Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews
Author: Ray Bradbury
Date: 2000-01-01 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Non Fiction; Biography; Writing; Memoir; Books About Books
Description: A definitive collection of interviews with one of America's most famous writers, covering his life, faith, friends, politics, and visions of the future.Ray Bradbury, the poetic and visionary author of such classics as Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, is one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. From Mikhail Gorbachev to Alfred Hitchcock to David Bowie, Bradbury’s sway on contemporary culture is towering. Acclaimed biographer and Bradbury scholar Sam Weller has spent more than a decade interviewing the author; the fascinating conversations that emer
Publisher: Stop Smiling Books
Rights: Copyright © 2010 by Sam Weller

LISTEN TO THE ECHOES

Listen to the Echoes
The Ray Bradbury Interviews

©2010 Sam Weller

First Melville House printing: June 2010

Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201

Stop Smiling Books
1371 N. Milwaukee Avenue
Chicago, IL 60622
www.mhpbooks.com
www.stopsmilingbooks.com
eISBN: 978-1-61219-230-7

Cover Photograph: Photofest
Unless otherwise credited, all archival photographs courtesy of Ray Bradbury

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010926572
v3.1

For my two amazing fathers
WILLIAM WELLER and RAY BRADBURY

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword by Black Francis

Introduction

Chapter One: CHILDHOOD
Chapter Two: HOLLYWOOD
Chapter Three: FAME AND CELEBRITY
Chapter Four: FAMOUS FRIENDS
Chapter Five: HIS OWN WORK
Chapter Six: FAITH
Chapter Seven: ART AND LITERATURE
Chapter Eight: POLITICS
Chapter Nine: SEXUALITY
Chapter Ten: WRITING AND CREATIVITY
Chapter Eleven: SCIENCE FICTION

Chapter Twelve: LIFE, LIVING & THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

Chapter Thirteen: VISIONS OF THE FUTURE

Appendix: THE LOST PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW

Acknowledgements

About the Author

FOREWORD

In the beginning there was no Ray Bradbury, just his words. I had no need for Ray Bradbury the man, because I had his words. I was fourteen years old and I was deep into his words. The Illustrated Man. The Martian Chronicles. The October Country. At that time I probably couldn’t have told you why I liked his books; I just did. I can’t even really explain it now, but I read them and they prompted me to start writing down my own words. My high school English teacher gave me permission to ignore lessons so I could just write. He was validating my creative instincts, but Ray Bradbury had validated me first.

Now I think of Ray Bradbury the man, and I often think of pizza in a cardboard box. The first time I ever saw his face he was eating a take-out pizza. There were probably 400 other people there in the room at Chatsworth High School in the San Fernando Valley. I was in my 30s, and we were all watching Ray Bradbury eat his pizza. It didn’t bother anyone that he didn’t offer to share, which would have been silly because of the size of the crowd. He apologized for having the pie brought in at the end of his speech, but he had given it his all and he was hot and tired and he needed fuel. He wasn’t going to take it in the back room because he knew we all wanted his autograph. Four hundred people waited in line patiently to get something signed, including me, and to perhaps exchange a few personal words with the man who had us under his spell, most of us long before that day. He had told us about his life, about the many things he loved, his ups and downs, his adventures, about space, writing, movies, war, fear, comedy, love, death, horror, ecstasy; he seemed to be relishing the whole thing, and so it was so satisfying for us to see him, of course, loving his pizza.

I heard him speak again a couple of years later, and one time I even got to interview him on the telephone for the LA Weekly—a milestone for me. But those words in his books still caress with love. The words are not all happy, but they are all beamed out from a heart hopelessly in love. They can be dark yet they whisper sweet, sweet love. Ray Bradbury loves you. He loves the whole damn thing, from the most distant burning star to your silly haircut. It’s a Jacques Tati love, a Yoko Ono love, an Alfred Hitchcock kind of love. It’s not fiction. It’s a human saying yes to life itself, yes, yes, yes. Ray Bradbury validates not only humanity but every molecule in this exploding soup of a universe. This is the spirit that haunts his words, the spirit that shines through on every page of this fascinating book of interviews.

I made a record called The Cult of Ray, which has a song on it called “The Cult of Ray.” The rhyme can be called weak, but I think it expresses my feelings about him.

What is there to say?
Still I can’t be silent
Hear the Cult of Ray
And you’ll be enlightened

Black Francis
Los Angeles, California

LISTEN TO THE ECHOES

INTRODUCTION

Ray Bradbury once wrote a teleplay for a short film titled, “The Great Shout of the Universe.” It was a musing on the miraculous formation of the cosmos—a classic Bradburian consecration of life and creation. Looking over the conversations contained in this book—interviews that I conducted with the author over the course of nearly a decade—it becomes readily apparent to me that with his film title, Bradbury could well have been referring to himself.

He is outspoken, vociferous, brimming over with joie de vivre. He is a confetti storm of a man, a celebratory blizzard of color and kinetic energy. He is also undaunted when it comes to sharing his often controversial opinions, from politics, to faith, to the state of contemporary cinema and much more. All of this emerges in the pages of this book.

Bradbury is one of the great idea men of twentieth century literature, a remarkably prolific writer who has explored his many philosophies, moral viewpoints, and humanistic themes through a colorful prism of poetic language and fantastic fable. Literary critics, scholars, and mainstream readers alike have hailed him for his imaginative concepts, rich use of metaphor, and lyrical language.

In “There Will Come Soft Rains,” the house of the future goes through its daily machinations, even after humanity has been eradicated by nuclear annihilation: The voice clock still sings the hour, the stove browns toast and fries eggs, robotic mice glide to and fro, vacuuming the living space of the recently deceased.

In “The Swan,” a young man at the beginning of his life meets an old woman at the end of her days, and they come to realize that they are soul mates who have met at the wrong point in time.

In “A Sound of Thunder,” a time traveler steps on a butterfly and returns to the present to find his world irrevocably altered. (Through this tale, the term “butterfly effect” entered the language as a metaphor for our smallest daily decisions having universal implications.)

And, of course, with the October 1953 publication of his opus, Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury established himself as a visionary. In this dystopian masterwork, he predicted, among other technological and cultural prognostications: flat panel televisions, ear-bud headphones, 24-hour banking machines, live television broadcasts of fugitive chases, the rise of teen violence and school shootings, the decline of newspapers, and the demise of literary reading. Yet with all of Ray Bradbury’s vision, originality, and prolificacy (some 600 published short stories and seventy significant trade and limited edition books), little has been done to document the personal philosophies and opinions that have inspired so many of his narrative concepts. Even in the biography I wrote, The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury (William Morrow, 2005), there was only so much latitude to examine the author’s contemporary viewpoints.

And Bradbury tells it like it is. He is a deeply opinionated man. And why shouldn’t he be? As I write this, Bradbury is on the precipice of entering the rarified realm of the nonagenarian. Through so much of his nine decades of life, he has encountered, known, and worked with a sweeping roster of historical and cultural notables. As a child, he sat on the knees of Civil War veterans. Later, as the oft-recognized “poet of the rocket age,” he befriended many of the Mercury and Apollo astronauts, who, incidentally, read his books and were inspired to dream for the stars.

From the veterans of Antietam, to the veterans of the Sea of Tranquility, Ray Bradbury has witnessed and celebrated a century of unprecedented global progress and change. His is a quintessentially American story.

Along with books such as Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and The Illustrated Man, he has worked and crossed paths with Walt Disney, Alfred Hitchcock, Rod Serling, Chuck Jones, and John Huston. Bradbury has worked in film, radio, television, comic books, theater, and architecture. As a result of this varied career, Bradbury has things to say, stories to tell, and ideas and opinions on just about every topic. And in listening to him—his thoughts, his memories, his ideas—one thing more than any other shimmers at the surface: He loves life. LOVE with all capital letters. And he is not timid about expressing his gratitude.

I sat down for my first interview with Bradbury on Memorial Day weekend, 2000, for a cover story for the Chicago Tribune Magazine. That feature story ultimately morphed into my 2005 biography of the literary icon. Over the course of working on that book, I clocked hundreds of hours of conversations with Bradbury, traveling every two or three weeks from my home in Chicago to his home in Los Angeles. Even after the book was published, as his biographer I continued to visit his home to document more of his continually unfolding legacy.

In working with Bradbury, there were many, many privileged and decidedly surreal moments. In the autumn of 2004, we called upon two diametrically opposed, yet unequivocally American domiciles—the Playboy Mansion and the White House. In a short span of days, we shook hands with Hugh Hefner and George W. Bush.

When we drove up the winding entrance of the Playboy Mansion, we passed a yellow road sign cautioning: “Bunny Crossing.” Upon pulling up to the Mansion, indeed, a trio of Hefner’s photo-friendly cottontails, garbed in skin-tight lycra workout gear, roamed free about the spongy front lawn.

“I’m never leaving!” proclaimed Ray Bradbury.

At the White House, George W. Bush pushed Ray Bradbury around the Oval Office in his wheelchair. Karl Rove, advisor, deputy chief-of-staff, and controversial lightning rod, was so giddy upon meeting Bradbury, he nearly shook the author’s arm off while professing his love for The Martian Chronicles.

From the Grotto to the West Wing, these are the everyday voyages of Ray Douglas Bradbury.

Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois. The son of a local utility lineman, he was a child reared on popular culture. At an early age, he was inundated by cinema, traveling circuses, comic strips, illustrated children’s books, stage magicians, and the literature of the fantastic—including the works of Poe, Baum, Burroughs, Dickens, Verne, and Wells. When he began writing at the age of twelve, it was his steadfast dream to one day find his books shelved alongside his literary fantasist heroes. Amazingly, fueled by the high octane of his creative passion, he did exactly that.

Bradbury came of age during the Great Depression, a child of modest means, his family moved to Los Angeles during the golden age of cinema. A rabid film devotee, the teenager found himself surrounded by Hollywood’s greatest stars.

He established himself as a writer in the Forties: first in the literary ghetto of the pulp fiction magazines, then in slicks such as Harper’s, Mademoiselle, and The New Yorker. He later went on to shape all the mediums of popular culture that helped shape him as an imaginative child. His second book, The Martian Chronicles, brought literary credibility to the often ostracized genre of science fiction. Today, Fahrenheit 451 is a staple of grade school curricula. During his lifetime, Bradbury has attracted an impressive fan club of intellectuals and visionaries that includes Christopher Isherwood, Fritz Lang, Aldous Huxley, and renaissance scholar Bernard Berenson. In the span of his storied career, Bradbury has influenced a diverse range of creators and dreamers—from author Stephen King to Apple computer co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Author William F. Nolan, arguably the first Bradbury scholar (Nolan published The Ray Bradbury Review, an examination of Bradbury’s work, in 1952), notes that, “Bradbury is, after Ernest Hemingway, the most influential writer of the 20th century. His work has influenced writers young and old. You can talk to any writer in any field and they will tell you that they have read Bradbury and been influenced by him.”

His cultural impact extends beyond the boundaries of planet Earth. NASA named a crater on the moon, as well as an asteroid, for this prolific American creator. His books are numerous and beloved, the achievements and accolades multitudinous.

In this book of interviews, you will encounter Ray Bradbury unfiltered and unplugged. He is, at turns, funny, impassioned, opinionated, poetic, and surprising. The conversations in this book transpired between May 2000 and January 2010 in the back of limos, at posh LA restaurants, and into the late hours sitting in the Bradbury home surrounded by books and cats and half-empty bottles of wine.

Here you will find Bradbury’s opinions on everything from his religious beliefs to the presidential candidates he supported over the decades. He muses on the origins of many of his short stories, and illuminates the creative process that has made him one of the most prolific writers of his time. Bradbury shares stories about love, sex, and the secret to his hopeful outlook on life and living. He shares the tales and encounters from his childhood spent traversing the star-studded streets of old Hollywood. And as his career took off into the literary stratosphere, he muses on his relationships with many of the twentieth century’s greatest artists and creators.

Ray Bradbury is a master storyteller. In Listen to the Echoes, the subject of his captivating tales is himself. Befitting the author of Fahrenheit 451—one of literature’s great opponents of censorship—Bradbury spares no opinion and censors nothing. In these pages, you will discover the Great Shout of the Universe.

Sam Weller

Chicago, Illinois

April 2010

chapter one
CHILDHOOD

RAY BRADBURY IS THE POSTER CHILD FOR THE IMPORTANCE OF EARLY childhood development. For him, so much points back to the formative years: dinosaurs, Mars, and Egypt, not to mention carnivals, freak-show tents, and dark locomotives lumbering into town in the shadow-hours before dawn.

Then there are the early, profound literary influences: L. Frank Baum, Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.G. Wells, and Jules Verne. Cinema and pulp magazines and comic strips, along with lavishly illustrated tomes of children’s fables, filled Ray Bradbury’s wide-eyed boyhood, as did World’s Fairs, architecture, and enigmatic stage magicians.

Even at the age of 89, he is still the quintessential man-child. He is just as likely to be found reading the prefaces of George Bernard Shaw as the early comic-strip reprints of Prince Valiant.

Venturing into his home in a manicured enclave of West Los Angeles, you notice it right away. There are toys everywhere. Oversized stuffed animals sit perched on the furniture in the spacious living room—giant lions and dogs—even a human-sized Bullwinkle the Moose sits in a cushioned chair. The room is a fine representation of the dichotomy that is pure Bradbury. Clean, white, floor-to-ceiling bookcases are packed with weighty volumes on world history, philosophy, religion, architecture, and art. There are shelves lined with rare Bradbury first editions. Stunning original landscape paintings by Eyvind Earle, the background artist on the Disney film Sleeping Beauty, adorn the walls. Gleaming Cable Ace Awards line the mantel over the fireplace, accolades garnered for the television program The Ray Bradbury Theater.

In the dining room, next to the long, honey-colored table, is a small shelf. On it rests a shrine to Bradbury’s great childhood mentor, his beloved Aunt Neva, who first introduced him to so many seminal influences—Poe and Baum and Grimm’s fairy tales, among others. There is a black-and-white picture of Neva, circa 1925, with her striking gray, crystalline eyes. One of Neva’s small paintings is there, a framed portrait of a child and a dog. In a small gold urn rest Neva’s ashes. Nevada Marion Bradbury, nine years Ray Bradbury’s senior, passed away March 16, 2001.

Throughout the house—more toys. A small tin robot atop a tiny bicycle pushes an ice cream cart. A massive hand-carved wooden Tyrannosaurus Rex bares its needle-like teeth. A limited-edition Hot Wheels-brand Mars Rover traverses a cluttered tabletop landscape of envelopes and stationery. And then there are more and more and more stuffed animals.

Bradbury is the first to make the point. He has grown and acquired adult intellectual tastes, but he also never loosened his grip on youth. And it is this connection, this inseparable and vital partnership with his younger self, he insists, that led to his success as a writer and visionary.

WELLER: From Dandelion Wine to Something Wicked This Way Comes—and in many of your short stories—you write about childhood. It is one of the predominant themes of your oeuvre. Why do you suppose you have returned so regularly to your own childhood in your writing?

BRADBURY: It’s going back to your own myth, going back to your root system. It’s not just your childhood, but all the things that were important. It’s going back to The Hunchback of Notre Dame, to The Phantom of the Opera, to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars books; it’s going back to dinosaurs. I’ve never lost track of that root system. And most of my books wouldn’t exist without that. I wouldn’t have gotten the job writing Moby Dick if I hadn’t stayed in love with dinosaurs. That one story about the dinosaur falling in love with the lighthouse, “The Fog Horn,” is why John Huston hired me for Moby Dick. He read it and later told me that he sensed the ghost of Melville in that story.

WELLER: What is your earliest childhood memory?

BRADBURY: I remember the day I was born. I have what might be called almost total recall back to my birth. This is a thing I have debated with psychologists and with friends over the years. They say, “It’s impossible.” Yet I remember. My response to people who say, “It’s impossible” is: “Were you there? Because I was.” I was a ten-month baby, you see. Most people are in the womb for nine months, but when you stay in the womb for ten months you develop your eyesight and your hearing. So when I was born, I remembered it.

And I recall the event when we had our first baby, brought her home from the hospital and she had a nightmare in her crib. She was five days old. And I said, “She’s had a nightmare.” And my wife said, “What could she have a nightmare about?” I said, “Well, it’s about being born. It’s the only experience she’s had.” It is a shock. You’ve been comfortable. You’re drifting in there, you know, and suddenly you’re forced out into the cold air.

Then it all came back to me. I remember lying in the crib at night when I was two weeks old and I could recall the direction I was facing. My head was toward the west and my feet were toward the east. I could look out the window toward the apple trees outside. So when these memories came back to me, I called my mother and I said, “How long after I was born did you suckle me?” She said, “Three or four days.” I said, “I remember the flavor.” And I said, “When was I circumcised?” She said, “Five days after you were born.” I said, “But it wasn’t at the hospital, was it?” She said, “No.” I said, “It wasn’t at home or anywhere else. Did my father carry me downtown, walk me downtown, carry me and go up some stairs into a room and put me on a table and a man and woman leaned over me with a scalpel? I remember the pain.”

My memories are too vivid! Where could I have gotten that memory? No one is going to tell a kid that sort of memory. Especially because when I was born in 1920, the culture was still influenced by Victorian times.

WELLER: How did your mother respond when you called her up with these questions? You described her once as having her “corset on too tight.” She was a private woman from the Victorian era. Was she shocked that her own son would call and ask about his own birth, breast-feeding, and circumcision?

BRADBURY: No, I asked in a gentle way, so she remembered. And that conversation happened very late in time, you see, after my first daughter Susan was born in 1949. So by then, my mother was used to that sort of thing from me—“crazy Ray.”

WELLER: So your mother loosened up over the years?

BRADBURY: No. She was in her corset forever. I remember touching her in the coffin after she died in 1966 and thinking, “The corset is still there.”

WELLER: How do you respond to people interpreting your birth memory through a Freudian prism? It’s not every day that someone says they remember the taste of their mother’s breast milk.

BRADBURY: Oh boy. Just tell those people to come talk to me. They probably haven’t had any breast milk lately!

WELLER: What else influenced you very early on?

BRADBURY: My mother was a movie fan. My middle name, Douglas, comes from Douglas Fairbanks. She took me to movies constantly. She took me to see The Hunchback of Notre Dame when I was three. She took me to see the other Lon Chaney films, like Mr. Wu, a Chinese drama. A child wouldn’t go see that. I went because of my mother. There’s one scene where he’s looking through a moon-shaped window into the next room and that scene has stuck with me all my life. It’s a beautiful scene with this Chinese gentleman looking through a moon window.

My mother took me to see Intolerance when I was just a child, and many years later, because I was a nag to the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, they rebuilt part of the set from Intolerance at the mall on the corner of Hollywood and Highland next to the Kodak Theatre where they have the Academy Awards. That tall archway you see there was my idea. I’ve been telling people for years that throughout Hollywood they should reconstruct famous sets from films.

This love of cinema started because my mother loved movies. She took me to see Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, as well as the original King of Kings and all the other religious films that came out during the middle 1920s. She took me to see The Big Parade with John Gilbert, and later I became friends with King Vidor and I told him that I saw that film when I was six years old and he was so happy.

WELLER: What else influenced your imagination when you were very young?

BRADBURY: King Tut came out of the tomb when I was three. I saw pictures of his golden mask. All these things stayed with me. When I saw the Tut exhibit decades later at a museum, I stood and looked at that mask and realized that’s where I got the masks for my Martians in The Martian Chronicles. I didn’t know I did this when I wrote the book. I only discovered it years later when I stood before the mask of Tutankhamun.

WELLER: How important were comic strips to you as a child?

BRADBURY: My parents taught me how to read by using the comics. They taught me by reading Happy Hooligan, Bringing Up Father, and what have you. Later, when I was a little bit older, I would go to downtown Waukegan every Saturday night and buy the Chicago Tribune and my dog Pete would pull me downtown on my roller skates and then he’d pull me home. And I’d bring home ice cream from the Walgreens on the corner of Genesee and Washington and sit down and read the funnies.

WELLER: You’ve spoken about the effect of illustrated children’s books on the development of your imagination. Which books, or artists, impacted you the most?

BRADBURY: For Christmas in 1925, my Aunt Neva gave me a book of fairy tales called Once Upon a Time. The illustrations were done by Margaret Evans Price, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of them. “The Beauty and the Beast” was incredible! The illustrations in that book, along with the images from film, changed me forever. My books are all very visual. They read like movies. It’s because of these influences.

WELLER: Were there any other specific illustrators who influenced you as a child?

BRADBURY: The illustrations of Harry Clarke, the artist who did the drawings in the book of Edgar Allan Poe stories my Aunt Neva gave me, really captured my imagination when I was nine years old.

WELLER: Circuses and carnivals were central to your childhood growing up in Illinois. What are your memories of these traveling shows, and why do you suppose they were so important to your development?

BRADBURY: Again, it’s all passion. I was in love with circuses and their mystery. I suppose the most important memory is of Mr. Electrico. On Labor Day weekend, 1932, when I was twelve years old, he came to my hometown with the Dill Brothers. Combined Shows—combined out of what, I wondered? He was a performer sitting in an electric chair and a stagehand pulled a switch and he was charged with fifty thousand volts of pure electricity. Lightning flashed in his eyes and his hair stood on end. I sat below, in the front row, and he reached down with a flaming sword full of electricity and he tapped me on both shoulders and then the tip of my nose and he cried, “Live, forever!” And I thought, “God, that’s wonderful. How do you do that?”

The next day, I had to go to the funeral of one of my favorite uncles. Driving back from the graveyard with my family, I looked down the hill toward the shoreline of Lake Michigan and I saw the tents and the flags of the carnival and I said to my father, “Stop the car,” and he said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “I have to get out.”

Here I was, a twelve-year-old kid saying this, and my father stopped the car and I got out and he was furious with me. He expected me to stay with the family to mourn. But I got out of the car anyway and I ran down the hill toward the carnival. Until a few years ago, I’d forgotten about that funeral. But I was running away from death, wasn’t I? I was running toward life.

Mr. Electrico was down with the carnival at the bottom of the hill. And by God I got there and he was sitting on the platform out in front of the carnival and I didn’t know what to say. I was sort of scared of making a fool of myself. I had a magic trick in my pocket, one of those little ball-and-vase tricks—a little container that had a ball in it that you made disappear and reappear—and I got that out and asked, “Can you show me how to do this?” It was the right thing to do. It made a contact. He knew he was talking to a young magician.

He took it, showed me how to do it, gave it back to me, then he looked at my face and said, “Would you like to meet those people in that tent over there? Those strange people?” And I said, “Yes, sir, I would.” He said, “C’mon.” So he led me over there and he hit the tent with his cane and said, “Clean up your language! Clean up your language!”

He took me in, and the first person I met was the Illustrated Man. Isn’t that wonderful? The Illustrated Man! I didn’t call him that, he was the Tattooed Man. I changed his name later for my book. But I met the Strong Man, I met the Fat Lady, I met the trapeze people, I met the dwarf and the skeleton. They all became characters later in my life.

Then we went out and sat on the dunes near the lake and talked, and all of a sudden, I don’t know why he said it, he leaned over and he said, “I’m glad you’re back in my life.” I said, “What do you mean? I don’t know you.” He said, “Yes. You were my best friend outside of Paris in 1918. You were wounded in the battle of the Argonne Forest and you died in my arms outside there, twenty-two years ago. I’m glad you’re back in the world. You have a different face, a different name, but the soul shining out of your face is the same as my friend. Welcome back.” Now why did he say that? Explain that to me, why? It could be that he saw the intensity for which I live.

Every once in a while at a book signing I see a young boy or girl who is so full of fire that it shines out of their face and you pay more attention to that. Because they are so alert, and everything you say, they are hanging on it. It could be that maybe at the age of twelve there was something in my face that I couldn’t see, of course, but he did. Maybe that’s what attracted him.

So when I left the carnival that day I stood by the carousel and I watched the horses running around and around to the music of “Beautiful Ohio” and I cried. Tears streamed down my cheeks because I knew something important had happened to me that day because of Mr. Electrico. I felt changed. And so I went home and within days I started to write. And I’ve never stopped. Isn’t that amazing? It makes me cold all over to think about it. My life was turned around completely.

WELLER: Did you ever see Mr. Electrico again?

BRADBURY: He told me he was a misguided Presbyterian minister, a defrocked minister. He gave me his address, he lived in Cairo, Illinois—pronounced “Kay-row”—and later I wrote him, and he wrote back one time. So the next year, the carnival came back to town and I ran down and said, “My God, I hope he’s there!” I got there, and he was gone and they didn’t know where he was. It broke my heart that night. I never heard from him again.

WELLER: Why did you start writing after your encounter with Mr. Electrico?

BRADBURY: It was all intuitive. It just happened.

WELLER: How would you describe your family?

BRADBURY: We were very average, maybe even a little boring. We didn’t talk about much. But my parents were wonderful in their own way. They bought me a toy typewriter for my twelfth birthday because they knew I wanted one. I wrote a sequel to The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and episodes of Buck Rogers and Tarzan. I was busy imitating all my favorite writers.

WELLER: Did your parents read your early stories?

BRADBURY: Oh, well, sure. But what could they say except, “That’s brilliant!” They were good people. They were really good people. There was nothing wrong with our family that I could see. If anything was wrong, they hid it from me.

WELLER: How did the Great Depression impact your family?

BRADBURY: My father was in and out of work constantly. We moved to Arizona for a time because he was looking for employment. And that’s what brought us to Los Angeles in April of 1934. My Uncle Inar had moved his family to Los Angeles and sent us pictures of the orange groves. That did it. We moved west. But the amazing thing was that my parents never talked about money. At least not around my brother and me. We didn’t have money, so what good did it do to discuss it? We were in LA for a month. I didn’t find this out until many years later, but we had fifty dollars to support four people for one month. We lived in a quadroplex on Hobart Avenue, and we almost had to move back to Illinois, but my dad got a job at the last minute. My folks were wonderful. They never worried us boys about things.

WELLER: They hid their financial worries from you, but looking back, can you recall anything that indicates to you that they were stressed?

BRADBURY: Well, my dad walked everywhere trying to find work. We didn’t have enough money to buy gas for our car. So he’d go out and walk all around LA and come back, and one evening, he sat in the kitchen and tears dripped off the end of his nose. I only saw my father cry twice in my life. When my sister Elizabeth died when I was seven. We were living in Waukegan and I awoke one winter morning and she was lying there in her crib and the funeral home people came in with a wicker basket and carried her out. My father cried then. Then, during the Depression in Los Angeles, I saw him cry again. Those were the only times. But that last day in Los Angeles, we were all packed and ready to go back to Waukegan, he got a job for a cable company making fourteen dollars a week and we stayed on. Fourteen dollars in those days, you could buy your basics.

WELLER: You grew up living next door to your grandparents. You beautifully conjured them in Dandelion Wine. How did your grandparents contribute to the blossoming of your imagination?

BRADBURY: When I was four years old, my grandfather gave me a copy of Harper’s magazine with an H.G. Wells story in it. It showed the beautiful city of the future under glass. I still have those tear sheets from my grandfather put away in my basement.

WELLER: Did your grandfather like science fiction and fantasy?

BRADBURY: He must have. That’s why he gave that to me. That same year, he gave me a three-dimensional stereopticon of the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis and also the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. So that was my first exposure to World’s Fairs, H.G. Wells, and the cities of the future. And he also introduced me to radio when I was two years old. He built a crystal radio and I touched the crystal and, with earphones on, I heard radio for the first time.

I also remember summer nights sitting out on the front porch of my grandparents’ home along with my parents and my grandfather and grandmother. My brother Skip and I would lay on the floor and it would be dark and the adults would talk. When I pressed my ear to the planking on the floor of the porch, I could hear the baritone of my grandfather’s voice coming through the xylophone of floorboards. That was primitive radio.

WELLER: Did your grandparents really make dandelion wine, as you wrote in the novel?

BRADBURY: I went back and visited Waukegan twenty-five years ago and I walked down the main street and into the town barbershop. I hadn’t been there for forty years. The town barber took one look at me and threw his scissors on the floor. He said, “By God! I’ve been waiting for you to come through that door for forty years!” I said, “Who are you?” He said, “I was your grandmother’s boarder when you were three years old.” And then he said, “I remember your grandfather giving you a gunnysack and a nickel and sending you out to a field of dandelions to pick them over and bring them to the basement to put them in a wine press to make dandelion wine. He put it in bottles marked ‘Summer, 1921,’ ‘Summer, 1922.’ ” I sat in the barbershop chair and I wept and I said, “It’s true, then, it’s true.” I wasn’t sure I remembered making dandelion wine, I was guessing, but now this town barber verified it.

WELLER: Your grandfather died when you were five. Do you have memories of his passing?

BRADBURY: Yeah, I visited him while he was dying upstairs in his big bedroom in the house on 619 West Washington Street in Waukegan. I talked to him as he was dying. I vividly recall going to his funeral too.

WELLER: So many of the themes and ideas you have explored over the years in your books seem to stem from your childhood, from your early love of dinosaurs, to your attraction to fantasy stories. Looking back, do you have memories that indicate to you now that you were singular?

BRADBURY: When I was ten years old, I would lie in bed night after night and stare at the ceiling. In my mind, I would project movies from my eyes, up onto the bare ceiling. I would watch entire films, from beginning to end, over and over again in my head. My brother slept next to me, but of course I never told him I was doing this. He wouldn’t have understood.

chapter two
HOLLYWOOD

IN THE TOP DRAWER OF HIS BEDROOM DRESSER, BURIED UNDERNEATH layers of dark dress socks, Ray Bradbury keeps a stack of weathered autograph books, each roughly the size of a standard-issue banking checkbook. When he moved with his family at the age of thirteen to Los Angeles in April 1934, Bradbury immediately began frequenting the gates of all the old film studios: Paramount, RKO, Columbia, and MGM. On his very first sojourn, riding atop steel-wheeled roller skates, he encountered the peerless W.C. Fields, who grudgingly signed an autograph for the star-crazed teenager and, upon handing back the signature, said, “There you are, you little son of a bitch!”

The autographs in Bradbury’s collection capture the Golden Age of Hollywood: Clark Gable. Marlene Dietrich. Judy Garland. Jean Harlow. Henry Fonda. “Best Luck to Ray, Fred MacMurray.” “To my pal Ray, Irvin S. Cobb.” “Here’s to Ray, Sincerely, George Burns.”

They are all there. The Ghosts of Hollywood.

Bradbury spent countless sun-drenched afternoons outside the old film studios during the heyday of Hollywood, taking photographs, filling his autograph books, sometimes, on separate occasions, gathering two, three, even four signatures from the same star.

“I was madness, maddened,” he said, looking back on his days as an impetuous autograph hound.

Film has always been at the center of Bradbury’s life, going back to his early years growing up in Waukegan, Illinois, during the Jazz Age. “I have seen every film ever made,” he likes to say. And while this may be a slight overstatement, it is not too far off. Ray Bradbury’s knowledge and understanding of movies is encyclopedic.

Today, an argument can be made that Ray Bradbury is the first truly literary writer to have his sense of narrative shaped by cinema. Bradbury is an idea man. Many of his stories are “high concept.” His plots are instantly memorable and easily articulated, similar to Hollywood films.

The last dinosaur on earth lumbers from the depths of the sea, mistaking the moan of a shoreline foghorn for the call of its lost mate.

An assassin storms an amusement park exhibit to shoot a robotic Abraham Lincoln.

A foundling, adolescent child, raised by a family of vampires, yearns to be like his loved ones.

The strikingly visual nature of Bradbury’s writing certainly reflects the influence of movies on his imagination. Who could ever forget the Tyrannosaurus Rex in “A Sound of Thunder,” with its “pebbled skin the mail of a terrible warrior”?

Or the Illustrated Man covered in a “riot of rockets and fountains and people, in such intricate detail and color that you could hear the voices murmuring small and muted, from the crowds that inhabited his body”?

Addressing the visual nature of Bradbury’s oeuvre, filmmaker Sam Peckinpah said once that adapting his work is easy, just “rip the pages out of the book and stuff them in the camera!”

From his earliest childhood recollections of film, to his experiences living in Hollywood during its golden era, to his own accomplished work as a screenwriter, film has always been a vital component of his identity.

WELLER: What are your earliest recollections of cinema?

BRADBURY: My mother took me to see a movie when I was two. I’m trying to remember, it was with Erich von Stroheim. It was about some sort of Russian or German wedding. Then, when I was three, everything changed because she took me to see The Hunchback of Notre Dame starring Lon Chaney at the Elite Theater in Waukegan. The hunchback appealed in some secret way to something inside me, which made me feel at the age of three, that perhaps I was some sort of hunchback myself.

How this film could have evoked in a three-year-old a feeling of sympathy, I don’t know; except Chaney was so incredible at doing his portrayal and his lost love was so touching and immediate that my whole soul went forward at that young age and, it seems amazing that in my small body, I would crouch down inside myself and become the hunchback. A few years later, when I was five, I saw The Phantom of the Opera and then The Lost World and I was in love.

Lon Chaney died when I was ten. Later that year they revived The Phantom of the Opera at the Academy Theatre, which was very unusual. I attended one night with a pain in my side, which I thought was appendicitis. But I refused to give up to death, because in those days, if you had appendicitis, the chances were you could die. But I sat in my seat in the Academy Theatre groaning in pain. I had to see that film, knowing that I might be dead in two, three days. So that’s the intensity with which I love films.

WELLER: I’ve always wondered, your father was in and out of work, how did you afford to go to the movies?

BRADBURY: I went to matinees. They didn’t cost anything then. Ten cents for a kid.

WELLER: How often did you go to the movies in Waukegan?

BRADBURY: My mother took me every week. We always saw Rudolph Valentino do his films, and he died when I was six, along with Houdini, who died on the same day.

WELLER: You moved to Hollywood in April 1934. For a movie fanatic, that must have been nirvana.

BRADBURY: I went crazy. My parents let me roller skate into Hollywood, day after day. All during 1934, 1935, 1936, I was away from home. Where was I? I was in front of Paramount Studios and all the other film studios seeing famous people and collecting autographs. It’s a nutty thing. I had one good friend that I hung around the studios with, Donald Harkins. He’s buried near the Eiffel Tower in Paris. So when I go to Paris I visit him. But no one else I knew from my school was outside the film studios like I was, day after day, collecting autographs and taking pictures. I stood outside the Brown Derby restaurant and the Vendome Room every day getting autographs. In 1935 I saw Shirley Temple set her feet in cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. I was all over Hollywood.

WELLER: There’s a photograph of you with George Burns taken when you were a teenager. What are your memories of him?

BRADBURY: I was fourteen and he encouraged me with my writing. I wrote scripts for the Burns and Allen radio show, which they never used of course because they were so horrible, but George pretended they were good. I hung out in front of the theater one day, and I asked him if he would take me into the broadcast. And he did. He took me and my friend Donald in and sat us in this theater. Burns and Allen did the show for the two of us. It was an empty theater. There were no audiences in those days.

WELLER: Didn’t he actually use one of the jokes you wrote for him?

BRADBURY: Yes. In February 1936. Gracie faints on the air, and George tries to revive her, saying, “Gracie, say something! Say something.” And Gracie wakes up and says, “This … is … the Columbia Broadcasting … System!”

WELLER: Do you remember where you were when that aired?

BRADBURY: At home listening on the radio. Oh God, that was exciting.

WELLER: Did you ever meet Burns again later in life, after you had become famous yourself?

BRADBURY: I was at an awards banquet at the Coconut Grove about forty years ago, and in the middle of the awards, I looked over in the corner and there was George Burns. I hadn’t seen him since I was a kid. And I stopped everything. I said, “To heck with these awards that we’re giving out, I want to give an award to a friend of mine who may not remember me because I was a kid, he was very kind to me—George Burns. Thank you, George.” When it was over, George Burns rushed up to me and said, “Was that you! Was that you! I remember you!”

WELLER: How do you think the movies shaped you as a storyteller?

BRADBURY: I wouldn’t be where I am without them. All the Lon Chaney films deeply affected me. When he died, it was the end of the world. I thought to myself, “If Mr. Death can die, we’re all in trouble.”

WELLER: You used to mill about outside the old Uptown Theatre in Los Angeles, and you saw many stars of old cinema there. What are your memories of that period?

BRADBURY: The theater has been gone thirty years or so now. They tore it down. It was a quality theater. MGM put on all their previews there. So there was a preview about one night a week. I saw Laurel and Hardy, and Irving Thalberg in his tuxedo, and Norma Shearer wearing a silver lamé evening gown. After the theater, they’d go over to the Coconut Grove. I helped Norma Shearer get into her limousine when I was fourteen. When we lived in an apartment on Hobart Avenue, I could stand on our balcony and see all the way to the theater. There was a red light on top of it, and when it was on and blinking—that meant a preview. And I’d get all excited and rush over to the theater.

WELLER: What sort of Hollywood encounters did you have while working as a newspaper boy?

BRADBURY: People used to come to the corner and talk to me. I must have been a good talker. John Barrymore used to buy newspapers from me, and Buster Keaton, and James Dunn, who made films at Twentieth Century Fox. Pedro de Cordoba was a customer. He played the priest in Ramona with Loretta Young, which was made in 1936 when I was in high school.

WELLER: Is there anyone during the golden age that you wish you had met? Is there anyone you didn’t get an autograph from?

