Plain Speaking on Children’s Books : Publishing: Westside art gallery hosts a party that is attended by celebrities and others who believe in freedom of expression in kids’ literature.

Once upon a time there was community of people who were so comfortable and confident that they thought even children should be free. So they got together at a Westside art gallery to celebrate the “freedom to read.”

Everybody at the party believed the same thing: That it’s wrong for one person to decide what another person is allowed to read, even if one of the people is grown up and the other is only in third grade. Indiana Jones and other famous people were at the party, and there were cookies next to a sign that said “Eat me.”

Everybody was happy because the Book-Banning Meanies--the people who want children to read only books that are good for them and who draw diapers on naked little boys in picture books--stayed home.

The party was at night when most boys and girls are already in bed. But the grown-ups managed to have a good time anyway, and they all agreed that children should be free to read--even if they aren’t free to stay up late and go to Westside parties.

Beverly Hills library director Michael Cart, one of the 175 people who gathered Wednesday evening at Every Picture Tells a Story, a gallery on La Brea Avenue that specializes in original art from children’s books, recalled his first run-in with a would-be censor.

It happened a couple of decades ago when Cart was head of the public library in his hometown of Logansport, Ind. An indignant school principal came to Cart and demanded that Maurice Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen” be removed from the library’s shelves.

“He was particularly indignant that Mickey, the protagonist, was presented in full frontal nudity,” Cart recalled.

Cart was polite to the visitor, particularly so since the man was principal of the school where Cart’s twin sister taught. But Cart was firm. Anybody old enough to turn the pages would be free to study Mickey, naked as the day he was drawn, as he tumbled through the night kitchen of Sendak’s unfettered imagination.

The Wednesday night program, co-sponsored by PEN Center USA West, the local branch of the international writers’ organization, and the American Booksellers Assn., celebrated “Freedom to Read” and featured Sendak and others who support First Amendment rights for everyone, including people too young to vote.

Actress Whoopi Goldberg, who is now writing a book for children, reminded the audience that freedom of expression is protected by the Constitution. “This is America,” she said, “or it was at one point.” Goldberg, who introduced Sendak, singled out his prize-winning book, “Where the Wild Things Are.”

“I am a wild thing,” the recent Academy Award winner confessed. “I am. I’ve been trimmed and combed, but it’s a happening thing in the dead of night.”

Sendak cited the gallery as a particularly appropriate place to take an anti-censorship stand. Among the works currently on display is an 1865 edition of “Alice in Wonderland,” a perennial favorite of book banners. (The book, which includes 10 original pencil drawings by John Tenniel, is worth more than $2 million, a gallery spokesman said.) Art from other censored and banned books is also being shown, including illustrations from Lane Smith’s “The Halloween ABC,” called Satanic, and Margot Zemach’s “Jake and Honeybunch Go to Heaven,” accused of being both racist and blasphemous.

Sendak, who obviously delights in tweaking those who want Mickey and his other creations toned down or tossed out, made his loyalties clear.

“Me and the kids are in conspiracy,” he said. “We have turned powerlessness into an underground creative force.” Sendak said he would continue to create “devious” works that disturb adults who would deny children their intelligence and sensuality. “I promise to honor their honest perversity,” he said of children.

“They ain’t no different from us,” Sendak said of his young readers. Denouncing the “Puritanical assumption” that adults know best, Sendak encouraged adults to give children what they really need from their elders: “education, consolation, love and the admission, on the part of adults, that they have brains.”

Actors Harrison Ford and Robin Williams, both of whom have young children, collect work by some of the gallery’s artists. But both said they attended the program because they think the issue is so important. “They’re writing the Constitution on an Etch-a-Sketch,” Williams machine-gunned, “and I think they should stop it before they shake it!”

Last year, People for the American Way, a national civil liberties organization, documented more than 200 attempts to have books banned in the country’s public schools.

According to the group’s president, Arthur J. Kropp, the usual reasons for trying to suppress books are “the 3 S’s--swear words, Satanism and sex.” Statistics for this year will not be released until Labor Day, but he sees no decline in the number of calls for censorship, usually by conservative religious groups. One recent development, he said, is the apparent strategic targeting by would-be censors of school districts that are hard-pressed financially--and are thus more easily intimidated by threats of costly litigation over controversial books.

Kropp said he did not yet know who would emerge this year as the most-censored authors, but Judy Blume, Maya Angelou and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. were all once again contenders.

Sendak created a lithograph on “Freedom to Read” for this year’s American Booksellers Assn. convention. The work, which features Mickey and the titles of such often-banned books as “The Catcher in the Rye” and “The Grapes of Wrath,” is on sale at the gallery, with proceeds going to the ABA Foundation for Free Expression and Sendak’s recently created nonprofit children’s theater, called Night Kitchen.

Speaker after speaker revelled in the power of words, including their ability to scare people into trying to suppress them. Writer Harlan Ellison cited Kafka’s contention that “we should only read those books that bite and sting us.”

That’s what writing is all about, he said. “It’s supposed to make you uncomfortable, and if it’s not, it’s not doing the job.”

No one disagreed.

And, while Sendak’s characters smiled enigmatically in the lithograph on the wall, everyone danced to the wild music of the mind.