Becoming Dr. Seuss

by Brian Jay Jones

  In September 1969, Geisel published My Book About Me—with words by Dr. Seuss and art by Roy McKie—a different kind of Beginner Book in which young readers were encouraged to write and draw directly on the pages as they filled in their name and address, counted the number of forks in their home, collected autographs from a policeman, and answered yes-or-no questions about their hobbies. Geisel liked the format so much he would use it again a year later for I Can Draw It Myself, encouraging young artists to draw stars on the bellies of Sneetches and horns on the heads of goats. Ted proudly called the books “a revolt against coloring books.”42

  As My Book About Me went to press, Ted and Audrey flew to Hawaii for the first stop on a planned seven-week trip around the world—their first long trip as a married couple. Typically, Ted spent much of his travel time kicking around ideas for a book; this time he was considering a Dr. Seuss travel guide and could be found writing and drawing silly comments on menus, in the pages of his guidebook, even on his visa. Visiting the temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, for instance, Ted was suddenly inspired to describe “rice-stuffed-rice,” while the busy shopfronts of the streets of Tehran moved him to write a Seussian observation on his hotel stationery: “All barber chairs in Sleefa face in the direction of Sloofa, birthplace of Ali Hoofa, patron saint of the scissors.” As the Geisels made their way around Paris in October, Ted used stationery from the Ritz to scrawl a bit of political commentary. “It is absolutely forbidden to give gratuities to kings,” he wrote. “All other people, animals, or inanimate objects may be tipped, or else.”43 By the time the Geisels wrapped up their trip at Brown’s Hotel in the Mayfair district of London, Ted had compiled a sheaf of notes, sketches, and observations . . . all of which would go into the bone pile when he returned to the Tower in La Jolla in November, filed away as unusable.

  The bone pile could still be a source of inspiration, though Geisel had come to dread the inevitable question, Where do you get your ideas?—to his disappointment, it would be the first question Jacqueline Onassis would ask when he met her in 1971. Over the years, Geisel would have a number of prepared answers ready for just such a scenario; lately his favorite was “I get them in a little town near Zybliknov, where I spend an occasional weekend.”44 But there were times when ideas did come in from explainable though unexpected places. Such was the case with what would be one of Geisel’s most quoted—and most controversial—Dr. Seuss books, the ecologically minded The Lorax.

  The Lorax was written in anger—“one of the few things I ever set out to do that was straight propaganda,”45 he said later—spawned as Geisel stood at the windows of his studio looking out at the San Diego coastline, where residential development and cookie-cutter condominiums were slowly encroaching on the pristine hillsides. “Everything God took years to put there, they are tearing down in a week-and-a-half,” he said later.46 Geisel wasn’t the only one concerned; environmental activism was on the rise in the United States, especially in Southern California. In early 1969, an oil well just off the coast of Santa Barbara had blown out, killing countless dolphins, sea lions, fish, and waterfowl and staining the picturesque coastline. A year later, in April 1970, the United States would formally celebrate its first Earth Day, marking a new commitment to and support for environmental policies. Geisel, too, was determined to say something about saving the environment—but it was harder than he thought, especially if he didn’t want it to turn into “a preachment.”47 “The ecology books I’d read were dull,” he said later. “But I couldn’t get started on [The Lorax]—I had notes, but I was stuck on it for nine months.”48

  Struggling with writer’s block and out of ideas, Ted took Audrey for a safari trip in Kenya in 1970, hoping to clear his head. For the Geisels, their safari consisted mostly of swimming, reading, and drinking at the Mount Kenya Safari Club—but it ended up being inspiration enough. “I hadn’t thought of the Lorax for three weeks,” Ted said later.49 “Then I happened to be in Kenya at a swimming pool, and I was watching a herd of elephants cross a hill. Why that released me, I don’t know—but all of a sudden, all my notes assembled mentally.”50 The only paper within reach was a small notepad, and Ted spent the next ninety minutes filling page after page with the Lorax’s story. “[I] wrote the whole book that afternoon on a laundry pad,” he explained later, still slightly amazed.51 “I’ve looked at elephants ever since, but it has never happened again.”52