BRADBURY: Bette Davis. But I did meet her very briefly at the Academy Awards in February 1935 at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown LA. I was there with a mob of people. They had no barriers and no police were there to stop us. I saw Bette Davis trying to get in through a side entrance, and she couldn’t open the door. So I ran down and opened the door for her. I helped Bette Davis get in to win her first Academy Award. I never saw her again after that. I wish I could have.

WELLER: How about Greta Garbo? She was notoriously reclusive. Did you ever meet her?

BRADBURY: In October 1938, I came out of the downtown LA Library. I walked past the Biltmore, and they were showing a George Bernard Shaw play—Candida. As I walked past the theater, I heard applause. I knew the play was just over, and I got down near the entrance and heard running footsteps, and a woman ran out of the theater and fell against me. I grabbed her shoulders and she lifted her face toward me. She was wearing a hat. It was Greta Garbo. She looked startled, and she broke free and ran across the street into the Biltmore garage to get her car. When she broke away from me, she didn’t look as she crossed the street. She could have been killed.

I knew the girl behind the ticket window at the theater, and she said, “Did you just see something unusual?” I said, “Yes.” She said, “Was it Greta Garbo?” And I said, “Yes.” She told me that they always sold Greta Garbo the last seat in the last row. She would come in after the lights went down and the play had started so no one could see her. And when the play was done, before the lights came on, she would duck out and be the first one out. The girl at the ticket window verified that I had, indeed, run into Greta Garbo.

WELLER: Amazing story. I’m curious, do you have a favorite film?

BRADBURY: Citizen Kane and Fantasia. I fell in love with those movies in the same year. They are unusual. Nothing like Fantasia has ever been made since. It’s all by itself. And Citizen Kane is a real combination of director, screenplay, and acting—all those elements in one film. I knew the first time I saw it that it was the greatest film ever made. Long before film critics started putting it at the top of their “best movie” lists. My intuition worked for me. I came out of the theater and God told me, Citizen Kane will be in your heart forever. I go with my instincts. I saw it again the other night and I’ve never changed my mind. I first saw Fantasia with my Aunt Neva, and the following week I took all my friends. With all the money I had, I bought tickets for my friends so they could see it, and if they didn’t like it—that was the end of the friendship!

WELLER: In 1962, you were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short for Icarus Montgolfier Wright, but you didn’t win. You’ve never won an Oscar, yet you have one on your mantel in the living room. What’s the story there?

BRADBURY: A nice old man, Bill Scowl, gave that to me. His picture is behind the Oscar. He was a member of the Lafayette Escadrille in France during World War I. I wrote about him in the story, “Lafayette, Farewell.” And he was also a cinematographer. He photographed Father of the Bride with Spencer Tracy forty years ago. And he worked on Joan of Arc in 1948. He won the Oscar for that film.

When he died, he left word with a minister who came here to speak to me, and he said, “Bill left word that anything you want over in the house you can have.” He said, “What do you want?” I said, “I want the Oscar, because I’m never going to win one. And therefore I’d be so proud to put his Oscar here with his picture behind it.” It’s been there over twenty years now. And every time someone asks, I tell them about my friend and neighbor.

WELLER: You began your career as a prose writer. How did you learn to write screenplays?

BRADBURY: Going to movies helped. I accumulated all these films in my subconscious, and by the time I was fourteen, I was seeing as many as four or five films a week. When I was in high school, I was seeing half a dozen films a week or more. So I was putting all this junk into my system, along with the great stuff, and I was learning all the time. The best kind of learning is the secret learning you’re picking up and you don’t really know it, and then you go back later and you dredge through all this material and it helps you write screenplays.

WELLER: You wrote the narration to the 1961 film, King of Kings, yet you were not given a screen credit. Why not?

BRADBURY: The author of the screenplay didn’t want someone else getting credit even though the narration was my writing. He wouldn’t allow it.

WELLER: Those were all your words, the narration is all yours?

BRADBURY: That’s correct.

WELLER: Is it legal to keep your name off it even though you wrote it?

BRADBURY: The studio decided. I didn’t decide. And Orson Welles didn’t get a screen credit either, because he wanted money to use his name and they wouldn’t pay. So they took his name off too.

WELLER: But they used his voice?

BRADBURY: That’s right. But no name.

WELLER: How did you come to write the screenplay for Moby Dick?

BRADBURY: In the late 1940s, my friends started asking me, “Ray, when are you going to do a screenplay?” My answer always was, “When John Huston asks me.” Huston was my hero, and I knew that I wanted to work for him. Well, I gave John all of my books of short stories one day in 1951, and he wrote back from Africa where he was making The African Queen and said, “Yes, I agree with you, someday we’ll work together. I don’t know on what.”

In 1953, the day finally came. I came home from the Acres of Books bookstore in Long Beach. I was there with my friend Ray Harryhausen looking for dinosaur books. When I walked into the house, Maggie said, “John Huston just called. He wants you to come to the Beverly Hills Hotel.”

So I went to Huston’s hotel room. He put a drink in my hand and he sat me down and he leaned over and he said, “Ray, what are you doing during the next year?” I said, “Not much, Mr. Huston. Not much.” And he said, “Well, Ray, how would you like to come live in Ireland and write the screenplay for Moby Dick?” And I said, “Gee, Mr. Huston, I’ve never been able to read the damn thing.”

Well! He’d never heard that before, and he thought for a moment, and then he said, “I’ll tell you what, Ray. Why don’t you go home tonight, read as much as you can, and come back tomorrow and tell me if you’ll help me kill the white whale.” So I went home that night and I walked into the house and I said to my wife, “Pray for me.” She said, “Why?” I said, “Because I’ve got to read a book tonight and do a book report tomorrow.”

WELLER: In your 1992 novel, Green Shadows, White Whale, you documented your experience of working in Ireland with John Huston. You have been very candid over the years about Huston’s dark side. How soon after you arrived in Ireland in September 1953 did the relationship begin to sour?

BRADBURY: Fairly early on—perhaps a month into the project. I was at lunch one day with John and some English reporters, and John said, “I don’t really feel that our young writer here has his heart in writing the screenplay of Moby Dick.” And I froze. I couldn’t move for the rest of the lunch. I couldn’t eat. I was so horrorstruck that he would say that to strangers, and when it was over and they were gone, John looked at me and said, “What’s wrong, Ray?” I said, “My God, John, did you hear yourself in there? Here I am adapting the work of one of the greatest American authors, Melville, and I’m working with one of the greatest American directors—you. There’s no one else in the world I want to work for. How could you have said that I didn’t have my heart in the project?” And I began to cry.

John ran over and put his arms around me and said, “Oh, Ray, Ray, it was a joke.” So he apologized and we went on with our friendship, and then, a week later, he did something just like that all over again. He couldn’t resist. There was a thing in him that he had to tantalize people. I saw him do it to his secretary. I saw him do it to his wife. The very first day in Ireland that I visited Huston at his home at Kilcock, he made his wife cry right in front of me. It’s a shame. On the other hand, when he wanted to be sweet, no one could romance you better.

I’ll give you an example: At dinner one night out in Kilcock, he had a lot of people invited in from Dublin and London. I was seated at one end of the table, and John started talking. He said, [imitates Huston] “I read a short story the other day about a lighthouse and a foghorn and a monster in the deep, rising up and falling in love with the lighthouse when hearing the foghorn.” John told the story completely. It took ten minutes. When he was finished, he said to all of his guests, “That story was written by that young man right there,” and he pointed to me. Well! You’d kill for him, wouldn’t you? I blushed with pride! My hero had praised me in front of a dozen other people. So you’d kill for him. Then, a week later, bang!, in goes the knife in your back.

WELLER: You shared screenplay credit with John Huston for Moby Dick, but you have said that that was a mistake. Why?

BRADBURY: I offered him credit on the screenplay. I shouldn’t have, but I was grateful. I was loving. One night in winter, it was a really bitter, cold night, and I called for my driver at Heeber Finn’s Pub, and he pulled up in front of John’s house in Kilcock, and John gave me a glass of whiskey against the cold, and he felt the breeze coming and said, “Wait just a moment, Ray,” and he went over to the closet, and he brought over his coat, his overcoat, and put it on my shoulders. Well! You know, God has just knighted me! I wore that coat home, and I didn’t want to give it back to him; my love was that complete. So I got home, and I was grateful that we made up, and I sent additional pages for Moby Dick to him overseas when they started shooting in ’54, and everything went okay.

WELLER: You were rewriting material for the script even after you had returned stateside?

BRADBURY: Yeah. I had ideas I wanted to add. So I sent them. It might have been twenty pages of scenes. The film didn’t premier until two years later. When the first ads appeared in Variety, they said at the bottom, “Screenplay by Ray Bradbury.” I got one put away. And then a few weeks later I got a letter from the Writers Guild saying if I didn’t protest, the screenplay would read: “By John Huston and Ray Bradbury.” Well! I hit the ceiling. He put it in to take credit. And so I became paranoid. For the next month I would have killed him if I had seen him, because he had his chance. I offered it to him, and if he had accepted it, there never would have been any trouble.

WELLER: When you first realized that Huston had inserted his name into the screenplay credit, what did you do?

BRADBURY: I knew there was nothing I could do. I protested to the Writers Guild—I’ve got copies downstairs somewhere—I gave them my screenplay. And as proof of what he had done on the screenplay, he had a copy of my script that he had marked with a red pencil. I said to the Guild, “Look, every single screenplay of Moby Dick has my name on it. They were all mimeographed in London by his people, not by me. So you can’t find a screenplay anywhere with his name on it! Now isn’t that proof?” But then, later, they wrote letters to me, and the judges said, “If it were anyone else but John Huston, we would give you sole credit.” I have those letters from three judges.

WELLER: Why did they rule in favor of Huston?

BRADBURY: It must be that he wielded too much power.

WELLER: Did you ever see John Huston again?

BRADBURY: I saw him at the premiere for the film at the Pantages Theater in 1956. We were cordial to each other. Enough time had gone by. After all, the film turned out okay, and they used my script. Thank God for that.

Years later, just before John died, I was at the Bistro Gardens, an open-air restaurant in Beverly Hills, having dinner there with my friend Sid Stebel, and I saw John sitting at a table with my old film agent, Ray Stark. Stark was my agent for my first meeting with Huston and he was there for my last encounter with him. Can you believe that? John had a tank of oxygen with him and a hose. I believe he had emphysema. Jack Nicholson was there at the table, too.

I went over to their table and in front of all these people—John Huston, Jack Nicholson, Ray Stark, and two others—I said to everyone, “Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Ray Bradbury, and I want to make a little speech here. I’ll never have another chance to make it.” I pointed to John, and I said, “This man changed my life completely and forever. Only for the good. He gave me the job of writing Moby Dick thirty years ago, and it all turned out beautifully because he read my stories and thought maybe I could do a screenplay. But I wanted to thank him tonight in front of people, and you can go tell people that Ray Bradbury spoke to you tonight and told you that he loves John Huston and thanks him forever.” So I shook John’s hand and walked away. That was it. True story.

WELLER: How did Huston respond?

BRADBURY: His jaw dropped a bit. And then he said, “Thank you.”

WELLER: Despite all the drama involved in working with him, you forgave him completely.

BRADBURY: As John said himself, we all have our foibles. If we judge our friends by their faults, we’d have no friends.

WELLER: What other film projects over the course of your career were you offered?

BRADBURY: When I returned from Ireland after writing the screenplay for Moby Dick, there were several offers, but I turned them all down. I had offers to write Good Morning, Miss Dove; Anatomy of a Murder; Les Diaboliques; Friendly Persuasion; and The Man with the Golden Arm. Those were the main ones.

I remember walking down Hollywood Boulevard a couple years later and three of the films I had turned down were playing at theaters at the same time: Good Morning, Miss Dove, Anatomy of a Murder, and The Man with the Golden Arm.

WELLER: Why did you turn those offers down?

BRADBURY: The Man with the Golden Arm, drugs. Anatomy of a Murder, rape.

WELLER: So it was the subject matter?

BRADBURY: Yeah. And I wanted to spend time with my family. I also knew that no one ever remembered screenwriters. How many can you name?

WELLER: You have a point.

BRADBURY: And I didn’t do Friendly Persuasion because they already had a screenplay, written by a Communist sympathizer—or maybe he wasn’t—Michael Wilson, and they went ahead and used his screenplay under an assumed name, and later the screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award. They didn’t reveal the writer’s name until many years later. Terrible, terrible period.

WELLER: Wait, they offered it to you but it had already been written?

BRADBURY: Robert Wyler, William Wyler’s brother, came to me and said, “We want to do Friendly Persuasion, and we have the rights to the book and here’s a screenplay that’s been done and we think it needs work.” Well, I read it and I said, “It doesn’t need work, shoot it.” And they said, “We can’t.” And I said “Why not?” “Because this guy’s on the list with McCarthy,” and it was after McCarthy had retired even, as I recall, and I said, “Be brave, make the film.” “Well, we can’t do that. Will you work on it?” And I said, “I can’t work on it because it’s perfect, and I’m not going to lend my name to a project like this. Change the name and shoot the film and then later you can reveal who the real author is, as long as you pay him, huh?” So they did that and they paid him.

WELLER: Let’s talk about your relationship with Rod Serling and your work for his series The Twilight Zone. Where did you first meet Serling?

BRADBURY: It was around 1958. His series started in ’59 or ’60, something like that. We were at an awards dinner together. He was a friend of the writer John Gay, and John Gay was working at Hecht-Hill-Lancaster Productions with me on various scripts. We worked on White Hunter, Black Heart, the John Huston book, together. During this time Rod was doing two-hour specials and he was beginning to be well known, so the night of the awards banquet at the Writers Guild, we sat with Rod and his wife and John Gay.

After dinner, Rod said he was starting a series, a fantasy series, but he didn’t really know what he was doing, he needed help. I said, “Come to the house with me right now and I’ll give you books that will help you.” I gave him copies of books by Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, John Collier, and Roald Dahl. I said, “Now you’ve got a complete idea of what your show should be like. Buy some of these stories or hire these authors to work for you, because you can’t do the whole thing yourself.”

WELLER: You have been pretty vocal over the years that you felt Serling stole ideas from you. Can you explain?

BRADBURY: He was unconsciously aggressive. He plagiarized without knowing it.

WELLER: You really believe that?

BRADBURY: The first program of Twilight Zone is based on a story from The Martian Chronicles. He invited me to a screening with my friend Bill Nolan and the other boys in the gang, you know, and when we came out, we all looked at each other and said, “God, that looks a little bit like a story from The Martian Chronicles.” I didn’t say anything because I was embarrassed.

A month or so later, Rod called me and said, “Why didn’t you tell me?” I said, “Tell you what?” He said, “Well, my pilot script is based partially on a story of yours from The Martian Chronicles.” He said, “I was in bed reading with my wife and Carol turned over, she was reading The Martian Chronicles, and she said, ‘Rod, read this, it’s like your pilot.’ ” And he said, “My God, I realized that inadvertently I’d stolen part of your idea.” He said, “I’ve gotta buy your story and make amends.” I said, “No, you don’t. The very fact that you called me and recognized that happened, that’s it. There are no problems.”

He called back two weeks later and said, “I can’t stand it, you know. I can’t stand it. I’ve gotta buy your story. My lawyers will call you.” He hung up and the lawyers never called. 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. Well, after that, he stole from Henry Kuttner, he stole from John Collier.

WELLER: Blatantly?

BRADBURY: Well, again, no, of course not, it was all indirectly, but I got a phone call one night from Bill Nolan, I think it was, who said, “Turn on your set, Rod’s done it again.” And I turned it on and it was a variation of “Presenting Moonshine,” a John Collier story. I don’t think Serling knew what he was doing.

WELLER: Really?

BRADBURY: I’m trying to be generous. He wrote too much too soon, you see, and forgot what he was digesting.

WELLER: Yet you wrote for the program. You wrote the episode “I Sing the Body Electric” and two other scripts that went unproduced. If you felt betrayed by him after his lawyers didn’t call you, why did you write for him?

BRADBURY: Nothing much more happened like that, you see, and time went by. I ignored the fact that the lawyers didn’t call. I did “I Sing the Body Electric” for him. Then George Clayton Johnson did a story which was like “Death and the Maiden,” and Bill Nolan read it and warned him that it was a plagiarism of my story. George said it wasn’t. We warned Rod about it, that George had done this, and nothing was done. Gladys Cooper played the woman, and the male lead was played by Robert Redford. Well, it went on the air, and we all watched it, and sure enough it was a copy of “Death and the Maiden.” So that was an irritation.

I went to a party six months or a year after that and an editor was there from Bantam Books who edited my work when I began with them twenty years before, and he knew about some of my problems with Rod, and he said to people at the party, “Tell them your opinion of Rod Serling, tell them about your problems. We’ve heard rumors.” I said, “No, I don’t want to talk about it.” He said, “Come on, it’s not gonna hurt,” so I let him egg me on and I told them about the pilot. The next day, I got a call from Rod.

WELLER: What did he say?

BRADBURY: Someone at the party—I think my editor—called Rod and told him what went on. That I was talking. And Rod said over the phone, “I hear you’re talking behind my back.” I said, “Rod, you want me to talk to your face? Meet me this afternoon for drinks in Santa Monica and I’ll tell you my story, okay?”

So he came to the bar, and I said, “Let’s go down the line now. You called me fifteen years ago and confessed that you had inadvertently stolen my Martian Chronicles story, right?” “Right.” “Then I let you off the hook. I said, ‘No, the fact that you talked to me makes it okay.’ Then you called back some weeks later and said you couldn’t stand it, my lawyers have got to call you and buy the story, and I said, ‘Okay, have your lawyers call.’ ” And I said, “Rod, did your lawyers ever call?” He said, “Oh God! That’s terrible.” “It sure is,” I said. “You were off the hook with the first phone call. You should never have called me the second time. Then you plagiarized a story by John Collier, and you did one by Kuttner, right?”

Then I said, “When I ride with cab drivers, they think you write your program, all of it. That’s not true, is it?” He said, “No.” I said, “Other people help you?” “Right.” “But at the end of your show, before the commercial, a voice comes on and says, ‘Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, will be back in one minute.’ ” The commercial comes on before the credits. When the credits come on later you discover what you saw was not created by Rod Serling, but was written by Richard Matheson. “Oh, yeah, we’ll change that,” he said. Well, he never changed it. So, all these things accumulated. He said, “I’ll behave, I’ll change.”

WELLER: He was agreeable to everything you were saying?

BRADBURY: Yeah. I said, “Will you do me a favor? Hire Charles Beaumont to be your censor and editor, and every week when you finish a new script, give it to him and say, ‘Is this familiar? Did I inadvertently steal this from somewhere?’ And then he’ll tell you. And if you did, then you buy it from the author. And then there’s no trouble.” He said, “Oh, that’s a great idea, I’ll do that.” Well, he never did. And he never changed the order of the credits at the end of the show.

I can’t remember what caused me to write the final letter, but I wrote that it was the first letter I’d ever written to end a friendship, and that from now on he should please not contact me. “I’ve given you a lot of chances,” I wrote, “and you haven’t done it, so that’s the end.” I don’t like to talk about this, you see. It’s all very negative and it’s very sad. Because I have mixed feelings, you see I don’t like this sort of thing.

WELLER: You had another plagiarism experience with CBS. You sued the network for stealing your work in 1957. What is the story behind that lawsuit?

BRADBURY: I’d just returned from Europe, and a friend called me and said, “Watch Playhouse 90 on Sunday night, they’re stealing your Fahrenheit 451.” I said, “Come on, they’re not going to do that. That would be ridiculous.” My friend said, “Well, I watched a rehearsal at the studio the other day and by God it’s your story.” I didn’t turn it on. I was having dinner with some friends at home around nine p.m. at night. Halfway through the program, I got a phone call from Connecticut, from a stranger who had called the operator and said, “Put me through to Ray Bradbury. It’s an emergency.” The operator got me on the line and this stranger said, “Mr. Bradbury, do you have your TV set on? You’re being robbed right at this very moment on Playhouse 90.” I thanked him and hung up and turned on the set—sure enough, there’s the plagiarism.

I went to my agents the next day and told them about it. And I called CBS. I said, “I want to see the film tomorrow afternoon.” And I went with my friends Bill Nolan and others, and we saw the broadcast of Playhouse 90. After they ran the film, I went to my agents and said, “I want to sue these people.” My agents said, “Well, we won’t do it.”

WELLER: Why?

BRADBURY: Conflict of interest. They were afraid of offending CBS. So I said, “I’ll tell you what, I’m going to sue them all on my own, and I’m going to win, and you’re not going to get anything.” So it took me three years. I wrote most of the briefs. My lawyers didn’t know what plagiarism was. It had to go all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, because I lost the first time out. It took three years, and it was not worth it. There are others I could have sued over the years, but I couldn’t take it. It takes too long and it’s too tiring.

WELLER: On a more positive note, you wrote seven episodes of the television program, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Tell me about that experience. Did you get to know Hitchcock?

BRADBURY: All the people associated with that program were wonderful. I never had any trouble writing for them. We would have lunch when I turned in my script. We’d have another lunch after they read it, and if they had any arguments, we’d argue over lunch. If I won, the script stayed the way it was; if they won, I’d make slight changes. I had a terrific relationship with the producers, Norman Lloyd and Joan Harrison. Mr. Hitchcock would come in and out from time to time. He was terrific. I interviewed him one day over lunch along with Arthur Knight, the cinema writer. It turns out that everything Hitchcock said to us, he had said in a book by François Truffaut. Hitchcock was repeating himself, so the interview was never published.

WELLER: Was there ever talk of doing a film with Hitchcock?

BRADBURY: He had a meeting with me and gave me a copy of the novella The Birds by Daphne du Maurier. I took it home and read it and met with Hitchcock the next day. I said, “Mr. Hitchcock, I’d like to do this, but you have to wait two weeks.” I told him I was already working on a script but that I’d be done in two weeks. He told me he couldn’t wait. I told him, “Mr. Hitchcock, you have to wait. I can’t work for you.” He said, “Who are you working for?” And I said, “Alfred Hitchcock. I’m working for you on your television series.” But he wouldn’t wait, and he got that dreadful script with that dreadful ending instead. I’m not saying I could have cured the ending, I just don’t know. But the film didn’t work with that ending.

WELLER: You helped create a film appreciation society in Los Angeles. Can you tell me the history of that?

BRADBURY: I started it in 1960, I believe. I was on the board of the Writers Guild. I came to a meeting one night, and all the other members of the Guild—seven or eight members—were there. I said, “Last night, I saw this film.” They didn’t see it. Then I said, “Two nights ago, I saw that film.” They didn’t see it. I said, “Last Saturday, I saw this third film.” They didn’t see it. I said, “Jesus Christ, this is the screenwriters’ board. You’re the executive committee. Don’t you see films? That’s stupid!”

And the head of the Writers Guild said to me, “Ray, why don’t you start a film society and teach us?” I said, “I will, I will.” So everybody there made fun of me that night. I said, “Don’t make fun of me, I’ll found a film society. I’ll educate writers and change history.” So I turned to Ivan Moffat, who was a screenwriter standing next to me. I said, “Ivan, will you help me form this?” I turned to another writer, his name will come to me, and I said, “Will you help too?” So the three of us founded the film society and within two weeks we had two thousand members who joined by giving us ten dollars.

Over a period of five or six years we had two hundred thousand dollars in the bank from members because we got the films for free (the studios would give us the films), so we didn’t have to rent them. So we put the money in the bank and when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences got rid of their theater, we bought it. It was the Fox Theater, built in 1921. They moved into it. It was theirs at the Academy, and then I moved in with my group sometime around 1965. Before then, we were showing our films in the basement of a bank for about five years, then we moved over to the Fox Theater.

WELLER: Does the film society still operate today?

BRADBURY: Yes. It changed Hollywood. The film society has three thousand members right now.

WELLER: How did your friendship with King Vidor come about?

BRADBURY: Oh, he became my second father. We had retrospectives at the film society, and during that time the film historian Arthur Knight arranged for me to go to the premiere of Broken Blossoms with King Vidor, Lillian Gish, and Colleen Moore. And I’d seen Ms. Moore’s films when I was seven years old. So Colleen Moore became a good friend too.

I’d seen all of King Vidor’s films. I saw The Big Parade, starring John Gilbert, with my brother when I was five years old, and I’d seen Broken Blossoms and a record came out, “A Lady Picking Mulberries.” My mother bought that record when I was five years old. I put it on every day for a thousand days! I heard it all day for years. One time I was watching a screening of the film with King Vidor sitting beside me. This was back in 1977. They were doing the score with a live orchestra up in front of the theater, and I said, “My God! I know that tune! That’s ‘A Lady Picking Mulberries’! I played it every day when I was five years old.”

So I ran up to the conductor—it was Max Steiner, the composer’s son. I said, “Mr. Steiner, did you make a tape of this score today?” He says yes. I said, “Could you send me a copy?” And I told him my name, and luckily he knew my work and he sent me a tape. So I’ve got copies of the score of Broken Blossoms here and I can give it to people.

King Vidor became a dear friend. He heard me talking about being a director someday myself. I was having dinner one night with King and some other friends, and he heard me say, “You know, I always wanted to be a director, but it’s impossible. But someday I’d like to direct a little tiny film, ten minutes long, to see if I can do it.” King Vidor spoke up and said, “The day you do that, Ray, I’ll carry the camera.” Isn’t that beautiful? He was so kind to me.

WELLER: Of all the cinematic adaptations of your work, what do you think is the best?

BRADBURY: The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit is my favorite. The director followed my script. It’s that simple. It’s a beautiful film. It was released direct to video. I’ve asked the Disney people to rerelease it to the theaters. I wish they would.

WELLER: The Martian Chronicles has never been made into a feature film. Going back to the 1950s, Fritz Lang was interested in doing it. John Huston talked about making it into a movie. You have written several scripts for various studios yourself, beginning with MGM in 1962. With all of this interest, why do you think The Martian Chronicles has never been produced as a film?

BRADBURY: I don’t know. The studio people want something more sensational. More male machoness. There’s not enough killing. Not enough violence. At least it was made into a miniseries on television. It wasn’t great, but it’s there.

WELLER: You didn’t like the 1982 NBC miniseries?

BRADBURY: It was okay. It was just boring.

WELLER: Does a studio currently own the rights?

BRADBURY: Universal. They hired a young writer who did three screenplays for The Martian Chronicles, each worse than the last. I’ve got the scripts in the basement. I’ve got to show you how bad they are. He doesn’t know how to write. He doesn’t know grammar. He rips the guts out of people. It’s bloody. It’s violent. When you look at the remakes of The Mummy—that’s Universal. They think if one mummy is scary, a dozen Rockette mummies doing kicks is scarier. It’s hilarious. Thank God I have a lot of things to do, otherwise I’d go crazy.

WELLER: What did you think of François Truffaut’s adaptation of Fahrenheit 451?

BRADBURY: It’s very good, but he made a mistake by casting Julie Christie in double roles as Montag’s wife and as Clarisse. I love the music by Bernard Herrmann. He was a great composer. I helped get him the job working on Fahrenheit. I knew he had just been fired by Hitchcock. They had had arguments over the film Torn Curtain. It’s not a good film. And the point was, if you don’t have much to work with, you can’t write good music. So Hitchcock and Herrmann parted ways. I called Truffaut and said, “Do you have a composer for Fahrenheit 451?” and he said, “No.” I suggested Bernard Herrmann, and Truffaut hired him. I’m responsible for that. I’m very proud of it. The music is beautiful.

WELLER: What other film composers did you enjoy working with?

BRADBURY: Jerry Goldsmith started with me in 1956 when he was twenty-seven and I was thirty-six. He did the music for my story “Hail and Farewell” that was broadcast on the CBS Radio Workshop. Later he did the score for The Illustrated Man. The music is great, but the film is no good. It’s boring.

WELLER: What are your thoughts on the current state of films coming out of Hollywood?

BRADBURY: The secret of films is screenplays. It always has been. And when an actor who is not known gets a screenplay that’s brilliant, overnight he’s famous. Like Russell Crowe, who won an Academy Award for his role in Gladiator. He’s not a great actor. He’s a nice, bland, character player, but he has good taste in screenplays. Russell Crowe has selected things that improve his image all the time. But he’s not a great actor, just very nice.

Take a film like L.A. Confidential. All those actors could be replaced by other actors, but it’s a great screenplay. But you have Kevin Spacey and Russell Crowe, and they are wonderful, but they are not great actors—that was a great screenplay. So you think you’re watching great performances, but they’re just good actors who perform well with a good screenplay. Put Kevin Spacey into a boring film like The Shipping News and you go right to sleep. It’s paint drying, huh? Nicolas Cage is another good example. I love Nicolas Cage. But he’s had good screenplays. He’s worked with great directors, like the Coen brothers. Raising Arizona is wonderful. And Moonstruck is terrific. But most of those actors are interchangeable. Most people haven’t discovered this, including Hollywood, that the secret is screenplays.

chapter three
FAME AND CELEBRITY

YOU KNOW YOU HAVE ARRIVED WHEN THERE IS A CRATER ON THE moon named for one of your books. In 1971, the crew of Apollo 15 christened a lunar pockmark “Dandelion Crater,” for the Bradbury classic Dandelion Wine. And if that accolade of celestial significance isn’t enough, there is also an asteroid that bears his surname—“9766 Bradbury.”

Adding to it all, Gene Roddenberry, the late Star Trek impresario, named a Starfleet vessel the USS Bradbury. Talk about universal name recognition.

Ray Bradbury likes being famous. Money was never it for him. His primary motivation has always been, as he would say, “to be loved.” At book signings, he will stay until the very last person in line has received an autograph. There was one moment at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books in 2005 when he signed books for a couple of hours. It was a taxing endeavor for the almost-85-year-old author, yet he soldiered on, like one of the perseverant colonists in The Martian Chronicles.

As time passed and the line continued to stretch out of sight, Bradbury grew fatigued. His head began to slump, even as his pen continued to scribble his signature. And then he stopped signing altogether and fell asleep.

His handlers—on this day his driver, his youngest daughter Alexandra, and his editor—called it off. Bradbury was seated in a wheelchair, and they began to pull him away from the signing table.

Mass chaos ensued.

A man near the front of the line—one of the next up to get a signed book—went into a rage. He had waited patiently and was now getting slighted. There was pushing. Yelling. Someone else in line tried to settle things down. Punches were thrown. Within seconds, security moved in to break up the melee and Ray Bradbury awoke.

“What’s going on?” he asked, bewildered and dazed from his all-too-brief catnap.

When Bradbury was informed of the situation, he signed a book for the disgruntled fan and was whisked away, to sign again another day.

With his books a staple on school curriculum lists and his works adapted into twenty-five languages around the world, Bradbury is more famous today than ever before. And unlike other, more reclusive writers, he basks in the glow of his renown. He relishes his fame.

WELLER: Do you remember the first time you were recognized as Ray Bradbury, the writer?

BRADBURY: I went east for the publication of The Martian Chronicles in the spring of 1950. And I took the train and had three hours between trains in Chicago. So I went to the Art Institute, my favorite place, and I made an appointment for a lunch there with a friend. I got there and I saw a mob of people at the top of the stairs—tourists going into the Art Institute—and I saw, all of a sudden, all of these people, twenty or thirty, turn and come down the steps toward me. They were all carrying copies of The Martian Chronicles. That was a turning point, you see. All my new lovers. Because that had never happened to me. You see, no one had ever showed up anywhere with a copy of my book in their hands. So I had lunch with all thirty of them, then I took the train and went on to New York.

WELLER: How did these new fans know you would be there?

BRADBURY: I think the friend I was having lunch with must have let them know.

WELLER: Do you enjoy being famous?

BRADBURY: Sure. To know you are loved everywhere you go. That’s wonderful.

WELLER: How many books have you sold worldwide?

BRADBURY: I’ve never bothered to ask. It’s not how many that’s important, it’s who owns them.

WELLER: You have influenced a good many rock musicians over the years. Elton John and his lyricist Bernie Taupin wrote the hit “Rocket Man” as an homage to your 1951 story of the same name. The members of KISS are fans. Black Francis, a progenitor of alternative rock and the leader of the seminal band The Pixies, named a solo album “The Cult of Ray” for you. How do you respond to all this adulation from the world of rock music?

BRADBURY: Everyone in rock is a science fiction freak. About twenty-five years ago, David Bowie was coming to Los Angeles to perform, and my daughter Alexandra came to me and said, “Do you know David Bowie?” I said, “No.” “You know his music?” I said, “Yes. It’s pretty good.” She said, “Well, he’s gonna have a concert next Saturday night, and the tickets are sold out. Do you think you could try to get us in?” So I called BMI and asked about Bowie’s agent. They gave me his name and phone number, and they said, “He’s in San Francisco with David Bowie right now.”

So I got his hotel number and I called San Francisco. I identified myself and said, “I want to buy two tickets for the concert. I don’t want free tickets.” They said, “Are you kidding? David Bowie’s your number-one fan. You’re gonna come and you’re gonna see him after.” So we go to the arena to attend the concert, and I take Alexandra backstage afterward. David Bowie comes out and embraces me, and then he introduces me to Ringo Starr from the Beatles. Ringo falls over a chair getting to me. Neil Sedaka, Bette Midler, and John Belushi are all there too, and they swarm. My daughter was standing there like, you know, “This is just my father.”

The next night we had dinner with David Bowie. It was fun because he liked to talk about certain essays and science fiction books. He was off on some discussion about Francis Bacon.

WELLER: What other celebrities surprised you by their fandom?

BRADBURY: I was in London in July 1969 and I got an invitation to go to the Playboy Club. I’d never been to one, even though I’d been to the Playboy Mansion. Maggie said, “Why don’t you go over and see what it’s like?” So they were having a big reception for Sammy Davis, Jr., and I went over there and there’s Michael Caine and Richard Harris. I had a nice chat with both of them, but there was such a mob around Sammy Davis that I couldn’t get anywhere near him. So after about an hour, I decided to leave.

On the way out I looked over, and there’s a break in the crowd around Sammy Davis, so I shoved my hand through and said, “Mr. Davis,” and he grabbed my hand, he said, “Yes.” I said, “Ray Bradbury, sir.” He said, “Oh my God, come here!” And he pulled me through the crowd, and he sat me down, and he sat at my feet. I said, “Don’t sit at my feet. People will think you’re shining my shoes.” And he says, “I’ll shine ’em! I’ll shine ’em!” He turned out to be a huge fan, and he said, “What are you doing tomorrow?” I said, “Well, I’ve got my daughters here, and my wife.” He said, “I’m at the studio, you’ve got to come out.” So the next day I took my daughters out to the studio, and we had lunch with Sammy Davis, Jr. and Peter Lawford and Jerry Lewis. Now, Jerry Lewis, I never really wanted to meet. I didn’t like his stuff. But it turned out we had a fantastic lunch. He was a sweetie-pie! They spoiled us, and we watched them shoot some scenes.

WELLER: That’s an amazing story. Certainly there were other luminaries who expressed their appreciation of your work.

BRADBURY: I was standing on the corner one day in Beverly Hills and Sidney Poitier, the actor, drove by and stood up out of his car and yelled over at me, he said, “Mr. Bradbury, I’m Sidney Poitier and I love you!” And he drove off. Those moments, they last forever.

WELLER: What other moments do you recall like that?

BRADBURY: I was at a party once in Los Angeles honoring the Russian film director Sergei Bondarchuk. Sam Peckinpah was there. William Wyler, Billy Wilder, George Cukor—all the great directors. So Bondarchuk went down the line and was introduced to George Cukor and to William Wyler—you know, all the way down the line. And at the end of the line I was standing there just observing. I was curious to be there with the director and see him meet all the great directors, and when he got to me he said, “Oh, Ray Bradbury! Ray Bradbury!” and he dragged me over to a table and brought out a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka. He had two other Russian directors with him, and the four of us sat at that table, and all the great directors are staring there wondering, “What’s happening? He’s paying attention to a writer and not to a director! How could that be?”

When we finished one bottle, he brought out another bottle. God knows how I got home, I’ll never remember. I was so drunk. I’ve never been so drunk in my life. Bondarchuk was his name, Bondarchuk.

WELLER: Part of celebrity status entails the talk-show circuit, and you’ve certainly done your share of these programs over the years. It’s always fascinated me how these venues often attract a confluence of unlikely guests. Do you have any memories of sharing the stage with other unlikely cultural icons?

BRADBURY: I was on a program once with Colonel Sanders, the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken. He was a nice guy. I was on camera and the colonel had just finished being interviewed, and we were both wearing our white suits. For a time I wore my “Wonderful Ice Cream Suit” all the time. But that night, on that television program, I looked like one of the colonel’s employees.

WELLER: You received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in April 2002. How special was this accolade, considering you spent your teen years chasing stars all across Los Angeles as an autograph collector? You likely rollerskated many times over the very spot where your star now stands.

BRADBURY: A lot of people say how wonderful it is, but it doesn’t really count for me. The people who come up to me and tell me that my books changed their lives, those are the people who count, because no one told them to do that. No one paid them to do that. I don’t want to be small or mean about it. It was great being there on Hollywood Boulevard with Charlton Heston and Rod Steiger and my kids. When they gave me the star, I appeared before the city council in downtown Los Angeles. The mayor announced it “Ray Bradbury Day” in Los Angeles.

