The Bradbury Chronicles (40 page)

As the novel on his Ireland experiences was released,
The Ray Bradbury Theater
was winding down its successful run. But this hardly marked the end of Ray's television success. That same year, almost twenty-five years after Ray had first envisioned it as a film,
The Halloween Tree
was made. David Kirschner, the president of Hanna-Barbera and creative force behind such cartoons as
The Flintstones,
The Jetsons,
and
Scooby-Doo,
purchased the rights to
The Halloween Tree
and hired Ray to freshen up the script he had peddled in Hollywood in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The result:
The Halloween Tree,
an animated film narrated by Ray Bradbury and starring the voice of
Star Trek'
s Leonard Nimoy as “Moundshroud.” A rousing success, it won the Emmy Award for “Best Animated Children's Program” of 1992. Beginning with
The Ray Bradbury Theater
and ending with the highest award given in the television industry, for
The Halloween Tree,
Ray Bradbury had moved effortlessly into the realm of television. And to think—all from a man who had issued a stern warning of the dangers of television, in his short story “The Veldt” and his novel
Fahrenheit 451
.

Ray has been a father to us … guiding and inspiring us, encouraging us at our best, chiding us at our worst, his work always deeply felt, deeply human, and deeply poetic. In fact, I've always thought of him as a poet … a poet of the Rocket Age. And I don't mean rockets with boosters and O-rings, I'm talking about rockets with tail fins that look like art deco sculptures. These aren't rockets that carry cargoes of scientific hardware, they carry cargoes of deep and compelling human truth.

—
FRANK DARABONT
,
Academy Award–nominated screenwriter and filmmaker

T
HE
L
OS
Angeles Times
called him “a giant.” The
Washington Post
proclaimed, “Almost no one can imagine a time or place without the fiction of Ray Bradbury.” The
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
declared, “Bradbury's talents are immortal.”
Time
stated, “Bradbury is an authentic original.”

Throughout the 1990s, Ray secured his rightful place on the bookshelf alongside his childhood literary heroes. The books of Ray Bradbury were now ensconced alongside the works of L. Frank Baum, Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Edgar Allan Poe. But they also sat cozily next to Hemingway, Welty, Steinbeck, and Fitzgerald. By the 1990s, Bradbury's stories were as widely assigned in junior high schools and high schools as those of all the other “literary” writers. He had been translated into more than twenty foreign languages; Ray Bradbury was a household name.

One afternoon in the early 1990s, after giving a lecture, Ray, now into his seventies, visited the town of Sausalito and stumbled upon an old-fashioned toy store. He walked inside and found stuffed animals, junior laboratories, plastic dinosaurs, Tinkertoys, action figures, and magic sets. When he left the shop, he saw a group of boys, aged twelve and thirteen, pressing their noses to the toy store's window. When they were ready to leave, one boy remained with his hands pressed to the storefront glass, transfixed.

“Go in,” Ray said under his breath, looking on from a distance. “Go in.”

“Come on!” cried the other children to the boy.

“Hurry up,” one said.

“That's kid's stuff!” another child said. “Come on!”

The boy snapped to and he spun on his feet. In an instant, to Ray's chagrin, he was off and running with his friends.

“Grow up?” said Ray. “What does that mean? What does that mean! I'll tell you: It doesn't mean anything.” When he saw that boy take off with his friends instead of going into the toy store, he remembered the moment he buckled under his own friends' ridicule and peer pressure and destroyed his beloved
Buck Rogers
comic strip collection. Ray wrote of this childhood memory and his
Buck Rogers
experience in the introductory essay to
Zen in the
Art of Writing
.

 

Where did that judgment and strength come from? What sort of process did I experience to enable me to say: I am as good as dead. Who is killing me? What do I suffer from? What's the cure?

I was able, obviously, to answer all of the above. I named the sickness: my tearing up the strips. I found the cure: go back to collecting, no matter what.

I did. And was made well.

But still. At that age? When we are accustomed to responding to peer pressure?

Where did I find the courage to rebel, change my life, live alone?

I don't want to over-estimate all this, but damn it, I love that nine-year-old, whoever in hell he was.

