After a year without a new Dr. Seuss book, Geisel would finally be back at the drawing board to prepare a book for release in 1978. His eyesight was mostly restored. To his relief, his color sense was as sharp as ever, though his line work could still be a little shaky and uncertain. While there were times he’d labored at his desk, doodling “hundreds of characters”74 in search of an idea, for this particular book, he knew exactly what he wanted to write about—the two things that were on his mind the most at the moment: literacy and eyesight.
The Beginner Book I Can Read with My Eyes Shut! would be a celebration of the joys of reading, with the Cat in the Hat and his son guiding the reader from the delight in picking out colors with one eye shut—inspired, no doubt, by Geisel’s real-life situation—and the thrill of reading long words like Mississippi and Hallelujah! to the excitement of learning how to do new things from reading books.
The more that you read,
The more things you will know.
The more that you learn,
The more places you’ll go.75
It was clear he was having fun again. “I write for myself, and for the pleasure of saying, ‘Audrey, don’t you think this is funny?’” Geisel told The Christian Science Monitor. That didn’t mean it wasn’t still hard work—“two sentences in a children’s book is the equivalent of two chapters in an adult book,” he said ruefully.76
Geisel had shortened his work hours slightly, spending six hours a day in the office instead of the usual eight. As always, the well-worn stuffed dog Theophrastus sat propped up near the desk, silently watching over Geisel as he sketched, then traced over the drawings in black ink and filled them in with colored pencil. His day could still be interrupted by phone calls—often Retan wanting to consult on Beginner Books—and Geisel would lean back in his chair, one foot against his desk, as he took the call, exhaling endless streams of cigarette smoke toward the ceiling “to ease the embarrassment of talking to someone,” he said sheepishly.77 As he shipped the final manuscript off to Random House—a parcel that included detailed instructions for the production department, with every color clearly labeled and numbered—he inserted one last page, this one dedicating the book to his hardworking ophthalmologist, “David Worthen, E.G.* (*Eye Guy).”
With I Can Read with My Eyes Shut! quickly blowing through its first printing, Geisel did the best he could to keep up with the countless requests for interviews and the frequent demands for his time and attention. Bob Bernstein, always looking for opportunities to put his favorite author in front of large and enthusiastic crowds, encouraged Geisel to accept an invitation to speak at the American Booksellers Association’s (ABA) annual meeting in Atlanta, where he would be sharing the bill with two fellow writers who were also big Dr. Seuss fans, Maurice Sendak and Judy Blume.
Ever since his successful “Uncle Terwilliger” speech at Lake Forest College, Geisel had wisely opted not to give lengthy prepared remarks, but rather to compose a few short, Seussian lines appropriate for the occasion. His speech before the ABA, then, would set the crowd roaring as he poetically explained:
As everyone present undoubtedly knows . . .
Due to a prenatal defect in my nose . . .
(Which seems to get worse the longer it grows)
I am completely incapable of speaking in prose. . .78
That same year would see him standing at a podium before a hometown audience at UCSD’s Revelle College, the campus’s academically rigorous liberal arts college. For the occasion, Geisel composed what he called a “Small Epic Poem (Size 2¾ B),” which mostly made fun of the fact that he had traveled less than five miles to be there for the lofty occasion:
I’ve been brought here this morning
At the enormous expense
Of precisely one dollar and fifty-five cents
—plus 19 cents more if you add on the tip
To the driver who drove on this hazardous trip . . . 79
But it was the final quatrain that brought the 360 graduates to their feet:
I wish you good luck
And a hasta luego
From U.C. La Jolla
. . . I mean San Diego.
Dr. Seuss was seemingly everywhere that autumn—it didn’t hurt that a lengthy profile written for The Christian Science Monitor had been reprinted in countless newspapers throughout the year—and Geisel found himself applauded by crowds as he entered a room. In Detroit, he served as the grand marshal for the city’s Thanksgiving Day parade. He won an Emmy for Halloween Is Grinch Night—another of his collaborations with DePatie-Freleng—and scarcely seemed to mind that his name had been mispronounced as Geezul. Jed Mattes, who had taken over as his agent after the death of Phyllis Jackson, thought Ted was slightly embarrassed by all the fuss. “He had a lot of distrust and wariness in any efforts to make him an icon,” said Mattes.80
But really, it was out of his hands at this point. Over the objections of Theodor Seuss Geisel, Dr. Seuss was becoming an icon.
