The Bradbury Chronicles (31 page)

As ever, as Ray was endeavoring to work on
White Hunter, Black Heart,
and as
Dandelion Wine
was in the prepublication stages, he continued to craft new short stories.

Ever since Ray and Maggie had visited Bernard Berenson in the spring of 1954 at his Italian villa, Ray had remained in touch with the aged Renaissance scholar. The two men corresponded often, writing each other letters touching upon any number of subjects, from space travel to the aesthetic hurdles that confronted artists. It was a tender relationship, a father-and-son bond that Ray never had with his own father. Leo Bradbury was a tough guy, a blue-collar man, never one to wear his emotions on his shirtsleeves, though he had a terrific sense of humor, and he loved his son, but he was never able to relate fully to his sensitive imaginative, anomalous offspring. In Bernard Berenson, Ray had found a man who shared his enthusiasm for the love of the creative process. In Ray Bradbury, Berenson had found a young man who shared his passion for the arts, and for creating. What Berenson found most remarkable about Ray was his ability to articulate this love concisely. “All my life I have been trying to say what the artist does to us and I have never succeeded in doing it better or half so well as you,” he wrote Ray.

With each letter from Berenson that arrived in Ray's mailbox, he continually pointed out that his time on Earth was nearing its end. With each letter, Berenson expressed his desire to see Ray and Maggie soon, for it could be their last visit. This pained Ray no end. Even as his star had risen dramatically since working on
Moby Dick,
he and Maggie still did not have enough money for a return trip to Europe. The occasional television work helped, but with three little girls to support, they had just enough money to live comfortably, but had nothing left for luxury. A trip to Europe was out of the question, and Ray feared that he might never see Bernard Berenson again.

But in the summer of 1957, fate intervened. Writer Graham Greene had read Ray's short story “And the Rock Cried Out” and brought it to the attention of film director Sir Carol Reed. The director was looking for a new project, and one afternoon, as Ray recalled, Reed happened to be on the telephone with Harold Hecht, for whom Ray had been working on
White Hunter, Black Heart
. Ray was in Hecht's office when the call came in. Reed asked Hecht if he had ever heard of this young writer named Ray Bradbury, as Reed was interested in working with him on a film adaptation of “And the Rock Cried Out.” “As a matter of fact,” Harold Hecht told Reed, “he's standing here right this minute. Would you like to talk to him?”

Ray, Maggie, and the girls were soon off to London, where Ray would adapt his own short story into a screenplay for Sir Carol Reed. It was a stroke of serendipity and, most important to Ray, the opportunity allowed him to visit Bernard Berenson one last time. Around this time, Ray learned that his work on
White Hunter, Black Heart
would be all for naught. Hecht-Hill-Lancaster was unable to find a studio to back the picture. The film would have to wait several more decades, when new writers would adapt the novel for director Clint Eastwood.

Ray spent that summer in London, writing the screenplay, which turned out to be an exhilarating creative experience. Carol Reed was no John Huston. He encouraged Ray, reading the screenplay's completed pages and telling him to just “keep doing what you're doing.” In a matter of weeks, Ray finished the script, but his work was in vain. Once again, Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, the producers of
And the Rock Cried Out,
was unable to procure funding. To this day, according to those who have read the script, it is Ray Bradbury's best unproduced screenplay.

When Ray had completed work on
And the Rock Cried Out
in August, he and his family traveled south to Italy to meet with Bernard Berenson. “We were reunited in joy,” Ray wrote in the essay “The Renaissance Prince and the Baptist Martian,” “as if three years had not passed since our last fireworks. B. B. was, of course, even more the trembling gray moth now: the bones had thinned within the mother-of-pearl, crushed-flower flesh, but his spirits were good and his mind clean.”

Ray and Maggie shared sumptuous lunches and exquisite late-afternoon teas with “B.B.” It was their last visit with this extraordinary man, who was a kindred spirit, a father figure, and an unlikely fan of Ray's. Although Bernard Berenson lived two more years after this visit, Ray and Maggie would not return to Europe in time to see him again. He died October 6, 1959.

 

W
HILE IN
Italy, the Bradburys visited Rome. It was on a golden afternoon, with the city spreading out before their hotel balcony window, that Maggie turned to Ray and told him that she no longer loved him. She wanted a divorce. Ray was dumbfounded; he had never sensed any such feelings in Maggie before, and decades later, he maintained that he was unaware that Maggie was unhappy. He was a faithful husband, a loving father, and a hard worker. Ray could hardly understand why she would ask for a divorce, but she told him that she was through.

