The Bradbury Chronicles (27 page)

From the lift operator to the hotel manager, the staff of the Royal Hibernian Hotel treated the Bradburys as family. Exhausted from travel, the Bradburys planned on relaxing their first day in Dublin. But as Ray was reading the
Irish Times,
he discovered this ad:
TODAY, ONE DAY ONLY—STAN LAUREL AND OLIVER HARDY
. The famous comedy duo was making a rare appearance that night at the Olympia Theatre in a benefit show for Irish orphans. While Maggie, Regina, and the girls rested, Ray went to the Olympia and bought the last available ticket. His seat was front-row center.

That night, Ray felt as if he was fourteen again. “When the curtain went up,” he recalled, “Stan and Ollie did all their great routines. When it was over, I went backstage, and I stood by their dressing room door and I watched all their friends going in and out. I didn't bother them. I didn't introduce myself. I just wanted to be in their ambience.”

Ray and his family settled into their new home at the Royal Hibernian. Soon after, he joined John Huston and his wife, Ricki, for dinner at their rented manor house in the countryside. Over dinner, Ray made his first script suggestion to Huston, to remove Melville's Parcee Fedallah character from the film. Ray deemed the character unnecessary, and, instead, wanted to give Fedallah's good lines to Ahab. Huston wholeheartedly concurred. But from that point on, the dinner degenerated rapidly. The subject of Spain came up, and Huston's young and beautiful wife stiffened. Huston raved about Spain—the bullfights and Hemingway, the colorful cities, the wonderful people. Huston explained that he and Ricki had visited Spain a month earlier when a little mishap occurred. When Huston mentioned this, Ricki stood up. Huston told his wife to sit down, to tell the story to Ray. Puzzled, Ray sensed a palpable tension in the room. Ricki dutifully sat. They had been crossing the border by automobile, she said, when a Spaniard without proper papers pleaded with them to smuggle him across the border. Spain's political climate was volatile, and Huston wanted to assist the man. But Ricki protested. It was illegal to smuggle someone out of the country. What if they were caught? She had children to worry about and could not risk landing in jail.

“Very simply,” said Huston to Ricki, “you were a coward.”

Ricki protested, but Huston refused to back down. Ricki said they would have been breaking the law, and Huston upbraided her for being a coward. The director then turned to Ray. “Wouldn't you hate to have a wife who's yellow, Ray?” Of course, Ray could hardly reply. Sympathizing with Ricki and horribly uncomfortable, Ray looked at her. Her eyes were welling with tears.

John Huston and Enrica Soma had married less than three years earlier, after Ricki had become pregnant with their son, Walter Anthony. Huston was married at the time to his third wife, actress Evelyn Keyes. He filed for a hasty divorce and, one day after receiving the decree, married the seven-months-pregnant Ricki. She was nineteen years of age to his forty-three.

With Ricki in tears, Ray sat saucer-eyed and appalled, naïvely assuming that Huston's malicious behavior indicated some sort of marital strife. Huston would never zero in on him like that, would he? In 1992, thirty-nine years after the fact, Ray would finally document the entire Huston/
Moby Dick
melodrama in the book
Green Shadows, White Whale
. But then, as John Huston was belittling his wife, Ray had no idea of what was to come. He could only hope that Huston's mean-spirited machismo would never be turned in his direction.

 

I
RELAND
. J
OHN
Huston had fallen in love with the cold, rugged landscape and the kindhearted people. A tall, tough man, Huston was a sportsman—a prize-winning boxer, an amateur bullfighter, a globe-trotting big-game hunter, a reputed womanizer. Lately, Huston had been charmed by the ritual of the Irish foxhunt. “I had hunted the fox in the States,” he said in his 1980 autobiography, “in England and on the Continent, but Irish hunting came as a new and joyful experience. It had little of the formality of the other hunts. You heard laughter and shouting as the hunt went on; there was a festive feeling about it all. Everyone was in high spirits.”

