Becoming Dr. Seuss

by Brian Jay Jones

  Geisel’s real work for the Army-Navy Screen Magazine would begin shortly after his arrival at Fort Fox, when Capra approached him with a concept that Geisel would turn into one of the newsreels’ most popular segments. A year earlier, Capra had assigned one of his staff writers with the task of developing a short comedic film called Hey Soldier! in which a bumbling private learns the hard way about Army rules and discipline. Capra never made the movie—but as he watched the Why We Fight movies in a theater full of enlisted men, Capra noticed that the audience tended to perk up during any animated segments, even if it was just an animated map. Capra revived the Hey Soldier! idea, but this time proposed it as a series of animated shorts about a similarly bumbling soldier named Private Snafu—from the military acronym for “Situation Normal: All F**ked Up.” Capra thought Geisel, with his crossover experience in design, advertising, and editorial cartooning, would be the ideal man to take charge of the new project.

  Because Private Snafu would require actual animators—unlike the live-action films, cartoons couldn’t be made from stock footage—Geisel sent the project out for bids from animation studios. Disney and Warner Bros. went head to head for the opportunity, with Warner submitting an aggressive cost per film that significantly undercut Disney’s offer. Disney had hampered its bid from the beginning by insisting on ownership of the Snafu character—a condition that Warner did not impose—but the loss of Private Snafu was likely a relief to Walt Disney himself, whose studio was already running a deficit on the military films he, too, was producing for the government.

  Warner Bros., with its looser animation, loopier sense of humor, and more frantic pacing, was probably the better fit for Geisel anyway. There was plenty of talent among the directors in the stable of Warner Bros. animation—Frank Tashlin, Bob Clampett, Isadore “Friz” Freleng—but Capra was perceptive enough to pair Geisel primarily with a director cut very much from the same comedic cloth: artist, writer, and animator Charles M. “Chuck” Jones. Only thirty years old, Jones had been directing for Warner Bros. for six years, mostly overseeing cartoons featuring Sniffles the Mouse, Porky Pig, and some early iterations of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. By happenstance, in 1942 Jones had directed “The Dover Boys at Pimento University” or “The Rivals of Roquefort Hall,” a spot-on parody of Geisel’s beloved Rover Boys novels. As Capra suspected, Chuck Jones and Dr. Seuss would get along just fine.

  Together, Geisel and Jones designed the look of Private Snafu, developing the character model sheets with Art Heinemann and another young artist in Capra’s unit named Ray Harryhausen, later the groundbreaking stop-motion model animator. “It was a delight to work with him,”29 Harryhausen said of Geisel, adding that even with all the hands on Snafu’s design, “Dr. Seuss . . . was in charge of the Snafu character.”30 While the final version of Snafu soaked up the varying artistic styles of his creative crew, Geisel’s influence can still be seen in his basic design: wide eyes with light lashes, car-door ears sticking straight out from his head, and a slightly lopsided grin—all features on Ted’s faces since his Oxford notebook.

  Geisel would personally write the scripts for the first few installments of Private Snafu, setting the tone and establishing the pacing for the thirty or so films that would follow over the next three years—some of which Geisel would oversee, many of which he wouldn’t. He was also learning how to storyboard, working with Jones and his animators to sketch out the key moments of stories and sequences, pin them to corkboard, then move them around or add and subtract sections as the story was reworked and revised.

  Geisel would work with his staff of “perhaps ten men”31 to write, design, lay out, and storyboard each six-minute cartoon before sending everything over to Warner Bros. to finish off. “[Chuck Jones’s] layout men had to adapt our work,” said Maurice Noble, an artist and animator under Geisel’s supervision. The director—whether it was Jones, Freleng, Tashlin, or others—and the team at Warner Bros. would complete the animation, dub the voices (most of which were performed by Warner Bros. stalwart Mel Blanc), overlay Carl Stalling’s music, and then send the film back to Geisel for release by the Army—at a rate of about two cartoons per month. “It was a very productive small unit,” Noble said proudly.32

