“Grandpa!” I shouted. “Be careful! Oh, gee!
Who’s going to drop it?
Will you . . . ? Or will he . . . ?”
“Be patient,” said Grandpa. “We’ll see.
We will see . . .”48
Geisel knew he was doing something important with The Butter Battle Book, telling Teddy Owens it was “the best book I’ve ever written.”49 He was feeling very much like the cockeyed crusader he’d been during his time at PM in the early days of World War II—and yet his idealism was tinged with realism. “If I’d have to say we should arm or not, I’d say we arm,” Geisel said later. “But if we arm toward nuclear climax, we’re finished. Before, when I was fighting against Hitler, we were dealing with human will which could accomplish miracles . . . Today, no amount of spirit or belief can win a war of this sort . . . Critics may say the book is too simplistic. I think it has to be simplistic. I think this problem would be solvable if we made it more simplistic. The damn thing has got to stop. How it stops, I don’t know.”50
Geisel personally delivered The Butter Battle Book to Random House in October 1983. The response was muted and slightly confused. Geisel sensed the editorial bewilderment immediately. “I have no idea if this is an adult book for children or a children’s book for adults,” he told his production team. Even Ted’s cover, showing a Right-Side-Up Song Girl carrying a butter-side-up banner, came under scrutiny, with art director Cathy Goldsmith recommending something “more confrontational,” that might give readers a better idea of the themes being addressed inside.51 But Geisel clearly didn’t like that idea, and the conversation became more heated as the morning wore on. Finally marketing executive Jerry Harrison suggested Goldsmith put together a mock-up of an alternate cover for Geisel to consider. Ted told her he would take her cover back to La Jolla and think it over. Goldsmith knew immediately that Geisel’s original cover would stay. “If you were his friend, he couldn’t look you in the eye and say he didn’t like something,” said Goldsmith.52
The title, too, came under scrutiny, particularly from the marketing and sales teams, where there was concern that The Butter Battle Book was too vague and gave no indication of what the story was about. Bob Bernstein gently encouraged Geisel to change the title to The Yooks and the Zooks—a title that stuck long enough to show up in an early press release announcing the book. Ted was furious, and Audrey took it on herself to call Bernstein personally to explain how much Ted was committed to his original title. The title was changed back to The Butter Battle Book.
Random House’s jitters continued through the editing process—usually the part of the process where Geisel’s word was beyond reproach. And yet Janet Schulman gently pointed out that while the opening pages of The Butter Battle Book appeared to be told in flashback—with the grandfather telling the tale of the weapons buildup to his grandson—it concluded in the present tense, with the grandfather running to the wall and threatening to drop the Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo. Again, Geisel refused to budge. “I see what you’re saying,” he told her, “but I’m not going to change it. The grandfather is just a device.”53 Schulman wisely let it go. “When you’re dealing with a genius and he won’t change, you don’t change,” she said.54
Schulman also sent an early proof of the book to Maurice Sendak, asking for his opinion and perhaps a blurb Random House could use in its promotional materials. Sendak sent back a rollicking endorsement in no time. “Surprisingly, wonderfully, the case for total disarmament has been brilliantly made by our acknowledged master of nonsense, Dr. Seuss,” wrote Sendak. “Only a genius of the ridiculous could possibly deal with the cosmic and lethal madness of the nuclear arms race . . . [Dr. Seuss] has done the world a service.”55 And yet, the Random House sales department worried that Sendak’s politically tinged endorsement might discourage families with a conservative bent from buying the book. Bernstein called Geisel to let him know of the marketing department’s concern—and Ted, with a gusty sigh, agreed to keep Sendak’s message out of the marketing materials. But he resented the suggestion that The Butter Battle Book was a negative statement about the military. “I’m not anti-military,” he insisted, “I’m just anti-crazy.”56
* * *
• • • •
The cancer had spread. On December 16, 1983, Geisel underwent surgery for a radical neck dissection and deep biopsy to thwart the cancer that had moved into one of his lymph nodes. The surgery was invasive and painful and would require a lengthy postoperative stay at Scripps, forcing him to miss his own Christmas party at the Tower. For the next two months, he would exist in a fog of pain and heavy medication. Doctors had tried to persuade him to recover in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber that would make his wounds heal faster, but Geisel had refused. The confined space made him feel too much like he was being buried alive.
