by Ray Bradbury
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 …”
