The Bradbury Chronicles (8 page)

In Arizona, Ray's creative force blossomed, forged of myriad popular culture influences, but he would soon have to leave this new and wonderful world. Leo Bradbury's entrepreneurial endeavor in the chili-brick business never took off, and he was forced to move his family back to Illinois yet again. For Ray's last night on air, the announcer said good-bye to him; Ray was elated that the man acknowledged him over the airwaves. It was an evening of bittersweet emotions for Ray; that night in the studio, Ray cried. It was a heartbreaking good-bye to John Huff, as well. The night before their move, Ray stopped by John's father's business to say farewell to his first true friend. It was gut-wrenching. The next morning, with the Buick loaded, the family began their trek back to Illinois. After the nine-day voyage, the Bradburys were back in Waukegan.

For Ray, moving back to Illinois would have been bleak had it not been for Neva, who had missed her Shorty tremendously, and for the 1933 World's Fair, brought to Chicago to commemorate the centennial of the city's incorporation. Opened to much fanfare on May 27, 1933, the Century of Progress World's Fair was held on a stretch of 427 acres along Lake Michigan, just south of downtown Chicago. Soon after its opening, Leo and Esther brought Ray and Skip to the fair. “It hit me like an avalanche of architecture,” Ray said. “The whole thing so stunned me, I just wandered through the fair, enchanted and in a spell all day.” At the exposition, Ray encountered life-sized statues of dinosaurs at the Sinclair exhibit; he also discovered audio-animatronic dinosaurs that moved and roared. The exhibit featured a moving turntable—a people mover—that carried the crowd past the great artificial beasts risen from seventy million years of extinction. “I went in there and the exhibit went by so quick on that turntable that I walked backwards so I could stay in there for ten minutes. The people who ran the ride saw me and thought I was holding up traffic so they came and threw me out,” said Ray, remembering how captivated he was by the exhibit. He also marveled at the fair's stunning architecture, structures that pushed the envelope of design. The buildings were a fusion of Art Deco and Greek mythology—monoliths rising straight from the pages of his beloved
Buck Rogers
comic strips. He was mesmerized.

Later that summer, Neva brought Ray to the fair for another visit. She had been involved in making costumes for an exhibit titled “The Streets of Paris,” and had enlisted her nephew to help carry the costumes by train to the fairgrounds. At the fair, Ray was again so overwhelmed that he asked Neva if he could explore on his own. As ever, Neva obliged. They agreed to meet in the evening in front of the General Motors building and then parted. Ray spent the entire day exploring every exhibit; when he returned at seven o'clock to the prearranged meeting point, Neva was not there. Nightfall was just beginning to descend on the fair grounds. “After two hours of wandering around, trying to find her,” Ray recalled, “I went to the lost and found and I said, ‘I'm not lost, but my aunt is.'” Another two hours later, Ray's flummoxed aunt showed up at the lost and found, discovered Ray, and breathed a heavy sigh of relief. She had waited for him at the wrong building. By the time the duo returned to Waukegan, it was one o'clock in the morning. The entire town was dark and still. “All the lights were out in Waukegan,” recalled Ray. “There were no streetlights. So we had to walk from the train station up near Genesee Street and Washington, down past the ravine to my grandmother's house at one in the morning with no Moon and only the stars for light. We walked over the ravine scared witless.”

The Century of Progress, with its towering buildings and grand visions of the future, so jolted Ray Bradbury that he woke the next day determined to build his own world's fair. Ray gathered cardboard boxes, construction paper, and glue and marched out to the backyard on St. James Street and began building. He had found a new passion, architecture, to add to his list of loves—movies, books, radio, and comic strips.

Luckily Leo Bradbury was rehired by the utility company and, for the time being, though the family never quite had enough, all was well. In 1934, Ray's uncle Inar decided to move with his wife, Arthurine, and daughter Vivian to California. Inar had worked in the laundry business in Waukegan for years, and his wife's family owned a dry cleaning business in California. Once there, Inar often sent postcards home; he wrote of the balmy weather and lush orange groves and suggested that the Bradburys come west. Leo Bradbury was tempted. That spring, he was laid off once again and decided to accept Inar's invitation. The Bradburys would move to Los Angeles.

