Geisel was convinced he had a disaster on his hand—he was “discouraged,” he said diplomatically, by Kramer’s handling of the movie.32 When filming completed in April 1952, Ted and Helen immediately abandoned their Hollywood apartment and retreated to La Jolla, where Ted dove into work on Scrambled Eggs Super!, now woefully behind schedule. “Ted simply has to get his book done and get it to New York,” Helen wrote her niece. “It was due in January and if we don’t get it there early in June, it will be too late for the Christmas trade.”33
On Sunday, May 11, Ted drove north to Los Angeles to watch a first cut of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. at Stanley Kramer’s house. He spent most of the viewing with his head in his hands; the film, Ted thought, was too cynical, with no spontaneity or real dreamlike sense of fantasy. Even the normally upbeat Kramer was depressed. Geisel abandoned La Jolla and Scrambled Eggs Super! and returned to Hollywood to spend the next two weeks huddling with Kramer, writer Allan Scott, film editors Al Clark and Harry W. Gerstad, and other studio executives to see if the film could be recut. “Perhaps [Roy] Rowland was not the right director,” Kramer offered glumly. “The picture required a tougher man.”34
Geisel drove back to La Jolla in a dark mood. Arriving at the Tower in the early evening, Geisel stayed up all night, staring out the window into the darkness, fretting over Dr. T. and decisions that couldn’t be unmade. Partly, too, he was likely worried he’d be blamed for the film’s failure—and what that failure might mean for the career he was still hoping to have as a screenwriter. Helen found him still pacing his office in the morning, then handed him a sleeping pill and ordered him to bed. As Ted collapsed with exhaustion in La Jolla, Helen phoned Louise Bonino in New York and told her not to expect Scrambled Eggs Super! anytime soon. Several days later, Ted and Helen left for an extended vacation, with Scrambled Eggs Super! still untouched on Ted’s drawing table. Ted would deliver the book later in the summer, but not in time for the Christmas rush. There would be no new Dr. Seuss book in 1952.
Dr. Seuss would still make an appearance before the end of the year, however, in a remarkable piece written for The New York Times. Titled “. . . But for Grown-Ups Laughing Isn’t Any Fun,” it was the first time Dr. Seuss had ever spoken directly to his readers to explain not only what he did but, more important, why he did it. Touching on one of the themes he’d explored in his Utah lectures, Geisel first addressed the perceived stigma of writing for children. “Wherever a juvenile writer goes, he is constantly subjected to indignities,” Geisel wrote. If he isn’t being introduced at a party as the author of “the sweetest, dear, darlingest little whimsies for wee kiddies,” his peers are seating him in “the very end seat at the table” at professional gatherings.35 And yet Geisel informed his readers he was “writing for the so-called Brat Field by choice”36 and for a very good reason:
. . . there is something we get when we write for the young that we never can hope to get in writing for you ancients . . . Have you ever stopped to consider what has happened to your sense of humor?37
Adults, Geisel argued, had not only lost their sense of humor, but their sense of wonder and their giddy love of nonsense. Children, he maintained, “never let their laughs out on a string,”38 worrying about what their employers or neighbors or critics might think is funny. But for grown-ups, laughter had become “conditioned”—and here Geisel for the first time explicitly addressed the issue of laughter at the expense of others:
This conditioned laughter the grown-ups taught you depended entirely on their conditions. Financial conditions. Political conditions. Racial, religious and social conditions. You began to laugh at people your family feared or despised—people they felt inferior to, or people they felt better than . . .
In the same way, you were supposed to guffaw when someone told a story which proved that Swedes are stupid, Scots are tight, Englishmen are stuffy, and the Mexicans never wash . . .
Then you learned it was socially advantageous to laugh at Protestants and/or Catholics.39
“Your capacity for healthy, silly, friendly laughter was smothered,” Geisel said, admonishing adults everywhere. “You’d really grown up. You’d become adults . . . adults, which is a word that means obsolete children.”
