The Bradbury Chronicles (33 page)

On the home front, he and Maggie enrolled in an evening adult education course at the University of California. Two nights a week, they went to the Westwood campus to study the history of Renaissance arts, politics, and culture. Their appreciation of the Renaissance era had been fueled by their friendship with Bernard Berenson. Ray and Maggie, in their spare time, loved nothing more than to pontificate about these subjects, and during these years and the decades to come, despite Ray's grueling work schedule or any personal matter between them, the two would indulge in these kinds of activities, whether it was an evening course or a European trip, always enriching themselves.

Meanwhile, Ray's relationship with Rod Serling and
The Twilight Zone
continued to spiral ever downward. The third and final teleplay Ray wrote for the series, “I Sing the Body Electric!,” had actually sold and gone into production. The story followed a family of children who had recently lost their mother, and their father, looking to find a surrogate, purchases a robotic grandmother.

“I was very excited about it,” Ray said in a 1972 interview. “I asked Mr. Serling if I could count on it being filmed exactly as I had written it, as had always been the case with Hitchcock, and he assured me that it would be.”

But when Ray watched the episode the night it aired on May 18, 1962, he found that Rod Serling had not kept his word. “They cut out the most important part of the story,” said Ray. “The moment of truth in the story when the grandmother tells them that she is a robot.”

Ray was livid, but he said nothing to Serling. Trying to move beyond the negativity, he turned his attention to his forthcoming novel. At least he had that to celebrate. Simon & Schuster published
Something Wicked This Way Comes
in September 1962. With its origins as a screenplay, this new book reflected the influence of cinema on his writing.
Something Wicked This Way Comes
was a tale of good versus evil, encompassing themes of age and mortality, told through a cinematic narrative. And just as the book's structure and gothic descriptions showed Ray's love of film, the very premise of an evil carnival arriving at the end of October, carrying with it the mysterious “autumn people,” highlighted Ray's lifelong love affair with circuses and carnivals.

In an unpublished
Paris Review
interview, Ray summed up the popular culture influences on his life: “A conglomerate heap of trash, that's what I am,” he said with a laugh. “But it burns with a high flame.”

His gift of provocative thought on the human condition through the medium of science fiction stands as a beacon of light for writers of the genre. No wonder Gene Roddenberry held him in such high regard … and named a Starship the USS
Bradbury
in his honor.

—
NICHELLE NICHOLS
,
original
Star Trek
cast member

“I
N 1962
, two men appeared at the front door,” said Ray. “I answered the door and they introduced themselves. They represented the United States Pavilion at the New York World's Fair, which was beginning to be built and was going to open in two years. They said, ‘Mr. Bradbury, we're here to give you a fifty-million-dollar building.' I said, ‘Come in, come in!'”

It was yet another full-circle opportunity for Ray Bradbury, who had wandered the pavilions of the Chicago World's Fair as a boy. It also portended a new, burgeoning role for Ray—as cultural consultant for the rocket age. In 1933 and again in 1934, when he was just a boy, Ray had visited the Century of Progress World's Fair along the lakefront in Chicago. During these trips, a lifelong, passionate interest in architecture developed. “[I] walked among the cities of the future,” he said, “with all the wonderful colors and shapes and sizes and when it came time to go home that night … I didn't want to leave. My mother and father had to drag me out of the fair and they were taking me away from the buildings of the future. So I went home and I started to build those buildings in the backyard. Very dreadful cardboard cutouts. But I began to make outlines for cities of the future when I was fourteen. And I began to write. Because I discovered a remarkable and terrible thing about the Chicago World's Fair, that after two years, they were going to tear most of it down, and I thought—how stupid, not to leave the future up and build toward it. So, since they were going to tear down the future, I began to write about it.”

In the summer of 1939, when Ray visited the New York World's Fair and saw its marvelous constructions, he found his “beliefs in architecture and the buildings of the future reaffirmed again.” It was the night of July 4, 1939, and World War Two would soon begin. “I was afraid for the future,” he recalled. “I was afraid that none of us would live to inhabit those buildings.”

Now, in 1962, two men stood in the foyer of the Bradbury house in Cheviot Hills with a firm offer. They wanted Ray to serve as a consultant for the United States government exhibit at the upcoming World's Fair, to be held in New York. In just under thirty years, Ray had gone from little boy, awestruck by world's fairs, to American icon, consultant for world's fairs.

