The Bradbury Chronicles (35 page)

When François Truffaut first read the Bradbury book in 1960, he was immediately moved by it. During production, he maintained that if he accomplished anything, he wanted his film to bring more attention to the book. The director even declined two offers from writers looking to publish books on the making of
Fahrenheit 451
. “[W]henever I work from a novel,” the director wrote in 1966 in his journal, “I feel a certain responsibility toward the author. Whether it comes off or not, whether it is faithful to the book or not, the film of
Fahrenheit 451
should only favor the sales of one book, the book from which it was taken. A book about the making of the film would only create confusion with Bradbury's.”

Because of logistical and financial turmoil, it took three and a half years for cameras to begin rolling on
Fahrenheit 451
. Principal photography on
Fahrenheit 451
lasted three and a half months. Throughout, the relationship between Truffaut and actor Oskar Werner degenerated dramatically. Tensions began two weeks into the shoot. Werner had felt that a flamethrower used for a scene had been dangerously mishandled behind his back, and an argument ensued between lead actor and director. The relationship never recovered. Both men held widely divergent opinions on how the character of Guy Montag should be portrayed. Werner championed playing the lead character as a classic movie hero, while the director clearly was uninterested in heroics. “I'll never be able to film courage,” he is quoted as saying in Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana's book,
Truffaut: A Biography,
“probably because it doesn't interest me.” Truffaut felt that Werner was being a prima donna. By the end of shooting, Truffaut and Werner were barely on speaking terms. “We must put up with each other until the end of April,” Truffaut told the actor. “It isn't the film you envisioned and it isn't the film I envisioned, it's somewhere in between, and that's the way things are. Now if you don't like the scene the way I'm filming it, you can just stay in your dressing room and I'll shoot without you or use your stand-in.”

As production came to a close, the icy relations between Truffaut and Werner had frozen solid. Werner went so far with his disdain of Truffaut and his vision that he had his hair cut to destroy continuity in the film. Werner claimed he had fallen asleep in the barber's chair, but Truffaut suspected otherwise.

On November 2, 1966,
Fahrenheit 451
opened in New York.
New York Times
writer Bosley Crowther summed up the opinion of most critics in this November 15, 1966, review:

 

If François Truffaut were trying to make literature seem dull and the whole hideous practice of book-burning seem no more shocking then putting a blow-torch to a pile of leaves, he could not have accomplished his purpose much better than he unintentionally has in his first motion picture made in English,
Fahrenheit 451.

Holy smoke! What a pretentious production he has made of Ray Bradbury's futuristic story....

 

F
URTHER ESTABLISHING
Ray's role as unofficial spokesperson for the Space Age,
Life
magazine assigned him to write a story on the Apollo program, the astronauts, and the uncharted territories of outer space. On the morning of January 13, 1967, Ray arrived in Houston, Texas (ironically and predictably by passenger train), to witness firsthand where humankind, with all of its chutzpah, was headed. After Ray checked into the Nassau Bay Motor Lodge, a representative from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration came to drive him to the nearby Johnson Space Center. Right from the start, Ray encountered fans. One of the first NASA administrators Ray met told him that his favorite book was
Dandelion Wine
. Ray spent the afternoon touring the NASA facilities, taking in the vast technologies: flight simulators, lasers, flight suits, and the centrifuge, in which astronauts were exposed to g-forces.

That evening, Ray dined in Houston with astronauts Jim Lovell and John Young, Richard Gordon and Pete Conrad and their wives. “Gordon and Young have qualities of Buck Jones, Bob Steele, Tom Mix about them,” Ray wrote in his notes. “They are short, compact men, economically built. Young is shy, Gordon more direct, but there is the familiar echo of the intellectual cowpuncher here. Something out of my own memory perhaps. Conrad is the clown of the bunch, much fun to watch and listen to. Lovell very friendly and easy and the proverbial host.”

In the days that followed, while visiting the Johnson Space Center, Ray attended a press briefing. He sat in the back of the conference room as one by one the young horses were trotted out—nearly sixty Apollo astronauts, as Ray recalled, the primary teams and the alternates. They were all present: Armstrong, Aldrin, Grissom, Lovell. They were clean-cut kids, all-American types, with blindingly white smiles and military crew cuts, and courage taller and mightier than the Saturn rockets they would ride on. When someone in the room announced that Ray Bradbury was present—Ray Bradbury, the author—at least half of the astronauts looked up, alert, scanning the room excitedly. Several of them approached Ray after the conference. As young dreamers with imaginations fixed squarely on the stars, many of them credited Ray, and specifically
The Martian Chronicles,
as an early inspiration. Ray suddenly found himself surrounded by American heroes, who were worshiping him. The kid from Green Town—Buck Rogers, as so many in the literary community had disparagingly deemed him—had done good. As Ray shook hands with all the astronauts, a line from one of Ray's favorite films,
Things to Come,
based on the H. G. Wells story of the same name, came to him: “Which shall it be, the stars or the grave?”