Dr. Seuss had drawn a line in the sand, defending not just those who wrote for children, but the children themselves. Geisel had argued in his Mrs. Mulvaney lecture that quality children’s books were vital to creating smart young readers who would grow up to become smart adult readers. But here he didn’t seem to be arguing that catering to the condition-free laughter of children would translate into condition-free laughter from adults—though if that happened, said Geisel, one should consider oneself lucky.
For the first time, too, Geisel was reproaching adults for their tendency toward laughter at the expense of others—something he’d certainly been guilty of as well. Children, he argued, didn’t laugh at race or religion or ethnicity. Children’s laughter had no agenda. And so, Geisel was taking a side; if given a choice, he would take the pure, unconditional laughter of children over the stilted, conditional laughter of grown-ups.
In the end, Dr. Seuss wasn’t out to save adults; he was here on behalf of children, to help them have the best childhoods they possibly could, celebrating the age when “the one thing you did better than anything else was laugh.” Once children grew up, however, that laughter—whether conditioned or not—was someone else’s responsibility. “Adults are obsolete children,” Geisel would reiterate later, “and the hell with them.”40
* * *
• • • •
In early January 1953, Ted and Helen drove to Los Angeles to attend a preview showing of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. Producer Stanley Kramer still had high hopes for the movie, and had convinced Columbia to promote the film aggressively, beginning with a gigantic float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade,41 then churning out knickknacks like beanies with the distinctively Seussian yellow hand emerging from the top. Costars Peter Lind Hayes and Mary Healy were dispatched for a promotional junket, singing and dancing their way through ballrooms across the country. As the audience filed into the Los Angeles movie theater that evening, it seemed, for a moment, that 5,000 Fingers might have overcome the bickering, delays, and mass-vomiting that had plagued its production since almost day one.
Then the lights dimmed and The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T. began. It would be, as Ted said later, “the worst evening of my life.”42
After fifteen minutes, audience members began quietly walking out. Ted sank down into his seat next to Helen, mortified. “At the end, there were only five people left, besides Kramer and our staff,” Ted recalled. “It was a disaster. Careers were ruined.”43 It was “as bad as we anticipated,” sighed Helen, who could do little to console her husband except talk to him about taking a long vacation far away from everything. “I wish Japan were a little nearer and a little cheaper and we could go there and collect our yen, take hot baths, and begin life anew,” said Helen wistfully.44
The disastrous preview sent Kramer scrambling back to the editing room to try to salvage the film. Right away, nearly half of the twenty songs Geisel had written were eliminated—a decision that baffled costar Hans Conried, who argued that the movie “might have been an artistic triumph rather than a financial one” if “knowledgeable but inartistic heads of studio” hadn’t lost their nerve.45 Scenes were cut or moved around, while other sequences were entirely rewritten. The cast were called back to the studio for a week of reshooting, but Ted wanted no part of it. He washed his hands of the project entirely and went back home to La Jolla to try to make Helen’s dreams of a tour of Japan come true.
