Mike Schramm

The Illustrated Life
How Ray Bradbury chose Sam Weller to chronicle his life

Is Sam Weller a geek? "Pffff," he scoffs. "I am a full-on geek!" he exclaims, eyebrows lifting above his horn-rimmed glasses, almost reaching his blond buzz cut. Blown-up paintings of Spider-Man and Fantastic Four comic-book covers span the wall behind him. Little toy robots and figurines--including an intensely detailed wild thing from "Where the Wild Things Are"--stand guard around his Irving Park office, filled to the brim with books, memorabilia and the accessories of what some might call a "nerd."

"Check this out," he says excitedly, and turns to a flat-screen iMac loading up iPhoto. "This is so cool." After a few seconds of searching through thumbnails, he loads a photo on screen. It's him at the White House--he and the President stand smiling at the camera with a small group. Seated in front of them, also smiling at the camera through familiar-looking horn-rimmed glasses, is Ray Bradbury, Weller's hero, and the man whose biography he just spent five years writing. "In the friggin' Oval Office!" says Weller with enthusiasm.

Weller is Bradbury's number-one fan. Ask him, and he'll tick off Bradbury's many and varied accomplishments. Author of "Fahrenheit 451" and "Dandelion Wine." Scriptwriter for radio, television and stage. Walt Disney asked him to consult on Epcot Center, and astronauts want his autograph. "He's got a crater named after him on the moon," says Weller. "'Filmmakers say, 'You changed the way I tell stories.' Stephen King says, 'There'd be no Stephen King without Ray Bradbury.'" And now, as author of "The Bradbury Chronicles," Sam Weller has not only been able to meet his childhood hero, he's written his biography.

"I visited him every two weeks for four years," says Weller about his relationship with the man who influenced him so much. "Either researching in his basement or in his garage, or interviewing him. We'd go to dinner, we'd go to lunch, we'd go to Hollywood, just drive around." Weller is obviously thrilled to be talking about "spending time with someone who I admired as a kid."

And even before that. Weller's father read "The Illustrated Man" to him in his mother's womb. Twenty years later, with his mother dying of cancer, Weller describes finding Bradbury again in an audiobook. "It was pure magic and so very cathartic for my soul, which enjoyed a brief respite from my mother's illness and all that sadness... In that moment, I felt a kinship. I was not alone." Eight years later, Weller was freelancing for the Chicago Tribune after an award-winning stay at Newcity, and went to Los Angeles to write an article about his favorite author's eightieth birthday in 2000. After hitting it off, the two became friends, and Weller started thinking about a larger profile when he discovered that no complete chronicle of Bradbury's life existed. Biographies were "bookends," Bradbury believed, and he wasn't ready to be bookended yet.

After some correspondence and convincing, Bradbury finally let Weller work on an authorized biography. "We were having lunch at a restaurant that we go to a lot, and he said, `I've thought about this, and I want you to do this book,'" says Weller about the day his odyssey began. "That was a pretty mind-blowing experience."

Weller started by seeking out Bradbury's earliest influences. He began in Waukegan, the hometown of Leo Bradbury, Ray's father and head of a Victorian turn-of-the-century family with roots going back to the Salem Witch trials. "I found every birth certificate, every death certificate of every family member, going back to their arrival in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1847," says Weller, all "to see who these people were--how they lived, how they died. I looked up every newspaper article on the Bradbury family in the last 100 years." And he found enough characters to populate hundreds of Bradbury stories.

There's Inar Moberg, a "loud, boisterous, Swedish drinking uncle" who later found a home in "Uncle Einar," a Bradbury story about a jolly old vampire uncle. There's Harry Blackstone, the famous magician who entranced Bradbury early on. There's "Mr. Electrico," a mysterious carnie with an electricity trick that gave Bradbury the willies at a young age: "His white hair standing on end, sparks leaping through his teeth, he brushed an Excalibur sword over the heads of the children, knighting them with fire," Bradbury recounts to Weller. Electrico then entreated the young Bradbury, fatefully, to "Live Forever!"

And then there's Neva, Ray's aunt, the artistic outsider of the Bradbury family. "She was boundary-pushing," remarks Weller. "She was a flapper, she had the short bob, she partied with the absinthe set, hung out with garden-brooding Goths at the Art Institute. She was a painter, dresser, set-builder, sculptor--totally a progressive woman. And she saw this little imaginative nephew of hers, took him under her wing and, more than any other person, shaped who Ray Bradbury became." It's tough to imagine Ray Bradbury without Neva's influence. Throughout his life, Bradbury was courted by literary agents and directors, respected by mentors and imitators, and accosted by fans and apprentices, but Neva's praise letter is the one that reads most poignantly in Weller's book. "You awe me," she writes her nephew in 1950, after the release of "The Martian Chronicles." "I read you and my great feeling of pride detracts from the story. I am so aware of it--and I must read and re-read portions over and over. At times I have cried, not from the sadness of the story, but because I am so proud of you. I think, perhaps, my dear," Neva tells the young man who will become Ray Bradbury, "that you may live as one of our great writers, in the future."