On the Sunday before their move, Ray attended Sunday school at the First Baptist Church in Waukegan. The Bradburys were never a particularly religious family. Mostly, as Ray remembered, they attended church on Easter and Christmas and, on rare occasion, a few other Sundays throughout the year when Esther Bradbury had the inclination. On this Sunday morning before the family move to Los Angeles, there was a new Sunday school teacher and, after class, she invited the students to her house. Seventy years later, during an interview, Lydia V. McColloch remembered clearly the day when the nearly two dozen teenagers visited her home. “The kids found out that we had this setup where you could talk into a microphone in the basement and it would come out of the radio upstairs and that was
real
intriguing to Ray,” said McColloch. With his professional experience in radio broadcasting, Ray proceeded to direct all the kids to the upstairs, where he put on a program for his audience. McColloch marveled at Ray's talent and noted how much he reveled at being the center of attention. A few days later, Leo Bradbury loaded the family into the Buick yet again, this time bound for Los Angeles. And this time, they were leaving for good.

Waukegan—the Green Town immortalized in Ray's works—had an incalculable effect on his life, for Ray Bradbury would always be a midwesterner at heart. By the age of thirteen, however, he had outgrown Waukegan. After his experiences in Arizona, he realized there was much more to life than ravines and the Genesee Theatre. He had run wild on the brick-paved streets of Green Town long enough. It was now time to discover something utterly new: Hollywood, California.

There is so much joy and poetry in Mr. Bradbury's stories, joy for the universe, the love of language. Whether time is being altered through the crushing of a butterfly or an astronaut is burning up as he enters the atmosphere so as to become our shooting star, even here in these dark moments there is somehow joy. It is irresistible.

—
FRANK BLACK
,
founder of the Pixies

“T
HERE YOU
are, you little son of a bitch!” said W. C. Fields, handing the autograph book back to the brash thirteen-year-old. It was Ray Bradbury's first week in Hollywood, and already, poised on his roller skates outside the gates of Paramount Studios, he was making friends. This boy, who was in love with the world of movies, was now living in the middle of it all. It was the day after the Bradburys had arrived in Los Angeles, and Ray had strapped on his roller skates and headed out of the family's new apartment at 1318 Hobart Boulevard. At the corner of Western and Pico, he stopped to get directions from a corner newspaper salesman.

“Which way is it to MGM?” Ray asked.

The salesman pointed to the west and Ray began skating in that direction. “Wait a minute!” the man yelled. Ray skidded to a halt and turned. “That's five or six miles!” the man informed him.

Ray thought for a moment. “Well,” he said, “where's the closest studio?”

That was how Ray landed outside the gates of Paramount, where, the moment he arrived, author Irvin S. Cobb, orchestra leader Ben Bernie, and actor W. C. Fields walked out of the studio's gated entrance. Ray approached them all for autographs. Fields called him a son of a bitch (
after
acquiescing to the autograph request). This was Ray's introduction to Hollywood.

From that moment on, Ray haunted Paramount. It was mid-April 1934, and he and Skip had pulled a fast one on their parents. The Bradbury boys had lied, telling Leo and Esther Bradbury that school in Los Angeles would be letting out in just a few weeks. The boys argued that it would be ridiculous to enroll at the very end of the academic year. Leo and Esther, not bothering to check the story, allowed the boys to remain home. Actually, school was not done until mid-June, but their parents never found out, and Ray and Skip enjoyed an extended summer vacation.

One afternoon during the first week in L.A., outside the tall white walls of Paramount, Ray spotted another autograph hound—a boy around his own age, lurking about waiting for a glimpse of Hollywood royalty. The boy's name was Donald Harkins and, as Ray learned, they would be attending Berendo Junior High School together come autumn. Donald Harkins was a shy, self-effacing kid, and his family was, like Ray's, suffering financial woes. If anything, the Harkinses were even worse off than the Bradburys. Donald and Ray shared an ardent love of motion pictures and they became fast companions, often arranging to meet each other outside Paramount or, when Ray did not roller-skate across town, taking the streetcar there together. Through the summer months, Ray and Donald happily loitered outside the studio walls, collecting autographs at a prodigious clip. Ray also started to collect
Flash Gordon
comic strips, which premiered that year. The space opera was just one more piece of popular culture that comprised the Ray Bradbury mosaic.

