Harriet Pilpel, the attorney at Greenbaum, Wolff and Ernst who was now handling Margaret’s legal affairs, pressed her client’s claims in a lawyerly follow-up letter. Margaret confided to Pilpel her amusement at “such petty crooks” as landlords generally proved to be. “Why,” she said, “are they so boringly evasive. Who do they think they are—a writer?”19
Another unwelcome surprise befell her two weeks later on a visit to the New York Public Library during Children’s Book Week. When Margaret and Ursula Nordstrom arrived for the annual celebratory tea, they were met at the door by a staff member checking for invitations. When Margaret was unable to produce hers after searching through her purse, the librarian decorously informed her that she would not be allowed to enter the room until everyone with an invitation had been seated.
As there was no reason to doubt that Margaret had been sent one, the door-keeper’s adamancy was ludicrous in the extreme. Harper’s editor, her invitation in hand, retorted that she simply refused to attend the event except in the company of her illustrious companion, and that rather than be subjected to an unnecessary wait the two of them would hold a Book Week meeting of their own out front on the Fifth Avenue steps, between the library lions. This they did, and Margaret took the occasion to promise Nordstrom a gift of three stuffed owls to hang over her office desk so that she could thenceforward be just “like the important ladies.”20
The Hurds asked Margaret to join them in Vermont for Thanksgiving, but “an old-fashioned cold and a new-fangled flu”—the still-lingering effects of the icebox explosion—kept her home in bed. She was sorry, she wrote them afterward, to have “missed a good fire and a snowstorm with you.” She had momentarily lost her usually robust appetite, if not the impulse to be a little shocking: “I didn’t even touch a sparrow that day.”21
Eager, perhaps, for additional rest in a warmer climate, Margaret flew out west to spend the Christmas holiday with her friends the Reeves near Tucson. As more guests were expected than could fit in the house, her hosts had rented a trailor as a temporary spare bedroom. The children were delighted to learn that this was to be set aside for them and that Margaret intended to decorate it. The Reeve girls idolized the glamorous writer from New York who always had time for long big-sister-little-sister talks with them. For her part, Margaret had evidently learned a lesson in life from her experience with young Thacher Hurd over the summer. There was no fur in the Reeve children’s holiday house, just holly and juniper cuttings, strings of cranberries, and tinsel.
Early in the new year of 1952, Margaret sat for an interview at Cobble Court with a reporter from the Richmond News Leader. The occasion was one for nostalgia mixed with old-fashioned storytelling and self-promotion.
She had decked out the tiny, low-ceilinged parlor with gracious Southern touches: a table arrangement of white dogwood blossoms, a large urn of magnolia leaves. Recalling with pride her Virginia school and family ties, Margaret suggested that one reason she had wanted to live in Cobble Court was that it reminded her of an old Charlottesville house she had stayed in one summer. Gratified by her visitor’s predictable astonishment at her improbable quarters—”miraculously located,” as the reporter was to write, “in the heart of Gotham”—she offered a second, more cryptic account of the cottage’s appeal for her.22 “I used to come by to look at this house to make sure I hadn’t dreamed it,” Margaret said. Satisfied as to its existence, she had finally gotten Cobble Court for herself, “thinking they would be less apt to tear it down if I was in it.” Her explanation for one of the house’s most extravagant features sounded oddly like common sense; she had covered the parlor sofa in leopard skin and scattered polar bear rugs on the floor because “insulation is something of a problem.”
She was eager to discuss her burgeoning career as a songwriter. She had, she said, written about one hundred songs, several of which had already been recorded or published, and she had more such projects in the works. One of her musical collaborators, Elizabeth Randolph, was a concert pianist and composer from Norfolk, Virginia. Margaret spoke proudly of her fledgling association with Burl Ives. She also made mention of her many illustrators, noting with delight that her most frequent collaborator, Leonard Weisgard, had won the Caldecott Medal for The Little Island and that more recently Two Little Trains, with illustrations by Jean Chariot, had been chosen by the New York Times as one of the ten most distinguished picture books of the past fifty years.