That handwritten letter now resides in Weller's office, in a filing cabinet directly beneath a picture of Weller and Bradbury with Hugh Hefner in his signature bathrobe.

And now, five years later, the book is a complete Bradbury history, the story of a life immersed in American popular culture. We see a young Bradbury hounding W.C. Fields' autograph on the Paramount lot, and writing jokes for George Burns and Gracie Allen. Truman Capote discovers him in a Mademoiselle slush pile, McCarthy is targeted in angry essays, and a bullying John Huston starts shenanigans while Bradbury works on the script for "Moby Dick."

And yet this writer once dubbed "Buck Rogers" by his peers had to spend years working to earn the respect of a culture he was helping shape. "Throughout his career, there has been a history of people who've denied borrowing Bradbury's stories, but they look remarkably like Bradbury stories," notes Weller. "It started really with EC Comics, who absolutely stole his stories. Re-titled them and turned them into comic books in the fifties. Really cool comic books, and they admitted it; they paid him. They said, `We're sorry, it was an oversight on our behalf.'" Rod Serling's "Twilight Zone" created a few shows that were overly similar to Bradbury stories, but simply insisted that they were reflecting archetypal myths, not Bradbury property. "A lot of people did, in my opinion, steal from Bradbury," says Weller, "and that was their logic."

To this day, America's literary establishment accords less respect for writers of "genre" fiction. Weller says that's a battle Bradbury still fights. "He'll fight it for the next 200 years, long after he's gone. There's a prejudice against Ray Bradbury that will always exist... there will always be a sector of the literati who will always lift their noses to him, because he writes stories of the fantastic." Weller says there's a common stigma against the genre itself: "Suddenly, when you write a story about another time, in the future, it can't be literature. I mean, that's just the biggest load of crap I ever heard. I hate that whole aspect."

On the other hand, Bradbury "was validated, to a large degree," says Weller proudly, mentioning a 2000 National Book Award for a Lifetime Contribution to American Letters. "Has he written really great science fiction? Totally. But he's also written some stories that are straightforward contemporary literature that have no elements of the fantastic whatsoever in them, and a lot of the people who are labeling him conveniently ignore those stories."

Though the biography is "authorized," Weller was allowed free rein. "That was important to me," Weller says, "because while I'm a fan, and a friend of his, I'm first and foremost a storyteller and journalist. And, the fact that a writer's writing about a writer--he respected that. My obligation as a journalist is to tell a truthful, good story fairly and honestly, and as objectively as possible."

The only pressure, it seems, came from publisher William Morrow, who asked Weller to remove the names of Bradbury's two mistresses from the manuscript. "Initially, I would have said the names, but my publisher mandated to me, since the women were still living, to avoid lawsuits," Weller says matter-of-factly. "I've met one of them; she's a lovely woman. The whole family knows about the affairs. Mrs. Bradbury found out about the affairs, the daughters found out about the affairs, they all know about them." Because hiding the identities of the women didn't change the story, he relented to the publisher. "Does it change what happened? Had it affected it or made the story worse," he says, "I would have fought hard and done it."

In fact, the only major obstacle Weller says he had to face was length. "I would have loved it if this book was 100 to 150 pages longer, but they specifically didn't want a doorstop biography." After a thousand hours of interviews, there a large quantity of material that didn't make it. "One story that I would have loved to squeeze in," Weller recalls, was when "Bradbury had dinner with Mikhail Gorbachev, upon Gorbachev's request... Anecdotally, I would have loved to put that in there."

But maybe the most important thing Weller learned from his research is what Bradbury himself was able to teach the biographer. Weller says he learned "to not intellectualize your writing process. If you think too much, you start second-guessing whether your writing's good." Bradbury, self-educated, has always been an advocate of writing by instinct, setting off on a metaphor and not deciding where you're going until you get there. "That's why he's bewildered by people who complain about writing. And by people who take ten years to write a book," adds Weller. "His philosophy is, `I wonder what other writers do with their time.' This is a man who's written 700 short stories, thirty books, screenplays." And a man whose creative influence, Weller says, will continue to reach across generations.

In Weller's office, across the room from the filing cabinet that holds Aunt Neva's precious letter, there's a copy of Bradbury's "The Toynbee Convector." Inside, on the acknowledgement page, there are two handwritten notes. The top note reads, "To Sam, the next Ray Bradbury--even better. Dad, 1988." Weller's father, the man who read Bradbury to him in the womb, gave him the book twelve years before Weller walked into Bradbury's living room to write his biography. Like Neva's letter, the inscription is glowing with pride.

And below, there's another note in another hand. "Sam! And now in 2002! Love!" it says. "He likes to use exclamation points a lot," laughs Weller. The signature below scrawls across the page: "Ray Bradbury."

Newcity is sponsoring a launch party for "The Bradbury Chronicles" on April 7 at Sonotheque.

(2005-04-05)

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