Becoming Dr. Seuss

by Brian Jay Jones

  The two young editors had very different relationships with Geisel. Of the two, Retan was the more reticent, recalling that he would quietly offer suggestions while “sort of holding my breath.” Geisel would usually bristle, then make exaggerated chomping noises on a cigarette before finally grumbling, “I was afraid you’d say that.”4 More often than not, however, he made Retan’s recommended change.

  Frith, however, could give as good as he got, trading jokes, keeping up with Geisel swig for swig as they drank from a bottle of vodka, or making a game of calling out the code numbers of the Random House color charts. When progress on a book bogged down, Geisel might suddenly say, “Time for a thinking cap!” and pull one his countless hats from the corner closet—“two grown men in stupid hats trying to come up with the right word for a book that had only fifty words in it at most,” said Frith.5

  The Beginner Books were Frith’s favorite to work on. While Geisel had grown to loathe the word list, Frith actually enjoyed the discipline of sticking to a restricted vocabulary. “The whole idea of Beginner Books was so unbelievably tightly designed and regulated, and every aspect of every word examined and reexamined a trillion times,” said Frith. “To me, it’s like writing a sonnet. A sonnet isn’t a sonnet unless there are that number of lines, that number of beats in that particular form. And that’s what makes it work.”6

  Eventually, Geisel came to trust Frith’s artistic instincts implicitly—at least when it came to the LeSieg books. For these, Frith would often storyboard each book, typing the text directly onto Ted’s mock-ups—“so I could see just where everything fell,” explained Frith, “and properly coordinate the words and pictures”7—before sending the book off to Geisel’s handpicked illustrator. “By the time I would hand a book over to a writer and/or illustrator, it was laid out right down to the last square inch of white space,” said Frith, “[showing] what goes where, where the text goes, exactly how the text would read.”8

  At one point, Frith even stepped in to illustrate a Beginner Book—one that the assigned writer had never delivered to Ted’s satisfaction (“an author failed us,” Geisel grumbled)9 so that Geisel was obligated to rescue the book by rewriting the entire manuscript in a single day. Rather than credit the story to LeSieg, however, Geisel wanted to create a unique nom de plume for his only collaborative effort with Frith, titled Because a Little Bug Went Ka-Choo! Frith suggested they name their pseudonymous author after Audrey, and Geisel mentioned that Audrey’s maiden name was Stone. Scarcely missing a beat, Frith dubbed their author Rosetta Stone. Highball glasses of vodka tonics were clinked together in celebration.

  Frith, too, appreciated Geisel’s fundamental respect for the intelligence of his readers. “Never for a second did anybody entertain the idea that we were talking down to anybody,” said Frith. “The kids were just as smart as we were. They just hadn’t been exposed to the world as much. And we had to do the very, very best we knew how to do.”10 Still, there were many times Geisel’s Beginner Books authors didn’t or couldn’t maintain the high standards he expected, severely testing his patience and forcing him to limit the imprint to four books a year so he could spend more time with each. “I know that I’m not going to get more than four good ones,” said Geisel. “I take my four authors and my four illustrators and push them and push them and push them.”11 As Frith notes, “we really had to beat up on them to get things kind of to the quality that you wanted.”12

  Still, there were some Beginner Books authors Geisel reliably returned to again and again. Apart from the dependable Berenstains, one of Geisel’s favorite illustrators—especially for LeSieg books—was fifty-year-old Roy McKie, who was not only a great artist but also fast. “[Roy] was never late for a deadline, always working all night, all weekend,” remembered his wife, June.13 A former commercial artist, McKie loved receiving the latest LeSieg scripts and didn’t mind if they had arrived already laid out with rough pencils. He liked the way Geisel thought about the relationship between text and image, and trusted Geisel without question.

  “I believed in him completely,” said McKie.14

  * * *

  • • • •

  The animated version of The Lorax premiered on CBS on Valentine’s Day 1972 to considerable buzz and decent reviews, but unimpressive ratings. “Have you an ax to grind?” snickered one critic. “Be careful when you try it on TV.”15 Still, it was artfully enough done that it would receive the Critics Award at the International Animated Cartoon Festival, and the Geisels and the Frelengs would travel together to Zagreb to proudly accept the award.

