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  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 hi
m 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.