  Private Snafu would make his debut in June 1943 in the short cartoon Private Snafu: Coming!! On-screen, Snafu’s name would be parsed as “Situation Normal: All Fouled Up,” with the narrator pausing for dramatic effect before refusing to use the expletive. In his first appearance, Snafu is introduced as “the goofiest soldier in the U.S. Army”33—patriotic and well intentioned, but inclined to laziness, carelessness with rules and procedures, and shortcuts. But for the purposes of teaching soldiers, those weaknesses were the strengths of the film—for soldiers would learn the value of particular skills or habits by watching Snafu either disregard them or perform them badly, often resulting in his imprisonment, his hospitalization, or even his own death. “Snafu gave [Geisel] the chance to write adult humor for adults, or for boys who were being trained to die as men,” wrote film critic Richard Corliss. “The series tried to ensure that more of those boys would come home alive.”34

  Geisel’s Private Snafu would be frequently aided by Technical Fairy, First Class—a perpetually unshaven guardian angel of sorts, who smoked a cigar and fluttered about wearing only military issue boxers, army boots, and garrison cap. The Technical Fairy would grant Snafu any variety of wishes, all of which go awry and drive home the underlying point of the film. In an early cartoon called Private Snafu: Gripes, for instance, the Technical Fairy shows up to answer the undisciplined Snafu’s wish that he could be in charge of the Army, granting the request in rhyming verse that could only have come from the pen of Dr. Seuss:

  I heard ya sayin’ it: Everything stank!

  That you’d run things different if you had more rank.

  So as technical fairy, I got a good notion

  To give you a chance, pal—here’s a promotion!35

  Naturally, because of Snafu’s failure to impose discipline, his unit is completely unprepared when attacked by the Germans, leading the Technical Fairy to admonish him in similar verse:

  No use! They ain’t trained! They ain’t got no morale!

  Your army’s a washout, my fine feathered pal!36

  Because the cartoons were intended to be seen only by servicemen, and not for public release, the government gave Geisel considerable leeway with language, permitting use of the scandalous epithets hell and damn. Off-color humor was also tolerated, within reason; one of Ted’s and Chuck Jones’s favorite jokes would appear in the cartoon The Home Front, in which Geisel’s script described icy conditions as “so cold, it could freeze the nuts off a Jeep.” Without missing a beat, the camera pans across a snowbound Jeep, which drops two metal hex nuts onto the ice with an audible clatter.

  From the beginning, Geisel also applied Munro Leaf’s recommendation that if they really expected young servicemen to pay attention—even to a cartoon—they had to “make it racy.”37 And so the Snafu cartoons feature plenty of shapely women—nurses, WACs, girls back home—in various states of undress. Geisel remembered the problems he’d had with female anatomy in Seven Lady Godivas and wisely left the design work to Jones and the Warner animators, who gleefully inserted women who looked as if they had stepped straight out of a pinup calendar by Alberto Vargas. It was all in good fun, but even Jones understood the civilian animators were also taking their patriotic duty seriously. “I tried to make good pictures,” said Jones, “and it turns out that some of them did save a few lives, by teaching them through animation.”38

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  • • • •

  Between scriptwriting, film editing, and conferencing with Capra, the men of the 834th resolutely went through their daily drills and training regimens. Despite swimming and playing handball regularly for the past couple of years, Geisel remained, in the words of Paul Horgan, “hopelessly uncoordinated.” “[Ted] tried so
earnestly in field drills that it was touching,” said Horgan. “He was warm and full of worthy convictions, and patriotic to the limit . . . He was tall, skinny, his hair parted in the middle and falling like some of the birds he drew, and with that great beak of a nose.”39 Even Geisel knew he was not a terrific foot soldier; on the pistol range, he never qualified with his .45—information he likely didn’t share with his sharpshooting father—and often joked that if called into battle, he fully intended to “grab [the gun] by the barrel and throw it.” He would wear the pistol upside down in his holster for the remainder of the war.40 Later, Geisel would perform better with an M1, placing fifth among the ninety-three participating members of his division, and qualifying as a marksman.41

