Becoming Dr. Seuss

by Brian Jay Jones

  It was an elegant, albeit controversial, conclusion. “I used the word burp, and nobody had ever burped before in the pages of a children’s book,” said Ted. “It took a decision from the president of the publishing house before my vulgar turtle was permitted to do so.”23 The Hitler metaphor, however, went unquestioned.

  Yertle the Turtle was published in April 1958—around the time Ted, Helen, and Phyllis Cerf were starting their hunt for Beginner Books authors—and landed in bookstores matter-of-factly, with excited announcements of its arrival but few real reviews. It was the third Dr. Seuss book in two years; for most, that was enough. The book would go on to be one of the best-loved and most-talked-about Dr. Seuss books—a relief to Ted, who knew he was taking a chance by writing a book with an explicit message. While readers had long been reading morals into his previous books—the Grinch was a favorite to pick through—Ted usually insisted they were reading too much into things. “There is a moral inherent in any damn thing you write that has a dramatic point,” he argued pointedly. “People change places, and with any resolution of conflict or narrative motion, a moral is implied.” But that wasn’t the case with Yertle, who was “a deliberate parable of the life of Hitler.”24

  While most readers were thrilled to watch the tyrannical Yertle get his comeuppance at the end, there were some who later puzzled over Dr. Seuss’s final couplet:

  And the turtles, of course . . . all the turtles are free

  As turtles and, maybe, all creatures should be.25

  In an interview, Geisel was asked why his concluding line used the equivocal maybe instead of the more definitive surely. “I qualified that in order to avoid sounding too didactic or like a preacher on a platform,” Ted explained. “And I wanted other persons, like yourself, to say ‘surely’ in their minds instead of my having to say it.”26

  Geisel had dedicated Yertle the Turtle to the families of two of his oldest and dearest friends: his Dartmouth classmate Donald Bartlett, and Joseph Sagmaster, who had formally introduced Helen to Ted at Oxford. Perhaps because of his newly prominent role as a leading advocate for children’s literacy, Ted was feeling particularly in awe of Bartlett, one of Dartmouth’s most respected educators. “I stack you up on the top of my list as one of the greatest successes I have ever known,” Geisel wrote to his old friend. “You are tops among the few dedicated people who are doing the most important, most under-paid goddamn necessary job in the world. You are doing what I didn’t have guts enough to do, because I took the easier path. A much much easier path than you have taken.”27

  Bartlett, with perhaps an equal reverence for Geisel, generously offered to host the Geisels in Hanover in the late summer of 1958. It was partly a thank-you for the dedication in Yertle the Turtle, but Bartlett had other motives as well: Geisel had recently promised his alma mater he would donate his original manuscripts to the college in his will—and maybe, he hinted, a little bit more—and Dartmouth was eager to show its appreciation. The Geisels made the trip to Hanover, and Ted trekked over to meet Bartlett on the Dartmouth campus, where he was stunned to find the faculty had arranged to have him greeted by reception committee, which included nearly a hundred children dressed as Dr. Seuss characters. After being serenaded by the costumed children, Ted was led to an old convertible Packard Phaeton and slowly driven around the campus, where he was swarmed by even larger crowds of children, who pressed scraps of paper and copies of The Cat in the Hat and Yertle the Turtle into his hands to be autographed.

  Ted was furious about all the fuss and grumbled to Bartlett that he was reconsidering his promise to donate his manuscripts. He eventually cooled down—“Dartmouth will always be number one for me,” he said28—and insisted that he had only been joking. “They don’t come any better than Ted,” said Bartlett later, sounding slightly relieved. “He has a wonderful sense of humor and is always fun to be with.”29 In the end, however, most of Geisel’s original manuscripts would be donated to the University of California at San Diego, much closer to La Jolla.

