Geisel—wearing an patch over one eye following yet another surgery—traveled to New York with Audrey in late June of 1980 to pick up the award. True to form, he’d prepared a bit of rhyming verse for his acceptance speech, giving a generous tip of the hat to Miss Bodanker, his boyhood librarian in Springfield, as well as to Mr. Strathmore, the supplier of “the paper that I ink up,” and to Mr. Smirnoff, who “furnishes the vodka that occasionally I drink up.”30 Ted concluded his speech to enthusiastic applause. The Laura Ingalls Wilder Award would be the only award he would ever receive from the ALA.
Dartmouth College, however, would continue to honor its favorite son. In 1981, student organizers of the Winter Carnival overwhelmingly supported adopting “Hanover Hears a Who” as the theme for that year’s winter celebration. The campus green would be filled with gigantic snow sculptures of Dr. Seuss characters, including a two-story Cat in the Hat. Geisel was unable to attend but sent along his thanks. “I’m very flattered. And delighted,” he told the Dartmouth Review. “I feel very honored and wish that I could be up there with them and cavort with them in the snow.”31
That winter, Geisel was still working slowly on his first Big Book in nearly a decade, Hunches in Bunches. “It is a psychological study of what goes on in a kid’s head when he can’t make up his mind,” Geisel said. “He follows many hunches at once.” And so, Geisel had drawn his interpretation of what different kinds of “literal Hunches” might look like, sketching a Real Tough Hunch on roller skates or a Sour Hunch in a striped costume, all in vibrant colors and traipsing across some of Geisel’s most twisted, Seussian landscapes. “It’s more modern in treatment and illustration,” Geisel explained.32
Geisel’s work habits hadn’t changed much, with one exception: he had stopped smoking—or at least he was trying. Concerned for her husband’s health, Audrey had encouraged Ted to give up his cigarettes—a promise, it seemed, he could keep for only a day or so at a time; while he vowed to Audrey that he had quit, she soon caught him sneaking outside to smoke in the evenings. And so Audrey had taken to hiding his cigarettes, or rationing them out to him one at a time so she could keep track of how much he was smoking. But it was hard for Ted. His addiction was part of his creative process; when stuck on a manuscript, he found his hands fumbling for cigarettes that were no longer there. His solution was to circumvent Audrey entirely, asking his assistant to pick up a pack or two on her way to the Tower each afternoon. Audrey eventually figured out that bit of subterfuge and put a stop to it.
It seemed the more Audrey thwarted Ted’s efforts, the more determined he was to keep smoking, coming up with one ridiculous plan after another for sneaking cigarettes. Audrey once caught him strolling too casually through a restaurant, picking up and pocketing discarded or half-smoked butts. When she admonished him, Ted went to Plan B, asking friends to leave cigarettes in his car. For a while he had even gone back to his old trick of putting radish seeds in a pipe and watering them when he wanted a cigarette, but the urge to smoke would eventually become too strong, and he’d start begging friends to smuggle cigarettes into the Tower. When Duke Johnston refused to do so, Ted was visibly upset. “I thought you were my friend,” he sulked. “That’s the point,” Johnston shot back. “I am.”33 Still, Ted sometimes felt as if Audrey and their friends were ganging up on him. At one of the Geisels’ large dinner parties in September, Audrey had NO SMOKING printed on small cards, to be put in front of each place setting. Ted set his on fire.
Ted awoke the morning after the dinner party complaining of heartburn—and then again the following day. Audrey decided to have him examined by a doctor, who discovered that Ted had suffered a very minor heart attack. His directive to Geisel: no more coffee—and no more smoking. Ted’s agent, Jed Mattes, often remarked that Audrey had kept Geisel “alive and lively.”34 That was probably true—and when it came to breaking his smoking habit, she may have literally saved his life.
Geisel completed work on Hunches in Bunches in early 1982 and made the trip to New York to deliver and read the manuscript to Random House in person—an increasingly rare occurrence since Random House’s 1969 relocation—and where the editorial musical chairs continued. Walter Retan was out as editor in chief for juvenile books, replaced by the level-headed Janet Schulman, while the art department had been put in the hands of a talented new art director, thirty-year-old Cathy Goldsmith. The first time Goldsmith met Geisel, she could barely speak. “[Dr. Seuss] wasn’t God to me, but he was close,” said Goldsmith. “I had no idea what to call him. You couldn’t call him Dr. Seuss, and I didn’t hear anybody refer to him as Mr. Geisel. You didn’t call your parents’ friend by a first name, and certainly no one as important and famous as he was.” Geisel, towering over the barely five foot Goldsmith and sensing her shyness, leaned over her and said quietly, “If you don’t call me Ted, I’m going to call you Little You!”35 Geisel ended up having a genuine affection for Goldsmith—never more evident than when he handed over Hunches in Bunches for her to read aloud so he could watch the reaction in the room.
