Becoming Dr. Seuss

by Brian Jay Jones

  “The Germans had folded up, but the Pentagon was concerned about keeping up the fighting morale of our troops until Japan was licked,” said Geisel. “At Fort Fox, we decided one way to do this was to scare them about the possible next war.”73 According to Geisel, he had read an article in The New York Times—or maybe it was a Buck Rogers comic strip, Geisel could never keep the story straight—that described “how there was enough energy in a glass of water to blow up half the world.”74 Geisel began writing a script in May 1945 describing how to harness that potential energy and use it in a weapon of mass destruction—a weapon that could be launched from a rocket activated by pushing a button a thousand miles away. It was “[all] about the next war being a push-button atomic war,” recalled Geisel.75

  The script landed on the desk of Paul Horgan, who immediately forwarded it to Vannevar Bush, head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Bush thought Geisel’s “extraordinary projection of the most lethal weapons” sounded a little too much like the highly classified Manhattan Project, which had recently exploded an atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert and was preparing the next one for the military to use on Axis civilians. Vannever ordered Horgan to immediately cancel Geisel’s project, and to destroy all storyboards and scripts.

  “I called Ted and he was devastated,” said Horgan.76 According to Geisel, Horgan also insisted he burn whatever source it was where he had gotten his information on such a weapon. Geisel later claimed he had burned The New York Times in a solemn ceremony. “Then I called Washington,” Geisel continued, “and said, ‘Mission accomplished, sir. We have burned the Times.’ ‘Well done, Geisel,’ I was told, then they went on with the war.”77

  According to Horgan, after he had canceled Geisel’s project, Horgan had gone to Europe for six weeks, during which time the United States detonated an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945. “When I returned, my secretary said, ‘Major Geisel has been making daily calls from the West Coast,’” said Horgan. “So I called back—and before I could say anything but ‘Hi, Ted,’ he said, ‘I understand everything now. All is forgiven.’”78 On August 15, due in part to the continued threat of what Geisel had called “a push-button atomic war,” Japan announced it was surrendering; the formal surrender would be signed on September 2, 1945. One final casualty was Know Your Enemy: Japan, which General Douglas MacArthur himself ordered be permanently shelved “due to change in policy governing occupation of Japan.” It would stay in his vaults until 1977.

  The war was over. And yet twelve days later, Geisel would be devastated by tragedy.

  On Friday, September 14, Ted’s sister, Marnie, was in the kitchen in the house on Fairfield, when she mentioned to her daughter, Peggy, now seventeen, that her left arm had gone numb and that she was feeling faint. “But she’d said that for years,” recalled Peggy. “She wouldn’t see a doctor.” Over the past few years, Marnie had grown increasingly angry, paranoid, and withdrawn as she sank deeper and deeper into alcoholism and depression. Lately, she had become convinced that her own family was conspiring against her; Peggy was certain her mother had suffered a complete nervous breakdown. That morning, shortly after announcing that she felt faint, Marnie collapsed in the kitchen and died of a heart attack at age forty-three.

  Marnie was buried in Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, close to her mother. Ted would be haunted by his sister’s death for the rest of his life. Whether he regretted that he’d fallen out of touch with Marnie as she’d grown more and more despondent—and whether there was a touch of guilt that his self-removal had played some small part in her decline—Ted never said; he would rarely speak of Marnie’s death with anyone. Peggy, a freshman at Katharine Gibbs business college in Boston, was invited to live in California with Ted and Helen, an offer Peggy gladly accepted. Perhaps it was Ted’s way of atoning for his own benign neglect of Marnie.

  Ted’s army term of service was ticking slowly toward its end; his days at Fort Fox were now numbered. Late in 1945, Geisel began working on the script for what would be his final project for the Army Signal Corps. With the war now officially over, American soldiers were being asked to occupy Japan—and Geisel, who had laid out how to successfully occupy Germany in Your Job in Germany, was now asked to do the same job for Japan. For help with Our Job in Japan, Geisel called on his colleague Carl Foreman—who, like Geisel, had also been involved with Know Your Enemy: Japan—and this time, unlike Your Job in Germany, there would be no loathsome policy of nonfraternization to enforce.