“I suppose she was tired of raising four children,” Ray surmised, counting himself as the fourth child. In the Bradbury household, Maggie did most of the parenting. She was the disciplinarian; she helped the girls with their homework; she attended all the parent-teacher conferences. Ray, of course, did his share: He was the enthusiast, always willing to cart the girls off to the movies, to play games, to paint, to tell bedtime stories. But apparently Maggie carried the brunt of parenting. At least, this was how Ray perceived it when confronted by Maggie's dissatisfaction. Somehow, Ray didn't remember how, he managed to talk Maggie out of leaving and, many years later, when he asked her why she had asked for a divorce, why she had said what she did in Rome, Maggie replied that she recalled none of it.

 

T
HE
B
RADBURYS
arrived stateside and, upon their return home, Ray learned that his father had been admitted to the hospital with a burst appendix. The initial prognosis had looked good, so Esther Bradbury refrained from telling Ray, fearing that he would worry too much and that his vacation would be spoiled. Unbeknownst to anyone, Leo had been misdiagnosed. He did not simply have a burst appendix; he was in fact suffering from peritonitis, an acute inflammation of the inner lining of the abdominal cavity. “Had they operated immediately, they might have saved his life,” Ray lamented.

Before Ray left for Europe, he had given his father an advance copy of
Dandelion Wine
. Leo Bradbury loved it. Ray had given copies of all of his books to his parents upon publication (he even dedicated
The Illustrated Man
to “Father, Mother, and Skip”), but this book was different. After all, it poetically evoked Leo Bradbury's hometown, too.
Dandelion Wine
was published in September 1957 as Ray's father was hospitalized.

During this time, Ray remembered, Maggie again asked for a divorce. He was heartbroken. But with an indefatigable spirit, he determined to set things straight. First, he had to tend to his father. Ray wanted him moved. Leo had been admitted to a veterans' hospital where he had to share a room with several other patients; Ray wanted his father to have his own room. In recent years, Ray had come to love and appreciate his father, particularly since the tear-filled turning point when Leo Bradbury had given him Samuel Hinkston's gold pocketwatch.

Ray managed to move his father to Santa Monica Hospital, but two days later, Leo suffered a massive stroke. After this, Ray visited his father twice a day, every day, for two weeks. Each time, Ray told him that he loved him. But Leo never recovered. On October 20, 1957, he passed away.

The funeral for Leonard Spaulding Bradbury was held two days after his death, at the Kingsley and Gates Funeral Home in Santa Monica. This devastating day for Ray was made heartwarming only by a huge turnout of Leonard Bradbury's coworkers, people Ray had never known. “I never knew so many people cared about my dad,” he said.

After Leonard Bradbury was buried, Ray set out to salvage his disintegrating marriage. He still claimed to be befuddled by Maggie's unhappiness and dissatisfaction. He went to Maggie the only way he knew: “I suppose I just cried,” Ray recalled. It worked. Maggie agreed to stay, “like so many spouses do,” said Ray, “for the children.”

When I visit schools, kids always ask me, “What's the scariest book you've ever read?” and I always tell them
Something Wicked This Way Comes.
I still remember how creepy it was. It really struck a chord with me.

—
R. L. STINE
,
author

D
ESPITE FISSURES
in their marriage, Bradbury baby number four—Alexandra Allison—arrived on August 13, 1958. Like her three elder siblings, “Zana,” as friends and family called her, did not share the supranatal proclivity of her father; none of the Bradbury girls recalled their own births.

The ranch house at 10750 Clarkson Road was now too small for the family, prompting Ray and Maggie to look for a new home. The first place the couple saw was a sprawling three-bedroom house, not far from where they had been living, in the Cheviot Hills enclave of West Los Angeles. Cheviot Hills was, and remains, a junior Beverly Hills; the houses are not nearly as ostentatiously large, but still reasonably sized by Los Angeles standards. The streets are rolling, with well-manicured lawns fringing the sidewalks; and rows of mature palm trees reach to the sky. Ray and Maggie loved the split-level stucco house, which had been built in 1937. It was nestled into a cozy embankment of grass and tall green shrubbery. It had an attached garage beneath the kitchen and, most important for Ray, it had a basement where he could put his office. The Bradburys found the sliver of a backyard perfectly charming; it was just big enough for Ray and the girls to play badminton at twilight—one of the family's favorite nightly rituals. (Many years later, with his daughters grown and out of the house, Ray had the gutters cleaned. When the serviceman climbed onto the roof, he discovered an old badminton birdie among the leaves. Ray noticed the serviceman holding the shuttlecock in his hand, and he told him to return it to its nest. Ever the sentimentalist, Ray wanted to leave the fond memories of nightly badminton games undisturbed. The utility man returned the birdie to the gutter, where it sits to this day.)