On its publication in the fall of 1982, Hunches in Bunches suffered through some mixed reviews. “The rhythm [of the rhyme] . . . is rough in places,” went one typical review, “other Seuss stories are much better.”36 But Ted was happy with it. He knew it looked and read a bit different from some of his other books—and that had been intentional. “After you’ve done fifty books, you want a little change,” he said. “It isn’t that I’m bored. But you get into a rut.”37
More successful was The Grinch Grinches the Cat in the Hat, the animated special Geisel produced with DePatie-Freleng—now under the umbrella of Marvel Productions—featuring Dr. Seuss’s two best-known mischief-makers. Geisel had suspected the two characters might play off each other well, and he’d been right—though in the end, the Cat gets the better of the Grinch, thwarting the Grinch’s reality-bending plans by reminding him of how much his mother loves him. The cartoon would win Geisel and DePatie-Freleng an Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program of 1982—and Geisel would win an additional Emmy for the songs he had written with Joe Raposo, his partner on both Pontoffel Pock and Halloween Is Grinch Night.
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• • • •
In December 1982, the San Diego Museum of Art opened an exhibit featuring the work of one of the most popular children’s authors of the last twenty years—a writer who had “never presumed to write for children” and who was constantly trying to stage ballets and write operas based on his work.38
The author was Maurice Sendak—and on the evening of Thursday, December 9, he and Geisel had agreed to be interviewed together in an open forum in Copley Auditorium at Balboa Park in San Diego. Each was a great fan of the other. “I’ve never appeared in tandem with anyone else. I would do it with no one else,” remarked Sendak.39 For his part, Geisel had loved Where the Wild Things Are from the moment it was published in 1963, sensing in Sendak a kindred spirit. “Sendak has the courage not to be influenced by editors,” Geisel said later. “Everybody said his book Where the Wild Things Are would drive kids crazy, and they love it.”40
Though twenty-four years separated them—Geisel was seventy-eight, Sendak fifty-four—their views on writing for children were remarkably similar. “We write for people,” said Geisel as Sendak nodded enthusiastically. “We have never presumed to write for children,” Sendak said. “We do very different work, but what I see as similar is an honesty in [our] work,” continued Sendak. “Geisel is a real human being at work, and you can see that in what he writes. There are so few of my colleagues that I feel that respect for.” Still, their different styles, and different approaches to storytelling, could be seen in the way each responded to the audience. Sendak, in a dark suit and tie, was more animated, answering questions directly. Geisel, meanwhile, in a light suit and a floppy bow tie, preferred a folksier approach, telling stories, giving some of his well-rehearsed answers, and providing what for many would be the most memorab
le line of the night: “Reality is there, but we look at it through the wrong end of the telescope.”41
At the end of the evening, Geisel shook Sendak’s hand warmly. Their time together, he told the younger man, had been “sort of a sentimental journey.”
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• • • •
In early 1983, Ted Geisel signed the biggest merchandising deal of his career, and wasn’t entirely sure what he was getting out of it except more work and more headaches. Coleco—manufacturer of the popular Cabbage Patch Kids and the ColecoVision video game system—struck a ten-year deal with Geisel, laying down $10 million to market Dr. Seuss plush toys and video games. Despite the lucrative offer, Geisel nearly balked, grumbling, “I don’t know that I want to spend the last several years of my life doing this.”42 But he signed the deal anyway, on the condition that he be given final approval on all products, even the computer games that so baffled him—why would anyone want to assemble a puzzle on a computer screen when they could do a real puzzle?
Samples of stuffed toys—the Cat in the Hat, the Grinch, the Lorax, even Thidwick—would soon begin making their way to the Tower for Geisel’s approval. Ted threw them into the swimming pool in dramatic disgust. “When you go to three dimensions, there will always be something wrong,” he groused to agent Jed Mattes.43 With Geisel’s stern guidance, Coleco would eventually begin producing a respectable line of plush stuffed animals and computer games—but he would tire of babysitting Coleco’s designers, and by 1987, Geisel would ask Mattes to negotiate an exit from the contract, forfeiting millions of dollars for peace of mind. Coleco, already hemorrhaging money from the same implosion of the video game market that would bring down the juggernaut Atari, would file for bankruptcy a year later.
The day after signing the Coleco agreement, Geisel went in for a routine dental checkup and was stunned to learn the dentist had found small cancerous lesions at the base of his tongue—a horrific consequence of Geisel’s sixty years of chain smoking. Geisel’s doctor recommended surgery to remove the affected section of his tongue, but Ted rejected that particular recommendation—he didn’t want his speech to be permanently affected—and sought another opinion from doctors at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco.
In San Francisco, doctors confirmed the initial diagnosis, but recommended a less invasive treatment comprised of radiation, followed by an iridium transplant at the base of his tongue to kill any remaining cancer cells. But Geisel once again rebuffed the proposed treatment, telling doctors he didn’t want his hair and beard falling out from the radiation. After consulting with Audrey, Ted offered a compromise: he’d agree to let doctors excise the cancer—without removing part of his tongue—and then have the iridium implant inserted near the site of the lesions. On Valentine’s Day 1983, Geisel underwent the surgery, followed by five days of recovery in the hospital. He told no one about his cancer or his treatment or even his trip to San Francisco.