The Bradburys lived on the second floor of a two-story building. A small balcony looked out to the north from which Ray could see the rooftop of the Uptown Theatre several blocks away. The movie palace had a red light on top, and about one night a week a movie previewed—a showing of a film in the late stages of the editing process. When this happened, the light on the rooftop was illumined. Ray would see the red beacon and rush to the theater. He stood outside many nights, spotting all manner of stars rolling up in their limousines. Helen Hayes and Brian Aherne arrived for
What Every Woman Knows
. He saw Laurel and Hardy, Irving Thalberg, Norma Shearer dressed in a flowing silver lamé gown; he saw Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and many others. They were all there, right before his eyes. He always had his autograph book with him and he asked for signatures from them all. He was even bold enough to ask some to inscribe “To my pal, Ray Bradbury.” But Ray seldom had enough money in the pockets of his patched corduroys (hand-me-downs from his brother) to go into the 1,600-seat theater himself. He decided to remedy this. It would take time, but gently he began making his presence known to the Uptown's manager. Ray was applying the same sort of pushy charm that he had used in securing his on-air post at the radio station back in Tucson.

Los Angeles agreed with Ray. Leo Bradbury, however, had applied for work all across town and still could not find a job; he had only enough money to sustain the family for two months and he was worried. Time was running out. After eight weeks, he still had no job. They would have to move back to Waukegan yet again. But Leo Bradbury did not want this. His family loved California. Only twice in his life could Ray ever remember seeing his father cry: The first time was after his baby sister Elizabeth had died in 1928, and the second was in the kitchen of the Hobart Boulevard apartment. Leo was unaware that his son was in the doorway as he sat at the kitchen table and silently wept. Ray looked on, watching as a single tear slowly descended down the bridge of his father's nose. But before the family packed up again, General Cable Company hired Leo Bradbury as a lineman. They were staying.

Even with the family's dire financial state, it was a good time. They had each other, along with Uncle Inar, Aunt Arthurine, and cousin Vivian living just a few blocks away. Ray remembered with fondness one evening when his father, Uncle Inar, and Skip played a game of kick the can out on the street in front of the Hobart Boulevard apartment. It was getting dark. They ran in the street, screaming with laughter, the tin can skittering across the warm pavement. “For that brief moment, Dad became a boy again,” said Ray. They were making such a racket that a police cruiser rolled up and the officer told them to keep it down.

With his cousin Vivian living so nearby, Ray continued his hormonal antics, sitting on the front steps of Hobart Boulevard in the evenings and trying to kiss her. When asked to describe Ray Bradbury at age fourteen, Vivian was succinct: “He was horny.”

One summer night Vivian had gathered a few girlfriends, one of whom had an admirer, a fellow named Eddie Barrera. Upon meeting Eddie, Ray realized that they shared a similar passion for radio and film, and they soon became close friends. By the autumn, Ray had started the ninth grade at Berendo Junior High School, as had his friends Donald Harkins and Eddie Barrera. In Waukegan he never really had any close friends, and had only met his first true friend in John Huff while in Tucson. Now he had two more lifelong chums. Meanwhile, Skip Bradbury joined the Emergency Conservation Work, later rechristened the Civil Conservation Corps. The CCC was a peacetime army of the young and the unemployed, established by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to help save the country's natural resources by battling soil erosion and renewing declining forests. The work would take Skip throughout southern and northern California; his three-year tenure began in San Bernardino, and eventually took him to the high Sierra Mountains. He made thirty dollars a month, sending twenty-five of it home to help his parents and Ray.

While his older brother was away, after classes on Wednesday afternoons, Ray often roller-skated across town to the Figueroa Street Playhouse where George Burns and Gracie Allen broadcast their renowned radio show. “In those days,” Ray said, “… there were no audiences for radio broadcasts. Seeing George Burns outside the theater, I skated up to convince him that he should take me and my friend Donald Harkins in to watch their rehearsals. Why George agreed, I'll never know. Perhaps we looked as poor and pitiful as we truly were. In any event, George led us in, seated us in the front row of an empty theater, and the curtain went up on George and Gracie playing to an audience of two ninth-grade kids.”

Tinsel Town was all around him. Even the proverbial girl next door had a connection; the girl's mother played piano for the Meglin Kiddies, an acclaimed children's workshop and song-and-dance troupe that spawned child prodigies. Ray's neighbor took him one afternoon to the Meglin Studio, where he met the Gumm Sisters, a sibling group who had gained fame on the radio and in short-subject films. The group included twelve-year-old Frances Gumm, who would later change her name to Judy Garland.

By November 1934, with steady work at long last, Leo Bradbury moved his family a few blocks away to an apartment at 1619 South St. Andrews Place. A house with a small front yard, it was divided into four units; the Bradburys lived on the ground floor on the north side of the building. Their neighbors in the adjacent unit to the south were the Hathaways, a friendly married couple whose name Ray would use for the physician-geologist character in the story “—and the Moon Be Still as Bright” from
The Martian Chronicles
. Ray would later maintain that naming his characters was never a laborious process as it often is for other writers; he contended that most of his characters were given names from his subconscious and only later, he said, did he discover that some of the names had symbolic meanings. Montag, for example, from
Fahrenheit 451
was the name of a paper manufacturer. Faber, from the same novel, was the name of a pencil maker. Bodoni, from the short story “The Rocket,” was the name given to a printer's typeface.

