Margaret Wise Brown and Michael Strange first met in Maine. Michael was fifty, Margaret twenty-nine. They were both romantically involved with “Big” Bill Gaston, a well-to-do lawyer and philanderer, through whom they were introduced.
Over the years Michael saw Bill sporadically; she had many lovers. Margaret’s only consistent lover was Bill, who was older than she was and owned a house across the water from her cottage in Maine.1 He kept telling her one day he’d settle down, or else she kept telling herself that he meant to tell her, that that was what he meant when he told her what he actually did tell her. He would visit her in New York, and she would write to him, imagining the family they’d have. But then Bill got another woman2 pregnant, and he married her instead. Margaret stayed away until she didn’t, because Bill was a flirt, and she loved him. His wife Lucille found the two in bed together and mentioned divorce, and so Margaret—clever, Margaret, not always kind—talked to the tabloid reporters about his failing marriage. She thought she could change Bill, she thought she could play God. And in a way she did play God, because that summer Michael read the article about Bill’s imminent separation and came to Maine to comfort him.
Michael and Margaret struck up a vibrant friendship. Back in New York, they went to lunch at one of Margaret’s favorite haunts in Greenwich Village. Are you dating anybody? asked Michael. How’s the sex?
Margaret drank a vermouth cassis.3 At this point she had published with Doubleday, Harper, Golden Books, and W. R. Scott.
“You should stop writing those silly furry stories,” said Michael.