change, Ferguson readily accepted. “It took me all of about an hour and a half to make the decision,” she recalled.

So the five set off on their European adventure. As the train cut through Utah, Ray wrote the opening scene of the film
Moby Dick
. He was exhilarated. After sending his books to John Huston over the last few years, and exchanging letters with him, they were at long last working on a motion picture together. Two days later, the train arrived at Chicago's Union Station. Maggie took advantage of the Chicago stop-off to remedy a major packing faux pas. “We forgot to pack diapers for Ramona,” Maggie recalled with a laugh, “so we all walked to the Marshall Field's department store on State Street to buy a fresh supply.” The Bradbury family also visited Ray's favorite museum, the Art Institute of Chicago; Ray had always loved the 1884 Georges Seurat impressionistic piece
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte
.

With disaster narrowly averted and a quick afternoon visit to the art museum, the Bradburys returned to the train and continued the journey eastward. When they arrived in New York City, they checked into the Plaza Hotel. That evening, Ray and Maggie joined Ray's publisher, Ian Ballantine, and his wife, Betty, along with editor Stanley Kauffmann, at Don Congdon's Brooklyn apartment for a celebratory dinner to mark the completion of
Fahrenheit 451
and to toast Ray's new cinematic endeavor. While they were in New York, the family also did some sightseeing. Watching his girls' excitement as they had their first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, and knowing that he'd provided this trip for his family, Ray felt that his hard work was finally yielding dividends.

Two days later, they left for Europe. The Bradburys boarded the SS
United States,
a five-star, 990-foot luxury liner that had made its maiden voyage a year earlier; at the time, it was the fastest ocean liner in the world. The family stayed in two second-class cabins, one for Ray and Maggie and one for Regina and the girls. The ship was bound for Le Havre, France, where the Bradburys would then travel by rail to Paris to meet up with John Huston before heading to London and then, finally, to Ireland.

One day during the Atlantic voyage, the skies darkened, the seas turned rough, vast green swells rose and fell, and the ship heaved with the waves. The SS
United States
was headed straight into a hurricane. Regina Ferguson had been on ships before, but this was something else altogether. She feared for her life. Maggie and the girls were fine thus far, but Ray was on the edge of nausea. “It was a very strong storm,” recalled Ferguson. “There were sixty- or seventy-mile-per-hour winds. The first night, a steward came into the room and put pillows along the side of the mattresses where the children were so, as the ship went from side to side, they wouldn't fall out. He told me to take everything off the dressertop. It was a godawful storm.”

“There were lots of bumps and bruises,” among the 1,500 aboard, reported the ship's surgeon, Dr. John E. Sheedy. The master of the
United States,
Commodore John Anderson, held the stately ship steady; even through the mountainous swells, the
United States
did not take on any water.

Ever one to put a positive spin on a dire situation, Ray looked at the tumultuous start to their voyage as the perfect occasion to reread
Moby-Dick,
the story of obsession and vengeance on the high seas. Ray curled up with the book on the ship's afterdeck and began devouring it, and with each passing page, he was more and more convinced of its power. It was a book of pure metaphor, which excited him, since this was how he viewed his own work. It was also a book, as Ray put it, “with two midwives—Shakespeare and the Old Testament.” After years of self-education in the library, Ray was more than well versed in both. “My midwives were also Shakespeare and the Old Testament—along with dinosaurs,” he proclaimed.

Ray finished rereading the book at three in the morning in the midst of the hurricane. “There was no better way to read it,” he said. In the coming months, he would read the Melville classic at least eight more times.

As the ship powered east, the hurricane grew in strength, lasting three days without reprieve. By the time the skies cleared, the SS
United States
arrived at port in Le Havre, France, on September 22, 1953. There, the Bradbury family caught a train to Paris. It was late afternoon when the passenger train arrived in the city, and Paris shone in the golden light of the setting sun. With his face pressed up to the window, Ray stared out. He had, at long last, made it to Paris. He cried.

“Looking out the window,” remembered Ray, “and seeing Sacré Coeur for the first time, oh God! I was in Paris. As I looked out the window, there were men on bicycles riding by with big loaves of bread under their arms. How French! It was right out of the movies. The whole landscape, everything about Paris in those days was right out of the movies.”

Ray, Maggie, the girls, and Regina checked into the Hôtel St. James D'Albany, and that evening, Ray and Maggie strolled the streets, hand in hand, through a light rain. In five days, they would celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary. It was a moment he wished to cherish forever. In the decades to follow, Paris, the City of Lights, would become the favorite vacation destination for Ray and Maggie. They both adored the city, its art, opera, food, and wine. In the 2000 essay “Beautiful Bad Weather,” Ray wrote about his love affair with the city, his frequent visits there with Maggie, and taking long strolls in the rain. Together, Ray and Maggie Bradbury would visit Paris twenty times, and each time would fall ever more enamored with their adopted hometown.

A few days later, John Huston arrived. Ray and Huston walked along the Champs-Elysées and discussed the work that lay ahead. “The first thing I learned,” said Ray, “was that John didn't know any more about
Moby-Dick
than I did. It was the blind leading the blind.” Ray was eager to please his hero, but he was uncertain about the kind of script Huston envisioned. “I asked John, ‘Do you want the Melville Society's version of
Moby-Dick,
or the Jungian version, or the Freudian version?' And John looked at me and said, ‘I want Ray Bradbury's version.'” This instantly put Ray at ease. Huston, agreeable and respectful, agreed to let Ray write the first fifty pages of the script without seeing any of it.