On my way out of that ceremony in my wheelchair, a man in the audience reached out and grabbed my elbow as I went by and said, “You changed my life.” Jesus Christ! You see? That’s the secret. If I can change one life, I’m a miracle man. He said that to me and it made me cry. It was more important than the meeting with the mayor and the city council. It was more important than the star on Hollywood Boulevard.

WELLER: When you do book signings, you’re often mobbed. Are you ever annoyed by pushy fan-boys?

BRADBURY: No. They’re enthusiasts. That’s all. Sometimes you just need to let them speak and then exit. I lectured in the Valley two weeks ago at the Hollywood Museum—all about Hollywood. When it was over this one guy came up and followed me around and all the way out to my car—he wouldn’t let go. He said, “You know, I have verbal diarrhea.” And he then proceeded to prove it! He babbled and followed me all the way to the car, and there was nothing I could do. I didn’t want to be impolite, and he was very loving, but he couldn’t stop. So I handled that by getting in the car with my driver and driving away very quickly.

WELLER: Does a writer become jaded at the sight of their name on a book or story? It can’t be as exhilarating today to see your name in print as it was when you first started writing.

BRADBURY: It depends on the publication. For example, when my big book Bradbury Stories came out in 2003, when that galley arrived, I wept. I couldn’t believe I’d written all those stories. When I look at that, along with the earlier book, The Stories of Ray Bradbury, there are two hundred stories in two big books. I look at those and I realize that I owe back to the universe. I’m a genetic result of a bunch of genes experimenting at some level, and it has allowed me to collect metaphors, which a lot of other writers don’t do. I didn’t know what a metaphor was until I was in my fifties, really. But this is a wonderful gift from the universe.

I don’t want to be fancy or metaphysical about it, but when I look at those two books, I didn’t write them! They wrote themselves. There was no intellect involved. Imagination always has intellect embedded in it. So you try not to let your intellect interfere. They work together—your intelligence and your imagination. If you can steer them together, just be careful to hold your hand around both, but don’t let your intellect get in the way, that’s why I feel obligated to the universe.

WELLER: How important is achieving literary immortality to you?

BRADBURY: I don’t think about it. But you know, my life has been a fight against death. I finish a story, go to the mailbox, drop it in and say, “Okay, Death, I’m ahead of you.” You see, every time I write a new short story, or essay, or poem, or publish a new novel, I’m that much ahead. I’ve finished a lot since my stroke in 1999—just in case. There’s no guarantee I’m going to be alive next year or even tomorrow. I hope I will be, but when you’ve had a stroke, God knows what can happen to you. So, the stroke was a good experience in many ways, because it taught me to seize the day once again. I hadn’t been seizing it rapidly or hard enough.

WELLER: What do your daughters think of your celebrity and, more importantly, your work?

BRADBURY: I’ve never asked them if they’ve read my books. In the past, their boyfriends asked them in front of me. That’s the way to have it done. They would occasionally bring a new boyfriend over and the boyfriend would ask, “What do you think of your father’s book Something Wicked?” They would say, “What?” The boyfriend would then say, “Well, you better go read it or we won’t have a relationship!” So, they were force-fed my books through their boyfriends. That’s the only way to do it.

WELLER: Over the years you have become highly sought after on the lecture circuit. What is your memory of your first public speaking engagement?

BRADBURY: It goes back about fifty years. I was invited to the University of Southern California to an English Honorary Society to speak. It was a small group, maybe one hundred people. And I got up, and I’d prepared a lot of notes and part of a speech, and I started reading it, and I looked up and everyone was asleep. I said, “Attention! Attention!” And they all woke up. Then I said, “Now watch this,” and I threw the speech on the floor and jumped on it. I said, “Now, to continue.” And from then on I looked them in the eyes, I never looked at notes. I have lists of metaphors I take with me. I have a list of about eighty metaphors—like dinosaurs, IBM, MGM, Twentieth Century Fox—and I’d just look at that metaphor, and I can talk for half an hour on it. It stimulates my imagination.

WELLER: In November 2000 you were given the prestigious Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. How important was this honor? After all, you weren’t being recognized as a genre writer, you were being hailed by the New York literary establishment.

BRADBURY: That was a fantastic evening. My agent Don Congdon was there. My date for the evening was my editor, Jennifer Brehl. Steve Martin was the host. You were there too. That was great fun. It was wonderful. There was a real problem getting back to my hotel room, though. The hotel where they held the ceremony in New York was so huge, it filled me with despair. After my stroke, I walk very slowly. I saw a sign that night that said. “Next restroom, 280 miles.” The registration desk was on the seventh floor! You have to wait ten minutes for an elevator just to go up and register! So, that night, some of the women there were taking me back to my room, and I said, “For God’s sake, where’s the men’s room?” We couldn’t find one. One of the girls said, “There’s a potted palm over there, why don’t you go use it?” So I went over. Nobody saw me. At least I don’t think so.

WELLER: These speeches are often eventful.

BRADBURY: I’ll give you a good example of the speech stuff: My friendship with Loren Eiseley, the anthropologist, years ago. I wrote him a love letter back in 1948 because I loved an essay he wrote, “The Fire Apes”, that was in Harper’s magazine. And it was so beautifully written I wrote him a love letter, and said, “Dear Dr. Eiseley, I read ‘The Fire Apes’ in Harper’s, and it’s the single best essay I’ve read in an American magazine in twenty years. You are a genius,” et cetera, et cetera. “I think you should write a book.” He wrote back and said, “Dear Mr. Bradbury, I know your work.” I didn’t have much out at the time, just one book, Dark Carnival. And he said, “You know, that’s an idea. I think I will write a book.” And he went on to write twenty books, and they were all fantastic, and we became friends as a result of my urging him to write a book.

So, he finally came to the Coast about forty years ago and spoke at Occidental College. I went along with him, and he spoke at this banquet. He put everyone to sleep, because he was face down in his speech, you couldn’t see him, and you didn’t want to listen because he wasn’t looking at the audience.

When it was over I ran up on the stage, I said, “Gimme that!” I grabbed his speech and looked at it, and I said, “My God, Doctor, this is beautiful. But you can’t read it, you have to learn it so you can recite it, and you’ve got to look at people’s eyes and pay attention to them, and then you’ll be a good speaker.” And I said, “Forgive me,” because he was about fifteen years older than me. I felt like a young punk, telling him what to do. “Please forgive me,” I told him, “but you can’t go on this way because you’re boring people and putting them to sleep. And I’m your best friend, and I want you to succeed.” But he wrote me a letter later and said thank you, because he began to learn how to memorize his speeches. So that’s the truth about public speaking. It has to be like acting, just as natural and wonderful as breathing.

WELLER: When did you really start to make money as a writer?

BRADBURY: Only when I got the job writing the screenplay for Moby Dick. We went to Ireland and I was making six hundred dollars a week. That was a lot of money back then. But we never lived beyond our means. Before that, in 1950, when we moved into our little tract house on Clarkson Road, the very first week I ordered a refrigerator and we bought it on time. And then I looked at the carrying charges. I could buy a suit of clothes. So we got money from my dad and Maggie’s dad, and we paid off the refrigerator so we wouldn’t have the carrying charges. From then on, we never bought anything on time until we had the money.

WELLER: Getting back to your stardom as a writer, what’s the strangest thing you’ve ever autographed?

BRADBURY: When I had my stroke in 1999, I couldn’t sign my name for quite some time. I did signings and brought an ink pad and put my thumbprint in books. People have heard about this, and they now ask me to thumb-print their books even though I can write again. The other thing, and I don’t know why, but people have been bringing baseballs to signings and having me autograph them. Can you believe that?

WELLER: Rock stars occasionally sign body parts for people. Have you done that?

BRADBURY: Not yet, but there’s still time!

chapter four
FAMOUS FRIENDS

SOME MIGHT ACCUSE HIM OF BEING A NAME-DROPPER. BUT WHEN you have lived as long as he has and have accomplished so much in almost every facet of media and entertainment, you are going to meet people. Famous people.

One night at the American Film Society when he was presenting an award to Orson Welles, Frank Sinatra was in the crowd, and Ray Bradbury approached him.

“Mr. Sinatra?” said Bradbury.

“Yes?” responded the Chairman.

“My name is Ray Bradbury. I’m a writer, and I love you.”

A slight smile crossed Sinatra’s face. “Right back at you.”

Over the course of his career, Bradbury has known and worked with an impressive cross-section of Hollywood talent. Along the way, he has collected an unlikely cadre of famous friends—a surreal cast of cultural luminaries.

WELLER: You’ve known and worked with an incredible array of people over the decades. Who are you particularly close to?

BRADBURY: I’ve never made a point of making too many friends too close to whatever I’m doing. My New York relationships are long-distance—telephone and letters, personal contacts on occasion. In Hollywood I haven’t made a point of being social.

WELLER: Why?

BRADBURY: I’m afraid of being taken in by the romance. You have to be careful not to live with the people you work with. I don’t think it’s healthy. The people I know are directors of films. I’ve known a lot of the old-time film directors: Rouben Mamoulian, King Vidor, George Cukor. I knew a lot of screenwriters, short story writers, and novelists. We have our own little writers’ group that we formed forty-five years ago, and we still meet on occasion. But we’ve all helped each other and it’s very intimate—it’s not a power thing. In other words, I’m not taking you to lunch or dinner because you’re a famous star.

I know Rod Steiger. We’ve been good friends for years, but we don’t see him more than once a year. I knew Charlton Heston. He had a library of first editions you wouldn’t believe. Incredible. He was very intellectual. I went to his fiftieth wedding anniversary, and he came to ours with his wife. They were lovely people, and the people who hated him when he was still alive are wrong. They didn’t know him. They hate him because of the NRA. That’s a lot of crap.

WELLER: Ray Harryhausen has been a lifelong friend. How did the two of you meet?

BRADBURY: I met him in 1938 at Forrest Ackerman’s house. He was there borrowing pictures of King Kong from Forry, and I discovered he loved King Kong as much as I did. When I found out he was animating his own dinosaurs, he invited me over to his house, and I went out in his garage and he was animating the dinosaurs on the floor. There, he showed me his first films. The dinosaurs were ball-and-socket steel covered with rubber and plastic and beautifully painted. Just like King Kong. And later he met Willis O’Brien, the animator, and O’Brien hired him to work on Mighty Joe Young. He learned from the master.

WELLER: Harryhausen was the best man at your wedding in 1947. What are your memories of him on that day?

BRADBURY: The greatest thing that happened: The day we got married, Ray Harryhausen drove us to the ceremony at the Episcopal Church on Slauson Avenue, and then we had a wedding breakfast at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. It cost a total of ten dollars: three dollars for the wedding cake, three for the champagne, and a couple dollars for the tip. Then Ray Harryhausen drove us out to our place in Venice, our very little apartment at 33 South Venice Boulevard. And after he dropped us off, Maggie and I walked down to the Owl Drug Store to buy toothbrushes. We needed toothbrushes for the honeymoon. But on the way, three or four little kids that were eight or nine years old followed us and sang “Happy Wedding Day to You, Happy Wedding Day to You.”

WELLER: Not too many years after your marriage, you met Gene Kelly. How did that friendship come about?

BRADBURY: A friend of mine knew Gene Kelly. He was at Gene’s house one night, and Gene was reading The Martian Chronicles. He turned to my friend and said, “You know Ray Bradbury, don’t you? Why don’t you bring him to the house? I’d love to meet him.” So I went to Gene Kelly’s house and he told me he loved The Martian Chronicles. I said, “Gene, let me top that. You just made the greatest musical ever made, Singin’ in the Rain. It is simply an incredible movie with a great screenplay, a great cast, and great numbers.” He was enchanted with the fact that I loved him as much as he loved me. So he kept inviting Maggie and I to MGM Studios for the next five years to see all of his films.

Walking home one night, I said to Maggie, “My God, I’d love to work with that man.” And she said, “Why don’t you? When you get home, take one of your stories out of the file and turn it into a screenplay for him and give it to him.” So I went home and I found my short story, “The Black Ferris.” I turned that into an eighty-page treatment and called it Dark Carnival, and I gave it to Gene the next day. He said, “Oh my God, this is great. I want to make this into my next film. Can I take this to Paris and London and try to get the money?” I said, “Take it, take it.” I couldn’t believe it. Wonderful. So he took it to London and Paris, and he came back a month later and said, “No money, Ray, I’m sorry.” I said, “Gene, don’t say you’re sorry. I’m honored that you tried.” So he gave me back the screenplay, and in the next three years I turned it into a novel called Something Wicked This Way Comes.

WELLER: You were good friends with the animator Chuck Jones. How did that relationship come about? And what was it about Chuck Jones that made him such a special friend?

BRADBURY: He used to call me on the phone and say, “Ray, I’ve been reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Should I tell you what I found today?” I said, “Tell me.” He said, “Did you know that when they were constructing the railroad across Egypt and they ran out of fuel, they used to run into the graveyard and take the mummies from the graves and put them in the locomotives and burn them for fuel?” I said, “Oh my God, Chuck, that’s wonderful! I’m going to go write a poem called ‘The Nefertiti-Tut Express.’ ” I met him the day after Halloween in 1968.

WELLER: Charles Beaumont was one writer you helped along. How did you know him?

BRADBURY: I was going into a bookstore in 1946, and this young man came up to me. His name was Charles Nutt, and he said, “I hear that you collect comic strips of Terry and the Pirates.” I said, “Yes, I do. I love Terry and the Pirates.” And he said, “You collect Prince Valiant too?” “Yes,” I said. “I’ve got some of those strips,” he said. “Would you like to have them?” He offered to make a trade. He knew of my friendship with the artist Hannes Bok, and he wondered if I could give him any photographs of Bok’s artwork. So we traded. He gave me Terry and the Pirates, and I gave him photographs of Hannes Bok’s work. So that’s how we got to be friends.

When I worked on It Came from Outer Space at Columbia Studios, Charles Beaumont came up to me—he had changed his name by then, he was no longer Charlie Nutt—and he invited me to his house. One night, he gave me one of the short stories he was writing, called “Miss Gentilbelle.” I read it and thought it was very good and told him that he could sell it somewhere. I told him where to cut a little bit, where to work on it, and where to send it, and they bought it. So he started his career, and he became a student of mine. He came to the house every Tuesday night along with my friend Sid Stebel. I told them both, “Look, it’s very simple. Between now and the end of the year, write one short story a week. I want you to write fifty-two short stories, each of you, and by the end of the year, you will know how to write short stories.” Sid Stebel became one of my students, and he wrote a short story about a young man and a saxophone, and we sent it off to an Italian literary magazine called Bottega Oscura. That’s where he sold his first short story.

Around that same time, Charles Beaumont sent off “Miss Gentilbelle” and sold it. So I told them, “Look, quantity is important. It makes for quality. You can’t get quality without writing a lot and learning from yourself. And by the end of the year, you have fifty-two short stories as examples of short stories to look at. And you’ll find out what was wrong with each of them, and then you write a new short story taking into account what you have learned, and at long last, you’re established.”

So those were three stories by three young writers whose careers I helped get off the ground that year, around 1954, 1955. A few years later I introduced Charles Beaumont to Rod Serling, and he wrote for The Twilight Zone. He was fabulous. He was very similar to me.

WELLER: You are also friends with Harlan Ellison. Did you teach him as well?

BRADBURY: No. We were totally different. He was a bombastic, Norman Mailer type. He loved life better than Mailer, but we were different people. He was a terrible-tempered Mr. Bang. He was part of a film society with me at the Writers Guild, and every time he came into a meeting, he was angry about something. I’d say, “What is it today, Harlan?” And he’d tell me what was wrong with that day. He hated somebody, and he’d tell me. So we’ve always been different, but we’ve had a good friendship. Behind the bombast, he’s a sweetheart.

WELLER: How did you come to know Rod Steiger?

BRADBURY: I was at Sy Gomberg’s house back in 1957, I believe, and Rod Steiger showed up, and we got to talking, and all of a sudden it was two in the morning—we were having such a good time talking—and Rod drove me home. That started our friendship. After that, he’d come over to the house. One time, he bought a new Jag and drove up to the front of the house, and Maggie and I came out to go with him in his new car, and he yelled up at us, “Eat your heart out!” That was pure Steiger.

WELLER: Was he as macho and eccentric as the persona he projected? What kind of man was he?

BRADBURY: A combination of macho and vulnerable. Easily hurt. You had to be careful. If you directed him in a film, I think he was a porcupine, in many ways.

WELLER: You knew the film director Fritz Lang. Can you tell me about that relationship?

BRADBURY: I bumped into him in a bookstore and he bought an extra copy of The Martian Chronicles right there and had me sign it. Then he took my address and called me later that summer because he wanted to make a film of it. It was 1950, right after we moved to the house on Clarkson Road. We were only there two months, and he came over for Halloween. And I told Fritz to come in costume if he wanted to. I said, “Fritz, I told you to come in costume.” He said, “I did.” And as he came into the light he pointed to his head, and there were little horns coming out the top of his brow. So that was his costume.

I also invited Ray Harryhausen that night. And Ray Harryhausen brought his marionettes with the strings and performed in the living room for us, and of course Ray was a long way from being discovered or successful or anything, but he did a performance for Fritz.

WELLER: Charles Laughton was a good friend. How did that relationship come about?

BRADBURY: I was in my thirties, and I did a stage play of Fahrenheit 451. I’d seen Don Juan in Hell, the George Bernard Shaw play done by Charles Laughton, with Cedric Hardwicke, Charles Boyer and Agnes Moorehead. It was around 1950. It was one of the most incredible productions on any stage at any time. There were just four people with four music stands and four books. It was a reading of Shaw. And I fell madly in love with Charles Laughton. In 1954 I wrote Fahrenheit 451 as a play for him. I gave it to Charles Laughton and Paul Gregory, the producer. They took me out to dinner one night. They got me drunk. After I was thoroughly drunk they told me how bad the play was. They did the right thing. They prepared me.

WELLER: How so?

BRADBURY: The play was terrible. What I had done was copy the novel. You can’t do that for the stage.

WELLER: But you feel you can do that for a screenplay. There’s that old Sam Peckinpah quote, “just rip the pages from the book and stuff them in the camera.”

BRADBURY: Well, I’ve learned how to write plays since. You float over your material. You don’t descend into it. You don’t retype it. You float over it like a salmon fertilizing your own eggs. So I went home from that dinner with tears streaming down my cheeks because I had so loved Charles Laughton and I wanted to work for him. Well, he came to the house a year later and said, “How would you like to write a science-fiction operetta for Elsa?”—his wife. And he said, “Find something and come to me.” So I found an idea and I went to his house.

The next six months, I had a glorious experience with Charles Laughton and his wife. I wrote a science-fiction operetta, which they didn’t produce immediately because they were busy with other projects. Then, a few years later, Charles died. I finally produced the play myself in the fall of 2009, and I think it’s the best play I’ve ever done. It’s called Happy Anniversary, 2116. The director of the recent production retitled it Ray Bradbury’s Wisdom 2116.

The experience with Charles Laughton was incredible. Every afternoon I’d show up with new pages, and then we’d have vodka martinis. In between, Charles would stand on his hearth and declaim for me. He would declaim Shaw or Shakespeare. He was going to do King Lear in London. He would invite me over to his pool; we’d swim around. He said, “Ray, what do you think of this idea?” I said, “Charlie, you’re the expert. I’m an amateur.” He’d say, “Yes, but I need a ricochet board. You’re the ricochet board.” So we had this wonderful friendship. And he introduced me to Shaw and I fell completely in love, and I’ve never been out of love since.

The very first time I went to Disneyland, the year after it opened, was with Charles Laughton. I didn’t go sooner because I had heard they hadn’t finished building it, and I didn’t want to go when it was incomplete. So Charles Laughton came to me and asked if I would like to go. I remember riding on the Peter Pan ride and looking down on London and the House of Parliament and the London Bridge with Charles Laughton, of all people! We went on the Jungle Boat Ride and he started doing his interpretation of Captain Bligh. It was incredible. Oh my God, I loved him!

WELLER: And you knew Walt Disney. How did you meet him?

BRADBURY: I was Christmas shopping in a department store in Beverly Hills in 1964. All of a sudden, through the crowd of people, I saw Walt Disney coming near me. He had an armload of wrapped presents going up to his chin. I ran up to him and introduced myself. I said, “Mr. Disney, my name is Ray Bradbury, and I love you.” And he said, “I know your books.” I said, “Thank God!” and he said, “Why?” and I said, “Because someday soon I would like to take you to lunch.” And do you know what he said? He said, “Tomorrow!” Can you believe that? Who says that? “Tomorrow.” So I went to his office and we had lunch at a little card table right there. We talked about all of our loves—animation, architecture, World’s Fairs. He was wonderful. I had lunch with him three or four times before he died.

WELLER: How did you hear of his death?

BRADBURY: It was an incredible coincidence. I took my four daughters to Disneyland, and when I got home, Maggie said, “The news people have been calling all afternoon wanting to talk with you. CBS. NBC. They want to get a comment from you.” I said, “About what?” and she said, “They wanted to know if you knew that Walt Disney died today.” I was shocked. I asked Maggie, “What did you tell them?” and she said, “I told them, ‘You are not going to believe this, but right now Ray is at Disneyland with his daughters.’ ” What a tribute that was to Walt. To be at Disneyland the very day he died. Oh my God, I’m so proud of that. I wept when I found out he had died and said, “Oh, thank God I went there today!”

WELLER: You were also good friends with Federico Fellini. Tell me how that relationship started.

BRADBURY: In 1977, I wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times, reviewing a big book of Fellini photographs. Hundreds of pages of photographs of all of his films. It was beautiful. All you had to do was look at the photos and the films came back to you. So I wrote this long essay comparing him to Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera and The Hunchback of Notre Dame and to Charlie Chaplin. So, a week later, I received a letter from Rome from Fellini. He wrote, “A friend of mine sent me this review. If you are ever in Rome, come see me.” So I wrote him back immediately and said, “Incidentally, we are going to be in Rome in August.” We were taking our daughter Alexandra over for her twentieth birthday.

WELLER: But you had met him prior to that, if I’m not mistaken.

BRADBURY: Yeah. Sometime in the early ’70s, he brought his film Satyricon over to Hollywood, and there was a big preview and a reception line to meet him. So I went through the reception line hoping that he would recognize my name. So I was introduced to him and nothing. Nothing. And I went away decimated. I wanted Fellini to know my name. I wanted him to know that I love him.

So the next night he was at UCLA with the film, lecturing the students. So at the end of the film, he answered questions from the students. I was in the audience, and I dared to ask him a question that is central to my life. I said, “Signore Fellini, I hear that when you make a film, you never look at the rushes. You never look at the dailies. And you make a whole film without looking at it. How can you do that?” He said, “I don’t want to know what I’m doing.” And this is how I have worked. This is the same way I provoke my psyche, my muse. When I get out of bed each morning, I say, I wonder what I did yesterday? And my creative self sits up like a cat, and cats don’t like to be ignored. If you pretend to walk away from a cat, it may just get curious and follow you. So an idea, then, if you neglect it, it will follow you. Fellini answered that question.

At the end of that evening, I went up to him again and I had a copy of Crónicas Marcianas, the Italian version of The Martian Chronicles, in my pocket. I introduced myself to him again and he said, “Ah! Ray Bradbury!” and I took out the book and gave it to him. And he knew the book. But we still hadn’t begun our friendship. At least I knew that he knew me. So a few years later I did the article in the Times and he wrote me. As soon as we got to Rome, I called him, and we got together for dinner. We had two or three dinners and lunches. We got together at the seaport with him one night and with Roberto Rossellini’s brother. He had all of his friends, and Maggie and me, down at the seaport. The light wasn’t exactly right in the restaurant, and Fellini moved us around to get the lighting on us better, and I said, “Federico, tell the sun to go down!” And he said, “Go down!” and the lights dimmed.

We spent an entire week together. We talked about films, music, and literature. On our last day we had lunch, and Fellini took me back to my hotel and we stood outside the hotel and he grabbed me and hugged me and kissed me and yelled at the heavens, “My twin! My twin!” And I wept, I was so happy.

WELLER: Did you see him many times after that?

BRADBURY: Yes, several times.

WELLER: He died in 1993. How did you find out?

BRADBURY: It was terrible, terrible. It was Halloween morning. I was sitting by the television and the flash came on. So I went around the house and threw out all the pumpkins and took down all the decorations. All of a sudden Halloween was too real.

WELLER: In recent years, you’ve lost a lot of friends, as well as your wife and brother. How have you handled this?

BRADBURY: The same way I handle all my problems—I get my work done. My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I’m so old. Almost all my friends have died, and I don’t have enough guts to take their names out of the book. So I’ve never buried them.

WELLER: How do you want to be remembered?

BRADBURY: The thing that makes me happy is that I know that on Mars, two hundred years from now, my books are going to be read. They’ll be up on dead Mars with no atmosphere. And late at night, with a flashlight, some little boy is going to peek under the covers and read The Martian Chronicles on Mars.

WELLER: When your wife passed away in 2003, you purchased a plot next to her at Westwood Memorial Park. Your gravestone is there, and you went in the summer of 2009 and stood over your own grave. How did that make you feel?

BRADBURY: I’d much rather be buried on Mars. Put my ashes in a tomato soup can, because that’s all I ate when I was a child. Bury me on the red planet. Place a tombstone there with my name and a listing of my most well-known books, Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. And at the top of the tombstone I’d like there to be a little hole and underneath that it should read, “Place only dandelions here.”

chapter five
HIS OWN WORK

JONATHAN R. ELLER, PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND CO-FOUNDER OF the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana University School of Liberal Arts, calculates that Ray Bradbury has published some 144 books and counting. This sizeable number includes fiction, nonfiction, books of poetry and essays, published film scripts, plays, children’s books, and graphic novels, as well as specialty, limited-edition works and educational titles. Like the title of his in-the-works collection of short stories, Ray Bradbury is a “Juggernaut.”

Ever since he began writing stories on a toy-dial typewriter at the age of twelve (a Christmas gift from his parents in 1932), Bradbury has been wildly prolific. And while he has illuminated the origins of such classics as Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, much less is known about the influences behind a good many of his nearly 600 published short stories. Equally fascinating are the “making-of” stories behind the tales themselves.

WELLER: People always want to know, of all of your books, do you have a favorite?

BRADBURY: Those are my children, you see. It’s like picking a favorite among my daughters. I wouldn’t do that. Or my grandchildren. The others are going to hate me if I do that. So my stories have lives, and if I pick a favorite the others are going to hate me.

WELLER: Your wife once told me that you do have a favorite book, that you just won’t admit it, and it’s Dandelion Wine. How do you respond to this?

BRADBURY: Oh, I suppose that’s true. All my books are special to me in different ways, but Dandelion Wine is really a tribute to my grandfather, who I loved so much. That book is very personal. So much of it is my life, you see. So I suppose it could be my favorite.

WELLER: You also told me once several years back that you do have a favorite short story, “The Toynbee Convector.” Is this still true?

BRADBURY: It certainly is one of my favorites. The old man who builds the fake time machine and fools everyone into believing that he has seen the future and that we must do something to save ourselves is me.

WELLER: I know you love the story, “Colonel Stonesteel’s Genuine Homemade Truly Egyptian Mummy.” What are the origins of that story?

BRADBURY: The story represents the relationship between the two halves of myself. There’s the old man and the boy in me, and they talk to each other. I’ve done that many times. It occurs in Farewell Summer, the conversations between the old colonel from the Civil War and the boy. So in “Colonel Stonesteel,” the little boy is suffering from boredom. The old man wants to stop the young boy from being bored, and the next thing you know, he’s making that mummy for the boy. Then, when it’s finished, they put it out in the field to be discovered. And then the townspeople discover this mummy in the field, and it’s impossible! Suddenly, my God, they’re famous! People come from all over the world to see this mummy.

And so, finally, when the story gets to be too much trouble, the Colonel gives the mummy to the boy and says, “Put it away, there may be a day in your life when you need this mummy again.” The little boy says, “Colonel, I have a feeling I’ll never need the mummy,” and then he talks about being a writer. And he’ll write his stories, and he won’t need the mummy ever again. I love that story. It makes me cry because it’s my younger self talking to my older self. And I have my mummy put away and I’ve never had to bring it out. I have my stories. It’s a great idea. That’s where ideas come from.

WELLER: Your story “Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby is a Friend of Mine,” from the collection I Sing the Body Electric, similarly examines the relationship between old and young.

BRADBURY: Same idea there. Again, it’s the old man talking to the boy, encouraging him to be a writer. That story was my tribute to Charles Dickens. A Tale of Two Cities is one of the greatest novels of all time. It’s pure poetry. It starts with poetry and ends with it. When I read that, Dickens became the center of my life and caused me to write my own prose poetry.

WELLER: In “The Kilimanjaro Device,” also from I Sing the Body Electric, you wrote about another of your favorite writers, Ernest Hemingway. What’s the story behind the story?

BRADBURY: When Hemingway killed himself, it was so terrible. It was such a shock. I didn’t know what to do with my sadness. A few months later I saw an article in the Wall Street Journal, I believe, about a reporter who encountered Papa on the road before he killed himself. The reporter saw Hemingway and recognized him and thought, “Papa, stay off the road, I don’t want you to get hurt.” This article gave me the idea of how I could save Hemingway. So I went down in my basement and wrote that story. After it was published, I received letters from all over the world from people saying, “Thanks for getting Papa off the road.”

WELLER: Another one of your very famous stories is “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit.” What can you tell me about the origins of that tale?

BRADBURY: In the early to mid-1940s, my friend Grant Beach’s mother owned a tenement building at Figueroa and Temple streets in downtown LA. It’s a shame the building is gone today. I lived in and out of that tenement in my twenties, and I got to know a lot of the people there, and I wrote several stories about them. The women on the porches after a big party, like Cinco de Mayo, threw their dresses off the tenement to other women down below. So the dresses the women used during Cinco de Mayo became the clothing the young women who owned no dresses used the rest of the year. That’s where I got the idea for “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit,” from the women throwing away their dresses.

WELLER: Wasn’t the short story “En La Noche,” from the collection The Golden Apples of the Sun, born of your experiences at the tenement as well?

BRADBURY: Yes. And that story is completely true. Mrs. Martinez was grieving that her son Joe went off to war. I knew the family very well. And when he came back from training camp, I helped put on a party for him up in the tenement, and Mrs. Martinez made food for everyone. Everyone in the entire tenement gathered in her apartment and ate enchiladas and what have you. And I led a conga parade through the tenement, up to the third floor and back down. I was the head of the conga line. There were twenty people behind me, and my friend Grant Beach was at the far end of the line. We celebrated Joe before he went off to war.

When he finally marched off to war, his mother started sobbing and moaning and saying, “Ohhhhh, Joe. Ohhhhh, Joe. My poor Joe.” I heard her saying this over and over. Everyone could hear her cries. And two men in the tenement, Villanazul and Gomez, were standing on the porch out front of the building, and they said, “How can we possibly make her shut up about her son Joe who has gone off to war?” And I said to Villanazul, “Why don’t you go up and scratch on her door? You know what to do.” And he said, “Yes, I’ll try.” So he went up and scratched on her door, and it worked. I wrote the story then. It’s a true story. That tenement gave me a lot.

WELLER: Didn’t the short story “I See You Never” also come from your experiences of your time down at Figueroa and Temple in Los Angeles?

BRADBURY: Grant Beach lived with his mother in the house next door to the tenement. One day, I was at their house, sitting at the luncheon table having an egg sandwich, and there was a knock at the door. When Mrs. Beach opened the door, this man leaned in and said, “Mrs. Beach, I have to go back to Mexico.” And Mrs. Beach looked at him. He was one of the renters at the tenement building she owned. There was a sheriff there that came to pick him up because he was an illegal. The sheriff was going to bring him to the border and then send him back to Mexico. Finally he said, “Mrs. Beach, I see you never.” I couldn’t believe it. I wrote those words down, and I wrote the story later that same day.

Several years went by, and I sent that story out and nobody wanted it. Then, one day in 1947, I got a letter from The New Yorker, from E.B. White’s wife, who was the editor, and she wrote me and said, “Dear Mr. Bradbury, I’ve read your short stories recently in several magazines, do you have anything you can send to The New Yorker?” I wrote back, I said, “I’m not sure this story will fit your magazine,” but I sent it to her anyway. She wrote back the next week saying they had accepted the story and would pay me three hundred dollars. It was my first sale to The New Yorker, and I never made another one. Thirty years went by, and they rejected hundreds of my stories.

WELLER: What is the story behind “The Drummer Boy of Shiloh”?

BRADBURY: I read an obituary in the newspaper about a bit player, an actor in film, who died, oh God, many years ago, and it said his great-grandfather was the drummer boy at Shiloh. And I said, Oh my God, the sound of that is so beautiful. That’s the way I react to something as stirring as that. So I went to my typewriter and typed out “The Drummer Boy of Shiloh,” and three hours later the short story was finished. I love that story.

WELLER: Did you have to do any research of Civil War history?

BRADBURY: I went and looked up the battle of Shiloh to find out what season it occurred and whether there where peach blossoms there, because I had them falling on the drum.

WELLER: When I give talks at middle schools and high schools about you, the one story I am asked about more than any other is “All Summer in a Day.” What can you tell me about the origins of that story?

BRADBURY: Everyone loves it because it shows you how mean children are. All children are mean, and they love to read about themselves. Secretly, they love to lock the character Margot in the closet and let her out when it’s all over. When I lecture to students, I tell them, “I know the secret to this story, you are all mean little kids.” When we did that story on TV for PBS, the director had to provide an additional ending. You can’t end a TV program with something that negative. So in the program, all of the kids felt guilty about what they had done, and in the hour or two when there is sunlight, flowers appeared all over the planet, and the kids went out and collected the flowers and brought them to the girl and asked for her forgiveness.

WELLER: How about “Downwind from Gettysburg”?

BRADBURY: I was meeting with Walt Disney, and he took me to see the robotic Abraham Lincoln they were building for Disneyland. I looked at the robot, and I said to Disney, “What if someone rides into Disneyland and shoots Lincoln?” He said, “Why don’t you write that?” So I went home and wrote the story. Disney told me to do it. It appeared in Playboy.

WELLER: The story “Powerhouse” was an O. Henry Award finalist in 1948. It’s a very subtle, existential story about one woman’s realization of her place in the universe while she is in an old electrical power station. Where did you get the idea for it?

BRADBURY: I lived next door to an old powerhouse when I was in Venice in the early 1940s. I used to go out at night and just stand there, listening to the machinery. It was very simple. The hum of all that tremendous equipment was a religious hum to me. And that hum said things to me and stirred up my soul. So I went and wrote the short story, all because that old powerhouse hummed at me.

WELLER: One of the most popular stories in The Martian Chronicles is “There Will Come Soft Rains,” about the mechanized house going through its automations after the atomic bomb has been dropped. There are no people in that story. Where did you get the idea for that?

BRADBURY: I picked up the newspaper after Hiroshima was bombed, and they had a photograph of a house with the shadows of the people who lived there burned into the side from the intensity of the bomb. The Japanese people were gone, but their shadows remained. It affected me so much, I wrote the story.

WELLER: I’m curious about the origins of another apocalyptic tale, “The Last Night of the World,” which appears in The Illustrated Man. You must have been quite bothered by the devastation of World War II and the escalation of the Cold War.

BRADBURY: I went to bed one night, not long after marrying Maggie, and thought, “What if we never wake up?” The US government was experimenting with bombs at Eniwetok, part of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. I wondered if these bombs would mean the human race would be dead forever. So I had to write that story.

WELLER: What do you recall about writing “And the Moon Be Still as Bright”?

BRADBURY: Maggie gave me a lot of these ideas by quoting poetry to me. We were walking down the street one night—we went to a movie in Hollywood—and all of a sudden she started reciting the poem, “So We’ll Go No More A-Roving.” I said, “That’s a lovely poem, what is that?” She said, “Have you ever read it? It’s by Lord Byron.” So I went and read it. Oh my God! It’s a great poem. So I wrote a story around it. It was wrapped around that poem because Maggie recited it to me that night.

WELLER: Where did you get the idea that became “The Parrot Who Met Papa”?

BRADBURY: Sid Stebel has been my friend forever. And Russ Burton was a good friend. He worked for Time-Life. One day in 1952, Sid called me and said, “Ernest Hemingway has a new novel called The Old Man and the Sea appearing in Life magazine tonight. There’s a printing plant over on the east side of town, and Russ and I are going to go and pick up copies of Life magazine as they come off the press. You want to come with us?” I said, “Oh God, yes, I do.” So at midnight we went over to the plant and stood by the presses and copies of The Old Man and the Sea came off and we each got one. Our hero, Hemingway!

We carried them off to a bar that was still open, and we sat and read The Old Man and the Sea, and we talked about Papa and how much we loved him. While we were there, Russ said, “I was in Cuba a couple of years ago, and I never met Papa myself, but I visited the bar where he used to go near Finca Vigía in Havana. When I was in this bar, they had a parrot there, and the bartender said to me, ‘Do you know whose parrot that is? That parrot knew Papa. And he talked to Papa.’ ” When I heard that story, I knew I had to write it. It was wonderful! So I made a note of it and brought it home and put it in my files down in the basement. That was 1952.

A decade later, Hemingway killed himself. Sometime after that I was looking through my files and I came across that note from that night we were at the bar reading The Old Man and the Sea. The note said, “The parrot who knew Papa,” and I thought, “My God! What if that parrot is still alive, and papa told him his final story?” So I sat down and wrote the short story that day. It’s a great story. I love it. So you see how stories happen? They just happen.

