Magic Words

How Maurice Sendak unleashed a multimedia monster with 10 little sentences.

by Lauren F. Friedman

Vilde chaya!" yelled Sarah Sendak, calling her young son a "wild thing" in Yiddish whenever he made trouble in their perpetually crowded Brooklyn apartment. Three decades later, the all-grown Maurice Sendak would channel his boyhood self into the wolf-suit-clad character of Max and set him loose in a strange world full of round-eyed, big-footed monsters based loosely on Sendak's own Eastern European aunts and uncles. He called them The Wild Things; they made Max their king; and they started a rumpus — all before supper.

"It always amazes me how your favorite books from childhood give you so much in your mind, when there's really not much there in substance," says Patrick Rodgers, a curator and Sendak expert at Center City's Rosenbach Museum & Library who heard the "vilde chaya" story and many others from the artist himself.

Where the Wild Things Are is just 10 sentences long and almost 50 years old, but since the trailer for a Spike Jonze movie adaptation first leaked in March, the buzz has been tremendous.

Now, the snowballing excitement has led to an incredible whirlwind of Where the Wild Things Are activity surrounding the film's Oct. 16 première. Dave Eggers, who collaborated with Jonze on the movie's screenplay, just released his novelization, The Wild Things (McSweeney's, Oct. 13), and Gregory Maguire, a personal friend of Sendak's best known as the author of Wicked, explores connections throughout the illustrator's body of work in Making Mischief: A Sendak Appreciation (William Morrow, Sept. 15).

Further still, New York's Animazing Gallery is in the midst of the largest-ever sale of Sendak's work ($21,000 Wild Thing etching, anyone?), and Philly's own Rosenbach — which holds the authoritative, 10,000-piece Sendak collection — is currently exhibiting a selection of Where the Wild Things Are ephemera.

With Urban Outfitters' cutesy line of Wild Things designs and Opening Ceremony's $600 Max-inspired wolf suits, it seems that excitement around the movie — and all of its possible marketing tie-ins — has reached a fever pitch.

Just what is it about this book? And why do so many adults still care?

"Some works resist being diminished even in the process of passing chronologically, from novelty to classic," writes Maguire in Making Mischief. "Major work doesn't bore through repetition but expands, whispering its secrets more deeply and richly every time it is encountered."

While plenty of books from childhood are remembered nostalgically and still others are simply forgotten, Where the Wild Things Are is, for many, beloved not only for what it was then, but for what it means now.

"When I was 6, I would always choose Where the Wild Things Are to read," recalls Nick Leone, the director of the illustration-centric Animazing Gallery and a friend of Sendak's. "It was my favorite book then, and — 35 years later — it still is.

"It still gives me the chills," Leone continues. "It's really about life, and life experiences, and taming the beasts you meet as you go along."

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Sendak himself, who is now 81 and has dealt in the past two years alone with triple bypass surgery and the death of his longtime partner, could not be reached for comment, but people close to him assert that there are still flashes of the man who dreamt up the wild rumpus. He lives in the woods in Connecticut and is currently finishing work on a new book, Bumble-Ardy, about a little pig. "Despite the carefully presented image of a curmudgeon, I've seen through the armor into the treasury of feeling he holds," says Maguire.

Harrison Judd, Sendak's meticulously dressed archivist of 12 years, explains that part of Sendak's genius lies in his gentle prodding of the thin line between children and adults — a line blurrier than most would care to admit. "Maurice is always willing to tell the truth," he says. "I'm 48, but I'm also 4, and I'm also 8, and the problem comes when we deny that."

"We need to hold onto that innocence, and be aware of the darkness," says Judd, peering through circular glasses with an impish wink. "We all know what's inside of us."

Sendak is celebrated for not talking down to children, and according to the production notes from the Where the Wild Things Are movie, Eggers and Jonze aimed to strike the same tone with the film. "I didn't set out to make a children's movie; I set out to make a movie about childhood," says Jonze.