Ray had also become an unwitting armchair astronaut. Prior to his leaving Doubleday in 1960, he had agreed to assemble two collections of his previously published tales of fantasy and science fiction that would appeal to the young adult market. They would serve as “greatest hits” packages for kids. The majority of the stories, given the new cultural interest in all things outer space, would be Ray's fanciful tales of rocket ships and space travel, with a few dinosaur tales and childhood memoir yarns thrown in for good measure. The first of this two-book agreement,
R Is for Rocket,
was released in October 1962. The timing of the book was perfect, arriving just as the space race between America and the Soviet Union was heating up. The second book—Ray's last with Doubleday—was another “Best of” collection, entitled
S Is for Space
. It would be published later, in August 1966. Both books, it is worth noting, were targeted to the juvenile market but, as a result of the strength of the stories, reached a much broader audience.

Even as
R Is for Rocket
was being readied for publication, Ray wrote an acclaimed essay for
Life
magazine about the Space Age, titled “Cry the Cosmos.” Ray had become an unofficial spokesperson for this new, exciting era of space exploration.

Meanwhile, the power brokers planning the U.S. Pavilion for the 1964 World's Fair had read Ray's introduction, “The Ardent Blasphemers,” to a new edition of the Jules Verne classic
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
. In the piece, Ray compared two mad sea captains, Herman Melville's Ahab (about whom Ray knew a thing or two) and Jules Verne's Nemo. Within the essay, said Ray, “I described the history of the United States in terms of a certain kind of wildness and blasphemy.” Because of this introduction, Ray was asked to write a short program for the top floor of the U.S. Pavilion. He readily accepted the assignment, agreeing to write the script for the educational display, about the history of the United States, titled
The American Journey
. Spectators were carried along a moving platform through the darkened pavilion, past movie screens of various sizes. The story was told through film, with Ray's narrative, and augmented by three-dimensional props.
The American Journey
was accompanied by a recording of a full symphony orchestra. The entire thing was a big, bold precursor to Walt Disney's EPCOT Center, and Ray had envisioned it all: the visuals, music cues, the narration.

Ray was venturing into yet another province of popular Americana, but he didn't stop there. He began working in the world of animated films. Writer George Clayton Johnson, a friend of Ray's who was just beginning as a writer for
The Twilight Zone,
had read Ray's short story “Icarus Montgolfier Wright,” about humankind's dream of flight. The story was first published in the
Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy
in May 1956, and collected shortly thereafter in
A Medicine for Melancholy
. Johnson approached Ray with the idea of adapting the story into a short animated film. Ray loved the idea, Johnson wrote the script, and Ray polished it.

Ray and Johnson shopped the short screenplay and quickly got backing from Format Films, an animation studio run by Joel Engel, formally of Disney, along with his partner Herb Klynn, an animation pioneer who had worked on
Mr. Magoo
and
Madeline,
among others. Ray tapped his longtime friend and illustrator Joe Mugnaini to work on the art. Mugnaini, working pro bono, spent a year animating the twenty-minute film, creating hundreds of colorful watercolor paintings.

Meanwhile, Johnson had written a teleplay for
The Twilight Zone,
which he titled “Nothing in the Dark.” Once again, Ray felt that the story smacked of one of his own tales, “Death and the Maiden,” which had run in the March 1960 issue of the
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
. Ray's work with Johnson on
Icarus Montgolfier Wright
had concluded, but he was convinced that Johnson had adapted “Death and the Maiden” without giving him proper credit. Both stories dealt with Death disguising himself and paying a call on a suspicious woman. According to Ray, Johnson denied any plagiarism charges; their friendship, not surprisingly, was irrevocably damaged. In an interview for Gordon F. Sander's 1992 biography of Rod Serling,
Rod Serling: The Rise and Fall of Television's Last Angry Man,
Johnson acknowledged the author's profound influence on him and
The Twilight Zone
series, going so far as to admit stealing from Bradbury.

“I think that a lot of Bradbury was used in
The Twilight Zone,
” Johnson said. “A lot of his most unique and most Bradburian ideas were common property. The field was so heavily marked by Bradbury there was no way Serling could walk across it without stepping in some of Bradbury's footprints. I stole from Bradbury.... We all stole from him. Bradbury was the seminal influence.”

To this day, Serling and Bradbury fans disagree over what truly occurred. Serling's supporters maintain that the similarities between Ray's stories and
The Twilight Zone
episodes he claims were plagiarized are nothing more than tenuous at best. There is the theory that Ray Bradbury, the recognized master of dark fantasy, was having trouble getting his scripts produced while younger writers, some of them friends of Ray's, were having great success with the program. Some theorize that this upset Ray's ego. Ray's fans see otherwise. Ray, when asked how to counter the naysayers, pointed back to the conversation he had with Serling after the airing of
The Twilight Zone
pilot: Serling admitted that he had inadvertently stolen from
The Martian Chronicles
and offered to pay Ray for rights.

