Becoming Dr. Seuss

by Brian Jay Jones

  Laing agreed to write the text accompanying Geisel’s Hippocrass cartoons, but the project failed to gain any traction with editors at The New Yorker. Geisel could see the writing on the wall. “Not having received any checks, letters of praise or telegrams of disapproval, I take it that the Hippocrass has not been housebroken,” he wrote to Laing—and then gamely proposed another series of cartoons he called “Emminent [sic] Europeans,” featuring a stoic Croupier—the person in charge of a gaming table, who clears the table with a long rake—and a clueless Palace Guide. The Croupier was the funnier of the two ideas; Geisel proposed they “play up on his complete detachment from worry, his placid indifference to whatever happens”—and one cartoon shows a distraught gambler standing at the game table with a pistol to his head, eyes clenched tightly shut, as the blasé Croupier absently rakes in his money. “Kindly write me your opinions post haste,” Geisel begged Laing—but Laing found no takers for the Eminent Europeans series, either.

  Taking matters into his own hands, Geisel caught the train for New York City in April, convinced that a more personal touch with publishers would push open the doors to publication. In this, too, he was disappointed. “I have tramped all over this bloody town,” he wrote Whit Campbell from his room in the Hotel Woodstock on 43rd Street, and explained that he had been “tossed out” of the offices of two publishers, two movie studios, three advertising agencies, and the offices of Life and Judge magazines. Life, at least, had promised to “consider more carefully” one of his cartoons, while a local magazine had asked for “half a dozen grocery store cartoons,” which he grudgingly promised to deliver. But he remained slightly embarrassed by his ongoing efforts to “consciously cultivate” Laing at The New Yorker. “Key-ryst!” wrote Geisel. “What is this world coming to?”2

  He had also had dinner in the city with five Dartmouth classmates—a gathering that depressed him, as all five had real jobs and appeared to be on their way to real careers (except for one, noted Geisel, who would get somewhere only “if they don’t shoot him first”). As for his own prospects, he told Whit he was playing it by ear. “What comes up will come up, and will determine my future life,” he explained matter-of-factly. “I rather think it will be free-lancing for a while. I’ve been steered in that direction by all the great publishers and editors in New York.” He continued:

  I don’t know. But I know one thing.

  My policy is to laugh my god damned head off, be the provocation ever so slight. Occasionally I depress myself and work myself into one of those delightful funks . . . And I seek out subway tracks on which to toss myself. And then it strikes me as very comical—and I laff instead.3

  He signed off as Seuss, putting a flourish on the serifs of the S, then noted parenthetically that he was, “a damn fool and proud of it.”4

  Despite his darkening spirits, his persistence paid off. In early summer, an editor at The Saturday Evening Post purchased one of his cartoons for $25—about $350 today. It wasn’t a princely sum, but when pooled with his savings, it was enough that he could announce to his parents that he was moving immediately to Manhattan. “I informed my parents that my future was assured; I would quickly make my fame and fortune in The Saturday Evening Post,” Geisel said.5 His parents were delighted, though Geisel said later that his father was mostly happy because he was “hoping I’d become self-sufficient and get out of the house, because I was working at his desk.”6 Regardless, Ted boarded the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad, “and I invaded the Big City,” he said, “where I knew that all the editors would be waiting to buy my wares.”7

  They weren’t. The piece for The Saturday Evening Post—a Lawrence of Arabia joke drawn in a more traditional, less exaggerated style—ran on July 16, and was signed Seuss. It would be the last piece he would place in the Post for thirty-seven years.8

  Geisel moved to Greenwich Village that summer, taking a room with John Clarke Rose, a former Jacko artist. Their one-room studio at 133 Washington Place was over a lively club and restaurant called Don Dickerman’s Pirate’s Den, where servers dressed as pirates staged fights every hour on the hour. While the Pirate’s Den would become a fashionable night spot over the next decade, Geisel remembered only the overfed rats that he and Rose would shoo away by whacking them with brooms. “God, what a place,” he said later, shuddering at the memory.9

  Still, it was exhilarating to live in New York City—especially in the era of the speakeasy at the height of the Jazz Age. With booze in his blood, Geisel never for a moment considered giving up drinking, and he and Rose regularly sought out underground restaurants and clubs where the alcohol flowed freely—or barring that, found restaurants where greased palms ensured the police looked the other way. The nightlife in New York in 1927 was particularly thrilling; new clubs like the Onyx—started by the bootlegger Joe Helbock—were opening across the city, bringing jazz and bathtub gin to previously peaceful neighborhoods.

