The Bradbury Chronicles (9 page)

At the Figueroa Street Playhouse, the radio program
Hollywood Hotel
was broadcast on Friday evenings, featuring actor Dick Powell as the emcee and a woman many considered to be one of the most powerful women in Hollywood, gossip columnist Louella Parsons. Parsons certainly noticed the outgoing young blond man who wandered about the theater. She invited him in one Wednesday afternoon, where he sat next to Gary Cooper for a broadcast of
The Lives of the Bengal Lancer
. Ray even befriended Parsons's chauffeur. Before he knew it, he was riding with the driver in the Rolls-Royce limousine, running errands. “There I was,” said Ray, “in my poor clothes, sitting in the back of the limousine. We would pull up to a stoplight and all the people would look to see who was sitting in the back and it was just poor Ray Bradbury. I would smile back and wave.”

Louella Parsons soon learned that the teenager was stealing rides in her car and banished him from the theater, but this did not prevent Ray from rummaging through the Dumpsters behind the theater after the program was finished. He was looking for scripts from the show. Those
Hollywood Hotel
scripts were stored in his file cabinets for decades.

Soon after, during the summer of 1935, Ray chased actress Marlene Dietrich inside a building and up the staircase at the House of Westmore Beauty Salon. The reclusive actress was trying to flee the eager teenager, but he eventually won out, getting the star's autograph before being escorted away by salon employees. Not long after chasing Dietrich up the stairs of the salon on Sunset Boulevard, Ray spotted the actress again outside Paramount and asked her to pose for a picture with him. Ever bold and brash, he made a request of the camera-shy celebrity. “I suggested since the sun was on the wrong side of the street, she might be willing to cross over. On the verge of refusal, Dietrich inexplicably relented and made the trek.”

Ray did receive encouragement for his early writing career. George Burns was kind and actually gave Ray the time of day when they met outside the Figueroa Street Playhouse. Ever driven, Ray sensed an in. He had just started his first year, the tenth grade, at Los Angeles High School. It was the fall of 1935. During his typing class, Ray began writing speculative scripts for Burns and Allen, and each Wednesday afternoon he would skate over to the Figueroa playhouse to hand them personally to George Burns.

“He told me I was a genius and the scripts were brilliant. Of course they were lousy and he knew that but he was polite,” said Ray. Eventually, though, Burns and Allen took one of Ray's jokes, an end-of-the-program routine that aired on February 26, 1936:

 

GRACIE:
Ohhhhhhhoooooo!

GEORGE:
Quick, somebody … Gracie has fainted.... Hurry.... Bring a glass of water.... Gracie! … Talk to me.... Gracie … say something.... Gracie.... Can't you say something?

GRACIE:
Sure … this is the Columbia … Broadcasting System!

 

Listening to his words live on the Burns and Allen show only solidified this fifteen-year-old's determination. He wanted to write, to direct, to act, he wanted to be a part of this world he was looking at from close up. He wanted it so desperately. It had been nearly twelve years since he had first fallen under the spell of the cinema when he saw
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
. Moving to Hollywood, at play in a vast field of stars, only heightened his obsession, convinced him further of his own destiny. In Bradbury parlance, he was “madness maddened.” He had unflinching determination but, as Ray was the first to admit, there was one problem. His writing was dreadful. But that didn't stop him from pursuing his dream.

“When I think back on how I must've looked, sailing through Hollywood on my roller skates, a big chubby lunk of a kid with my autograph book under one arm and my cheap box Brownie under the other,” he said, “I mean, who would've predicted that lout would ever write anything anyone would ever want to read?”

Ray Bradbury's collection of short stories
R Is for Rocket
led me to a lifelong love of science fiction. It was my pleasure to work with Ray during the first One Book, One City Los Angeles project. One Book, One City is a sort of giant reading club for the whole city and I knew that the choice of books that very first year was perhaps the most important decision in determining the success of the program. So I chose a classic. One of my very favorite books,
Fahrenheit 451,
proved to work beyond my wildest dreams. It captured the hearts and imaginations of the whole city. Never since have we seen such a successful reading program as we did the year we chose Ray's masterpiece. On a personal note, I got to spend some time with Ray and I can honestly say that I've rarely encountered such warmth, intelligence, and personality as I found in Ray. I loved working with him, and I so appreciate the joy of reading that Ray helped spark for the people of Los Angeles.

—
JAMES K. HAHN
,
mayor of Los Angeles

I
N 1936
, Ray experienced a night terror so vivid that it stayed with him for years. In it a bulldog—black, vicious, and as big as a small house, all sinew and muscle and fang—was chasing him. Running as fast as he could, Ray could not run fast enough. The beast was closing in. Like a great tyrannosaur, the bulldog moved with a hunter's intent, tilling the ground with its talon claws. Ray couldn't escape. The black bulldog's ferocious mouth opened as he bore down on Ray, and in an instant, he was gone. Devoured by the great, black dog.