Ray spent a week in Houston, touring mission control and chatting it up with John Glenn. When the week was up, Glenn even offered to personally fly Ray Bradbury home in a private jet. Of course, afraid to fly, Ray declined. Glenn shrugged. “Stagecoach leaves for Tombstone in the morning,” he said, with a good-natured smile. “What a fool I was!” said Ray, looking back on it. “I could have had my first flight with one of the most famous astronauts in history.”

During his visit with the astronauts, Ray was invited to Gus Grissom's house, where he met the astronaut's wife and children. Everyone was so accommodating. The final frontier, Ray felt, would be well served.

When Ray returned home to Los Angeles, he sat down to write his article, but he was overwhelmed. He had hours and hours of taped interviews and reams of notes. Where was the forest through the trees? Ray was horribly out of his element. “I called my editor at
Life
and told him to fire me,” Ray recalled. “I had seen too much. I had too many quotes. Done too many interviews. I told him, ‘I'm not an article writer. I'm not a researcher. I don't know what in the hell I've got. I've been all over the place, met all these wonderful people, but I can't make sense of it. It's terrible.'”

Life
editor David Maness told Ray he had no choice. He had to write the article. Even worse, it was due in four days. Ray went to bed that night in a fit of anxiety. “I couldn't find the metaphor,” he said. But sometime over the course of the next sleepless hours, it hit him. “I got to thinking,” said Ray, “I'm looking at a theater. I've been watching all these actors, I've been meeting all these directors, they have scripts for what they are going to do, they're rehearsing every day, hour after hour, and once I got that, I was off and running on the article the next day.”

Ray filed the story, “An Impatient Gulliver Above Our Roofs,” with Maness and heard back almost immediately. The
Life
magazine staff loved the article. “If he hadn't pushed me,” Ray said, “I wouldn't have done the piece.” That afternoon, exhausted after filing his story, Ray was taking his daily nap when Maggie walked into the bedroom and woke him.

“Come look at the television,” she said with urgency.

Ray got out of bed and went to look at the TV. He had a sinking feeling. A tragedy had occurred at NASA. During a preflight test, a fire had ignited and enveloped the command module, taking the lives of the three-man
Apollo 1
crew—Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee. Ray stood and stared blankly at the television screen and began to cry. These three American heroes had sacrificed it all. They had died so those who might go after them could live.

My father was a big fan of Ray Bradbury's and he had me reading him when I was 9 or 10 years old. We had this tradition in our family that on holidays or when we took road trips we would all read stories to one another. Of course, Ray Bradbury had a story for every occasion so we read him a lot. My favorites were the short story “The Emissary” and the novel
Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Those stories still creep me out when I read them.

—
THOMAS STEINBECK
,
author and son of John Steinbeck

F
OLLOWING THE
tragedy of
Apollo 1,
Ray's article on the space program was shelved for several months to give the nation time to heal. It finally ran in the November 24, 1967, issue of
Life
magazine. The next year, Ray was given the Aviation-Space Writers Robert Ball Memorial Award for his story—the highest honor for writing of its kind. “Here is a boy who never flew,” said Ray. “I got the award from all the aviators of America for the best article of the year.”

Ray was invited to Cape Canaveral to accept his award. In an ironic twist, the ceremony was just days away, and there would be no time for Ray to take the train across country. “I called them,” said Ray, “and said, ‘I don't fly.' They said, ‘You don't fly!?' You get the aviation award and you don't fly!?'” Ray's editor, David Maness, went to the Cape to accept the award on Ray's behalf. “I was especially proud of the aviation award,” said Ray, “because I had never flown.”

But Ray's tethers to Earth were about to be loosened. He was invited to fly aboard the Goodyear blimp and, to everyone's utter amazement—even Ray's—he accepted. On a magnificent California day, at the age of forty-eight, Ray Bradbury lifted off from terra firma and flew for the first time. The blimp launched from Long Beach, and soared out over the shimmering Pacific, toward Catalina Island. The captain of the blimp spotted a whale and flew in quietly over it. “It was like three whales,” said Ray. “There was the whale coming to the surface, and then the shadow of the blimp, another whale, coming down over it, and then there was the blimp itself. All these whales came together. The blimp seemed like it was just ten feet from the surface. It was spectacular.”

