Bradbury Speaks Page 8
Similarly he corralled the ghosts of Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson in Together Tonight, a tapestry of their writings woven to become a flying carpet through time and landing them, reborn, on a lecture podium.
Lincoln and Douglas debated their timeless arguments, recalled by Corwin.
His Lust for Life, starring Kirk Douglas as van Gogh and Anthony Quinn as Gauguin did the impossible, proved the relationship between what is seen and what is painted, how to notice and re-create. The sort of metaphor the film The Snows of Kilimanjaro failed to prove with Hemingway’s African typewriter.
A few days before the 1940 presidential election, Corwin crammed a hundred celebrities into a studio, gave each four seconds. One by one they jumped to the microphone and spoke.
“This is Claudette Colbert. I am voting for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”
“I am Humphrey Bogart. Roosevelt’s my man.”
“This is Edward G. Robinson. Roosevelt.”
“James Cagney. Roosevelt.”
Did it work? Sheer political flimflammery? Yes and no. The job of electing Caesars or jerkwater town mayors has always been chicken in the garage, new tin lizzies out front, and vodka in your beer. Thousand of voters that night might not have shifted allegiance, for hearing was almost seeing. Their fingers itched for the voting-booth pad.
There was no similar broadcast before or since.
His radio drama On a Note of Triumph, aired on the eve of our European victory in June 1945, was a singular triumph for Corwin. The drama was broadcast over CBS, a light and dark celebration because the war was not yet over—we had yet to bring down Japan. For those who missed the program, as well as those who wanted to hear it again, it was repeated live eight days later. The country was in raw need of great sun and shadow declarations, and this program helped to fill the need.
After these fireworks it is time to admit my timeless friendship with Corwin.
In 1947, when I published my first book of stories, I sent him a copy inscribed, “If you like these stories half as much as I love your work, I would like to buy you drinks.”
The phone rang three days later. It was Corwin. “You’re not buying me drinks,” he said, “I’m buying you dinner.”
During that first dinner, I described a story, just finished, of a Martian woman who dreams an astronaut lands and flies her back to Earth. Norman, most kind, told me to write more about Mars.
I promptly did so.
And invited Norman down to meet my wife, Maggie, who married me for my money (forty dollars a week in a good week). And, by God, he came!
Norman Corwin, the world’s most acclaimed radio writer, brought his fine actor wife, Katie, to share bad wine and fair pizza on a card table in a matchbox parlor with this errant Martian heading for a far shore: up.
Two years later Norman said the most important thing: I must come to New York and let the book editors know I existed. He and Katie would welcome and protect me. Would I do this?
With Maggie pregnant and sixty dollars in the bank, I took the Greyhound bus to New York, a stack of stories on my lap.
Don’t you write novels? the editors said. I’m a sprinter, I said. I have one hundred stories, all bright and shiny new.
Norman and Katie, to console me, took me to animated cartoon festivals and sat me in at the taping of one of his magnificent One World broadcasts, which knocked my soul out of my body.
Finally, at the last moment, a Doubleday editor, Walter Bradbury (no relation), suggested that I had already written a novel but didn’t know it. All those Martian stories, inspired by Norman, wouldn’t they make a tapestry called The Martian Chronicles? Go back to the YMCA, said my editor, type an outline, and if it’s half good, I’ll hand you an advance. I stayed up all night in a hot un-air-conditioned Y, wrote the outline, and sold the book. Norman and Katie flew home, happy. I said to hell with the bus and rode west, el cheapo, on a train chair-car, triumphant.
We met again to celebrate with one bottle of red wine, seventy-nine cents—mine—and a red worth nine bucks—Norman’s—and more pizza. What a feast!
When John Huston asked me to write the screenplay for Moby Dick in August of 1953, the first person I telephoned was Norman Corwin.
My God, I cried, how do I do it?
Call you in three days, Norman said. He called. He had reread Moby Dick and gave advice.
It was much like that I got from my eight-year-old daughter, Susan, a few years later. One day I found her deep fathoms under, reading Melville.
I circled her gingerly. “Reading Melville?” I said.