Leaving her visitor momentarily, Margaret disappeared upstairs, returning with a tea tray and hot cross buns for toasting in the hearth. Crispian, who had been napping all through the interview on the leopard-skin sofa, was roused to consciousness by the smell of the buns just as the conversation turned to him.
“Crispian,” Margaret said, “has a book of his own, called The Dog Who Belonged to Himself,’ which will come out in October.”
“At the mention of his literary prowess,” the New Leader later reported, “the dog jumped off the sofa and, in a jealous rage, knocked four of Miss Brown’s books from the butler’s table.” In the “ensuing scramble,” Crispian “retrieved a hot cross bun.”
A small comic masterpiece, Mister Dog; The Dog Who Belonged to Himself revealed Margaret at the height of her powers. Her most fully realized tale of self-possession, it was also the work of a creative artist gathering up the tag ends of an immensely productive period of writing in preparation for new things to come.
The winsome tone of the piece is set in the subtitle, which is also, of course, a gloss on Margaret’s own rather dauntless dog’s name. The fictional Crispian is a more agreeable if no less adventuresome pup who one day meets a similarly self-possessed little boy. Recognizing each other as equals, they decide to live together as friend and friend. In Wait Till the Moon Is Full Margaret underscored the gradual nature of the process by which an emerging self becomes ready for an independent life. In Mister Dog, she carried her account of the process an important step further, showing that with self-possession comes the possibility of friendship—perhaps even of love—based on mutuality.
Mister Dog was a happy synthesis and recapitulation of old concerns, the elemental wish for a safe and secure home that Margaret had already expressed in Goodnight Moon and other books. Like Goodnight Moon, the new book was a stock taking and inventory, another of the author’s lists. “Crispian was a conservative. He liked everything at the right time—dinner at dinnertime, lunch at lunchtime, breakfast in time for breakfast, and sunrise at sunrise, and sunset at sunset.”23 Aptly, for Crispian’s “two-story dog house in a garden,” Garth Williams painted an only slightly modified version of Cobble Court in his illustrations for the book. For it was Margaret’s new-found self-possession, as well as the reader’s, that the carefree Mister Dog heralded.
In April Margaret left for a week’s vacation on Cumberland Island, Georgia. An old school friend had invited her to see this tranquil spot northeast of Jacksonville, a portion of which was set aside as a wildlife preserve stocked with deer, wild horses, and an astonishing variety of rare sea birds. There were marshlands, forests of wild dogwood and oak, and a pristine eighteen-mile beach. Margaret found natural beauty there to rival anything she had encountered in the Ring of Kerry, at Carmel-by-the-Sea, or in Maine. There was also fascinating evidence of the island’s many-layered history of human habitation: the grass burial mounds of Cumberland’s original inhabitants, the Timucuran Indians; the gravesite of Revolutionary War hero Light-Horse Harry Lee, who died on the island in 1818; the burnt-out brick chimney remains of Cumberland’s antebellum slave quarters. There were ruins of a fantastically turreted Scottish-style castle built by the turn-of-the-century robber-baron Carnegies, an intact second Carnegie estate that was now an inn, and the summer cottages of other famous families, notably the Rockefellers.
At a crowded party one evening, Margaret traded glances with an animated younger man, who was introduced to her as “Pebble. “At twenty-six, James Stillman Rockefeller, Jr., was a gentle-spirited romantic and s
ailing enthusiast. A descendent of both Andrew Carnegie and the branch of the Rockefeller family which controlled the First National City Bank of New York, he had recently graduated from Yale following two and a half years of service in the Army Air Force. He was now, he told Margaret, well into the planning of a transpacific crossing in his sloop Mandalay. Pebble’s easygoing boyish manner and lack of pretense appealed to Margaret greatly. As he later recalled, theirs had been a case of love at first sight.
