The interviews contained within this volume were conducted between June 2010 and April 2012. I first met Ray Bradbury while writing a feature story for the Chicago Tribune Magazine in 2000, the year he turned eighty, and we quickly bonded over our shared childhood experiences (roughly fifty years apart) growing up in northern Illinois, as well as in southern California. We had a remarkable number of things in common and a similar sense of curiosity and a joie de vivre, and we began to work together closely, as I became his authorized biographer.
I walked into Bradbury’s life after he had suffered a debilitating stroke—a difficult reminder of his fragile mortality. Over more than a decade, we talked about any number of topics. Quite literally, because after years of fostering trust—a long investment in biographical immersion—no subject was verboten. This trust was a great privilege, but it also endowed me with a tremendous sense of responsibility—I’m acutely conscious of the smudged line between being sensitive to Bradbury’s generosity of spirit and a journalistic dedication to documenting his legacy. Because of our long relationship, I was able to ask him questions he wouldn’t have answered had they come from other writers and journalists. I think this level of intimacy emerges at the very start of the final interview in this book, which is, quite literally, the last interview.
The conversations contained in this volume capture a Bradbury who was, as he would say, “very late in time” (he was eighty-nine years old at the time of the first interview), and they capture a great literary writer nearing the end of his days—reflective, grateful, wise, and ever defiant. At the time of these interviews, Bradbury was physically quite frail, yet still opinionated and very much in possession of the great mind that created such imaginative masterworks as The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, and Something Wicked This Way Comes.
This book is a slight departure from the other volumes in the Melville House Last Interview series. In the other editions—books that include conversations with James Baldwin, Gabriel García Márquez, and Hannah Arendt—different writers and journalists conducted the multiple interviews in each book. In Ray Bradbury: The Last Interview, I conducted all of the four interviews. In selecting these conversations, I was conscious to avoid redundancy of subject matter. I also tried to select interviews that explored new ideas, philosophies, details, and anecdotes not examined in my earlier books on the author.
The last two years of Ray Bradbury’s life were deeply challenging. He spent most of his time at home, in bed, venturing out only occasionally for the odd appearance or public conversation. (Two of these conversations before live audiences are presented here.) Most of the hours we shared in the last two years were housebound, as I sat at the side of Ray Bradbury’s lift bed in his home in Cheviot Hills, California. He moved into this house in November 1958, raised his four daughters there, held annual Halloween parties, hosted famous writers and musicians and dignitaries, and lived with his wife of fifty-six years, Marguerite McClure Bradbury. Maggie passed away in 2003, and Ray remained in the house, alone, save for a live-in nurse, until his final days. When I would visit him, he often asked me to bring along a meal—hamburgers, Indian food, and deli sandwiches were the most popular selections. We occasionally had a glass of wine. He liked visitors to read to him. And of course we talked. This was not the Ray Bradbury I had first met back in 2000. He was, in his late days, a brilliant star in the sky, gently diminishing in light and intensity. Each time I visited him, I always feared it would be the last.
On April 12, 2012, I spoke at the West Hollywood Library about his life and career. At any other point in our long relationship, he would have happily been there with me, but that night, his health kept him home. After the presentation, I drove the short distance over to his house. It was around 9:30 in the evening. He slept in short intervals, and he woke not long after I arrived. The television was on—it stood atop a rollaway cart at the foot of his bed and was tuned to Turner Classic Movies throughout the day and night; the monotone voices of Hollywood’s yesteryear—of his own yesteryear—brought him comfort. We visited for about thirty minutes. I remember the sound of crickets coming in through the window. Ray had often, over the years, called me his “honorary son.” But that night, when I stood to say goodbye, he said something different, “I love you, you are the son I never had.” There was a gravitas to these altered words that he had intended, that carried so much meaning and weight. I hugged him and thanked him, and I walked to the bedroom door and turned back. He was looking at me, and I wondered if this was to be the last time our eyes would ever meet. It was.
Ray Bradbury passed away less than two months later, on June 5, 2012. He always knew that in his four daughters and his eight grandchildren, he would live on. He knew, too, that his books would grant him a sort of immortality. The very fact that his words would remain here long after he was gone gave him solace. And so his final words, at least to me, live on as well. In this, the final interview, Ray Bradbury lives forever.
Sam Weller
Chicago, Illinois
September 6, 2014