  The Lorax was a success, too, as a piece of propaganda. The Keep America Beautiful campaign would present Geisel with a special award for his environmental improvement efforts.16 A decade later, the United Nations would distribute the book in several languages to reinforce a conservation message globally, and the environmental group Global Tomorrow Coalition would seek permission to name its highest award after the Lorax—a request Geisel granted. (He wouldn’t always be so generous when he felt his message was being misconstrued or misappropriated. When Horton’s humanist mantra, “A person’s a person, no matter how small!” showed up on the letterhead of a pro-life organization, Geisel’s attorneys slapped the organization with a cease-and-desist order.)

  Most of the mail that flowed out of the Tower, however, was what Geisel called Cat Notes. Geisel had reams of stationery printed with a large image of the Cat in the Hat taking up the left-hand side of the page. Geisel would write notes in the blank space next to the Cat, sometimes drawing a word bubble coming from the Cat’s mouth in which he’d write a thank-you, other times filling the space with cartoons or funny observations, all handwritten in his distinctive print. Incoming mail was still sorted and managed by the Geisels’ secretary—and in 1973, the steadfast Julie Olfe stepped down and the position was passed to a young woman named Claudia Prescott, whom Ted would quickly come to adore. Prescott would be particularly adept at making up fanciful but believable excuses for Ted to use to decline the glut of invitations that flooded into the Tower every week. She was so good at this that Ted would dub her Claudia the Prevaricator.

  When Peggy’s teenage son Ted—whom Geisel had dedicated Grinch to in 1957—was put into a full body cast for nine months following spinal fusion surgery for scoliosis, Ted kept him entertained with a steady stream of drawings, cartoons, notes, and envelopes full of stamps, coins, and postcards. Bob Bernstein, too, was on the receiving end of endless Cat Notes; one of his favorites had come from Geisel after Bernstein mentioned that his young son asked how fertilizer companies got manure into bags. Geisel sent him a cartoon with a wide-eyed cow holding a canvas bag and asking a farmer skeptically, “In a bag???”17

  Even Audrey would receive Cat Notes and letters, especially around holidays like Valentine’s Day or their anniversary, where Ted would leave her love letters rather than have to express his feelings verbally. “He couldn’t say ‘I love you’—he was too private,” said Audrey, “—but he could write it.”18 For events like her birthday, St. Patrick’s Day, or Halloween, he would give her homemade cartoons, which, Audrey said, were “mature, sophisticated, not always entirely to my liking, but always howlingly funny.”19

  While Ted and Audrey’s relationship had fractured their La Jolla social group, over time they had settled into a new social circle, welcoming in politicians and friends like polio pioneer Jonas Salk and his wife, the artist Françoise Gilot, who had lived just down the hill for ages, and who would become one of Ted’s favorite confidants and beer-drinking buddies. Audrey would never be quite the hostess Helen had been—part of being a good hostess required knowing how to fade into the background, which was never Audrey’s particular forte. But she was trying. She collected cookbooks and hired her own housekeeper, and there would be regular dinner parties at the Tower again. Audrey’s strength as a hostess was her good taste and eye for details: the dinner table would be set with crystal and silver, th
e dining room chairs featured carved medallions with Seussian creatures on them, and the ceiling was covered with Schumacher damask. Under Audrey’s management, every party was an event, with personalized place cards, neatly folded napkins, unique appetizers, and after-dinner aperitifs.

  Ted wasn’t big on all the trappings, but he loved watching Audrey flit from guest to guest, laughing at everyone’s jokes and being very much the center of attention. Ted’s own stories at parties seemed to be getting longer, but he always seemed to stick the landing on a well-timed punch line. Ted often regarded himself as a wry observer of La Jolla society; indeed, among the large paintings in his studio was a series he had dubbed La Jolla Birdwomen, winkingly portraying some of La Jolla’s socialites as Seussian birds with garish plumage and gigantic feathered hats.

  Geisel would be a whirl of activity for the next few years—as Frith had noted, he seemed perpetually in motion—completing four Bright and Early Books and one Big Book, and overseeing two more animated specials between 1972 and 1974. It was no wonder there were times when Geisel couldn’t remember which age group he was writing for.