  Geisel was convinced that, no matter how bad Japanese atrocities might have been—and in Our Job in Japan, he and Foreman called them “so disgusting, so revolting, so obscene that [they] turned the stomach of the entire civilized world”—Geisel thought American fraternization was necessary for the Japanese to become the free and peaceful people they aspired to be. Geisel had come a long way since his “fifth column” cartoon in PM questioning the loyalties of Japanese Americans. Furthermore, he also warned American troops against “pushing people around,” a progressive directive that could have come straight out of one of Ingersoll’s PM editorials.

  Despite the friendly sentiments—or maybe because of them—Our Job in Japan was doomed to suffer the same fate as Know Your Enemy: Japan. After its completion in March 1946, General MacArthur asked the Army to pull the film from circulation; in fact, it wouldn’t be released at all and was thought lost until it was rediscovered and released as a curiosity in 1982.

  The film’s fate was of little concern to Geisel anyway; on Tuesday, January 8, 1946, Major Theodor Seuss Geisel, now forty-one years old, was awarded the Legion of Merit for “meritorious service in planning and producing films, particularly those utilizing animated cartoons for training, informing and enhancing the morale of the troops.”79 It was an award Geisel would remain particularly proud of for the rest of his life, always making certain it was included on his long list of honors and achievements even well into his seventies.

  Five days after receiving the Legion of Merit, Geisel was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel.

  And then on January 27, Lieutenant Colonel Geisel left active duty and returned to Helen and their hillside house on Wonder View Drive. Dr. Seuss was home from the war—and very uncertain about what to do next.

  CHAPTER 8

  A GOOD PROFESSION

  1946–1949

  On the evening of March 7, 1946, the 18th Academy Awards ceremony was held at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Inside, the theater was packed with a capacity crowd of 2,100; outside, those without tickets thronged Hollywood Boulevard in what one reporter called the “greatest demonstration of pomp the town has seen since before the war.”1 That evening, the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject went to the film Hitler Lives?, a film lifted almost entirely from Your Job in Germany. As the winning film’s title was announced that night, producer Gordon Hollingshead made his way to the stage to pick up the Oscar. “I didn’t get [the Oscar],” Geisel remarked. “The producers did. They don’t give Academy Awards for short documentaries to the creative people.”2

  In fact, Geisel wasn’t eligible to pick up the Oscar that night at all; while Hitler Lives? had borrowed heavily from Ted’s Your Job in Germany documentary for Capra—much of the film used Ted’s script verbatim—Ted’s name appeared nowhere on it. As Geisel later explained it, because Your Job in Germany was a government film, it was exempt from normal copyright protection. That made it fair game for director Don Siegel to tweak some of the images and redub most of the narration and for writer Saul Elkins to add some additional exposition. “They took our narrator’s voice off and put theirs in and brought it out as Hitler Lives?,” Geisel said with just a hint of exasperation. “And they got an Academy Award for it.”3

  The Academy Award arrived at a precarious moment in Geisel’s career. Since leaving the Army in early 1946, Ted had been somewhat uncertain of his postwar profession. With the filmmaking
skills he had honed while working with Capra, Geisel thought he might perhaps quit writing children’s books altogether in order to reinvent himself as a film writer, director, or editor—and the Academy Award just won by Hitler Lives? did much to make him attractive to more than a few movie studio executives. Shortly after Hitler Lives? picked up its award, in fact, Geisel was contacted by Warner Bros. producer Jerry Wald, who offered him a job as a screenwriter and script doctor at a hefty weekly salary of $500—worth about $6,000 today. It was a staggering salary, so it was perhaps little surprise Ted leapt at the offer. Better still, he and Helen could stay in their house on Wonder View Drive, which practically backed onto the Warner Bros. lot, while Ted commuted to the Warner offices.

