The Bradbury Chronicles (37 page)

After the discussion had ended, Ray approached Fellini again, this time armed with an Italian edition of
The Martian Chronicles
. When he handed the book to the director, Fellini's face brightened. “He said in his thick, Italian accent, ‘Oh! Ray Bradbury!'” Ray went home that night feeling much better.

As he crossed over into modern cultural mediums that had helped foster his own imagination—and met people he had worshiped as a boy—there was still much that Ray wanted to do. In fact, Ray Bradbury always kept a mental “to-do” list of countless ideas. One of his dreams was to direct a short film. When he mentioned this wish to the noted film director King Vidor, the filmmaker remarked, simply, “Let me know when, and I'll carry the camera.” Of course, the renowned filmmaker was just paying Ray a compliment; the project remained a dream.

Another of Ray's dreams was to design a library, with a children's library in a subbasement accessible by a slide (as well as a more practical elevator for those unwilling or unable to slide in). Masks would hang on the sides of the tall stacks of books. When touched, they would light up and speak the subjects in that aisle: “Aisle 7: Dinosaurs to Egypt,” for example. Ray believed that the modern library had lost its mystery, forgotten its imagination. New libraries were too cold, too bright, too impersonal. He maintained that a library should have pools of good light for reading, but they should also have shadowy areas in which the mind and body could wander and get lost.

Architecture and design had always been his one unfulfilled passion. Ever since his visit to the 1933 World's Fair, he had dreamed of designing and building. In 1970, he wrote an essay on urban design in Los Angeles, titled “The Girls Walk This Way; the Boys Walk That Way—A Dream for Los Angeles.” It was first published on April 5, 1970, in
West,
the magazine of the
Los Angeles Times
. The essay lamented the demise of the town plaza as a central gathering point in American culture, and it was vintage Bradbury. He was being nostalgic for the past, while offering solutions for our future. In his essay, he spoke of the countless outdoor cafés lining the rain-slicked streets in Paris where people congregated late into the night. He wrote of town plazas in Mexico, hubs of community, family, and friends. It was through these time-honored urban success stories that Ray prescribed his vision for the future of Los Angeles.

When Ray's essay was published in 1970, a thirty-year-old L.A. architect named Jon Jerde read it with piqued interest. Jerde was on a career path that would eventually find him crowned king of the stigmatized architectural subspecies known as shopping-plaza design. In the decades that followed, Jon Jerde would become the controversial yet celebrated architect of shopping centers and dramatic public spaces around the world. His goal: “To get people to come back to the core of the city.” It was this vision that prompted a
Los Angeles Times
architecture critic to state that Jerde “reached beyond the cultural elite to tap into the public imagination. And that public has flocked to his projects.”

Jon Jerde was never interested in designing structures to dazzle other architects. His visions were about people. The architect wanted to design spaces that would entice the public's imagination and draw them in. “My interests have always been the ordinary, common man, not the elitists which are all the other architects,” he said.

Jon Jerde's hero in all of this was none other than Ray Bradbury, who was certainly an unlikely influence for an architect. Jerde had first read
The Martian Chronicles
when he was a teenager growing up in 1950s America. When he read
Dandelion Wine,
he was bowled over by the story “The Lawns of Summer.” “Anybody who would think to write a story about the scent of cut grass,” said Jerde, “that's a brilliant thinker.”

After Jerde read Ray's essay in
West,
a mutual friend arranged a lunch between the architect and the author. Jerde had recently designed the Glendale Galleria shopping center and, at that first meeting, he asked Ray Bradbury if he had seen it.

“Yes,” Ray said.

“What do you think of it?” Jerde inquired.

“It's nice,” Ray said.

“That's yours,” Jerde told him.

Ray was uncertain what the young architect was getting at. And then Jerde explained. He told Ray that he had read his essay “The Girls Walk This Way; the Boys Walk That Way” and had been inspired by Ray's visionary plan to revitalize depressed retail districts. Jerde had imitated all the things Ray Bradbury had spelled out in his urban-planning blueprint. The Glendale Galleria was based on the concepts of Ray Bradbury.

Ray was incredulous. And proud. He told Jon Jerde that if it was okay with him, he wanted to claim to the world that he was his “bastard son.”

From that point forward, the two men forged a tight working relationship. “I went to work for Jon as a part-time consultant,” Ray said. Ray went to Jerde's office, an old Los Angeles power plant turned design studio. As both men had myriad outside projects going on, they met once a week, very early, around seven-thirty in the morning.

“Very slowly,” said Jerde, “I discovered my really great friend. We did a lot of explorations together, from the very trivial to the very profound, without even knowing so.”