  “In those earlier and regular-sized books I’m writing for people; in the smaller-sized Beginner Books I’m still writing for people, but I go over them and simplify so that a kid has a chance to handle the vocabulary,” he said. “But basically, I’ve long since stopped worrying about what exact ages the books are for—I just put them out.”20

  Fortunately, the 1972 Bright and Early Book Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!—about a defiant little creature in footed pajamas who refuses to go to bed—had come to Geisel relatively quickly. The name had been borrowed from the local Cadillac dealer and had been inspired, at least in part, by guests who lingered a little too long at the Geisels’ Thursday-night dinner parties. And with an unapologetic use of words like broomstick and bureau, Geisel had clearly scuttled the approved vocabulary list for good.

  Marvin K. Mooney would pick up greater significance two years later, during the height of President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, when Geisel happened to run into the political humorist Art Buchwald during a visit to the San Diego Zoo. In July 1974, Buchwald sent Geisel a copy of his book I Never Danced at the White House, “along with a rather snide remark that I was incapable of writing anything political,” Geisel added.21 Rising to the challenge, Geisel picked up a copy of Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!, replaced every mention of Marvin K. Mooney with the name Richard M. Nixon, and shipped the book back to Buchwald.

  Buchwald loved it—and on July 30, 1974, in his syndicated column running in several hundred newspapers, Buchwald ran the entirety of Richard M. Nixon Will You Please Go Now! and encouraged his readers to “read it aloud,” especially as they reached the closing lines:

  Richard M. Nixon!

  Will you please GO NOW!

  I said GO and GO I meant . . .

  The time had come.

  SO . . .

  Richard WENT.22

  Nine days later, Nixon resigned. “My finest hour!” Geisel joked to a reporter, then added in mock innocence, “But of course children’s books writers are apolitical. They never smoke or drink, either.”23 (Meanwhile several cigarette butts smoldered in the ashtray.) Writing to Buchwald, however, Geisel took an enthusiastic victory lap. “We sure got him, didn’t we?” he said. “We should have collaborated sooner.”24

  One of Geisel’s more unusual Bright and Early Books, The Shape of Me and Other Stuff would appear in the summer of 1973. Inspired by photographs of Inuit stone-cut silhouettes of hunters and whales, Geisel created a book in which readers were encouraged to study and identify people, animals, and things by their silhouettes alone—a beautiful book that looked like no other in the Dr. Seuss oeuvre. More traditional, however, was Geisel’s other book from that year, the Big Book Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?, Geisel’s reminder that no matter how bad a day you might think you’re having, there’s always someone who has it worse than you do. He had struggled somewhat with the verse—Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? was perhaps his most densely written book since Scrambled Eggs Super!—and Audrey soon got used to watching him “jump up and start chain-smoking and walking around the house, all but tearing his hair out—and in the middle of the night yet,” she said. “He gets so impossible, I’ve pushed him in the pool.”25 Geisel would ultimately dedicate the book to one of the people in his life who constantly reminded him of how lucky he was: his agent, who he teasingly called “Phyllis the Jackson.”

  There would be two more Bright and Early Books in 1974, starting with A Great Day for Up!, a rarity in the Dr. Seuss catalog, in that it would be the only book featuring text credited to Dr. Seuss with illustrations by another artist, in this case the English cartoonist Quentin Blake.26 “He loved Quentin Blake’s stuff,” says Michael Frith, “which thrilled me, because of course I think Blake is such a genius.”27 Then in November came There’s a Wocket in My Pocket!, a rhyming book filled with some of Geisel’s most uproarious nonsense names (there was a zable on a table, and a nooth grush on a toothbrush). One particular creature took its name from a serendipitous typo on the part of secretary Claudia Prescott, who couldn’t read Geisel’s writing on his handwritten manuscript and transcribed a U as a V, turning an Uug under the rug into a Vug. Geisel liked it better and left it in the final manuscript.

  A Great Day for Up! and There’s a Wocket in My Pocket! marked a major turning point for Geisel in that after their publication he decided to significantly scale back the amount of time he spent overseeing Beginner Books. Not that he would be stepping down, but he had decided to cede to Walter Retan much more editorial control over the two imprints. Retan frankly thought the decision was overdue. “Ted really should have allowed someone else to do more editing earlier,” said Retan. “He didn’t mean to, but he almost choked off that series.”28 Meanwhile, Michael Frith had also decided that A Great Day for Up! would be his last book with Geisel, and had announced his departure from Random House to accept a position working as creative director for Muppet creator Jim Henson.

