The Bradbury Chronicles (16 page)

Ray inquired if the store stocked the collection
Who Knocks?
He informed her that he was a writer and that one of his stories was included in the book. Marguerite McClure's curiosity was piqued. Since childhood, she was a voracious reader, and books were her passion. And now, standing before her in Fowler Brothers Bookstore was a young man telling her he was a published writer. Ray didn't know it at the time, but it was the perfect thing to say. He then added that one of his short stories was in the brand-new
Best American Short Stories
collection. Marguerite was even more intrigued. And Ray was smitten. But whenever he met an attractive woman, he was no longer loquacious and outgoing, and, too shy to ask Marguerite out, he left the store after a brief conversation with her. Afterward, Marguerite, who now believed that Ray was not the crook in question, located a copy of
Who Knocks?
She took it home that night and read “The Lake.” “I was dazzled by the style of the story,” said Maggie Bradbury, many years later. “His phrases were so memorable.” The macabre content wasn't her literary cup of tea, as it were, but the writing was most impressive.

Ray returned to the bookstore a few days later and mustered up the nerve to ask Marguerite out for coffee. She accepted. “His energy was enchanting,” said Maggie of that rendezvous. “I had never encountered anyone who could talk like him,” she said with a laugh.

The young man was so full of ideas, literary aspirations, and philosophies for the future; he never stopped talking. He was opinionated and entertaining. When he stopped to catch his breath between his passionate rants, he was impressed by Marguerite's vast knowledge of literature. It far surpassed his own, and he loved that about her. “I looked up to her,” said Ray. “I've never understood men who have love affairs with women who are inferior. Those men don't want to be threatened.”

Along with her love of books, she was also a natural student of language; she was fluent in French, Italian, and Spanish. “I think it's something you are probably just born with,” she surmised. It also didn't hurt that throughout her childhood, Marguerite's mother, who spoke German and Slovak, would speak both around the house. “When she didn't want me to know what she was talking about, she spoke in these languages. That gave me an intense interest in language,” Marguerite said, admitting that she never learned to speak those languages herself.

Ray and Marguerite's afternoon coffee soon turned into lunch, which quickly turned into dinner. In May, they went to an upscale restaurant in downtown Los Angeles. He couldn't afford it, so she recommended they go dutch. She was eloquent and well off and sipped martinis at dinner. She had gone to UCLA to study literature and languages, but left before graduation after an argument with an instructor. Maggie, a headstrong Irish girl, disliked being told that a swim class was mandatory. When the class instructor suggested that her figure could use it, Maggie retorted that the teacher's figure needed it more. Of course, she failed the course, didn't get the credit, and walked away from the university.

Ray, on the other hand, was a young, self-educated, penniless writer who had worked his way up from nothing. Maggie was an only child who loved long days being left alone with her books. He was a bold, brash kid (except when it came to the opposite sex, of course) who had grown up in Illinois surrounded by a colorful extended family. She was a child of the Depression who had never gone without. He was a child of the Depression whose family barely got by. He still loved comics and pulp fiction. She loved Proust and Yeats.

Whatever it was—the yin and the yang; opposites attracting—they hit it off immediately. “Once I figured out that he wasn't stealing books,” said Maggie, “that was it. I fell for him.”

Marguerite Susan McClure, nicknamed “Maggie,” was born on January 16, 1922, to Lonal and Anna McClure. She had a rich genealogy; among her father's family were the founders of
McClure's
magazine. Another relative had invented the coupler that connected freight train cars. Her great-grandfather had married a full-blooded Cherokee Native American in the wheat plains of Kansas in the late 1800s. Marguerite's father was a Los Angeles restaurateur. During the First World War, he served as head chef to General John Joseph Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in France. In his lifetime, Lonal owned many restaurants in the Los Angeles area. But his greatest source of pride was his only child, Marguerite, delivered into a silver-spoon world that knew no want, no hardship, no poverty.

