In early September 1948, a year after she rewilded the landscape of literature with Goodnight Moon, Margaret Wise Brown watched the love of her life fade to black. 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 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.
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 youth, Blanche had been named the most beautiful woman in Paris. 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.
Margaret and Michael had met seven years earlier. 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. Soon, back in New York, she was surprised to receive a lunch invitation from Michael, who had shown up dressed in fur from head to toe, asking bold questions about her love life while sipping sherry.
Margaret was thirty, Michael fifty and on her third unhappy marriage; her latest husband had never read her poetry. Both women were born in the wrong century, bent on bending it to their will; both were accidental radicals, just by living unselfconsciously; both had had affairs with Thomas Wolfe; both were at heart poets more than anything else. By the middle of the World War, they were lovers; Michael had declared that she had never loved anyone the way she loved Margaret and never would; she had promised to love her until her dying day.
Late one night, Margaret’s phone rang. Michael’s voice poured in, sped up with alarm, imploring her to get into a taxi right away. Her husband had found out about their relationship and, in an era when the diagnostic manual of psychiatry classified same-sex love as a mental illness, was threatening to have her locked away in an asylum.
A doctor was on his way to “diagnose” her. With her maid’s help, Michael managed to slip out through the back staircase and into the taxi as Margaret was pulling up. On the disorienting ride through the New York nocturne, they weighed their options and decided to head to the high-society women’s club Michael frequented.
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