During their weekly meetings, the two visionaries plotted all sorts of design concepts for malls that Jerde's firm, the Jerde Partnership International, was developing. One of these malls was a new, $140 million center called Horton Plaza, to be built in downtown San Diego. Ray wrote a conceptual design essay, expressing his vision for this urban mecca, titled “The Aesthetics of Lostness.” In it, he extolled the virtues of getting “safely lost” as adults. To wander the side streets of Paris, London, or New York, getting lost in the fray, he posited, was divine. Ray suggested that shopping plazas should offer the same retreat. “[E]ven in our interior malls,” he wrote, “we can plan in such a way that, for a brief if not lengthy time, we can enjoy sensations of lostness. To build into these arcades twists and turns, and upper levels that by their mysteriousness draw the eye and attract the soul: That can be the subliminal lure of all future architectures.”

When Horton Plaza finally opened, with four staggered floors boasting balconies and hidden alcoves, it was a direct interpretation of Ray Bradbury's essay. “Ray's influence on the design was total,” said Jerde.

Even as Ray's influence was extending into architecture, on Ray's favorite holiday, Halloween, his first collection of poetry was published.
When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed
was released on October 31, 1973. It had taken Ray a long time to gain confidence as a poet. He had deemed his first forays into the form, back in his high school days, as complete and utter failures. Ray made a silent pledge then not to return to verse until he had achieved a certain level of maturity and skill.
Elephants
symbolized Ray's newfound confidence that he had finally reached that goal. The book contained fifty-one poems, ranging in subject from the very personal, to the profoundly spiritual, to visions of the future and nostalgic sojourns into the past. In many ways, it was his most personal work to date, the clearest window yet, unoccluded by the ornate décor of fantasy, into Ray Bradbury the man, the writer, husband, father, son, child of the universe. It was the book's opening poem that, perhaps, said most about this sensitive man, an unabashed celebrant of sentimentality, but also a steadfast proponent of looking ahead to the future. In “Remembrance,” Ray recalled a visit he had made to his childhood hometown of Waukegan, Illinois, sometime in the 1960s. He walked by the old house at 11 South St. James. He wandered down into the ravine, where he used to play some forty-odd years earlier. And then he remembered. Standing there alone in the ravine deeps, golden sunlight filtering through a leafy green canopy, he looked up at a tree and he started to climb. In his poem, Ray recalled the incident, the silly forty-something-year-old man climbing a tree trunk as high as he could go. He found an old squirrel's nest and reached inside. His fingers played around until they landed on something. A note, a message written decades before.

 

I opened it. For now I had to know.

I opened it, and wept. I clung then to the tree

And let the tears flow out and down my chin.

Dear boy, strange child, who must have known the years

And reckoned time and smelled sweet death from flowers

In the far churchyard.

It was a message to the future, to myself.

Knowing one day I must arrive, come, seek, return.

From the young one to the old. From the me that was small

And fresh to me that was large and no longer new.

What did it say that made me weep?

I remember you.

I remember you.

I think it's fair to say that somebody as distinct an individual as Ray Bradbury was never meant to succeed in mainstream Hollywood. Hollywood thrives on people who conform in one way or another—conform to popular taste, conform to current trends, conform to formula, to box office mandates, or bend to a director's or producer's wish. None of those things describes Ray. In a way, it makes sense that he doesn't have a longer list of movie credentials.

—
LEONARD MALTIN
,
film critic, author

S
OON AFTER
Ray's first extramarital relationship had ended in 1974, late in the afternoon one day, the phone rang in his office. A woman's voice was on the other end of the line.

“Mr. Bradbury?” the woman asked.

“Yes?”

“It's your birthday,” she said. “Your wife has forgotten it. Your children have forgotten it. Your friends have forgotten it, but I haven't forgotten it. Happy birthday.”

Though it's hard to believe that his wife and loving children would have forgotten his fifty-fourth birthday, Ray claimed that, indeed, they did. He must have been lonely, if they had done so, and when he picked up the telephone and heard the woman wishing him a happy birthday (this was not yet the era of stalkers, and Ray was always generous to anyone who expressed appreciation), he reached out to her. The woman was calling, it turned out, from a nearby pay phone, so Ray invited her up to his office. She was an aspiring writer in her early thirties. They chatted for a while, and the more they talked, the more Ray grew attracted to her. A week later, the woman invited him to her home in the Hollywood Hills and Ray's second affair began. It was a passionate and exciting relationship that lasted four years. Ray was fairly certain that Maggie was unaware of his infidelities, even though his daughter Ramona had seen him in a Beverly Hills delicatessen with his first mistress (his daughter acted as if she had not seen him or his companion). If Maggie knew, at this point, she neither acknowledged his straying nor confronted him about it.