“Yep,” Susan said.
“How do you like it?” I said cautiously.
“Fine,” Susan said, “but I skip a lot.”
“So do I,” I said.
So said Norman. Do every other chapter, he said. And then go back to make sure nothing’s left out. The whaling stuff is fascinating, but you can’t cram it all in. Do Richard III, then dress it with the White Whale’s oil.
I did just that and woke one dawn to stare in a London mirror crying, “I am Herman Melville!” In the next eight hours, I furnaced my typewriter to finish the last forty pages of Melville’s tempest.
Back home the first one I showed the script to: Corwin.
“You’ve done superb work,” he said.
“No, you,” I said.
Not male bonding, but mind bonding.
Norman showed the way, I could but follow.
It has been said that the voice of history and creative drama, delivered and broadcast, might light-year travel beyond Saturn, Uranus, and Pluto and ricochet on to eternity, where, if we speed fast enough, we might catch Roosevelt’s bravado, Hitler’s lunacies, and Corwin’s rhymed and unrhymed philosophies. We would like to believe that his tripled and quadrupled voices linger in Andromeda because he revitalized dictionaries and recast more words in new echo chambers. He dined on Marcus Aurelius, Daniel Webster, and Homer, blind with bright sound waves for a tongue.
After the silence of ages, Corwin spoke, and the field beasts froze in the fields and listened.
And we were the beasts.
BECAUSE OF THE WONDERFUL THINGS HE DOES (1999)
No, not the Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
But the wonderful wizard who birthed the Wizard.
L. Frank Baum, who has filled our century from one end to the other with naïve joys and unthinking delights.
And what, you ask, are the reasons why.
The Wizard of Oz will never die?
Let me set you a task and make you a test.
Place two books on a table, Alice in Wonderland and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Then blindfold any friend, steer him (or her) across the library and ask him, with some hesitation, to drift his hand down to touch one of these books.
How will the blind choose?
Is there a temperature there, an ambience that sifts upward to one’s as-yet-unselective fingers?
There is. And how to describe it?
From Wonderland: a winter landscape, where as the characters speak, you see their breath.
From Oz: a bakery air, the land of the midnight sun, where the day never stops, where noons persist or, if they darken briefly, reburst themselves with pure delight.
From Alice’s friends, the contemptuous sneer.
From Dorothy’s, laughter or, at least, a smile.
The Red Queen’s “Off with their heads”?
Or Ozma’s merest sweet-tempered word?
Alice’s oysters eaten, every one?
Or the Oz quadlings, in a later book, who, when they hurl their heads as projectiles, still get them back with promises of no more headlong cannonades?
Tweedledum and Tweedledee to help you get lost at the fork in the road?
Or the Shaggyman, in still another book, with his love magnet luring you to innocent passions?
The hand hovers and descends.
Choosing Alice, are you then a cynic, a skeptic, or just a disillusioned dropout?
Choose.
I don’t claim that we can judge readers by such choices. There must be travelers, like myself, who can go a-journeying through both countries, dark and light, and come forth intrigued, insightful, and happy. Wonderland may be fog and drizzle, but Alice stands as a beacon in its midst, stays sane, comments, and survives.
One might almost recommend a dose of Alice’s fog midday, a jolt of Emerald sun at midnight.
Indeed, some of us can traverse both lands with equal enjoyment.
After all, you suffer a culture shock when you shift climates and characters. Addressing a snide caterpillar is not quite the same as oiling a reconstructed Tin Woodman, who remains happy though once he was flesh and blood whose limbs were chopped off for tin replacements. Imagine such a Tin Man lamenting his fate rather than running Dorothy, happily, on the Yellow Brick Road.
Or imagine the Scarecrow fallen out of his field to confront not Dorothy but Alice. How long before the Looking Glass crows ripped his muslin, seeking corn?
To freeze or to bask, these are the alternatives offered by these forever contradictory books. And it is our business here to bask in the light of the road adventures of that eternal boy-child, L. Frank Baum, who could have hot-footed that Deadly Desert that encircled Oz and survived intact, flesh and soul, innocently pronouncing the trip a lark.