Maggie lived with her parents in a nice, comfortable home in the Lienert Park neighborhood of L.A., near the intersection of Slauson and Crenshaw. From the day they began dating, Ray and Maggie were nearly inseparable. When they weren't together, they spent long periods of time talking to each other on the telephone. But only after several dates did Ray finally find the nerve to hold Maggie's hand.

During the early days of their courtship, Ray was still publishing stories in the pulps, while he continued putting
Dark Carnival
together. It was during this time that he sold his first piece to radio. The producers of the NBC program
Mollé Mystery Theater
in New York had seen one of Ray's stories, “Killer, Come Back to Me,” in the July 1944 issue of
Detective Tales
magazine, and bought the rights. The drama starred the popular radio actor Richard Widmark, who would move to Los Angeles the following year to embark on a long and successful film career. “Killer, Come Back to Me” aired on May 17, 1946.

Ray's foray into radio prompted him to submit more material for the medium. “I had sent tear sheets of some of my short stories from
Weird Tales
to William Spier, at CBS in Hollywood,” said Ray. Spier was a well-known producer and director for the nationally broadcast radio program “Suspense.” He read Ray's stories and wrote back, inviting him to come to his house in Bel Air for a visit. Spier was married to Kay Thompson, a noted singer, composer, actress, and vocal coach to many, including Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra. “She danced just as well as Fred Astaire,” commented Ray. A decade later, in 1955, Thompson would create Eloise, the popular children's literary character. Ray arrived at their house and Thompson handed Ray a drink. Spier sat him down and went through many of Ray's stories. “Bill bought a couple of my stories right there,” said Ray. He had crossed over into yet another storytelling medium.

As his career continued to take off, his personal life was soaring, too. Ray and Maggie were head over heels in love. It's amazing he was getting any work done at all. They soon knew they wanted to spend the rest of their lives together. Maggie had visited the Bradbury house a few times by then, and Esther Bradbury pulled her son aside and demanded to know who this girl was who had stolen her son's heart. Esther was protective of her little bottle-fed-until-he-was-six boy and she wasn't going to let him go so easily. But it was too late. In June 1946, Ray and Maggie became engaged.

Curiously, neither of them remembered the exact moment of the engagement. Maggie recalled that Ray proposed to her one evening after they had kissed good night. Ray insisted that Maggie proposed to him, yet he couldn't recall the details. “It's too far back,” claimed Ray (this from a man who recalled his own birth!). He did remember a night that, as he said, was likely the clincher. He had kissed Maggie good night. “It was the kiss that broke my eardrums,” he said. Ray had left in a daze, intending to take a streetcar home. But he boarded the wrong train and, lost in thoughts of Maggie, rode it all the way to the end of the line in Redondo. When the conductor approached and asked the final, lone passenger to disembark, Ray realized the mistake he made in his lovesick stupor. “I just kissed my girlfriend,” he told the conductor. The conductor smiled. “I've done something like that,” he said, sympathetically. The man made a deal with Ray. He asked Ray to help flip all the seats as the streetcar reversed and headed back toward Los Angeles. In return, Ray could ride home for free.

Despite the fact that Ray rarely explored sexual themes in his writing, he was a highly sexually charged young man. Maggie summed it up best: “He couldn't keep his hands off of me.” Added Ray: “We made love underneath every pier along the coast.”

On occasions when Ray and Maggie had the Bradbury house to themselves, the young couple made love on the living-room floor. “Why we did that, I don't know,” he said. “There was a bedroom!” Another time, Maggie's father, a stern man, actually caught his daughter and her fiancé in the act. Ray was visiting Maggie in the living room of her house, when Lonal McClure entered the room unexpectedly and caught them on the sofa. Lonal McClure didn't say a word; he simply turned and left. He didn't speak to Ray again until he had finally married his daughter.

