While it certainly seems as if a book all about a zoo may have been inspired by the days he spent with his father at the Springfield Zoo, Geisel said the idea had been spawned by a conversation he once had with his mother. The book, though, would end up being dedicated not to Nettie Geisel, but to his own godchildren, Toni and Michael Gordon Tackaberry Thompson, the children of New York friends Peggy Conklin and James “Bim” Thompson. Geisel particularly loved the way Michael’s name rolled out in what he called a “crazy iambic pentameter.” Perhaps inspired by the bounce of Thompson’s lively name, If I Ran the Zoo contains some of the spryest rhyming verse in any Dr. Seuss book. For instance, as Geisel describes a hunt in the mountains of Zomba-ma-Tant, he tells of trying to catch
. . . the fine fluffy bird called the Bustard
Who only eats custard with sauce made of mustard.
And, also, a very fine beast called the Flustard
Who only eats mustard with sauce made of custard.6
Geisel’s verse seems to have similarly inspired reviewers, who took great delight in writing their own assessments of the book in rhyme. “Such a mad lot of animals never could be. You won’t want to miss them. Believe me—you’ll see!”7 wrote a reviewer in the Chicago Tribune, while in the Akron Beacon Journal a similarly well-intentioned critic came up with, “It’s flat, funny and bright and the ideas are quite right. Isn’t this what you’d do, if you ran a zoo?”8 Riding rave reviews into Christmas 1950, If I Ran the Zoo quickly blew out of its first printing—one of the fastest-selling Dr. Seuss books since Horton Hatches the Egg.
The same year would also see Geisel publish several shorter stories in Redbook, including a trial run of If I Ran the Zoo, several return visits to characters from Mulberry Street with “Marco Comes Late” and “How Officer Pat Saved the Whole Town,” and the one-upmanship story “The Big Brag,” which would eventually make its way into the 1958 hardcover Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories. With these stories, Geisel was practicing some of what he had preached in his Utah workshop, writing stories that were short and punchy, with the rapid pacing of the loathed comic books. “Remember, you’re competing with the comic books,” Geisel had told his class. “They’re terrible, but they’re written for twentieth-century kids . . . get out of your rocking chairs. Get into your story fast or the children will yawn in your face.”9 Geisel was honing his own storytelling skills, sometimes telling a complete story in just a few verses or with just one or two illustrations.
Other times Geisel didn’t illustrate his short stories at all. One story in particular featured a little boy named Gerald McCloy10 who spoke only in sounds. Geisel shrewdly realized that telling the story effectively meant telling it not on paper, but through the use of sound effects. The story, called Gerald McBoing-Boing, would be successfully adapted as an audio story by Capitol Records, narrated by actor Harold Peary—in his over-the-top Great Gildersleeve persona—with Gerald speaking only in sound effects, including a very audible BOING! The only artwork Geisel would create for the story appeared on the record’s jacket, which featured a little boy in short pants loudly shrieking “Boing! Boing!” and startling his dog. It was a charming and innocuous project—and one that would take Geisel on an unexpected career detour, resulting in one undertaking that would win him an Academy Award and another that would sap his creative energy and derail his book-writing progress for nearly three years.
* * *
• • • •
In early 1950, Geisel met with an old friend, the artist Phil Eastman, who had served with him in the Signal Corps, where he had assisted on Private Snafu. After the war, Eastman had ended up at the nascent United Productions of America (UPA) animation studio, which was basking in two Academy Award nominations for its Fox and Crow cartoons and had more recently struck gold with the myopic character Mr. Magoo. Geisel was unimpressed with UPA; toward the end of the war, the studio had produced several of the Private Snafu cartoons, with less-than-spectacular results. But Eastman promised him that things were different now, boasting that UPA had upped its game and that Warner Bros. or Disney just couldn’t compete. “All the cartoons being made [by Warner and others] are obsolete. UPA has a fresh outlook,” he told Geisel, and appealed to his friend for some new content. “You must have a story idea for us,”11 said Eastman. For $500, Geisel sold Eastman and UPA the animation rights to Gerald McBoing-Boing.