 

T
HE YEAR
1969 marked the release of two more Bradbury movie adaptations—
The Illustrated Man
and
Picasso Summer
. Ray had sold the story rights to
The Illustrated Man
two years earlier, in December 1967, for the tidy sum of $85,000. Ray's fee was increasing, along with his international stature. As conceptual as
The Illustrated Man
was, Ray had never sold the film rights to the 1951 book. Even with the memorable idea of the tattooed outcast whose skin illustrations come alive to predict the future, the book was, in the end, a short-story collection and not an easy narrative to adapt. This hardly frightened director Jack Smight, who planned on bringing
The Illustrated Man
to the screen. Smight was known primarily for his work in television, directing episodes of
Route 66,
The Defenders,
and
The Alfred Hitchcock Hour,
among others, and in 1966, he directed the film
Harper,
which starred Paul Newman and Lauren Bacall.

Smight intended to use the carnival sideshow freak, just as Ray had done in the prologue and epilogue of his book, as the primary narrative thread throughout his film. But it would be impossible to adapt all eighteen stories from
The Illustrated Man,
so Smight settled on three: “The Veldt,” “The Long Rain,” and “The Last Night of the World.” Smight cast Rod Steiger in the title role.

Ray Bradbury and Rod Steiger had been acquaintances since the late 1950s when they had met, as Ray remembered, at their mutual friend Sy Gomberg's house. The two men had had a grand time talking and laughing well into the morning. “Rod drove me home at two in the morning,” said Ray, “and that was the beginning of our friendship.” Ray recalled another time after Steiger had purchased an expensive, new Jaguar automobile. “He drove up to the house one day and yelled for us. Maggie and I came out and Rod looked at us and yelled, ‘Eat your heart out!' and drove off.” It was all in fun, and was pure Rod Steiger.

Despite Ray and Steiger's friendship,
The Illustrated Man
was both a critical and financial failure. Once he sold his story, Ray had no creative input into the film. He occasionally visited the set, took publicity photos with Steiger in his tattooed incarnation, and waited, with the now-growing army of Bradbury fans around the world, to see the motion picture upon its release in March 1969. After an early screening, as the audience left the theater, Ray noticed a teenage boy, a fan, staring at him.

“Mr. Bradbury,” the teenager said, woefully. “What happened?”

Equally disappointed in the film, Ray, too, was befuddled and could hardly reply. “The script was bad and the film, as a result, wasn't any better,” Ray concluded, years later.

If
The Illustrated Man
was a flop,
The Picasso Summer
was a travesty from start to finish. Ray had sold the rights to “In a Season of Calm Weather,” a short story from
Medicine for Melancholy,
in the autumn of 1967. He agreed to write the screenplay, based on the tale of a husband and wife who, while vacationing in a coastal community in France, have a magical encounter with Pablo Picasso. The short story, first published in
Playboy
in January 1957, was an odd choice for a film adaptation. It was a tight and concise narrative, the epitome of a short story. Because of this, Ray always believed that it would make for a better half-hour live-action film, incorporating Picassoesque animation. But given Ray's unyielding confidence in his own abilities, he agreed to a write a feature-length script for the film, which would be given the more straightforward title
The Picasso Summer
. The response to Ray's screenplay was fantastic. Producers Bruce Campbell, Roy Silver, and comedian Bill Cosby were all enthusiastic. So, too, was director Serge Bourguignon. Actor Albert Finney signed on, and arrangements had been made for renowned artist Pablo Picasso to make a cameo appearance. But Picasso's involvement with the motion picture would quickly fall apart in a comedy of errors that would portend further production problems. As Ray recalled the bizarre scenario, Dominguín, the Spanish bullfighter—a close, personal friend of Picasso's—had agreed to act as a liaison between the film's producers and the artist. Dominguín assured the filmmakers that he would secure Pablo Picasso for the movie. But then Dominguín, Ray said, slept with actor Yul Brynner's wife. Brynner was a friend of Picasso and his wife, Jacqueline Roque. “When Picasso's wife found out what Dominguín had done, she fired Dominguín out of their life. End of friendship,” said Ray. And, as Dominguín had been the middleman between Picasso and Campbell-Silver-Cosby, it was the end of the artist's involvement in
The Picasso Summer
. Many years later, Ray laughed boisterously at the absurdity of the whole situation. Making matters worse, when director Serge Bourguignon cast a Picasso look-alike to play the artist, “Dominguín fled Madrid,” recalled Ray, “and took with him the Picasso double that we were going to use!”

The trouble with the bullfighter and the painter did not mark the end of problems for
The Picasso Summer
. In fact, they worsened. When Ray saw an early screening of the film in a Hollywood projection room before its scheduled release, he felt angry and betrayed. Before Bourguignon had even left for Europe to shoot the feature, he had gushed with superlatives over Ray's screenplay. However, when Ray saw the finished film, his script was nowhere to be found. Bourguignon had detoured from the screenplay, deciding to ad-lib the story, to give it a more “natural” narrative flow. It was a crazy artistic decision with disastrous results. Bourguignon was in the projection room that day with Ray. When the film was over, and the lights came up, Ray turned and pointed at the director. “Fire that man,” Ray said.