One day in June, Ray and Maggie went to a ritzy jeweler's shop in downtown Los Angeles and bought two thick gold rings for thirty-five dollars apiece. These are the wedding bands they both wore for the rest of their lives.

Earlier that month, Ray had sent August Derleth a completed manuscript for
Dark Carnival
. He had continued to alter the table of contents up until the last minute, rewriting stories such as “The Wind,” “The Crowd,” and “The Poems.” He had added new stories: “The Maiden,” “Interim,” “Let's Play Poison,” and “Uncle Einar,” another story about his fictional vampire family, the Elliots. This new tale was an homage to his favorite uncle, his mother's brother Inar Moberg. Inar had always been the life of the Bradbury party, a laundry delivery driver who frequently stopped by the old house in Waukegan and burst through the back door with great energy, laughter, a hint of liquor on his breath. In the short story, Ray changed the spelling of his uncle's name, gave him glorious green wings, and turned him into a lovable vampire. “Uncle Einar” was yet another offbeat piece of “weird” fiction centered upon the theme of the misfit.

Rounding out
Dark Carnival
was “The Next in Line.” In this newly written story, Ray had drawn from his experiences visiting the mummies of Guanajuato, Mexico. The result was one of the most powerful stories in the book, a psychologically complex creation, dripping with gothic atmosphere that displayed Ray Bradbury at his poetic best.

In early September 1946, Ray traveled by train to New York. With his appearance in the
Best American Short Stories
anthology and his string of sales to the respected slicks, he had become a minor darling of the New York literary establishment. As he made his way east, he stopped in Waukegan to visit family, and in Sauk City, Wisconsin, where he met his publisher, August Derleth, for the first time. Aside from their business relationship, Ray and Derleth shared many interests. They both had grown up reading comic strips, and while they were both well regarded for their pulp stories, they shared a keen interest in contemporary fiction. As an armchair architecture buff, Ray was taken by Derleth's house, built by renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

While he was in New York, Ray met with editors from
Harper's, Collier's,
and
Good Housekeeping
. He met with Martha Foley, the editor of the
Best American Short Stories
anthology, and was the guest of honor at a party hosted by
Mademoiselle
fiction editor George Davis. He had come a long way in four short years, from shilling newspapers on a street corner wearing his brother's hand-me-downs to this—a party thrown for him by New York's literary luminaries. When Ray walked in, a drink was thrust into his hand and a crowd swarmed around him. Along with George Davis, Ray mingled with
Mademoiselle
's Rita Smith and her sister, author Carson McCullers. Ray also met
New Yorker
cartoonists Sam Cobean and Charles Addams, who had been commissioned to create the artwork for Ray's story “Homecoming” in the upcoming October issue of
Mademoiselle
. “I was kept constantly inebriated by all and sundry,” said Ray. That night, in the small New York apartment, Ray waltzed with Carson McCullers.

A few days later, he lunched with Charles Addams, and the two struck up a friendship. Addams had created his own ghoulishly wonderful brood—the Addams Family—a recurring series of cartoons appearing in
The New Yorker
. Ray and Addams discussed the possibility of one day working on a book together. Ray would write more tales of his vampire family from “Homecoming” and Charlie Addams would furnish the illustrations. “It will become sort of a
Christmas Carol
idea,” Ray wrote Addams, later, “Hallowe'en after Hallowe'en people will buy the book, just as they buy the
Carol,
to read by the fireplace, with lights low. Hallowe'en
is
the time of year for story-telling.” Addams and Ray agreed to stay in touch on the project.

Ray also met with Simon & Schuster editor Don Congdon, who had written Ray while he was in Mexico asking him if he had a novel. “I didn't have a novel, but I had some ideas,” recalled Ray. Those ideas revolved around a series of stories, set in the Midwest, about a young boy, as Don Congdon remembered, “who was going to try to prevent the continuation of time, and didn't want to grow older and so on, and keep his boyhood as it were.”