20 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ MARCH 9, 2020
He was wearing a ratty old sweater so
we bought him socks, underwear, and
a new shirt in the hotel gift shop. They
were outrageously expensive, but he
said they were the best socks he had
ever had. The next morning he came to
the breakfast in the new shirt, but with
the ratty sweater over it. He said he
couldn’t give the speech to a big audi-
ence ‘with just a thin shirt between me
and them.’ ”What’s next?
Hayes plans to spend more time with
her four grandchildren, who live in the
Silver Lake neighborhood of Los
Angeles. (“They have libraries like you wouldn’t believe,” she
admits.) She will miss the work, and the people she worked with
will certainly miss her.
“She helped me write some of the best books of my life,
teaching me something new with every pass,” says Sarah Dessen,
who published more than a dozen of her bestselling YA novels
with Viking. “I am so lucky to have gotten to work with her.”
Rosemary Wells said Hayes belongs in the pantheon of great
editors, “the whisperer behind the curtain” who helps each actor
perform to his highest ability. “I have had the good fortune of
working with the best and brightest editors of my generation,”
says Wells, who counts Fogelman, Michael di Capua, Amy
Ehrlich, Dick Jackson, and Ann Tobias among them. “But
Regina takes the cake.”
No doubt Hayes would blush at that praise. Then and now,
for her, it is always about the story. “I still love the work, and
I’m never happier than sitting with a big fat manuscript, a
pencil in hand, to date myself, but it was time to make way for
ducklings,” she says. “I just had to do it and know that I’d then
figure out what to do next.” ■trouble keeping True Story in print. “I think
we reprinted something like six or seven
times that first year, for a total of something
like 80,000 copies, which for that time was
huge,” she says. Next came The Stinky Cheese
Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, which won
a 1993 Caldecott Honor.
“Without Regina, there would not have
been a True Story of the 3 Little Pigs or a Stinky
Cheese Man or a Math Curse or Science Verse or
Time Warp Trio series,” Scieszka says. “She
had both an editor’s sharp eye for a good
story, and a generous, kid-centered heart.
And she always saw that humor was
important.”
Simms Taback also won a Caldecott
Honor during Hayes’s tenure, for There Was an Old Lady Who
Swallowed a Fly, a redesigned edition of a novelty book he had
published years before. “After that, he brought in Joseph Had a
Little Overcoat, which of course went on to win the Caldecott
Medal,” Hayes says. “He was a joy to work with. The last book
we published with him [Taback died in 2011] was Kibitzers and
Fools. He came in to meet with [art director] Denise Cronin and
me about it one day, and I remember he said, ‘This is the most
Jewish book I have ever written, and I can’t believe I’m here
putting it together with a couple of Irish girls.’ ”Reviving the backlist
At Viking, Hayes also worked closely with the estates of many
departed creators—including McCloskey, Ludwig Bemelmans,
Don Freeman, Ezra Jack Keats, and Astrid Lindgren—to ensure
backlist classics like Make Way for Ducklings, Madeline, Corduroy,
The Snowy Day, and Pippi Longstocking would continue to reach
new audiences. In the 1970s, many of the books had been rede-
signed without jackets, or in a reduced trim size, to save money.
Hayes restored them to their original glory.
The work brought her in contact with legends like Cooney,
whom she visited at the author’s home on the Damariscotta
River in Maine, in a house her son had built for her. “Thomas
Moser made all her cabinets and in her studio there was a place
for every brush and tube of paint,” Hayes remembers.
“Everything was blue and white. It would have made for incred-
ible photos although I can’t imagine Barbara would ever be on
Instagram.”
McCloskey, who also lived in Maine, was “lovely and so sweet,”
Hayes recalls, noting he was also very shy and intimidated by his
own fame. She remembers him being asked to give a speech at
the Children’s Books and Author breakfast at ABA. He arrived
in New York City the night before the breakfast and the plan
was to meet for dinner, but McCloskey went to the wrong hotel
and his luggage had been lost.
“Finally, he showed up about 8:30 p.m.,” Hayes recalls. “A
kind lady had found him wandering around a different hotel.Department|CHILDREN’S BOOKS
She helped
me write some of
the best books
of my life, teach-
ing me something
new with every
pass.
— Sarah Dessen
Hayes (r.) visiting Barbara Cooney, at Cooney’s house in Maine.