Oh, you'll like this. Boy, will you like this. For a number of years at Comic-Con, I had the honor/privilege/thrill (it was many other things, as well) of interviewing Mr. Ray Bradbury. Ray came down to Comic-Con almost every year just for Saturday. If he'd wanted to stay over, they would have given him the grandest suite in town but I don't think that ever happened. What he wanted, first of all, was to have the option of not showing up if he felt like sleeping or doing something else that day.
He'd get up that morning, decide that he wanted to make the trip and he'd have someone pick him up and drive him down there, arriving around 10 AM, give or take an hour. Once in a while, someone on the con staff would seek me out just to confirm, "He's on his way," meaning the interview would not be canceled. It was not canceled any of the years I did it and I don't know that it was ever canceled before I began doing it.
But he always seemed to have that option…and why not? If he'd called in sick, what were they going to do to him? It's hard to fire a guy you're not paying, especially if he's Ray Bradbury.
He'd spend the morning browsing the hall, looking at this and that, sometimes buying this or that. I recall him arguing with a dealer who had a rare old pulp magazine he wanted. The dealer wanted Ray to just take it and Ray was insisting on paying. The quarrel got a bit nastier than a disagreement about that should ever get and I think they wound up compromising — Ray paid half-price.
Sometimes, he'd run into an old friend like Julius Schwartz, Forrest Ackerman or Stan Freberg and they'd embrace and catch up on things. If you noticed and recognized him, he was glad to sign whatever you wanted signed and to talk about whatever you wanted to talk about. I'm sure there are many, many folks out there who still treasure those encounters. He had a way of shifting the topic from himself to you. You'd ask him about The Martian Chronicles and wind up talking about what you did or wanted to do for a living.
If you were passionate about something, especially if it was to someday be a writer or artist, he would tell you that you reminded him of himself at your age. That was a powerful feeling he had at the con and he expressed it in so many ways.
The interview was scheduled for 2 PM or 3 PM, not to run more than an hour. He always told me that if we reached a good stopping point five or ten minutes before the scheduled end time, I should just call a halt to the proceedings then. Like any good writer, Ray understood the value of ending strong.
He'd have lunch somewhere and then a half-hour before our scheduled start time, I would meet him in the Pro Suite for a chat and a very brief discussion about what we'd be talking about. I don't know why we did that because we never followed the plan. He'd ask me to get him to tell a certain anecdote and then, out in front of that always-packed audience, I'd ask him to tell that story and he'd say, "Oh, I don't want to talk about that." There's a little of that in the video below. He asked me before the conversation to ask him about his days hanging out at Clifton's Cafeteria in downtown L.A., I did and then he didn't answer.
I learned that everything went best when I recalled or researched a great story he'd told many times before and then led him into it. Shortly before the chat below, he'd appeared on a little-watched cable show that Dennis Miller was hosting. Ray started telling a story that was too long for the time remaining so Miller rushed him through it, then cut him off before the punch line. Late in this conversation, I got Ray to tell it in full. Whenever I could steer him into the right tale, it was magic. I just sat there in the best seat in the house and enjoyed Ray Bradbury talking, sometimes at great length. Even at his advanced age, he was one of the best public speakers I've ever seen.
I'd look out at the audience while Ray was doing what he did so well and I'd see this scene in so many rows: A parent roughly my age had brought his or her kid(s) to hear this amazing man they'd probably never heard of…and the kids were all staring with stark wonderment at us up on stage — well, at Ray — absorbing every single word. I wished I'd had a concession outside the room selling Ray Bradbury books. I would have made a bloody fortune.
So my job was to introduce him, cue some stories and get out of the way, then get us off the stage at the proper moment. The last one or two times we did this, I had an extra task. Ray's daughter asked me to, as much as possible, keep Ray off certain topics. In his dotage, he'd developed some strange notions, mostly relating to how men should treat women.
It was not a matter of anyone wanting to censor Ray Bradbury — as if anyone or anything could. It was just that things went better when he spoke on these topics instead of those topics. In this video, I was asked to keep him off the topic of Michael Moore's then-current movie, Fahrenheit 9/11. As you will see, I did not succeed.
This is our conversation from 2004, since which time I've lost about 65% of that hair and 135 pounds off the rest of me. It's in three parts which should play one after the other in the player below. Thanks to Shane Shellenbarger for saving this lovely example of how spellbinding this man could be.