WELLER: How important is this notion of “What if” to your ideas? “What if” Hemingway recited his last masterwork to a talking parrot? “What if” atomic war came to earth and a mechanized house continued to operate with no people there? “What if” the last dinosaur on earth, living in the deep sea, heard the sad moan of a lighthouse foghorn and mistook it for the call of its long-lost mate? Is the “What if” question central to your ideas?

BRADBURY: You must never ask questions of yourself when writing a story. Never think about stories. Do them. All of these stories came to me, boom, like that! When I’m up late at night and watching an old movie on television, I’ll recognize a bit actor and their name will come to me and I’ll know what films they did. It all comes to me and I don’t think about it. It jumps right out of my head. So it’s either in there, or it’s not in there. Trust your subconscious to have all these springs in there. All you have to do is poke them, and they pop out.

WELLER: Stephen King once referred to your first book, Dark Carnival, as “the Dubliners of American Gothic.” One of many frightening tales in that remarkable collection is the story, “The Jar.” What can you tell me about the origins of that one?

BRADBURY: When I was fourteen, I went into an exhibit on Venice Pier that had all these fetuses in jars, including a cat, and other animals, and then little, tiny human fetuses. They got bigger and bigger and bigger, jar by jar, until there was a full grown baby at the end. There were no explanations for these things, but I sensed it. I didn’t know anything about sex or conception at that point in my life, but I had an idea. That’s the inspiration behind “The Jar.”

WELLER: I’m curious about a more recent short story, “Unterderseaboat Doktor,” from the collection Quicker than the Eye. What can you tell me about that one?

BRADBURY: One day my friend Russ Burton was talking about a psychiatrist that he knew who was a former submarine commander for Hitler. I said, “My God, a psychiatrist who was a submarine commander. How Freudian!” So I jotted down a note and later wrote the short story about this psychiatrist. I’m lying on his couch one day being analyzed, and all of a sudden he cries, “Dive! Dive!” and I roll off the couch and get under it and look up and there’s a periscope going into the ceiling. The lesson there is to be alert to what you hear from other people, as well as to what you say. That’s where stories come from.

When I was in Ireland sixty years ago working for John Huston, we’d sit around the fire late at night out at his estate and we’d get terribly drunk. I was not a hard-liquor person. I’ve always been a wine drinker and started drinking beer later in life. But John was great for all kinds of whiskies. So we’d sit around the fire and get maudlin, and John would say things like, “You know, Ray, the problem with our relationship is you don’t love me half as much as I love you.” I’d say, “Come on, John, I do so.” So one night we were sitting by the fire drinking Scotch, and John said, “You hear that, Ray, outside, just now? You hear that, out there in the wind?” I said, “What?” And he said, “Do you know what that is? Do you know? That’s a banshee, Ray. A banshee. A ghost, mourning for the dead. Tell you what, Ray, why don’t you put on my coat and go out and bring the banshee in?” I said, “No, no, John, I don’t want to do that,” and he said, “Don’t be yellow, Ray, don’t be yellow. Now get out there!”

Well, I never did go out and get the damn banshee, but I wrote the short story “Banshee” later that starred John Huston, and in the story I killed the son of a bitch! I’ve had nightmares for years since writing Moby Dick where someone bangs on my front door in the middle of the night, and I run down and open it and John Huston is standing there with a snorkel outfit on. He has a harpoon, a mask, an oxygen tank, and he says, “Okay, kid, let’s go down to the ocean and I’ll teach you how to snorkel,” and I say, “No, I don’t want to do that, John.” And he says, “Don’t be yellow, Ray, now come on!” and he takes me down and drowns me and I wake up. The point I’m trying to make is that there’s so much in our heads already that we don’t know is there. The more we test it, the more we drag it out, the more that follows. This is where I get my stories.

WELLER: As a teacher, I firmly believe that you are the perfect bridge author between young-adult books and literature. Your ideas are exciting to young readers—you write of rocket ships and new sneakers and dinosaurs—while utilizing all the techniques of great literature.

BRADBURY: All my books are children’s books. I never knew that I was writing for kids, but when I do book signings, eight-year-olds show up with The Illustrated Man or Fahrenheit, it’s quite amazing.

WELLER: Why do you think you appeal to so many young readers?

BRADBURY: I write Greek myths and Roman myths, and that makes the difference. When we are kids, we love the Greek myths. It’s all about love, and we don’t know exactly what love is. I was influenced by the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Norwegians, the Chinese, and the Swedish—the Norse Eddas. That’s why my stories are so popular with children. Because they can remember them and they don’t hurt. You can talk about death. You can talk about sex, which is a mystery, a beautiful mystery. And something stirs in them, and I don’t know if I’m stirring them, but there it is.

Another element I have recognized about my stories, and why they appeal to young readers, is that you can write sequels to many of them. You say to a kid, “Do your own version of ‘Kaleidoscope.’ If you were falling through space with your friends, what would you say? Or, if you had, an illustrated man, what tattoo would you see on his body? Or—” God, I could name a dozen other stories you can do that with. Same thing.

WELLER: What is the difference between myth and metaphor?

BRADBURY: They can be similar, but they can be different. A metaphor can be pure of history. It can be pure of all that went before. You can make a new metaphor. But a myth has a metaphor, which works on every level; it’s very complete. I never thought of that before. That’s a very good question. I’d like to explore it some more.

WELLER: Getting back to some of your short fiction, the 1945 short story “The Big Black and White Game” was one of your first publications in a slick magazine and not in the pulps. It is also a straightforward, literary narrative about racial tensions on a baseball field. At that point in your career, you were writing fantasy stories almost exclusively. Was there a conscious effort to write a literary tale stripped of the fantastic elements to break into a more respected magazine?

BRADBURY: No. It just happened because I had witnessed that baseball game when I was a boy. That story is, oh, probably eighty-percent true. You see, I never know anything about anything. All my stories are written because they have to be written. You must never interfere with the gut.

WELLER: In 1950 you wrote the 25,000-word novella, “The Fireman.” Three years later you added 25,000 more words to the story, turning it into your classic novel Fahrenheit 451. I would imagine you had to consult the original story in order to turn it into the novel. How did you do this if you don’t like to intellectualize while writing?

BRADBURY: I just asked the characters to talk to me some more. I had the fire chief talk more. I had Faber talk more. So I just listened to them.

WELLER: How closely did you work from the original novella in reworking it into Fahrenheit 451?

BRADBURY: I tried not to look too much. When you write a play, don’t look too much at the original. Write it first, then see what you’ve left out. That’s what I did when I wrote Fahrenheit. I’ve never gone back to read the original to see how much I changed.

WELLER: Much of the text is different, including the classic opening line at the beginning of the novel, “It was a pleasure burn.”

BRADBURY: Yes. That was new. Again, I let Montag speak and I listened. Later, when I wrote the play, the fire chief came to me and said, “Would you like to know why I’m a fireman?” That’s not in the book. And he gave me an explanation. He was a romantic. An idealist. At a certain time in his life, too many people died. There was cancer with his mother, suicide with his father, and when he opened his books, they were empty. They couldn’t help him. So he turned on the books. I wish now I could add this to my novel, but I don’t want to mess around with the original.

WELLER: But again, you edited and in some cases rewrote stories when you published The October Country in 1955, and that book was a repackaging of your first collection, Dark Carnival. Why was it okay then, as you put it, to “mess around with the original”?

BRADBURY: I’ve never done that to a published novel. I’ve reworked short stories that were first published in Weird Tales. I was also very young when I wrote them, so I had to go back and take out the clumsy things.

WELLER: Upon publication, Fahrenheit 451 was hailed as a visionary work of social commentary.

BRADBURY: You have to be very careful. If you write about certain subjects, you have to realize that no one is going to pay attention. All social subjects, all political subjects, they go out of style and they are gone. Fahrenheit 451 has social commentary in it, but it’s hidden in an adventure story. It’s a James Bond adventure. It has science-fictional tricks to keep your interest. The mechanical dog is a science-fictional device. There’s flesh all around the social concepts in the book. From the very start of the novel, everything is fantastic, everything is futuristic—and so you read because you are fascinated. How does a fire department work in the future? Especially since it starts fires. Well, that’s just a great idea.

So you read that and along with that you get the message, you shouldn’t be burning books. Except, I don’t argue about that. I argue the reverse, which keeps your interest. Let’s burn books. Why? And then Captain Beatty tells you. They are dangerous. They get you to thinking and that makes you unhappy. There’s no room for diversity because as soon as you become diverse, you begin to argue with people. And then you go to bed very unhappy. So everything in Fahrenheit 451 is presented in the reverse, and you have fun with it and I keep provoking you. Faber gives you some ideas and the captain gives you ideas about the fact that they don’t really have to burn books at all because the education system got provoked by all the minorities, like we’re going through today. You can’t read Huckleberry Finn because of Nigger Jim. Everyone is offended by something. You have to treat the Jews a certain way. Don’t offend the Catholics. Don’t offend the gays.

WELLER: How much of the fictional totalitarian system in Fahrenheit 451 was based on Nazi Germany? After all, you wrote the book just eight years after the conclusion of World War II.

BRADBURY: All during the mid-Thirties, they had newsreel footage in movie theaters. I remember seeing newsreel footage of the Nazis burning books in the streets. And Russia was just as bad. And then along came McCarthy, and he handled things very badly. He came to Hollywood and looked for Communists because it was easy to stigmatize them. But people don’t talk about Russia, even though they killed millions of people. All of that is in my book.

WELLER: What do you make of Fahrenheit 451 landing on banned-books lists? Isn’t that ridiculously ironic?

BRADBURY: It was nothing important. It was a schoolteacher here, a school board member there. It all blew over in one or two days. It wasn’t censorship.

WELLER: How did you get to the UCLA library every day for those now-storied nine days in which you wrote Fahrenheit 451? It was a mile or two away from the home you were living in on Clarkson Road.

BRADBURY: On the bus. One day when I was working on Fahrenheit, I went out to get on the bus and there was this young man sitting on the bench with me. I was twenty-nine years old, and he was about twenty-two, carrying a lot of books, and the bus was late in coming. I looked at his books—they were all science books. We got to talking. I said, “Taking all these subjects?” “Yeah,” he said. “Do you belong to the science fiction club up at UCLA?” He said, “Yeah, I do.” I said, “Who are your favorite writers?” He said, “Well, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein …” I kept waiting, and then he said, “Bradbury,” and I said, “Ohhhh! Do you like Bradbury?” “Yeah, very much.” “Would you like to meet him?” He said, “Oh, yeah, I’d love that.” I said, “He’s right here.” He went into shock, okay.

So we sat there and the bus came. We got on, and I sat with him and asked where he was from. He said, “I’m from Cuba.” I said, “Oh. Where about in Cuba? Havana?” “Yeah.” “Any special place near Havana?” “Well, yeah. Pica de Via.” I said, “What’s your last name?” He said, “Hemingway.” It was Hemingway’s son! It turned out he lived a couple of blocks from me. I invited him over to the house the next night with his wife and baby.

chapter six
FAITH

LATELY, AS AN OCTOGENARIAN WIDOWER, RAY BRADBURY HAS BEEN spending many of his days sitting alone in a small, shady room in the back of his West Los Angeles home. There, he is surrounded by shelves of books and mountains of papers, letters, story starts, play starts, and manuscripts in various stages of revision, along with copious stacks of fan mail that he spends time answering each day. There is also a large flat-screen television in one corner of the room. For those familiar with Fahrenheit 451, the irony of this is duly noted. Ray’s response: “I’m not against all television, I’m just against bad television!”

Ray sits in an oversized, comfy brown leather chair and goes about his daily writing. In front of him is a TV tray shelving his telephone and an assortment of prescription medications, a necessity of his advancing age. There is a door in the room that leads outside to a back patio. Ray often leaves this door open to let the sunlight and Pacific air pour in. There is just a slight hint of oceanic salt swirling about, along with the stronger scent of hibiscus and rose blossoms that bloom year-round in the small backyard. This garden was the pride of Ray’s beloved wife of 56 years, Marguerite, who passed away on November 24, 2003.

For the last year, Ray has had a visitor come through the doorway, a courageous little black bird that, at first, only stared into the darkened chamber from a safe distance out on the patio. The bird moved in manic hops, each day venturing closer to the doorway, staring in at the elderly man sitting in the cool, shadowy room. When Ray first noticed the avian visitor, he was delighted. He would break up a saltine or a piece of bread and hold it out to the creature.

“Come in! Come in!” he coaxed.

One day the curious bird crossed the threshold and hopped into the room. Ray tossed the morsel to the floor, and, in one quick instant, the bird skittered to it, snatched it up in its beak, and then, in a terrific explosion of movement and color, the bird fluttered its wings, exposing a brilliant underside of blue. Then the creature flew out the door and was gone.

Ray was delighted. Each day after that, the bird came into the house and Ray fed it. And when the bird’s wings exploded in that mystic hue of blue, Ray beamed.

“God bless,” he often said, as the bird departed out the open door.

God bless. Arguably, Ray Bradbury says this phrase more than any other. He says it many times throughout any given day. Often when he is concluding a telephone conversation he says it. When an excited fan recognizes him on the street and rushes up to say something along the lines of, “Your books changed my life,” he says it.

God bless.

In 1954, he said it, and the film director John Huston overheard him. Bradbury was working for Huston as the screenwriter on Moby Dick. Huston had obviously heard his thirty-three-year-old screenwriter issue his standard blessing before.

“God bless!”

“Ray,” said Huston, at last. “You’re always going around saying ‘God bless’ to everyone. Just who do you think you are, the pope?”

To be sure, Ray Bradbury never aspired to a pontifical plateau. But it does beg the question: Just who is Bradbury’s God?

WELLER: Religion and spirituality have been central to many of your stories. What are your beliefs?

BRADBURY: I’m a delicatessen religionist. In other words, I’ve been using this in my lectures recently when people say, “Do you believe in Darwin and his theory of the descended man?” I say, “Yes, I believe in Darwin.” “Do you believe in Lamarck and his theories of the will and genetics?” “Yes, I believe in Lamarck.” “Do you believe in Genesis and the Old Testament and the creation of the world?” “Yes, I believe in that.” “Well, how can you believe in Darwin, Lamarck, and Genesis?” I say, “Because nothing is proven.” None of it. So therefore why not have a delicatessen in your head? I’ll take some of these ideas, some of those and some of that.

WELLER: Do you believe in the afterlife?

BRADBURY: The soul is a metaphorical concept. The life energies that make you and me work is a life energy built into the protoplasm, but when you look at the fertilized egg in the woman’s uterus, it’s a little, tiny mass of plasma. There’s nothing there. And then, something tells it to create an eye, another eye, ears, a body, this little thing forms, it’s living in water and feeds off the mother’s umbilical cord, and suddenly this child appears which was nothing but a sperm and an egg. It’s all very miraculous. Where in the cell is the energy that tells the cell to do all that? It’s too mysterious. We just don’t know. So you’ve got to give up asking and think about the future.

WELLER: Does this “miracle” hint at some sort of higher power?

BRADBURY: Of course, of course, but we speak of the higher power in anthropomorphic terms. You can’t do that. There is no anthropomorphic God. The universe is the power. The whole universe and you and me in it are part of the energy framework. But we shouldn’t ask questions. We just exist.

WELLER: If we are not to anthropomorphize our spirituality, then who was Jesus Christ in your mind? Just an everyday man?

BRADBURY: No, he was a remarkable person, and we’re all remarkable in some way, but he was super-remarkable. Jesus was a man with a vision about personal responsibility and forgiveness. And other people spoke similar things: Confucius, Buddha, and the people that followed. But they were all preaching much the same thing.

WELLER: And so what about the miraculous aspects of Christ—the rising from the grave—is that just a myth? A metaphor?

BRADBURY: It doesn’t matter what you call it, if it works, it’s good. You can put any name on it you want. Metaphor. Myth. But we must live by these messages. We have to form images in order to survive. We have to remember portions of our lives as metaphors. The metaphor of childhood. The first time you see something that is dead and you wonder about it, you are about three years old, maybe you see a dead bird or a dead dog or whatever, and the mystery is there. And it’s hard for you to think about, so you make a metaphor. And then you move into the time when you are thirteen or fourteen and you discover sex and passion and love and all these things. We must conceptualize these feelings or we can’t think about them. That’s why people write love poetry and war poetry. It’s why people write novels. To try and figure ourselves out.

WELLER: Christ appears quite often in your work, in stories such as 1951’s “The Man,” about Christ on other worlds, all the way up to more recent writings like “The Dog in the Red Bandanna,” about Christ in the animal kingdom. Why do you suppose you return to the concept of Christ so often in your fiction?

BRADBURY: Christ is both philosophical and literary. The story is a good one. We need a literary symbol to concentrate on. The fact is very simple: You are Christ. I am Christ. We are God, all of us. The mystery of where man came from, we don’t know. You know, Darwin never talked about the creation of man. He talked about the apes turning into man, but where did the apes come from, then? Where did the dinosaurs come from? Darwin never answered that. I like Darwin, but I’m more interested in the beginning of the world.

WELLER: Do you believe in the concept of the Devil?

BRADBURY: No. I think that we are a fusion of God and the Devil. Half of us is God and the Devil’s over here. For example, von Braun’s V-2 rocket destroyed London and his other half took us to the moon. He did all that. He was terrible and incredible.

WELLER: So what is your dark half?

BRADBURY: You’ve seen my books, you can tell right there. I’m Jim Nightshade. I’m Mr. Dark.

WELLER: How so? Everybody knows you as such a positive, loving, encouraging, inspirational figure. What is the darker side to your persona that people don’t know?

BRADBURY: It’s all in Dark Carnival, it’s all in Something Wicked. There it is. Completely. I get the dark side out in my stories.

WELLER: Do you go to church?

BRADBURY: No. When I was growing up in Waukegan, Illinois, my parents took us to the First Baptist Church. My parents were very casual about religion. My dad never went to church, maybe once a year for Easter or Christmas. My mother went more often. I went to Baptist Sunday school, which was mainly a bore, and later, when I was thirteen, I had a wonderful Baptist Sunday-morning teacher who had kids over to his house for parties.

WELLER: But you have told me that after you moved with your family to Los Angeles in April 1934, when you were a teenager, you had a period of religious and spiritual inquiry. Can you talk a little bit about that?

BRADBURY: I investigated every religion in Los Angeles when I was between the ages of fourteen and twenty-three. I was curious about all the religions, the Catholic Church, the Jewish faith, Buddhism, and many of the occult religions. I began to wander around downtown LA, and the biggest synagogue in LA was at Wilshire and Temple near the old Ambassador Hotel. One Friday night I noticed there was a service going on in there and I was curious. So I edged in through the door. I was very shy. A nice old gentleman saw me there and knew that I was a stranger and probably a gentile, and he said, “Would you like to come in, young man?” I don’t think I said anything, but I nodded, so he took me in and put me in a pew toward the back. I watched the ceremony that evening, and I was the last one to leave.

After that, later on in my teens, I began to investigate all kinds of other churches. I went to the old Agabeg Temple on Wilshire with a woman named the Reverend Violet Greener, and she wore makeup to fit that—violet and green-colored cheeks. She was an occult predictor, and she would put you in touch with the dead. I saw all these old people there—widows and widowers, trying to get in touch with their dead sons or daughters or their dead husbands or wives. I just sat there and watched and said nothing. I wasn’t judgmental. I watched.

I became a saved Christian when Aimee Semple McPherson blessed me and saved my soul down at her temple when I was nineteen. My friends dared me to get up on the stage with her and have my soul saved by God. So I got up and ran up onstage, knelt down, and she put her hand on my head and said, “Lord, Lord God, take care of this good son.” So I was saved by Aimee Semple McPherson, and then I ran back down to tell my smart-ass friends. It’s interesting, how many people do you know that have investigated every religion? I was curious. That’s the element I was born with.

WELLER: What conclusions did you come to in your studies of these various faiths?

BRADBURY: Just that they’re all necessary. What a shame that we can’t all relax and accept the fact that when it comes to God, none of us know anything. The great mystery remains. We haven’t the faintest idea how life on Earth got here. But we all celebrate the mystery one way or another, in our own way, through our own belief, and the fantastic joy and delight of knowing we’re alive for one time only and we’re not coming back, so you better damn well celebrate.

WELLER: So, as you say, “We’re alive one time only and we’re not coming back.” Does that mean you don’t believe in the afterlife?

BRADBURY: The echo of what you are lives after you; that’s the afterlife. And your children are your afterlife. I’m all over the place. I have eight representatives of myself as grandchildren and four daughters. How much more afterlife do I need?

WELLER: Do you think there’s a tangible place we go to after we die?

BRADBURY: We don’t know. We would all dearly love to have a Heaven in which our children, good friends, wives, and husbands would be with us. But we don’t know. And we promise ourselves impossible things, which is understandable. In the meantime, get your work done.

WELLER: Do you pray?

BRADBURY: I don’t believe in prayer unless it’s you talking to yourself, and you say to yourself, “What do I love?” and then you give instructions to yourself to go do it. If that’s a prayer, I believe in it. I wrote a poem called “Joy is the Grace We Say to God.” If we’re joyful creatures, we’re proving out what God wants us to do. So when you are joyful about the work that you do, you have already prayed.

WELLER: So you’ve never prayed in the traditional sense? Even when you were a child and going to church?

BRADBURY: The only time prayer works is when someone’s sick and they know they have friends that are praying for them. If they actually know it, then that helps.

WELLER: You are the world’s best-known science fiction writer. You must have a theory as to how the universe was formed.

BRADBURY: I’ve written programs for planetariums, which celebrate the universe. The whole thing is so totally mysterious. And in my lectures recently I’ve said, “God’s in trouble with the Smithsonian.” I wrote a planetarium show for the Smithsonian because they were boring the hell out of people. You went into the planetarium and you could hear people snoring all over the place. So they said, “What are we doing wrong?” I said, “My God, you’re teaching instead of preaching. Let me preach for you. And you’re boring everyone with the details. If you put on a good show in the planetarium—the wonder of the universe—they’ll buy the book on the way out or they’ll go to the library. For Christ’s sake, stop pushing. Let me do a thing called ‘The Great Shout of the Universe,’ the great beauty of the universe.”

So I went to work for them. I sent them a thirty-two-page script and they sent back twenty-eight pages of criticism. I called them on the phone and said, “What’s wrong with you? You got a problem? You want to go back to boring people?” “Well,” they said, “your script is filled with scientific inaccuracies.” I said, “What’s the one thing in my script that bothers you the most?” And they said, “Well, you got a big thing about the Big Bang, you know.” I said, “Well, what did I say?” And they said, “Well, you said the Big Bang occurred ten billion years ago.” And I said, “Well, when did it?” They said, “Twelve billion years ago.” And I said, “Prove it.” Well, that ruined the marriage right there.

WELLER: What ultimately happened to your script?

BRADBURY: After a couple more weeks, I called them on the phone. I said, “Look, this is a bad marriage. It’s not going anywhere. And how much do you owe me right now?” They said, “Fifteen thousand dollars.” I said, “Okay, give me seven thousand dollars, let me go.” So I quit the Smithsonian and brought it out to the Space Museum here in Los Angeles. I got James Whitmore to read my narration accompanied by a full symphony orchestra. It’s been there for fifteen years. It’s wonderful. It’s all about the glory of being alive at all.

We have no way of knowing anything about the genesis of life on Earth. They do shows on TV every once in a while and they say, “How did life come on the Earth? The seas were formed, there’s no life and then lightning struck and suddenly matter decided to come alive.” I say, “Yeah, but how? How come?” They don’t know. They say, “Well, it just did.” I said, “That’s not very scientific, is it? ‘It just did.’ ” I said, “My theory is just as good as the Big Bang. My theory is this—the universe has always existed. There never was a beginning. Now that’s impossible, but the Big Bang is impossible too, see? And life is impossible. So therefore I like my theory because the universe goes on for billions of light-years in any direction you want to go in. There’s no end. Every time we develop a new telescope, the universe gets bigger. So why not relax? Take a look at the past and plan for the future.” So I’ve been planning for the future all my life and I’ve loved it. I’ve had a great time.

WELLER: You also worked on the script for the 1961 film about Christ, King of Kings. You wrote the narration. This certainly shows your grasp of the Bible. Tell me how that project came about, and why on Earth are you not given screen credit for your work on the script?

BRADBURY: The producer had me in for a meeting and said, “You’re a Christian, aren’t you?” I said, “Yes, I was raised in a Baptist church.” “Do you know the Bible fairly well?” “Yes,” I told him. “Well,” he said, “the man who is directing King of Kings wants to have a meeting with you. He’s the guy who directed Rebel Without a Cause, Nicholas Ray.” So I had lunch with Nicholas Ray, and he says, “We’re in the last days of making the film, but we need a narration. Will you write a narration for us?” I said, “I certainly will, because I love the Bible.” And he said, “We need an ending for the film, we don’t know what the ending should be.” I said, “Have you tried the Bible?” And he said, “Well, you provide an ending for the film.”

So I wrote an ending for the film, which they didn’t use. It was too expensive. They cut the hell out of the ending, but they used my complete narration. And the scene that I wrote between Barabbas and Judas Iscariot, that’s the scene that ends before the intermission. That’s the scene I wrote. The rest of the script is written by Nicholas Ray’s screenwriter. When the film came out, the author of the screenplay didn’t want to have my name on the film, because he was jealous of my doing the narration. And Orson Welles didn’t get a credit because he wanted an extra twenty-five thousand dollars to have his name on the film and they wouldn’t give it to him. So they didn’t use his name, and neither credit appeared.

But I’m very proud of the film and what I did when I listen to the narration. And I got to know the film composer Miklós Rózsa, and Margaret Gould, the film editor. We became very close friends, and they taught me more about film than anyone else. The great thing for me was to watch Miklós Rózsa conducting the orchestra. He did the score for the film—and to hear my narration coming out over the orchestra with my voice! I wish I had a tape of that. They had me in to do a reading for the orchestra and then they added Orson Welles. But I wish I had a tape of my own voice doing that.

WELLER: What is it that you love about the Bible?

BRADBURY: It’s well written. The Book of John is my favorite, of course. I took a lot from the Book of John when I wrote the narration. I really got back into the Bible because of Moby-Dick. It’s full of Biblical quotations and influences.

WELLER: What do you make of the way other faiths have addressed the creation of the universe? The ancient Greeks, the ancient Egyptians, for example?

BRADBURY: I didn’t know until a few years ago, when I saw a television program on ancient Egypt, that the universe was created by Ra when he ejaculated. The universe was created by his ejaculation. There are statues of Ra in museums all over the world, but we haven’t seen them because people are embarrassed because he is masturbating and creating the universe. But you know something? I like that better than the Big Bang theory. They’ve hidden these images because they are embarrassed. They don’t want to show him with an erection. But the erection is the center of our life—all of our lives.

WELLER: You have long associated the space race with religion and faith. What is the connection?

BRADBURY: Exploring space is our effort to become immortal. If we stay here on Earth, human beings are doomed, because someday the sun will either explode or go out. By going out into space, first back to the moon, then to Mars, and then beyond, man will live forever.

chapter seven
ART AND LITERATURE

LOS ANGELES: THE SANTA ANA WINDS BLOW DRY AND HOT. BRADBURY sits in the front seat of a town car, headed south on the 405 Freeway. As the automobile approaches an overpass, Bradbury looks out through the windshield at the roadway above. Painted along the side is a mural of graffiti art—a swirling black tag of graceful letters, illegible at sixty miles per hour—surrounded by a splash of vibrant spray-painted color.

“That’s wonderful!” Bradbury remarks, just catching a glimpse of the illegal artwork before the car passes beneath it. “I wonder how those artists hang from the overpasses to do that?”

A few days later, Bradbury sat down to write the short story “Olé, Orozco! Siqueiros, Sí!,” a tale about a Los Angeles graffiti artist who dies while hanging from an overpass. The story would go on to be published in the collection The Cat’s Pajamas.

This is how Bradbury works. Art and literature of all kinds influence him. From graffiti to comic strips, fine art, film scores, architecture, literature, and more. No surprise, then, that he has strong opinions on the subject of art and books.

WELLER: You’re passionate about so many different forms of art—from film to fiction, painting to poetry. Is there one art form that you find most moving?

BRADBURY: No. All the art forms are great. You can’t pick one form. Anything that gives you rebirth and makes you want to get out of bed in the morning. Then you’ve got a great art form.

WELLER: You are a film fanatic and a tremendous bibliophile. What do you see as the differences between these two mediums of storytelling?

BRADBURY: David Brown was a producer at Twentieth Century Fox, and he married Helen Gurley Brown, the Cosmopolitan editor. He did a film a few years ago based on Angela’s Ashes, the Irish autobiography. Beautiful film, beautiful book. But you can read a book that’s negative in its aspects—a complete description of Dublin, and the weather and poverty—and not have it kill you because you can pause and close the book. It’s different because when you read it, you’re creating it in your own theater inside your head. But a film is total realism. You can’t change it, it’s right there, there’s nothing you can do about it.

You can change a book in your mind. Every book is like Japanese flowers that go into your head and sink down through the water inside your head and then open out. The difference between books and film is that books are unreality. They open up inside the head. They become yours. They’re more personal. Films are immediate and insistent. They’re like a bully. They bully you with their brilliance, and you can’t turn away from them. Later you may, in remembrance, change them, but it can’t compare to the immediate thing that the book has where the reader fantasizes in the head. After all, it’s only print, it doesn’t mean anything.

You have to learn at a certain age how to read those symbols and turn them into paper flowers that open in the mind. A film makes you think you know everything—you don’t. You can’t escape film. So the long way around to my point, David Brown made this film on Ireland which is beautiful. It’s all about the poverty, and the rain, and the deaths, and when you’re done with the film, you want to kill yourself. I’ll never look at it again. I wrote to him and said, “It’s a beautiful film. I’m glad you made it, but I never want to see it again.”

WELLER: In recent years, you have been quite busy with your own theatrical production company, the Pandemonium Theatre Company. You have arguably given more time to the theater in the last decade than to any other medium. Why do you love the art form of theater so much?

BRADBURY: I love movies, I love poetry, I love novels, but I love theater especially because you get to know the family—all of the actors—from the very beginning, whereas in filmmaking, it’s all fragmentary. You show up at the set, wait for an hour for them to light it, then they do a three-minute sequence, and then they break and set up another segment, another set of lights, and you spend all day waiting! So you don’t get to know people. Another reason I love theater so much is that secretly, I always wanted to be an actor. From the moment when I was three years old and saw The Hunchback of Notre Dame, I loved acting. When I was six, I saw The Phantom of the Opera and that only reinforced my desire to be an actor. In 1939, I joined a theater group run by the actress Laraine Day, and it was there that I realized I can’t remember lines. I’m a good lecturer, but I can’t act.

WELLER: I’d like to talk about some of your literary contemporaries, if you will. What are your opinions of the work of Kurt Vonnegut?

BRADBURY: His writing eludes me somehow.

WELLER: Did you know him?

BRADBURY: We had a wonderful time together in the late 1980s. Yousuf Karsh, the famous photographer, took some pictures of me the same day he photographed Vonnegut. So we had pictures taken together. My first meetings with him, years before that, were not very good. We’re such different people. He was very serious. He lived a serious life. Terrible life, growing up during the bombings of Germany. I don’t know how he survived that. Thousands of people dying all around you. But then the second time with Karsh, we had a lot of fun. He was more relaxed, and Karsh and his wife have terrific senses of humor, so we have great pictures taken laughing together.

WELLER: What are your opinions on the New Journalism of the 1960s?

BRADBURY: Some of it is very good. Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion is wonderful. And I love From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe. Truman Capote’s early work I like very much, his short stories, of course. A Christmas Memory is beautiful.

WELLER: What about In Cold Blood?

BRADBURY: I didn’t care for that. He got involved with those criminals while writing that book. I don’t believe in reality. He was kidding himself about a new style. I don’t believe he invented a new style. Capote was a clerk at Mademoiselle magazine in 1945 before he became well known, and he was helping the fiction editor, Rita Smith, look over the slush pile of short stories that came in the mail to the magazine. I sent a short story to them that Weird Tales had rejected because it wasn’t their cup of tea. They wanted a traditional ghost story. I had run my course at Weird Tales. I’d sold one story to Mademoiselle at that point, and I sent my vampire story, “Homecoming.” This story was in the slush pile Truman Capote was helping read through. He turned to Rita Smith and said, “Hey, look at this story here. You ought to buy this.” And he gave her a copy of “Homecoming.”

They held it for many months not knowing what to do with it—it was so unusual for the magazine. They finally sent me a telegram that said, “We were thinking of ways to change your story to fit the magazine, and then we decided to change the magazine to fit the story.” So they bought it, and it appeared in a special Halloween issue of Mademoiselle, beautiful. They got Charles Addams to illustrate the story, and they invited me back to New York to meet all the editors. And so, on Labor Day weekend, 1946, I went on a train to New York and the Mademoiselle people put on a big party for me—Mr. Davis, the head editor, as well as Rita Smith, who was Carson McCullers’ sister. I went to this party and Charles Addams was there, Carson McCullers and her husband—it was incredible. I was accepted into New York intellectual society at the age of twenty-six.

I had lunch with Charles Addams, and I told him how much I loved his illustrations, and we planned on doing a book together about his family and my family. We both had the same idea at the same time, but his family was spookier than mine. Mine was much more human. So we corresponded about that. We submitted ideas to various publishers together and nothing ever happened. Along the way, later that year, I bought the painting he did for “The Homecoming” in Mademoiselle from him for, God knows, around three hundred dollars, which I didn’t have, so I paid for it on time, maybe thirty dollars a month. But thank God I bought it and kept it all these years.

WELLER: And Truman Capote was responsible for the sale of that story? Did you ever meet him?

BRADBURY: I saw Capote. I had the chance to thank him. At the Hotel Bel-Air one day about twenty-five years ago, while visiting with my agent, I looked across the pool and there was Truman Capote sitting there. I went over and introduced myself and said, “Mr. Capote, I owe you a lot of thanks.” He said, “For what?” “Well,” I said, “you were in Rita Smith’s office thirty years ago, and you got her to buy my short story,” and he remembered. So I was able to shake hands with him and thank him.

WELLER: While we are on the topic of the founders of the New Journalism movement, what are your opinions of Norman Mailer?

BRADBURY: He didn’t like life. He was a typical male. The secret of males is this: We are jealous of women. They have all the power. The essence of a woman is the power she has to attract just by being. A lot of men beat the hell out of their women because the women are too powerful. They hate that. So Norman Mailer never liked life, he didn’t like women, they were too powerful, he beat up on his wives, he stabbed one, so I didn’t like Norman Mailer because his books were full of this need for masculine power. I don’t believe in masculine power. I’m not masculine. I’m a sissy. I’m a reformed sissy, because when I met and married Maggie she helped me grow up. She helped me stop being a sissy, and in the process I became a good writer. But it’s not masculine junk.

WELLER: Did you ever meet Mailer?

BRADBURY: My good friend Sid Stebel and I met him at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel the night they had a publication party for his book about Marilyn Monroe. That was around 1973. John Huston was there because he liked Mailer. And Mailer came into the room and I ran over and said, “Mr. Mailer, my name is Ray Bradbury, and my friend and I have read your book,” and he sailed on. That was it. He escaped me. He didn’t want to know who I was. So I never had the chance to talk to him. So what the hell.

WELLER: Do you know Gore Vidal?

BRADBURY: A very nice man. When I was in New York in the early 1950s I met him, and we walked all across the city and talked about writing and books.

WELLER: Completely changing subjects, what do you think of the Harry Potter books? They were banned by some school boards across the country.

BRADBURY: I bought all of them for my grandchildren. They’re wonderful. That series is like Something Wicked This Way Comes. Listen, if they are offending some people, it’ll all blow over. I tell the teachers and the librarians when they contact me, “Look, when the people come into the library to remove a book from the shelf, when they’re gone, put it back on the shelf.” If they come back a week later, say, “Oh! What’s that book doing on the shelf? Gee, how did it get there?” If they take the book again, when they are gone, put it back. They’re going to lose eventually. We’ve never had censorship in this country. No book burnings, nothing major.

WELLER: You really believe we’ve never had censorship in the United States?

BRADBURY: Like I said, nothing major. It seems to go in cycles. If it gets bad, it eventually blows over because people get upset.

WELLER: You were an avid reader of comic strips when you were a child. Are you still a fan of the more contemporary strips?

BRADBURY: Oh, yeah. I love Mutts, that’s my favorite. The Wizard of Id, and B.C., and of course when the Peanuts were still being reprinted. Calvin and Hobbes is great.

WELLER: Were you a fan of superhero comics as a child?

BRADBURY: Not really. They didn’t appear until I was nineteen. Well, they’re boring, anyway. They’re too strong, you see. Tarzan is vulnerable. Occasionally he almost gets killed, and it takes him months to recover.

WELLER: How about the character of Batman, then? He had no powers. He’s vulnerable.

BRADBURY: That was too late. I was nineteen or twenty. They’re all too fantastic, you see. They did impossible things like flying through the air. I like Tarzan because he did something I knew about; he could climb trees, or swing on vines.

WELLER: But the Mars stories of Burroughs are impossible, and they had a huge influence on you.

BRADBURY: Well, Mars is different. John Carter is all fantasy. And I accepted that. But it wasn’t impossible fantasy—it was based in swordsmanship.

WELLER: Did you and your wife have the same literary tastes?