Geisel handed Gerald over outright; perhaps because of his friendship with and trust in Eastman, Geisel never tried to micromanage the project. Even as the animators designed a new look for the character and modified some of the rhyming verses, Geisel was content to merely peer over their shoulders from time to time. In the hands of the UPA crew, the characters in Gerald McBoing-Boing would look nothing like Dr. Seuss drawings; the cartoon would instead be animated in the minimalist style that UPA would famously make its norm: little shading or depth of field, minimal backgrounds, and spare with its use of color. Geisel would receive a story credit, along with Eastman and UPA writer Bill Scott. “Don’t make fun of [Gerald],” Geisel advised the writers on the pages of the script. “He’s a success.”12
And so, too, was Gerald McBoing-Boing. Columbia Pictures, the cartoon’s distributor, would premiere the film on November 2, 1950, to make it eligible for the 1950 Academy Awards before officially releasing the cartoon on January 25, 1951. Eastman’s assessment of UPA’s abilities turned out to be correct; critics were nearly unanimous in their enthusiasm for the cartoon’s unique look and sense of humor. “Gerald brings beautiful simplicity of background, color, character drawing and movement to the screen,” wrote the Tampa Bay Times, adding that “[Gerald McBoing-Boing had] exploded years of mediocre cartooning.”13 In the Akron Beacon Journal, critic Sydney Harris hailed it as “witty and mature—and yet absurdly naïve enough to appeal to children.”14 In March 1951, Gerald McBoing-Boing won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short—the third Oscar-winning film based on one of Geisel’s scripts in five years.
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• • • •
Helen Geisel wasn’t well. Since her bout with polio as a child, Helen had watched her health warily—and now, at age fifty-two, she was always on the lookout for seemingly benign symptoms that could indicate more serious health issues. In early 1951, she was feeling mildly ill; she would get easily tired and was complaining of painful ulcers. Hoping to rest and recover her health, she and Ted retreated to the Tower for the rest of the winter—and with no book on the drawing table in Ted’s office at the moment, she and Ted could spend some time enjoying the sunshine and each other’s company.
There was other pleasant company at the Tower that spring as well; their niece Peggy had driven across the country in a green Oldsmobile, which was now parked in the Tower’s driveway as Peggy looked for work in La Jolla.15 For a few weeks, Peggy took up residence in the top floor of the Tower, playing canasta late into the evenings with Ted and Helen, casually shopping with them in Tijuana, and spending the days walking with Ted among the flowering bushes on the Mount Soledad hillside. “He was forever pausing beside some little blossom to identify it for me,” recalled Peggy, who noted with amusement that Ted identified every colorful bloom as a “California Wildflower.”16
The Geisels loved having Peggy around. Years earlier, Ted had fondly dubbed her “Peggy the Hoofer” because he was constantly making her run errands; he had even sketched a portrait of her diligently on task with the caption “I run errands for 50 cents.” Now at age twenty-three, the young woman referred to Ted and Helen by their first names, though she would playfully call Ted “Uncle Worm” for his aggressive card playing. Peggy would land a job at the Navy Electronics Laboratory in San Diego that spring, where she would shortly meet Navy lieutenant Albert Owens, an electrical engineer. Only a little more than a year later, she and Albert would marry in the Tower as the Geisels stood by proudly, with a well-tanned Ted beaming in a dapper gray suit and striped tie.
Eve
n between hillside walks with Peggy and late night games of canasta, Ted still found time to publish short stories in Redbook and other magazines, bringing back one of his most popular heroes for “Horton and the Kwuggerbug,” in which the well-intentioned elephant is taken advantage of yet again by another creature who strictly holds him to the credo “a deal’s a deal.” There was also “The Rabbit, the Bear and Zinniga-Zanniga,” all about a rabbit who outsmarts a bear by telling him his head is crooked, and “The Bippolo Seed,” a story of wishes gone awry. But there was no major brat book in the works and wouldn’t be for some time; Hollywood had turned Geisel’s head yet again.
While working with Sid Rogell and RKO on Design for Death in 1947 had been a misery, Geisel remained hopeful that his experience there had been the exception, not the rule. So when Columbia Studios, still flush from the success of Gerald McBoing-Boing, offered Geisel $35,000—more than $300,000 in today’s money—to develop a proposal for a feature-length live-action film, Geisel viewed it as an easy opportunity to revive his aborted career as a screenwriter. He had good reason to be optimistic; whether as the uncredited author of the source material (Hitler Lives!), the credited screenwriter (Design for Death), or the credited author of the original story (Gerald McBoing-Boing), Geisel’s last three films had each won an Academy Award—a hot streak in Hollywood few if any screenwriters could match.