While Helen and Ted himself really needed a vacation, there were other reasons he had lately felt compelled to go to Japan. “My conscience got the better of me,” Ted admitted later. Perhaps slightly embarrassed by his racist PM cartoons and the blatant propaganda of his script for Design for Death, Ted may have
felt it was finally time for genuine empathy and understanding. He wanted to go to Japan to meet the people, experience the culture, and, perhaps most important to him, talk to Japanese children and their teachers face-to-face. Using his connections at Life magazine, Ted managed to finagle a most-expenses-paid trip to Japan, promising to deliver the magazine a piece on Japanese children in the country’s postwar American-influenced society—“how the Japanese child’s thinking had changed during the [American] occupation,” Ted explained.46
On Tuesday, March 24, Ted and Helen boarded the ship President Cleveland in Los Angeles for the ten-day cruise, bound for Tokyo. On their arrival in Japan, Ted was paired with Kyoto professor Mitsugi Nakamura, dean of Doshisha University in Kyoto, whom Dartmouth classmate Donald Bartlett, now a specialist with American intelligence, had recruited to serve as the Geisels’ translator and guide. For nearly three weeks, Ted was swept up by his Japanese publisher and bustled excitedly from one tourist attraction to another, gawking at temples, shaking hands, taking photos, and respectfully bowing to his hosts. The charming Mitsugi interpreted deftly, paying particular attention to syntax to accurately convey Ted’s often self-deprecating humor, which could sometimes baffle their literal-minded hosts. The festivities ended with a banquet in a geisha house, prompting Helen to remark that their tour was already “the craziest operation we’ve ever embarked on.”47
The Geisels toured schools in Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe, taking the time at each to talk with teachers and students one-on-one. Ted was immediately impressed “by a people trying to find a voice, and make it known.”48 In each elementary school, he asked students to draw pictures of what they wanted to be when they grew up, anxious to see how peace and American occupation had changed or influenced the answer to such a fundamental childhood question. “If we had given them this assignment ten years ago,” one teacher told Ted, “every boy in Japan would have drawn himself as a general.”49 Now, however, the children had different ambitions. “Social concern was the theme that came through,” said Ted.50 “I wish to work against war,” wrote one young man, “the thing I hate most,” while another charmingly boasted of ending hunger by inventing a machine “to make rice out of the air.” One nine-year-old told Ted he wanted to earn a degree and be president of a university, while another drew himself as an astronaut, shaking hands with the king of Mars. Countless others drew themselves as doctors, prompting Ted to wryly comment that if every child who wanted to be a doctor actually became one, there would be one doctor for every seventeen people in Japan.
As much as the responses from the boys fascinated him, Ted was even more encouraged by the drawings he received from girls. Less than a generation earlier, Japanese families made money by renting their daughters to geisha houses. Now Japanese women could vote—and, as Ted pointed out with a wry smile, they were beginning to use a “startling phrase . . . ‘my own.’”51 “I want to make my own money in a big office,” wrote one girl, drawing herself sitting at a typewriter, while another drew herself as the owner of a beauty shop, writing proudly, “I want to set up and own my own shop.” Another drew herself as a scientist, peering into a microscope, saying she had been inspired by Madame Curie. Ted loved it. “Most had visions of themselves working for a better world,” he said warmly.52
The Geisels returned to Los Angeles in early May on board the President Wilson (“we only travel on ships named for Democrats,” Helen joked), carrying nearly fifteen thousand children’s drawings bundled together in wicker trunks. Ted’s article, along with a selection of children’s drawings, would appear in Life magazine ten months later. Oddly, Ted accused publisher Henry Luce of turning his work into an anti-Japanese screed. “[He] raped the article,”53 Ted said bitterly, suggesting that the editors at Life had been directed to publish only drawings by “the few reactionary kids”54 or by children who had drawn themselves in traditional Japanese attire.
It was an odd charge; the piece contains few if any “reactionary” drawings. It mostly shows art by children who had chosen more progressive careers, including those by girls who wanted to run their own businesses and boys who wanted to be teachers or astronauts. One boy did draw himself wearing a traditional kimono, but he was drawing himself as a rich man, “who has money and time for joy”55—the stereotypical equivalent of an American millionaire lounging in a bathrobe or smoking jacket. But whether he was being overly sensitive or not, Ted was furious and vowed he’d never work for Life or for Luce again. He also felt he’d let down his Japanese hosts—a slight he was determined to remedy the best way he knew how.
* * *
• • • •
Ted and Helen returned from Japan just in time to find The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. sliding into and quickly out of movie theaters. After its calamitous January preview, the film had been recut and reconfigured before its final distribution, but Ted would always refuse to watch the recut version. The film had debuted in San Diego with Dr. Seuss’s name prominently on the marquee—he was a local, after all—but Ted had been in Japan for opening night and had politely excused himself from the local premiere by jokingly informing disappointed San Diegans he was off spending Japanese royalties.