BRADBURY: Different. She liked Henry James more than I do. I prefer short things, short novels. And she liked to read a lot of history. She knew everything there was to know about French history, French writers, Camus and Proust. She was very fluent in the French language. When we traveled through France, they thought she was French. She read all the time. And she loved mysteries. She read everything by Agatha Christie.

WELLER: Architecture has always been very near and dear to your heart. Over the years, you have worked as a design consultant in a number of high-profile projects, including scripting the interior concepts for “Spaceship Earth” at Disney’s EPCOT Center. How did you first get involved with architecture and design?

BRADBURY: It started with the United States Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair. Two men showed up at my door in 1962, and they were from the United States government representing the World’s Fair, which was building in Flushing Meadows in New York. I asked them what they were doing at my door, and they said, “We’ve come to offer you a fifty-million-dollar building,” and I said, “Come in! Come in!” They had read my essay “The Ardent Blasphemers” from the Bantam edition of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea about Captain Nemo and Captain Ahab, the madness of both men and the inherent blasphemy of the American spirit. They read this essay of mine, and they said, “We think you are the very man to create the top floor of the United States Pavilion.”

WELLER: When did you discover your passion for architecture?

BRADBURY: When I was eight years old. I saw the covers of science fiction magazines with the fabulous paintings of the cities of the future. And then when I was thirteen years old I went to the Chicago World’s Fair and walked among the cities of the future, with all of the wonderful colors and shapes and sizes. When it came time to go home that night at the fair, I didn’t want to leave. My mother and father had to drag me out of the fair. They were taking me away from the buildings of the future. So I went home and I started to build those buildings in the backyard—very dreadful cardboard cutouts, but I began to make outlines for cities of the future when I was fourteen. And I began to write, because I discovered a remarkable and terrible thing about the Chicago World’s Fair. After two years, they were going to tear most of it down, and I thought, “How stupid,” not to leave the future up and build toward it. So, since they were going to tear down the future, I began to write about it when I was thirteen, and fourteen.

WELLER: You have done design work on shopping centers in Southern California. How did that come about?

BRADBURY: Over a period of time, living in Los Angeles, I became disillusioned with what I saw going on in Hollywood. Hollywood for many years was like Hiroshima at high noon. Downtown LA has gone to hell for quite a while. So in 1970, I wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times about what we should do with downtown LA and I made a sketch of the perfect plaza and what we should put into that plaza.

A couple of years later, Jon Jerde, who was a budding architect, came to me and we had lunch. During lunch he said to me, “Have you seen the Glendale Galleria?” I said, “Yes, I have.” “What do you think of it?” And I said, “I think it is quite wonderful.” He said, “That’s yours. That’s the article you wrote in the Los Angeles Times, and I followed your directions and I built the Glendale Galleria.” I said, “Am I allowed to say that?” And he said, “Yes, of course, why?” And I told him, “Because I want to claim that you are my bastard son!” So I joined Jon Jerde’s firm in an amateur capacity for the next year or so. We were like kids playing in a sandbox. We threw ideas up in the air like confetti and ran under them. During this time, we made plans for Horton Plaza down in San Diego, and it was the most fun I’ve ever had in my entire life.

WELLER: Do you have a favorite building or structure?

BRADBURY: The Chrysler Building in New York. It’s as beautiful as a Russian Easter egg. And to think, some people made fun of it when it was first built. It didn’t look like all the boxes in New York City. I first saw it in 1939, and I loved it. Later, my agent, Don Congdon, had an office right next to it, and he had a view right from his office window of the Chrysler Building, which was just two blocks away. It was right there, through the window, and it was magnificent.

WELLER: Any others?

BRADBURY: So many. I love the Marin Civic Center in Marin County, California. That building is a treasure. It’s surrounded by nothing and with its wonderful blue roof it’s as if a piece of porcelain sky had been ripped out of the heavens and fired in an oven and made even more blue and fantastic. So when you see this jewel lying there, this gigantic piece of blue sky lying there on the ground covering that beautiful architecture, it’s simply impossible. I also love Rockefeller Center. The way it closes in on the crowds that go there, and then you have the restaurant mall in the center, and then you have Apollo, that great golden statue, hovering over all of it—it’s a terrific combination of modern architecture planning and mythology. Outdoor plazas are so much more fun than enclosed areas. You can breathe better, the air gets to you, and, as I said somewhere in Dandelion Wine, eating a sandwich, sitting on the grass, smelling the air—the sandwich tastes better.

WELLER: What contemporary architects do you admire?

BRADBURY: Santiago Calatrava is a genius. His work is beautiful.

WELLER: Switching mediums, I know that you are a fan of film scores. Who, in your mind, are the great film composers?

BRADBURY: Bernard Herrmann, of course. And Erich Wolfgang Korngold. He did the score for Robin Hood and The Sea Hawk, and two or three other films. They did a symphonic night of his music a few years ago in Los Angeles, and I went down to hear it. His music was incredible. I wish I could have met him so I could have hugged him.

WELLER: Who are your favorite painters?

BRADBURY: The whole Wyeth family. N.C. Wyeth, the father, who illustrated children’s books, like Treasure Island. His son, Andrew Wyeth, became famous, as did N.C. Wyeth’s daughter, Henriette. All the Wyeths were inspiring to me because they inspired one another. They had a showing of Andrew Wyeth’s work at the Art Institute in Chicago once and I could hardly get in, the line was so long. It was beautiful. Goya is also marvelous. I used his work on the covers of two of my books, and nine of his illustrations were used inside a special edition of October Country. His work is mysterious and evocative.

WELLER: How about the Impressionists?

BRADBURY: When you develop a photograph in a darkroom, you put it in one emulsion and then you put it in another emulsion and the picture emerges. That’s what the great Impressionists do. They are emulsions and they bring up life the more you look at them. Renoir was one of my favorites. His work is evocative. His son, Jean Renoir, wanted to do a film with me, “The Picasso Summer.” The studio people wouldn’t accept him. He was too old. They were afraid he would die making the film, and they had no insurance then. Isn’t that terrible? He became a friend. I saw him at least four times, a wonderful man.

WELLER: Do you have a favorite painting?

BRADBURY: “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” by Georges-Pierre Seurat. That is terrific. It demands that you sit and enjoy that Sunday with all those people. You become part of the mob. And you walk along the water and you look at each person and you say, “I wonder why that person came here?” And now I’m here. I’m part of the mob. That’s what that painting does to me.

WELLER: What are your opinions of Abstract Expressionists? Jackson Pollock, for example?

BRADBURY: Jackson Pollock didn’t know how to paint. There’s nothing to see there.

WELLER: How do you account for his popularity? His paintings are worth millions.

BRADBURY: People are stupid.

WELLER: What about Andy Warhol?

BRADBURY: I was there at the opening of his show in Los Angeles on La Cienega Boulevard. I saw him there surrounded by stupid people, and I knew that he was stupid too. He did terrible things. He put out a film called Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein. That’s not his film. He took someone else’s film and put his name on it. He’s a dishonest man. And if you do that sort of thing, I don’t like you.

WELLER: What influence did photography have on you?

BRADBURY: When I was a teenager I loved looking at Infinite Riches in a Little Room, the miniature magazine put out by Esquire. I couldn’t afford it, but I picked up copies here and there and occasionally I would buy it for a dime, and I would tear out the pictures and I’d write stories around the pictures. I didn’t know what I was doing! I started writing prose poetry based on all those pictures from the magazine. My intuition told me to write, and I was doing prose poetry, but I didn’t even know what the term meant. Sometimes there were pictures of semi-nude women, or photographs of seascapes or deserts or skies. Then I’d write prose poems from them.

Ray Bradbury, age three, outside his boyhood home at 11 South Saint James Street, Waukegan, Illinois, summer 1924.

Ray standing on his grandparents’ lawn on the corner of Saint James and Washington Streets in Waukegan, circa 1923. The lawn would serve as inspiration for the novel Dandelion Wine.

Ray Bradbury, with his brother Leonard “Skip” Bradbury, Waukegan, Illinois, circa 1924.

Ray Bradbury (left) in the petrified forest in Arizona, seated alongside his father Leonard Bradbury and his brother (wearing hat) Leonard “Skip” Bradbury, Jr., 1932.

The young writer in Santa Monica in the early 1940s as he was establishing his name in the pages of pulp fiction magazines.

Ray Bradbury, far right, standing next to his friend Donald Harkins in Hollywood on Highland Avenue, outside the Max Factor Building, summer 1935.

Alongside his father and brother, 1938.

Young newspaper salesman, hamming it up at the corner of Olympic and Norton in Los Angeles, circa 1938.

Early publicity photo, 1945.

March 27, 1946 telegram acceptance for the classic Bradbury short story “The Homecoming” from Mademoiselle editor George Davis. This story was discovered in the office slush pile by then-assistant, Truman Capote.

Outside the gates of Paramount Pictures with Marlene Dietrich, 1935.

Standing outside his home at 670 South Venice Boulevard in Venice, California, 1942.

Maggie Bradbury in front of their home in west Los Angeles, January 1953, at the same time her husband was writing Fahrenheit 451.

Maggie Bradbury in front of the couple’s first apartment at 33 South Venice Boulevard holding their firstborn, Susan Marguerite Bradbury, 1950.

Publicity photo outtake, 1950.

Bradbury at the office of Sid Stebel in Los Angeles.

Bradbury at the Bards Meeting, 1948.

1964 ticket stub from Bradbury’s Pandemonium Theater company’s production of The World of Ray Bradbury.

Ray Bradbury with film director Alfred Hitchcock, circa 1963-64.

Speaking at Cal Irvine, 1971. (Courtesy Marci Mauthe)

Bradbury outside in Houston, Texas, in January 1967 while working on a story about the Apollo space program for Life magazine.

Forrest J. Ackerman and Maggie Bradbury at a screening of the Charlton Heston film Diamond Head, January 1963.

Charlton Heston, Caspar Weinberger, Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke at a Washington, DC, dinner, 1984.

“My twin! My twin!” Bradbury with Federico Fellini at the Hotel Hassler in Rome in the early 1990s.

Man in a Wonderful Ice Cream Suit outside of Paris, 1978.

Bradbury reflected in his glasses, Paris, 1992. (Courtesy Michel Fainsilber)

In 1952 when I met Aldous Huxley, he said to me, “You know what you are? You’re a poet.” I couldn’t believe it. I’d wanted to be a poet all those years. In high school I was terrible. I never once wrote anything that was any good. And at long last, because I started by doing the intuitive things—looking at photographs and writing evocations—eventually I became a poet. It was all intuitive.

WELLER: In 1952 Bernard Berenson, the renowned Renaissance art historian, wrote you a fan letter. When you were done writing the screenplay for Moby Dick, you visited Berenson at his estate in Florence, Italy. You have said often that he became a second father to you. What did you learn from Bernard Berenson about art?

BRADBURY: He let me teach him. That’s how he worked. I recognized things in art, and he wanted me to tell him, rather than the other way around. He wanted me to discover things, rather than him just telling me what to discover. The first day we were in Florence we went out to roam around the city. I hired a horse-drawn carriage, and I said to the driver, I want to see the Michelangelo Plaza, but the driver misunderstood and we wound up at a church. So we were at the wrong place, but we went in anyway, and there were murals on the walls. I’d never seen murals like that before.

We went back and had lunch with Berenson, and he asked about our morning. I told him about the church we had visited and told him about the murals. He asked me what I thought. I told him, “They look like the work of a man who was turning the Renaissance sideways. He was looking at things from a new perspective.” I thought that this painter was changing the Renaissance, and I asked Berenson if this made any sense. He said, “You nailed it.” So my perception was absolutely correct. He loved the fact that I found that out by myself without being told. That was how Berenson worked.

WELLER: At the end of Fahrenheit 451, people have gathered in the wilderness, and they have memorized a book in order to save it from ruin. What book would you memorize?

BRADBURY: I would memorize Bernard Shaw’s gigantic book of prefaces to his plays. There are as many pages of essays as there are pages to his plays. Those essays on how to be creative, and how he created those plays, makes for a wonderful book. It’s a huge thing, about two thousand pages long. I have two copies. That book is my bible. The other book I might select is A Christmas Carol. That story is a hymn of life and death. It’s everything about birth and living and dying and surviving. And it makes me weep. It makes me cry, because Scrooge is so beautiful.

The film adaptation with Alastair Sim is a great version. When he survives at the end and dances with joy, I dance with joy. When I saw A Christmas Carol on Christmas Day, I said to Maggie, “I better write to this man. His Scrooge is the greatest Scrooge ever, and the film is so beautiful and I have to thank him.” So I wrote him a love letter that said, “Dear Mr. Sim, thank you for your Scrooge. You are the greatest. God bless you.” And I sent the letter to my agent in London and said, “I don’t know where this man lives, but if you can get in touch with him and give him this letter, I want him to know how much I love him.” So two months went by and I didn’t hear from him, and I figured he didn’t get my letter. I was so upset. Finally, a letter came in the mail from Alastair Sim. It read: “Dear Mr. Bradbury, your letter reached me in hospital and made me well.” Isn’t that beautiful? I can’t find that letter now. It’s somewhere in my house. But anyway, A Christmas Carol went on to influence me in so many ways. It is the reason I wrote The Halloween Tree. The Halloween Tree is A Christmas Carol all over again. My character Mr. Moundshroud is a semi-evil Mr. Scrooge.

chapter eight
POLITICS

SOME HAVE PERCEIVED IT AS A SEISMIC IDEOLOGICAL SHIFT. WHAT the heck happened to Ray Bradbury’s political views?

In November 1952, just after the presidential election that put Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Oval Office, Bradbury, while becoming a name writer but still grappling to reap the financial rewards of his newfound literary credibility, took out an expensive full-page advertisement in Variety, the trade magazine for the motion picture business. In the ad, Bradbury lambasted the Republican Party for employing fear tactics to win the election and decried the escalating witch-hunt that would lead to the rise of Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy. The following year, Bradbury published Fahrenheit 451, a scathing indictment of mass media, totalitarianism, and censorship.

But even before Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury’s writing reflected a viewpoint of abiding liberal humanism. In short stories such as “The Big Black and White Game” (anthologized in Best American Short Stories: 1946) and “The Other Foot” (anthologized in Best American Short Stories: 1952), the author was examining issues of race relations and civil rights. In 1950’s The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury used science fiction as a passageway to contemporary social commentary, musing on environmental issues, nuclear proliferation, colonization, and war, among other pressing concerns.

Yet sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, Bradbury’s views began to shift. His voting record certainly reflected the change. Some would say that the metamorphosis could be attributed to the age-old maxim: “If you are young and not a Democrat, you have no heart. If you are old and not a Republican, you have no brain.”

Bradbury himself dislikes political labels. Even more, he has great disdain for partisan politics. In truth, Ray Bradbury’s political opinions are far more nuanced than can be summed up through one party or another. The only real way to get a handle on his opinions is, quite simply, to ask the man himself.

WELLER: In the late 1930s, while you were in your late teens, you were involved in the Technocracy political movement. How did you get involved with that?

BRADBURY: Russ Hodgkins, the head of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society, joined, and he invited representatives from the Technocracy movement to come talk to our group at Clifton’s Cafeteria. After that, I went to more Technocracy meetings and joined. I still have my membership card. I was involved with it for about two years, and it finally sank in that I was boring everybody to death. I was lecturing all the time, telling people how wonderful Technocracy was, the same way people preached about Communism and Fascism. Any of these “isms” are very dangerous.

WELLER: What was the ideology of Technocracy?

BRADBURY: The basic idea was to have a government where experts were elected to run departments. Engineers and scientists would run the Department of Energy, and so on. People were given posts based on talent rather than political ambition. In many ways, it’s not such a bad idea. They predicted, because things were so bad during the Depression, that the whole entire system would collapse and Technocracy would take over. Well, that was wishful thinking. The war came along and rescued us. Meanwhile, I went around talking about Technocracy to everyone, and I bored the hell out of them. I put everyone to sleep.

WELLER: Why did you move away from Technocracy?

BRADBURY: I went to a meeting at the Shrine Auditorium with my friend, Muriel Kay, and Howard Scott, the head of Technocracy, was there. He came out onstage and he was surrounded by men, all wearing gray suits. That was their costume. And as I looked at all those people, I thought, “This isn’t that much different from Fascism or Communism, where people get together and wear the same suits, they have the same emblems, and speak the same jargon.” So I quit.

WELLER: You were twenty-one when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Why did you not serve in World War II?

BRADBURY: Without my glasses, I’m legally blind. I went down for my test, stood there naked with everyone else, came up to the oculist who was testing everyone’s eyesight. He said, “Take off your glasses. Read those letters over there.” I said, “What letters?” He said, “The letters on the card.” “What card?” “The card on the wall.” “What wall?” You see, when I take my glasses off, you disappear. So he turned to me and said, “Do you really want to be in the Army?” And I said, “Uh, I don’t think so.” He said, “You’re not.” And that was it.

So I’ve had a chance to live for my country. No one ever talks about that, and they should. It’s one thing to die for your country—a horrible, horrible thing. How about living for your country? But you can’t think this way and you don’t dare say anything about it because it’s too egocentric. The truth is, if I died fifty years ago, there’d be a big hole there, somewhere, wouldn’t there? All those books that you read, that you liked, you’d have to depend on J.D. Salinger instead.

I was at a Halloween party when I was twelve and I ran out to a hall, but it wasn’t a hall, it was stairs going down into a cellar. I fell all the way down and it was a miracle I wasn’t killed or I didn’t break any bones. But I’ve often thought back to that day. What if I’d been killed? All of my work wouldn’t exist, and who would come in to fill the gaps? It’s very strange.

WELLER: Do you consider yourself conservative, liberal, or moderate?

BRADBURY: You mustn’t put labels on people. This is what is important: Somebody somewhere along the line had to give the taxes back to the people. Roosevelt never did it, Hoover never did it. They could have cured the Depression in 1932 when my father was out of work for ten years. My father suffered. They should have given him back his tax money. Nobody thought of that, and nobody did anything. Kennedy was the first to experiment with it. The year before he died, there were a few experiments with giving the taxes back, but there was never the chance to really experiment fully, and he died. So it was never mentioned again until Reagan came along and cut the taxes, and then we began to get jobs. When he came into office, there were millions of people unemployed. He lowered taxes all over the United States and created millions of jobs. And I got so curious about this, I called the Department of Labor Statistics in Washington the first of every month, and I got to know a guy there. I’d call and say, “How many jobs did we put out last month?” And we made five million new jobs, nine million new jobs—it kept going up and up and up. So Reagan’s experiment worked. That’s not being conservative, that’s not being anything except sensible.

WELLER: Sounds to me like fiscal conservative thinking.

BRADBURY: No, no. No labels. I don’t believe in them.

WELLER: George W. Bush cut taxes very early in his presidency, and in the fall of 2009, just before he left office, by most accounts, the United States was in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. What happened?

BRADBURY: Wall Street’s what happened. Do you understand Wall Street? I don’t understand Wall Street. Nobody understands Wall Street. We have a dislocation of understanding investment. We made a lot of mistakes with credit cards, we made a lot of mistakes with mortgages. I don’t believe in mortgages. I’ve been a poor writer most of my life. I don’t believe in mortgages. Pay them off as soon as you can. So when I sold that house on Clarkson Road in 1958, we got twenty-eight thousand dollars for it. I took all that money and put it in this house, so I only owed another thirteen thousand after that, and I paid that off in five years and owned this house completely in just a few years. If you let yourself be endangered, you’re going to lose your house.

A lot of people are stupid. They didn’t pay attention to their expenses. They had too many credit cards, they spent money without knowing it. I want to have a day, celebrate it, I want to have it announced by our new president. We should have a card-burning day. We don’t need to burn books, we should burn credit cards. A lot of people have too many credit cards. I know people with six or seven credit cards. I have two credit cards, I only use one. But if you have credit cards, you don’t know what you’re spending, you forget to check. It’s too easy to sign your name. It’s dangerous. So we should have a day when we say to people all over the United States, on this day, take out your wallet and count your credit cards and burn at least three of them, and we can improve the economy. We can be a check against Wall Street being what it is—it’s a danger.

And now on to mortgages. We should make a deal: The government should say that all the people in the United States should get three months’ freedom from paying their mortgage right now and not lose their house. Give them a chance to make the money and come pay it off sooner. There are a lot of people losing their houses today because they didn’t pay attention to the fact that it was creeping up on them. The day of burning the credit cards and the day of delaying the mortgage payment. We could save the whole society! But we’re not doing hard thinking. I want to be in charge, goddamn it!

WELLER: Have you invested much over the years?

BRADBURY: No. My books are my investments, and every few months I receive dividend checks in the form of royalties.

WELLER: Do you make a lot of money from royalties?

BRADBURY: I’m comfortable. I don’t make as much as I used to now that I’m not traveling to do speaking engagements. But I could retire on the royalties from Fahrenheit 451 alone.

WELLER: I’d love to go over your voting record over the decades. You were first eligible to vote in a presidential election in 1940. Who did you vote for?

BRADBURY: Wilkie.

WELLER: In the early 1950s, you volunteered for the Adlai Stevenson presidential campaign. In ’68 you worked for Eugene McCarthy’s bid in the Democratic presidential primary. Since that time, you have grown less enchanted with the Democratic party. What happened? Did your politics shift?

BRADBURY: I started to have doubts about the Democrats because of the Kennedy policy on Vietnam. The whole thing went wrong from there. Lyndon Johnson was worse, and in 1968, when the Democrats had a chance to win the White House, they didn’t comment on Vietnam.

I worked for the Eugene McCarthy campaign because he was a good man and he opposed the Vietnam War. But Humphrey got the nomination and he got up—in Chicago with the terrible riots going on in Grant Park—and he didn’t say a word about the war or the riots. None of the Democrats spoke up against Chicago’s Mayor Daley, telling him to call off the cops. It was horrible. Humphrey should have said, “The mayor of Chicago is a son of a bitch. He should be fired.” But Humphrey didn’t mention the riots in the streets of Chicago, and he didn’t mention the war. When he gave his acceptance speech, all he had to say was, “I’m going to change the policy of Johnson. There will be a new direction.” That would have ended the war. And he could have won, because he lost by a very small margin.

When Humphrey gave his speech that night, I was watching on television at home with Maggie, and I turned to her and said, “You have just witnessed the destruction of the Democratic Party.” So Nixon won, the very man we didn’t really want to have as president—we didn’t like him very much. Nobody did. But Nixon won because Humphrey was a coward. So over the years, very gradually, I’ve moved to the middle of the road. I have had it with both parties.

WELLER: How often do you get involved as a volunteer for political campaigns?

BRADBURY: I used to do a lot of political work, but I stopped ever since Vietnam and Kennedy’s approval of our assassination of [president of South Vietnam Ngo Dinh] Diem and his brother-in-law, Madame Nhu’s husband. We said it was okay to assassinate Diem. The whole country approved of it. We all did. I’m guilty just as much as anyone, because he was a bother. So he was assassinated and his brother-in-law was assassinated with him and three weeks later Kennedy was shot and killed. And Madame Nhu came on television and said to the American people, “How does it feel?” We hated her for telling the truth. So we shouldn’t have done it. And Kennedy shouldn’t have been shot, but he was. So then what followed was Johnson made things much worse. The war was terrible. And Johnson was a monster.

My daughters picketed Johnson when he was at the Century Plaza Hotel. My kids were out in the streets against that terrible man! His helicopter flew over our house every day from the Plaza to the airport, and I thought, I wish I had a rifle! As a result, I withdrew more and more from the Democratic party, and then, finally, when Humphrey turned out to be such a coward—that was it.

WELLER: You never voted Democrat again?

BRADBURY: The night Humphrey gave his speech in 1968 and the cops were beating up on the kids in the park, I told Maggie, “You watch, people are going to vote for Nixon as a punishment vote because we’ve all had it with the Vietnam War.” And sure enough, Nixon became president. I voted for him as a punishment vote against Humphrey. At the ballot box, you have to punish as well as reward. When Fritz Lang found out I voted for Nixon, we had a huge fight. He swore at me. I said, “Fritz, this is a democracy, you’re not going to tell me how to vote.” Fritz was incensed. A few days later he sent me a note, a signed photograph of himself, to say we were still friends.

WELLER: And what did you think of Nixon as president?

BRADBURY: He was not a popular man, but he’s the one who eventually got us out of Vietnam.

WELLER: What did you make of Watergate?

BRADBURY: Nixon’s problem was that he didn’t believe in himself. He won the election because he said things the Democrats didn’t say. The Watergate thing destroyed him, and it shouldn’t have. I mean, who would want to break into Democratic headquarters? To steal what? What a shame. And he was part of the moon landing. The first president to talk to the astronauts on the moon. After the president resigned, he became our delegate to Russia and China. He was more important than any former president during that period.

WELLER: What did you think of Jimmy Carter?

BRADBURY: I voted for him because I thought maybe he was going to be okay. He seemed all right. Then he got involved with Iran and made mistakes handling the hostage situation.

WELLER: And you are a fan of Ronald Reagan?

BRADBURY: He was one of the best presidents of the last century.

WELLER: Why?

BRADBURY: Because he was the first person to have the courage to challenge the Russians to tear down the wall. Reagan and Pope John Paul II ended the Cold War.

WELLER: What are your opinions of George Bush, senior?

BRADBURY: He should have pursued the first Gulf War all the way to Baghdad. He shouldn’t have quit. He should have run it completely into Baghdad and gotten rid of that dictator so his son wouldn’t have had to do it. Had we overthrown Hussein during the first Gulf War, we wouldn’t be in Iraq today. We blame Bush Two for the war in Iraq, but that was his father’s fault. But we don’t pay enough attention to the fact that we got rid of a dictator and they have had an election in Iraq. That’s a good thing. We don’t pay enough attention to that. Do we believe in elections or don’t we?

WELLER: And what about Bill Clinton?

BRADBURY: He was a strange thing. He got better as time passed on. I couldn’t help but sympathize with him with that girl in his office who was down on her knees all the time. We went too far with that impeachment trial. He should have had enough sense just to quit himself.

WELLER: What about his policies?

BRADBURY: They were opportunist. He did things at the last moment, like sending bombs over to various countries to help with elections. He was very aggressive during elections.

WELLER: I must ask the question that all Americans who were alive in the early 1960s are asked: Where were you when you learned that President Kennedy had been shot?

BRADBURY: I was in a taxicab going to Columbia Studios to turn in half of the script of The Martian Chronicles, and on the way the cab driver suddenly stopped the taxi and pounded the seat. “God damn!” he shouted, and then sobbed. I said, “What’s wrong?” He said, “They shot the president.” He heard it on the radio on the way to Hollywood. And I got to the studio and by then Kennedy was dead. When I went into the studio we all embraced each other, but we were very unhappy. I gave them the script and I went home.

WELLER: In the course of writing my biography The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury, I discovered that the FBI had a file on you. What is your response to your government spying on you?

BRADBURY: All this nonsense about people keeping files on people. I don’t care. What have I done?

WELLER: But you wrote Fahrenheit 451, a book about Big Brother, about censorship and the proliferation of mass media, right in the midst of McCarthy-era finger-pointing.

BRADBURY: Yeah, but the book was pointing the finger at the Communists too. Anyone that wants to burn books. I don’t care if the FBI spies on me. I have nothing to hide.

WELLER: But the government must have felt threatened by you and your thoughts.

BRADBURY: No, my liberal agents were the ones that cut me off, not the government, not McCarthy. I took an ad in Variety at the end of the 1952 political campaign, the day after the election of Eisenhower. I was so incensed at the behavior of the Eisenhower people and people like McCarthy smearing others because they were Catholic, because they were Jewish, because maybe they were Communists, et cetera, and I took this ad out and it said, “Go back to Salem where you belong. Otherwise, four years from now, we’ll vote you out of power.” Well, I went to see my liberal agent the next day, and he slammed the door in my face.

WELLER: Which agent was that?

BRADBURY: My Hollywood agent. Super liberal. He said, “Now they’re going to think you’re a Communist.” I said, “How could they think that? I’m not.” You cannot prove … you’ve got to have something in the background to latch onto.

WELLER: What response did you get from your ad?

BRADBURY: The reaction in the next few days was fantastic. None of the producers or directors or actors in Hollywood contacted me. But all of their secretaries called me. They were so proud of me for standing up for our rights. To say to McCarthy, “You’re a son of a bitch, go away.” So I said to my agent, “They’re gonna hire me next year. They’re gonna prove you wrong, that I’m not a Communist. They’re gonna hire me and I’m gonna get a major film job.” The next year John Huston hired me to do Moby Dick. My agent slammed the door in my face again. He couldn’t stand it when he was wrong.

WELLER: What was your agent’s name?

BRADBURY: Ben Benjamin.

WELLER: Did you end your business relationship with him?

BRADBURY: No, he remained my agent for years. But he couldn’t stand the fact that I was right. I proved him wrong. We men are peculiar animals. So then I went on, and the Un-American Activities Committee never touched me. Because there was no reason to. There was nothing to prove. The Hollywood Ten had things in their background which were very mysterious and caused them trouble.

WELLER: You said you knew one of the Hollywood Ten?

BRADBURY: He came to me.

WELLER: Who was it?

BRADBURY: I could look it up. He wanted me to sell his screenplay for him. And I said, “I can’t do that because it’s your screenplay.” And we had a long discussion and I finally said to him, “What do you hate most about McCarthy?” He said, “He’s a liar.” I said, “Well, what are you asking me to do? You’re asking me to lie for you. I won’t lie for you. I’ll tell the truth for you.” I said, “There’s a meeting of the Writers Guild tomorrow night. The annual meeting. I’ll go there with you. I don’t know you, you’re not my friend, I don’t owe you anything, but I’ll go with you tomorrow night and I’ll demand the membership find you employment.” He wouldn’t go.

WELLER: Why?

BRADBURY: I said, “Why are you passing up this chance? I’m putting my neck out for you. I don’t have to do this. But I’ll do it for you. But I won’t lie for you.” He wanted me to sell the script and keep half the money. I said, “No. I’ll help you sell the script, you keep all the money.”

WELLER: Poor man. Tough times.

BRADBURY: Yeah. But they were not brave. They should have stood up to McCarthy. I said, “You should have taken an ad in the newspapers of America, saying to the American people, ‘Here’s who we are, we’re not going to tell that son of a bitch who we are, but we’ll tell you who we are.’ ” They needed to get the American people on their side against McCarthy. And then go to him and refuse to testify. But it was too late.

WELLER: And that was 1952?

BRADBURY: The worst year was ’52, when I took that ad out, and in ’53 toward the end of the year was when Edward R. Murrow did his show about McCarthy that began to show what a son of a bitch he was. By ’54 McCarthy began to disappear. In ’54, a lot of these Hollywood Ten still couldn’t find employment. That’s why this one guy showed up at my office and I said I’ll do all these things to help you, but you haven’t handled your career correctly. You should have told the American people, I am a Communist and I’m proud of it, I’m a Communist but I no longer believe in it, or I am not a Communist, but I don’t want to talk to that son of a bitch. Doesn’t matter what you were. You should have told the people. And you didn’t do it.

WELLER: In Fahrenheit 451, you examined the looming shadow of Big Brother. Because of this, a lot of people want to know what you think of the Patriot Act and the telephone wiretapping instituted by the NSA during the Bush Administration.

BRADBURY: They are not going to hear anything. They are going to get bored. There are too many phone calls. We talk too much. I hope it bores the hell out of them. I really have no opinion. I think it’s stupid.

WELLER: On the subject of another lightning-rod issue, what is your opinion on abortion?

BRADBURY: If it’s really important, I suppose people should have the right, but if it isn’t, you shouldn’t do it. You know, it’s a very difficult subject.

WELLER: When you say “really important,” what do you mean?

BRADBURY: It’s too huge a subject. It involves three hundred million people. It’s very hard to debate.

WELLER: When you were young, it was illegal, and there were doctors doing it in back alleys, very dangerous.

BRADBURY: Yeah. We all have those moments where we wonder if we’re going to have to face that. It never happened, but I remember twice when I was engaged to Maggie, her period was delayed. It scared the hell out of both of us, and, luckily, her period came and we never had to have an abortion. So we never had to face the problem directly.

WELLER: Do you think you would have had an abortion if she was pregnant in her early twenties?

BRADBURY: I suppose so. We weren’t ready. I would have had to get a job and then I wouldn’t have written my books.

WELLER: New topic: What is your stance on guns? Do you own one?

BRADBURY: No, I don’t like guns. I’m afraid of them. I found my father’s revolver after he died, and I took it apart and threw it away. I can’t stand that sort of thing around the house.

WELLER: You have always been critical about the role of the automobile in our society. You’ve never driven a car yourself. What do you see as the future of the automobile?

BRADBURY: We have paid a terrible price for the automobile. We lose almost fifty thousand people a year. Do we really want that many people killed every year so we can drive? I don’t want that. I have been saying this for decades: We must build monorails all across the country. They can follow the existing freeways. I have fought for years to build the monorail in Los Angeles, but they went instead with a subway that no one uses. It doesn’t go where people need to go. We need more reliable public transportation. But it’s a long time in the future.

chapter nine
SEXUALITY

THERE IS A COMPLEXITY AND A NEED FOR SENSITIVITY WHEN addressing the issue of sexuality with Ray Bradbury. His parents were deeply rooted in a Victorian morality, and sex was a subject simply never discussed in Bradbury’s childhood home. In his own writing, the topic is seldom mentioned. In his late years, Bradbury once picked up a biography of the actress Marlene Dietrich. Bradbury had encountered the screen legend when he was a teenager, rollerskating down the streets and alleyways of Hollywood. He had a photograph taken with her in 1935. He even chased her up the steps of the House of Westmore Beauty Salon to get her autograph. Later in life, when he read the actress’s biography, upon discovering that Dietrich had an affinity for oral sex, Bradbury promptly closed the book and set it aside. “I don’t want to know about people’s private lives,” he said.

As a result, addressing Bradbury’s own private life and his thoughts on sexual matters is a delicate undertaking. But while the author is most decidedly private, he is by no means a prude. In his teens, Ray Bradbury was relentless in his attempts to, as he said, “fingerprint” his cousin Vivian Moberg. On the occasion of his sixteenth birthday, he lost his virginity to a Los Angeles prostitute. His early courtship with his wife-to-be, Marguerite McClure, was fiery and passionate.

WELLER: You haven’t written much about sex over the years. Why is that?

BRADBURY: Because I’ve had a good sex life. If you have had a good sex life, why would you write about it? Unless you can write about it indirectly. In a short story of mine like “The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair,” it’s all there. If two characters love each other, you know darned well they are going to go to bed. But who cares? Why write it? It’s familiar territory. There’s no way to do it originally.

WELLER: What are your earliest sexual memories?

BRADBURY: When I was twelve, my cousin Vivian was fourteen. Boy, a girl cousin is really a wonderful thing to have. We fiddled around and played doctor a lot. I could never get her to take off her pants, though—she was a smart cookie. But I didn’t know anything about sex. We used to kiss. We used to tell ghost stories upstairs in my Uncle Inar’s house, and I’d get an erection, but I didn’t know what it was. No one ever told me. And my brother was necking with our other cousin, and we went to the bathroom to pee and we couldn’t pee straight, of course, because we had erections and we both started laughing. I’ve written a story about it, “House Divided.” I don’t think Vivian minded. We didn’t know anything about sex. Absolutely nothing.

WELLER: What was your first sexual experience?

BRADBURY: I was returning home by train from New York in 1939 after going to the first World’s Science Fiction Convention and the World’s Fair. I stopped off in Waukegan and visited an old friend. We went to see the film Juarez starring Bette Davis. Afterward, we sat out on her front porch and felt each other up.

WELLER: But didn’t you tell me that you lost your virginity to a prostitute when you were sixteen? You don’t consider that your first sexual experience?

BRADBURY: No. That was too fast. You know, it was over before I even knew what happened. I was sixteen, and the prostitute was about twenty-one. We went to a house in downtown Los Angeles, and my friend Eddie Barrera paid for the prostitute. You don’t even know how to climb on. And then for a month after, you worry about having caught something and that it’s going to drop off! So I never did anything like that again. I don’t understand men who use prostitutes, though. If you don’t know someone, how can you have sex with them?

WELLER: You were sexually active with Maggie before you were married, correct? How did you get away with that? You both lived with your parents during your courtship.

BRADBURY: Her parents went to bed early, and I laid her in the front room every night. But her father got up one night and discovered us making love in the living room, and he threw me out of the house. I couldn’t come back again. So from that point on, we had nowhere to make love. So we made love under the pier at Santa Monica, under the pier in Venice, under the pier at Ocean Park, and we were hoping they’d build another pier so we could initiate it. And I laid her up by the Greek Theatre too. Afterward she had leaves on her back. I said to my Aunt Neva, who was a dressmaker, “Will you sew a sweater for Maggie and put leaves on the back and sew them on so people won’t know when she’s been lying down?” Isn’t that a good idea?

WELLER: What did Neva say to that?

BRADBURY: She loved it. Because she knew I was in love. And she knew Maggie too.

WELLER: Your early relationship with Maggie seemed highly sexually charged.

BRADBURY: Yes, it was. We would go to movies and jack each other off. I remember we saw The King and I and did that.

WELLER: I guess one story of yours with a sexual theme is “Junior” from The Toynbee Convector.