CHAPTER 16
A FEW YEARS LONGER
1979–1984
On March 2, 1979, Ted Geisel turned seventy-five years old.
In La Jolla, he was feted with an early birthday celebration thrown by forty friends who presented him with a pair of handmade Cat in the Hat cuff links made of pure gold. Geisel dashed off his thank-you notes, then headed for Las Vegas to celebrate with Audrey, figuring “nobody will look for a children’s book author in Las Vegas.”1 Random House, noting that it had now sold more than eighty million Dr. Seuss books, marked the occasion by declaring May 1979 to be Dr. Seuss Month, which only made sales of Dr. Seuss books spike again.
The benchmark birthday would also be marked by a lengthy and widely circulated interview with Washington Post writer Cynthia Gorney. For the first time, Geisel eschewed his usual pat answers for a more thoughtful conversation about writing for children (“a child can understand anything that is read to him if the writer takes care to state it clearly and simply enough”) and what he saw as the everyday absurdities in growing older. “It’s getting awful, because I meet old, old people, who can scarcely walk, and they say, ‘I was brought up on your books,’” said Geisel. “It’s an awful shock.”2 For the first time, too, he was careful not to be photographed while smoking.
Random House president Bob Bernstein, always working a good marketing angle, again tried to persuade the enigmatic Geisel to consider writing his memoirs. Now several years removed from the Edward Connery Lathem interviews, Geisel was interested enough in the idea again to begin working what he called his “Non-Autobiography,” which he wrote out as a long interview with himself. But once again, he would get no further than a small stack of handwritten pages before abandoning the idea of a memoir.
Birthday wishes poured into Random House from all around the world, some enclosing handmade toys and sculptures, homemade versions of oobleck, even a wrapped package of green eggs and ham. Most were answered with one of three different form letters, two of which were signed by Dr. Seuss, the other by the Cat in the Hat, who also received his fair share of mail.3 Some of the more thoughtful letters were passed on to La Jolla to be personally answered by Geisel, who would respond with genuine warmth. One aspiring young author excitedly told Dr. Seuss he’d waited in line for his autograph twice, and eagerly asked if there was a “strategy” for writing books for children. “Always remember when you’re writing that you’re not writing for kids—you’re writing for people,” Geisel advised, then added cheerily, “I’d never stand in line to get MY autograph twice. But I’m very flattered that YOU did so. And I’ll stand in line for you when you write that book of yours.”4
Fans also still made their way to the Tower on a daily basis, mostly children who learned that Dr. Seuss lived at the house at the top of Mount Soledad and just wanted to say hello or happy birthday. Audrey did her best to keep unwanted callers away from Ted, patiently speaking with
them at the front door and gently letting young visitors know that Dr. Seuss was either away or too busy to come see them personally. Most left happy, though one persistent young man asked if he could use the bathroom and then waited for Dr. Seuss to show up.5 Ted was so touched by the outpouring of interest in and love for Dr. Seuss on his seventy-fifth birthday that he assured Audrey that he intended “to stay alive a few years longer.”6
Even at seventy-five, Geisel seemed determined to work as hard as he could, telling one journalist that he tried to have “a couple of books” and an animated television special in the works at all times. “When I hit a snag on one,” he explained, “I go on to another.”7 At the moment, he was preparing for publication in autumn the Beginner Book of “terrible tongue twisters,” Oh Say Can You Say? “I had to do a book to use the title,” confessed Geisel,8 but he was pleased with the tongue twisters he’d written, which he thought were even harder than those he’d composed for Fox in Socks fifteen years earlier. “I suddenly came to the conclusion that we were making it too easy for kids,” he said. The tongue twisters in Oh Say Can You Say? were meant for families to read aloud in what he called “competitive reading.”9 He was particularly proud of one he titled “Merry Christmas Mush”:
One year we had a Christmas brunch
With Merry Christmas mush to munch.