Geisel set to work outlining a story about a young boy named Bart Collins—yet another Bartholomew—and his widowed mother, a heroic plumber, and a sinister piano teacher named Dr. Terwilliker. The bulk of the story involved a musical dream sequence full of chases, escapes, and lots of sneaking around, culminating in the conniving Dr. Terwilliker demanding that five hundred of his young pupils, including Bart, play his symphony on a gigantic two-story piano. Geisel titled his movie The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T., and pitched it to studio executives as a “vicious satire,” though what it was satirizing wasn’t quite clear. Nevertheless, Columbia was thrilled to have the first full-length live-action feature written by Dr. Seuss, filled with Seussian contraptions and elaborate sets that Geisel was confident studio designers and carpenters could bring vibrantly to life.
On April 27, 1951, Geisel was paired with an up-and-coming thirty-seven-year-old producer named Stanley Kramer, who had so wowed Columbia with the film Cyrano de Bergerac that the studio permitted him to open his own production unit within the company. As part of his new contract with Columbia, then, Kramer was committed to producing twenty films over five years, each with a budget of at least $1 million. The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. would be among his first for the studio.17
It seemed an ideal pairing. Like Geisel, Kramer had served in the Signal Corps during the war, eventually attaining a rank of lieutenant; politically, both were progressives, and creatively, each bristled at the idea of ceding control of their work to others. Kramer, too, was a fan of Dr. Seuss, calling Dr. T. “one of my favorite properties” and one that he “very much wanted to direct.”18 But Kramer was already at war with Harry Cohn, Columbia’s swaggering studio chief, whom Kramer called “vulgar, domineering, semiliterate . . . and some might say malevolent”19—and Cohn “wasn’t ready”20 to let Kramer cross over from producing to directing. A frustrated Kramer would shortly leave the studio and slide into the director’s chair at his own independent company, eventually helming a number of iconic films, including Judgment at Nuremberg and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
As always, Geisel took his obligations seriously, even renting a house on North Kingsley Drive in Hollywood so he could be readily available for any meetings with Kramer and cowriter Allan Scott as the script progressed. Weekends would still be spent at the Tower—but even here, Geisel was hunched over his desk, handwriting notes, then banging away on the typewriter. Writing a script every two weeks for Capra had taught Geisel how to write a script relatively quickly—but his first draft still came in at a staggering 1,200 pages, as Geisel tried to metaphorically address gigantic issues like world conquest and oppression.21 By August, he was deep into rewrites, bouncing around ideas with Scott and paring down parts of the script that were too pricey or too difficult to film. Helen watched in mild disappointment as the year dragged on with no vacations, no book on the drawing board, and no real free time together. “This picture is really such a long-time dream of Ted’s that whatever we have to give up to do it is really of no importance,” she wrote in a lengthy letter to her niece Barbara Bayler.22
One of the things Geisel was really giving up was his creative independence. While he had a modicum of control over the script, the majority of the production was completely out of his hands. If Geisel was hoping to have the kind of friendly collaboration with Kramer and Scott on Dr. T. that he’d had with Capra and Phil Eastman on Private Snafu, he was doomed to disappointment. Decisions were kicked upstairs to be made by committees of faceless executives at Columbia who passed the scripts back with stained pages and cryptic notes. With Kramer forced to cede the director’s chair, the task was assigned to Roy Rowland, a competent if uninspired choice—his forte was dramas like Witness to Murder and Scene of the Crime, not musical fantasies like Dr. T. The project became mired in studio stinginess, with budget projections being recalibrated, slashed, reconfigured, then slashed again. Any joy in the project soon evaporated.