BRADBURY: “Junior.” I’ve never been able to sell that story. I sent it to Playboy, but they said they don’t want their audience reading about erections. I love that story! But that isn’t really a sexy story, a racy story. It’s a dream/memory story. It’s very dear, and it’s kind of sad. You don’t read it to feel racy. When you’re younger, you write pornography for yourself, but you throw it away.

WELLER: Did you do that?

BRADBURY: Oh sure. Everyone does when they’re fifteen. We didn’t have Playboy. You couldn’t buy a picture of a nude woman. People don’t realize how recent Playboy is. I helped start it. Fahrenheit 451 was in the second, third, and fourth issues. Hefner had no money, but he needed a story. So I sold him Fahrenheit for four hundred dollars. He came up to me at a party recently, and the first thing he said was, “You were there when I needed you.”

Back when I was a kid, we didn’t know anything about sex, anything. I lived on a ranch in Tucson, Arizona, when I was twelve, and I saw the birds and the bees and the cows and the bulls. When we moved back to Waukegan, Illinois, I told some of my friends about what I had seen, and their mother threw me out of the house. They never told their kids about these things. They denied everything I said. The truth about sex. So I was anathema. And you couldn’t buy a picture of a nude woman anywhere in our whole society. You could get a nude picture, but they brushed everything out. They painted everything over. All the good stuff.

WELLER: What are your opinions on gay marriage?

BRADBURY: Look, love is love. All I want is for people to be happy. Maggie and I had a lot of gay friends over the years. Our daughter Bettina worked for a director named Stockton Briggle. One night he and his boyfriend—I’d known them for years—invited us over for dinner at their house, and they invited Rock Hudson over along with his producer Ross Hunter. We had an evening with four gay men with Maggie and Bettina and me, and it was one of the greatest evenings of my life because we talked love—about loving movies. “Remember this movie? Remember that movie? Remember this movie?” It was exhilarating!

I knew Rock Hudson for years. His sexuality didn’t matter. We didn’t talk about those things. I don’t care if someone is gay. Like I said, love is love. It is the basis of everything. And so, homosexuality, if you fall in love with someone of the same sex, it can’t be helped. I remember things that happened to me, impulsively, and they upset me because I couldn’t figure them out. I remember I was in a gymnasium and a friend of mine was there. He came out of the swimming pool. He was a Greek god, he was all tanned, had dark curly hair, and he was in the shower and I looked at him and, my God, he was beautiful, and he looked up and saw me looking at him and it stunned me, and I thought, “What am I doing? I shouldn’t be looking at him,” but he was beautiful. So if something should have happened at that time, it could have happened, but it didn’t.

If one of my daughters came to me and said, “Dad, I’m going to move in with a woman because I’m a lesbian,” I wouldn’t have a moral viewpoint on it. I would have the viewpoint of, “What is this going to mean as far as happiness is concerned?” I would have that opinion with anyone, male or female.

WELLER: Your Aunt Neva, your great creative mentor, was gay. How did this go over in a family with Puritanical morals?

BRADBURY: I don’t think anyone ever guessed at it. I never discussed it with her, ever. We talked about everything else, though. She lived with a partner for many years, and she wasn’t happy in the relationship. I did talk to her about that. I asked her why she wouldn’t move out, but she didn’t have enough courage to leave what was essentially a relationship with no love.

WELLER: When you were a child, were your parents affectionate?

BRADBURY: My parents’ brass bed stuck out from their room into the living room about a foot, so their doors couldn’t be closed. I think they had sliding doors. My brother and I slept in the living room on a fold-out sofa bed. Every night my brother and I folded it out and went to bed. I can imagine my poor parents, they couldn’t have sex until we were asleep. I remember one night when I was thirteen, my brother nudging me, and we both listened and we could hear my parents, but I didn’t know what they were doing. That’s how ignorant I was.

WELLER: You’ve been candid about gender issues in the past, specifically being critical of power-hungry males.

BRADBURY: Men are the inferior sex. And we pretend at being superior out of our inferiority. The male ego is the problem in the world everywhere. Women are much easier to get on with. Men don’t want to be told anything. And we’re arrogant and we make wars and we destroy so much, yet we also build. So we’re a combination of things, a mixture of good and bad. But we’re a real problem for women to understand because of our differing moods and needs and craziness, part of which is very attractive. Men never do grow up, but there’s a difference between being childlike, which I am. I hope I’m not childish, which means you hold grudges too long, you hit people, and you’re violent. And violence is more of a male thing. The majority of the people in the prisons in this country are men, aren’t they? It proves my point. There are far fewer women who will ever become criminals. Most of the murderers and the rapists and the people who hurt people are men.

WELLER: You’ve told me in the past of your marital indiscretions. How did those come about?

BRADBURY: It’s important for me to emphasize that I have never been a womanizer. I’ve never been aggressive. But occasionally, women have suddenly appeared on my doorstep and I looked out and there they were sitting there. My first mistress was a teacher, and I lectured at her school long before we had an affair. I didn’t want to have an affair. There was a four-year period where I held her off.

I first lectured at her school in 1968. Well, she came to my office two or three times over a period of two years. I didn’t give in immediately. I scared her out of my office the first time. I told her, “If you stay in the office five more minutes I’m going to rip your clothes off.” She came back a year later, and she stayed. I went and got a bottle of wine, and we had wine up in the office and that’s when we started our love affair. We had a wonderful relationship. But it was almost four years before anything happened.

We met about once a week for a couple of years. I’d go down to Disneyland to the Grand Hotel and we’d meet there one afternoon a week. Then her husband got very, very rich and began spending millions of dollars on her, and she started to feel guilty that she was having an affair with me when her husband was treating her so well. She drifted away, and I understood that.

WELLER: Did her husband ever find out?

BRADBURY: No, but I have a feeling that he may have had a mistress. So it was easy for him to accept his wife. I’m only guessing. But in a way, if you’re having an affair, it would make you feel better if you let your spouse have one too. It would make you feel less guilty.

WELLER: Do you think your wife ever had an affair?

BRADBURY: We’ll never know. Maggie was a loner and I wasn’t. I can’t imagine her … I guess the secret of these things is if you don’t talk about it, you can do it. If she had a love affair on her own, and I was having one, that would be fair. As long as you don’t talk about it.

WELLER: You told me before about one other great love affair. How did that start?

BRADBURY: About the time my relationship with my first mistress came to an end, I was in my office one day on my birthday. I was turning fifty-four. The phone rang, it was five in the afternoon, and a woman asked for me. I said, “Yes.” And she gave me her name, and she said, “The reason I’m calling you is it’s your birthday, and your wife has forgotten it and your children have forgotten it and your friends have forgotten it, but I haven’t forgotten. Happy Birthday.” Well, c’mon, huh? She was right on the nose. She guessed it all. I said, “Where are you?” She said, “Downstairs.” And I said, “Come up.” And I talked with her. I think I got a couple of kisses from her, and then I think a week or so later I was invited up to her house, and we started our affair.

WELLER: How long did that relationship last?

BRADBURY: Almost five years.

WELLER: Why did it end?

BRADBURY: She wanted me to marry her. I couldn’t do that. I would have lost my children. She called me when I was at a hotel in New Orleans. I still have the menu of my breakfast that day. I saved it, the morning she called me and I called off the affair. I was down there to make a film with the ABC people, and she called and said she joined a church and couldn’t have an affair with a married man anymore.

WELLER: Did Maggie ever find out about the affair?

BRADBURY: She found out about the affair, because like a dumb fool I ordered flowers for the woman and her mother for Mother’s Day. Maggie found the receipt and confronted me about it. So I told her the truth.

WELLER: What happened?

BRADBURY: She threw me out of the house. I went to live in a hotel in Beverly Hills for a few days. Maggie finally called me and said, “You’re a son of a bitch, but I still love you.”

WELLER: Switching gears as we talk about issues of sexuality: What are your opinions on pornography?

BRADBURY: We all have to learn about sex one way or another. When I was twelve years old, there were “Little Blue Books.” Playboy didn’t exist. Playboy is very amusing.

WELLER: What about more explicit pornography?

BRADBURY: It shows too much. Women are meant to be inhaled, not impaled.

WELLER: Because of Fahrenheit 451, people often associate you with the theme of censorship. In your opinion, is there anything that should be censored?

BRADBURY: The government shouldn’t be doing the censorship, the people should. If you don’t like something, don’t buy it. Censorship is up to the family. It’s up to the papa and the mama. Once the government steps in, where does it stop? Censorship is a family issue.

chapter ten
WRITING AND CREATIVITY

BRADBURY LIVES BY ONE RULE. IT IS HIS MANTRA: “JUMP OFF THE cliff and build your wings on the way down.”

During his teen years in Hollywood, he fetched scripts from dumpsters behind theaters where radio broadcasts were recorded. He studied those scripts and wrote his own and then, in one instance, hand-delivered his narrative creations to George Burns in the hopes that the megastar might use them. Eventually, Burns did. He used a joke by sixteen-year-old Ray Bradbury.

In the early 1950s, having never written a screenplay (Bradbury had only written a screen treatment for It Came from Outer Space at this point in his career), he sent his books to his cinematic hero, John Huston, telling him that he would like to work together one day. A short time later, Huston called and Bradbury was off to Ireland to adapt Moby-Dick for the screen.

Having grown up with animated films, in 1962 Bradbury decided to write a script for a short animated film. Icarus Montgolfier Wright, an eighteen-minute cartoon on the history of flight, went on to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short.

Risk-taking has always been central to Bradbury’s creative modus operandi. If he has the passion, regardless of experience, he will take the leap of faith and work in a new medium, from radio to film to cartoons to architecture, poetry, plays and on and on. He lives by the rule—he jumps off the cliff each and every day.

WELLER: Is there one moment in your writing career that stands out as being particularly exhilarating?

BRADBURY: Well, the first time I saw my name on the cover of Weird Tales. That was great. But the first really great thrill was when I was twenty. Robert Heinlein sold a short story of mine to Rob Wagner’s Script in Beverly Hills. They didn’t pay anything except free copies of the magazine. It was a very handsome magazine like The New Yorker. And one day in August, a letter came in the mail from Rob Wagner saying “ ‘It’s not the Heat, it’s the Hu—’ [the title of Bradbury’s 1940 story] is a lovely story and we’re going to publish it immediately.” Well, I yelled to my mother upstairs and she came running down to the front yard and I showed her the letter. I was twenty years old, and we danced around the yard. No money, but I had copies of the magazine I could show to all my friends to prove I was a writer. You see, that first sale is so important. The psychological effect of it lasts for a year! Maybe you’re not going to sell anything else for a year, but my God, you did it once. And so later I sold it to Weird Tales and Super Science. All of these are little triumphs. You have all these individual moments. And someone like Federico Fellini writing to me. Or Mr. Berenson, saying, in effect, you’re the cat’s pajamas.

WELLER: You say you educated yourself at the Los Angeles Public Library after you graduated from high school in 1938. Did you write there as well as read?

BRADBURY: I’d go down to the main library in downtown LA and wander around the rooms. I would often pick up those little pieces of paper they put out for you to make notes on when you find a book so you can put down the number and the title. They’re big enough so you can put about twenty words on each one—I used to go to the library and write a story on those pieces of paper, wandering from room to room. I wish I had some of those now, because I would go wild with an idea, I couldn’t wait to get home. The library was very important. After high school, I went two or three nights a week for nearly ten years. The library is all the education you need. When I married Maggie in September 1947, I figured I was done. I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven.

WELLER: You have said that you don’t believe in going to college to learn to write. Why is that?

BRADBURY: You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do, and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time, huh? A lot of the people they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught.

WELLER: But you are taught widely in schools.

BRADBURY: And you know why the teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel, the lion’s den, you know. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can’t get free of them, and that’s what kids like in school. They read rocketships and encounters in space, things with dinosaurs, Something Wicked with strange carnivals—you know, all these things. I think I just naturally latch onto them.

All my life I’ve been running through the fields and picking up bright objects. I turn it over and say, “Hey, there’s a story.” And that’s what kids like. Today, my stories are in a thousand anthologies. And I’m in good company. The other writers are quite often dead people who wrote in metaphors: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne. All these people wrote for children. They may not have pretended to, but they did.

WELLER: I teach writing as a professor in an MFA program. Should I stop?

BRADBURY: No, because you know what writing is. You believe the same way I do. Everything is love. You also know the secret—the most important thing a teacher can do is to inspire.

WELLER: Now that you are widely read in schools around the world, have you encountered academic misinterpretation of your work?

BRADBURY: I was lecturing at Cal Fullerton once and they misinterpreted Fahrenheit 451, and after about half an hour of arguing with them, telling them that they were wrong, I said, “Fuck you.” I’ve never used that word before, and I left the classroom. I don’t like that word. You know, you can’t find any of that in my books. Instead, I love to use language like, “He swore.” Then in your mind you can make up what he said. And you’ve got plenty of words in your mind that are even better than the ones I would choose.

WELLER: Is that the only incident you can think of when you grew frustrated with an audience?

BRADBURY: One other time I used that word, and even worse. I was in Berkeley—I lectured in a bookstore up there. And they were all against everything I said. I made the mistake of saying I thought Reagan was okay, and that he brought down the Berlin Wall. And they kept growling at me and making noises and shouting me down. I finally said, “Listen, fuckheads, I came here to lecture, and you came to listen. Now if you want to come up here and talk, I’ll go sit down and listen to you. But in the meantime, assholes, you’ve got to listen to me, or there’s the door. If you don’t like me, get the hell out.” And I waited—one or two people left—and I said, “Now, to continue …”

WELLER: Have you encountered much professional jealousy from other writers because you are so prolific?

BRADBURY: Over the years when I have spoken at universities and colleges, rarely, rarely do the heads of departments meet me at the airport or the train station, because they all have a book in the bottom drawer of their desk that they haven’t finished. And when I show up, I remind them that they haven’t done their work. So when an English professor does meet me at the train or the jet, I know that they are okay and that they have a book that is published or is going to get published.

WELLER: In your early career, you faced a lot of rejection. How did you handle this?

BRADBURY: I figured the editors didn’t know what they were doing.

WELLER: Quite arguably, you are one of the most prolific authors of the twentieth century. This said, do you consider yourself a workaholic?

BRADBURY: No, I’m not.

WELLER: No?

BRADBURY: I love what I’m doing. There’s a difference.

WELLER: Do you write every day?

BRADBURY: For two hours. That’s all.

WELLER: Even on Sundays?

BRADBURY: Yes. Two hours. That’s all you need. If you love what you’re doing, it’s over in an hour. If I type as fast as I can, I can do fifteen hundred words in an hour, maybe more, two thousand words.

WELLER: But you haven’t always written this way. Certainly in the 1940s and ’50s you worked for more than two hours a day?

BRADBURY: That’s true. When I had my office on Wilshire Boulevard from the 1960s through the 1980s, I would go in around ten and work until four. But it’s not work. I’ve never worked a day in my life.

WELLER: Do you ever use a computer?

BRADBURY: Up until my stroke, I used a typewriter. An IBM Selectric.

WELLER: You’ve never worked on a computer? Have you ever owned one?

BRADBURY: A computer’s a typewriter. Why would I need another typewriter? I have one.

WELLER: Most would argue that a computer makes revising a whole lot easier. Not to mention spell check.

BRADBURY: I don’t correct.

WELLER: No?

BRADBURY: I’ve been writing for seventy years. If I don’t know how to spell by now …

WELLER: What role did your wife play over the years as an editor and critic of your work?

BRADBURY: Very important. If there was something wrong in my writing, she always caught it. I dedicated The Martian Chronicles to her. She typed the entire manuscript. We couldn’t afford a typist, of course. So she typed the whole thing.

WELLER: Who else have you relied on to read your work before it is published?

BRADBURY: Don Congdon, my agent in New York, has been the most important person. I married him the same week I married Maggie. He was an editor at Simon and Schuster in 1947. He wrote me and said, “I’m leaving my job as an editor and I’m becoming an agent. Do you need one?” And I said, “Only if it’s for a lifetime.” And he was with me throughout my entire career, until very recently. He passed away on November 30, 2009. He was wonderful. He was my best critic. I wrote for him, basically. When I wrote, he was my audience. He was never wrong. He never put me into a bad deal. He never wanted money instead of what was good for me. If a deal came up that had a lot of money connected to it, he always said, “What is this going to mean for your future? Are you going to be happy?” If I said “No,” then we didn’t do the deal.

He was so dear. I fell in love with him immediately when I met him in 1947. When he got a crew cut in the late 1940s, I got a crew cut. I so admired him. He was bright and fun. Early on, I went back to New York about once a year, and we shared this wonderful friendship.

WELLER: That sounds very rare. You hear creative people complain all the time about business relationships.

BRADBURY: And that’s wrong. You should be in writing because you are in love with it. Not because of money. I’m in theater and I’ve never made a penny. I’ve written thirty or forty plays. I’ve put them on myself. I used to say to my wife every five years or so, “Is this the year we open the window and throw the money out?” And she said, “You want to do another play?” I said, “Yeah,” and she said, “Open the window.” When I do a play I throw the money out and it never comes back. And I don’t expect it to.

WELLER: In your book Zen in the Art of Writing, you wrote that early on in your writing career you made lists of nouns as a way to generate story ideas, “the Jar, the Cistern, the Lake, the Skeleton,” and so on. Do you still do this?

BRADBURY: Yeah. But not as much, because it just automatically happens now. I don’t have to write it down. But in the old days I knew I had to dredge my subconscious, and the nouns did this. I learned this early on. Three things are in your head. First, everything you have experienced from the day of your birth until right now. Every single second, every single hour, every single day. Then, how you reacted to those events, whether it was disastrous or joyful. So there are two things you have in your mind to give you material. Then, you have all the art experiences you have had that are separate from the living experiences: the things you’ve learned from other writers, artists, poets, film directors, and composers. So that’s all in your mind as a fabulous mulch, and you have to begin to cause it to come out. So how do you do that? By making lists of nouns and then asking yourself, “What does each noun mean?” You can go and make up your own list right now, and it would be different than mine. It’s your own list of nouns. The night. The crickets. The train whistle. The basement. The attic. The tennis shoes. The fireworks. The fire balloons. All these things are very personal.

Then, when you get the list down, that’s when you begin to word-associate around it. You ask, “Why did I put this word down? What does it mean to me? Why did I instantly put this noun down and not some other word?” Do this and you’re on your way to being a good writer. You must pour everything out that’s in your subconscious. Too many people are writing for the outside world. You can’t write for other people. You can’t write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things. I tell people, “Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them.” When I wrote Fahrenheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are.

WELLER: Okay, so you’ve made a list of nouns, very personal words that come from the depths of your subconscious, then you word-associate around the noun. As a writer, where do you go from there?

BRADBURY: You begin to write little pensées about your nouns—pensées are a particularly French form of writing. It’s prose poetry. It’s evocative. It tries to be metaphorical. Saint-John Perse published four or five huge volumes of them on beautiful paper with lovely type that were purchased by a few eccentrics all over the world. Each page had a single paragraph on it. I could never afford one because they must have been twenty or thirty dollars, fifty-five years ago. But he influenced me because I read him in the bookstore, and I started to write short, descriptive paragraphs, one hundred to two hundred words each, and in them I began to examine my nouns. And then I’d bring some characters on to talk about that noun and that place, and all of a sudden I had a story going.

I started doing this when I was fifteen, sixteen years old. I used to do the same thing with photographs that I did with nouns. I would rip photographs out of Coronet magazine. It was put out by Esquire. I’d take the photographs and I’d write little prose poems about the photographs. Certain pictures evoked in me things from my past. When I look at the paintings of Edward Hopper, it does this. He did those wonderful townscapes of empty cafés, empty theaters at midnight with maybe one person there. The sense of isolation and loneliness is fantastic. So I’d look at those landscapes and I’d fill them with my imagination. So I wrote little pensées to go with these pictures and I put them away. I still have them. This was the beginning of bringing out what was me. I wasn’t writing for this market or that market, I was writing from within.

WELLER: Can you cite an example of a pensée in your own work?

BRADBURY: The description of the fog horn in the short story, “The Fog Horn.” The paragraph describing the dinosaur in “A Sound of Thunder.” Those are good examples.

WELLER: You had a number of influences as a writer. Did you ever meet any of your literary heroes?

BRADBURY: I met Eudora Welty at a writers’ conference in Santa Barbara. And she was lovely. I was able to tell her that I loved her. I discovered her stories when I was twenty-two years old, and she influenced me, along with John Collier. Those two shaped my life.

WELLER: What stories of Welty’s do you recall were an influence?

BRADBURY: Her book of short stories called A Curtain of Green.

WELLER: What was it about that book that shaped you as a writer?

BRADBURY: It’s very odd. It’s very strange. It was like a book written by a crazy lady. It appealed to something that was crooked in me.

WELLER: In hindsight, can you think of any stories you’ve written that had that sort of crookedness?

BRADBURY: It’s hard to say because you blend it in a way with the influence of John Collier and it grows fuzzy. It’s like John Collier knocked her up and they gave me the baby.

WELLER: So if there’s a crookedness to Welty, what was it about Collier that intrigued you?

BRADBURY: He was very weird too. He was always strange. A brilliant strange. And I met him at long last. I got his autograph on a book in 1952, and he became a friend. I went to a Christmas party because I knew he was going to be there along with his wife. And the whole evening, his wife didn’t let him talk. So I spent Christmas Eve with John Collier, and all I heard him say at the end of the evening was “Goodnight, folks.” I wrote a poem about that. It’s in one of my books of poetry.

WELLER: Tell me about your encounter with John Steinbeck.

BRADBURY: I was traveling in Mexico with my friend Grant Beach in the fall of 1945. I was twenty-five years old, and we visited Mexico City. We stayed overnight in a private home owned by the people who owned one of the biggest hotels in Cuernavaca. The home was occupied by girls from Smith College most of the year, but they were on vacation, so all the rooms were available. My Aunt Neva’s partner, Anne Anthony, told us about the place. She was a photographer for National Geographic and was in Mexico City at the same time. So we stayed at the house and had a nice room.

The first morning I was there, a dog ran into the breakfast room, a big sheepdog with one blue eye and one brown eye, and sat in front of me. The dog was followed by a tall man who came in after him. He sat down in front of me, and it was John Steinbeck. I went into shock. He was drunk at breakfast. Tipsy. Happy drunk. Steinbeck was there making a film, The Pearl, based on his book of the same title. I was too shy and I was too stunned at meeting him. So I didn’t get an autograph or anything.

Then the strangest thing happened. Anne Anthony was staying in the room next to Steinbeck, and they shared a bathroom. She had strung some of her photos up to dry in the bathroom, and Steinbeck said to her, “I know what you’re up to! You crept into our room last night and took pictures of me and my girlfriend and you’re going to blackmail us.” Anne was incensed. He kept saying, “I know what you’re up to! I know what you’re up to!” He wouldn’t let her off the hook. Then he says, “Who owns that station wagon out in front of the house?” Well, it was Anne’s station wagon, and Steinbeck says, “That was my station wagon three months ago in Hollywood. It’s a wreck. They sold you a heap of junk.” And it was true! He said, “Where’d you buy that? I’ll tell you the name of the dealer in Hollywood.” He gave the address, and Anne said, “Yes, that’s where I bought it.” So she bought Steinbeck’s second-hand car. He’d got it in a wreck and he got rid of it. The dealer repaired it and sold it to Anne. It was an incredible coincidence.

WELLER: How did Steinbeck influence you?

BRADBURY: Steinbeck’s story “Chrysanthemums,” which I read when I was eighteen, helped me discover how to write objectively. In that story, Steinbeck doesn’t tell us anything about the woman’s thoughts, but when she sees the chrysanthemums on the highway, thrown out by that salesman, we know damn well what she’s got to be thinking. She thought she moved that young man by giving him the love with her flowers, but then, driving into town, she looks out and there on the highway are the chrysanthemums. It breaks her heart. But Steinbeck didn’t have to say it. He described it so well that it breaks our heart! The lesson is, you don’t have to tell the thoughts, just tell the action. You must learn to describe things so that readers will know what a character is thinking without the writer having to tell them.

WELLER: The Grapes of Wrath is also an important book to you. Why?

BRADBURY: In The Grapes of Wrath, every other chapter is a description, a metaphor, prose poetry, it’s not plot. I read that book and I learned to ponder, to philosophize, to make images. So every other chapter doesn’t move the plot, it moves ideas all to themselves. I subconsciously borrowed that structure from Steinbeck when I wrote The Martian Chronicles. Every other chapter in The Grapes of Wrath describes the land, or the highway, or the individuals, a whole chapter on the camps out in California, a whole chapter on Route 66. The bridge chapters in The Martian Chronicles are pure Steinbeck.

Thirty years after The Martian Chronicles was published, a young fan wrote to me and said, “Mr. Bradbury, has anyone ever told you that maybe you were influenced by The Grapes of Wrath? I read The Grapes of Wrath the other day and said, ‘My God, this is a lot like The Martian Chronicles.’ Did you read The Grapes of Wrath when you were a young man?” And I wrote back and said, “Yes! You’re right! I read him when I was nineteen. He became part of my life and my soul.” Isn’t that a great story? I wrote that fan back and thanked him and said, “You’re the only one that’s discovered this.”

WELLER: When people ask you to name your favorite writers, George Bernard Shaw is usually right near the top of your list. What influence has Shaw had on your writing?

BRADBURY: Oh, a lot, once I really knew his work. I didn’t begin to read him until I was in my thirties, and especially when I got to know Charles Laughton. Charlie introduced me to a lot of Shaw’s stuff. Then I discovered his prefaces. Right now I’m reading the book of his letters to H.G. Wells and H.G. Wells’ responses. It’s just wonderful stuff. No matter what Shaw did, he had a way of writing that was so original and so fresh, you could read a book of his musical criticism and, a hundred years later, you don’t know any of the people, but it’s fascinating reading.

WELLER: What makes it timeless?

BRADBURY: His imagination. His way of looking at things. His way of being serious with his tongue in his cheek. He was very light, but very serious.

WELLER: I’d like to talk about Leigh Brackett. She was, arguably, your greatest writing mentor. What did she teach you about the craft?

BRADBURY: She was my teacher. I imitated her, of course. She had those beautiful short stories in Planet Stories about John Stark, they were all Edgar Rice Burroughs par excellence. In other words, she could write better than Burroughs. She took the same sort of things he did: the fighting man of Mars, the gods of Mars, the Martian stories, but gave them that extra ambiance, style, and imagination, and that’s how she got the job writing The Big Sleep for Howard Hawks.

WELLER: How did you meet her?

BRADBURY: When I joined the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society in 1938. A few years after I joined, she became a member, along with Robert Heinlein, Henry Kuttner, Jack Williamson, and, of course, Forry Ackerman, who was the founder of the group. We all met every Thursday evening in the Brown Room at Clifton’s Cafeteria in downtown LA. Joining that group changed my life completely. I found a group of people who were almost as weird as I was. Forry Ackerman loaned me the money to go to the First World Science Fiction Convention in New York in 1939. He also paid for my magazine, Futuria Fantasia. But Leigh Brackett was the most important. She was my great teacher. We met every Sunday at Muscle Beach in Venice, and she read my bad stories and I read her good ones.

WELLER: Did you ever have romantic feelings for her?

BRADBURY: The funny thing was, my hair was longer than hers, so people thought I was girlish and people thought she was mannish. We were a real couple, huh? And if I hadn’t met Maggie, we might have wound up having a love affair—we were very close to having a love affair quite often. I think we both sensed that an affair might hurt our friendship. You have to discuss these things with people. You meet certain girls along the way and then you sit down and have a serious discussion. Are we going to wind up in bed? And if we do, is that going to hurt us? Do we want the friendship more? And if you’re smart, you pick the friendship.

WELLER: Brackett really helped hone your early short story writing. Your wife Maggie once told me that she thought, of all the mediums you have worked in, from poetry to screenplays to novels, you were best at the short story. Am I mistaken, or do you prefer reading short stories to reading novels?

BRADBURY: Yeah. It’s my real appetite. I know short stories.

WELLER: Do you think that it’s an issue of patience? They call it attention deficit disorder these days.

BRADBURY: Yeah. Turn an asset out of a liability. I think it’s true. My attention is not there. So you write what you can write. You write short stories.

WELLER: The question you get asked most often is, “Where do you get your ideas?” What advice do you give young writers when it comes to coming up with original characters and stories?

BRADBURY: You have to have a lot of antennae. The prescription I give to students is this: Read an essay a night for a thousand nights, one poem a night for a thousand nights, one short story a night for a thousand nights, and at the end of a thousand nights, you have three thousand metaphors in your head, and they become your antennae. So it makes it easy for you to come up with ideas. That’s where the ideas come from. The addition of your life plus the metaphors you have ingested makes for a very rich mixture in your head. But if you’re not doing that, what the hell is in your head, except your experiences? That’s not enough. You can’t wait for life to happen, you have to make it happen.

I know writers who wait around for months or years for an idea to come through something they lived. You can’t do that! Things happen to you every day right in front of you. Simple, everyday things. I was thinking the other day about the old problem we all have: You sit down at a formal dinner with all these people and you think, “Now whose bread is that? Whose fork is that?” And you wait for someone else to take the first fork and the first bun. So I thought the other day at dinner with some people, I said, “What if no one ever moved? What if the first person didn’t take the bun or the fork? And they all sat there?” There’s your short story.

WELLER: So your prescription of one thousand poems, one thousand essays, and one thousand short stories—is that all it takes to help generate ideas?

BRADBURY: Even then, there’s no guarantee that it will spark. God gave me the ability to react to the junk in my head. But I can at least teach you to collect and be curious.

WELLER: What do you like best about the writer’s life?

BRADBURY: It’s different every day. In 1936, I went to see Blackstone the magician at the Orpheum Theatre here in Los Angeles. As you know, I loved him when I was a boy and saw him perform several times when I lived in Waukegan. When I saw him in 1936, in Los Angeles, I ordered myself onstage.

WELLER: How do you order yourself onstage?

BRADBURY: He asked the audience for volunteers, and I ran up before he had a chance to choose someone. He was putting a half-dollar into a bottle, and it was my job to hold the bottle. He hit the bottle with the half-dollar and it suddenly appeared inside. And then he shook the bottle and brought it out to show the audience. As he did this, I could smell whiskey on his breath. I realized then that if you can find work that’s different every day of your life, you’ll never have to drift. How horrible it must be to be onstage two or three times a day for a year! Doing the same thing! It would drive you crazy! Smelling his breath was a portent of a future I didn’t want. It was based on boredom. So writing, to me, has been so wonderful because it’s been different every day for seventy years.

WELLER: What do you think your role is as a writer? Is it to entertain? To inspire? To instruct?

BRADBURY: All of those things. And I have to help you through things. If I can get your attention and you have anything bubbling to the surface, if I can help you surface it, so you can go on the next day and be better, that’s my job. Increasingly, in the last few years with a lot of my stories, all I want to do for the rest of my life is make people happy. And that’s why fantasy is wonderful. Too much reality is depressing. It leaves you with a terrible disability.

WELLER: Many writers write realistic stories.

BRADBURY: No, no. That’s too easy. I could do that tomorrow. I know enough about people. Maggie and I stayed at La Siesta Villas in Palm Springs. Thirty years ago, there was a young man and his wife tending the place, and we thought they were a little peculiar. They were probably taking dope of some sort, I don’t know. Anyway, she went to her doctor one day and had X-rays taken and she had incurable cancer. You know what happened? He packed up and left home and never came back.

WELLER: He left her in the lurch?

BRADBURY: Yeah. So you say to me, I don’t know life. I do know about life. I can make lists of terrible things. But instead I look at the lists and I say, okay, what can I do over here then?

WELLER: Who says you don’t know anything about life?

BRADBURY: People say, they read my stories. They read Dandelion Wine, they don’t read it well enough, because all the darkness is there. And Something Wicked, it’s all about life, it’s all about death. So when people say to me, “You don’t know about life,” I know about life. I know all these things. I choose not to write about them. I couldn’t write that short story about that woman with cancer. It would depress people so terribly.

WELLER: Does negative criticism of your work hurt you?

BRADBURY: No. I try not to pay attention. Just get your work done.

WELLER: If your first draft, as you often say, is primarily your subconscious speaking to the page, do you intellectualize in the rewriting stages?

BRADBURY: Sure. I go through and cut. Most short stories are too long. When I wrote the novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, it was a hundred and fifty thousand words. So I went through and cut out fifty thousand. It’s important to get out of the way of yourself. Clean the kindling away. The rubbish. Get it out of the way. Make it clear.

WELLER: You are a fast writer. Are you a fast editor?

BRADBURY: No. The way I edit myself is this: I type my first draft quickly. Very impulsively. I get out of the way of myself. A few days later, I retype the whole thing, and my subconscious, as I retype, gives me new words. Maybe it’ll take retyping it many times until it is done. Sometimes it takes very little revision work. I don’t know how it works for other people, but that’s how it works for me.

WELLER: How do you know when a piece of writing is finished?

BRADBURY: Again, it’s all instinct. If you read enough and write enough, you train yourself to know these things.

WELLER: What time of day do you do most of your writing? Are you a morning writer? A night writer?

BRADBURY: All the time. I get up every morning not knowing what I’m going to do. I usually have a perception around dawn when I wake up. I have what I call “the theater of morning” inside my head. And all these voices talk and when they come up with a good metaphor, then I jump out of bed and run and trap them before they’re gone. So that’s the whole secret: to do things that excite you.

WELLER: You also take naps.

BRADBURY: And I always have. That way I have two mornings!

WELLER: And what about writing at night?

BRADBURY: Yes. Sometimes I get so excited with ideas I can’t fall asleep. In Paris, at three in the morning—there’s something about Paris—one night I stayed up all night and I wrote parts of three or four different stories. Incredible. Well, the city is so beautiful. God, I hope to go back one day. I miss it terribly.

WELLER: Do you make outlines or plot your stories out?

BRADBURY: No, never. You can’t do that. It’s just like you can’t plot tomorrow or next year or ten years from now. When you plot books you take all the energy and vitality out of them. There’s no blood. You have to live it from day to day and let your characters do things.

WELLER: You have told me on several occasions that a writer must not mess with his younger self. That is, don’t go back and rewrite previously published material. Yet there seems to be a contradiction here. You edited and, in some cases, rewrote stories in The October Country that originally appeared in your first book, Dark Carnival. Another example of this is the stage play of Fahrenheit 451. You added a few scenes to the stage version that were not in the novel. How do you respond to this apparent contradiction?

BRADBURY: I only add things or rewrite when the characters demand it. In other words, they came to me like Constance did after I was finishing Death Is a Lonely Business. She said, “I don’t want to be dead.” She was in my typewriter, so I retyped her and she came back. I killed her off in the first book. So when the characters come to me and say this, then I make changes. But I don’t stand over my books and try to change them with my intellect.

WELLER: What about the rewriting process? A story like “The Homecoming” went through several different incarnations. It first appeared in the October 1946 issue of Mademoiselle. Then it was published in 1947 in Dark Carnival. You reworked it for the 1955 collection The October Country, and then it appeared again in a slightly different version in 2001’s From the Dust Returned. Weren’t you “messing with your younger self” each time you altered this tale?

BRADBURY: Well, that was a long time ago. I was only twenty-five or twenty-six when I wrote that story. I really didn’t know how to write back then, I was just learning. I had to learn how to relax. I worried about myself too much back then. That’s very dangerous. As the years went by, the stories got better when I got off my own back. So I had to rewrite “The Homecoming,” but I was very careful when I did it. When you’re rewriting like that, you can only run a damp rag over a story. That’s all. It’s like that old quote about love affairs from Oscar Wilde, “Love will die if held too tightly, love will fly if held too lightly.”

WELLER: Do you ever reread your old books and short stories once they’ve been published?

BRADBURY: Every so often, late at night, I come downstairs, open one of my books, read a paragraph and say, “My God.” I sit there and cry because I haven’t done any of this. It’s a God-given thing, and I’m so grateful, so, so grateful. The best description of my career as a writer is, “At play in the fields of the Lord.” It’s been wonderful fun, and I’ll be damned where any of it came from. I’ve been very fortunate.

chapter eleven
SCIENCE FICTION

SOMETIME IN THE EARLY 1980S, RAY AND MAGGIE BRADBURY TOOK a trip to Washington, DC. A terrific storm had rolled in over the city as the couple, along with some friends, made their way back to their hotel after a night on the town. It was after midnight, and they decided to stop and peer through the glass doors of the Air and Space Museum. Ray pressed his nose to the glass, and just as his eyes started to make out faint details of silhouetted flying machines in the dark gallery, lightning flashed across Washington. In that crack of an instant, Ray spotted Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, the aircraft the great aviator used to become the first to cross the Atlantic. All went dark and a rumble of thunder followed. Then, another bolt of lightning, and the lobby of the museum was again momentarily illuminated. In the glow, Ray and Maggie could see the Wright Brothers’ plane, the Flyer, hanging by wires from the ceiling. Then, again, darkness. Followed by more thunder. Another whip-snap of lightning-flash and Ray and Maggie glimpsed the Apollo 11 capsule, the very vehicle used to carry the astronauts safely back to Earth after the first manned mission landed on the moon. In those brief milliseconds of stormy glow, Ray and Maggie were looking at the entire, sweeping history of aviation. As the rain fell, both husband and wife stood in the downpour with tears streaking down their cheeks.

The flying machines inside the Smithsonian are now antiques, much like the technology in Bradbury’s science fiction. As Frank Darabont, the writer and director of The Shawshank Redemption, once said, “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.”

