One day on Vinalhaven - the Maine island where Margaret would spend much of her life and write most of her books - she had rowed to a lover’s cottage and found the luscious stranger sunbathing there with her lover. Margaret and Michael had met seven years earlier. Now, about to turn fifty-eight, Michael Strange was a ghost on a New York stage, her skin sallow, her body emaciated to the size of a child’s after refusing to let her aggressive leukemia keep her from performing. In her youth, Blanche had been named the most beautiful woman in Paris.
Michael Strange and Margaret Wise BrownĪnd before you can even say Jack Robinson When her wealthy family of Austrian royal lineage had found her erotic poetry embarrassing, Blanche had emancipated herself under the male nom de plume, which soon became a stage name as she strode into the theater world as playwright and actress, and eventually swelled into a total persona - the name with which she signed her letters, the name by which her intimates addressed her, the name of her self-image. In her tight tweed pants and long-tailed blazers and oversized ties, she moved effortlessly through the sea of gloves and lace and whispering society ladies. Michael Strange, born Blanche Oelrichs, had cast an instant spell on Margaret - outspoken, sophisticated, and self-possessed, so tall Margaret had to lift her grey-blue eyes to meet the black of Michael’s, her tall frame clad in masculine clothing she herself had designed to cling to her curves, with a musical voice unspooling from her haunting dark beauty, a deep velvet laugh, and a reputation for rarely keeping a promise.
In early September 1947, a year after she rewilded the landscape of literature with Goodnight Moon, Margaret Wise Brown (May 23, 1910–November 13, 1952) watched the love of her life fade to black.
0 kommentar(er)