  What downtime the men had—and there wasn’t much—was spent drinking in the canteen or playing cards or dice. In a sheaf of unpublished cartoons Geisel drew of life at the 834th, one is of himself leading a visiting colonel around Fort Fox. “And . . . er . . . here, Colonel, are the artists!” says cartoon Ted, pointing to a group of men on their knees, playing dice. The brass must not have minded; a second cartoon shows Ted trying to unsuccessfully pull the same colonel away from the game. To boost morale, Geisel also created the camp’s own version of the Academy Awards, handing out statuettes of Private Snafu to award winners. When questioned by Army accountants about the costs of the trophies, Geisel would neither confirm nor deny whether he had buried the expenses among his cost sheets; another of Geisel’s cartoons shows him on a witness stand, coolly ignoring a prosecutor’s questioning about the hidden costs.42 In each cartoon, Geisel draws himself with a long pointed nose and round glasses, his hair parted down the middle with a cowlick in the back.

  In the evenings, Ted and Helen were doing their best to find some semblance of a social routine in the Hollywood area; it wasn’t quite the theater and restaurant scene they’d left behind in New York, but Los Angeles did have its own kind of appeal. Sometimes he and Helen would go to the clubs on Sunset, where they once caught a performance by Nat King Cole and his trio. Other evenings, they’d head for the Hollywood Canteen on Cahuenga, where Ted, or any other serviceman, could get in free if he wore his uniform—and might even spot Marlene Dietrich volunteering her time to work as a waitress, or Abbott and Costello busing tables. Lately, too, they’d been attending a racy revue called Ken Murray’s Blackouts, a burlesque show hosted by comedian Ken Murray at the always-packed El Capitan Theatre on Vine.

  As 1943 wound down, Geisel picked up some additional work from the War Finance Division of the Treasury Department doing the art for an international campaign about “the Squander Bug,” discouraging profligate spending over the holidays in favor of war bonds. He also oversaw the completion of what would be one of the most Seussian of the Private Snafu cartoons, at least in its overall look and feel. Called Private Snafu: Rumors, it opens with more of Geisel’s lively verse, bouncing in rhythm reminiscent of Mulberry Street:

  ‘Twas a bright sunny day with the air fresh and clean.

  Not a rumor was stirring, ’cept in the latrine.43

  It’s while sitting in the latrine that Snafu starts a conversation with another soldier, who makes the flip scatological joke that it’s a “nice day for a bombing.” Snafu immediately spreads the rumor of an imminent bombing by the Germans—and like the telephone game, the rumor gets larger and wilder as it’s passed along. “Now shoot off your face!” demands the narrator as a man’s mouth morphs into a cannon. “And baloney is flying all over the place!”

  Geisel’s design sense was ideal for images of flying baloney, but there are also Seussian-influenced “rumor monsters”—direct descendants of the creatures Geisel had dreamed up to terrorize automobiles in his ads for motor oil—including birds with trumpets for beaks, chattering gas bags, and a horse-faced creature with sleepy eyes and a shock of white hair. The end of the cartoon finds Snafu in a straitjacket, quarantined because of “rumor-itis.” It was the animated equivalent of Dr. Seuss’s sprawling one-pagers in Judge or Life.

  While Geisel was continuing to serve as the primary producer and project officer for the Private Snafu cartoons, by early 1944 he was leaving more and more of the writing to others, turning frequently to thirty-five-year-old cartoonist P. D. Eastman to write and storyboard the cartoons. Eastman, a former animator for both Disney and Warner, was a fan of Dr. Seuss, and was delighted to have the opportunity to work directly for Geisel. With the writing and storyboarding in the capable hands of Eastman and others, Geisel’s duties as project officer mostly required him to run the administrative traps, which included getting all scripts approved and, as needed, cleared by the military to ensure Snafu didn’t give away any real military secrets.