  Back in La Jolla several weeks later, Geisel was clear enough on the story, but was now struggling with the look of the main character. At first he sketched the Lorax as a small gopher-like creature, but soon discarded that design and started over again. In another version, he was mechanized, like a robot. “That didn’t work,” said Geisel flatly. “He was big at one point. I did the obvious thing of making him green, shrinking him, growing him.” Finally he arrived at a squat orange creature, with sleepy eyes and a drooping mustache. That was it. “I looked at him, and he looked like a Lorax,” said Geisel.53

  Nearly five decades later, anthropologists at Dartmouth would claim they had discovered in Africa Geisel’s inspiration for the design of the Lorax. By scanning photos of African monkeys and the Lorax into a facial recognition program, they determined the Lorax most closely resembled the glowering, orange-faced patas monkey. Geisel would likely have dismissed such a suggestion; he had drawn the Lorax the way he had “because that’s what he was.”54 And while some saw in the Lorax’s beloved Truffula Trees the foreign greenery of the plains of the Serengeti, La Jolla residents were fairly certain they resembled the wind-blown trees on the hills surrounding the Tower.

  Audrey, too, would be involved in the overall look of The Lorax, advising her husband on the book’s color palette, encouraging him to bring in more colors “women can relate to,” such as purple, mauve, and “evening shades,” as opposed to Ted’s usual bold colors. “Before that, I’d just popped in a color here, suggested one there,” said Audrey. “The Lorax was my first sustained effort.”55

  The Lorax is one of Geisel’s most beautiful and complex narratives, with a rapidly moving plot told mostly in dramatic flashback. An unnamed young boy, standing in for the reader, walks through a polluted landscape to the Street of the Lifted Lorax and entreats the world-weary Once-ler—who is never fully seen—to tell the story of the long-departed Lorax. The Once-ler explains how he had come to the region when it was pristine and perfect, and began cutting down the beautiful Truffula Trees to use their tufts to manufacture Thneeds. At once, the Lorax had appeared to speak for the trees—“for the trees have no tongues”—and to explain to the Once-ler that the loss of any Truffula Trees also meant the fuzzy Bar-ba-loots had fewer Truffula fruits to eat and less shade in which to play. For their own good, then, the Lorax had sent the Bar-ba-loots away. But with an eye on future profits, the Once-ler shrugged off the warnings of the Lorax, and continued cutting down more and more trees and building larger and larger factories in which to manufacture Thneeds.

  Eventually the Lorax informed the Once-ler that the air and the water had become so polluted by the Thneed factories that he had sent away the Swomee-Swans and the Humming-Fish as well. But the Once-ler had lost his patience with the Lorax, and screamed at him for harping about responsibility to the ecosystem:

  Well, I have my rights, sir, and I’m telling you

  I intend to go on doing just what I do!

  At that moment, the Once-ler’s company chopped down the very last Truffula Tree, exhausting all the natural resources of the region. Lacking trees to manufacture Thneeds, the factories closed, all the Once-ler’s employees departed, and the Lorax disappeared forever through a hole in the smog, leaving behind a small pile of rocks engraved with one word: UNLESS. And at this moment, Geisel jolts the narrative back the present to leave the reader with the underlying message of The Lorax, in what would become one of Dr. Seuss’s most-quoted quatrains:

  “UNLESS someone like you

  cares a whole awful lot,
>
  nothing is going to get better.

  It’s not.”

  At this, the regretful Once-ler throws down the last remaining Truffula seed and encourages his young listener—and the reader—to take better care of the trees in the future:

  “Grow a forest. Protect it from axes that hack.

  Then the Lorax

  and all of his friends

  may come back.”