Seduced by the allure and magic of the Emerald Isle, Huston had, earlier in the year, rented an old, spacious country house near the town of Kilcock, in County Kildare. Called Courtown, the gray-stone house came replete with a staff of servants and sat on a patchwork quilt of green—three hundred acres of meadow and forest, and, as Ray said, beyond that “more meadow and more forest.” In the coming months, Ray took many cab trips from Dublin to Courtown, a thirty-mile ride through the lush Irish countryside, to discuss the screenplay's outline and progress with the director. The reason Ray had been summoned to Ireland to work on a screenplay for a film that was to be shot largely in the Canary Islands was so Huston could make the foxhunting season.

Ray found the first weeks of writing the screenplay nerve-wracking and the novel almost insurmountable. He read passages over and over, some hundreds of times. He worked twelve-hour days, seven days a week, which was foreign for Ray, who had always worked on multiple projects simultaneously, to skirt boredom and frustration. Once he began the
Moby Dick
screenplay, it was all white whale, all Ireland, all John Huston. He had no time for creative respite. In his limited free time, Ray occasionally accompanied Huston to the horse-racing tracks, another world foreign to Ray. Sometimes, he would catch an occasional movie, take weekend walks with his family in the countryside, or down a pint of Guinness at Heeber Finn's Pub in Kilcock. Ray and Maggie had met an American couple, Len Probst and his wife, Beth, and become friendly with them. Len was the head of the United Press International office in Dublin, and coincidentally was working on a story about John Huston. The two couples met once a week for dinner. But these joyful moments were fleeting. Ray was consumed by two towering American icons: Herman Melville and John Huston.

Making matters more grim, there was no autumn in Ireland. The days turned short and gray; the weather turned cold, damp, and dreary; and fog and rain descended upon Dublin. With each day, Ray sank further into depression, which he had never before battled. As a child, he had bouts of feeling blue, but those waves of emotion were nothing compared to his frame of mind in Ireland. “I was suicidal,” he said, “for the first time in my life.”

Maggie was helpless—she could do nothing except watch her husband sink deeper into the
Moby Dick
–induced doldrums. Ray was overwhelmed; mostly, he was beleaguered by the idea that he might disappoint his hero. What if Huston despised his work? What then? The pressure was nearly unbearable, and by early November, the moment arrived to present John Huston with the first fifty pages. Ray took the long, lonely cab ride out to Courtown.

When Ray arrived at the house, he put the pages in John Huston's hands. “John,” Ray said, “if you don't like what you read here today, I want you to fire me. I want you to send me home. Because I will not take money under false pretenses.”

“Okay, Ray,” Huston said, holding the stack of pages in his rugged hands. “Go upstairs and lie down and take a nap while I read the script.”

Ray was flabbergasted. Take a nap! “I was thinking to myself, ‘You're kidding! I'll go upstairs and roil around on the bed waiting for you to read the script.'” So Ray went upstairs and did just that. “I roiled around on the bed, waiting for word from him, because I meant it, I didn't want to go on working if it wasn't right.”

Nearly an hour later, Ray heard Huston calling from the bottom of the staircase. Ray went to the top of the stairs and looked down. Huston was standing with drink in hand. “Ray,” he said, “come down and finish the screenplay.”

“I came down the stairs weeping,” recalled Ray. “I so loved that man, I so loved that project. At that point, the burden was lifted from my shoulders. Up until then, I was suicidal. But after that day, it was gone.”

Though Huston approved of the work Ray had given him, the director began preying on the young writer. Huston had a reputation as a vicious practical joker, and he loved a good laugh at another's expense. He had derided Ray for his fear of flying. At first, the jesting was gentle, but it soon turned malicious. Huston knew Ray desperately sought his acknowledgment and affirmation, and began ridiculing his screenwriter in public.

One afternoon Huston, Ray, and two of Huston's associates were in a cab, on the way to lunch, when Huston turned to one of his friends—a former assistant of Charlie Chaplin's—and said, “I don't think our friend Ray here has put his heart into writing the screenplay of
Moby Dick
.”

