I … Am Herman Melville!

Sam Weller details the tempestuous collaboration of Ray Bradbury and John Huston on the production of the 1956 movie “Moby Dick.”

By Sam WellerSeptember 5, 2024

• SF

• Fiction

• Film

SEVENTY YEARS AGO, Ray Bradbury, then 33 years old—the author of The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and Fahrenheit 451 (1953)—stood in front of a mirror in a London hotel room and declared, “I … am Herman Melville!” It was a last-ditch effort to channel the great American writer of Moby-Dick (1851). For Bradbury, it was either that or accept complete failure.

Today, few people are aware that Bradbury, renowned science fiction writer, beloved fantasist, and mainstay on banned-book lists, wrote the screenplay for the 1956 John Huston adaptation of the Melville classic, which starred Gregory Peck as the iconic and obsessive Captain Ahab. Writing the screenplay was a dream come true for Bradbury, until it morphed into a waking nightmare. As the old adage goes: Never meet your heroes.

So how did a writer known for conjuring carnival sideshow freaks, Art Deco rocket ships blasting off for Mars, and a dystopian future where books are illegal come to adapt what is often deemed the great American novel? If you asked Ray Bradbury, who died in 2012, he would tell you the answer to this question was a four-letter word: L-O-V-E.

I worked with Bradbury for 12 years as his authorized biographer, and this was a subject we spoke about often. The “love” Bradbury spoke of was enthusiasm—his guiding creative ethos. “Do what you love and love what you do,” he often opined late in life to anyone who asked for writing advice. What he meant was that you should write about things that excite you, ideas that seize you by the collar and won’t let go.

Ray Bradbury was, throughout his life, the quintessential fanboy. He was an unabashed enthusiast: he loved, fervently. So much so that, penniless at the age of 18, he traveled by passenger train from his home in Los Angeles to the first World Science Fiction Convention, held in July 1939 in New York City. Not just a fan of science fiction, Bradbury devoured popular culture in general, particularly cinema. And in the early 1950s, his favorite film director, hands down, was John Huston, the Oscar-winning auteur behind The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), and The Asphalt Jungle (1950). “He knew how to get actors to live inside the skin of their characters,” Bradbury told me in 2004, “so you weren’t watching actors acting, you were watching people living.” 

Even as Bradbury established his name as a bona fide literary force in the mid-to-late 1940s, publishing in Harper’s, The New Yorker, and the Best Short Stories of the Year anthology, he never lost touch with his youthful nerdish heart. It was this gleeful enthusiasm that led directly to his writing the screenplay for Moby Dick (the film dropping Melville’s hyphen). 

In 1946, under contract for his first book (the gothic collection Dark Carnival, published in 1947), Bradbury began writing for a slew of dramatic radio programs, most notably Mollé Mystery Theater, Suspense, and Dimension X. His talent agent at the time was Ray Stark, at the Hollywood agency Famous Artists, who had a close relationship with John Huston. In early 1951, at Bradbury’s request, Stark arranged for the two men to meet. Huston was always on the lookout for new literary talent to script his films, and he was often drawn to adapting literary classics.

Bradbury and Huston met at Romanoff’s restaurant on Rodeo Drive, a posh midcentury Beverly Hills establishment frequented by Hollywood’s elite. There, Bradbury, never afraid to wear his fannish affections on his sleeve, professed his admiration for Huston and his oeuvre. Indeed, he went even further, boldly proclaiming to Huston that he believed they were destined to work together. He had carted copies of his books along that night—Dark Carnival and The Martian Chronicles, as well as a prepublication copy of his latest collection, The Illustrated Man. Sliding them across the table, he told Huston: “If you love my books half as much as I love you, give me a call.”

Huston’s next project was The African Queen (1951), starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, production for which was scheduled to commence in Europe and Africa. A short time after their dinner meeting, he wrote to Bradbury from London. “Impressed is hardly the word for my state of mind,” he said, thanking Bradbury for his books. The director went on to praise the young writer for several of his short stories and then ended the missive with this proclamation: “[T]here’s nothing I’d rather do than work with you on a picture.”

In September 1951, the British edition of Martian Chronicles was published. The book was retitled The Silver Locusts for UK readers—a metaphor for the swarm of rocket ships departing earth on their way to colonize Mars. The novel-in-stories received high praise from noted writer and critic Christopher Isherwood and, as a result, brought serious literary credibility to the genre for the first time. Bradbury sent a copy of The Silver Locusts to Huston, who wrote back in December of that same year about the book, a gripping, poetic, science-fictional parable based on the myth of American westward expansion. “There is no doubt in my mind it would make a great picture,” Huston opined. “I will try my best to get some studio to let me make your book.” Bradbury’s dream of making a film with John Huston was getting closer.

Of course, in Hollywood, things often move at a glacial pace. Throughout 1952, Bradbury readied his third story collection, The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953), for Doubleday. He also signed his first film contract that summer with Universal Studios, developing and writing the screen treatment for It Came from Outer Space (1953). Defying the campy space-aliens scenario suggested by the producers, Bradbury subverted genre tropes and made the interplanetary visitors sympathetic. He made $300 a week writing the story outline, more than he had ever earned before. And, importantly, it was his first foray into Hollywood. As a teen, Bradbury had literally climbed the walls of Paramount Studios and was summarily escorted out. Now he was afforded an office at Universal.

In early 1953, Bradbury sent a prepublication copy of The Golden Apples of the Sun to Huston in London. The book was a collection of mixed short fiction (fantasy, SF, and literary realism). He had by then moved on to his next project, Fahrenheit 451. 

The making of Fahrenheit 451 is the stuff of literary legend. Bradbury famously spent nine days in the summer of 1953 holed up in the basement of Powell Library at UCLA, where he could make use of their rental typewriters. Distracted at home by his two young daughters, he needed a quiet place to work but didn’t yet have the income for an actual office. He was under contract with Ballantine Books to expand a 25,000-word novella he had written three years earlier called “The Fireman” into a full-fledged novel. The premise of the story was about a near-future society where firemen go house-to-house burning books because they empower people with ideas. In Bradbury’s future world, books are dangerous instruments. The story used the methods of science fiction to indict McCarthy-era America; it was a cautionary tale warning of the rise of authoritarianism and the suppression of intellectual culture.

After serious toil, working one-on-one with his Ballantine editor, Stanley Kauffmann, Bradbury surrendered the galley pages in mid-August 1953. Exhausted, he took a trip to a favorite Long Beach bookstore with his best friend, animator Ray Harryhausen. The two men shared a common love and were looking for books about dinosaurs. When Bradbury returned home that evening, his wife Maggie gave him a message. John Huston had called. The director was in Los Angeles and wanted to meet.

The next night, Bradbury met Huston in his suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The fateful encounter was one of Bradbury’s favorite stories to tell. 

“I walked into his room.” Bradbury recalled. “He put a drink in my hand. He sat me down and he leaned over and said, ‘Ray, what are you doing during the next year?’” When Bradbury imitated Huston, he assumed a rough, throaty baritone.

I said, “Not much, Mr. Huston. Not much.” And he said, “Well, Ray, how would you like to come live in Ireland and write the screenplay of Moby Dick?” And I said, “Gee, Mr. Huston, I’ve never been able to read the damn thing.”

He’d never heard that before and he thought for a moment and then he said, “Well, I’ll tell you what, Ray. Why don’t you go [home] tonight, read as much as you can, and come back tomorrow and then tell me if you’ll help me kill a white whale.”

Bradbury was stunned. He went home and told his wife, “Pray for me.” Maggie Bradbury, accustomed to her husband’s hyperbole, responded, “Why?” And he said: “Because I’ve got to read a book tonight and do a book report tomorrow.”

A page from Ray Bradbury’s personal day planner, August 19, 1953.

He burned the midnight oil, attempting to devour as much of the notoriously formidable novel as he could. There was no way to read Moby-Dick from start to finish in one night, so he leapfrogged through it, diving into the middle, skipping to a chapter here, a section there, taking it all in—the characters, the metaphors, the Shakespearean drama, the biblical allusions.

The next day, Bradbury agreed to write the screenplay. It had been quite a run. In just over a week, he had finished Fahrenheit 451 and agreed to work with his movie hero, adapting one of the most challenging works of American literature into a two-hour film. Bradbury signed a 17-week contract earning $650 a week plus living expenses, a king’s ransom for a man who, less than a decade earlier, had earned his stripes writing for pulp magazines that paid $40 or $50 per story. 

Some in Hollywood were taken aback by Huston’s screenwriting choice to bring Melville to the big screen. After all, to adapt a profoundly complex literary novel, he had given the nod to a man known for writing science fiction. Perhaps no one was more surprised by Huston’s choice than Bradbury himself. Huston had read the most recent book Bradbury had sent him, The Golden Apples of the Sun, and the lead story was all it took.

“The Fog Horn” is a tale about two lighthouse keepers who, late one November night, are paid a visit by a beast that has surfaced from the depths after hearing the lonely call of the lighthouse’s foghorn. Bradbury’s love of dinosaurs had led him to write the story, and it was this love that led Huston to believe he was the right man to adapt Moby-Dick. In reading “The Fog Horn,” Huston stated in his 1980 autobiography An Open Book, he “saw something of Melville’s elusive quality.”

