remembering

I don’t often write about personal things, but today it seems appropriate.

I worked for Maurice Sendak from 1995 until 1998, out of an office in his darkly magical home in Connecticut, filled with Mickey Mouse memorabilia, Blake originals, frayed carpets and such obscure ephemera as the walking stick of Beatrix Potter. I lived in the nearby town of West Redding, where he visited me once to see my checkerboard collection.

I am not going to write a paean simply because he has died. Dying does not make you great. He was, by his own admission, not a great man, but he was the most extraordinarily talented and disciplined man I have ever met.

As his assistant, speech editor, occasional chef and babysitter, I got to know him very well. One thing he taught me, indirectly, was discipline about work. He worked every day, and pretty much did the same thing every day of his life. He had a wicked wit and a way of assessing people as objects, saying things like, “That woman reminds me of a great potato.”

At the time I began working for him, the film “Wild Things” was just getting off the ground. It would take another dozen years to bring it to the screen. Among many other projects, we were working on the merchandising of the Wild Things characters, for which he had approval of all things. “The hair is too orange, the whiskers too long.” Everything took forever. He was also working with Tony Kushner on a project about the holocaust, on the sets for the opera “Hansel and Gretel,” illustrating the complete works of Shakespeare, designing a play area and restaurant for the Yerba Buena “Metreon” Center in San Francisco, and the cartoon series, “Little Bear.” President Clinton gave him the Medal of Arts in the snowy winter of 1996, for which I made all arrangements, not including an inadvertent trip to Newark when, while trying to get him settled, the train left with me still on it, my first and only experience as a stowaway.

He was a curmudgeonly figure, cranky and curious, and lived rather unhappily with a terribly unpleasant maid and her grungy husband (who lived on his property). His partner of 40 years, Dr. Eugene Glynn, would visit on weekends. I could never tell if this pleased or annoyed Maurice.

During the Japanese recession of ’97, the entire Sony Retail Entertainment Division (my employers who assigned me to him) would be axed. Even the chairman was canned. I returned to California.

Maurice had the extraordinary ability to recall everything about his childhood in vivid detail. He kept a small box on his dresser that contained the wedding rings of his late parents. On top of the box was a blue and white ceramic dog. I asked him about it on my first tour of his home. “There were about five of those dogs when I was little, that’s the only one left. He guards the rings.” About a year into my job, I was shopping at an antiques store in Greenwich, and found a similar dog from the set. I gave it to him for his birthday.

He wept like a child.

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