Yet another way to look at it is your choice of houses to live in. If you unlocked the door of a desolate mansion minus central heating, a proper hot-water bath, and a kitchen, all knives and no spoons, you must certainly find Alice’s Janus friends, two-faced but mostly facing north, pleased by blizzards and bloodless tantrums. Your slumbers would be one long glide off a glacier into a lake of cold soup.
That old baseball rhyme might serve as finale. There is no joy in Mudville, mighty Casey has struck out. Even a slight win might raise the temperature but five degrees.
Conversely if you moved into the Emerald City, best take along fans, sunburn lotion, and a wolf pack to circle your basking hounds, for if you bask too long, someone crying wolf might cry the truth. Summer people are grand fodder for winter sneaks.
Best, then, for the intelligent reader to engage in self-contested tennis, striking the ball and leaping to catch one flight in shadow, one in the lie that says it’s noon. For both sides fudge the truth to estimate the climate of mankind at unequal times.
Neither can be proven, both must be experienced, despite the imbalance.
It seems only correct that many of the Oz books were written in a make-believe country where nothing was or ever will be real: Hollywood. Oz could well have been born on the back lot at Universal Studios or indoors on Lon Chaney’s Opera Phantom stage. For the back lot is façade lacking back porch and roof, while the Phantom’s theater is haunted by flickering ghosts of ideas that bombard our sight without drawing blood. Even murder, in Hollywood, is a falsehood told in full trump, signifying nothing. Lewis Carroll’s cast of characters would have died here of saccharine or run back to hide behind the cold glass. Baum settled in, delighted with bright nothings.
And as for the illustrations? I began with W. W. Denslow in my Aunt Neva’s Oz collection, as a child of three. I moved on, with equal love to Jno. R. Neill. And now find much room for Michael McCurdy.
Baum, in forever’s day, handed multitudinous metaphors to artists who knew how to shut their eyes and see clearly. No match, of course, to Moby Dick, whose Melvillean Richard IIIs, Lears, and Hamlets seized lightnings and sank in ten dozen different illustrated White Whale editions.
But Baum with less, does well. This is not the last readaptation of his metaphors by a cadre of illustrators. McCurdy is not Denslow, nor is he Jno. R. Neill, but he is indeed McCurdy. More than sufficient for this new repaving of a road well taken and a harvest of characters well met.
McCurdy is the most recent, but more will follow in the twenty-first century. If the Wicked Witch is truly dead, it is because L. Frank Baum landed on her with his Boys’ Life Forever Sunkist philosophy. No witch could survive Baum, even today when witches beam themselves up. Cynics and skeptics scatter at his happy cry on what might have been a doomsday afternoon.
Alice and her misfits will survive beyond the millennium, oh, yes, but should Alice ever melt out through the cold glass or escape the Rabbit Hole, she will surely head for the forever-August Emerald City.
So there you have it. Two books, two countries. Two roads taken or refused. Chill your eyebrows, warm your cockles, or stand between, a Twilight Zone of one and much room in your head and heart for both. Down the Rabbit Hole into the Deadly Desert. Over the rainbow to drop your house on the Red Queen? What a fascinating, lovely mix.
Yours to start one journey now.
Tomorrow go stare in Alice’s polar Looking Glass, to see if anything human stares back.
A MILESTONE AT MILESTONE’S: BONDERCHUK REMEMBERED (UNDATED)
During that two-week period more than twenty years ago, when the Russian director Sergei Bonderchuk’s quite amazing War and Peace was being previewed in Hollywood, and shown, especially at my Film Society, in its twelve-hour length, Bonderchuk arrived to be wined and dined by all the celebrity directors. I was invited up to Lewis Milestone’s house for a private reception for Bonderchuk one night. I don’t recall if there were any other screenwriters there; I remember only the incredible roster of directors who stood in a line waiting to receive Bonderchuk.
John Ford was there, as well as Billy Wilder, King Vidor, Sam Peckinpah, William Wyler, Frank Capra, Rouben Mamoulian, George Cukor, Sidney Lumet, and on and on, another dozen, all famous.