"We wanted to make a movie that didn't look down at a kid but got inside him," says Eggers. "Most kids in movies are de-fanged. They have no wildness."

In early drafts of the Where the Wild Things Are manuscript, Sendak writes notes to himself to remember to focus on Max, since it's his emotional narrative driving the story. The film adaptation does the same, giving Max a rich and full life both at home and with The Wild Things.

Maguire recalls, "Maurice said to Spike Jonze, 'Unless it comes from you, it will be a failure as a piece of art,'" and Sendak — credited as a producer — was involved in the film from the very beginning.

"[Jonze] didn't do an homage to the book; he did something that belongs to him, which makes him a real filmmaker and a real artist," says Sendak in the production notes. "I love the movie. It's original. ... He's turned it into his 'Wild Things' without giving up mine."

The 10-sentence book is full of gaps that children fill in with their imaginations, but that's part of its charm. "There's so much mystery to the book," says Rodgers. "It will be interesting to see how a movie that really fleshes everything out still holds that mystery together."

Oct. 16 will not be the first time the Wild Things have jumped off the pages of the book.

"I think a lot of people are going to see the movie and think, 'Wow, they've done this great thing with this book that nobody's done anything with since the '60s,'" says Rodgers, "but [Sendak's] been playing with The Wild Things since he created them." One large-scale but frequently overlooked Sendak project was a 1979 opera that featured the Wild Things as giant monsters who grumbled Yiddish curses and — weighed down by their unwieldy costumes — occasionally tumbled into the orchestra pit.

"They have this huge life that I think might be a surprise to a lot of people," Rodgers explains. "The film is just the next expression of it, and it will keep going on beyond the film."

The Rosenbach's "And It's Still Hot: Where the Wild Things Are" follows the creatures from their beginnings in a 1955 illustration strip — Where the Wild Horses Are — to the widely recognizable monsters that have been appropriated by everyone from Bell Atlantic (for a late-'90s ad campaign) to Rolling Stone (on the cover of their 1976 holiday issue).

"It really goes through the book from the beginning, with what Sendak really wanted to do with it, through the last pieces that he created for it," says Rodgers, who came to the Rosenbach to curate last year's "There's a Mystery There: Sendak on Sendak" exhibition and has been immersed in the artist's world ever since.

"In childhood, I was around three Sendak books," he explains, "and now, in my adulthood, I'm around hundreds." "[Sendak] is magic for kids," he says, "but he's also magic for adults."

The Rosenbach's "Wild Things" show includes much of the original artwork for the book, but — better still — it offers a rare glimpse into the creative process that led to the final version. Visitors can see early drafts of the entire text and four different sketched ideas of the scenes in which Max is "making mischief." On one early draft, from May 1963, a frustrated Sendak wrote, "Mo gives in day!" next to the date. On the top of a manuscript from September, Sendak — apparently still unsure about the book's final line — wrote: "_And_, [it was still hot!] ?!?"

Sendak's beloved editor, Ursula Nordstrom, whom Rodgers calls "a giant of children's publishing," scribbled plenty of edits on the typewritten pages of one almost-there draft, but then offered some prescient words of encouragement in the margin, neatly underlining the penultimate word as if to emphasize her certitude: "This is going to be a magnificent, permanent book."

Forty-six years after Nordstrom wrote those words, visitors at the opening of the Sendak show at the Animazing Gallery crowd around a guestbook that will be passed on to the aging artist, filling its pages with superlative words of praise and improvised Magic Marker sketches of Wild Things. "Words can't express the joy you've brought to millions through your incredible illustrations," wrote one. "Thank you for making it OK to embrace the wild side."

(lauren.friedman@citypaper.net)

"And It's Still Hot: Where the Wild Things Are" runs through Oct. 25 (hands-on tour with Patrick Rodgers, Sun., Oct. 18, 3 p.m. and Fri., Oct. 23, 3 p.m., free with admission), $10, Rosenbach Museum & Library, 2008 Delancey Place, 215-732-1600, rosenbach.org. Read Shaun Brady's review of the film on p. 25.