Ray and Maggie purchased their new home in the autumn of 1958. They moved in on Thanksgiving Day because, as Maggie said, with her usual sarcasm, “I was trying to get out of cooking Thanksgiving dinner!” It took two moving trucks to relocate all the Bradbury belongings, the first vehicle for furniture, clothes, and household goods. Ray was a packrat; he threw nothing out, and many of the boxes were stuffed with his collection of toys, old autograph books, and movie and theater ticket stubs spanning the decades. A second moving truck was called into duty just for the books. The Bradburys packed things where they could squeeze them. Ray even placed an obstreperous cat into a trash can for the short drive over to the new house. In the new house, Susan and Ramona shared a bedroom, with their own bathroom, while Bettina had her own room on the west side of the house. Baby Alexandra slept with her parents.

Not long after the Bradburys moved into their new home, screenwriter John Gay, who had briefly collaborated with Ray on
White Hunter, Black Heart,
introduced Ray to his friend Rod Serling. Serling, a three-time Emmy Award–winning writer, was in the midst of developing a new fantasy and science fiction series for CBS. The show's title was
The Twilight Zone
.

According to Don Presnell and Marty McGee, authors of
A Critical History of Television's The Twilight Zone, 1959–1964,
Serling had “helped define television as a dramatic art form,” beginning with a teleplay that aired on the
Kraft Television Theater
in January 1955. Some would proffer that Rod Serling was to dramatic television in the 1950s what Norman Corwin was to radio in the 1940s; Serling was known for addressing social issues and writing “serious” stories. And so, when he announced his intentions to develop a dark fantasy television series, it came as a surprise to many. Furthermore, according to Ray Bradbury, Serling was out of his element with a genre television program and he needed help. Soon after meeting Rod Serling, Ray and Maggie attended an awards banquet sponsored by the Writers Guild. Serling was there and he approached Ray, who by 1959 was hailed as one of the undisputed masters of fantasy and science fiction.

“Rod told me that he was starting a fantasy series,” recalled Ray, “but he didn't really know what he was doing. I invited him over to the house that night.” Serling accepted the invitation and, as Ray recalled it, he took Serling down to his basement office and put a pile of books in his arms, by Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson (both friends and acolytes of Ray's), Roald Dahl, and John Collier. Ray placed a few of his own books on top for good measure.

“I told Rod,” Ray said, “‘After you read these books you will have a complete idea of what your show should be like. Buy some of these stories or hire some of these authors to work for you, because you can't do the whole thing by yourself.'” Ray then sent Serling off.

After that, Rod and his wife, Carol, would have Ray and Maggie over for dinner occasionally. As their friendship progressed, Ray agreed to be a regular contributor to Serling's television program.

Meanwhile, Ray landed a short story in
The Best American Short Stories
anthology of 1958. “The Day It Rained Forever” would mark his last appearance in the respected literary collection. He had also readied another short-story collection,
A Medicine for Melancholy,
which featured twenty-two newly collected Bradbury short stories, including such reader favorites as “The Dragon,” “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit,” “In a Season of Calm Weather,” and the widely anthologized “All Summer in a Day.” The latter story told of a group of vicious schoolchildren on Venus who lock a little girl in a classroom closet just as the sun is preparing to make its brief, once-every-seven-years appearance. “More people ask me about that one story than any other,” Ray said, reflecting on his prolific output of short stories. “That story reveals the dark side in all of us. And it makes us feel ashamed.” Doubleday published
A Medicine for Melancholy
in February 1959.

At the same time, Ray's film agents offered him free use of an office space in a gleaming white building located at 9441 Wilshire Boulevard, in Beverly Hills. Ray's agents were moving to another office, but had prepaid a year's lease at the Wilshire location. Ray readily accepted the generous offer. Each morning, he took the bus, or a cab, or asked Maggie to drive him to the office (the family had, at long last, given in and bought an aqua blue station wagon). Ray was working diligently on a new novel, and the Wilshire Boulevard office provided him a quiet respite from the tapping of little feet above his basement office at home.

At this time, unbeknownst to Ray, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began looking into his possible involvement with the Communist Party. According to the FBI file, recently declassified through the Freedom of Information Act, the bureau began investigating Ray on April 2, 1959. Over the years, some of Ray's works—stories in
The Martian Chronicles
and
The Illustrated Man,
and, of course,
Fahrenheit 451
—had strong antigovernment overtones; Ray's public criticism of the House Un-American Activities Committee and of the McCarthy hearings also made him a target. It is worth noting, however, that in the FBI report, the bureau, like many journalists over the years, spelled Ray's name incorrectly: He is listed as “Raymond” Douglas Bradbury. The FBI's investigation, which included surveillance of the Bradbury house in Cheviot Hills, combed through Ray's past, searching for evidence that he was a member of the Communist Party. One anonymous informant advised the investigators that writers such as Ray were reaching a large audience through mass paperbacks and, consequently, were “in a position to spread poison concerning political institutions in general and American institutions in particular.” The report cited several public speeches Ray had delivered in recent years that included comments critical of the U.S. government. It also took note of the November 1952 advertisement decrying the Republican Party that Ray had taken out in the
Daily Variety
. In the end, while the bureau had suspicions that Ray was a Communist sympathizer, the report concluded that “no evidences have been developed which indicate he was ever a member of the CP.” On June 3, 1959, the FBI closed its case on Ray.