Ray woke up in a cold night sweat in the front room of the apartment on St. Andrews Street. He had died in his dream. And right away, somehow, he knew what the dream represented. It was a vision. The nightmare had portended the inevitable. War was coming. It was 1936, and while America was still consumed by the Great Depression, across the globe, the Fascist dictator of Italy, Benito Mussolini, had ordered the bombing of Ethiopia and was leading the world toward all-out conflict. Ray didn't know where and he didn't know when, but he knew that World War Two was coming. And he couldn't escape it.

The prospects of getting shipped overseas to some far-off battlefield frightened him beyond belief. His uncle Sam Bradbury had had dreams of becoming a great writer and poet. And those dreams had been extinguished when he died of influenza on his way to fight in World War One. Ray knew that if he were to be sent into war, he too would die, and never have the great literary career that he so desired. “I was scared that I would never get the chance to live for my country,” said Ray. “People don't ever talk about that. I wanted to live so I could contribute.”

Despite the chilling midnight vision, Ray continued to write, hoping to publish. Fittingly, just four days before Ray's sixteenth birthday, on August 18, 1936, in the city where he was born, the
Waukegan News-Sun
published a poem he had submitted on the occasion of the one-year anniversary of the death of screen and radio star Will Rogers, who had died in a plane crash. Ray had no publishing connections in Los Angeles, but in Waukegan, where his grandmother lived and where the Bradbury name still had cachet, he knew he had a chance of publishing his poem in the town paper. His instincts proved correct. The
News-Sun
printed the poem in its entirety. It began:

 

        IN MEMORY TO WILL ROGERS

        The man who jested through his life

        And chased away all care and strife.

        The man whom we called, “Just plain Bill.”

        Our ambassador of Good Will,

        Has laid away his ink and pen

        To see his maker once again.

 

The poem concluded with a note from the editor:

 

IT WAS A YEAR AGO LAST SATURDAY THAT GENIAL WILL PLUNGED TO DEATH WITH WILEY POST. THE ABOVE RECOLLECTION OF THAT SAD EVENT COMES FROM A FORMER WAUKEGAN RESIDENT, RAY BRADBURY, SON OF LEONARD S. BRADBURY, WHO WAS BORN IN WAUKEGAN IN 1920 AND LIVED HERE UNTIL TWO YEARS AGO.

 

The verse was childlike. As Ray said, “It was very primitive. But it was an emotional response to an important sadness in my life. At the heart of it was the fact that I loved Will Rogers and his death diminished me. If I had learned to do more of that sort of writing during the next few years, I would have become a published writer much sooner. I was latching onto something in myself but I couldn't see it. And that's the trouble with living, you don't see yourself. You can't see what you're doing. And then suddenly you look back and realize, ‘Oh God, if only I had looked closer at what I had done, maybe I would have learned something.' But we don't have the ability to do that at that age.”

After this accomplishment and his sixteenth birthday, Ray and his friend Eddie Barrera made a decision: They would lose their virginity. Neither had a girlfriend and both suffered from an acute case of shyness when it came to the opposite sex (except, of course, for those earlier times Ray had spent with his cousin Vivian). Ray's facial acne and boils on his neck made him unpopular with the girls in school. So the two boys, with two dollars apiece, wandered downtown on San Pedro, walking the streets until they happened upon two prostitutes in their early twenties, one rail thin, the other a full-figured redhead.

“Eddie gave me the plump one,” recalled Ray with a laugh. The women brought the boys to an apartment building that, as Ray remembered, actually had a red light glowing outside its door—the proverbial symbol of a house of debauchery. In a second-floor apartment, Eddie was led into a bedroom and Ray into the bathroom. Ray's escort drew a bath and slowly undressed Ray, wide-eyed with terror and arousal. He stepped his toes into the warm water and glided slowly down into the porcelain tub.

“She washed me off,” Ray said. “And, of course, that was almost fatal. To have a woman soak you and wash you at that age, if you're not careful, it's all over.”

After the bath, Ray and the young woman went to a bedroom, and the big romp of his adolescent fantasies was over in three minutes. Afterward, the two boys parted company with their respective
filles de joie
and, in a postcoital stupor, walked to a nearby pharmacy to buy salve. Just sixteen, they had no idea what they were doing. They both worried that they had contracted a sexually transmitted disease. “For the next month,” recalled Ray, “I would look down there to make sure it hadn't fallen off!”

It was a telling moment. Although he had entered the world of manhood, he was still that exuberant, pimply-faced, gee-whiz, stargazing, toy-coveting, celebrity-chasing, roller-skating boy, a bit naïve and innocent, filled with childlike wonder. It was the persona Ray Bradbury would embody for all his days—half man, half boy.

In the fall of 1936, Ray and Eddie began eleventh grade at Los Angeles High School. Ray's other good friend, Donald Harkins, who lived downtown, attended Metropolitan High School, but the two pals continued to meet at least once a week to hound the stars outside the studios. After receiving numerous postcards imploring her to move, Ray's aunt Neva joined the Bradburys in Los Angeles. Neva rented the apartment directly above Ray and his family on St. Andrews. Ray was thrilled that his beloved aunt—his first and foremost muse—was nearby once again.