“I sat there stunned, in the back of the cab,” said Ray. He was mortified and could not understand why Huston would say such a thing. Did Huston really feel that way? When they arrived at the restaurant, Ray sat at the table, poking at his lunch, unable to speak, unable to eat a bite. In the meantime, John talked amiably with his friends, laughed, and enjoyed his lunch. Apparently, he had dropped the topic of Ray and the screenplay. “He noticed that I was quiet, but he didn't say anything,” recalled Ray.

Later that afternoon at the Royal Hibernian Hotel, Ray and Huston sat down to discuss details of a scene Ray was tinkering with, and, as Ray remained rather quiet, Huston asked about his uncharacteristic silence.

“John,” Ray said, “did you really mean it when you said that I wasn't putting my heart into writing the script? That I didn't care?” The ever-emotional, easily wounded writer was on the verge of tears.

“Ray!” Huston chortled, putting his arm around his screenwriter. “Ray, I was only joking!”

Ray tried to laugh and disguise his hurt. But this episode marked the beginning of Huston's bad treatment of Ray. In the next months, their relationship grew ever more strained.

Maggie Bradbury, fiercely protective of her husband, did not approve of Huston's behavior or his attitude toward Ray. “He was weird,” Maggie said, decades later. “And he took a strange attitude toward me.” Maggie remembered one morning when she was breakfasting with Peter Viertel in the living room of Huston's home in Kilcock. “Peter was a very intelligent man, and one morning, we were having such fun talking, and Peter said, ‘You know how John is always asking people what they're talking about? When he comes down the stairs today, I'll say “transcendentalism.”' Well, a short time later, down the stairs comes John Huston. Peter and I were laughing and quieted down when Huston appeared.” Maggie remembered that Huston instantly inquired, as if on cue: “What are you two talking about?” “Peter responded,” Maggie recalled, “‘Transcendentalism.' Well, Huston was no intellectual, he could tell a good story, but he was no intellectual. He asked Peter what transcendentalism was; Peter gave him some made-up answer, some rigmarole, and Huston said, ‘Oh, I understand,' and walked away. Peter and I had a great laugh over that. Huston couldn't have understood it because Peter's explanation made no sense!”

By Christmas, Ray had written nearly a hundred pages of the screenplay. To celebrate the season, he and Maggie visited Courtown together. Huston had bought Ricki a new horse, a beautiful chestnut, as Ray and Maggie recalled, for Christmas, and all the holiday guests were outside admiring the horse, which had a wreath around its neck. To properly show off her husband's gift, Ricki climbed upon the horse, but no sooner was she in the saddle than the horse threw her off. As Ray and Maggie recalled the scene, Ricki Huston landed on her head. “The normal reaction to something like this,” said Maggie, “is horror, and then to go see if you can help. You know what Huston said? ‘Goddammit, Ricki! Get back on that horse! If you had done what I'd told you, you wouldn't have been thrown.' He said it in that icy-cold voice.”

“He didn't check her out first, to see if she was hurt,” added Ray. “She could have broken her neck. She could have been killed.”

Ray began seeing Huston in a new light, but just as Ray was thinking poorly of his hero, Huston ensnared him time and again with considerate words and encouragement. The two were such opposites: Huston was a gruff, macho, often mean-spirited man, while Ray Bradbury was acutely sensitive, easily brought to tears, and forever seeking love and attention.

Ray tried to be congenial and play along with Huston. For instance, when Huston told Ray that he had received an urgent telegram from studio head Jack Warner, insisting that a female love interest be inserted into the screenplay, Ray was livid and stomped around the room. He was attempting to remain as faithful to the tone and spirit of Melville as possible and to add a romantic female lead was absurd, but after Huston broke out in laughter and revealed it was another of his many gags, though Ray was still miffed, he laughed with Huston. By January, Maggie had had enough and asked to leave. She could not continue to stand by as Huston victimized her husband with his malicious humor, though she never confronted Huston, fearing that it could jeopardize her husband's position.

Wearied of witnessing the abuse and enduring Ireland's foul weather, Maggie told Ray she needed to leave with the girls and go somewhere warm. Ray suggested she phone a travel agency and ask them to pull out a map and locate the southernmost tip of Europe, and when Maggie complied, Ray booked them passage to Italy.