Just a few months later, in the fall of 1959, Rod Serling's program,
The Twilight Zone,
premiered on CBS. The pilot episode, “Where Is Everybody?” aired on October 2. The plotline followed a confused astronaut who, after enduring isolation training on Earth in preparation for orbital space flight, finds himself inexplicably wandering through a desolate town, an amnesiac looking for any sign of life or even a sign of his own identity. After watching the program, Ray was shocked. “Where Is Everybody?,” bore an uncanny resemblance, at least in his mind, to one of his own stories, published almost a decade earlier in
The Martian Chronicles
. In Ray's tale, “The Silent Towns,” a reclusive man living in the blue hills of Mars emerges from his shack to find the planet completely evacuated. All the recent settlers had rocketed back to Earth to assist in the great atomic war raging back home. As the man walks the desolate streets of a Martian town, he is desperate to learn if he is truly the last person on Mars.

“When I saw the pilot episode of
The Twilight Zone,
” said Ray, “I thought, ‘That looks a little bit like a story from
The Martian Chronicles
.' I didn't say anything to Rod. I was embarrassed.” He assumed that it was an unintentional lifting of his concept.

A month later, remembered Ray, Rod Serling called him. “He said, ‘Why didn't you tell me?' and I said, ‘Tell you what?'” Ray related the phone conversation. “Rod said, ‘That my pilot script was based partially on a story of yours in
The Martian Chronicles
.'” Serling told Ray that the previous night he had been reading in bed when his wife, Carol, who was immersed in
The Martian Chronicles,
turned to him and pointed out the similarities between “Where Is Everybody?” and “The Silent Towns.”

According to Ray, Serling admitted over the telephone that he had inadvertently used Ray's concept—at least in part. He was calling to right the wrong. Ray said that Serling offered to buy the rights to “The Silent Towns,” as an act of good faith. “I told him,” said Ray, “‘The very fact you called me and recognized what happened, that's it. Let's let it go.'”

Two weeks later, according to Ray, Serling called him again. “He said, ‘I can't stand it. I've got to buy your story. My lawyers will call you.' Rod hung up and his lawyers never called,” Ray said. “He shouldn't have made the second call. He was off the hook. I let him off the hook. And then he called and talked about his lawyers and they never called.”

Shortly thereafter, on October 30, 1959, Ray noticed more narrative similarities to his own work in the fifth episode of
The Twilight Zone,
“Walking Distance.” The nostalgic story followed a man who travels back in time to visit his childhood town. The story at once evoked the mood and imagery of
Dandelion Wine,
but, as
Twilight Zone
aficionados would note, Ray Bradbury does not have a monopoly on tales of nostalgic Americana. The episode even included the mention of a character, “Dr. Bradbury,” an apparent nod of appreciation from Serling. But Ray was frustrated, feeling that Serling was liberally borrowing ideas, themes, and concepts from his canon.

“On one level,” wrote Christopher Conlon in the December 2000–January 2001 issue of
Filmfax
magazine, “Bradbury's frustration with what he saw broadcast each week on
Twilight Zone
is perfectly understandable. The
Zone
is in fact drenched in Bradburian notions and plot devices, and from the onset Serling himself was well aware of Bradbury's central place in mid-century fantasy fiction.”

Even so, Ray wrote three teleplays for
The Twilight Zone
. The first teleplay he submitted to Serling's Cayuga Productions was an adaptation of his short story “Here There Be Tygers,” first published in the 1951 science fiction anthology
New Tales of Space and Time
. The story follows a rocket crew to the distant Planet 7 in Star System 84 (a rare instance of a Bradbury story set on a world outside of our own solar system). Planet 7 is Eden in outer space: beautiful, expansive, green, untouched. The rocket crew soon discovers that the planet rewards their respect of its ecology, by fulfilling their every thought: A creek flows with white wine; the wind flies an astronaut like a drifting kite. But when one crew member endeavors to exploit the planet for its rich natural resources, Planet 7, a living, breathing entity, decides to lash out. Thematically, “Here There Be Tygers” was a perfect fit for
The Twilight Zone
. Serling was intent on his show addressing social issues, and in his teleplay Ray was examining modern ecological concerns (well before the ecology movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s). There was one problem with “Here There Be Tygers.” It would cost too much to produce; consequently, it was rejected.