Geisel would feel sufficiently recovered to travel to New York to celebrate the publication of The Butter Battle Book on March 2, 1984—Dr. Seuss’s eightieth birthday. Geisel gamely attended a birthday party thrown by Random House at the New York Public Library, with more than two hundred guests in attendance, then slid into a limousine that shuttled him over to a more intimate formal party at the 21 Club—the very same place Ted had been wooed away from Vanguard and over to Random House by Bennett Cerf in 1938. This time, however, Geisel was feted by the new owners of Random House, Donald and Samuel I. Newhouse Jr., whose family company had just acquired the publishing firm from RCA for $70 million.
Among the fifty-nine guests in attendance were old friends and colleagues like Maurice Sendak, the Berenstains, and Joe Raposo—but Ted, as usual, seemed embarrassed by all the fuss, and could only loosen up after downing a few vodka martinis. One by one, guests stood and toasted his health, usually delivering a few rhyming couplets in their best imitation of Dr. Seuss. Geisel raised his glass respectfully to each.
Dr. Seuss’s eightieth birthday—just like his seventy-fifth—was cause for celebration around the country, and congratulatory letters and telegrams streamed into Random House. Everyone, it seemed, was trying to “do Dr. Seuss,” toasting him in mostly bad but well-intended rhyming verse. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan acknowledged the occasion with a Seussian speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate, though Congressman Ed Boland—who represented Geisel’s hometown of Springfield in the House of Representatives—played it straight. Perhaps the most accurate Seussian parody came from New York mayor Ed Koch, who even managed to work the latest Dr. Seuss book into his celebratory letter:
All is calm at City Hall.
Toward peace we’ve made great strides.
The secret is really very simple:
We butter our bread on both sides.57
While Dr. Seuss may have been adored without question, some critics weren’t so sure they felt the same way about The Butter Battle Book. The New York Times bluntly called it “bleak” and disparaged it as “an arms control polemic that has no happy ending”58—failing to realize that the enigmatic ending had been precisely Geisel’s intention. The New Republic, too, seemed to miss the point entirely, maintaining that there were real-life issues that mattered far more than which side of the bread one buttered. A blasé review in Kirkus yawned that “all this seems, however well-intended, a little out-of-date, even a little out-of-keeping.”59
There was even some hate mail from parents who accused Dr. Seuss of intentionally scaring children, admonishing Geisel for not providing them with a happy ending. “I was tempted to give it a happy ending,” admitted Geisel, “but then I would have gotten into dishonesty.” The ending in the book, he said, was “the situation as it is.”60 But newspaper columnist Ellen Goodman publicly took Geisel to task for that decision, arguing that while the ending might have been honest, “what children need from the good doctor, from all adults, is a dose of hope.”61
Geisel, predictably, refused to explain himself. “Since this is the hottest topic in the world, if kids are at all intelligent and read anythin
g, of course they’re facing it,” he said.62 He was proud he wasn’t talking down to kids about tough issues—and he was perfectly willing to put his fate in their hands. “One thing I think is great is that kids are discussing problems in a way they didn’t when I was a kid. So I am leaving it up to them to write the happy ending for me. Adults haven’t been able to do it so far.”63
And yet despite the controversy—or maybe because of it—The Butter Battle Book would race to the top of both the juvenile and adult fiction bestseller lists, elbowing its way into position alongside books by Stephen King and Robert Ludlum. “It’s not a book that should be ignored,” wrote a reviewer for Gannett News, who compared the eighty-year-old Dr. Seuss to “a prizefighter in his prime.”64 Bob Bernstein would forever rate The Butter Battle Book as Geisel’s finest hour, while Cathy Goldsmith hailed it as “a statement from an elder statesman.”65 While frequently banned for its perceived politics, The Butter Battle Book would come to be embraced and appreciated for its allegorical brilliance in the nerve-racking years that would define the end of the Cold War. While he was unable to promise that everything would be okay, Dr. Seuss had nonetheless held his readers’ hands tightly through a frightening, formative experience. For most readers, that was more than enough.