That evening, Ray dined with Huston, writer Art Buchwald, actress Suzanne Flon, and writer Peter Viertel (whose estranged wife had warned Ray to turn down the offer to write the
Moby Dick
screenplay), along with several others. As she often did, Maggie opted out of the social gathering. She was the introvert, the quiet one, satisfied with staying behind and reading a book (and curling up with her cats when she was home), and sipping wine. Her husband, on the other hand, was gregarious, a talker, a man who fed on the energy of crowds. Much later in life, Ray lamented how much Maggie missed. But had they both been wildly bombastic and extroverted, the marriage very likely would have imploded.

 

T
HE
B
RADBURYS
left Paris and headed to London, following Huston, who was traveling there to take care of last-minute details for his latest film,
Beat the Devil
. By sheer coincidence, it was the same week that
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
was opening in London. While there, Ray happened upon a theater in Piccadilly Circus. Posters advertising the film were plastered all over the front of the movie house. Ray had already seen the film, months earlier, at its premiere in Los Angeles. It was a campy 1950s B movie, fun and innocuous, with noteworthy Ray Harryhausen effects, but it was little more than kitsch. It was a film that Ray had nothing to do with, except that it had been loosely based on his story of the same name; one scene in particular, in which the dinosaur lumbered up from the depths of the sea and destroyed the lighthouse, had been pulled intact from his short story. As Ray stood in Piccadilly Circus, he was shocked to see his name prominently displayed on the posters and lobby cards. He was panic-stricken. What if Huston saw it? Ray was worried Huston would think he had hired a mere B-grade sci-fi scribe to adapt what many deemed the great American novel. Ray knew that Huston hired him because he believed he was a worthy writer, but in his heart of hearts he also understood that a part of Huston's decision to hire him was born of sheer perversion. Huston reveled in the shock value of having hired a writer who had made his name in the fantasy and science fiction pulp magazines, and whom he had charged with adapting Herman Melville's great
Moby-Dick
. Fortunately, Huston never mentioned that he had seen the ads. Ray's fears were unfounded.

While the Bradburys were in London, Huston invited Ray to Elstree Studio for a screening of
Beat the Devil,
which starred Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, and Gina Lollobrigida. From the beginning, production on
Beat the Devil
had been troubled. Peter Viertel and Tony Veiller had written the original draft of the screenplay, an adaptation of the Claud Cockburn novel (written under the pseudonym James Kelvick). But the writers had a terrible time adapting the story. Struggling with the plot, they turned to Huston for guidance. But Huston, Viertel felt, was preoccupied with another project—
Moby-Dick
. “Left to our devices,” said Viertel, “Veiller and I worked relentlessly on the Cockburn story, but the longer we persisted in our efforts, the more apparent it became to us that the material was flimsy despite its bright dialogue.”

The screenplay they presented Huston was not up to his standards, and he threatened to scrap the project. Frustrated, Viertel and Veiller resigned. Luckily for Huston, he was able to bring in author Truman Capote, who happened to be in Rome at the time, to write a new script; coincidentally, shooting was to take place in Rome. Yet even with the last-minute heroics of the twenty-eight-year-old Capote,
Beat the Devil
was a failure for John Huston. After the Elstree screening, Ray went to the theater rest room and stood at the urinals side by side with director William Wyler and Peter Viertel, who had remained friends with Huston. No one said a thing. The film was dreadful.

Days later, the Bradburys traveled by overnight train from London to the town of Fishguard, Wales. As the train sped through the dark and unfamiliar countryside, the Bradbury girls prepared for bed. Outside, it was snowing, and Susan and Ramona peered through a window, which was broken, and watched the snowflakes. Never having seen snow in Southern California, the girls were alarmed. “There was snow everywhere,” recalled Susan years later. “It was so bloody cold that we all slept in our clothes and our overcoats that night.”

After arriving in Fishguard, they boarded a ferry for the final leg of the trip to Dublin. At customs, the agents searched Ray's luggage and pulled out his copy of
Moby-Dick
. In the midst of a political crackdown, Ireland had banned certain books, and Meville's masterpiece was one of them. Ray was unaware of this ban, and he found it terribly ironic, given the fact that he was in Ireland to adapt the book into a screenplay, and that he had just finished writing
Fahrenheit 451,
an anticensorship novel. After a brief holdup and an explanation of why he was carrying
Moby-Dick,
the customs agents moved Ray and his family along. Ray was allowed to keep his book.

In Dublin, the Bradburys checked into the old yet opulent Royal Hibernian Hotel on Dawson Street and were given two rooms. Ray and Maggie's room—number 77—had a fireplace, and in this room Ray would do much of his work on the screenplay. Regina and the girls were placed in a separate room, with a coin-operated heater into which Regina continually fed money to keep the room warm. Regina Ferguson was the ideal nanny; she was attentive and patient with the nearly four-year-old Susan and two-year-old Ramona, nicknamed “Monie.” “I was really very fond of the kids,” Ferguson recalled, decades later. “I loved Susan and I adored Ramona.” Ferguson's recollections of Ray Bradbury, the young father, were equally fond. “He was a super dad. The kids just adored him. He was just a lovely man. He was kind and compassionate, sort of a spiritual hemophiliac. He was very gentle and very thoughtful.”