 

W
HEN
O
SCAR
nominations were handed out for 1962,
Icarus Montgolfier Wright,
the film Ray cowrote with George Clayton Johnson, was named to the list for best animated short subject. Ultimately, the film lost to
The Hole,
a short film about two New York construction workers pondering the subject of nuclear proliferation.

 

B
ECAUSE
R
AY
was an efficient creator, he was able to work on several projects simultaneously and still have time for his wife and children. As Maggie adored warm weather, the Bradburys took their annual summer vacations on Coronado Island, near San Diego, where they stayed at the Hotel Del Coronado, an old, opulent Victorian retreat. The four blond Bradbury girls loved running barefoot across the warm white sand beaches, across the dew-covered patches of Bermuda grass that surrounded the hotel, and under the shadows of the dozens of palm trees on the property. These were unforgettable days, filled with laughter and a robust sense of family. Ray was an energetic, doting father, even if he left most daily parenting responsibilities to Maggie.

Halloween was always another special time in the Bradbury house. Ever since he was eight years old, Ray had loved it. His aunt Neva would often pile him and his brother, Skip, into her Tin Lizzie, a Model T Ford. With Neva behind the wheel and the two boys in the backseat, the car would rumble west of Waukegan into farm country. The trio would collect pumpkins and sheaves of corn from the October fields and come home to decorate Ray's grandparents' house. Indeed, Halloween was almost better than Christmas in many ways in the Bradbury house, and because Susan's birthday was on November 5, Ray and Maggie often combined the two events, throwing boisterous parties with a Halloween theme in her honor. Ray would also take his daughters out trick-or-treating, frequently donning a mask of his own. They would tirelessly roam their neighborhood, occasionally knocking on a door of a Hollywood celebrity like Barbara Billingsley, the mother in the television program
Leave It to Beaver
. The morning after Halloween, the girls would often find that their father had raided their candy stashes, absconding with his favorites.

More than anything, Ray loved taking his girls to the movies. They watched everything: Westerns, Saturday matinee horror films, Japanese movies with badly dubbed dialogue (Ray was especially fond of the films of director Akira Kurosawa). They saw
House of Wax
at Graumann's Chinese Theater;
One Million Years
at the Picwood;
Camelot
at the Cinerama Dome. “Often after,” remembered Bettina Bradbury, “we would go out for ice cream at Baskin-Robbins or hit one of the magazine stands in Hollywood and Dad would let me buy all the
Archie
and
Little Lotta
comics I wanted. We'd ride home in a yellow cab and I remember leaning on his shoulder and thinking to myself: Life doesn't get much better than this.”

The taxicab was a ubiquitous fixture of growing up a Bradbury. On days when Maggie could not drive the girls to school, Ray called for a cab and rode with his daughters. Embarrassed, the girls demanded to be dropped off blocks from school so that classmates did not see their mode of transportation.

One afternoon in the early 1960s, Ray was walking his daughters down Hollywood Boulevard when they passed a magic shop; through the storefront window Ray spotted a ghost from his past—Blackstone the Magician. The Bradbury girls were, of course, well familiar with Blackstone, having heard bedtime stories of their father's fictional childhood adventures with the magician. But the girls believed the stories to be true, and so Ray told them to wait outside the magic shop for a moment. He walked in and approached the nearly eighty-year-old magician.

“Mr. Blackstone,” Ray said, “the last time we met was when I stumbled onstage at the Orpheum Theatre in 1937, to help you with your canary cage. My daughters think I know you better than I really do, because I've told them stories about you for the last two thousand nights. Can I bring them in?”

Blackstone laughed and said of course, but before Ray ushered his girls inside, the old magician asked Ray his name. Ray then shepherded the girls into the magic shop.

“Ray!” cried Blackstone. “It's been so long! Great to see you again!” The Bradbury girls were awestruck. For the next thirty minutes, they watched with wonder as the elderly illusionist vanished cards and made handkerchiefs dance on air.

While it couldn't have been easy for Maggie to have a husband running wild with much the same mind-set as the children, in her later years, she was always very proud of her husband's relationship with their daughters. “Ray was a terrific father and the girls just adored him,” Maggie said.