Back in La Jolla in early April, with The Butter Battle Book making its way up the bestseller list, Geisel was considering subjects for his next book—and wondering, at times, whether at eighty years old, he even had another book in him at all. He was still dabbing at paintings—though usually only after midnight—and found himself on the couch in his office reading more “history or some classy junk”66 one morning when the telephone on his desk jangled loudly. It was a reporter from the Associated Press, calling to ask Geisel if he had heard the news.
Dr. Seuss had just won the Pulitzer Prize.
CHAPTER 17
OFF AND AWAY
1984–1991
Dr. Seuss could hardly believe the news. When a reporter from the Associated Press called to notify him that he’d won the Pulitzer Prize, Geisel was nearly speechless. “The damnedest thing,” he said over and over.1 The award, a special citation, hadn’t been bestowed on any particular Dr. Seuss book, but rather in recognition of his entire body of work, and “for his contribution over nearly half a century to the education and enjoyment of America’s children and their parents.”2
Geisel could only shake his head in awe. “That’s amazing. All I can say is I’m highly gratified and surprised,”3 he said, then added, “I think it’s amazing that it came at all.”4 While plenty of other writers won Pulitzer Prizes in 1984—notably William Kennedy for his novel Ironweed and David Mamet for his play Glengarry Glen Ross—it was usually Dr. Seuss’s name that appeared in the headline and his photo that appeared alongside the story. Everyone, it seemed, knew he’d won the prize, and for a few weeks “all hell broke loose”5 as the phone rang constantly with congratulations from friends and requests from journalists for interviews. Cards and letters piled up in his office. Michael Frith sent a telegram with an intentional groaner of a rhyme he knew Geisel would appreciate:
Had I but paid more attention in schoolitzer,
I could’ve come up with a good rhyme for Pulitzer.6
Geisel admitted he liked “some” of the fuss, but groused that all the attention had made things “rather unprivate” for him.7 Mostly, he was pleased that he could explain to any skeptics that “all my books are a war against illiteracy,”8 and repeatedly joked that he should have received a Pulitzer when he was an actual journalist at PM.
Ted and Audrey celebrated the honor at a dinner with friends, where the wine flowed freely during laughter and conversation. But such dinners out were getting rarer; Ted preferred eating dinner on TV trays with Audrey in the living room—though rarely with the television on—to going out to restaurants down the hill in La Jolla or San Diego. Most evenings out tended to end with Ted, eyes rolled skyward, hovering near the exit waiting as Audrey flitted from table to table, saying one long goodbye after another.
Lately, Geisel’s life had become a series of one waiting room after another. Between trips to the UCSD Medical Center at San Francisco and the Scripps Clinic closer to home, Geisel complained that he was “fed up with a social life consisting entirely of doctors.”9 He called his illness “a series of everything,” requiring endless tests, endless poking and prodding, and endless rounds of paperwork. “When I discovered I was spending more time in hospital vestibules than I was at my drawing board, appearing before various doctors and taking various tests, I began drawing what was happening, or what I thought was happening, which I did just to amuse myself.”10 And suddenly Geisel found himself working on his next Dr. Seuss book.
While Ted wanted nothing more than to sit and work at his drawing table, Audrey encouraged him to accept an invitation to receive one more honorary degree, this time from Princeton University. In June 1985, as Geisel stepped forward on a New Jersey stage to be hooded by president William Bowen, all 1,500 graduates rose to their feet for a lengthy standing ovation, shouting in unison, “I am Sam! Sam I am!” Ted was visibly moved as the degree was conferred—“He shows [children] the way to the adult world,” said speaker John Coburn, “as he shows adults the way to the child”11—and gave the briefest of remarks. “It was a very sound decision to honor somebody who writes children’s books,” Geisel told the crowd. “They usually live without honor.”12 As he sat down, a light drizzle of rain began to fall.
* * *
• • • •
Back at the Tower, Geisel was slowly pinning up the pages of the manuscript that would take up most of his time in 1985, the satirical paean to aging, You’re Only Old Once! More and more of his personal experiences and frustrations with doctors and hospitals were showing up in the book. In the waiting room in San Francisco, Ted had sat next to a fish tank containing a sad-looking fish named Norval that Ted couldn’t resist putting into the book as a recurring character. His unpleasant and expensive memories of his first cancer treatment—in which doctors had proposed several unacceptable treatments and still socked Ted with a $75,000 bill—would also make it into the book, as his main character peered through a complicated contraption at an eye chart that read, HAVE YOU ANY IDEA HOW MUCH MONEY THESE TESTS ARE COSTING YOU?
Complaints about costs aside, You’re Only Old Once! was Ted’s protestation against needless procedures and what he often saw as a disregard for the concerns of patients—like himself—who didn’t want to be forced into entering frightening-looking machines. Geisel’s book would be filled with odd and scary contraptions—beds of nails, a Diet-Devising Computerized Sniffer called a Wuff-Whiffer—as well as doctors who asked endless rounds of useless questions before finally shuffling patients off to billing. “I don’t think he was an easy patient,” said Peggy Owens sympathetically.13 One could hardly blame him. Ted loved to tell a story about the time he was being rolled into the operating room on a gurney, and “the guy who was wheeling me in . . . brought a book out just before we got to the swinging doors and asked for an autograph,” said Ted, laughing. “He probably figured it would be the last I ever gave. I was very flattered, but I wanted to sock him.”14
For the first time, Geisel was writing specifically for the “obsolete children” among his readers. “Is this a children’s book?” he asked rhetorically. “Well . . . not immediately. You buy a copy for your child now and you give it to them for their 70th birthday.”15 While the book would be full of appropriately Seussian contraptions with Seussian names, there would be no imaginary creatures; and with the exception of Norval the fish, Geisel had populated his book entirely with humans—something he hadn’t done since Bartholomew and the Oobleck. The main character, in fact, was based on a real person: P. D. Eastman, one of Geisel’s favorite Beginner Books authors, whose Are You My Mother? and Go, Dog. Go! were nearly as popular as the titles by Dr. Seuss. “That character is Phil [Eastman], because Phil was g
oing through a lot of medical problems at that time,” said Michael Frith.16 The character even looked like Eastman, bald with a brush mustache. Unfortunately, Eastman would never see his alter ego in print; he would die in January 1986 at age seventy-six, six weeks before the publication of You’re Only Old Once!
As Geisel was completing You’re Only Old Once! in late 1985, he had two visitors to the Tower. One was Bob Bernstein, who tried to make it to La Jolla at least once a year to pay his respects to the closest thing Random House had to a living icon. Bernstein always loved seeing what Geisel had pinned to the walls of his studio. “He would wait for my opinion, actually nervous about what he had produced,” said Bernstein. “When I expressed my complete delight, which was so easy to do, he would still challenge me to be sure I wasn’t just being kind.”17 The book was mostly finished now, and Ted was working from photocopies of his finished line art, carefully coloring them with his colored pencils. From there, he would then find the corresponding color on the Random House color chart and write the color’s chart number directly onto the photocopy, with an arrow pointing to the precise area to be filled. From a distance, it looked like a complicated math problem. “People think you can just sit down and write a children’s book in an afternoon,” he said, then waved a hand at the sheaf of colored and labeled pages, “but look at all this!”18
The other visitor was Geisel’s neighbor Joe Hibben, a trustee of the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, who asked Ted if he had any interest in working on a Dr. Seuss retrospective. While Hibben’s own museum had declined to host such a project, he had found an eager supporter in Steven Brezzo at the San Diego Museum of Art, which had presented exhibits on pop culture figures and artists like Jim Henson, and was eager to accommodate a Dr. Seuss show. Geisel agreed, on the condition that he be permitted to work closely with curator Mary Stofflet to determine what went into the exhibit and what didn’t. While Geisel understood that the exhibit would showcase much of the art from his books, he also wanted to feature some of his paintings—a request Brezzo was happy to accommodate, eventually taking three watercolors, three oil paintings, and two ink and crayon drawings Ted had personally selected for the exhibit.
Becoming Dr. Seuss Page 44