In this modest apartment, once again, as with every place they had ever lived, Ray slept out on a foldout bed in the front room. But with Skip away in the CCC, Ray at least had a bed to himself.

At school, Ray excelled in his English and art classes, but failed miserably in mathematics. After school, he rushed over to Hollywood to pace outside the various studios. One day, Ray and Donald Harkins walked through the Hollywood Forever Cemetery that backed up against the wall of Paramount (a setting used in the novel
A Graveyard for Lunatics
) and climbed atop a woodpile and then up and over the wall of the movie studio. They had made it into the back lot of Paramount—a symbolic act of arrival in show business. But their visit was short-lived. Ray and Donald had walked just a few feet into the studio's carpenter shop before a hulking security guard confronted them. The man promptly escorted the teenage trespassers out.

The two starstruck boys roamed all over Los Angeles, casing the studio gates, gathering autographs. They had learned where actor George Murphy lived and would hang upside down from the trees across from his home. The actor never emerged.

Meanwhile, Ray, the self-described “wimp,” was having problems with a bully in school. “I was a smart-ass,” said Ray. “I was in history class and the teacher asked a question and this Armenian boy sitting in front of me gave the answer and under my breath, I said, ‘Good guess.' And the teacher heard that and she said to the boy, ‘Was that a guess?' Like a damn fool, he said, ‘Yes.' So he got a zero and he started beating up on me. Every time he saw me, he would hit me on the arm. My arm was a series of bruises for years.”

Though Ray was bullied at school, he was able to escape the trouble in the afternoons, when he and Donald Harkins headed to the movie studios. Occasionally, Ray was able to talk his father into letting him borrow the family camera—a “box Brownie.” It was against Leo Bradbury's better judgment to let his son skate all over Los Angeles with the equipment, so he made an agreement with Ray. Ray had to tie a piece of string to the camera and leash it to himself. In a photo of Ray standing next to George Burns outside the Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood in 1935, this string is visible. Burns is wearing a fedora and clutching his ubiquitous cigar, his arm is locked around Ray's, and the string is attached to the belt of Ray's raincoat. The string travels out of the frame and is attached to the camera that took the photo.

On another afternoon in 1935, Ray was visiting Eddie Barrera at his house on Washington Boulevard when they heard a terrific crash outside. The boys bounded out the front door and saw a smoldering car about a hundred yards up the street, in front of a cemetery. The car had hit a telephone pole head-on and the passengers had been catapulted onto the pavement. Ray and Eddie ran to the car, the first to arrive at the accident scene. Blood was everywhere. Three people had already died; another—a woman—was barely alive. Her face horribly disfigured, the woman looked at Ray as he loomed over her and in that instant as they made eye contact, her eyes fluttered shut and she died. “It was a scene out of a nightmare,” Ray said. “I stumbled home that day, barely able to walk. I had to hold on to trees and walls I was so stunned.” It so stunned him, in fact, it was the main reason why Ray never learned to drive. The experience would also later serve as the inspiration for the 1943 short story “The Crowd,” in which Ray would ponder the very nature of those who arrive first on the scene of deadly accidents. Recalling that the cemetery was nearby, he wondered if those people could even be ghosts. Seventy years after witnessing the horrific crash, Ray was still scarred. “About once a month,” he admitted, “I still have nightmares about that poor woman who looked at me.”

After that, Ray spent many days with Eddie Barrera. The two tried to forget the accident's gruesome images. They spent their time scheming to become famous. One afternoon, Eddie paid twenty dollars (his parents had a bit more money than Ray's) to book a recording studio in downtown Los Angeles and, along with another friend, Frank Pangborn, the trio taped a comedy radio show titled “Our General Petroleum.” The material during the recording is, predictably, juvenile, and squeaky-voiced Ray hammed it up considerably. After making the recording, Eddie and Frank were convinced that this great, unrecognized comedy trio could make it to the big time. They begged Ray to run away with them. “The dreams of boys are so impractical,” Ray remarked. “I said to them, ‘Where are we going to go?' and they said, ‘To a big city,' and I said, ‘We're already in a big city and nobody wants us.' I refused to run away from home and go with Eddie and Frank out to conquer the world. It's a good thing I decided that.”