The next morning at dawn they went for a walk along the beach. Rockefeller, who was almost as many years younger than Margaret as Michael Strange had been older, asked her if she had ever been married. “Oh no, I’m too busy and too selfish to get married,” she replied.24 Margaret then spoke with schoolgirlish pride of her accomplishments. She had, she said, published seventy-two children’s books. Queen Mary of England kept a copy of the Little Fur Family by the royal bedside. (This may or may not have been true, but the mother of Britain’s reigning monarch, George VI, is known to have purchased a copy of The Sleepy Little Lion.)
Margaret was playing delightfully with her new friend—even a Rockefeller would have to be impressed by a writer in demand with a queen. Then, however, her self-confidence abruptly ebbed away. “Someday,” she said, “I will write something serious.” Yet this too was a part of the flirtation. She had already decided that she could let down her guard with Pebble to an extent she had done with few people in the past. She cherished this about him. She talked to him about her hectic New York routine and how the “fidget wheels of time” were “forever getting in the way.” Cobble Court stilled the “fidget wheels.”25
Soon afterward, Margaret left for New York, promising to return to Cumberland Island the following month. On April 17 she telephoned Charles Shaw to ask him to dinner at Cobble Court and to say that she had fallen in love.
Margaret and Posey Hurd had always been candid collaborators able to speak their minds as they worked toward a finished manuscript acceptable to them both. But in the early months of 1952, a new Golden Books project in the here-and-now vein, “The Early Milkman,” became a battleground on which some of the tensions of the previous summer resurfaced in exchanges that reached the heated intensity of family strife.
With the Hurds living in Vermont, collaboration had to be carried on by mail, except for the occasions when Margaret drove up to their farm for a visit. She felt put upon by this arrangement, she now said, and asked—demanded rather, with a child’s irritability—to know why they could not come down to New York more often.
Margaret proceeded to send Posey a nearly completed draft of their book in which four pages—a fraction of the whole—had been left blank, ostensibly for her collaborator to fill in as she saw fit. This high-handed gesture aroused her usually mild-mannered friend’s indignation. With unrestrained sarcasm, Posey thanked Margaret for having created the conditions for such a “complete collaboration,” and returned the manuscript with some fairly piquant marginal notations.26 To these Margaret added notes of her own.
Margaret’s draft of May 8, the focus of all their commentary, began, “Shhhrrrrrr (italics) – – – (complete line) The milkman’s rubber tired truck sounded soft and hushed in the still, pale darkness before dawn.” To the left of these lines, Posey commented, “About as dull a beginning for a children’s book as I have yet read.” To which Margaret replied, “Thoroughly disagree! . . . The quietness of milkmen is their wonder! and consequently their drama for children.” She proposed that they leave this point for the editor to resolve.
Further along, Margaret suggested that a passage of Posey’s be deleted: “Let pictures carry the burden of the information.” Posey rebutted with an impatient “Why bother to write anything?” Margaret replied, “To Hell with you!” Later in the piece, Margaret referred to a “wagon” which she had previously called a truck. Posey pointed out the inconsistency and Margaret responded, “Quite right Professor.” And so the collaboration was left for the moment, to be continued over the next weeks and months.
In the past, Margaret and Posey had been rather good at catching themselves in the act of their critical excesses and quickly restoring their friendship to an even keel. Along with her latest round of comments, Margaret sent a note calling, perhaps only halfheartedly, for a truce:
Listen Pose—Maybe we are talking like children’s writers—a penny a dozen—What you call my arrogant high horse is what I call saying quickly what I believe and what else can I say. What else can you say. . . .
Here is my rewrite which I expect you to rewrite which I expect to rewrite which I expect you to rewrite which I expect S & S to rewrite which I expect us to rewrite and so go the pains of collaboration . . . which we are both obviously fed up with.
Margaret registered a raft of other complaints before finally calming down: “All this is silly between us and I hope you will think so to [sic]. Lets [sic] go to work. Love, Old Horror.”
