Listen to the Echoes Page 12

  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 McClu
re, 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?