  While Geisel understood the need to get all scripts sanctioned by headquarters, that didn’t make the governmental red tape any easier to tolerate. In another of Geisel’s unpublished cartoons depicting army life at Fort Fox, he drew himself standing in an office with his portfolio of scripts and storyboards under one arm, as two officers sword-fight over a particularly problematic page. “Keep it in!” the first officer says as he lunges while the other parries, shrieking, “Take it out!”44

  Even with multiple eyes on the work, some things nearly got missed. In the 1944 cartoon Private Snafu: Going Home, Snafu returns to the States, where he can’t resist bragging to friends, family, and strangers about his war service, carelessly revealing the location, missions, and weaknesses of his former unit—with disastrous results when the information gets into the wrong hands. At one point, Snafu mentions a superweapon—“a new flyin’ bazooka, with radar control!”—capable of destroying an entire island with one blast. The cartoon was finished and ready for distribution when military intelligence suddenly ordered, without explanation, that Geisel shelve the completed film. Not until more than a year later would Geisel realize why: the capabilities of his cartoon superweapon were a little too close to the properties of the atomic bomb, the classified weapons project currently being developed in laboratories in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Los Alamos, New Mexico. It wouldn’t be the last time Geisel would be so prescient about military weaponry.

  In early February 1944, Geisel was promoted to the rank of major—and Capra, it seems, was pleased enough with his work heading up the animation unit that he decided Geisel had earned a spot as project officer for a longer film. With the tide of the war in Europe beginning to turn, Capra had been advised to begin putting into production films explaining what would be expected of American soldiers after the fighting was over. And so, Capra assigned Geisel to Project 6010X, tentatively titled Your Job in Germany, tasked with educating American soldiers on how to responsibly interact with the Germans as a conquered nation.

  Apart from recognizing Geisel’s demonstrated skill heading up a project, Capra may also have felt that Ted, as an American of German extraction, was uniquely qualified to take on the subject. Geisel began consulting regularly with the War Department in Washington, D.C., to learn about the United States government’s official policies on Germany and the German people, commuting bicoastally in military transport planes nearly every week. “I’ve done almost enough traveling to last me from here on in, having flown half a million missions to the Pentagon building,” he told friends at Dartmouth.45 Sorting through reams of reports, classified documents, photographs, and miles of film, Geisel began working on the script for Your Job in Germany. “You are up against German history. It isn’t good,” wrote Geisel solemnly in his script. “The next war. That is why you occupy Germany. To make that next war impossible.” Geisel set out to guide viewers through a brief history of Germany and its would-be world conquerors, from Otto von Bismarck to Kaiser Wilhelm to Adolf Hitler. And in no uncertain terms, Geisel’s script held the German people responsible for continually propping up one fascist strongman after another. “Practically every German was part of the Nazi network,” wrote Geisel.

  For Geisel, the larger threat came not from the Germ
an people, but from the German youth. “Guard particularly against this group,” he warned in his script:

  They know no other system than the one that poisoned their minds. They’re soaked in it. Trained to win by cheating . . . they’ve heard no free speech, read no free press . . . Practically everything you’ve been trained to believe in, they’ve been trained to hate and destroy.

  For Ted, this wasn’t hyperbole; in his travels to Germany with Helen several years earlier, he’d seen firsthand the effects of German propaganda on German children, and it had alarmed him. He’d addressed the issue directly in one of his final cartoons for PM, showing Uncle Sam discharging a bellows labeled PSYCHOLOGICAL DISARMAMENT OF AXIS YOUTH into the ears of a German child. “We’ll have to clean a lot of stuff out before we put peace thoughts in,” says Uncle Sam.46

  While Geisel was a true believer when it came to the skeptical approach to German youth, he was much more dubious about the military’s policy of nonfraternization with the German people. Years earlier, Geisel had been moved by the plight of his own relatives in Bavaria. It broke Ted’s heart to think the official policy of the United States was to discourage even the smallest of human connection with a conquered people. He thought it was an “impossible and ill-advised” position for the government to take. “I strongly believed in everything that I wrote in this film with the exception of the Non-Fraternization conclusion,” he said later, “. . . which I wrote as an officer acting under orders . . . and later worked to get rescinded.”47 For now, though, Geisel wrote it like he meant it. “The German people are not our friends,” he wrote in his script for Your Job in Germany: