Becoming Dr. Seuss

by Brian Jay Jones

  That summer, California was taking preparedness seriously. There were blackout drills each evening, and every week, the Geisels’ hillside retreat seemed to be the focal point of countless military drills. “Once a week, the marines invade and usually capture our hillside,” Helen wrote Evelyn Shrifte:

  We are dive-bombed at 5:30 a.m.—then we look out of the window to see hundreds of little boats, amphibious tanks, etc., rushing to shore. In a few minutes, our house is in the midst of it all—tanks, jeeps, trucks, bayonets bared right on the driveway. The din of blank cartridges is so terrifying that I can’t even conceive of what the real thing must be like!74

  Geisel continued to airmail his cartoons back to New York that summer, filing cartoons regularly addressing the need to buy war bonds and the dangers of disunity and of Georgia’s racist governor Eugene Talmadge, at that time trying to segregate the University of Georgia. (Talmadge would be defeated later that year.) There was still Hitler taunting Pierre Laval, this time depicted as an insect-sized, capitulating louse. And early that autumn, a Dr. Seuss cartoon included a billboard asking, IF all of us were fighting as hard as YOU are . . . WHO would win the war, and how soon?

  It was a question Geisel had lately given considerable thought. For more than a year, he had been encouraging the United States to enter the war—and, once they were in, he had tried to keep their spirits up and remind them what they were fighting for. But now that didn’t seem like it was enough.

  At age thirty-nine, Geisel was too old to be drafted. So in October, he applied for a commission from Naval Intelligence, which required a lengthy approval process. But the Naval gears turned so slowly, in fact, that by the time Geisel received notice in December that he’d been cleared for service in Naval Intelligence, he’d already accepted a commission from the U.S. Army. “They [the Army] didn’t want me,” Geisel later joked, “but they had to have me.”75

  On January 7, 1943, Captain Ted Geisel reported for active duty in Fort MacArthur, California. Dr. Seuss was going to war.

  PART II

  IT IS FUN TO HAVE FUN BUT YOU HAVE TO KNOW HOW

  CHAPTER 7

  SNAFU

  1943–1946

  Geisel had joined the Army—or so he would say for years—mostly “to save face.”1 “I got a letter to the editor [at PM] saying, ‘Dr. Seuss, who is so old he can’t be drafted, got us into this war,’” he explained with not a little amount of stretching. “I thought maybe I had started the war, so I better join up.”2

  What Geisel usually omitted in his retelling of the story is that he had been actively recruited to join the Army by a savvy lieutenant colonel named Frank Capra, the three-time Academy Award–winning director who was now in command of a unit within the Signal Corps, tasked with producing training films, informational brochures, and other educational materials. In late 1942, Capra had dispatched one of the writers in his unit, Leonard Spigelgass, to New York to look for potential writers, artists, and filmmakers. Spigelgass had immediately zeroed in on Geisel. “He has a remarkably good brain,” the young writer reported to Capra, “and seems to me useful infinitely beyond a cartoonist.”3

  That was good enough for Capra. Geisel was offered a temporary appointment with Capra’s unit, effective December 31, 1942—and when he was informed days later of his acceptance by Naval Intelligence, Ted declined their commission. “I told the Navy, ‘Thanks, but I can’t go,’” said Ted. “And they said to me, ‘You’re AWOL.’”4 On January 7, 1943, Theodor Seuss Geisel—serial number 09214057—was sworn into the U.S. Army. Three days later, he would be commissioned as a captain and board a train for Fort MacArthur, California, to take his place in Capra’s Signal Corps unit.

  Dr. Seuss was officially an Army man—and he was glad to be there. “The only good thing Adolf Hitler did in starting World War II,” Ted said later, “was that he enabled me to join the Army and finally stop drawing, ‘Quick, Henry, the Flit!’”5 It also meant the end of his editorial cartoons for PM. Ted’s final cartoon for Ingersoll ran on Tuesday, January 5, 1943, two days before his induction into the Army. It was one of his reliable cartoons about complacency, featuring a grizzled old man regaling his grandchild with stories of “The Battle of 1943”—but explaining that even as the Germans closed in, he simply “sat in this chair and groused about the annoying shortage of fuel oil!”6 Ted had joined the Army largely because he didn’t want to be that guy. He was proud of his work at PM—“I think I helped a little bit,” he would say later7—but like many men of the era, he was itching to do his part in uniform.

  Frank Capra felt much the same way. Brilliant, brooding, and frequently bothered, Lieutenant Colonel Capra, like Captain Geisel, was too old to be drafted and signed up instead. Unlike Geisel, however, the forty-six-year-old Capra had been in the Army before, serving as a second lieutenant during World War I, where he was mostly confined to a desk. After the war, he’d helmed one successful film after another—taking home Oscars for directing It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and You Can’t Take It with You—until the bombing of Pearl Harbor had spurred him to answer the call of duty again. Capra had barely finished editing Arsenic and Old Lace when he reported for active duty.

  Capra didn’t intend to be a desk jockey again. Initially he had lobbied to oversee a combat photography unit, hoping to witness firsthand the kind of glorious action he was convinced rival director John Ford was seeing in the field. But George Marshall, the U.S. Army chief of staff, thought Capra was too valuable for that. American soldiers, Marshall explained, unlike their German counterparts, didn’t have a “faith” they were fighting for—as Stewart Alsop put it, “something for which they would gladly die.”8 Capra’s job, said Marshall, was to make films that not only showed young men how to fight, but also “explain to our boys in the Army why we are fighting, and the principles for which we are fighting.”9 And so, Capra had been put in charge of the Army’s 834th Signal Service Photographic Detachment, Special Services Division, Film Production Section, tasked with motivating, instructing, and inspiring American soldiers. His first command: move the 834th from Washington, D.C., to Hollywood, “both for production and for political reasons,” insisted Capra.10

  Capra took control of his unit on July 13, 1942, setting up briefly in a temporary space, then moving over to the vacant Fox Studio at 1421 North Western Avenue, leased from mogul Darryl F. Zanuck at the cost of one dollar per year. For the remainder of the war, Capra, Geisel, and nearly everyone associated with the unit would fondly refer to their site as “Fort Fox.” Initially set up with 8 officers and 35 enlisted men, Capra’s unit would eventually swell to around 150 men by the time of Geisel’s arrival in early 1943.

  Because Geisel was stationed in California, his duties at Fort Fox were essentially his day job; he and the other men were free to go home at the end of each day and sleep in their own beds. For the period of Ted’s military service, then, the Geisels relocated from New York to California, taking a spacious three-bedroom home at 3595 Wonder View Drive, “high on a mountaintop” overlooking Hollywood.11 The address was apt, for it truly was a wonderful view: from their perch on the windy hillside, the Geisels could see the Warner Bros. movie lot out their back door and the sparkling Hollywood Reservoir through the front; meanwhile, just to the east was the famous Hollywood sign, still reading HOLLYWOODLAND in early 1943.

  To keep Helen company while he went off to work at Fort Fox each day, Ted bought her an excitable Irish setter from a breeder down the hill, and took great delight in dumping the gigantic dog in Helen’s lap and announcing, “Here’s your lapdog!”12 When she wasn’t babysitting the dog, Helen took up gardening—she would grow gorgeous roses—and worked to supplement Ted’s meager Army income by writing children’s books. Writing under her maiden name of Helen Marion Palmer, Helen regularly produced titles for Disney and Golden Books, including Donald Duck Sees South America. “She supported us during the war,” Ted said proudly, noting
that the only book she’d ever had rejected had to do with the Virgin Mary—that was a bit too touchy for a children’s book.13

  * * *

  • • • •

  When Geisel arrived at Fort Fox in January 1943, Capra already had been hard at work on the first of what would be seven films in a series called Why We Fight. The first of these films, titled Prelude to War—examining the conquering of Manchuria by Japan and Ethiopia by Italy—would win the Academy Award for Best Documentary in March, though Capra’s name wouldn’t appear anywhere on it. None of the films produced by the 834th, in fact, would contain a single creative credit. “You are working for a common cause. Your personal egos and idiosyncrasies are unimportant,” Capra told his men. “There will be no personal credit for your work, either on the screen or in the press. The only press notices we are anxious to read are those of American victories!”14