 

After
Green Shadows, White Whale
was published in 1992, Ray ended his long partnership with his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. His first editor, Bob Gottlieb, had moved on to edit
The New Yorker
. His second Knopf editor, Nancy Nicholas, had left for Simon & Schuster. His current Knopf editor, Kathy Hourigan, had in Ray's opinion done a splendid job with his books; he credited her with bringing
Green Shadows, White Whale
to life. Ray dedicated the book, in part, to Hourigan. However, he was displeased that Knopf had allowed
The Halloween Tree
to go out of print; furthermore, many of his classics were no longer available in hard cover. The final blow came when Ray handed in his manuscript for a new children's fable,
Ahmed and the Oblivion Machines
. The book sat with Knopf for a year, and Ray was not told whether the publisher wanted it or not. Hourigan hoped to publish it, for certain, but she had to report to higher-ups. Exasperated and hurt that his publisher had dragged its feet for so long, Ray and his longtime agent, Don Congdon, arranged to leave Knopf. Avon Books publisher Lou Aronica made an enticing offer, promising to keep Ray's backlist in print. Ray also felt genuine love from Avon and Aronica; he signed with the publisher and never looked back. Ray said in a 2002 interview that Avon was the best publishing house of his storied career.

As his stature as a great American icon burgeoned, Ray continued to release books through his new publisher. In 1996,
Quicker Than the Eye,
a new short-story collection featuring new and old stories (recently unearthed by Bradbury friend, fan, and researcher Donn Albright), was published.

The following year, Ray assembled another collection by the same means, and released
Driving Blind
. Both books received high praise from many national critics. They showed Ray's leaner, more dialogue-driven prose. His work had become far more minimalistic. “Much of the text is dialogue,” wrote a
Publishers Weekly
reviewer, “and it works because Bradbury excels at portraying the robust textures of American speech.” Susan Hamburger of
Library Journal
said of the collection, “[Ray Bradbury] paints vivid word pictures of people and small towns in a kind of skewed Norman Rockwell way.”

“Most authors peak at some point,” remarked Maggie Bradbury. “They can't sustain it much past their sixties. But not Ray. It amazes me. He only gets better with time.”

As he had done since he was twelve, Ray still wrote virtually every day. Several times a week, he traveled to the family's second home in Palm Springs, about two hours by car from L.A., where he kept an office. The house, a low-slung testament to midcentury modernism, had a small, rectangular swimming pool in which Ray would take a dip or would sit beside in a reclining chair. He used a spare bedroom as an office, where he kept an IBM Selectric typewriter, just like the one in the Cheviot Hills house.

From the early fifties, Ray and Maggie had regularly visited Palm Springs, and in 1980 they had purchased the vacation house. They also thought that since there was so little room in Cheviot Hills for Ray's collection of, for lack of a better term,
stuff,
it could become something of a repository. “I've been a great saver and I still am,” Ray said in a 1961 interview. “It's very hard for me to throw out. Practically the whole texture of my life is put away somewhere in the house.”

The second home was now bursting at the rafters, like the first. Original paintings by Joseph Mugnaini lined the walls and shelves; beside them were numerous trophies and placards. In a side bedroom, every square inch of every wall was covered in family photos and old letters, including an early rejection slip from original
Esquire
magazine editor Arnold Gingrich that called his ideas “unoriginal.” A letter written home to his mother from the First World Science Fiction Convention in New York City in 1939 declared: “The one thing I miss is tomato soup.” The walls were also papered with playbills from the many stage adaptations of his work and with memorabilia from the movie versions of his stories. One item taped to the wall summed up Ray's collecting habits better than any other: It was a white envelope stuffed with a lock of hair from his daughter Ramona, presented to her father when she was a little girl:

 

Dad—I know you love to save things. So here is some hair from my head. Love, Mona.

 

Ray liked retreating to his midcentury home in the desert. At this point, he was drinking more than usual, by his own admission. He loved cold Coors beer out of the can and confessed that a six-pack a day “went down like water.” The beer consumption, coupled with a diet high in fatty foods and lots of sweets, caused Ray to gain considerable weight. For lunch, he would often head into town to a Mexican restaurant—Las Casuelas—where he had been dining since it opened in 1958. He always ordered the same thing: the number one combination—a chile relleno with a cheese enchilada.