Writing slowed to a crawl. By late September, Geisel was still working on the revised second draft, penciling on the red cover of his script the names of twenty songs he was writing. One of the very few pleasures left in the film was that he was being permitted to write the lyrics for the movie’s various musical numbers, and Geisel sent his scripts back to Kramer, indicating where in the movie he thought the songs should be inserted. At one point, he spent days fussing over a lyric using the word Chopin, trying out the names of several other composers to see if any fit the meter better. “[The songs] are really so lovely that I feel quite optimistic about the whole thing being a success,” Helen wrote hopefully. “Maybe we’ll make a lot of money. In that case we’ll go to Ireland, Japan, South Africa, and Siam.”23 But by November, even Helen was worried that Hollywood had seriously sidetracked Dr. Seuss. While Geisel had started a new book called Scrambled Eggs Super!, his priorities were elsewhere. “Alas, alas, we have no book this year,” Helen told Barbara, “and if this film doesn’t hurry up, we’re likely not to have one next year, either.”24
Unfortunately, the film wasn’t about to hurry up. Besides writing the script, Geisel had spent the last several months sketching designs for sets, costumes, and characters, hoping to maintain some vestige of control over the look of the film. There were street signs made of gloved hands, ladders climbing up to nowhere, and a terrific drawing of Dr. Terwilliker in his costume for the final concert, with epaulets at his shoulders, a military jacket with medallions, and a “white beaver busby” hat. But budget cuts had slowed the progress of the studio architects, carpenters, and seamstresses charged with making Geisel’s designs tangible—and Ted, feeling he was expending too much energy justifying his value to the project, finally decided he’d had enough. Just after New Year’s Day 1952, he notified Kramer he was quitting.
Kramer pled with Geisel to stay, telling him the only way the film could be saved was if he remained attached to it. Kramer promised to take Geisel’s concerns seriously—the budget would be increased to more than $2 million, making it one of Kramer’s most expensive films at Columbia—and Geisel was permitted to submit a final version of the script by the end of January, removing any scenes he considered “vulgar.”25 The final script, credited to Dr. Seuss and Allan Scott, landed on Kramer’s desk on January 30. Geisel would never really be happy with it, feeling he had conceded far too much to the whims of Kramer and executives at Columbia.
Rehearsals began in early February, even as sets were still being built across several enormous sound stages, with carpenters working in shifts that kept hammers flying around the clock. Real-life married couple Peter Lind Hayes and Mary Healy
(“broken-down, middle-aged nightclub comics,” groaned Geisel)26 arrived to rehearse their dance routines, as did Hans Conried, an accomplished radio actor with a malleable face and distinctive voice who had been tapped to play the dastardly Dr. Terwilliker. “We rehearsed for eight weeks,” remembered Conried, “an extravagance that I as a bit player had never known.”27
Still, production continued to lag as sets remained uncompleted, and Geisel and Allan Scott continued tinkering with the script, arriving on set with their revised final draft on February 25, 1952. Shooting would begin shortly after that, on beautifully finished sets that really did look as if Dr. Seuss drawings had magically popped into the real world. Furniture and windows bulged with Seussian curves and irregular geometry. A gigantic two-story piano wound through Dr. T.’s concert hall, and there were slanted doorways, curving slides, and bending ladders for nine-year-old Tommy Rettig, playing hero Bart Collins, to clamber over and through. Production designer Rudolph Sternad had delivered.
Geisel was on set for most of the filming, standing patiently behind director Roy Rowland, with a well-thumbed script in his hand. Tommy Rettig recalled seeing Geisel lounging in a chair during the long downtime between takes, doodling on the pages of his script. “Mostly he would sit there sketching the next set, or the next scene, showing things to the director and cameraman about how he pictured it,” said Rettig. “It was so much fun . . . I mean, just to be able to run up to Dr. Seuss’s chair and watch him draw in his script. It was really an outstanding experience.”28
It was not, however, an outstanding experience for Dr. Seuss. Despite the increased budget, Kramer had still cut some serious corners; for one thing, there weren’t the resources to hire five hundred boys—the 5,000 fingers of the title—needed to play the gigantic piano for the finale. “There wasn’t enough money to do what should really have been a musical extravaganza,”29 recalled Kramer, who could only afford to pay for a little more than a hundred boys. Kramer also made the colossal mistake of paying the boys in cash—and one afternoon, as a gigantic thunderstorm raged outside, the bored boys, with their pockets full of money, all filed down to the studio commissary to buy armloads of hot dogs and junk food, then gorged themselves and immediately became sick. “This started a chain reaction causing one after another of the boys to go queasy in the greatest mass upchuck in the history of Hollywood,” said Geisel.30 Even director Roy Rowland, his nerves fraying, had to be taken to the hospital “at the end of his rope,” recalled Geisel. “It was the damnedest, nerve-rackingest, screamingest experience of my life.”31
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