During his junior year, though he never abandoned his love of comic strips and pulp fiction magazines, Ray began reading more literary material, visiting the library and studying
The Best American Short Stories of the Year
anthologies, and pledging to himself that one day his own work would be published in the pages of these revered collections. He also promised himself to publish in the
Saturday Evening Post,
a magazine his father greatly admired. But Ray's talent didn't match his determination. By his own admission, he was a poor writer in high school; his work was too derivative. He imitated rather than trying to develop his own voice, spending his time copying Conan Doyle's
Sherlock Holmes,
P. G. Wodehouse's
Jeeves,
and Edgar Allan Poe's tales. “Imitation is fine for a while, but then you've got to move on and take a chance on something that's really you,” he said later.

Occasionally, Ray would write about his own experiences, but he was too much of a neophyte to recognize its potential. Once, he wrote about the ravine in Waukegan, with its dark and twisted tangle of jungle malevolence, but he was self-conscious about penning it. (Of course, much later, the ravine would be central to
Dandelion Wine, The Halloween Tree,
and the unpublished sequel to
Dandelion Wine
,
Farewell Summer
.) And so he discarded the short story about the ravine and continued imitating his literary heroes. It would be another six years before Ray discovered that drawing from his own experience would produce a wealth of material. In the meantime, his lack of writing chops frustrated him.

“Ray was a suffering soul in high school,” recalled Bonnie Wolf, a writing classmate one year younger than Ray. “He had this burning ambition and at that time it really wasn't based on anything. That was a source for a great deal of despair on his part. At that age, you don't really have any material. None of us did.”

His painful shyness with girls, coupled with his anguish to become a great, successful writer, made Ray's junior year in high school miserable. He was a good student, even though his math scores were barely above passing and his wood shop projects took weeks longer to complete than did all the other students'. Unlike the popular kids who drove cars, played sports, and dated, Ray roller-skated, wrote stories, and only lost his virginity by paying for it.

Complicating matters, Ray was writing mostly science fiction, a genre with little literary credibility, as he soon discovered. He struggled for his classmates' acceptance, and years after he established himself as a writer, he would seek the literary establishment's as well. Nonetheless, Ray's ambition was undeterred, and he wrote every day.

At school, Ray enrolled in a poetry class and club, both led by one of his favorite teachers, Snow Longley Housh, a gentle, older woman who wore glasses and a bob of graying wavy hair. He also took a short-story class, taught by another favorite instructor, Jennet Johnson. These two teachers changed Ray Bradbury's world, so much so, in fact, that he later dedicated his 1962 novel
Something Wicked This Way Comes
to them. Housh and Johnson encouraged the young, untamed writer. Housh told Ray that he was a poet, even though, as Ray described it, he wrote “lousy poetry.” On one of his early science fiction stories, Johnson scribbled “I don't know what it is you're doing, but don't stop.” These simple words of inspiration gave Ray the confidence to continue, and after that, Ray always maintained that the fundamental responsibility of a good teacher is to inspire.

But “I still didn't have a real typewriter,” Ray recalled. “So every day I gave up my lunch period and I would go to the typing room and write stories.” In that room by himself, surrounded by forty typewriters, he wrote furiously, and minutes before the lunch hour ended, he ran to the cafeteria to eat. The sixteen-year-old's determination was almost fanatical. He was writing, on average, one short story a week. Ray could also be something of a bulldozer; in his writing classes, he had no compunction about the discussion of his work monopolizing class time. He was certain he would, one day, make a name for himself as a great American writer.

He was so convinced of his destiny, he began sending his stories to several top-tier New York magazines, but his submissions were all promptly rejected.
Esquire
editor Arnold Gingrich, in a handwritten note, summed up Ray's writing at the time, stating that “while it's a fair job, the idea is one of those that are constantly occurring.” Despite rejection, he continued writing. “I just figured the editors didn't know what they were doing,” Ray said. The boy persevered and, in March 1937, his poem “Death's Voice” was selected by Snow Longley Housh for the school's
Anthology of Student Verse
.

While he was fixated on a career as a writer, thanks to his great love of movies, a part of him dreamed of becoming an actor. Since his seventh-grade appearance onstage in the Tucson school Christmas pageant, Ray had fallen under the spell of the live audience. So that year, in addition to his writing course and club, he joined the school drama club, the L.A. Players. It was these extracurricular activities that made high school palatable for him.

In the spring of his junior year, the call went out for actors, writers, and musicians for the annual talent show, the Roman Revue. With a résumé that included reading the funny pages over the Arizona radio airwaves, contributing a sketch to the vaunted Burns and Allen show, and publishing a poem in the
Waukegan News-Sun,
Ray had a steely confidence and a growing ego, even though, as he said, it was “based on nothing.” And so he went to the Roman Revue auditions in the spring of 1937 and presented himself as an announcer, a director, a sound-effects man, and a writer. Ray then wrote an entire speculative script and plunked it down in the hands of the faculty adviser in charge of the student talent show.