  In Harlem, Duke Ellington and his orchestra would take up residency at the Cotton Club, the beginning of a highly creative and productive three-and-a-half-year gig. This was also the year Babe Ruth would become the first baseball player to hit sixty home runs in a season, leading a team of hard-hitting New York Yankee sluggers in a batting lineup known as Murderers’ Row. In film, 1927 would see the release of the first full-length talkie, The Jazz Singer, as well as Fritz Lang’s groundbreaking silent science fiction film Metropolis. And that June, New York would shower aviator Charles Lindbergh with a gigantic ticker-tape parade, a hero’s welcome celebrating his successful solo flight across the Atlantic.

  The world was becoming a whole lot bigger and louder—and Geisel, in his apartment in lower Manhattan, was in the middle of it all. But Helen wasn’t. To Geisel’s disappointment, she rarely visited his dirty bachelor pad, preferring to spend the summer with her mother on the New Jersey shore. When Helen was in the city with Ted, however, she was, in nearly every sense, the epitome of the new American woman—one who danced and drank and voted and earned her own money. Even with her modest pay as a schoolteacher, she was significantly out-earning Ted.

  Despite making endless rounds of the magazines, Ted was still having a hard time finding anyone who was interested in his work. “I tried to do sophisticated things for Vanity Fair,” he recalled. “I tried unsophisticated things for the Daily Mirror.”10 Nothing seemed to work until one fall evening, between sessions of rat-whacking, John Rose mentioned that a former Dartmouth classmate named “Beef” Vernon had been hired to sell advertising for the humor magazine Judge—and Rose thought perhaps he and Ted could “con him” into an introduction to editor Norman Anthony.

  In no time, Ted found himself hustled in front of thirty-two-year-old Norman Anthony in the offices of Judge on East 48th Street. Anthony, in the lingo of the era, was a certified rake. A hard-drinking, rambunctious womanizer—he would later report being married “three or four” times—Anthony had overcome an early life as a New York City street thug to become a successful journalist and editor.11 After several years at the New York Herald, he had been hired as the editor of Judge—a satire magazine that called itself “the world’s wittiest weekly”—and had rapidly turned it into the most successful humor magazine in the nation.

  Founded in 1881 to challenge the political humor magazine Puck, Judge had eventually driven Puck out of business—and under the leadership of Anthony, it also regularly outsold Life and its newest rival, The New Yorker. While Judge featured both text pieces and cartoons, Anthony was savvy enough to understand it was cartoons his readers wanted, and had scaled back the text in favor of illustrations and cartoons—an editorial decision that sent sales soaring from 30,000 to 100,000 copies weekly. With its full-color front and back covers and a double-page centerfold, Judge made its artists look good—and cartoonists longed to have their work featured in its pages. And now, thanks to the maneuverings of Beef Vernon, Geisel was here in Anthony’s office, knocking on the door of the big leagu
es.

  With his rapidly receding hairline and round wire-rimmed glasses, Norman Anthony might almost have been mistaken for a banker or insurance salesman, were it not for the sly, slightly crooked grin almost perpetually on his face that gave away his sense of humor. It was perhaps little wonder, then, that he and Geisel hit it off immediately—and it speaks to Geisel’s patter and power of persuasion that he left Anthony’s office with an offer to join the staff of Judge in October, at a salary of seventy-five dollars per week—about $1,000 today. Ted and Helen celebrated the good news with a spaghetti dinner at a speakeasy.

  Geisel’s first cartoon for Judge—his second for a national publication—appeared in the October 22, 1927 issue. It was yet another henpecked husband joke, this time featuring two married circus performers on tall unicycles. (“And to think!” says the wife, “I could have been the wife of a six-day bike racer—if I hadn’t listened to your rot about Higher Art!”) As he had with the piece in The Saturday Evening Post, Ted signed this one Seuss as well.