Bonderchuk arrived and moved along the line exclaiming quietly to each name as he was introduced. With him were two other Soviet directors, whose names escape me.
Needless to say, I was not in the receiving line with the godlike directors. I loitered near the wine and hard liquor. I watched Bonderchuk with awe and admiration as he moved among all the famous and powerful. I was struck not only by him but at being in the same room with heroes from my childhood.
The procession moved quietly, with agreeable compliments offered, but with no great outcries.
Until at last, with all the cordial comments and fine compliments finished, Bonderchuk and his cohorts arrived at the finale. And there I stood, hearing my name pronounced by Lewis Milestone.
The sun exploded. Three Russian faces took fire. Bonderchuk’s eyebrows flew up, his eyes widened, his mouth gaped, as did the eyebrows, eyes, and mouths of his friends.
“Bradbury!” he cried.
“Bradbury!” they all cried.
Three sets of arms grappled me. Bonderchuk seized me first with an immense bear hug, as he rained kisses on my cheeks.
“Bradbury!” he cried, turning to the twenty stunned directors. “Do you know who this is? Do you realize what is this talent? Your greatest genius, your greatest writer. My God. Get out of the way! Come! Where’s the vodka!”
One of the others produced a bottle and held it high.
“Where are the glasses?”
Milestone brought four glasses.
“This way. Down. Sit. Open. Pour.”
And before the astonished crowd, Bonderchuk sloshed my glass full, filled the other glasses to be lifted in a toast.
“Bradbury!” they shouted.
And then, “The bottle’s empty! Another!”
Another was brought. They drank me, literally, under the table. There must’ve been a third bottle. I lost count. I never laughed so much in my life. I never cried so much with joy. My shoulders were bruised from being slapped. My ribs ached from being hugged. My cheeks were blushed with interminable kisses.
I haven’t the faintest idea of how I got home. Someone must have poured me into a taxi. I don’t recall how long the evening lasted. I only remember being surrounded by Russians who kept pawing and hugging and kis
sing me, while the two dozen Hollywood directors, riven by lightning, watched ruefully and finally retired to their own drinks.
I awoke the next morning thinking, It didn’t happen. It can’t have happened. I am ruined. All those directors will never call, never speak to me, never hire me. My God, what have I done to myself? What has Bonderchuk done to me!?
Well, some of the directors eventually did call. Peckinpah, for one, and Robert Mulligan, and Tony Richardson, and Sidney Lumet, about various projects. And eventually some of my other ideas got made into films, mainly for TV by directors who hadn’t stood under the storm of Bonderchuk’s inattention and found themselves rained out.
I have never written about that evening until now. Even as I write, it seems an inordinately fantastic time. The Russians cannot have loved me all that much. But they did. I must be lying through my teeth. I am not.
FREE PASS AT HEAVEN’S GATE (1999)
There is, I recall, an Egyptian myth about passing muster, getting through, being allowed entrance, at Heaven’s Gate.
Arriving there at some far future date, you will be asked just one question by the God of the Dead.
Did you have Enthusiasm?
If the answer is “Yes!” you’re in!
If “No”—a hole opens underfoot and you go to hell.
Which brings us to Jon Jerde.
Enthusiasm?
His answer would blow the ears off that dread Egyptian god.
Another Egyptian metaphor applies here. The pharaohs, buried with bread and onions for the trip, were accompanied by pedestrian slaves or boatmen. If their children died, toys were stashed in their tombs so the gods would come play.
Jerde, in his fevers, puts toys, immense toys, not in our tombs but out front, in back, topside and bottom, of our lives. So we can come play.
Most architects ignore or bore us with their conceptual ennuis, gum our eyes shut with banalities.
Jerde jars us awake and alert, with his lively sense of fun and beauty, a fused mixture that keeps us off balance. One glance at his outsize toys makes us want to go in!
Jon Jerde arrived in my life almost twenty years ago. We were introduced by John DeCuir Jr., a superb designer for motion-picture sets.