  Regardless of Geisel’s discomfort at being paraded around campus, however, there was no denying that crowds of fans were becoming inevitable—and in late 1958, with Yertle the Turtle selling strongly and Beginner Books picking up steam, Bennett Cerf made the decision to pair Geisel with a savvy new sales and marketing manager, a freckled thirty-four-year-old named Robert Bernstein. Bernstein had started his career running errands at rival publisher Simon & Schuster, and as he slowly made his way up in the corporate structure, he discovered he had a knack for the marketing of children’s books and authors. During his twelve years with Simon & Schuster, Bernstein had worked diligently with Eloise creator Kay Thompson on marketing and securing her subsidiary rights—earning the eternal gratitude of Ms. Thompson, who continued to retain Bernstein’s services even after he was hired away by Bennett Cerf.

  Now in his first months as a sales manager for Random House, Bernstein was itching to get his hands on Dr. Seuss. Bernstein was immediately smitten with Geisel, finding him “charming, modest, and funny,” and explained that he wanted to apply to Dr. Seuss the same strategy he’d brought to Eloise: promotion, promotion, promotion. “I told [Ted] that we could really increase his sales if children got to know Dr. Seuss,” recalled Bernstein, who suggested sending Geisel on a book tour of some of the major midwestern and northeastern booksellers, most of which were large department stores. “Author tours weren’t really a commonplace thing,” said Bernstein, “but I thought the publicity we could generate through word of mouth would be more valuable than any advertising we could do.”30

  And so Bernstein had arranged for Geisel to visit ten cities, stretching from Boston to Minneapolis, where he would sit for press conferences and lunches, meet with store managers and librarians, and sign books for crowds that seemed to only grow larger as he moved from city to city. At Marshall Field & Company in Chicago, the line snaked through most of the department store, requiring five ushers to keep things organized and moving. In Detroit—where Geisel arrived by helicopter, to the delight of shrieking children—the Northland branch of Hudson’s department store had to stay open an extra two hours to accommodate the crowds, while the central branch was so mobbed during Geisel’s signing that his table was eventually moved from the cramped book section to the larger cafeteria. In Cleveland, Higbee’s department store required tickets for Geisel’s appearance, and were stunned when all five hundred tickets immediately sold out. On the day of Geisel’s signing, the line of ticket holders stretched out the door, with patrons standing in the rain for more than an hour just for the opportunity to shake the hand of Dr. Seuss.31

  Despite his distaste for crowds or public appearances, Geisel found he enjoyed meeting with his readers, who came in all ages, colors, and sizes. Ted took special care to spend a few moments with each child as he or she approached his table, and objected when one store began removing from the autograph line any children who hadn’t purchased a book for him to sign; Ted made it a policy of signing almost anything a child put in front of him, whether it was a book, an index card, or a crumpled piece of paper. Still, being Dr. Seuss came with its hazards; at one store, a woman carrying a two-year-old on her shoulder—with “his fist in his mouth,” recalled Geisel—sidled over to his table and told her son to remove his hand from his mouth to shake hands with Dr. Seuss. “And he did,” said Geisel, shuddering only slightly at the memory.32 But “meeting all those kids was wonderful,” he said later.33

  He also liked Bob Bernstein, who shared his affinity for practical jokes. During a signing in Chicago, Geisel found himself shadowed by a local entertainer dressed in Native American attire and called Chief White Cloud, who prowled the lines of autograph seekers, chatted up parents, and then signed his own name in copies of Yertle the Turtle or The Cat in the Hat. At Geisel’s request, Bernstein shooed away the interloper—but a few days later, at a stop in Minneapolis, Bernstein sneakily scrawled Chief White Cloud on the title page of a few
books. When Ted saw the signature, he roared with laughter. “Bob!” he shouted to Bernstein. “The damned Indian has followed us all the way to Minneapolis!”34

  It was Bernstein, too, who badgered Geisel into permitting his characters to be licensed for marketing—a creative decision that had made Kay Thompson a very rich woman. While Geisel had allowed some very limited marketing of his creations in the past, like the mounted Seuss animal heads, these were the exceptions, not the rule—and Geisel had been largely in control of the products anyway. But Bernstein could practically smell the money to be made in an officially sanctioned line of Dr. Seuss merchandise. “Once started, a property develops like a snowball rolling down a mountain,” Bernstein wrote in a memo to Donald Klopfer. “I’ve worked myself into an absolute frenzy thinking about merchandising Dr. Seuss.”35