  Typically, Geisel had fretted over his ending, finally deciding that his readers deserved an upbeat, if enigmatic, ending. “A child identifies with the hero, and it is a personal tragedy to him when things don’t come out all right,” he said.56

  * * *

  • • • •

  Even as Geisel was finishing up the tale of the Lorax, he was commuting regularly to Los Angeles to consult with animators David DePatie and Friz Freleng, who had finally convinced Ted—after his two animated specials with Chuck Jones at the now-defunct MGM animation studio—to give DePatie-Freleng Enterprises a chance to bring Dr. Seuss’s creations to the television screen. Geisel hadn’t agreed without a bit of grumbling, however. “First I have to pick one of my books to be animated, and there’s always a long discussion about that,” he groused. “Then I have to revise my characters—for some reason, in animation, the rounder the figure the better.”57

  The first book DePatie-Freleng would adapt was the one they’d wanted to get their hands on all along: The Cat in the Hat. Despite his public moaning, Geisel had been delighted to work on the project—he was always happy to write song lyrics—and DePatie recalled the working relationship with Geisel as both productive and pleasant. “He was a very hands-on guy,” said DePatie. “He lived down in La Jolla and he would fly over here. During the course of the production it wasn’t unusual to see him once a week. He was very instrumental in the creation of the series. Friz [Freleng] and I had a very good rapport with him.”58 The singer/satirist Allan Sherman, tapped to provide the Cat’s voice, also loved working with Geisel, in whom he found a kindred spirit who delighted in wordplay. “Dr. Seuss and I are both crazy about words,” said Sherman. “There we were in the studio . . . two grown men, debating whether one of [the Cat’s] words should be poo-poodler or poobledly-poobler.”59

  The animated version of The Cat in the Hat aired on CBS on March 5, 1971, right at the time The Lorax was going into production at Random House. There had been a moment of panic in the weeks leading up to its showing when a major earthquake rocked the San Fernando Valley at the very time the only print of the animated special was being processed in a Los Angeles photo laboratory. “All morning I kept calling out there and I couldn’t reach anybody,” said Geisel. “I didn’t know what had happened to it.”60 Fortunately, the print had already left the lab and was on its way to the network.

  Written by Geisel, The Cat in the Hat cartoon expanded on the plot of the book—he would even reveal the name of the scolding goldfish as Karlos K. Krinklebine—and contained a number of clever songs, including one featuring the words cat and hat in various foreign languages. Warmly reviewed by critics, the special would be rebroadcast regularly over the next two decades, and would cement the relationship between Geisel and DePatie-Freleng, who would work together on six more Dr. Seuss specials over the next nine years. And they’d already decided on which Dr. Seuss book they would adapt next: The Lorax, still six months from publication, but which was already being anticipated as a very different kind of Dr. Seuss book.

  As advance copies of The Lorax circulated—and word spread that Dr. Seuss had taken on an ecological agenda—Geisel was trying warily to manage expectations. “It well may be an adult book,” he said guardedly. “The children will let us know. But maybe the way to get the message to the parents is through a children’s book.”61 An advance copy had also made its way into the hands of former president Lyndon B. Johnson, who thought the book’s message was consistent with the conservation initiatives he and the First Lady had pursued during his administration. “I know my grandchildren will enjoy [The Lorax],” Johnson wrote to Geisel, “but not more than we will.”62 Inspired, Lady Bird Johnson had written to express her admiration for the book and asked Geisel if he would consider donating the original manuscript of The Lorax to the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library. Geisel agreed and made the trip to Austin for the official opening of the library on May 22, 1971. While Dr. Seuss was one among three thousand invited guests in Austin that afternoon, the former president made a point of writing to Geisel to assure him that had anyone taken a popularity poll in Austin that weekend, “you would have won it hands down.”63

  The Lorax arrived in bookstores in late September of 1971—and Geisel tried to head off any controversy by sitting patiently for one interview after another, answering the same old questions (“Where do you get your ideas?”) and giving the same old answers. Geisel still looked good at age sixty-seven, though the bags under his eyes were deeper now, and his hair had gone from black streaked with silver to silver streaked with black. The bow tie was still there, too, but, reflecting Audrey’s influence, it was now likely in a bolder pattern or an offbeat color. As he stubbed out cigarettes in an ashtray, Geisel admitted that he worried the pro-environment stance of The Lorax might cost him some readers. “It insinuates that there might be something wrong with Big Business,” he said.64