Geisel was back in La Jolla by early March, still in visible pain; the iridium affected the circulation in his jaw, causing some of his teeth to loosen. And yet on Friday, March 4, Ted managed to accompany Audrey to a black-tie party hosted by Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip on board the Royal Yacht Britannia to celebrate the thirty-first wedding anniversary of President Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Several weeks later, with his jaw still smarting, he attended a reception at the Hotel del Coronado honoring his old friend and commanding officer Frank Capra, whose film work was being featured at the newly christened San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts.
When asked—as he almost inevitably was—where he received his most useful training as an artist, Geisel would always reply, “In the Army, working with Frank Capra.”44 It was Capra who had helped him understand the need for tight pacing and concise storytelling and—most important—the wonderfully useful skill of storyboarding. Geisel approached Capra and the two of them spoke together quietly, trading war stories, then posed for photographs—Ted, in his suit and bow tie, with his left arm draped warmly around Capra’s shoulders. Even forty years after they had served together, it was clear each still understood his place: Capra, in a loud-checked suit, beams widely, while Geisel, with his head slightly bowed, shows just a hint of a respectful smile, as if awaiting Capra’s “At ease, soldier.”
In May came the release of Jonathan Cott’s acclaimed history and analysis of children’s literature, Pipers at the Gates of Dawn—named for a chapter in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows—featuring essays and interviews with prominent children’s authors, including Maurice Sendak, Mary Poppins creator P. L. Travers, and Dr. Seuss. Geisel had sat with Cott for an extended interview session at the Tower, giving lengthy and thoughtful answers to Cott’s questions and observations—and giving many readers their first real public look into the mind of Dr. Seuss and his creative process:
The difficult thing about writing in verse for kids is that you can write yourself into a box. If you can’t get a proper rhyme for a quatrain, you not only have to throw that quatrain out, but you also have to unravel the sock way back, probably about ten pages or so . . . And you also have to remember that in a children’s book a paragraph is like a chapter in an adult book, and a sentence is like a paragraph.45
When pressed, Geisel could speak the language of academics—he could still recite Goethe’s The Erl-King in its original German, a novelty rattling around in his brain since his days at Oxford. At one point, Cott described the thirteen rules of composing verse for children outlined by Russian children’s poet Korney Chukovsky in his 1925 book From Two to Five. As Cott reached rule 10, declaring that “the predominant rhythm [must] be that of the trochee,” Ted nodded in agreement. “That could be true in Russian,” he told Cott. “It could come out of the way the Russian language sounds. In most of my work, I use anapests. But in any case, I think the subject matter is more important than what meter you use.”46 What he hadn’t told Cott at the time was that the subject matter for his next book was going to be his most important, and most serious, yet.
Nuclear war.
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• • • •
Dr. Seuss was looking for a crazy reason to go to war. In the Seussian universe, what was a cause worth fighting over? There had been conflicts in his books before, of course—after all, Bartholomew Cubbins had been unable to remove his hat, earning the wrath of the king—and Geisel had even portrayed something like the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union, when a North-going Zax had encountered a South-going Zax and each refused to change direction to accommodate the other.
Not that reasons for war in the real world were any less outrageous; in 1983, the threat of nuclear war seemed very real indeed. Both the United States and the Soviet Union were ramping up their nuclear capabilities and investing heavily in weapons. President Reagan was proposing the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a space-based weapon to knock any nuclear missiles on the way to the United States out of the skies. In September of 1983, the Soviet Union shot down a Korean Air Lines flight that encroached Soviet airspace, killing 269 people, including a U.S. congressman. Both nations held their breath, fearing retaliation. On November 20, 1983, ABC showed what such retaliation might look like, broadcasting the made-for-television movie The Day After, about life in the United States following a nuclear strike. The entire world was on edge about the possibility of nuclear annihilation—which was exactly the reason Geisel wanted to say something about it.
After thinking about it for weeks, Geisel decided to tell the story of the Zooks and the Yooks, who disagree over whether to eat their bread butter side up or butter side down. Geisel informed editor Janet Schulman that he was working on a story he called The Butter Battle Book, but told her little else. “All he would tell me . . . was that it was about some people who ate their bread butter side up, and some others who ate their bread butter side down,” said Schulman. “I had no idea that it was a book about nuclear disa
rmament until he brought it all finished to New York.”47
With a fundamental disagreement over which side of the bread to butter driving the plot, The Butter Battle Book tells the story of nuclear proliferation, with the Yooks and Zooks patrolling a border wall separating them with increasingly larger and more dangerous weapons. Geisel even parodied Reagan’s SDI proposal with the Zooks’ invention of a Jigger-Rock Snatchem, which has the ability to catch rocks slung over the wall by the Yooks’ dreaded Triple-Sling Jigger and fling them right back. Each side taunts the other—the Yooks stage a military-style parade with Right-Side-Up Song Girls—until eventually both sides simultaneously develop the Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo, capable of blowing either side into “small smithereens.” As each side stares down the other and threatens to drop their ultimate weapon, Geisel ends the book on a terrifying cliffhanger:
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