  Even with Judge’s large monthly circulation, editor Norman Anthony was always convinced his magazine was on the verge of bankruptcy, and was always on the lookout for any way to keep up his cash flow. Lately, he had implemented a policy permitting his staff and other contributors to be paid with “due bills” from advertisers. What this meant was that if Judge was owed $250 in advertising revenue from Barbasol shaving cream—and Anthony owed one of his cartoonists $250—Anthony could have the cartoonist collect a “due bill” directly from Barbasol in the amount of $250. Translated into practice, however, what tended to happen was that Barbasol and other advertisers would simply pay their due bill with an equivalent amount of product instead of cash. It was essentially a barter system—and Geisel recalled that he was indeed once paid for his work with $100 worth of shaving cream. Another time, recalled Geisel, “I was once paid in Little Gem nail clippers—a hundred gross of them, which they thought I could sell for a profit. I finally gave up trying to sell them.”12 Still, Geisel thought the system had its advantages. “I sort of loved trading my stuff for their stuff. I was happier in one way under the barter system than I’ve ever been since. When you get paid in money, it leads to accountants and lawyers.”13

  Now that he was officially employed and bringing in a somewhat stable income—whether partially comprised of nail clippers or not—Ted decided that he and Helen should be married—and the sooner, the better. Ted proposed they marry before the end of the year, preferably in early November, a timeline that Helen eagerly agreed to. But that vaguely defined date was vetoed by Nettie Geisel, since Ted’s sister, Marnie—now married to lawyer Lloyd Dahmen—was due to deliver their first child on or about the first of November. When Marnie delivered a healthy baby girl—whom they named Margaretha, but whom everyone would call Peggy—precisely on November 1, Ted and Helen set their date for the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, exactly four weeks later.

  On November 29, 1927, Ted and Helen were married at five P.M. in Westfield, New Jersey, in the home of Helen’s brother, Robert. Helen was given away by her mother, while Whitney Campbell—who had driven more than two hundred miles from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to New York—served as best man. Ted choked up with emotion as he thanked Campbell for standing with him. “It was a long way for you to come just to toss a ring onto a Bible,” he wrote to Whit several days later. “But it was a gesture that I will remember as long as my cerebral textures remain healthy and intact.” He told his friend he was trying to find an appropriate thank-you gift that was “an outward and comical sign of an inward and spiritual grace”14—about as poetic a thank-you as Ted would ever manage.

  A formal reception of punch and cake followed—but the real post-wedding party was thrown later that evening by Ted’s father, who hosted a champagne dinner at a nearby speakeasy. “The champagne supper cheered up my mother,” said Ted. “And the party saw everyone in a very pleasant frame of mind.”15 Ted took some good-natured ribbing from a few Dartmouth men who expressed shock that Ted and Helen hadn’t already gotten married in Europe—an accusation at which Ted would only grin and wink cheekily. The evening ended on a high note, when one of Ted’s Casque & Gauntlet brothers did a drunken impression of Lady Astor—the very same English socialite whose party invitation Ted had spurned two years earlier for spelling his name incorrectly.

  Ted and Helen spent their honeymoon in a hundred-dollar-a-night suite at the Hotel Traymore in Atlantic City, paid for with—what else?—due bills. “[I]t is fun,” he told Whit. “The Traymore (if you don’t know it) serves perfect food and we are growing stout and catering to our predispositions toward laziness.”16 During their first year of marriage, Ted and Helen would, in fact, spend many long weekends enjoying hundred-dollar suites at the Traymore, courtesy of more of Judge’s due bills.

  It was certainly better than the apartment the newlyweds had taken at West 18th Street in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. For one thing, the neighborhood stunk. The apartment was located across the street from a stable, from which dead horses were frequently dragged into the street to be disposed of later. It was also unsafe, and if Geisel wanted to make the two-mile walk uptown to the offices of Judge, he made certain he left the house carrying what he called his “loaded cane”—a walking stick fitted with a spring blade in one end—to ward off would-be muggers.17 Other times, he might sprint for the subway station at Broadway and 23rd, ride to the stop at 49th Street, then walk the two-and-a-half blocks to the Judge offices at 18 East 48th.