  The backlash Geisel anticipated never really happened—or at least not to the degree he initially feared. While some reviewers were put off by even the very idea of a Dr. Seuss book with an explicit agenda—conveniently forgetting the obvious messaging in Yertle the Turtle or The Sneetches—most were content to simply acknowledge that the book had an ecological slant and then move on. Some communities actively embraced its conservation message—a reviewer in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, saw her own community reflected in the Lorax’s story, as the “last bastion of beauty that has not been ruined by pollution”65—while others savaged what they perceived as purely an anti-logging agenda. The book would be removed from shelves in at least one logging community—“Our kids are being brainwashed!” complained one critic66—and would find itself on several banned books lists over the years. Geisel was sympathetic, at least to a point, but encouraged critics to read the book carefully. “The Lorax doesn’t say lumbering is immoral,” he pointed out later. “I live in a house made of wood and write books printed on paper. It’s a book about going easy on what we’ve got. It’s anti-pollution, anti-greed.”67

  Over time, Geisel would come to regard The Lorax as his personal favorite of all his books. “In The Lorax, I was out to attack what I think are evil things and let the chips fall where they might,” he said later.68 “But it was not a great seller. And I knew it wouldn’t be.”69 Still, he was confident that its message had been received and that he had made a difference; indeed, the book would gain traction and sell more and more strongly over time—especially as new readers came to understand and appreciate its underlying ideas.

  “I’m naive enough to believe that society will be changed by examination of ideas through books and the press,” Geisel said, “and that information can prove to be greater than the dissemination of stupidity.”70

  CHAPTER 15

  YOU’LL MISS THE BEST THINGS IF YOU KEEP YOUR EYES SHUT

  1971–1978

  Ted rarely visited Random House anymore. Partly, some of the magic was gone; in 1969, the rapidly growing company—now a corporation—had abandoned the old school elegance of its headquarters at the Villard Mansion to take over fourteen floors of a forty-story Manhattan skyscraper at Third Avenue and 50th Street. “Of course we all hate to leave,” said Phyllis Cerf, but admitted to The New York Times that she was looking forward to leaving the quirky offices of Step-Up Books under the eaves of the Villard Mansion attic, and moving into a place where they could “stand up without bumping our heads.”1

  Worse, Bennett Cerf was gone, too. On August 27, 1971, the rakish raconteur, who had done perhaps mo
re than anyone to bring the world the brilliance of Dr. Seuss, died in his sleep at his Mount Kisco house. He was only seventy-three. Cerf’s funeral service, in the chapel of his beloved alma mater, Columbia University, was, appropriately, the social event of the season, with luminaries like Frank Sinatra, Truman Capote, Ginger Rogers, and Philip Roth in attendance. Geisel had been unable to attend the service2—fortunately, he’d spoken with Cerf on the telephone as the publisher lay in a hospital room several weeks earlier—but he surely smiled in agreement as he read the eulogy by What’s My Line? host John Daly, who called Cerf “a glorious amalgam of pragmatist and leprechaun.”3

  This all made Geisel less inclined to deliver his books in person and read them aloud in the Random House offices; from here on, he would do so only intermittently. He was also less motivated to do Beginner Books business in the new but charmless Random House headquarters. So, more often than not, the mountain would be brought to Muhammad, with Michael Frith or Walter Retan making regular trips from New York to La Jolla to discuss any of Geisel’s latest books—whether it was a Beginner Book, a Bright and Early Book, or one of his own Big Books. Here in sunny La Jolla, the young men would take up temporary residence in the new guest wing at the Tower, and Audrey took great delight in awakening her guests each morning by loudly whistling “Reveille” over the Tower’s intercom system.