“Bourguignon jumped to his feet and started after me to hit me,” Ray said, recalling the resulting scene. “People had to get between us so we wouldn't come to blows.”

Producer Bill Cosby, who, as Ray recalled, had very little to do with the day-to-day logistics of the film, was incredulous at how the production had degenerated. “He said to us,” recalled Ray, “‘I don't need you people to waste my money, I'm going to go waste my money myself!'”

The Picasso Summer
was dreadful. “There was one minute in that film that you could look at. That's it,” said Ray. The film's only redeemable attribute, in Ray's opinion, was the beautiful score by Michel Legrand with vocals by Barbra Streisand. Ray was so ashamed of the film, he demanded to use the pseudonym “Douglas Spaulding” in the credits.
The Picasso Summer
was never released to theaters.

In July 1969, Ray vacationed in London with Maggie and their four daughters (again they crossed the Atlantic by ship). They were there to take in the Wimbledon tennis tournament—as the Bradburys enjoyed tennis as a spectator sport—and to witness the national celebration of the investiture of Charles, Prince of Wales. On the evening of July 20, Ray was asked to appear on two television programs, one with journalist David Frost, a second with CBS newsman Mike Wallace. It was a monumental night in world history. Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, and Michael Collins—the crew of
Apollo 11
—were headed for the moon. Armstrong and Aldrin would be the first human beings, if the mission succeeded, to step foot on the lunar surface. The entire world was on the edge of its seat. In his newfound role as layman color commentator for the space program, Ray had been asked to appear on the television programs to discuss the moon mission. Ray was at the David Frost studio when, at 9:17
P.M
. London time, Neil Armstrong took “one small step,” becoming the first person to step foot on a celestial body other than the Earth. Ever emotional, Ray watched with everyone else in the studio that night and cried. It was a moment beyond words. He had waited his entire life for this. The television lights went on as the show began airing. But immediately, Ray realized that something was amiss. Frost had Engelbert Humperdinck on the program that night, along with Sammy Davis Jr. “I love Sammy,” said Ray, “but come on! It was not the right night for that.” Ray stood off-camera, watching the campy spectacle, realizing that David Frost and his staff were not recognizing the magnitude of the evening. Ray stormed out of the studio, walking away from his scheduled interview with Frost. As Ray crossed the parking lot, one of the show's producers chased him, insisting that he return for the interview with David Frost. “You can't leave,” the producer said.

“Yes, I can,” Ray shot back. “That idiot in there doesn't give a Goddamn about space, and he's ruining the whole evening. He's terrible!”

Ray hailed a taxi and went to the CBS studio, where he sat down with Mike Wallace for a taped interview that would air later that night, via satellite, in the United States. Having sufficiently simmered down from what he deemed the inappropriate extravaganza of the David Frost program, Ray waxed poetic on the events of the evening. “This is an effort to become immortal,” he said. “At the center of all of our religions, all of our sciences, all of our thinking over a good period of years has been the question of death. And if we stay here on Earth we are all of us doomed, because someday the sun will either explode or go out. So in order to ensure the entire race existing a million years from today, a billion years from today, we're going to take our seed out into space and we're going to plant it on other worlds and then we won't have to ask ourselves the question of death ever again.”

 

B
ACK HOME
by October 1969, Ray had moved beyond his recent cinematic disappointments and published another short-story collection,
I Sing the Body Electric!,
released by publishing house Alfred A. Knopf. (Ray's Simon & Schuster editor, Bob Gottlieb, had moved to Knopf, and Ray had followed him there. Gottlieb was a staunch supporter of Ray and his work, and Ray wanted to stay with him.)
I Sing the Body Electric!
featured seventeen stories, most written during the period 1964 to 1969, although the title story had earlier origins as Ray's only produced teleplay on
The Twilight Zone
. The new book was Ray's only collection of short stories released in the 1960s, and it represented nearly all of his published short stories during the decade. This certainly wasn't a sign that Ray's output had tapered off. To the contrary, he was as busy as ever. He had merely refocused his energies away from the short-story form—arguably his best medium—choosing to concentrate on World's Fair consultation, the lecture circuit, the theater, and film. Ray added another role to his repertoire. At the recommendation of Norman Corwin, he joined his friend on the Documentary Awards Committee for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Ray was now part of the “Oscar” voting. That same year, before the decade was out, in September Ray's oldest daughter, Susan, married Morgan Cavett, a Los Angeles record producer and songwriter who had worked with singer Johnny Mercer, as well as the rock band Steppenwolf, among others. Just as Ray and Maggie had done twenty-two years before, Morgan and Susan married in a private ceremony, without their parents. Days later, Ray and Maggie threw a postnuptial dinner reception to celebrate the marriage of their firstborn child.