  Geisel was impressed with Capra from the moment he met him. Capra could look tightly wound—he was short and somewhat bulky, with dark eyebrows, a tight-set mouth, and dark hair slicked back to reveal a widow’s peak—but he quickly earned the respect of officers and enlisted men alike. George Marshall thought highly of the prickly director and paid him his highest compliment by referring to him warmly as “that fellow Capra.”15 “The secret of Capra is his patience,” said Geisel. “He’s always been a good teacher. I never heard him cuss anybody out or embarrass anybody.”16 Geisel wasn’t the only one in the 834th devoted to its commanding officer. “The innate quality of Capra’s leadership was so implicit that he never had to exert it,” said Paul Horgan, who would later become a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian. “It came from the power of that man’s character.”17

  Still, Capra understood that there were men within his division, including Geisel, who were somewhat disappointed to be stationed stateside, away from the action, free to go home each evening as if they were on shore leave. Capra was quick to assure them that what they were doing was vital to the war effort. “Some carping individuals will accuse you of fighting ‘The Battle of Hollywood.’ Don’t argue with them,” Capra wrote. “This is a total war fought with every conceivable weapon. Your weapon is film! Your bombs are ideas! Hollywood is a war plant!”18 Still, military discipline was sometimes tough for the fiercely independent and egotistical Capra. “It was difficult for me to function. I felt very uneasy,” Capra admitted.19 Ted later said that being a good soldier and following orders without question “must have cost Capra a great deal.”20

  From mid-1942 until early 1946, Capra’s unit would produce seventeen orientation and propaganda films, each running in length from ten minutes to over an hour. There were also the regular fifteen-minute newsreels, called Army-Navy Screen Magazine, to be produced every two weeks for viewing by the troops, as well as the weekly Staff Film Report, which was easily one of the most important—and classified—projects Capra would oversee. These invaluable briefing films were compilations of recent war footage, including reconnaissance and other classified materials culled even from enemy films, that was viewed by the president, the joint chiefs of staff, and allied commanders, to provide only slightly delayed details of theaters of combat. Production of these films required sorting through more than 200,000 feet of raw combat footage, then cutting together two or three reels of film quickly, with finished narration—and in some cases, animation—for approval and circulation by military commanders every week.

  “The work is hard, but fascinating,” Geisel wrote for a Dartmouth newsletter. “The Division, as you know, publishes, broadcasts, and makes movies. Everything from Stars and Stripes, Yank, booklets, news-maps and poster to films of syphilis, malaria, Fascism, and schistosomiasis.”21 While tales of producing films about syphilis would be among Geisel’s go-to war stories (“I was in charge of soldiers not getting syphilis. I made movies with a message. The message was, ‘Don’t do it.’”22), he never actually made a syphilis movie. He would, however, become something of a specialist in malaria.

  One of Captain Geisel’s first assignments was to provide the art for a U.S. Medical Corps booklet that taught soldiers to protect themselves from the malaria-spreading anopheles mosquito. An earlier brochure on the topic—with stilted prose and clinical art—hadn’t done the trick. It was little wonder: 37 percent of those serving in the U.S. military in World War II had less than a high school education. A text-heavy, jargon-riddled document probably wasn’t going to be understood, if it was read at all.

  In stepped Captain Munro Leaf, a public relations consultant to the U.S. Medical Corps, who also happened to be the author of the children’s book The Story of Ferdinand. Leaf contended that soldiers might be more inclined to read—and more likely to understand—the brochure if it more closely resembled a children’s book, with punchier writing and funnier pictures. Leaf, who knew a thing or two about writing prose for kids, offered to compose the new text, writing it out in longhand on a folded mock-up of a brochure titled “This Is Ann”—short for anopheles mosquito. For the illustrations, Leaf thought he knew just who to call.

