A Nursing Home With Celebrity

Priscilla Maltbie stands out at Catered Manor Nursing Center in Long Beach. She’s only in her 50s, with long blond hair spilling over her tie-in-the-back hospital gown. She has a rowdy laugh that carries into the hall. And then there’s the clicketyclack of her computer keys.

Maltbie, a paraplegic, writes children’s books.

Right now, she’s reworking her second one, about Mark Twain and a cat named Bambino, who in her tale nudges the famed author out of his grief after his wife dies.

The story follows on the heels of “Picasso and Minou,” about another cat, who lures artist Pablo Picasso out of his Blue Period.

“Picasso and Minou” was published last year and the first printing sold out, though copies can still be found.

Maltbie wrote it before a neurological condition forced her out of her mobile home and into a remote-controlled hospital bed, in which she now often writes from a reclining position.

“I call myself the ‘horizontal writer,’ ” Maltbie said with a grin on a recent morning, her two gray-haired roommates snoozing nearby.

Maltbie’s editor calls her a success.

“I’m pretty much in awe of her,” said associate editor Randi Rivers of Charlesbridge Publishing near Boston, which issues about 40 books a year for children up to middle school age. “She’s had a phenomenal response to her signings.... I think about 100 people came out [to the first one]. That’s phenomenal at a bookstore.”

And the fact that she did a reading and book-signing at the nursing home? “That’s amazing,” Rivers said.

Julie Morris, owner of the Long Beach independent bookstore Once Upon a Story, said she still has copies of “Picasso and Minou” but it has sold very well -- especially after the author, who writes as P.I. Maltbie, did readings last year at the store and at a children’s fair at the Long Beach Museum of Art.

“People really love the book,” said Morris. “And I think people love it even more when they meet Priscilla. She is a person with a handicap who has clearly overcome it.”

Rivers plucked Maltbie’s story from a pile of unsolicited manuscripts in 2003. By then, Maltbie had left her double-wide, and lost much of her independence.

Starting in about 1990, her vertebrae had begun to clamp around her spinal cord, slowly strangling the nerves that control the lower body.

She had been managing to live independently, using a wheelchair and getting weekly visits from Long Beach disabled services staff. But around Thanksgiving of 2002, having just bought and moved into her mobile home, she collapsed and ended up in a hospital for weeks.

In time, it became clear that she needed daily medical help. She could not go to work. “I was forced to sell everything I owned and become a pauper, so I could get medical treatment,” she said.

She had settled in at Catered Manor when Rivers tracked her down to tell her that Charlesbridge wanted “Picasso and Minou” -- that Maltbie was a rare aspiring author who had sent a story in cold and sold it.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Maltbie said, clapping her hands.

“The first thing I noticed was the writing,” said Rivers, “and it was a good angle on a story. Priscilla has a way of finding that defining moment in a person’s life, like Mark Twain wearing only the white suit, and writing it with her sensitivity and dry humor.”

The Twain tale is not yet published. The Picasso book will need a second printing to resupply retail stock. But before that happens, its illustrations need to be revised: Rivers said the Picasso estate wrote to object that they re-create Picasso’s work. Rivers hopes the new version of the book will be ready for sale by December or early 2007.

In Maltbie’s book, Picasso is unable to sell his sad-looking Blue paintings and, without money, has to leave his studio cat to its own devices. Minou -- French for male kitten -- encounters circus performers who feed him sausages that he drags home. Picasso follows the cat one day and meets the colorful troupe. As he paints their portraits, his work is infused with cheerier colors. And it starts selling.

“It was a stroke of true genius that led Priscilla to write ‘P&M;,’ ” said illustrator Pau Estrada, a Picasso devotee from Barcelona, where Picasso spent his teens. Estrada said two Picasso scholars have praised the book, which Maltbie crafted with creative license around one truth: Picasso did have a dutiful studio cat, and biographies mention the cat dragging home a raw sausage that the poor young artist cooked up and devoured.

“She took a very small anecdote of Picasso’s youth in Montmartre and used it to explain his evolution from the Blue to the Rose Period and to create a portrait of a young artist and his creative process,” Estrada said.

Maltbie had long been interested in Picasso. Growing up in Illinois, she often wandered the Chicago Institute of Art, where she fell in love with the artist’s work. Even as a child she pondered what had taken him from his bleaker to his brighter work. “It just fascinated me,” she said.

After she graduated from high school, her father, a graphic artist, moved the family to Southern California, where Maltbie earned a master’s degree in English literature from Cal State Long Beach.

At the time, Maltbie dreamed of becoming a professor and novelist. But she struck out at finding jobs in academia, and, she said, some businesses told her, “ ‘You don’t fit the image our company wants to project’ -- which apparently meant they didn’t want to employ a smart person who happened to be of short stature.”

Maltbie was born with achondroplasia, the most common form of dwarfism, a term she loathes because “it sounds so medieval.”

She describes her childhood as charmed, and even the often tough teen years were spent “feeling special, but always included.” The neurological condition called lumbar spinal canal stenosis that led to her paralysis is one of the main complications in adults with achondroplasia.

Throughout her life, people have suggested that Maltbie capitalize on her small stature and perform. She never considered it, she said.

“That’s fine for some people if they want to do it, but there are three parts to choose from,” she said. “Leprechauns, elves and munchkins.”

In writing, she said, “Nobody gets out a yardstick to measure you. Nobody cares.”

For a few years in the 1970s, Maltbie wrote teacher guides and other material for the Orange County Department of Education in Santa Ana, but she was laid off, she said. Her aging parents moved in with her and they pooled resources.

In the early 1990s, Maltbie began freelancing, writing opinion pieces on disability issues for local newspapers.

In a 2004 piece for New Mobility magazine called “Breaking Out of the Disability Box,” Maltbie wrote about her efforts to avoid being typecast and described how she felt when she became a published book author.

“I had done it. Like Picasso, I had broken out of my own Blue Period box. I could move on to other things,” she wrote.

“Now I am a writer who has a disability, not a disabled writer.”