  Wald steered Ted into an office at Warner, its walls lined with cabinets filled with prefabricated jokes that Ted, as a script doctor, could insert into screenplays in need of a quick laugh. Ted’s first real assignment, however, was to fix a “problem picture”4 based on a book Warner had recently acquired: psychiatrist Robert M. Lindner’s 1944 Rebel Without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath. Lindner’s book was more nonfiction than novel, essentially the transcripts of forty-six sessions of hypnotherapy he’d had with a criminal psychopath named Harold—a “maniac” in the language of the day. Whether Warner was looking to create a thriller or sexploitation film based on Lindner’s book is unclear—but Wald was unhappy enough with the current condition of the script to ask Geisel to spice things up by incorporating a character named Amy, who, Wald argued, was the most fascinating in the book.

  Geisel, who had been reading up on hypnotherapy and had read Lindner’s book front to back, was baffled by Wald’s demands. Lindner had made very few references to Amy beyond a few sentences, Geisel said, “in which Harold said, more or less, ‘Then I went to the country and met a girl called Amy. Her I never screwed.’”5 Under pressure from Wald, Geisel dutifully wrote and rewrote, under protest, until he abruptly quit the project—and Warner Bros.—in a pique of disgust. While Warner would test several young actors—including Marlon Brando—using early drafts of the script, the project was indefinitely postponed until 1954, when screenwriter/director Nicholas Ray would try again. Ray’s final screenplay, by screenwriter Stewart Stern, would bear little resemblance to Geisel’s script—or to Lindner’s original book, for that matter. The completed film would also make a movie star out of James Dean.

  Shutting the door on Wald and Warner also meant shutting off the $500 in relatively easy money that flowed into the Geisel bank account each week. But Geisel had no regrets. While he’d never been one to adhere to the edict of “follow your bliss,” he certainly wasn’t inclined to remain in a job that made him creatively and artistically miserable, either. Despite their still-meager returns, Geisel continued to have high hopes for the brat books. “We can live on one hundred dollars a week,” he explained to Chuck Jones. “If I could get five thousand dollars a year in royalties, I’d be set up for life!” Jones was unimpressed. “Don’t forget that good screenwriters are earning five times that much,” he reminded his friend. But Geisel was already moving on. “If I’d wanted to live that way, I’d never have left Warner,” he told Jones.6

  In the meantime, without a brat book in the works or Hollywood calling, Dr. Seuss was still in demand as an adman—and there were still plenty of campaigns to take on for Flit and Essomarine, including another boating brochure called The Log of the Good Ship, which Geisel populated with haughty fish and jaunty lobsters.7 And as it turned out, the Geisels weren’t long for their Wonder View address.

  Early in the summer of 1946, Ted took a call from Kelvin Vanderlip, the son of Frank Vanderlip, the wealthy banker who had regularly invited the Geisels to dinner parties in his New York home. Frank Vanderlip had died in 1937 but had left behind as part of his enormous estate a beautiful family retreat—which they called Villa Narcissa—built to resemble an old Italian castle in the hills of Palos Verdes, hugging the Pacific coastline. Kelvin wondered if perhaps Ted and Helen wanted to spend the summer at the estate, with its Mediterranean gardens and view of the Pacific Ocean, instead of in landlocked Hollywood, where the only water in sight was a reservoir to the south.

  Ted and Helen left almost immediately, making the thirty-five-mile drive south down the Pacific coast and up into the hills of Palos Verdes. From the terraces of Villa Narcissa, Ted could look southwest across an endless vista of colorful hills of palm trees and bougainvillea, out onto the Pacific Ocean, with Catalina Island visible against the far horizon. He told Helen he wanted to live there forever, in weather where he could “walk around outside in my pajamas.”8 Inspired by the landscape, Ted unwound by taking up watercolors, leaning his damp paintings up against the Villa Narcissa’s antique chairs to dry. He’d also started kicking around ideas for another children’s book, this one about a magical fishing spot, hoping he could somehow bring the lush pastels of his watercolor paintings to the pages of a new hardcover. Random House publisher Bennett Cerf, happy to hear Dr. Seuss was back at work again after nearly seven years, promised Ted he’d see what he could do.