  Within a month of working at Judge, Geisel was already producing a regular ongoing series called “Boids and Beasties: A Department for Indefatigable Naturalists,” a text-heavy feature with lots of smiling Seussian animals, many of which could trace their roots back to the pages of his Oxford notebook. In the first installment, published in the November 19, 1927, issue, the piece is credited to Dr. Theophrastus Seuss, a nod to Ted’s beloved stuffed dog, while the signature at the bottom of the page was Seuss. Geisel hadn’t settled on Dr. Seuss yet, but he was getting closer.

  Geisel’s art was getting more stylized, though there was still a lot of crosshatching and the outlining of figures with short parallel lines, an artistic conceit lifted from the comic pages. Nearly every creature, from human to bird to lion to fish, is also a bit bug-eyed, with visible eyelashes. Men tend to have beards or mustaches and wear hats or smoke cigars; a clueless-looking Calvin Coolidge was a favorite target as well. Ted also struggled to draw animals even somewhat realistically—his kangaroo was particularly terrible, with a face like a French bulldog—but he excelled at elephants, which managed to radiate charm and personality while still keeping their basic anatomy intact.

  When he could get fanciful with his creatures, things got better. There was a written piece about “The Waiting Room at Dang-Dang: Where the D.T. Animals Stay When They’re Not Out on Jobs,” profiling Mr. Fronk, the Superintendent of the Beasts of Delirium Tremens, Inc., who sends out a wild menagerie of animals to romp through the booze-soaked hallucinations of drunks. The accompanying cartoon shows an assortment of weird Seussian animals seated around Fronk—including an elephant with a cigar, a polar bear playing the bass viol, and a rabbit-like animal with eight legs.18

  Prohibition and alcohol-related jokes, in fact, were the easiest for him, as well as the inspiration for some of his most popular cartoons. College students, in fact, would pore through Judge each month, looking for Geisel’s soused elephants or staggering drunks. “When I think about the twenties, I realize that so much of my work was about drinking,” Ted said later.19 “Humor is a funny thing. You pick something out of the air. If the air changes, it’s not funny any more.”20 For Ted, booze jokes would almost always be funny; even the Hippocrass, neglected but not forgotten, would make an appearance in a Christmas 1927 full-page piece called “Christmas Spirits”—yet another drinking joke—as the embodiment of the alcoholic spirit “Green Chartreuse.”21

  Still, some topics
were taboo. “As far as humor [in the 1920s] was concerned, sex had not been invented,” Geisel said later. “Dirty words were illegal as hell.”22 And yet he still couldn’t resist making at least two jokes featuring the naked Lady Godiva on horseback, though both times the joke was about the horse, rather than more obvious sniggering about Godiva’s state of undress.

  He would also sneak the names of his friends into his prose pieces: there was Whit Campbell flicking ashes into the open trunk of an elephant, Joseph Sagmaster in a Santa suit hunting reindeer, and former roommate John Rose wielding a snake to blackmail millionaires. Geisel also wasn’t above a bit of obvious product placement, using the names of real products in his drawings or as punch lines, which sometimes resulted in appreciative packages showing up on his desk at Judge; when Geisel name-checked White Rock soda in one piece, the company sent him forty-eight bottles of their soft drinks. This would not be the last time Ted’s use of a brand name would pay dividends.

  By early 1928, Geisel was quickly becoming one of Judge’s most popular artists—Teddy Roosevelt Jr. would even write to the magazine asking for one of Ted’s originals, a request that Geisel thought more than made up for his supposed humiliation at the hands of the late president on a Springfield stage all those years ago. And Judge, despite Anthony’s playing fast and loose with the bottom line, would continue to outsell the competition, on the strength of both Geisel’s work and text pieces by writers like S. J. Perelman, who would later write for the Marx Brothers and The New Yorker. It was The New Yorker, in fact, that was Judge’s closest national competitor—even Geisel would admit that the New Yorker’s proficiency with one-liners could often make Judge’s “He-She two-line gags” sound “square.”23

  Like the prolific Perelman, Geisel, too, was producing his share of long prose pieces, hauling out his typewriter to place it on the sloped surface of his drawing table and banging away as a cigarette burned in the ashtray. Smoking, a common habit of the era, was a habit Geisel himself would never be able to shake. When working, he would often chain-smoke, lighting one off the last, then stubbing out the old one in a deep ashtray sitting on his drawing table. Geisel would try and fail to kick the habit countless times throughout his life.