Bradbury is, in some ways, the original steam punk, the contemporary sub-genre of science fiction that employs the antiquated rust and rivet and whirligig technology of Victorian times. He writes about the future with an eye squarely on the past.

Technology is simply a means to an end for Bradbury—its authenticity and accuracy secondary to his constant emphasis on the human condition. He was always the stepbrother to the science fiction community, the man who dared put an atmosphere on Mars; the writer who never bothered to explain the inner workings of his time machines. To hell with it.

John W. Campbell, the legendary editor of Astounding Science Fiction, often credited with launching the hardware-heavy golden era of science fiction in the late 1930s, only published one Bradbury story. His fellow sci-fi scribes embraced him with a shrug. His technology was laughable, but he had, without question, a way with words.

Yet today, it is often said that there are the “ABCs” of science fiction. Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke.

And while Ray Bradbury has often been deemed an outsider in the field he helped establish, he has outsold his alphabetical brethren many times over.

WELLER: Let’s talk about some of your science fiction contemporaries. What are your opinions of Ursula K. Le Guin?

BRADBURY: I met her years ago. She’s a very good writer. She has a wonderful style. She does things that tend to be more fantastic.

WELLER: Do you think you had an influence on her writing at all?

BRADBURY: Oh, I don’t think so. We’re about the same age. I don’t think there is any influence one way or another. It’s like myself and Arthur Clarke. I’d known him, oh, almost fifty years, but he writes a different sort of science fiction: he’s more technical. We were good friends, but I haven’t read in that field for fifty years. I don’t want to be influenced by my friends, just in case I’ve got an idea that’s similar, I don’t want to be upset, or think I shouldn’t do it.

WELLER: How did you meet Arthur C. Clarke?

BRADBURY: He came to visit me around 1952. He published a book about space travel with the Book-of-the-Month Club, and I invited him over to the house one night. My wife was visiting her mother and father, so I cooked him some hamburgers and gave him some wine. He and I got on very well together.

When 2001: A Space Odyssey came along in 1968, I went to the premiere at Warner Brothers with Chuck Jones, Arthur Clarke, and my wife Maggie. The film was four hours long. When HAL destroys the astronauts on board the ship, they are in mummy cases. They are asleep going across the universe and you don’t know those people. So when HAL kills them, it’s not important. I keep telling people that if, when they made that film, they spent ten minutes on the characters so when HAL kills them it actually matters, it would be a much better movie. But he kills people you don’t know, so it doesn’t count. Stanley Kubrick never learned screenplays. 2001 was terrible. It had no real plot. No characters. But it was a brilliant exercise in photography and music.

When it was over, we staggered out of the theater, and I said to Arthur Clarke and Chuck Jones, “Let’s go to a bar where all the young people will show up. This film is a twenty-four-beer film. People gotta drink a lot of beer and sit there and try to explain it to each other.” So we went to the nearest bar, and it was full of young people, nattering and badgering each other, saying the film meant this, the film meant that. They were saying what I said they’d be talking about. I said to Arthur that night, the film needs two hours cut, at least. And the next week they cut at least an hour out of it.

I went to see the film again, and it was still too long. I timed one scene where there’s a press conference and they reveal two items: it was seven minutes long. Oh my God! The actors talked forever about nothing! There’s no reason for that. There’s nothing brilliant. There’s no metaphor. Nothing startling. The film had a lot of scenes like that: scenes that went on too long. I could go through it with an editor and cut the film myself, and tomorrow it would be a brilliant movie. All you need is ninety minutes. You don’t need three hours.

WELLER: Let’s talk about some of the other science fiction writers who were occasionally part of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society with you in the late 1930s. Robert Heinlein was one of your mentors. What are your memories of him?

BRADBURY: Heinlein was a big influence. He was a humanist. He wrote stories about real people, instead of mechanical stories. He was a vast influence. He was older than me, and when I met him in the Science Fiction Society, he had already been published and made a name for himself. I went up to his house in Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills, and he let me stand behind him and watch him while he typed his stories. He was very strict. He didn’t speak to me for years because I didn’t join the army.

There was a science fiction convention at the Century Plaza Hotel about twenty-five years ago, and I gave a speech and Heinlein was in the audience, but I didn’t know it. And during my speech I praised Bob because he sold my first short story. And when my speech was over, I was down mainly with the fans, and I felt a hand on my shoulder and it was Heinlein, and we made up after all those years.

WELLER: What are your memories of the writer A.E. van Vogt?

BRADBURY: He came to meetings of the science fiction society. He helped invent Scientology and Dianetics. He helped promote L. Ron Hubbard. He taught classes in Dianetics. We were totally different writers, and he wrote different science fiction. I couldn’t learn from him for the same reason I couldn’t learn from Isaac Asimov. They wrote scientific stuff and technological stuff that to me was boring.

WELLER: You knew Isaac Asimov. What do you think of his work? It hails from a different school of science fiction than your writing.

BRADBURY: Asimov was a scientific genius and he wrote in a drier kind of style. I recognize his genius, but he was too technical. He told you how to build a rocket. I didn’t want to know. I wanted to know how to fly one! He wrote super-galactic stuff that I never knew how to write. But he was a very nice man, very shy. Did I tell you about his encounter with me and Gorbachev?

WELLER: Briefly. The day you had lunch with Gorbachev?

BRADBURY: And Gorbachyova. I was invited by Gorbachev for lunch at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC, in 1990. I had a copy of The Martian Chronicles with me in Russian. After I talked to him, I talked to his wife Raisa Gorbachyova, and I gave her a copy of my book. Well, Asimov, who was just ahead of me, it turns out, had one of his books too, but he was too shy to give it to her. That’s the kind of guy he was. And he saw this and ran back and gave his book to Gorbachyova. I thought it was so sweet. For a learned man, for an intellectual man, he is so much brighter than I will ever be. He had an incredible IQ, but he was like Woody Allen.

One of the great moments that day at lunch was when Gorbachev made a little speech, and I was sitting with Eugene McCarthy, the politician who ran for president (I helped him with his campaign twenty-five or thirty years ago), and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. In the middle of his speech, Gorbachev said, “I want to mention the fact that today there are two people here because my daughter loves them and we invited them, and they are Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury.” Isaac was at the next table and I looked over at him, and Douglas Fairbanks looked at me and gave me a big wink, and Mr. McCarthy applauded. My whole body blushed! What a day it was. When I went back to my hotel later, I went into the main desk and said, “Get me out of here, I’m leaving.” They said, “Well, you’re supposed to leave tomorrow.” I said, “Yeah, but I’m so happy, I want to go home to my wife and my cats.” So I went home early. You can’t beat leaving like that. Gorbachev was so sweet. He was a very nice man.

WELLER: As for Asimov, when did you first meet him?

BRADBURY: We met when we were both nineteen at the World Science Fiction Convention in New York City in 1939. He was already established. He had sold his first short stories and I was two years away from selling anything.

WELLER: Did you know Philip K. Dick?

BRADBURY: Forty years ago we were together at a bar and we talked. You meet people and you realize they don’t like being alive. They don’t like talking. He seemed pretty negative.

WELLER: The first introduction you ever wrote in a book was for Theodore Sturgeon’s Without Sorcery in 1948. When did you first meet Sturgeon?

BRADBURY: I met him when I was back in New York in the late 1940s. We had lunch and became good friends. I told him how much he influenced me when I was younger. He moved ahead of me with his career and wrote some wonderful short stories, which I devoured, in Astounding and Worlds Unknown. Anyway, he asked me to do the introduction, and that was the very first one I ever did. It’s overwrought, I think, but it’s very honest. He was strange in a wonderful way. He told me he had an apartment, and the floor of the apartment was one big mattress so when he brought girlfriends home and opened the door, he tripped them onto the floor and it was all over in no time.

WELLER: Let’s talk about science fiction in film. In your opinion, what is the best science fiction movie?

BRADBURY: Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s the greatest film of science fiction ever made. They should run it in the Vatican. They should go to St. Peter and have Pope John’s ghost come see it. Why? Michelangelo wrote the script. Michelangelo had God reach down with his all-powerful finger, and Adam reached up the other way and they touched, and Close Encounters is God encountering man and man encountering God. It’s a religious film. There’s only one religious film ever made by a science fiction director and Spielberg did it.

I called him the day after I saw Close Encounters and I said, “Mr. Spielberg, I saw your film last night, can I come see you?” He said, “Yes, you want to come to my office?” So I ran to his office at Universal City. I walked into his office and he said, “How’d you like your film?” I said, “What?” He said, “I would never have made Close Encounters of the Third Kind if I hadn’t seen It Came from Outer Space when I was a boy.” I said, “Oh God, I’m honored, because I think you’ve made the greatest science fiction film I’ve ever seen.” Before I left his office I told him, “I now adopt you as my honorary son.” When he wrote me years later, at the end of the letters, he always wrote, “Am I still your son?”

WELLER: What did you think of the Star Wars films?

BRADBURY: The first three were wonderful. The second film, The Empire Strikes Back, is the best because it has Zen Buddhism in it. My friend Irv Kirchner directed it, and my great teacher Leigh Brackett wrote it. I stayed in touch with Irv. He’s a very fine director, and he’s done some very fine films, but that’s his best film of all.

WELLER: What is Zen about The Empire Strikes Back?

BRADBURY: The message of Zen—I’m a Zen Buddhist—is something I have been teaching people for years when it comes to writing. It’s what Yoda says, “Don’t think, do.” That’s pure Zen.

WELLER: Do you really consider yourself a Zen Buddhist?

BRADBURY: It’s a nice label, but I don’t like labels. I don’t need a label.

WELLER: Were you a fan of Star Trek?

BRADBURY: It was very good. I knew Gene Roddenberry. He wanted me to write for the show. He showed me his pilot, and I said, “I can’t do it because they are your characters and your ideas, they’re not mine.” I spoke at his memorial service. On the way there, I met up with my friend Stan Freberg. I went to visit him because it was a sad day and I wanted to be cheered up. I went over to Stan’s studio where he was making a commercial. He introduced me to a young woman who was a musical composer. She said, “Oh, Mr. Bradbury, I just loved Star Trek.” And I said, “No, my dear, I’m on my way to bury him. I’m on my way to his funeral right now.” She was so embarrassed. I said, “No, it happens all the time.”

So I got over to the memorial service for Roddenberry and I was the first speaker. I got up and said, “It happened again just now: On my way here today I was mistaken for Gene Roddenberry. I can imagine sometime in the future I’ll be walking down the street in Beverly Hills and a woman will come running up to me and say, ‘Oh, Mr. Roddenberry, I thought you were dead!’ And my answer will be, ‘Not as long as I’m alive.’ ”

WELLER: Who is writing science fiction and fantasy today that has the potential to be a new Ray Bradbury?

BRADBURY: I haven’t read science fiction or fantasy for more than fifty years. But from what I can tell, the nearest thing to me is Greg Baer. I’ve known him since he was in high school. I’m his papa. He was an artist, and he came to me with his paintings and then gradually he became a writer. I encouraged him, and now he has more awards than I do. He’s the nearest thing to me. But the nearest real thing to me, years ago, was Charles Beaumont. He was one of my students too. He died young. He was maybe thirty-eight. He had some peculiar disease that aged him. It was like a horror story. He turned eighty overnight.

WELLER: How do you respond when science fiction purists criticize you for flawed technology in your stories?

BRADBURY: Who cares? I spoke at a graduation ceremony at Caltech a few years ago, and they introduced me by saying, “Here is Mr. Ray Bradbury, the man who put an atmosphere on Mars.” So they make a joke of it. They put up with me.

WELLER: When you were a younger writer, did you worry more about the science in your work? Did you research?

BRADBURY: Here and there, but not much, really. If you’re going to write The Martian Chronicles, you can’t have people walking around in space suits. You have to just say, “No, there’s an atmosphere after all. We didn’t know that.”

WELLER: Do you believe there is life on other planets?

BRADBURY: There are a million planets out there. Of course.

WELLER: But you don’t believe we’ve been visited?

BRADBURY: No, there’s no proof. Roswell is a bunch of shit. It’s all a lie.

WELLER: Do you think humans will ever reach Andromeda, the nearest galaxy to our own?

BRADBURY: If we can create the technology to travel at the speed of light.

WELLER: Will that happen?

BRADBURY: I think so, yes.

WELLER: And what about time travel?

BRADBURY: No, time travel will never happen. It’s totally impossible.

chapter twelve
LIFE, LIVING & THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

RAY LIVES EACH DAY WITH IMMENSE GRATITUDE. HE HAS ALWAYS been this way, even when he was a little boy. Ebullient. Excitable. A lover of life. Each time Bradbury leaves his rambling West Los Angeles home, he steps outside and notes the beauty of the day. He comments on the blooming flowers in the small flower garden along the side of the house. He looks to the sky, shields his eyes with his hand, and squints at the glory of the cascading sunshine.

“It’s David Lean light!” he says, referring to the great British filmmaker, a personal favorite. “Lean liked to photograph his films late in the afternoon or early in the morning so everything had that golden patina of sunshine.”

This is how Bradbury sees the world. He yearns to have more days on this Earth to create and, quite simply, to celebrate living.

WELLER: Do you consider yourself an optimist?

BRADBURY: Well, if you’re not going to be an optimist, you better not go on living. I mean, if you start every day saying, “I’m gonna lose,” what kind of a day is that? I’m going to win, maybe I won’t. I want to try this, let’s see if it works. If it doesn’t work, do something else. What the hell! But I don’t believe in optimism. I believe in optimal behavior. That’s a different thing. If you behave every day of your life to the top of your genetics, what can you do? Test it. Find out. You don’t know what you can do. You haven’t done it yet. So that’s optimal behavior. And when you behave that way you have a feeling of optimism. There’s a difference. Not to be optimistic, but to behave optimally. At the top of your lungs, shout and listen to the echoes. You must live life at the top of your voice!

I learned a lesson years ago. I had some wonderful Swedish meatballs at my mother’s table with my dad and my brother, and when I finished I pushed back from the table and said, “God! That was beautiful.” And my brother said, “No, it was good.” Do you see the difference?

WELLER: Do you consider yourself a hopeful man?

BRADBURY: Action is hope. There is no hope without action. So at the end of each day, you’ve done your work and you lie there and you think, well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. And at the end of the week you have all of this accumulation, and at the end of a year, you look back and say, “I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.”

WELLER: You suffered a stroke on November 4, 1999. What are your recollections of that experience?

BRADBURY: I was out at my house in Palm Springs working on a short story and a novel, and all of a sudden, I couldn’t walk very well. I was walking around the house and suddenly I got unstable, and I couldn’t talk very well, either. I called my wife and she sent my driver out to get me, and when he arrived I said, “I want to go home,” and he said, “No, no, I’m taking you right to the hospital.” So he saved my life. He took me to the Eisenhower Hospital in Palm Springs, and they ran tests on me, and they saw I was in lousy condition. My leg was paralyzed, my arm was paralyzed, I couldn’t talk very well, but getting me to the hospital that quickly saved my life.

WELLER: Tell me about your recovery.

BRADBURY: It’s severe because you can’t move. You lie in bed and you say to your leg, “Okay, move,” and it doesn’t. It’s like a dead dog. “Roll over, dead dog, roll over.” And does your hand move? No. So after a period of weeks, finally, slowly, you get a finger to move, you get your toes to move. Time begins to go by, and you think you’ll never get through the first month, but you do. And finally your leg begins to come alive. God has been good to me. I’ve been given good genetics, and the whole experience was good for me because I’ve taken off all this weight. So my blood sugar is normal now. I don’t have to take medicines for that. My blood pressure is normal again after many years. I did all this to myself. I have no one to blame: lots of beer, lots of wine, overweight by seventy pounds, and it was time to take it off.

WELLER: Is it your intention as a writer to inspire your readers?

BRADBURY: Yes. I wrote an article once called “Marvels and Miracles, Pass It On.” That’s my job. To remind you of your potential and how wonderful life is constantly.

WELLER: Have you ever experimented with drugs?

BRADBURY: Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, and Christopher Isherwood called me one day, and they wanted me to try some drugs. Huxley was experimenting with drugs for his book The Doors of Perception. They said it was all perfectly safe, and they had a nurse with them. I said, “Look, I don’t want to try any of these drugs you’re willing to offer me. I have a trapdoor up here on my head. Every day I open it, and I reach in and grab one lizard and pull it out, and I nail it to the typewriter! The next day, I reach up and open the trapdoor and reach in and get another lizard, and I close the trapdoor and bring the lizard down and hammer it to the typewriter. I have a good relationship with my trapdoor and my lizards. I don’t want you to set all the lizards free at the same moment with your drugs.”

WELLER: So you never did drugs?

BRADBURY: Once, and I didn’t know it. I went to a party thrown by the young man who played the lead actor in “The Life Work of Juan Diaz,” an episode I did for the Alfred Hitchcock show, which was directed by Norman Lloyd. At the party given by that young actor, they gave me a couple of brownies. And when I had to pee later, I went to the bathroom and discovered I had a twelve-inch penis. I said, “Oh my God! What happened?” It had to be the brownie.

So on the way out of the party, I said to the young actor, “Do you have an extra brownie to give me?” And he said, “Yes.” I said, “I want to keep my twelve-inch penis. You don’t mind, do you?” He said, “No,” and gave me a brownie.

Another time, someone handed me a joint at a David Bowie concert, but I couldn’t smoke anything. I coughed. When I was fourteen years old I picked up a cigarette and tried to smoke it in the street. I lit the cigarette and coughed and choked and realized I’d never be a smoker.

WELLER: You were married for fifty-six years before your wife passed away in 2003. What was the secret to the longevity of your relationship?

BRADBURY: In marriage, if you don’t have a sense of humor, you don’t have a marriage. This dumb film came out called Love Story, and there’s a line in it: “Being in love means never having to say you’re sorry.” That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. Being in love means saying you’re sorry every day for some little thing or other. You make a mistake. I forgot the light bulbs. I didn’t bring this home from the store, and I’m sorry. You know? So being able to accept responsibility, but above all a sense of humor—so that anything that happens can have its amusing side—is the secret to a good marriage.

WELLER: Did you ever go to a psychiatrist?

BRADBURY: Only once, which had nothing to do with a psychological need. It had to do with my place in the world. I was twenty-four years old. I was selling short stories to Weird Tales, but no one knew that I existed. I had something in Weird Tales every issue, every month, but no one came up to me on the street and said, “Oh, are you Ray Bradbury? Oh, geez, you’re great.” I was making fifteen dollars a story, twenty dollars a story. All the stories are in my first book, Dark Carnival. So I talked to a friend of mine about this, and I knew he was going to a psychiatrist for his problems. I said, “Will you lend me your psychiatrist for half an hour some afternoon?” He said he would. And I could just barely afford that because I think he was charging twenty-five dollars for forty-five minutes, and my income was eight or nine dollars a week, selling newspapers.

So I went to him. His name was Dr. Neilsen—a very famous psychiatrist at the time. The psychiatrist sat there and said, “What’s your problem?” I said, “Well, nobody knows that I exist. That’s my problem. I want to be known.” He said, “What do you want to do?” I said, “I want to write the greatest book that was ever written.” At the age of twenty-four to have the nerve to say this! But at least I knew where I wanted to go. Maybe it was impossible. Maybe it couldn’t be done. But then on the other hand, why not try, huh?

So he said, “Well, you know, if that’s what you want, you’ve got to wait a while. How old are you?” I told him I was twenty-four. He said, “Well, while you’re waiting to become famous and loved, go read the Encyclopaedia Britannica and see what happened to all the writers through history. Some of them were famous overnight. But a hell of a lot of them had to wait.”

WELLER: Why was it important to you at twenty-four to be famous and loved?

BRADBURY: In high school, I’m quoted under my picture in the yearbook as saying, “Headed for Literary Distinction.” How could I say that? I wasn’t headed anywhere! I hadn’t written a good short story yet. I hadn’t written a good poem. A good essay. How could I say that? God told me to say that, and I listened.

WELLER: So did fame motivate you?

BRADBURY: Love motivated me. Love is the answer to everything. I was in love with life.

WELLER: Do you ever get depressed?

BRADBURY: Only occasionally. I learned the secret is: Get to your work. All these books about depression, half the people who write them are totally wrong. You’re depressed because you’re not doing something. For Christ’s sake, get off your ass and go do something! It doesn’t matter what it is, but do it. Blindly. And then, after you do it, find out why in the hell you did.

WELLER: You are still so filled with childlike wonder. How have you been able to keep in touch with your inner child?

BRADBURY: I learned a lesson about this crap, “growing up.” Come on. What does that mean? It doesn’t mean anything! Behaving in a certain way, being very proper, very stolid. I was in Sausalito about twenty years ago. I was outside this toy store and I went in, and when I came out a bunch of boys ran by, all around twelve, thirteen, from the seventh grade maybe. They’re all running down the street. This one boy stopped and stared into the store. Under my breath I said, “Go in. Go in.” And all the other kids said, “Ah, come on! That’s kids’ stuff.”

Do you see what they were trying to do to him? They were trying to take away his happiness. We’re always talking about penis envy, but there’s a thing called joy envy. And if people see you’re too happy, if they can do anything, not directly, but they might just feel like they’d like to kick your sandcastle down. And the boy stood there wavering between the toy store and the kids. And I kept saying, “Go in, for God’s sake, go in.” And finally he ran off with them. And it killed my soul.

WELLER: Looking around your home, I see that you still avidly collect toys.

BRADBURY: Every time I go anywhere, I go to the toy store. Every Christmas I always told my wife to give me toys. There are two stuffed cats over there. There are stuffed animals all over my house. I love them. So I don’t let my kids or my wife give me anything but toys. I love them. They cause you to use your imagination.

WELLER: You have so much stuff in your house. All your toys and collectibles and ephemera collected over the course of your career. You also have an amazing art collection. With all these possessions, do you think that you are materialistic?

BRADBURY: No. That’s not materialistic. That’s aesthetic. That’s dream-world stuff. My love of art is not materialistic. There are some people who collect art for profit, but that’s not what I do. I collect it because it makes me fly.

WELLER: And all the toys? Is that art to you?

BRADBURY: Those toys are all my metaphors. The ectoplasm that comes out of ghost’s mouths. All of those things are a part of my tissue. My being.

WELLER: Is your pack-rat personality an affect of your upbringing during the Depression?

BRADBURY: I don’t know. I don’t think so. My brother didn’t save things like I do. And my mother and father didn’t either.

WELLER: When have you been on the receiving end of what you call “joy envy”?

BRADBURY: When I was nine, Buck Rogers came into the world. October 1929, at the start of the Depression. And I took a look at one single panel of Buck Rogers and I was hooked on the future. I began to collect the Buck Rogers panels. And all the kids in the fifth grade made fun of me. There was no future. We weren’t going to build rocketships. We weren’t going to the moon. We weren’t going to Mars. How stupid for me to do what I did.

Well, I listened to them and I tore up my Buck Rogers comic strips. It’s the worst thing I ever did. Three days later, I started to cry. And I said to myself, “Why am I crying? Who’s dead?” And the answer was, “You. You’re dead. You killed the future. You listened to these fools. Now what can you do to cure this?” I went back to collecting Buck Rogers, and I’ve never listened to one damn fool after that. Best lesson I ever had.

In the hallway here at the house, one of my fans sent me in a frame that first panel of Buck Rogers, torn in half, put back together again as a symbol, the metaphor in my life. I learned how to never listen to anyone about films, about books, about cartoons. Since that experience, I’ve collected comic strips all my life.

WELLER: With the exception of the six months you spent in Ireland writing the Moby Dick screenplay, you’ve lived in Los Angeles continuously since April 1934. Did you ever consider moving?

BRADBURY: No. My roots are too deep. I have too many friends here. And I love LA.

WELLER: Yet I would call you, unequivocally, a “prairie writer.” The Midwest—the heartland—is central to so much of your work. Something Wicked This Way Comes, Dandelion Wine, The Halloween Tree, to name but a few. Perhaps more than any other writer, you have personified autumn. One only needs to read a story like “The Emissary” to see the proof. As much as you love fall, how have you been able to live away from it for so long?

BRADBURY: Because fall is even better in my imagination than it is in real life. I always have fall up in my head.

WELLER: Do you even have a fall in Los Angeles?

BRADBURY: Not really. As William Faulkner once said, autumn in LA is when one leaf falls in Laurel Canyon.

WELLER: Los Angeles is certainly known as a city proud of its car culture. Why is it that you have never driven?

BRADBURY: I saw a terrible car accident when I was fourteen. I was visiting my friend Eddie Barrera down on Washington Street in LA. We heard a terrible noise and ran out of his house down to the street corner. A car had come along doing sixty or seventy miles an hour, and right in front of a cemetery, it hit a telephone pole. The car was cut right in half. There were six people inside. Three of them were killed instantly. We were the first at the scene. I ran up and looked at one woman lying there, and I bent over to help her. Her jaw had been torn and was hanging by one hinge. Her eyes met mine, then they fluttered and she died. I was stunned. I stumbled home that day in shock, clutching to trees and to walls of buildings for support. I still have dreams about that woman. I wrote the short story “The Crowd,” from Dark Carnival, about that experience. That one experience, along with all the people I knew who had been killed by automobiles, is the reason why I have never driven a car.

WELLER: You’ve never driven. Not a single time?

BRADBURY: No. But I was at a jet propulsion lab two months ago, and they took me into a room and said, “You’re not a driver, are you?” I said, “No.” Then they said, “You don’t have a license?” I said, “No.” They said, “We’re giving you a license now. We’re going to let you drive the rover on Mars. Here’s the screen, and the controls are here, and you control where you want the rover to go over the landscape.” So I drove the Mars Rover! It was a real sight, over the Martian landscape.

WELLER: Given the adversity you have faced in life—you experienced a lot of death during your childhood—how have you managed to stay so positive? The week after your wife passed away, you got back to writing. How were you able to do that?

BRADBURY: Work is the only answer. I have three rules to live by: Get your work done. If that doesn’t work, shut up and drink your gin, and when all else fails, run like hell.

chapter thirteen
VISIONS OF THE FUTURE

SOME HAVE GONE SO FAR AS TO CALL BRADBURY A LUDDITE AND A technophobe. Even though he began to write for dramatic television in the early 1950s, the Bradbury home went without a television until 1955, when the entire Bradbury brood—parents and four young daughters—contracted the measles, and they needed entertainment to abate the boredom of being on interminable house arrest.

Bradbury didn’t fly in an airplane until 1982, when he was sixty-two. Prior to that, he always crossed the country by passenger rail, and he ventured to Europe by ocean liner. But in 1982, while celebrating the opening of the EPCOT Center in Orlando, Florida, his train was unexpectedly cancelled. Needing desperately to return home to work, he acquiesced to his aviophobia and told his Disney hosts to buy him a plane ticket, give him three double martinis, and “pour him on the airplane.” From that moment on, Bradbury conquered his fear of flying.

“I discovered that I wasn’t afraid of flying,” he remarked. “I was afraid of me. I was afraid that I would run up and down the aisles screaming for them to stop the plane.” When his fears did not come to fruition, Bradbury embraced the airplane, and from that point forward, he became a frequent flyer.

Even still, he has always been slow to adapt to new technology in his own life. As for computers, Bradbury has never owned one and says he never will. His one capitulation to modern convenience is the fax machine. There is a room in the Bradbury home dedicated to the device, known as “the fax room.” And while there isn’t yet a shrine around the small machine, there may as well be. The Bradbury fax whirs around the clock. It is his chosen form of communication with his business associates, his editor, his agent, and his daily assistant, his youngest daughter Alexandra.

In 2009, the Bradbury writing process would go like this: Bradbury dictates a first draft over the telephone to his daughter, who resides in Arizona. She transcribes the story and then faxes it back to her father in extra-large bold typeface so he can begin editing it by hand with a Sharpie marker. This process has been part of the routine since his stroke in 1999.

Despite Ray Bradbury’s resistance to the digital age, he has been hailed as a technological visionary. In his books, stories, films, stage plays, and more, he predicted a vast number of innovations: flat-panel televisions, earbud headphones, virtual reality, twenty-four-hour banking machines, even live television broadcasts of fugitive chases.

It begs the question: What does Bradbury envision next?

WELLER: You have been critical of the Internet. Why?

BRADBURY: It’s distracting us. It’s causing us to not pay attention.

WELLER: How so?

BRADBURY: People are talking too much about nothing. Blah blah blah blah blah. Too much talk. Come on. The CEO of Yahoo called me recently and asked if I would write a novel to put up on the Internet. I told him to go to hell. I said, “Prick up your ears! Prick up your ears! Go to hell!” That’s not a book. You cannot hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. I don’t care what they say about “e-books.” A computer does not smell. There are two perfumes to a book: a book is new, it smells great; a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. So a book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.

WELLER: You’ve heard about the Amazon Kindle?

BRADBURY: Yeah, but you can’t hold the book. It’s just a reproduced page on a TV screen.

WELLER: With the publication of Fahrenheit 451, you were hailed as a visionary. The novel is a cautionary tale, addressing the decline of reading and the rise of mass media, among other pressing themes. What might you warn us about today?

BRADBURY: Our education system has gone to hell. It’s my idea from now on to stop spending money educating children who are sixteen, seventeen years old. We should put all that money down into kindergarten. Three-, four-, and five-year-old kids have to be taught how to read and write. Then we’d solve the problem for the whole educational system. If children went into the first grade knowing how to do everything, how to read and write, we’d be set for the future, wouldn’t we? So we must put out books with mythological educational pictures.

When I was five years old, my Aunt Neva gave me a copy of a book of wonderful fairy tales called Once Upon a Time, and the first fairy tale in the book is Beauty and the Beast. That one story taught me how to read and write because I looked at the picture of that beautiful beast, but I so desperately wanted to read about him too.

By the time I was six years old, I learned how to read and write completely. I want to go back and get people who are drawing the Sunday funnies, people like Bill Watterson who does Calvin and Hobbes, and use the comics to teach children how to read. Calvin and Hobbes could lead our children through kindergarten, from the age of five to six years old. This one comic strip could educate our children because it is filled with beautiful pictures and beautiful ideas. Charles Schulz’s Peanuts—same thing. So we’ve got to go back and spend all of our money today on kindergarten and save the children. We must not let them grow into fourth and fifth graders not knowing how to read.

We should forget about giving them mathematics. They’re not going to use it ever in their life. Give them simple arithmetic—one plus one is two, and how to divide, and how to subtract. Those are simple things that can be taught quickly. But no mathematics because they are never going to use it, never in their lives, unless they are going to be scientists later, and then they can simply learn it later.

My brother, for example, didn’t do well in school, but when he was in his twenties, he needed a job with the Bureau of Power and Light. He got a book about mathematics and electricity. He read it and educated himself and got the job. If you are bright, you will learn how to educate yourself with mathematics if you need it. But the average child never will. So it must be reading and writing. Those are the important things. And by the time children are six, they are completely educated, and then they can educate themselves. The library will be the place where they grow up.

WELLER: How important is arts education to your vision? Where do painting, music, and theater fit into your scenario?

BRADBURY: All of them are very important because they are a way of acting out what is in you. When my daughters were three, four, five, and six years old, I bought them batons and we sat in the front room of our house and I put on recordings of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” and the score of the Walt Disney film Fantasia. “Night on Bald Mountain” is a great piece of music. So my daughters all stood around in the living room with a baton and conducted. They acted out and they learned about great music. It was wonderful!

WELLER: Why have politicians ignored addressing education for so long? This is a cause that you have been speaking out on for decades.

BRADBURY: Politicians are not librarians. That’s why they don’t get it. I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week to educate myself. I did this every week for ten years, and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.

WELLER: Do you think the current model for education is completely flawed? Would you revamp the entire system?

BRADBURY: Just start teaching reading and writing earlier. We have a million people in jails right now, mostly, who cannot read and write very well. Our educational system is partially responsible for our prisons being full, because if you don’t have any words in your head, you can’t think. And if you can’t think, you’ll be a criminal, huh? You have to do something with yourself. Women don’t have that problem. They are automatically good students. If children learn to read and write, then they’ll escape being criminals. But we’re not paying attention to that right now.

Both political parties are bankrupt, and we’ve got to say to them, “For God’s sake, before it’s too late, let’s not have another generation of moron criminals.” Not one of these so-called politicians is emphasizing this. They say, “We’re gonna put money into education,” but they don’t target it.

WELLER: You have long been a vocal advocate of space exploration. Will humankind ever get to Mars?

BRADBURY: Sure. If we stop having wars and pay attention to the future. We’ve got to go. We should have never given up on the moon. We could have built a lunar base in the last twenty-five years to deliver what we need to go on to Mars. Now it’s going to take a lot of years to build a base. We’ve been talking about space stations—they won’t work! You can’t go to Mars with that, it’s not firm enough. You need a firm foundation on the moon, to build a city there first and then go to Mars. That will happen about twenty-five years from now. It’s a shame. All that wasted time.

WELLER: And China may get there before the US.

BRADBURY: Let them. Then it will truly be “the red planet.”

WELLER: But seriously, do you think China as an emerging superpower will ever pose a threat to the United States?

BRADBURY: No. They have too much to lose and so do we. The policy we have had of bringing Wall Street in under the Communists is working. The more technologies they have, the more they want. That helped undermine Communism. There was a time when Russia didn’t have radios and television. But once they got those things, and they heard and saw what other countries had, they wanted more. And when President Reagan stood his ground over nuclear disarmament against Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, it scared Russia. Gorbachev told me this when I had lunch with him, that Reagan was our best president. He forced Russia to either spend billions of dollars they didn’t have to keep up the Cold War, or to reconsider negotiating peace.

WELLER: Back to the final frontier. Why is space exploration so important to you?

BRADBURY: So that we can live forever. We can live a million years. A million years from tonight, we’ll be able to look back to events like the first lunar landing and say, “Those people started it all, and we owe it to them.” And they’ll build a memorial to von Braun and the other space travelers a million years from tonight. But it’s got to start here, you see. We’ve got to be the starters.

WELLER: On September 11, 2001, you told me, “This is the darkest day in American history.” As a man hailed as a visionary, how do you suggest we handle terrorism?

BRADBURY: All the uproar over the fact that the FBI and the CIA should have known that we were going to be attacked—come on. I’m a science fiction writer. I predict futures. You would think it would have entered my little brain that maybe someone would hijack an airplane and turn it into a bomb. That never crossed my mind. All the security measures we’ve put in place are relatively useless because all the terrorists have to do is do something else next time. They will always adapt. I can go to the corner drugstore right now and make a bomb. There are two elements you can buy cheap at any drugstore, mix them together, and you have a bomb. They are in every drugstore in America. What are you going to do about that?

This is the answer: We must soon make decisions on which will depend peace in the world for the next fifty or one hundred years. This is a time of great crisis, and we must carefully study the alternatives. We are confronted with a war inflicted upon us by invisible assassins who very much hate the United States of America. A good part of the Muslim population holds us in disgust.

We were attacked and are now fighting this war on terrorism, a war that may well last for many decades. But we have not asked ourselves the basic questions: “Why this war? Why this hatred? Why do so many of the Muslim countries of the world hate us so very much?” Unless we answer these questions, we will continue to fight a war and panic ourselves in the coming years.

WELLER: So what are the answers to the questions you raise?

BRADBURY: I believe that the Muslim nations and populations of the world distrust and hate us because of the policy we have been entertaining relative to Israel and Palestine. I have no prejudice against Israel. I have no prejudice against Palestine. I have no prejudice against the United States of America. But I do have a prejudice against a policy we have followed which has been unequal. We must go before the United Nations Council and ask them to join us in providing a virtual wall or a real wall between Israel and Palestine so that they will not be able to hurt one another. If we can insert such a wall and prevent destruction on both sides, we can then turn to all the nations of the world and ask them to join us in providing funds to finish the building of Israel and the rebuilding of Palestine so that during the next five or ten years we will have two nations created, whole and clean and right, and the two nations will have given up war because we stood between and would not allow their conflict. So at the end of that five-year or ten-year period, the Muslim nations of the world will see that we are proceeding with a policy of equality between these two nations.

I am deeply hopeful that as a result of this, forgiveness will begin. Hatred will begin to disappear. At the end of a period of time, the invisible war will vanish and we will live quietly again, not in panic or in fright of the future.

WELLER: In Fahrenheit 451, you predicted everything from flat-panel televisions to iPod earbuds and twenty-four-hour banking machines. How do you suppose you envisioned so much in that book? It’s uncanny.

BRADBURY: It shocks me as much as anybody. I don’t know. I was just using my imagination when I wrote it. My characters wrote that book: Clarisse, Montag, Beatty, and Faber. All of the ideas came from them. When my characters speak, I always listen to them.

WELLER: Since you were able to predict so much, particularly as it related to the proliferation of mass media, what do you think is the future of television?

BRADBURY: I hope there are more channels like Turner Classic Movies. A channel like that is a time machine. I turn it on and there’s my past. Every movie I’ve seen since I was three years old. We need more channels like The History Channel that are time machines that tell us about our past. We mustn’t forget our past. We must learn from it.

WELLER: Much has been made of our societal dependence on foreign oil. How should we move away from oil as a primary source of energy?

BRADBURY: To start, we need better public transportation. We need to use more alternative sources of energy, like the windmill farms out near my house in Palm Springs. But more than anything, we need to look at the French. They have been using nuclear power safely for many years now. Eighty percent of their energy comes from nuclear power, and they’ve never had an accident. We must move away from oil and toward nuclear energy. France and Japan have it right.