  Despite the kerfuffle with Wald at Warner Bros., Ted remained optimistic that a career in film might still provide him with the financial security that the brat books weren’t—so when RKO president Peter Rathvon reached out to Geisel in late 1946, he was open to further conversation. And Rathvon, it seems, knew just what to say. For one thing, he clearly understood Ted’s annoyance at having his own work poached and repackaged as someone else’s film, as Warner had done with Your Job in Germany. Rathvon, who had seen a cut of Ted’s Our Job in Japan before the film was shelved by General MacArthur, was now proposing to turn that film into a full-length documentary—but unlike the suits at Warner Bros., Rathvon wanted Geisel to adapt his own screenplay himself. That would ensure that Geisel received the writing credit he deserved on the final documentary.

  This was a savvy play by a savvy executive—little surprise it worked. Geisel agreed to adapt his own script, and—to the extent permitted—oversee the film’s production. His only real condition was that Helen be permitted to join him as a credited cowriter, assisting with the research and—as she always did with his children’s books—helping him maintain a cohesive narrative. Rathvon willingly consented. This would be one of the last times Ted would get his way on the project.

  The Geisels spent most of the early part of 1947 taking apart Ted’s script for Our Job in Japan and reassembling it into a screenplay they were now calling Design for Death. Unlike the knuckle-bruising Ted had given the German people in Your Job in Germany, the Geisels’ portrayal of the Japanese was mostly sympathetic, depicting them as victims of generations of corrupt government leaders who had perversely wielded the Shinto religion to wage war. Relying on Helen for the background on Japanese history had been a particular boon for Ted, exposing just how badly researched the original Our Job in Japan had been. “I had to rely on the State Department for my research [for Our Job in Japan],” said Ted, who blamed the poor intelligence “on old men of ninety who had never been to Japan and who thought Shinto was a kind of hockey stick.”9

  Unfortunately, Ted and Helen provided the only steady hands on the wheel of Design for Death. Production became a revolving door: Rathvon was dismissed and replaced by producer Sid Rogell, who used the Design for Death payroll to employ friends and cronies, including Theron Warth and Richard Fleischer, who would be credited as executive producers for doing little more than moving around paperwork. Rogell wasn’t much better creatively, demanding one rewrite after another—by Ted’s count, the script was revised thirty-two times. As Ted wrote and rewrote, film editor Elmo Williams patiently assembled and reassembled a rough cut of the film. “Ted and I continued to do the important work,” said Williams, who compared his and Ted’s creative partnership to that of a writer and an illustrator.10

  It was a collaboration doomed from the start, due largely to Rogell’s dictatorial ways. For one of
the film’s final shots, Williams suggested to Geisel that they suspend a camera just off the ground and slowly drive through a military cemetery. Both men thought the final shot was artfully done and a profoundly moving summation of the film. “The effect was that you were looking at all of civilization buried in a mass grave,” said Williams proudly. “Ted and I felt our message had hit a home run.” But Rogell was having none of it, yelling, “What in the hell is that?” during the film’s first screening. The scene was cut. “Ted and I were stunned,” said Williams.11

  All in all, it was an experience Ted wanted to forget. “Confidentially, Helen and I are not too well pleased with the job,” he confessed to friends at Dartmouth:

  Censorship forced us into straddling lots of issues that should have been met straight on . . . Certain hunks of history are considered too hot to handle. The industry wants to please everyone and offend no one. That’s how they make money . . . But don’t quote that, or I’ll get fired out of Hollywood.12

  Ted was much happier with his other major project for 1947: McElligot’s Pool, the book he had promised to Bennett Cerf a year earlier, all about a little boy fishing in a small pool that may or may not open up into a gigantic underwater world of Seussian creatures. For his first book in seven years, Geisel had gone back to his roots in more ways than one—for McElligot’s Pool not only recalled a fond childhood memory of fishing with his father, but its main character was Marco, the very same little boy who had turned minnows into whales in And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. This time, rather than expanding on a simple horse and wagon, Marco conceives that tiny McElligot’s Pool might actually be deeper and larger than anyone imagined, bringing in increasingly larger and more exotic fish from faraway locales.