  Geisel had no regrets about his decision. Overseeing the two imprints had finally become too exhausting, with too many authors needing to be hounded, too many manuscripts needing to be reworked. Partly, too, his fatigue had to do with age. In 1974, Geisel would turn seventy years old. While he was in good health—he really did look like a man ten years younger—decades of eyestrain were taking their toll, as would become all too obvious during Ted’s seventieth birthday celebration in Las Vegas. One evening as Ted and his friend Duke Johnston lounged at the Hilton Hotel, a fleet of scantily clad women came roaring past them on Harley-Davidson motorcycles. When an amused Johnston asked Geisel what he thought of the women, Geisel was confused; he’d been able to see only the motorcycles. “I realized I was getting blind,” he said flatly.29

  For the moment, the deterioration in his vision primarily affected his ability to distinguish colors, though Geisel knew the Random House art department’s color charts well enough to remember exactly which colors to assign to his art as he completed his first Beginner Book in five years, Oh, the Thinks You Can Think! Geisel was trying to do something a bit different with the book, calling it a “cabbages-and-kings job, in which I decided I would like to shock the child: lead him a certain way, get him into a plot, and then take it away from him on the next page and move him to another land or another completely different set of ideas.”30 Unfortunately, the book felt like a structureless unveiling of Seussian names and creatures—though it does contain what is likely one of Geisel’s most frightening images, the mysterious, shadowy Jibboo, waving from the end of a dark street—and the Southern Literary Journal sadly dismissed the book as “mediocre.” The New York Times Book Review gently agreed with the Journal’s assessment but was always willing to give Dr. Seuss the benefit of the doubt, suggesting he still deserved a Nobel Prize. “Think of the influence he has had on the huma
n race!” gushed the Times. “And all of it good!”31

  While eye surgery had eventually reset Geisel’s color sense—Audrey recalled him riding in the car on the way home from the hospital, raving about how brightly colored everything now appeared—things suddenly became more serious in early 1975, when Ted casually mentioned to Audrey that he was having a hard time focusing on his pen lines—“everything is squiggly,” he told her, indicating a sure sign of glaucoma.32 Ted immediately began seeing eye doctor David Worthen at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, the beginning of three long years of surgeries to treat glaucoma and remove cataracts that had developed in both eyes.

  As Ted lay in a hospital bed in June 1975, recovering from one of his first surgeries, Audrey suggested he grow a beard, insisting that his face would simply look better with one. “His head was mine. I created the beard,” Audrey explained later. “He had a nose that was looking for that beard all his life.”33 Ted shrugged and agreed, joking that growing a beard seemed to be the only thing he was permitted to do in the confined boredom of his hospital room. Geisel would leave the hospital with his beard coming in gray. It would be a defining feature for the rest of his life.

  That same month, the Geisels made the trip to Hanover to attend the fiftieth anniversary of Ted’s graduation from Dartmouth. Ted refused to make any speeches or have any fuss made about his attendance; he was there to stand with the men of the Class of ’25, nothing more. And yet it was hard for his alma mater and his classmates not to show their excitement. There was an exhibition of his art on display at the Dartmouth Library, and during a breakfast with his old friend Donald Bartlett, the retired professor became so worked up he accidentally ordered a martini with his breakfast. Ted could only encourage his old friend to drink up.

  During Geisel’s stay in Hanover, the dean of libraries, Edward Connery Lathem, convinced Ted to sit for a lengthy recorded interview, hoping Geisel might be inspired by the recordings to begin writing his memoirs. But Geisel blanched at the very idea of it; he insisted he was far too busy to write about himself. With Geisel’s permission, Lathem would use their interviews as the basis for a profile of Dr. Seuss in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine—but while Geisel liked the piece, he still refused to be persuaded by Lathem’s further entreaties for a memoir. “[My story] would become a source of irritation to the reader in a 200-page volume,” Geisel moaned. “Who could possibly care about all these details?”34