WELLER: What is the future of humanity on planet Earth?

BRADBURY: We’re going to make it. We’ve already made it this far. We’ve conquered diseases. My sister died of the flu when I was seven. My brother’s twin died in the flu epidemic in 1918. My uncle died in the same outbreak. In those days, there were no medicines. We forget, because today’s generation has grown up with penicillin and sulfonamide. People have stopped dying, but before that we died from the simplest things. So we conquer things. We survive. We always have. We will live on.

appendix
THE LOST PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW

THE FOLLOWING INTERVIEW WITH RAY BRADBURY WAS CONDUCTED in 1976 for The Paris Review. It never appeared in print. A single, undated letter from journalist and writer William Plummer, the interviewer, indicates that Review editor George Plimpton was dissatisfied with the tone of the conversation, finding it “a bit informal” and “maybe overly enthusiastic.” It certainly could not have helped that during the interview Bradbury lambasted the New York literary establishment.

Plummer returned the thirty-five-page typed transcript to Bradbury, along with two and a half pages of additional typed notes and questions for Bradbury to address. Bradbury never got around to rewriting this rather illuminating interview.

Bradbury finds the act of writing and creating as mysterious in nature. He is an emotional writer rather than an intellectual one. He bristles when asked to specifically examine his own approach to the craft of writing. A writer who relies heavily on a subconscious creative state, Bradbury turns a deaf ear when critics and scholars endeavor to analyze his work. “I don’t want to know what I’m doing!” is the usual spirited response.

George Plimpton was right. Bradbury is most definitely enthusiastic. And when it comes to explicating his own creative process, Bradbury can be downright elusive. Not by intent, however. For Ray Bradbury has always compared his approach to writing to a magician’s sleight of hand. In Bradbury’s case, the magic is often as mysterious to him as it is to his audience.

This unpublished Paris Review interview is an important document and time capsule that reveals the mind and spirit of Ray Bradbury circa 1976.

PARIS REVIEW: Tell me why you write science fiction.

BRADBURY: Science fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world, you are writing science fiction. It’s always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

PARIS REVIEW: Can you give me an example?

BRADBURY: Sure, let’s say thirty years ago, at the start of my writing career, I had thought to write a story about a woman swallowing a pill and destroying the Catholic Church and thereby causing the advent of women’s lib. That story probably would have been laughed at, but it was within the realm of the possible and would have made great science fiction. If I’d lived in the late eighteen hundreds, I might have written a story predicting that strange vehicles would soon move across the landscape of the United States and would kill two million people in a period of seventy years. You see, science fiction is always the art of the obvious. Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

If I had been a beggar on the streets of Baghdad or a teller of tales in Bombay two thousand years ago, my science fiction story would have run like this: “Sometime in the next two to three hundred years a new science will come into the world.” The children sitting there in the afternoon sunlight would have said, “What kind of science?” “The science of horsemanship,” I’d say. And they’d say, “Come on, the science of horsemanship?” So the Persians come along and invent the true art of horsemanship. And what do they do with it? They push back the Roman Empire and change the world.

PARIS REVIEW: There appears to be a new interest in science fiction, especially among young people. Does science fiction satisfy where mainstream writing does not?

BRADBURY: That really nails it right there. Yes, it does satisfy, because the mainstream hasn’t been paying attention to all the changes in our culture during the last twenty years. The major ideas of our times have been neglected. Only the science fiction writers have paid attention to the impact of, say, the hydrogen and atom bomb on our lives and on politics. Years ago, we thought the atom bomb meant the end of the world. A lot of stories were written about this. We were terrified, and it’s exactly this terror that has caused us to begin to behave like Christians. It’s been up to science fiction to pay attention to this sort of truth; the mainstream ignores it.

PARIS REVIEW: I’ve noticed, too, that well-known critics are beginning to pay attention to science fiction. Leslie Fiedler and H. Bruce Franklin, to name just two, have compiled anthologies and done studies. What’s going on?

BRADBURY: As always, the intellectuals are ten, fifteen, twenty years late. They’re always late, and they’re generally wrong. They’re so busy being intellectual, they don’t know how to feel, they don’t know how to love, they don’t know how to care. Which is a great shame. They miss out on a lot. Leslie Fiedler should have done his study of science fiction twenty years ago, when we really needed him. All of the important book reviewers and critics and analysts should have recognized science fiction sooner, recognizing that America, of all the countries of the world, is the most important culture of ideas. We have changed the world with these ideas in medicine and in the other sciences. Why the fiction of ideas should be so neglected is beyond me. I can’t explain it, except in terms of intellectual snobbery.

PARIS REVIEW: And now the field is becoming respectable?

BRADBURY: Twenty-five years ago if you went to a party and told somebody you were a science fiction writer you would be insulted. They would call you Flash Gordon all evening, or Buck Rogers. Of course, twenty-five years ago hardly any books were being published in the field. The earliest publications of Doubleday and of the Simon and Schuster science fiction series were in 1949 or 1950. Before that it was lucky if one or two books a year were published; we couldn’t afford to buy them anyway, since we were all too poor. Back in 1946, as I remember, there were only two science fiction anthologies published. That’s how bereft we were, that’s how sparse the field was, that’s how unimportant it all was. And when the first books began to be published, lots of them in the early 1950s, they weren’t reviewed by responsible magazines, good literary magazines. And that’s still pretty much true. If you opened the pages of The American Scholar for the last twenty-five years you wouldn’t believe that any of the science fiction writers of our time even existed. So we had to come to birth undercover. We were all closet science fiction writers. Very slowly, people have begun to allow us out in the open and have stopped making fun of us.

PARIS REVIEW: Do you think science fiction offers the writer an easier way to get at ideas?

BRADBURY: Ideas are uncomfortable to write about if you do them in straight stories. You write a novel like Fahrenheit 451. You’re dealing with book-burning, aren’t you? A very serious subject. You’ve got to be careful you don’t start lecturing people. So you put your story a few years into the future and you invent a fireman who has been burning books instead of putting out fires—which is a grand idea in itself—and you start him on the adventure of discovering that maybe books shouldn’t be burned. He reads his first book. He falls in love. And then you send him out into the world to change his life. It’s a great suspense story and locked into it is the truth you want to tell, without pontificating.

I often use the metaphor of Perseus and the head of Medusa when I speak of science fiction. Instead of looking into the face of truth, into the face of Medusa, you look over your shoulder into the bronze surface of a reflecting shield, then you reach back with your sword and cut off the head of Medusa. Science fiction pretends to look into the future but it’s really looking at a reflection of the truth that is immediately in front of us. So you have a ricochet vision, a ricocheted truth, which enables you to swallow it and have fun with it, instead of being self-conscious and super-intellectual.

PARIS REVIEW: Do you read your S.F. contemporaries?

BRADBURY: I’ve always believed that in your own field you should do very little reading once you’re into it. At the start it’s good to know what everyone’s doing. So, when I began, when I was seventeen, of course I read everything by Robert Heinlein and Arthur Clarke, and the early writings of Theodore Sturgeon and van Vogt, all the people who appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, but my big science fiction influences would have to be H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. They are the traditional authors for all of us. And of course I’ve gone back to read Verne in later years and found in him many of the qualities which I’ve developed in myself. In other words, he’s a writer of moral fables, an instructor in the humanities; he believes the human being is in a strange situation in a very strange world, and he believes that we can triumph by behaving morally. His hero Nemo—who’s sort of the flip side of Melville’s madman, Ahab—goes about the world taking weapons away from people to instruct them toward peace.

PARIS REVIEW: How about newer people, the Robert Silverbergs and Ursula Le Guins?

BRADBURY: I prefer not to read the younger writers in the field. Quite often you can be depressed by discovering they’ve happened onto an idea you yourself are working on. What you want is simply to get on with your own work.

PARIS REVIEW: You mentioned a minute ago about beginning at age seventeen …

BRADBURY: Actually, I began earlier than that.

PARIS REVIEW: Did you always want to be a writer?

BRADBURY: I think so. It started with Poe. I fell in love with the jewelry of Poe. Hey, that’s pretty good. He’s a gem encruster, isn’t he? I began to imitate him from the time I was twelve or so until I was about eighteen. And I was busy imitating Edgar Rice Burroughs, of course, and John Carter. I was doing traditional horror stories, which I think everyone who goes into the field starts out with … you know, getting locked in tombs. I drew Egyptian mazes. I loved to illustrate, too, and I was a cartoonist. I always wanted my own comic strip. So I was not only writing about Tarzan, I was drawing my own Sunday panels. I did the usual adventure stories, located them in South America or among the Aztecs or in Africa. There was always the beautiful maiden and the sacrifice. So I knew I was going into one of the arts: I was drawing, acting, and writing.

Everything went into ferment in one year, 1932, when I was twelve. There were Poe, Carter, Burroughs, the comics, and I was surrounded by carnival and circus people. I listened to a lot of imaginative radio shows, especially one called “Chandu the Magician,” which was recently exhumed as a nostalgia item. I’m sure it was quite junky, but not to me. Every night when the show went off the air I sat down and, from memory, wrote out the whole script. I couldn’t help myself. Chandu was against all the villains of the world and so was I; he responded to a psychic summons and so did I.

PARIS REVIEW: Where did you do your acting?

BRADBURY: One day in Tucson, Arizona, in that same year, when I was twelve, I told all my friends I was going to go down to the nearest radio station and become an actor. My friends snorted and said, “Do you know anyone down there?” I said no. They said, “Do you have any pull with anyone?” I said, “No. I’ll just hang around, and they’ll discover how talented I am.”

So I went to the radio station, hung around for two weeks emptying ashtrays and running out for newspapers and just being underfoot. And two weeks later I wound up on radio every Saturday night reading the comics to the kiddies: Bringing Up Father, Tailspin Tommy, and Buck Rogers.

PARIS REVIEW: You seem to have been open to a variety of influences.

BRADBURY: A conglomerate heap of trash, that’s what I am. [Laughs] But it burns with a high flame. I’ve had my “literary” loves, too. I like to think of myself on a train going across midnight America conversing with my favorite authors, and on that train would be people like George Bernard Shaw, who was interested in everything, interested in the fictions of ideas. He himself on occasion wrote things that could be dubbed science fiction. We’d sit up late into the night turning over ideas and saying: Well, if thus-and-so is true about women in 1900, what is it going to be in 1975 or in the year 2000?

PARIS REVIEW: You’ve mentioned Burroughs, Carter, Poe. Who else would be on that train?

BRADBURY: A lot of poets: Hopkins, Frost, Shakespeare. And then, writers like Huxley, Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe …

PARIS REVIEW: How have they been of use to you? Say, Wolfe, for example.

BRADBURY: He was a great romantic, of course. When you’re nineteen, he opens the doors of the world for you, doesn’t he? We use certain authors at certain times of our lives, and we may never go back to them again. Wolfe is perfect when you’re nineteen; if you fall in love with Shaw when you’re thirty it’s going to be a lifetime love. And I think that’s true of certain things of Thomas Mann. I read Death in Venice when I was twenty, and it’s gotten better every year since. Style is truth. Once you nail down what you want to say about yourself and your fears and your life, then that becomes your style and you go to those teachers who can teach you how to use words to fit your truth.

I learned from Gerald Heard, and a hell of a lot from John Collier. And also from people like Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Porter. There were a lot of women writers that I was madly in love with. Edith Wharton, I still go back and reread her, and Jessamyn West. Friendly Persuasion is one of my favorite books of short stories. I learned from John Steinbeck how to write objectively and yet get all the truths in there without too much extra comment.

PARIS REVIEW: Some of the passages I like the most—especially in The Martian Chronicles—are intensely lyrical …

BRADBURY: That comes from reading so much poetry every day of my life. My favorite writers have been those who’ve said things well. I used to study single lines out of Eudora Welty. She had the remarkable ability, and I gather she still does, of giving you atmosphere, character, and motion in a single line. In one line! And you must study these things to be a good writer. Eudora Welty would have a woman simply come into a room and look around. In one sweep she gave you the feel of the room, the sense of the woman’s character, and the action itself. All in twenty words. And you say: How’d she do that?! What adjective? What verb? What noun? How did she select them and put them together? You study that.

I was an intense student. Sometimes I’d get an old copy of Wolfe and cut out paragraphs and paste them in my story, because I couldn’t do it, you see. I was so frustrated! And then I’d retype whole sections of other people’s novels just to see how it felt coming out. Learn their rhythm. I don’t know how many young people do that nowadays; I suppose a lot of people do.

PARIS REVIEW: Certain writers are notably missing from your train. Proust, Joyce, Flaubert, Nabokov, writers who tend to think of literature as a series of formal problems. Has that line of thought ever interested you?

BRADBURY: No. If people put me to sleep, they put me to sleep. God, I’ve tried to read Proust so often, and I will recognize his style and the beauty of his expression. But he puts me to sleep. And Joyce, the same. Joyce doesn’t have many ideas. You see, I’m completely idea-oriented, and I appreciate certain kinds of French writing and English storytelling more. I just can’t imagine being in a world and not being fascinated with what ideas are doing to us.

PARIS REVIEW: You’re self-educated, aren’t you?

BRADBURY: Yes, I am. I’m completely library-educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down when I was in grade school, high school, and spent long days every summer in the library. I used to steal magazines and read them and then steal them back on the racks again. That way I took the print off with my eyeballs and stayed honest. I didn’t want to be a permanent thief, and I was very careful to wash my hands before I read them. But with the library, it’s like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there’s so much to look at and read. And it’s far more fun than going to school, simply because you make up your own list and you don’t have to listen to anyone. When I see some of the books my kids are forced to bring home and read by some of their teachers and be graded on, well, what if you don’t like those books?

PARIS REVIEW: That’s very important to you, isn’t it? Going by your own likes and dislikes.

BRADBURY: Oh God. It’s everything. I was offered the chance to write War and Peace for the screen twenty years ago. The American version, with King Vidor directing. I turned it down. Everyone said, “How can you do that? That’s ridiculous, it’s a great book!” I said, “Well, it isn’t for me. I can’t read it. I can’t get through it, I tried.” That doesn’t mean the book’s bad; just I am not prepared for it. It portrays a very special culture. The names throw me. My wife loves it. She’s read it once every three years for twenty years. They offered the usual thing for a screenplay like that, a hundred thousand dollars. People said, “How can you turn that down?” I said, “Because I’m not a liar.” It’s just that simple. You cannot do things for money in this world. I don’t care how much they offer you, and I don’t care how poor you are. There’s only one excuse ever, ever, ever to take money under those circumstances: If someone in your family is horribly ill and the doctor bills are piled up so high that you’re all going to be destroyed. Then I’d say, Go on and take the job. Go do War and Peace and do a lousy job. And be sorry later.

PARIS REVIEW: Why did you do Moby Dick?

BRADBURY: I fell in love with John Huston’s work when I was in my twenties. I saw The Maltese Falcon fourteen, fifteen times, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre scores of times. I went to a screening when I was twenty-nine. John Huston sat right behind me, and I wanted to turn, grab his hand, and say, I love you and I want to work with you. But I held off and waited till I had three books published, so I’d have proof of my love. I called my agent and said, Now I want to meet John Huston. We met on St. Valentine’s night, 1951, which is a great way to start a love affair. I said, “Look, here are my books. If you like them, someday we must work together.” He went to Africa and wrote me from the African Queen location. He said, “I read your books on the plane coming over, and you’re right, someday we’ll work together.” I didn’t see him again for two years, then he came back to LA and called me up. He said, “You got some time to come to Europe and write Moby-Dick for the screen?” I said, “I don’t know, I’ve never been able to read the damn thing.”

So here I was confronted with a dilemma: Here’s a man that I love and whose work I admire. He’s offering me a job. Now, a lot of people would say: Grab it! Jesus, you like him, doncha? I said, “Tell you what, I’ll go home tonight and I’ll read as much as I can, and I’ll come back for lunch tomorrow. By that time I’ll know how I feel about Melville. Because I’ve had copies of Moby-Dick around the house for years.” So I went home and I got out Moby-Dick. Strangely, a month before I’d been wandering around the house one night and picked up Moby-Dick and said to my wife, “I wonder when I’m going to read this thing.” So here I am sitting down to read it.

PARIS REVIEW: It’s sort of like the Bible, isn’t it? You read in it.

BRADBURY: I read it the way I use libraries. I dove into the middle of it instead of starting at the beginning. I came across a lot of beautiful poetry of the whiteness of the whale and the colors of nightmares and the great spirit’s spout. And I came upon a section toward the last where Ahab stands at the rail and says, “It’s a mild, mild day and a mild-looking sky, and the wind smells as if it blew from the shadow of the Andes where the movers are laying down with their scythes.” I turned back to the start: “Call me Ishmael,” and I was in love! You fall in love with poetry. You fall in love with Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote Moby-Dick, using Melville as a Ouija board. I found out later that what I recognized was my old friend Shakespeare, and I’d been in love with Shakespeare since I was fourteen. I was able to do the job not because I was in love with Melville, but because I was in love with Shakespeare.

The first day I went to see Huston, I asked, “Should I read up on the Freudians and Jungians and their interpretations of the white whale?” He said, “Hell no, I’m hiring Bradbury! Whatever is right or wrong about the screenplay will be yours, so we can at least say the skin around it is your skin.” That pleased me.

So after I’d read the book multitudinous times, I wrote the beginning on the way to Europe on the boat, and that stayed; that was fine. But everything else was so difficult, and I had to borrow bits and pieces from the end of the book and the middle and push them up front, because the book is not constructed like a screenplay. It’s all over the place, a giant cannonade of impressions. And it’s a play, too. Shakespearian asides, stage directions and everything.

I got out of the bed one morning in London, walked over to the mirror and said, “I am Herman Melville.” The ghost of Melville spoke to me and on that day I rewrote the last thirty, thirty-five pages of the screenplay. It all came out in one passionate explosion. I ran across London and took it to Huston. He said, My God, this is it.

PARIS REVIEW: The ending’s Bradbury, right? Not Melville?

BRADBURY: But it really works, because I came up with a revelation. One of the things I said to Huston when I got over there was: First thing, we got to get rid of Fedalla; Fedalla’s a terrible bore. Nobody really likes Fedalla. A few people in the Melville society think he’s okay. But he’s the extra mystical symbol that breaks the whale’s back. Just as O’Neill is difficult to adapt for the screen because there’s too much of him, so is Moby-Dick. It’s a huge book and you’ve got to decide what to throw overboard. I didn’t want Fedalla because he’d turn the whole thing into comedy. If you’re not careful in tragedy, one extra rape, one extra incest, one extra murder, and it’s hoo-haw time all of a sudden. So I got rid of Fedalla, and that leaves us at the end with no one to go down with the whale. So, hell, it’s only natural that Moby Dick takes Ahab down with him and comes back up with all these harpoon lines and Ahab gestures, so when the men follow him they are destroyed. Well, that’s not in the book. I’m sorry but I’m proud of that. Awfully proud of that. When I said, “I am Herman Melville,” I had him in my blood.

PARIS REVIEW: What about Gregory Peck’s Ahab?

BRADBURY: Oh, I have mixed feelings, and I’ve told Greg, too. He’s one of the nicest people I know. And a sweet, gentle man. But he’s not paranoid. And that’s a problem. You’ve got to be paranoid to be Ahab. Some people go crazy one way, some another. If Greg Peck ever went mad, I can’t imagine him being paranoid; he’d be catatonic. Olivier is the man I really wanted for the part. Olivier has incipient paranoia in many of the roles he’s done on the screen. But even with this reservation, the film’s going to be around a long time. It works, even though it’s flawed and we know it is.

PARIS REVIEW: How do you feel about the film adaptation of The llustrated Man?

BRADBURY: There’s just nothing there that’s right. There’s an arrogance that goes with certain kinds of filmmakers—I suppose that applies to every field. Until they own you they say that they love you and that you’re a genius and they’re going to do beautiful work with you. Then once they own you and they have your name on a contract and they’ve paid you, you see, there’s nothing you can do then, it’s too late. You can’t give the money back.

PARIS REVIEW: Did you do the screenplay?

BRADBURY: No, Christ, if I’d done the script it would have been beautiful. No, the producer did the script, and he belongs back selling real estate in New Jersey somewhere. Truffaut did a much better piece of work on Fahrenheit 451. The essence is there, and that is everything. You can change a lot of things, as long as the essence remains the same. See, I changed some of the words of Elijah, but that essence is Melville. That’s the important thing.

PARIS REVIEW: Do you write for an ideal reader or for a particular audience?

BRADBURY: Every time you write for anyone, regardless of who they are, no matter how right the cause you may believe in, you lie. Steinbeck is one of the few writers out of the 1930s who’s still around, because he didn’t write for causes at all. He wrote human stories that happened to represent causes indirectly. Grapes of Wrath and some of his other books are not political treatises at all. Fahrenheit 451 is in a way a political treatise, but it isn’t, because all it is saying, emotionally, is: Everyone leave everyone else alone!

PARIS REVIEW: Does literature, then, have any social obligation?

BRADBURY: Not a direct one. It has to be through reflection, through indirection. Kazantzakis says, “Live forever.” That’s his social obligation. Any great work does that for you. His Saviors of God celebrates life in the world. All of Dickens says, “Live life at the top of your energy.” Edgar Rice Burroughs never would have looked upon himself as a social mover and shaker with social obligations. But as it turns out—and I love to say it because it upsets everyone terribly—Burroughs is probably the most influential writer in the entire history of the world.

PARIS REVIEW: Really?

BRADBURY: By giving romance and adventure to a whole generation of boys, Burroughs caused them to go out and decide to become special. That’s what we have to do for everyone, give the gift of life with our books. Say to a girl or boy at age ten: Hey, life is fun! Grow tall! I’ve talked to more biochemists and more astronomers and technologists in various fields, who, when they were ten years old, fell in love with John Carter and Tarzan and decided to become something romantic. Burroughs put us on the moon. All the technologists read Burroughs. [Laughs]

PARIS REVIEW: This is literally true?

BRADBURY: I was at Caltech a couple of years ago with a whole bunch of scientists and they all admitted it; they hadn’t before. Arthur Clarke was there, and he admitted the influence of Burroughs on him. That’s natural, though; most of the people in the field grew up with him. But two of the leading astronomers—one from Cornell, another from Caltech—came out and said, Yeah, that’s why we became astronomers. We wanted to see Mars more closely. But I find this in most fields. The need for romance is constant, and again, it’s pooh-poohed by intellectuals. As a result they’re going to stunt their kids. You can’t kill a dream. I believe a lot of delinquency is the killing of a dream, one way or another. Social obligation has to come from living with some sense of style, high adventure, and romance. It’s like my friend, Mr. Electrico.

PARIS REVIEW: He makes a brief appearance in Something Wicked, doesn’t he?

BRADBURY: Yes, but he was a real man, that was his name. He came through my hometown in his seedy little carnival, and he sat in the electric chair every night. They pulled the switch and he’d reach out with his sword and dub everyone in the front row, boys and girls, men and women, with the electricity that sizzled from the sword, and he was prickling around his ears and his hair stood up. When he came to me, he touched me on the brow, and on the nose, and on the chin, and he said, [whispers] “Live forever.” And I decided to. He was a beautiful man, see, because he knew that he had a little weirdy kid there who was twelve years old and wanted lots of things. So I went back and got to know him. We walked along the shore of Lake Michigan and I talked my big philosophies and he talked his little ones. He let me talk and he treated me like a grown-up. He told me that we’d met before on the battlefield of the Argonne, and that I had died in his arms in 1918 in France. Here I was back alive in the world again, his old friend returned. Why he told me this I don’t know, but I’ve remembered it to this day. And he gave me importance; he gave me immortality; a mystical gift for whatever reasons … maybe he had a dead son, maybe he had no sons, maybe he was lonely, maybe he was an ironical jokester … who knows?

But within three months after my last meeting with him forty-four years ago, I began to write full-time and I’ve never stopped. Kinda beautiful, isn’t it? There are people like that in the world who go and change people. So that’s social obligation, you see. Theologians do it wrong by pontificating. Kazantzakis does it right by making you care about the whole universe and the way he looks at the stars. He says, My God, I want to live! There’s more theology in that gesture than in all the papal bulls ever written.

PARIS REVIEW: Do the novel and short story present different problems to you?

BRADBURY: Yes, the problem of the novel is to stay truthful. The short story, if you really are intense and you have an exciting idea, writes itself in a few hours. I try to encourage my student friends and my writer friends to write a short story in one day so it has a skin around it and has its own intensity and its own life, its own reason for being. There’s a reason why the idea occurred to you at that hour anyway, so go with that and investigate it, get it down. Two or three thousand words in a few hours is not that hard to do. Don’t let people interfere with you; boot ’em out, shut down the phone, hide away, get it done. So then you have one truth. But if you carry a short story over to the next day you may overnight intellectualize something about it and try to make it too fancy, try to please someone.

But a novel has all kinds of pitfalls because it takes longer and you are around people, and if you’re not careful you will talk about it. The novel is also hard to write, just in terms of keeping your love intense. It’s hard to stay erect for two hundred days. [Laughs]

PARIS REVIEW: Are there any specific problems you’ve had with any of your novels?

BRADBURY: With Something Wicked This Way Comes I did two months of intense writing to finish a draft. Then I put it away for six months, because I knew the big truth was eluding me. The way to describe writing a novel is to go after Moby-Dick first and just run like hell. After you’ve harpooned him, what happens? All the little killer sharks come up underneath the whale, and then the little minnows come up underneath the killer sharks, and then the barnacles begin to form on the bottom. So, get the big truth first. If you get the big truth the small truths will accumulate around it. Let them be magnetized to it, drawn to it, and then cling to it. That’s what happens: You put it away and you wait for the little truth to show up and say: Hey, I need to be born, too, now that you’ve got the big one.

With Fahrenheit 451, Montag came up to me and said, I’m going crazy. I said, What’s the matter, Montag? I’ve been burning books, he said. I said, Well, don’t you want to anymore? He said, No, I love them. I said, Go do something about it; and he wrote the book for me in nine days. The big truth and all the little truths came up under.

It’s a way to live, a passionate way to live that works like gangbusters. You’re so busy covering the walls with frescoes, you don’t notice there are people in the room.

PARIS REVIEW: Do you keep a tight work schedule?

BRADBURY: No, because my passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was twelve. So I never have to worry about schedules. I’m always going mad for some new subject, some new idea. Sometimes it’s a poem, sometimes it’s a play, sometimes it’s a screenplay, sometimes it’s an essay. But always some new thing is exploding in me; and it schedules me, I don’t schedule it. It tells me: For God’s sake, get to the typewriter right now and finish this.

PARIS REVIEW: What time of day do you write?

BRADBURY: Well, I generally start between nine and ten every morning, though I sometimes work late into the afternoon or evening if I get an idea.

PARIS REVIEW: Where do you do your writing?

BRADBURY: I can work anywhere. I wrote in bedrooms and living rooms when I was growing up with my parents and my brother in a small house in Los Angeles. I worked on my typewriter in the living room, with the radio and my mother and dad and brother all talking at the same time. Later on, when I needed an office and wanted to write my novel Fahrenheit 451 twenty-five years ago, I went up to UCLA and found a basement typing room where, for ten cents which you inserted into the typewriter, you could buy yourself thirty minutes of typing time.

PARIS REVIEW: Do you keep a notebook?

BRADBURY: No. Because as soon as I get an idea, I write a short story, or I start a novel, or I do a poem. So I have no need for a notebook. Everything’s done within the minute of getting the idea. I’m sensible enough to rush off to the typewriter and get it done. Or, if I’m not near a typewriter, I carry a pad and write a complete story on the street, if necessary. I do keep files of ideas and stories that didn’t quite work a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago. If a story is half-finished and for some reason doesn’t finish itself out, I put it in the file. I come back later, I look through the titles, and I give myself a sort of immense Rorschach test, I study all the titles.

It’s like a father bird coming with a worm, and opening the file. You look down at all these hungry little beaks—all these stories waiting to be finished—and you say to them: Which of you needs to be fed? Which of you needs to be finished today? And the story that yells the loudest, the idea that stands up and opens its mouth, is the one who gets fed. And I pull it out of the file and finish it within a few hours.

PARIS REVIEW: I suppose it’s unnecessary to ask whether you enjoy writing.

BRADBURY: Yes, it’s obvious that I do. It’s the exquisite joy and madness of my life, and I don’t understand writers who have to work at it. If I had to work at it I would give it up, because I don’t like working. I like to play.

PARIS REVIEW: Yet intellectuals, I’ve noticed in the course of our talk, seem to dampen the joy you take in writing. I know that Graham Greene, Christopher Isherwood, and Gilbert Highet have praised your work, and that you place a high value on your friendship with Highet and Bernard Berenson. Is it fair to say that you’re ambivalent about intellectuals?

BRADBURY: I’ve learned to differentiate among them. Gilbert Highet is a true intellectual: He’s an all-around man and a scholar, but he’s also a sweet and gentle man. Gerald Heard, the same. They don’t throw their weight around. See, a lot of intellectuals think the reason they gained all that knowledge is to beat people over the head with it. Intellectuals are in love with hierarchies. They come out of the universities where they’ve already been indoctrinated in hierarchies and they move into critical circles where they prescribe and proscribe.

My idea of a real intellectual is Chuck Jones, who did Bugs Bunny. You sit down with him and discuss Mark Twain and the idea of comedy. The first night I met Gilbert Highet we talked about Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and the film Disney had just made of it, twenty years ago. All I’m really saying is, don’t hit me with a bladder full of your brains! I’m not interested in proving your IQ or mine. I’m interested in having fun with ideas, throwing them up in the air like confetti and then running under them.

PARIS REVIEW: There was a time, though, wasn’t there, when you wanted recognition across the board from intellectuals?

BRADBURY: Of course. But I no longer want to be accepted by certain intellectuals. If I hear tomorrow that Norman Mailer likes me, I’ll kill myself. I think he’s too hung up. Or if I heard that Kurt Vonnegut suddenly liked me a whole lot, I would worry; I’d begin to think I was going around the bend. He has problems, he has terrible problems. He cannot see the world the way I see it. I suppose I’m too much Pollyanna, he’s too much Cassandra. But I prefer to see myself as the Janus, the two-faced god who is half Pollyanna, half Cassandra, warning of futures and perhaps living too much in the past—a combination of both. But I don’t think I’m too overoptimistic; I’m action-oriented and I know exactly what I want to do the next thirty years to help save the world and the country, and I intend to do it. I’ll write articles about it and I’ll lecture about it.

PARIS REVIEW: Vonnegut was written off by intellectuals as a science fiction writer for quite some time. Now it’s been decided that he isn’t, that he never was a science fiction writer. He’s been redeemed for the mainstream. So Vonnegut is “literature” now, and you’re on the verge.

BRADBURY: [Gaelic accent] I pray, Mother Cabrini, any day now I make saint. [Laughs]

PARIS REVIEW: Did Vonnegut make it because he’s a Cassandra?

BRADBURY: Yes, that’s part of it. It’s the terrible creative negativism, admired by New York critics mainly, that has caused his celebrity. New Yorkers love to dupe themselves, as well as doom themselves—in reality they’re doomed and they’ve got to do something fast. New Yorkers smell their own doom, and of course don’t know what to do about it; the average person is helpless and doom-oriented. But I haven’t had to live like that. I’m a California boy. I’m basically optimistic because of it, because we’re a really free society, we have no hierarchy. I don’t tell anyone how to write and they don’t tell me.

PARIS REVIEW: Do success or fame do anything for you?

BRADBURY: Not a thing. There’s no time to think of it. Anyone that thinks of it had better stop writing. No, I’m too busy. The kind of success that’s fun is a one-to-one thing where you meet a person that really knows and loves your work and says so, and proves it by saying, “Hey, that section in that book where you said this?” That’s swell, that’s immediate, there’s no crap, they really know what they’re talking about and prove it. But all the other stuff—publicity and advertising, that sort of thing—you’ve got to have it to let people know you exist in the world, but you must never believe it.

PARIS REVIEW: Do you resent that you’re not thought of when it comes time for National Book Awards, Pulitzers, that sort of stuff?

BRADBURY: I did when I was younger. But I’m getting something that a lot of writers don’t get: an immense feedback of love. Talk about energy? When you see it in people’s faces, it can’t be hidden; love can never be hidden. That’s better than a lot of these awards which are handed out by critics and intellectuals. I hope my friends give me a dinner later in life. I attended two dinners in the past two years, one for James Cagney, one for Orson Welles. I wouldn’t have dreamt of staying away. I wrote a love letter to Cagney which was printed in the program that was handed out at the banquet. I got two letters from Cagney about how important that evening was to him, because these were real people standing up saying real things. The same with Orson Welles. Citizen Kane touched all our lives! I’ve seen it thirty times now. That kind of award is important. That’s real stuff.

PARIS REVIEW: What do you want to do in the future? I see you’re writing poetry.

BRADBURY: Yes, I began writing poetry forty years ago, and it was dreadful. People encouraged me to give it up, but I couldn’t stay away because I was in love with Shakespeare, Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, Frost, and Pope. I’ve never been a technician, I’ve never been able to learn things technically. I have to take them into my blood. About five years ago my poetry began to be of such a quality that I was not ashamed. My first book of poems, When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, has done very well critically and has sold seven or eight thousand copies, an incredible amount these days.

As far as other things in the future: I want to finish a book on creativity, and someday in the near future I want to do a Grand Opera. I’ve been working with a lot of composers the last seven, eight years—Billy Goldenberg, Lalo Schifrin, Jerry Goldsmith. And I’ve written cantatas and madrigals and musicals. I’m intrigued with music, though I don’t read a lot. But I work very well with them doing certain kinds of lyrics. And I would like to do opera—a science fiction opera—if I can find the ghost and flesh of Puccini somewhere in the world to help me out, because he’s certainly one of my favorite operatic composers. Beyond that, do more short stories, more poetry. More essays, and keep moving, I hope, to the end of my life.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

All books have an essential cast of characters that make them work. This one is no different. First and foremost, I wish to thank Ray Bradbury for nearly a decade of memories that will always stay with me. Marguerite Bradbury was present during many of the conversations contained in this book. I am deeply grateful to her for her generosity and wonderful sense of humor. You are sorely missed. Thanks to the entire Bradbury family, in particular Alexandra, “Zee,” who was patient with innumerable requests of the most minute nature.

In the Ray Bradbury universe, thank you to my dear friends Santiago Montejo and Craig and Patti Graham, who were always there to help and always there with wonderful laughter.

Gratitude also to Eric Larson, John King Tarpinian, and Nard Kordell. God speed, my friend.

Thanks also to Malcolm and Christine Bell at the incomparable Mystery and Imagination Bookshop in Glendale, California, for hosting the blast off.

At Stop Smiling Books, JC Gabel has been my true creative partner. Thanks for bringing the idea for this book my way and for having the total faith to trust my vision. I’ve never had more fun on a project, thanks to you. To James Hughes for your confidence and commitment. To Sybil Perez for copious and essential behind-the-scenes work, including the midnight hour copy-edit; Tina Ibañez for the striking book design; and the entirety of the Stop Smiling crew, thank you. I am also deeply grateful to the gifted Zen Sekizawa who photographed the stunning Bradbury “still-lifes” in the book.

At Melville House, to Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians for the trust and vision, and to Kelly Burdick for steering this rocketship with grace.

I am extremely grateful to Charles Thompson (aka Black Francis), fellow Bradbury aficionado and legendary musician, for providing the thoughtful foreword to this book. Your generosity and good nature are deeply appreciated. Thanks also to Pixies manager Richard Hermitage.

Thanks to my colleagues in the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago—most notably my friend and mentor Dr. Randall Albers.

As ever, my remarkable and savvy agent Judith Ehrlich has been my friend, partner, and manager on every conceivable front. A better collaborator I could not find.

My steadfast assistant Karen Schmidt took on the bulk of the transcription work for this book. Thanks also to Nicolette Kittenger and Jon Gugala for additional transcription toilings.

There are simply too many friends to name, but I must bow to my pal John McNally, drinking buddy and writer extraordinaire. And to Steve Edwards, dear friend and sounding board. And thanks go to my friends at the peerless Columbia College Chicago Library, Kim Hale, Jan Chindlund, Jo Cates and her husband—the late, wonderful teacher, writer, and friend—Jim Sulski.

To Professor Jon Eller—gracious, generous, my brother in Bradburian scholarship. Thank you for realizing there is room for all of us who find the life of Ray Bradbury a work of art in and of itself.

To Jennifer Brehl and Peter Schneider—good friends and consummate pros, thank you for your continued friendship and support over the years.

To my beloved family—thank you. To those dearly departed, Mom, Tam Tran, Dis, and Sage, your presence is felt, always.

And to my darling wife Jan—eleven years of loyalty, support, and love. We are my favorite story, and you are my finest editor. I’m beginning to wonder, could I even write without you?

And, finally, to my two babies, Mai-Linh and Le-Anh, my two little bibliophiles, you are my joy, my love, my life. Live Forever!

Sam Weller is the author of The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury. He has lectured across the United States on the life and work of Ray Bradbury. Weller is the former Midwest Correspondent for Publishers Weekly magazine. He has written for The Paris Review and NPR’s All Things Considered, and was a host for the Chicago Public Radio program Hello Beautiful! A frequent literary critic for the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, and Playboy.com, Weller is also a professor in the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago.