Sorry, Tuffy; the name is just too good not to steal – uh, recycle.

This story is stolen from the book I’m reading now: Starstruck: When a Fan Gets Close to Fame by Michael Joseph Gross who was, and is, a fan himself, so he aught to know.

On April Fool’s Day, 1934, when Ray Bradbury was thirteen years old, his family packed up and left Waukeegan, Illinois, for Hollywood, where his parents would search for work, and he would spend his free time outside studio lots with the packs of fans who collected autographs from movie stars. Remembering those days, he told me, “Of all of the people who did that sort of thing, I was the only one who had a dream of the future. I had a purpose for what I was doing. I was standing outside the wall of Paramount Studios when I was thirteen years old and I had a dream that I would jump over the wall and land inside and write a picture.”

About twenty years later, that dream came true. Walking down the red carpet with John Huston at the premiere of Moby Dick, Ray Bradbury was shocked to see, standing on the pavement, some of the autograph collectors he had known as a teenager. He left John Huston’s side and approached them, hoping they would recognize him. “I said, ‘I was that crazy boy who used to stand with you in front of Paramount.’ They said, ‘Oh yes, what are you doing now?’ And I suddenly got very embarrassed and didn’t want to tell them. There was this chasm that opened up between us, between what we had done together, what they were doing now, and what I was doing now. And I said, ‘I worked on the screenplay.’ And they said, ‘Did you type it? Were you in the stenographer’s department?’ And I said finally, ‘No, I wrote the screenplay.” And a strange thing happened at that moment. Suddenly their hands shot out, and there were half a dozen autograph books in front of me, and somebody handing me a pen. I crossed the border. I was not collecting autographs now. I was giving my first ones. It made me cry. I had made it over the wall. But none of those other people had made it over the wall.”

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