One evening, as the sun set in Los Angeles and lights were starting to come on in the houses that dotted the hills of the Silver Lake neighborhood, Ray and his new love visited the famous staircase where, in 1932, Laurel and Hardy had filmed
The Music Box
. The scene in which Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy struggle to move a piano up 133 steps is now a classic of cinematic history. That night, Ray and his new mistress, as he liked to call her, snapped photographs of each other. In the pictures, Ray twiddles his tie, and she tousles her hair—an homage to Laurel and Hardy. It was a special, simple night, an evening that Ray would later fictionalize in the short story “The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair,” from 1988's
The Toynbee Convector
.

But as the secret relationship progressed, Ray became careless. One day he left a credit card receipt for flowers lying about the house and Maggie found it. Suspicious, she asked Ray for whom he bought the flowers. Not wanting to lie, Ray simply admitted his affair. Maggie was furious. She immediately tossed her husband out of the house. That night, dejected, Ray checked into a Beverly Hills hotel and wondered if he had lost his family for good. But after a few days, Maggie called him. “You're a son of a bitch,” she said, “but I love you.” Ray was allowed to return home. But was he chastened? Ray had never intended to hurt Maggie, but he felt hugely insecure in their marriage from the time Maggie had asked for a divorce. From his perspective, the fact that she even contemplated such an idea meant that she was no longer vested in their relationship. He believed that she could leave him at any moment, and so he turned to other women. This was how he rationalized his affairs. Had he discussed his feelings openly with Maggie, he would not have felt any more assured. He continued to see his mistress.

 

T
HROUGHOUT THE
1970s, Ray's reputation as a master of the imagination soared. By 1974, his stories had been collected in more than two thousand anthologies, from
The Best American Short Stories of the Year,
to numerous science fiction and fantasy collections, to high school and college literature textbooks around the world. Renowned writer William F. Nolan wrote in 1975's
The Ray Bradbury Companion
that “it is doubtful that the work of any American author has approached the remarkable anthology exposure achieved by Bradbury.”

As he was being read in schools all around the world and becoming a household name, he continued his forays into different media. Without doubt, Ray Bradbury had become a modern-day Renaissance man. Ever since his work on the United States Pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair, Ray had been on the radar screen of the design and development team for the Walt Disney company, Disney Imagineering. Headquartered in Glendale, California, at the foot of the Verdugo Mountains, in the San Fernando Valley, Disney Imagineering was the think tank behind the Mouse, responsible for turning ideas—from theme park rides to audio-animatrons to real estate development—into reality. As the Disney company was moving toward bringing to life Walt Disney's vision of an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, one of the names that was first bandied about as a potential creative contributor was Ray Bradbury. Executives Jon Hench and Marty Sklar could think of no other person who better reflected the ideals of the past in harmony with the concepts of the future: Ray's fond attachment to the small-town Americana of yesteryear, combined with his hopes and dreams for a better tomorrow, was a perfect match for Disney. Walt Disney had created “Main Street USA,” as well as “Tomorrowland.” But even before that, Ray had authored
Dandelion Wine
and
The Martian Chronicles,
odes to those very two concepts.

Ray was hired by Disney Imagineering in 1976—the year of the American Bicentennial—to consult on EPCOT Center. Just as he had done with the United States Pavilion at the World's Fair, he was asked to conceptualize and write the script for the interiors of EPCOT's centerpiece, the geodesic sphere known as “Spaceship Earth.” Ray worked at the Imagineering offices for a period of weeks late in 1976, four or five days a week. His hours were flexible. “They didn't care when I got there or when I left,” said Ray. “It was very relaxed.” The final result of Ray's efforts was a seventeen-page script for Spaceship Earth, an amusement ride that moved through the inside of the 180-foot-tall, eighteen-story geodesic sphere. Spaceship Earth would be the grand focal point of EPCOT Center, the largest geodesic sphere ever constructed. It was a 16,000-ton structure, comprising more than 11,000 interlocking aluminum and plastic-alloy triangles. While some would disparage the building as “the world's largest golf ball,” Spaceship Earth was unquestionably a bold futuristic concept brought to life. It also stood as the visual symbol of Walt Disney's grand dream—a year-round world's fair, one that would never be destroyed, one that would be in a constant state of change and modification.

Ray characterized his efforts as giving voice to “the interior metaphors” of the daring structure. The result was a journey through the history of our planet—the great spaceship, Mother Earth, on her voyage through space and time. Ray's script charted the story of communication through the ages, and humankind's quest for knowledge. The ride traveled from the time of the earliest cave etchings, to sun-scorched pyramids of ancient Egypt, to Michelangelo's paintings in the Sistine Chapel, and onward to the rocket age and beyond. Ray was exhilarated by the work, and in early 1977, turned in his final script.