But I don’t think you’d care for such,
We didn’t like to munch mush much.10
“[It] can’t be done after three martinis,” he said proudly. “It’s a two-martini tongue twister.”11
His eyes were finally recovering after multiple surgeries, so Geisel’s line work was steadier, though there would never again be the kind of variation in line thickness that had distinguished his earlier style. And now that he could better differentiate hues, he was again as picky as ever about colors, staring for hours at the Random House color chart to try to find the one that most closely matched the colored pencils he’d used on his original pages. He was usually disappointed—at one point he simply attached a note to a manuscript page and asked the Random House art department to come up with a “more parroty” green.12 Grace Clark, who oversaw the art department for children’s books at the time, always knew the latest Dr. Seuss book would be a challenge. “His color sense is the most sophisticated I’ve ever run into,” said Clark,13 even as she proudly noted that her department had never let Dr. Seuss down. Geisel would dedicate Oh Say Can You Say? to his youngest stepdaughter, Leagrey, who he had dubbed “Lee Groo, the Enunciator” due to her ability to read his tongue twisters aloud perfectly—just as her mother had with Fox in Socks.
The only thing, really, that kept Geisel from his desk for any length of time in 1979 was Pontoffel Pock, Where Are You?, another original musical cartoon produced with DePatie-Freleng. As always, Geisel had whizzed back and forth between La Jolla and Los Angeles to consult with the animators on what turned out to be an interesting, if sometimes complicated, story in which a failed pickle packer is granted a magical piano to whisk him anywhere in the world. The cartoon debuted on CBS in May to decent critical acclaim but less-than-enthusiastic fan response—and even after repeated showings over the next few years, Pontoffel Pock would remain a novelty in the Dr. Seuss cartoon catalogue. “I knew it wasn’t a good title,”14 Ted mused, but he’d already moved on to his next project for DePatie-Freleng, a new story featuring two of his best-known characters. “I’m experimenting to see how The Cat in the Hat will play against the Grinch,” he mused to the Los Angeles Times. “I think it will.”15
* * *
• • • •
Geisel was still happiest working at his desk—and couldn’t imagine doing anything else. “People of my age are all retiring, which is something I would never want for myself,” Geisel told The Saturday Evening Post.16 But despite his drive and willpower and his continued busy schedule, he was slowing down. After publication of Oh Say Can You Say? in 1979, there wouldn’t be another Dr. Seuss book published for three years; and while he was still writing for Beginner Books, Oh Say Can You Say? would be the last in the imprint to feature his art. Geisel still believed in his studio time, but more and more now he could be found sitting on his sofa calmly reading through the latest biographies, histories, and crime novels—paperbacks, never hardcovers—going through them so quickly that there were times Audrey couldn’t replace them with new ones fast enough.
Under Audrey’s eye, the Tower had been in an almost constant state of renovation and redecoration for the last decade. Sizing up the Tower for an article in Architectural Digest, writer Sam Burchell called it “ever-evolving,” a description Audrey could only agree with.17 “It just grew, Seusslike,” she said of their maze of quirky rooms.18 In the living room was a fountain, while the dining room—the busiest room in the house—was lined with mirrors to make the room feel even more gigantic. Out by the swimming pool, petunias seemed perpetually in bloom.
While there was a sign at the Tower’s front door warning visitors to BEWARE OF THE CAT, there were actually no real cats in the Geisel household. Instead, there was a miniature Yorkshire terrier named Sam—short for Samantha, not Sam-I-Am—a dog so shaggy that guests often joked she looked the same at both ends. “I’ve been accused of having drawn [her],” said Ted.19 In the garage was another of Ted’s babies, a gray Cadillac Seville with a California license plate reading GRINCH—and to Ted’s shock, the plate had been unavailable the first time he’d applied for it, having been scooped up by a Dr. Seuss fan who had placed it on an RV. Eventually, the plate holder moved to Iowa, freeing up GRINCH for the Geisels—and the RV owner, mortified, wrote an apologetic note to Dr. Seuss for having held on to the plate for so long.20
For decades, Geisel had dreamed of staging a Broadway musical or ballet based on his works—he would casually mention it in nearly every interview—and had resisted entreaties from other playwrights who wanted to adapt his work to the stage. As far as Geisel was concerned, the only one who would be adapting Dr. Seuss for the stage would be Dr. Seuss himself. That would change, however, when Geisel was approached by the Children’s Theater Company of Minneapolis about a musical adaptation of The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. Geisel had been so impressed with the company’s 1977 production of The Little Match Girl that he had quickly agreed to let director John Clark Donahue take on Bartholomew Cubbins—but cautioned Donahue not to stray too far from the source material or to add any characters.