  Dr. Seuss was skeptical, but Bernstein was persuasive—and in 1958, the Revell company was permitted to produce a series of small, colorful plastic Seussian animals with removable arms, heads, legs, and other body parts that could be assembled and reassembled in nearly infinite ways. Revell, known for their plastic model kits, was thrilled to have a licensed Dr. Seuss product, but at a cost: namely, Geisel insisted on being involved in nearly every step of the process, even providing the sculpted molds that Revell’s engineers would use to cast the figures. “I would sculpt them, and the engineer would work them, and I would resculpt them, and the engineer would change them, and I would resculpt them and so on,” said Geisel.36 Figures were reworked constantly so they could stand on their own when assembled. “None of my animals have joints and none of them balance,”37 Geisel sighed. As the plastic figures moved through production, Geisel would hover over the engineers as they worked at the Revell factory in Venice, California—the same factory that made plastic parts for Convair aircraft—and look for any imperfections. At one point, he confessed to “causing a hullaballoo over the animals not fitting,” thus forcing Revell to shut down their production line for ten hours until the problem was resolved.38

  The fuss, however, seemed worth it. “The hottest items we have for pure enthusiasm,” announced Revell—and Geisel had to admit he loved playing with the plastic figures, even permitting Revell to photograph him pulling them apart and reassembling them, one eyebrow cocked approvingly at the camera. The toys went on sale in September 1959 and quickly became one of Revell’s bestselling products. Bernstein had been right: people wanted Dr. Seuss toys.

  Bennett Cerf, too, could come up with his own savvy marketing initiatives. A witty raconteur, Cerf had become something of a household name with his regular appearances on the CBS-TV quiz show What’s My Line? Cerf had run a charm offensive with executives at CBS and secured Geisel an appearance on the show To Tell the Truth, where celebrity panelists tried to decide which of three gentlemen before them was the real Dr. Seuss. Only one panelist, the entertainment reporter Hy Gardner, chose Geisel—even though “he doesn’t look like a cartoonist,” said Gardner—with most of the panelists voting for a grinning gentleman named Burton Browne, who turned out to be the founder of a series of gentleman’s nightclubs.

  For the most part, though, Cerf stayed out of the way, preferring to cheer Geisel on with encouraging notes and to count the money Random House was making as the distributor for Beginner Books. In March of 1959, he enthusiastically reported to Geisel that after only eight months, sales of Beginner Books were exploding. “The net result is simply amazing,” Cerf wrote, “and I doubt whether anything like it has ever been pulled off in the whole damn publishing business heretofore.”39 He also asked Geisel for one of the Revell model kits—“so that I can play with it myself!”—and told Ted and Helen he was setting aside “a whole office here for Beginner Books, but don’t want to do anything definite until you both get here and can approve it in person.”40

  Ted definitely approved—surprising, since the space had been conceived by Phyllis, who had envisioned the area as a whimsical attic taking up most of the sixth floor. A false floor had been constructed to elevate the entire Beginner Books suite to halfway to the ceiling, accessible by a short flight of carpeted stairs. This had the effect of pushing the Beginner Books offices up under the eaves of the sixth floor, giving their headquarters the look and feel of a clubhouse for grown-ups. Ted loved it, decorating desks with silly nameplates for nonexistent staff—there was one for Dr. Valerie Vowel, Director of Consonants—and making signs with colorful arrows pointing the way for visitors the moment they stepped off the elevator. One sign read etaoinshrdlu—an in-joke among publishers, as it was the lettering sequence linotype typesetters used to fill blank lines—while at the foot of the stairs leading to the office door was an arrow-shaped sign reading, “This way to Dr. Schmierkase,”41 the name of a fictional editor Ted had created solely to take the blame for rejecting manuscripts.42

  The West Coast headquarters for Beginner Books wasn’t nearly as quirky; it was mostly just Helen’s office, which had been built into one section of the garage at the Tower. Framed and hanging on one wall was a needlepoint given to her by Phyllis Cerf of the Cat in the Hat, on which Phyllis herself had embroidered THIS CAT STARTED A PUBLISHING HOUSE. NO OTHER CAT CAN MAKE THIS CLAIM. While Helen was content to let Ted—or at least, Dr. Seuss—remain the public face of Beginner Books, she, too, was actively involved in the recruitment of authors and editing of their books. And like Ted, she, too, was squabbling with Phyllis.