  Creating a mosquito mascot for a malaria campaign was all in a day’s work for Geisel. “As an old Flit salesman,” he wrote, “I find that I am of occasional use in doing semi-educational propaganda against the mosquito.”23 But it was especially easy to be inspired by Leaf’s chatty prose:

  This is Ann . . . she drinks blood! Her full name is Anopheles Mosquito and she’s dying to meet you!

  Ann moves around at night (a real party gal) and she’s got a thirst. No whiskey, gin, beer or rum coke for Ann . . . she drinks G.I. blood. She jabs that beak of hers in like a drill and sucks up the juice . . . then the poor G.I. is going to feel awful in about eight or fourteen days . . . because he is going to have malaria!24

  Geisel drew an appropriately sassy mosquito, beckoning soldiers seductively with one hand on her hip, the other behind her head, wings vibrating. There were cartoons of mosquitoes stinging unsuspecting rear ends, and a malaria-suffering soldier, flat on his back, legs up, radiating steam and stink lines. It was the kind of character work at which Geisel excelled, both charming and disarming, and by all accounts, it made its point—the document would be reprinted multiple times and would appear in newspapers around the United States. But Geisel, in this early assignment for Capra, was unhappy with it. “I did the illustrations, of which I am not overly proud, in my spare time,” he explained later. “The booklet is interesting for one main reason: it is, to my knowledge, one of the few booklets assigned by the Chief of Staff and the Adjutant General that is completely goofy and informal in style and content.”25

  Unlike most projects that came out of Capra’s unit, Geisel was permitted to sign his name—in this case Dr. Seuss—on the “This Is Ann” brochure, making it something of a novelty piece, which may have accounted for its wide circulation outside the military. Still, Capra would maintain that “[e]verybody from top to bottom deserves equal credit for anything we’ve done.”26 And everybody, from top to bottom, was expected to pitch in on any project, at any time, regardless of their expertise as civilians. While Geisel would continue to be called on from time to time for his talents as illustrator, there was too much work to be done producing the various films. For most of his career as a soldier in the Signal Corps Information and Education Division, Geisel would make movies.

  He had a lot to learn—and knew it. “One of the reasons I love Capra,” said Geisel, “is that when I arrived at Fort Fox, he gave me the tour, and the last thing he said was ‘Here, Captain, are the Moviolas,’ I said, ‘What is a Moviola?’ He looked at me rather suddenly and said, ‘You will learn.’ The average guy would have thrown me out.”27 For a gadget guru like Ted, the Moviola—an apparatus that permits a film editor to view the film while making manual cuts—was easy enough to grasp and master. But Capra was patient enough and smart enough to teach Geisel and his unit that there was more to filmmaking than just the mechanics; Geisel quickly learned that filmmaking was
storytelling—and it all began with the writing.

  Most of the visuals for the Why We Fight films and the Army-Navy Screen Magazine were compiled from stock footage—strafing airplanes, tanks rumbling across fields—as well as from the gripping war footage shot weekly by cameramen on the front lines. It was up to Capra’s writers to weave the gigantic and regular flow of materials into a coherent, dramatic, and accurate narrative. Because of the nature of the project, there were no true directors for each film, only overseers called project officers. Most films involved the project officer and one or two writers working together on a script, outlining the overall direction of the narrative while simultaneously writing the script for the dramatic voice-over narration. Geisel was learning how to sort through a glut of raw materials, look for the overall story line, then compress both the visuals and the story down into an intelligible script.

  Geisel was in awe of Capra’s ability to distill a script down to its essence. He would bring Capra his first draft of a script for a training film, then watch with near reverence as Capra slowly went through it with a pencil. “The first thing you have to do in writing is find out if you’re saying anything,” he told Geisel—and Capra would carefully go through Geisel’s script, underlining the places where he had advanced the story. “The rest . . . he left unlined,” remembered Geisel. Most of his first drafts would be returned to him with little or no underlining. But Capra “taught me conciseness,” said Geisel. “I learned a lot about the juxtaposition of words and visual images.”28 The tight storytelling discipline instilled by Capra would be formative in shaping Geisel’s future art.