Monkey Business

She descends the stairs in a motorized chair, a regal entrance so transcendent it cannot be compromised by the basket full of stuffed monkeys by her feet when she stops. Margret Rey is no bigger than some of the larger toy-store versions of her simian offspring, Curious George, but her personality exceeds the sum of any assemblage of primates, two-legged or otherwise. She is an imperious presence, 5 feet tall at best, with penetrating eyes and short red hair that sticks straight up in spiny chunks.

“Children!” she roars. “Who understands why they like one thing and not another?” Rey was raised in Germany, and though she left long ago, her accent is still with her. “Certainly I can’t explain it.”

What is also curious is to contemplate the persistent appeal of a monkey who easily qualifies for membership in AARP. Curious George is 55. Next to Rey, who celebrated her 90th birthday in May by giving away 2 million of the many, many dollars that George has earned her, he’s a kid.

Maybe that’s part of his allure, Rey says. George stays spry and mischievous and, above all, inquisitive. “He can do what kids can’t do,” she observes. “He can paint a room from the inside. He can hang from a kite in the sky. He can let the animals out of their pens on the farm. He can do all these naughty things that kids would like to do.”

No less an authority on children’s reading habits than Madeleine L’Engle, author of a raft of young peoples’ titles that includes “A Wrinkle in Time,” agrees. In the introduction to Houghton Mifflin’s 1994 collection of the “Curious George” stories, L’Engle writes, “George dares to do things we don’t dare to do, but his mischief always comes from curiosity. He is never malicious; he doesn’t play tricks on people to make them uncomfortable; his curiosity is always friendly, whether he’s making paper hats out of the newspapers he’s supposed to be delivering or letting pigs out of their pens.”

In the days when her late husband, H.A. (for Hans Augusto), was drawing the picture stories that form the “Curious George” series, Rey often served as a human model for the impish little monkey. She would move her arms this way or that, or scrunch her face up or demonstrate some daring leap from one piece of furniture to another.

“A little bit, he used me,” Rey says, downplaying her role as inspiration. “My husband always called me curious. But then I think most people are, don’t you?”

While Hans drew the pictures, Margret wrote the words. The themes came from joint monkey storming sessions, as in, “Let’s have George on an ocean liner!” or “Let’s take George to the museum!” Hans would set about the illustrations and Margret would create the story, as if sending a monkey on a cruise or to an art gallery “were perfectly normal things to do.”

The collaboration proved to be both personally satisfying and professionally lucrative. “We enjoyed it. It seemed to work out well,” Rey says. “Except for one thing. My husband was always much slower than me. Me, I was very fast.”

Assiduously, the Reys did not aim their stories at children. “We wrote for ourselves, and then by pleasant coincidence, the children liked what we liked,” she explains. They spent not one single moment analyzing their market or pondering the juvenile thought process. “This business of research is nonsense,” Rey declares.

With no strategy whatsoever, the Reys created a character who outlasted fads and withstood the scrutiny of three generations of youthful critics. Curious George takes his place alongside classic juvenile characters like Winnie the Pooh, Wilbur the pig and the Little Engine That Could. For their part, the Reys became so closely identified with their monkey hero that once, upon meeting them, a little boy screwed his face into an expression of major disappointment. “I thought you were monkeys too,” he said.

But the furry brown beast with the endearing smile and mannerisms also fueled a gigantic merchandising empire, over which Margret Rey continues to preside, quite single-handedly. There are Curious George books, puzzles, film strips, stuffed animals and children’s clothing. George appears on wristwatches and lunch boxes. He has been on television and in the movies. For each incarnation, Rey rages over quality control.

“I do yell at my manufacturers,” she admits. As if she were explaining why it is vital to scold naughty children, she adds: “It’s important to keep up the quality.”

*

The Reys created just seven “Curious George” titles. “After each book, we would say ‘Never again,’ ” Rey remembers. “It was an immense amount of work. People never knew that. Always we waited several years between books, until the pain was forgotten, like a mother in childbirth.”

“Curious George Goes to the Hospital,” the last of the original series, appeared more than 20 years ago. Soon thereafter, in 1977, H.A. Rey died. Margret summarily rejected the entreaties of a parade of artists who offered to pick up where Hans left off and continue the saga. No one, she maintained, could capture the monkey’s true nature and antics the way her husband had.

In what passed for retirement, Rey turned to sculpture at her summer home in New Hampshire. She never so much as thought about writing for adults--”why would I do that?” she asks. She has an equal lack of patience for the class-project letters that come to her in crates when teachers decide it would be great to have their students write to their favorite little monkey. Occasionally an interesting missive makes it over the transom, but, “We don’t respond to many of them,” Rey says, “because they are so boring.”

This is not a description any sane or honest person would apply to the lives of Margret and H.A. Rey. Both were raised in turn-of-the-century Europe, with the kind of art-school educations that connote berets and easels by the Seine. They met in Hamburg, when 10-year-old Margret slid down a banister in her family home and bumped into Hans, then 18 and courting Margret’s older sister. Years later they re-encountered one another in Rio de Janeiro. Margret was working as a photographer, and Hans, reluctantly, as a businessman, selling bathtubs up and down the Amazon.

They married and settled in Paris, cobbling together careers that included newspaper cartooning for Hans and advertising copy writing for Margret. At one point Margret wrote singing commercials for margarine. “It made me immune to all commercials for life,” she says.

A French publisher spotted one of Hans’ animal cartoons in a newspaper and suggested the Reys turn the character into a book, “Raphael et les Neuf Singes,” Raphael and the Nine Monkeys. “We had never dreamed of children’s books,” Rey recalls. “But we needed money.”

One of the original nine monkeys graduated to star in his own book. Obscurity almost certainly would have followed had the Reys stuck with the ape’s original name, ZoZo. “A stupid name,” she acknowledges. But just who dreamed up the name that made Curious George a celebrity is a detail lost in time. “My editor [at Houghton Mifflin] says I thought of his name,” Rey says. “I say he did.”

Hours before Hitler’s troops marched into Paris, the Reys fled the city on bicycles. The monkey manuscripts, among others, were packed in their pockets. Because Margret was wearing gray flannel trousers, French border police assumed she was an Englishwoman and waved her across. They made their way from Spain to Portugal and eventually, from New York to the big brown-shingled house here where Margret and a feisty cocker spaniel named Janie still live. Curious George posters hang on the walls, among masks and primitive art from around the world.

*

In recent years Rey has grown more frail, an inconvenience to someone whose personality remains formidable. She is a fixture on the Cambridge intellectual / social circuit, and every 10 years, when George celebrates another milestone birthday, she ensures that the occasion is marked with appropriate festivity.

The seven George books have sold more than 12 million copies in English alone. Translations exist in a dozen and a half languages, including Norwegian and Chinese. Astonishingly, George utters not one word in any of those books.

Nor does the monkey serve as some kind of metaphor, or offer up some deep and probing social message. He is what he is, Rey insists, a monkey who rescues himself through his own ingenuity, and whose expressive face does all his talking for him.

“I don’t like messages,” Rey says. It is the proclamation of an artistic autocrat. She prepares to ascend to her chambers in her mechanical chair. “These are just stories,” she says by way of parting. “Stories. Just stories.”