  For Helen, the contentious book was You Will Go to the Moon by Mae and Ira Freeman, who had written several children’s science books for Random House, like Fun with Astronomy. Helen found the Freemans’ main character to be “lunkheaded,” and argued that they had depicted the moon as “a dusty, rather disappointing locale.” Phyllis, as she had done during her dispute with Ted over Sam and the Firefly, opted to pull rank on Helen and consulted first with noted chemist and Nobel laureate Harold Urey—who confirmed that the moon was, indeed, dusty and disappointing—then went straight to Bennett Cerf and demanded he order Helen to accept the Freemans’ book. Helen grudgingly accepted You Will Go to the Moon, but the Ted-Helen-Phyllis relationship would continue to erode. Bennett Cerf, meanwhile, with his head spinning, pled with the Beginner Books team to stop recruiting from his roster of Random House authors. (That prohibition, however, didn’t apply to Cerf himself, who would have several books published under the Beginner Books imprint, including Bennett Cerf’s Book of Laughs and Bennett Cerf’s Book of Animal Riddles.)

  Cerf’s ban on poaching Random House talent also didn’t discourage Ted from going after one of Cerf’s breakout authors, Truman Capote, whose novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s had been a sensation on its publication in 1958. Unfortunately, Capote had delivered a disappointing first draft, and Ted didn’t have the nerve to deliver the bad news, leaving the task to Phyllis, who “had to tell Truman that Ted didn’t feel it publishable.”43 Years later, Ted was happy to let the story of Capote’s rejected children’s book transform into something of an urban legend that concluded with Ted firing Capote, instead of Phyllis.

  Author selection aside, Ted was continuing to lay down a strict set of rules for authors to follow, usually having to do with the relationship between the text and the art. There could only be one drawing per page, for instance, and the illustration could not show anything that wasn’t included in the text—and to the extent possible, illustrations should contain as many of the items mentioned in the accompanying text. Some authors grumbled that Ted was trying to turn each book into a Dr. Seuss book—but Ted really believed he had done enough time in the trenches to know what worked best. “If a book pleases me, it has a chance of pleasing children,” he explained.44 “I changed the rules, based on my belief that a child could learn any amount of words if fed them slowly, and if the books were amply illustrated. We began to concentrate our efforts on linking the artwork with the text.”45

  Ted also continued to rail against any authors who he thought were writing down to children (“They s
ee right through you,” he warned would-be authors)46 or—worse—tried to write the kind of book they thought kids were supposed to read, which usually resulted in Ted dismissing their manuscript as one of the dreaded Bunny Bunny books. He was also a stickler about ensuring stories had an internal consistency. “Children are tough critics,” said Ted. “You can’t kid kids. They have a relentless sense of logic.”47 His own approach, he said, was to stick to what he called “logical insanity.” “If I start with a two-headed animal, I must never waver from that concept,” he explained. “There must be two hats in the closet, two toothbrushes in the bathroom, and two sets of spectacles on the night table.”48

  The logical insanity seemed to be working; by mid-1959, Beginner Books, with first printings of more than 60,000 each, was becoming one of the most profitable lines at Random House, surging past even the distinguished Modern Library imprint. “Whoopee! We’re in the black after four months!” wrote Helen after learning of their profits.49 Ted’s own “Big Books,” too, were selling so briskly that they earned him $200,000 in 1959—about $1.7 million today—easily outpacing the earnings of most bestselling novelists of the time. Ted’s latest book, Happy Birthday to You!, released in November that year, would continue the string of Seussian successes, blowing through its print run of 100,000 copies in only a few weeks.

  Happy Birthday to You! was a beautifully produced book, with each page painted in rich, full color—his first full-color book since McElligot’s Pool. Following the flight of the Birthday Bird in the Land of Katroo as it guides a child through all-day birthday festivities, Happy Birthday to You! was also a celebration of one’s own uniqueness, containing what would become one of Dr. Seuss’s most inspiring and oft-quoted couplets: