Becoming Dr. Seuss

by Brian Jay Jones

  Overlooked by readers and reviewers of Bartholomew Cubbins was Ted’s enigmatic dedication to the book:

  To

  Chrysanthemum-Pearl

  (aged 89 months, going on 90)34

  Who was the mysterious Chrysanthemum-Pearl? The answer was personal—and heartbreaking.

  While Dr. Seuss would be loved by millions—perhaps billions—of kids and young readers around the world, Ted and Helen Geisel themselves would never have children. For the rest of his life, in one interview after another, Ted would find himself faced with the inevitable question “Why don’t you have any children of your own?” His well-rehearsed response was a casual one: “You have ’em,” he’d say, “and I’ll entertain ’em.” But the publicly flip remark masked the Geisels’ own private sadness. “It was not that we didn’t want to have children,” Ted explained later. “That wasn’t it.”35

  Seven years earlier, around the time the Geisels had moved into their new apartment on East 96th Street, Helen had begun complaining of severe abdominal pains. Ted was concerned enough to take her to the hospital, where doctors determined she needed an immediate oophorectomy—a removal of both ovaries. While the actual diagnosis remains unclear, such a drastic medical remedy seems to indicate that doctors may have been concerned about severe ovarian cysts. Regardless, in 1931, only four years into their marriage—Ted was twenty-seven, Helen thirty-three—the Geisels knew they would never have children. Helen was devastated; she and Ted agreed to keep their grief private, restricting knowledge of Helen’s condition to their immediate family.

  Unable to have any real children, then, Ted and Helen created a fictional one: Chrysanthemum-Pearl, born at about the time of Helen’s surgery (hence her age was given as eighty-nine months, or a little more than seven years, in 1938), and a precocious child whom the Geisels could good-naturedly discuss at dinner parties when the conversation turned to children. Friends were in on the ploy—though as far as they knew, Ted and Helen had simply chosen to remain childless and had made up Chrysanthemum-Pearl for some genial competitive fun. And thus, any time a friend told a story about one of their children, Ted—in a tactic worthy of Mulberry Street’s Marco—would one-up the tale with a story of the miraculous feats of Chrysanthemum-Pearl, who could, for example, “whip up the most delicious oyster stew with chocolate frosting.”36 Everyone would laugh, and the conversation would usually move on to a different subject. In fact, Ted and Helen talked for years about Chrysanthemum-Pearl in such convincing terms that, for a while at least, their niece Peggy thought she was real. Even she wouldn’t know the full story behind Chrysanthemum-Pearl for decades.

  * * *

  • • • •

  On Saturday, December 17, 1938, Geisel sat down at a table at the prestigious 21 Club on West 52nd Street. He knew the place well—it was a former speakeasy, after all—but as one of the more upscale dining rooms in New York City, the 21 was rarely the setting for a run-of-the-mill lunch meeting. This meal would be no exception—for sitting across from Geisel that afternoon was the man who’d invited him to lunch: Bennett Cerf, the rich, witty forty-year-old cofounder of the Random House publishing company.

  A native New Yorker and the son of well-to-do Jewish parents, Cerf was clever, good looking, and something of a rake—three years earlier, he’d been married to the glamorous actress Sylvia Sidney for exactly six months. As a young man, he’d attended Columbia University, where he was editor of the Jester, Columbia’s humor magazine—although unlike Geisel, Cerf was more interested in incorporating book reviews than booze jokes into the magazine. After college, Cerf had worked briefly as a reporter and a Wall Street broker before founding Random House with Donald S. Klopfer in 1927. With no fear of controversy and a natural knack for publicity, Cerf in 1933 had hauled the U.S. government into court over the right to publish James Joyce’s controversial—and banned—“work of obscenity,” the novel Ulysses. Cerf had prevailed, and Ulysses quickly became one of Random House’s first bestsellers. And the publicity hadn’t hurt.

  But Joyce wasn’t Cerf’s only catch. Cerf had both taste and an instinct for talent; he would, over the course of his career, publish William Faulkner, Eugene O’Neill, and Truman Capote, to name just a few. And now, as he and Geisel dined on hamburgers while a drizzle of rain fell outside, Cerf told his lunch guest which author he was hoping to land next.

  He wanted Dr. Seuss.

  Dr. Seuss was definitely interested. Geisel liked Henle and Shrifte at Vanguard, but he knew Vanguard couldn’t compare to Random House when it came to the resources needed for printing, promotion, and publicity. Moreover, Geisel really liked Bennett Cerf. He found him entertaining and urbane, quick with a joke—and it didn’t hurt that they had both edited their college humor magazines; that had elevated Cerf significantly in Ted’s eyes. Writing for Jester, Cerf explained, “[taught me] how to write a quick story, how to put it down in as few words as possible . . . I learned not to clutter up my mind with a lot of useless information because an intelligent man doesn’t need to carry all that stuff in his head. He has only to know where to find what he needs when he needs it.”37 That was the kind of thinking Geisel could get behind, too.

  Random House, Cerf told Geisel, didn’t have a large catalogue of children’s books—but he liked what he had seen from Dr. Seuss, and asked Geisel if he had any other projects in mind. “Not especially,” Ted told him. “Maybe an adult book with naked ladies.”

  Cerf never blinked “Great! I’ll buy it,” said the publisher. “You come with me and I’ll print anything you do.”38 The two left lunch that afternoon with a handshake of an agreement—though no formal contract—to work together. “I felt [Bennett Cerf] was the kind of star I wanted my wagon hitched to,” Geisel said later. “You could tell that Bennett was going somewhere.”39 Geisel’s hunch would be right.

  What Cerf may not have suspected as he bounded down the steps of the 21 Club and out into the rain was that Geisel wasn’t kidding about his next project. He really did have an idea for a book with naked ladies in it—an adult-oriented fairy tale, updating the story of Lady Godiva and Peeping Tom. That all sounded fine to Cerf, whose main concern was that, whatever Ted chose to do, he just do it quickly. “It is extremely important that we have complete books in hand by early summer,” Cerf wrote to Geisel, “so that our salesmen can do a proper selling job on their early fall trips.”40

  Cerf’s faith seems to have inspired Geisel—for he went immediately to work writing and drawing not just one book for Cerf and Random House, but two.

  First up was the naked-lady book. The Seven Lady Godivas was a reimagining of the historic figure who—at least according to legend—had ridden naked through the streets of Coventry in protest of oppressive taxes, and went unseen by everyone in town except for a voyeuristic tailor named Peeping Tom. “History has treated no name so shabbily as it has the name Godiva,” Geisel wrote in the book’s foreword—and in his reimagining, it was actually the story of the seven Godiva sisters—Lulu, Gussie, Teenie, Hedwig, Dorcas J., Arabella, and Mitzi—and their suitors, the Peeping brothers: Tom, Jack, Harry, Dick, Frelinghuysen, Sylvester, and Drexel. In Geisel’s telling, the nudity of the Godivas was incidental; the sisters were simply so smart that they had no time for “frivol and froth,” which included things like jewelry and clothing.

  This wasn’t entirely new territory. Geisel had made a number of Lady Godiva jokes in the pages of Judge, where he had also drawn women in various states of undress. But Geisel’s particular style of drawing wasn’t suited to drawing women. “I tried to draw the sexiest-looking women I could, and they came out just ridiculous,” he said later.41 “I think their ankles came out wrong, and things like that.”42 In fact, anyone looking for anything scandalous in The Seven Lady Godivas is bound to be disappointed; apart from a few bare butts, Geisel’s women are usually drawn from the side or in three-quarter view to keep their pubic areas hidden, and exposed breasts are dev
oid of nipples. Other times, his women are discreetly covered by a conveniently placed fence or bale of hay. Nudity aside, the Godivas are the proactive heroes of the book, smart and sympathetic in their individual quests to find their “horse truths”—after a painful bite, for example, Teenie Godiva learns never to look a gift horse in the mouth. Geisel would be assailed in years to come about his lack of female protagonists, but in the pages of his first book for Cerf, he’d have seven of them.

  As he had with Bartholomew Cubbins, Geisel chose to write The Seven Lady Godivas in unrhymed prose. This time, however, he wouldn’t be working in full color; it was likely Cerf, eyeing the bottom line, who had gently suggested working only in shades of a single color. And so Geisel had drawn with black ink, using a gray ink wash for shading, and a reddish orange for highlights—which, when applied lightly, could be used to provide skin tones, or used heavily to tint the bright red sails of a ship. The different look was likely deliberate; Geisel was trying something new with Godivas, intentionally aiming for more adult readers. Geisel claimed it had been “to escape the monotony of writing about nothing but ‘men folks and children, dragons or fish.’”43

  While Cerf was looking for a children’s book more along the lines of Bartholomew Cubbins, the publisher was happy to indulge Geisel’s experiment if it would bring him under the roof of Random House. “I quite understand why you don’t want to sign any definite contract now for future juveniles,” wrote Cerf, ever the dutiful suitor. “I do hope, though, that after your present commitments are fulfilled, we will be able to work out a contract whereby we will become the publishers of every book that you write.”44

  Geisel had high hopes for The Seven Lady Godivas, believing he had created a new kind of literature—a comic aimed at more adult readers. “At that time, I was groping for a way to get out of what I was doing,” he said later. Unfortunately, Godivas, on its publication in 1939, “was my grope that didn’t work. It was my first adult humor book and my last. It was a complete failure.”45 Geisel would blame the book’s cover price partly for its tepid reception—at two dollars, it was his most expensive book yet—and he also thought his decidedly nonerotic naked women had disappointed adult readers who might have been looking inside for . . . well, something different. He had equally confused—and, in some cases, angered—parents who found The Seven Lady Godivas shelved alongside Mulberry Street and Bartholomew Cubbins. “Kids would take it out with the other Dr. Seuss books,” said Geisel, “and their parents were shocked.”46 Many libraries either discarded the book or refused to carry it at all.

  Random House would sell only 2,500 copies of Godivas out of its initial print run of 10,000. The unsold books would be remaindered—sold in bulk and at a cut rate—and Geisel loved to tell the story of finding them at Schulte’s Cigar Stores in New York, where they were sold for a quarter apiece to a more adult clientele. It was “the most expensive failure of my career,”47 he said later, though he tried hard to learn a lesson from it. “I think it all went to prove that I don’t know anything about adults,” he said plainly.48 Still, Geisel would dream for years of turning the book into an animated feature.

  Dr. Seuss’s first book for Random House had been a dud. But Bennett Cerf was hanging in there. “[Godivas was] intended for an adult audience, which I am sad to say it never found,” he said generously. Geisel’s editor at Random House, Louise Bonino—“one of the best juvenile editors in the country,” said Cerf49—told Geisel he needed to shake off Godivas and write another kid’s book right away.

  Fortunately, Geisel’s other book in the works for 1939, The King’s Stilts, was much more what Bonino was looking for. Geisel was firmly back in fairy-tale territory, using prose to tell the story of the good and dutiful King Birtram, whose kingdom begins to decline only when the evil Lord Droon denies the king his regular evening of fun on his red stilts. “[I]t’s hard work being King, and he does his work well,” say Birtram’s subjects. “If he wants to have a bit of fun . . . sure! . . . Let him have it!”50 The same could have been said of Geisel. “I think his ability to see humor everywhere in everyday life is one reason why Ted is so well and enjoys life so,” his sister, Marnie, told the Springfield Union-News.51

  Ted had worked hard on this one, too, and had relied heavily on Helen for her editorial input and aptitude for plot. Each day, he would read his manuscript aloud to Helen, then hand the typewritten pages over for her to correct or add her own suggestions. Like Godivas, The King’s Stilts was drawn in black and white, with a gray wash for shading and orange for highlights. Using yellow notepads, Ted would mock up and lay out each two-page spread carefully; thus he could determine exactly which drawings were facing each other, where the colors would go, and how much space the text should take up. Helen would mark these pages up as well, writing her remarks in the margins or beneath Ted’s own handwritten notes—and when Ted got the pages back, he would often write his new comments directly over hers, thickly doubling up his letters so his comments would all but obliterate Helen’s handwriting beneath.

  The King’s Stilts was a charming book, with a likable main character—King Birtram was much nicer than King Derwin of Bartholomew Cubbins, who seemed all too eager to cut off a little boy’s head—and a fun, fully realized story, with not a hint of nudity in sight. Yet, while it seemed Dr. Seuss had gotten back to form, The King’s Stilts also bombed on release, selling only 4,648 copies in its first year.

  Still, it had sold better than The Seven Lady Godivas. Cerf was determined to show Geisel he still believed in him, sending him by Pullman train car on an all-expenses paid book-signing tour that took Geisel through Rochester, New York, then into Ohio, where he visited Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, and Cleveland. To his likely surprise, he had no trouble with appearing in public at any of these venues. He gamely signed books at the fifth-floor bookshop in the gigantic Higbee’s department store in Cleveland, then headed for Columbus, where he was put up at the Deshler-Wallick Hotel. Here he dashed off an impromptu letter to Lew Miller, the sales manager at Random House, letting him know he’d sold “a mess of books.” Ted loved sending notes to people—many times just a quickly scribbled line about something that struck him as funny. Letters would arrive unexpectedly, containing perhaps a scrap of a newspaper article with Ted’s editorial annotations, a postcard with a short, pithy comment—or in the case of his letter to Miller, a note on the Deshler-Wallick’s stationery, which featured a line drawing of the hotel with one of its pointed towers. On Miller’s letter, Ted couldn’t resist adding a quick couplet just below the picture of the hotel tower:

  Here I sit in the Hotel Wallick.

  You’ll notice that the spire is Phallick.52

  The slow sales didn’t mean King’s Stilts didn’t have its fans. The New York Herald Tribune called it “the best Seuss so far, and that’s no small praise.”53 Meanwhile, over at The New York Times, children’s book reviewer Ellen Lewis Buell thought the book was “a little anti-climactic” when compared with Mulberry Street and Bartholomew Cubbins, but nonetheless warmly welcomed a new Dr. Seuss book, adding that “Dr. Seuss at his second best is much better than no Dr. Seuss.”54

  At the moment, however, Geisel wasn’t certain there would be another Dr. Seuss book; with The King’s Stilts selling slowly, Geisel was still having a hard time making a living off of what he called “the brat book business.”55 Fortunately, the Flit campaign had picked back up again, paying him good money to essentially use the same punch line over and over again. By then “I’d drawn them by the millions,” sighed Geisel.56 He’d also been fiddling for nearly a year with a gadget he’d hoped to unveil to great fanfare and profit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, which had opened in Queens, New York, on April 30, 1939. Forty-five million people were expected to pass through its entrance, strolling through exhibits centering around the theme of the World of Tomorrow. Ted’s invention, called the Infantograph, wasn’t a lofty gadget for a better tomorrow; instead, it was a bit
of carnival hucksterism—but that didn’t make it any less clever.

  Geisel envisioned setting the Infantograph up in a tent on the main concourse—he’d already designed it—with a banner out front beckoning couples inside with a tantalizing come-on: If you were to marry the person you are with, what would your children look like? Come in and have your INFANTOGRAPH taken! The unsuspecting couples would then come inside the tent, sit in front of the Infantograph, and, after the click of a camera shutter, would receive a photograph of their features blended together into a single composite image.

  In concept, wrote Geisel, the resulting photograph would be “instructive, entertaining, and amusing.”57 In practice, however: not so much. “All the babies tended to look like William Randolph Hearst,” he said sadly.58 Ultimately, Geisel would never get the camera to work in a way he was happy with; the idea was scrapped, and plans for a pavilion at the fair were abandoned. The only Infantograph photo that remains is a publicity shot of Ted and Helen demonstrating the machine, each staring blankly ahead, with their heads locked into wooden collars. Ted would hold on to the idea as long as he could, finally dissolving his Infantograph Corporation in 1944. Still, he would always insist, “it was a wonderful idea.”59