On November 4, 1999, Ray went to the Palm Springs house. He rarely took cabs anymore, as he had in the old days. Now he had a full-time limousine driver, forty-six-year-old Patrick Kachurka, whom Ray referred to as “the son I never had.” Kachurka had dropped him off and headed back to Los Angeles, where he owned and ran a limousine business. Ray was at his desk in the air-conditioned house, working on a short story, when he suddenly went numb all over. Talking with him on the telephone from Los Angeles, Maggie noticed that Ray's speech was slightly slurred. Alarmed, she called their youngest daughter, Alexandra, who had worked as his assistant since 1988. Zana immediately called her father from her home outside of Phoenix, Arizona, and could tell that something was wrong as well. Was Dad drinking? Maggie then called Kachurka, who intuitively sensed things were askew. After twelve years of driving Ray and effectively functioning as his personal assistant, Kachurka knew “Mr. B.,” as he called him, better than anyone except Maggie. He slipped into his midnight blue Cadillac Town Car and sped back to the desert house. He drove at over ninety miles per hour much of the way. When Kachurka arrived, he realized right away that Ray had had a stroke. But since his father's death in the hospital, Ray was terrified of hospitals and wanted nothing to do with them. Ray refused to go to the emergency room, and instead demanded that Kachurka take him home. Kachurka insisted and Ray grew angry. When provoked, Ray had a temper that most people danced around. But not Patrick Kachurka. He insisted that they head to the emergency room. Ray threatened to fire Kachurka.

“That's fine, Mr. B.,” Kachurka said. “You can fire me. But you're still going to the hospital.”

Kachurka helped Ray into the car, drove to a local hospital, the Eisenhower Clinic, and checked him in. “I got there and they ran all the tests,” said Ray, “and sure enough I had had a stroke. Patrick saved my life.”

Ray was transported back to Los Angeles, where he was admitted to St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica. “I was completely immobilized for about a month,” said Ray. “I talked to my foot and it wouldn't move. I talked to my arm, it wouldn't move. And you lie there and you shout at yourself, ‘Okay! Let's move!' And you don't move. It's very awful.”

But Ray Bradbury was, if anything, a fighter.

Now, bedridden in a Los Angeles hospital, he was not about to stop fighting. He summoned Alexandra to his hospital room. He needed to work. While lying in his hospital bed, Ray set out to finish a novel he had been working on in recent years,
Let's All Kill Constance,
the book that would complete his mystery trilogy. His spirit was indefatigable.

After a month, Ray was released from the hospital. He had lost sixty-two pounds. “The whole experience has been good for me,” he said. “My blood pressure is normal again after years. I did all this to myself. I have no one else to blame. Lots of beer. Lots of wine. Overweight by seventy pounds. And it was time to take it off.”

Slowly, Ray regained his strength, moving from wheelchair to walker to a four-pronged cane. And through it all, he never stopped writing. He thundered forward on
Let's All Kill Constance
. And, at the gentle prodding of his editor, Jennifer Brehl, he went to his basement file cabinets, blew away spider webs and cellar dust, and set out to complete his decades-in-the-making vampire family novel,
From the Dust Returned
. From the onset, Brehl hoped to surprise Ray by locating Charles Addams's original painting, which had accompanied the story “Homecoming” in the October 1946 issue of
Mademoiselle
. “Homecoming” was always intended as the cornerstone story in Ray's vampire novel, and Addams's autumnal artwork was the obvious choice to adorn its cover. There was one major problem: Brehl had no idea where the painting was. The Addams estate was also at a loss. A fevered treasure hunt ensued: Phone calls were placed, archives searched, the Internet combed over, but nothing. Defeated, Brehl finally telephoned Ray to tell him of her intentions, and her disappointment.

“But, darling, you should have asked me!” he told her. “The painting's on my living-room wall. Charlie gave it to me back in 1946.” The Addams painting was eventually used on the cover of
From the Dust Returned,
just one more title to add to Ray's ever-growing oeuvre.