As part of her campaign for a more ordered, less frenetic life, Margaret had concluded by the spring of 1952 that Simon and Schuster, of all her publishers, offered her the best possibility of stabilizing her wildly fluctuating financial situation. Accordingly, she informed Georges Duplaix, the founder and principal figure in the Golden Books operation, that she might be willing to sign a long-term contract binding her to write a specified number of new Golden titles each year—provided the agreement was not an exclusive one. The Golden Books management had made a policy of attempting to commit their authors and artists to working full time for them. Margaret, for one, had resisted any such suggestion. Confident as she was in her continued productivity, she had little fear, however, of entering into the type of agreement she proposed. On receiving word from her, Duplaix and his associates eagerly commenced negotiations.
The ensuing confusion might have been predicted from the peculiarly divided nature of the firm’s chain of command. Duplaix, having hired a staff and gotten the Golden Books imprint started, had become an absentee director. As he had told his editor in chief, Dorothy Bennett, from the outset, he had “an orderly mind only for painting” and intended to spend as little time as possible in the office and to continue living in Europe.27 During the months each year when he was away, even Mssrs. Simon and Schuster were not to be allowed to disturb his concentration. Once when Max Schuster telephoned Bennett to ask how Duplaix could be reached, she firmly replied that she and her staff were not at liberty to give out that information.
Bennett’s office and Duplaix’s studio were two centers of power of the Golden Books operation. There was also a third—the office of Lucille Ogle, who managed the production end of the business from her desk at the Western Printing Company in Rockefeller Center. Ogle initiated a great many Golden Books projects as well, and as one of the chief operating officers she took part in deciding which books from previous lists were to be dropped on account of disappointing sales. Such prunings of the list amounted to another form of editing, and a high pitch of tension generally prevailed between Ogle’s and Bennett’s sides of the business.
Duplaix seems to have served as the final arbitor in disputes in which authors and illustrators often found themselves caught uncomfortably in the cross fire. Margaret was not the only Golden Books author to turn to legal counsel for help in sorting out her knotty affairs with the firm.
It was with Georges Duplaix himself (in New York on a brief business trip) that Margaret first discussed the outlines of a long-term contract. Duplaix’s offer appeared to be generous, but in a follow-up conversation with Ogle, Margaret found that a number of key provisions had changed. Duplaix, meanwhile, had returned to Paris. Demanding clarification, Margaret angrily wrote him there:
What on earth am I dealing with? And with whom? Lucille has completely reneged and gone back on your proposition to me over the telephone. . . . There is an emotional destructiveness in this kind of dealing with artists that you as an artist should be the first to recognize and which I am damned if I can understand. I lost my temper last n
ight and sent Lucille the enclosed telegram which, on sober reflection, I would like to send her again. . . . Be glad that the ocean is there. If you don’t make good your word to me I will be over to shoot you with a bow and arrow in August. Love, Margaret Wise Brown.28
The telegram to Lucille Ogle that she had referred to, dated May 15, was equally firm:
LUCY, THIS AFTERNOON’S MEETING HAS SHOCKED ME TO THE END. IF YOU AND GEORGES AND DOROTHY OR WHOEVER IS IN AUTHORITY IN YOUR COMPANY CANNOT AGREE TO ONE JOINT PROPOSITION SUCH AS GEORGES PROPOSED TO ME SUCH AS LEVANTALL [sic] AND SHIMKIN ARE ALSO AWARE OF I CAN SEE NO POSSIBLE WAY IN WHICH HUMAN LOGIC AND MY DIGNITY AS AN ARTIST CAN DEAL WITH YOU. I WILL BE IN NEW YORK ONE MORE WEEK.29
Her attorney, Harriet Pilpel, followed up on the matter, reporting afterward, “As is usual, I found that your confusion simply reflected theirs.”30 Margaret’s irritation had been amply justified. Discussions with Golden Books continued, however, and the final agreement appeared to be highly satisfactory to her, although she told Pilpel she did not yet think the time had come to lower her guard. From that year forward, Margaret was to receive from the firm a guaranteed annual general advance of six thousand dollars— a handsome sum in 1952—in addition to her standard advance for each manuscript they bought from her and whatever royalties she earned. Margaret retained the absolute right to publish other work elsewhere. Money would most likely not be a problem for her again for the foreseeable future.
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