It was probably for the best. Reviews ran the gamut from uninterested to disastrous. “Results are sometimes fascinating, more often fantastic,” wrote Variety, trying to see the glass as half full, though it admitted in the end that, “the material is such that it’s hard to keep the interest from lagging at times.”56 The much-feared Bosley Crowther at The New York Times was, perhaps predictably, unimpressed, complaining that Dr. T. showed “little or no inspiration or real imagination” and that it was a “ponderously literate affair, pictorially potential but devoid of sense or suspense.”57 Mary Healy and Peter Lind Hayes went on a charm offensive, gamely suggesting that the film had “passed the popcorn test,”58 but Geisel was having none of it. The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. was, he said later, the “down period” of his career, an experience so miserable that he would for years omit the film from his official biography. “I will have nothing more to say until all the participants have passed away,” he said, “including myself.”59
“[Ted] desperately wanted to be a success in films,” said Elin Vanderlip. “He was so triumphant about the idea of The 5,000 Fingers.”60 Idea was one thing; execution was another. “Hollywood is not suited for me, and I’m not suited for it,” Geisel said later.61 Hollywood wasn’t the easy camaraderie and seat-of-the-pants filmmaking of the Signal Corps, nor was it passing pages back and forth with Helen as they mutually rolled their eyes at the clueless antics of Sid Rogell and his cronies at RKO. Ted preferred working by himself, where the creative decisions were made by him and him alone, and not by a faceless committee or a sea of executives. The real problem with Hollywood, he groused, “is that all these people work on things, until even the author doesn’t know what’s his and what’s not.”62
And so Dr. Seuss was done with Hollywood—again. “I realized my métier was drawing fish,”63 said Ted. Late that summer, he set up a meeting with a relatively new professional colleague, Phyllis Jackson, a literary agent with the powerful Music Corporation of America (MCA). The Atlanta-born Jackson was smart and savvy, devoted to her clients, with an intuitive gauge for writers with unique voices. Besides Ted, Jackson represented Beat writer Jack Kerouac—she was presently circulating his manuscript for the novel On the Road64—and would, over the course of her career, represent a diverse slate of talented authors like Ian Fleming, E. L. Doctorow, and Studs Terkel. Jackson was valued by her clients for her no-holds-barred opinions and frank guidance—both of which, while harsh, were at least brutally honest.
Geisel settled into his seat across from Jackson and went into his prepared spiel. “It’s been seven years since I gave up being a soldier,” he told Jackson. “Now I’d like to give up movies and advertising and anything that means dueling with vice presidents and committees.”65 What he really wanted to do, he told her, was stay in La Jol
la and write children’s books full time—all he needed to earn, he assured Jackson, was $5,000 a year. But was such a career even possible?
Jackson considered for a moment, then gave a typically informed answer. After the war, GIs had returned home, gone to college on the GI Bill, gotten jobs, and were now starting families. There was something happening in America, she told him; there was a middle class blossoming in the suburbs, and they were all having kids—a baby boom, as it were. “The children’s market is building,” Jackson told Geisel, “and you have a reputation.”66 That was true enough; Dr. Seuss did have a reputation. But even after nine books, Geisel still wasn’t earning enough from them to make a living. What he really needed was a blockbuster—a book that sold hundreds of thousands of copies and was popular enough to send readers looking for his earlier work, which Cerf was determined to keep in print.
Geisel had been pinning his hopes on Scrambled Eggs Super!, which Random House published earlier that spring. Dedicated to the Childs family, whom Ted had swum with in the Great Salt Lake, Scrambled Eggs Super! is the story of Peter T. Hooper, who decides that regular hens’ eggs are too ordinary for his specialty dish, Scrambled Eggs Super-dee-Dooper-dee-Booper, Special de luxe à-la-Peter T. Hooper. In a narrative structure similar to If I Ran the Zoo, Peter describes scouring the world for eggs laid by increasingly exotic birds, like the Kwigger, the Stroodel, the Pelf, and the Mount Strookoo Cuckoo. Geisel had written his story in dense—perhaps too dense—pages of rhyming verse, with art highlighted by alternating pages of red/blue and red/yellow.
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