Completely upending his life in less than a month, Bradbury, along with his wife Maggie and two young daughters, Susan (aged four) and Ramona (aged two), departed for Ireland. They were joined by Susan’s preschool teacher, who accompanied the Bradburys as their governess. Bradbury was terrified of air travel, so they planned to take an ocean liner across the Atlantic. Ray Harryhausen was at Union Station to see them off on their great adventure. As the passenger train cut through Utah, Bradbury wrote the opening page of the screenplay. 

After spending two days in New York, the Bradbury family set out for Europe aboard the SS United States, a 990-foot luxury liner that had made its maiden voyage just a year earlier. While crossing the Atlantic, the ship was caught in the middle of a hurricane. Ever the romantic, Bradbury took the opportunity to reread Moby-Dick on the afterdeck as the ship sailed through the enormous Atlantic swells. Bradbury didn’t know it yet, but the storm foreshadowed more turbulence ahead.

Their journey would take them first to Le Havre, France, then by train to Paris, later to London, and eventually, via train and ferry, to their final destination, Dublin. This is where Bradbury would spend six months writing the screenplay for Huston, who called Ireland home. The expat director, an avid equestrian and fox hunter, rented a Georgian country manor a half-hour drive from Dublin. Built in 1815, Courtown, as it was called, featured over 300 acres of verdant land.

When they had finally reached Ireland, Bradbury and his wife settled into room 77 in the Royal Hibernian Hotel on Dawson Street in Dublin, a venerable establishment opened in 1751 (his daughters and nanny were in a separate room). Bradbury spent his days writing by the fireplace and traveled in the evenings by taxicab out to Huston’s leased manor to show the director his screenplay pages. 

John Huston by the fireplace in Courtown. Photograph taken by Ray Bradbury on January 30, 1954.

Things started smoothly enough, but it didn’t take long for the collaboration to become more challenging. Bradbury wrote seven days a week, 12 hours a day. As an author, he was not used to such a laborious schedule. Back home in L.A., he had been his own boss. In Ireland, by contrast, he reported to Huston, who soon exhibited a different facet to his personality. The old maxim about never meeting your heroes rang true in the fanboy’s mind.

Huston perceived in his 33-year-old screenwriter a Midwestern naivete. Bradbury had never left the United States. His formal education had ended at high school. He wasn’t a hard drinker or smoker, nor was he a womanizer, unlike the famously libidinous Huston. The seasoned director saw all this and started to play increasingly vicious practical jokes on his earnest screenwriter.

For example, he told Bradbury that—at the personal request of one of the film’s major investors, Walter Mirisch—he had to insert a love interest into Melville’s story. This was funny, but it was not true. Huston went further, embarrassing Bradbury in front of others by accusing him of not having his heart in the screenplay, just to get a rise out of the young man. He pressured Bradbury to mount a horse and participate in fox hunts. He wanted him to play cards and gamble. Huston drank whiskey at night as he read Bradbury’s daily output of pages and wanted Bradbury to imbibe with him. It was bad enough that Bradbury had to adapt a doorstop book into a two-hour film, but now his hero was preying upon his innocence.

Still, Bradbury forged ahead, condensing the novel, combining characters, cutting copious scenes. Maggie Bradbury spent many nights out at Courtown for cocktails, including on Christmas, watching Huston tease her husband. She also saw how the director dismissed and insulted his own wife, the model and ballerina Enrica (“Ricki”) Soma. Maggie despised the entire scenario as each day dragged on. Later in life, she bristled at the mere mention of John Huston’s name.

There were some enjoyable moments, though. Bradbury, ever the fan, caught a rare stage performance of two movie legends, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre. Ray and Maggie befriended a married couple, Len and Beth Probst (Len was the bureau chief of the Dublin office of UPI), and the group got along famously. On good days, Huston even praised Bradbury for his hard work. But the director’s hot-and-cold demeanor, along with the Herculean challenge of adapting Melville to the screen, slowly began to wear on Bradbury. So did the repetitively gray, gauzy weather of Dublin in winter. When I asked Bradbury in 2003 if he had ever had suicidal thoughts, his response was immediate: “Only once—when I was writing the screenplay for Moby Dick.”

By January, trodden down by the dour weather and the laborious nature of her husband’s schedule, Maggie Bradbury, a lifelong Angeleno, decided to head south to Italy with her children and governess. While her husband was contractually obligated to finish his work, Maggie was under no such agreement. And as she recalled with a laugh many years later, if she had stayed in Ireland, she was liable to murder John Huston. This left Ray Bradbury alone, jostling with Melville, as well as with his tarnished cinematic hero. 