It was advice that Donahue’s handpicked scribe, John Lewin, promptly dismissed, turning in a rambling libretto with an unfamiliar introduction and several new characters. Geisel torpedoed Lewin’s script and asked Donahue to try again. This time Donahue brought in twenty-nine-year-old Timothy Mason to quickly write not only a new script, but also compose several songs. Instead of adding new characters, Mason simply fleshed out existing ones, giving more depth and backstory to minor characters like the Executioner to advance the plot. Donahue submitted Mason’s script to Geisel, then waited nervously for the other shoe to fall. It never happened. “Tell that Mason not to worry,” Geisel told Donahue. “It’s damn funny. Damn funny.”21 Ted was particularly effusive about Mason’s lyrics—always one of Geisel’s favorite parts of any production—and gave Mason his highest compliment: “You are writing very good Seuss.”22
Geisel was in the audience for the 8:00 P.M. preview performance at the Children’s Theater on April 17, 1980, and then again at the premiere the following evening. Backstage, as he signed autographs for the cast, Geisel was beaming. “I am more than happy,” he said, and judged the evening “very exciting.”23 Theater critics agreed, calling Cubbins “extraordinary” and “a fine effort by all concerned.”24 Bartholomew Cubbins would be the only stage adaptation of a Dr. Seuss book during Geisel’s lifetime; Mason, after his success with Cubbins, would write the songs for the 1994 musical How the Grinch Stole Christmas! After playing in Minneapolis and San Diego, it would make its debut on Broadway in 2006, where it
would play to sold-out crowds.
* * *
• • • •
Dr. Seuss continued to sell well into the millions of books each year. Teachers adored him, as he gave them books they could put into the hands of even the most stubborn readers. Parents revered him, giving them something they felt good about their children reading when they finally pried them away from the television. And kids? Kids were crazy for him. He gave them books of their very own that spoke directly to them, and not down to them. In newspaper and magazine pieces, Geisel was frequently referred to as “the good Dr. Seuss,” or “the beloved Dr. Seuss.” And yet for all the success and the adulation, there was still one thing Dr. Seuss didn’t have that Geisel truly wanted for him: critical acclaim.
While Ted liked to say publicly that awards didn’t matter, in truth, he longed to be recognized as an artist and as a major force in literature.25 To the layman, children’s books looked easy—pleasing pictures accompanying easily knocked-off rhyming verse. But Ted knew better. “It’s hard. I’m a bleeder and I sweat at it,” he confessed. “As I’ve said before: the ‘creative process’ consists for me of two things: time and sweat.”26 And yet while librarians loved Dr. Seuss, none of his books had received the prestigious Caldecott Award from the American Library Association (ALA)—though he’d come close twice—nor had he received its Newbery Medal, the highest award in children’s literature.
Charlotte Leonard, a librarian at the Dayton and Montgomery County library in Ohio, was determined to have her organization acknowledge the contributions of Dr. Seuss somehow—especially as there were some places in the country where his books were practically keeping local libraries in business. “Books by Dr. Seuss are replaced over and over again because they circulate so much,” Leonard wrote to the ALA. “Dr. Seuss is one name the children and parents know; he is a household word.”27 While there was some pushback inside the organization—one librarian said disparagingly that “many critics find his artwork too sadistic, his nonsense and fantasy too extreme”28—Leonard was convincing enough that the ALA finally announced it had selected Dr. Seuss to receive its Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, an award given every five years “for recognition of distinguished books published in the United States, which have over a period of years made a substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children.”29 It wasn’t the Newbery Award, but it was something—and Geisel was delighted to learn he’d received it.
Becoming Dr. Seuss Page 42