As Ray was writing the script for the interiors of Spaceship Earth, he was also assembling yet another collection of short stories. Knopf published
Long After Midnight
in October 1976. The title of the book, taken from a short story within the collection, was actually the earliest working title of what had become
Fahrenheit 451
. The new short story was unrelated to Ray's magnum opus, but he liked the title enough to “recycle” it. William F. Nolan, who had recently published a comprehensive Bradbury bibliography and biographical timeline,
The Ray Bradbury Companion,
had unearthed several stories published in magazines over the decades but never collected. Two of these stories, “One Timeless Spring” and “The Miracles of Jamie,” were among the trio of tales that Ray sold in August 1945, marking his entrée into the slick-magazine market. So why did Ray Bradbury sit on these two stories for more than thirty years? “I got busy with other things,” he said, in a grandiose understatement. “Then I forgot about the stories.”

Twelve of the stories in
Long After Midnight
had been written and published before—printed in various publications between 1946 and 1962—but, with Nolan's help, they made their first appearance in a Bradbury collection. Ten new tales rounded out the book. Ray dedicated the book to Nolan, calling him an “amazing collector, fantastic researcher, dear friend.” More than anything,
Long After Midnight
represented the way Ray would assemble future short-story collections. For example, 1988's
The Toynbee Convector,
1996's
Quicker Than the Eye,
1997's
Driving Blind,
2002's
One More for the Road,
and 2004's
The Cat's Pajamas
would all include new Ray Bradbury compositions side by side with at least one older tale culled from the voluminous filing cabinets in Ray's storied basement office.

 

O
N
N
OVEMBER
27, 1977, Ray reviewed the photographic book
Fellini's Films
for the
Los Angeles Times Book Review
. His article was at once celebratory, explosive, and brimming over with enthusiasm for the works of the Italian film director. “In
Fellini's Films,
” wrote Ray, “the author put his entire cartoon-oriented, vaudeville-circus-carnival-church-Roman-sweatbath mythology on full display.” The contents of the book, he continued, were “photographed from the walls and ceilings inside Fellini's magic lantern head.”

Two months after his review was published, in February 1978, Ray received a letter from Federico Fellini, forwarded to him by the editors of the
Los Angeles Times,
in which the great director said, in part: “… I admire you very much, dear Bradbury. And, knowing you like what I do and seeing it expressed with such fervor is one of those things that's good for the heart and makes one want to go back to work right away …”

As his letter continued, the great director inquired if Ray would be in Rome in the near future. By coincidence, Ray, Maggie, and Alexandra planned to travel to Italy later that year, to celebrate Zana's twentieth birthday. The initial meeting between Ray and Fellini would mark the beginning of a friendship that would last until the Italian director's death in 1993. Their common connection: passion for creativity. “Federico Fellini,” offered Alexandra Bradbury, “was an Italian version of Dad.”

 

O
N
J
ULY
19, 1979, ABC television aired a special program,
Infinite Horizons: Space Beyond Apollo,
commemorating the tenth anniversary of the moon landing. Ray Bradbury was the show's host. It was filmed on location at Cape Canaveral, Florida, and the NASA facilities in Houston. Ray quickly realized he wasn't cut out for the role of the television host, at least according to industry standards. Ray didn't believe in preparing lectures and speeches, and he cautioned against overthinking the writing process. He was a skilled extemporaneous orator, able to speak eloquently from the heart on numerous topics. But “the director insisted that everything be written on idiot boards,” Ray said, referring to the cue cards that are held off-camera from which a host reads a prepared script. “I had to read my dialogue,” Ray recalled, “and I hated it. I told them, ‘Just put me in front of the camera and tell me what you want. Let me ad-lib. Trust me.' But they wouldn't do that.”

Ray recalled one scene at the NASA vehicle assembly building that required twenty takes. “I flubbed it each time. By the time we were on the twenty-first take, I was in tears because I felt so stupid.” A crew member consoled Ray, telling him that everything would be okay if he'd just relax. But standing before the camera, reading a prepared script, was too deliberate for Ray. It smacked of inauthenticity and went against his credo of trusting the subconscious. Ray felt stiff on camera.

At the Cape, Ray was brought to the old launch pads from which the Apollo rockets had blasted off to the moon. “The launch sites were abandoned,” Ray remembered with sadness. “The very spot where the rockets lifted off. Abandoned in place. In other words, we had given up on the moon.” Ray was so moved by the desolation of the historic sites, and the symbolism of our abandoned hopes and aspirations, that he wrote three poems right there, on the spot where humankind had only a decade earlier reached for the cosmos.

Ray felt beleaguered by the entire experience of working on
Infinite Horizons
. And at that time, his personal life was in disarray: His second mistress phoned him while he was working on the television special to tell him she wanted to end the affair. She had joined the Catholic Church and could no longer continue the affair in good conscience. Ray was devastated. But he didn't try to woo her back, for he felt it was noble that she had found religion.