Genuinely concerned about his screenwriter’s isolation, Huston invited Bradbury to leave his hotel and move out to Courtown. But Bradbury had the sense to keep his distance and maintain some creative space. Writing all day in his hotel room took its toll, however, as he grappled with Melville’s monster and the damp winter days became indistinguishable. Bradbury fully embraced the romance of Ireland, its paradoxical gaiety and melancholy, but he was growing increasingly lonely and depressed.

By March 1954, Huston was eager to begin casting the film and wanted to relocate to London. He suggested that Bradbury join him, traveling by plane together. Bradbury asked to go by ferry (that dreaded aerophobia again), but the director told him no. He ordered him to fly or stay working alone in Ireland. Bradbury did his best to let it slide. He purchased a ferry ticket and gambled that Huston was just playing another one of his practical jokes.

After months of working together closely, Bradbury writing pages and bringing them each night to Huston, the relationship between the two men had frayed. When Bradbury arrived in London, he found that Huston would barely speak to him. The tension was nearly unbearable. One night at dinner, Bradbury reached his passive-aggressive flash point. Seated at a table in a London restaurant, Huston and Bradbury were joined by a large group, including the writer Peter Viertel and the filmmaker Jack Clayton, who would be an associate producer on Moby Dick. Huston made fun of Bradbury’s journalist friends back in Dublin, and Bradbury was done with it. 

“John,” he said, and Huston glanced over at him. “Fuck you.”

Huston was incredulous. “What?” he asked.

“John,” Bradbury said again. “Fuck you. Here you are in front of 10 people insulting my friends at dinner. Fuck you.”

Total silence fell over the table. Then, amid the tension, dinner was promptly adjourned. Everyone stood up to leave. Outside the restaurant, more words were exchanged, and Huston grabbed Bradbury by the lapels and cocked his fist. 

“Let me have it, John, but fire me first,” Bradbury said. He knew that Huston needed him to finish the screenplay. Huston relaxed his grip and lowered his clenched fist. As Bradbury walked off in the direction of his hotel, he was in tears. How could the relationship with his creative hero have deteriorated so badly?

The next morning, in a rare lowering of the sword, Huston phoned Bradbury to apologize. And so, head down, the author continued to plow forward on the screenplay as the process of casting proceeded. 

Early on, Huston had envisioned his father in the iconic role of Captain Ahab. But Walter Huston died in 1950. Orson Welles was briefly considered. Bradbury even suggested Laurence Olivier, but Huston settled, at last, on Gregory Peck. One afternoon, Bradbury watched as Peck, a friendly, affable man, was fitted with Ahab’s prosthetic leg.

Even after seven months of work, Bradbury still needed to write the last act of the script. And that’s when it happened. On the morning of April 14, 1954, he woke up, alone in his London hotel room, homesick for Los Angeles, lonely for his wife and children, longing for his old life as an author—autonomous, not answering to anyone, creating his own schedule, writing his own stories. He climbed out of bed, stood before the mirror, looked at himself and declared: “I … am Herman Melville!” He then calmly proceeded to his typewriter. 

As with the creation of Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury worked best when he wrote quickly, in an onslaught of creativity. “Your subconscious is smarter than you are,” he once told me, “so get out of its way.” He wrote nonstop for eight hours. He produced the final 37 pages of the script in that one sitting. And he knew that, of the 1,500 pages of drafts and outlines he had written in the seven months he had been working with Huston, these were his best. 

Huston concurred. Bradbury had finished the screenplay. There would be revisions to follow, but the day-to-day work was done. He was free to leave London and travel south to Italy to meet up with his family. He parted on good enough terms with Huston, the two men hugging, Bradbury thanking him for the singular experience. He left London on April 16, 1954, done with the ordeal of working every day with the unpredictable director. 

While he was still in Europe, new screenwriting offers poured in. He was offered assignments to adapt the novels Anatomy of a Murder (1958) and The Man with the Golden Arm (1949), among several other projects. The lifelong cinema aficionado was now completely embraced by Hollywood. And Bradbury turned every offer down. He had, after all, harpooned the white whale. And it almost killed him.

Thirty-eight years later, Bradbury would wax romantic on the whole ordeal in his autobiographical novel Green Shadows, White Whale (1992). The lyrical book, a comic paean of loosely connected episodes, was more about celebrating Ireland and its people than about his collaboration with Huston and the grueling nature of bringing Moby-Dick to the screen. But the book makes clear that, almost four decades later, the ghost of Herman Melville still haunted Ray Bradbury.

A manuscript page from Green Shadows, White Whale, with Bradbury’s handwritten notes.

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Featured image: John Huston and Ray Bradbury reviewing script pages. Images provided by Sam Weller.