Becoming Dr. Seuss

by Brian Jay Jones

  What had happened was that Ted and Audrey were in love.

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  • • • •

  Geisel spent much of 1964 working on two books he hoped to have completed by early 1965: the Beginner Book Fox in Socks and the Big Book I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew. The name Solla Sollew, like many Seussian names, had been inspired by a real person, in this case the president of La Jolla Federal Savings and Loan Association, and friend of the Geisels, named Sibley Sellew. Ted had struggled with the book, which featured one of his wordiest and most complicated story lines as it followed his narrator on a journey to the City of Solla Sollew, “where they never have troubles! At least, very few.”19 The Geisels spent several weeks in Australia, giving Ted an opportunity to clear his head and Helen the chance to have Ted’s undivided attention, free from the Dimonds, for perhaps the first time in months. Geisel loved Australia and would always be impressed with how literate the Australians were. “Ted should be put on the Chamber of Commerce for Australia,” joked Helen. “He tells everyone he would get there in a minute to start life again if he were twenty years younger.”20

  Geisel’s peace of mind would fade the moment he returned to his desk in La Jolla and to Solla Sollew, eventually becoming so distraught that he exhausted even Helen’s seemingly infinite patience. “About two weeks before the completion of every book, he seems to go into a tailspin,” Helen wrote to Anne Marcovecchio with slight exasperation. “[He] decides that nothing in the book is any good, that he can’t possibly finish it, and . . . I have a great job to do in keeping everything from falling in the scrap basket. I’m at my wit’s end trying not to be rude.”21 To her frustration, her own health had begun to decline again, and she feared she was beginning to go blind.

  Ted would deliver I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew in April 1965. The staff at Random House gathered excitedly to listen to Ted read it aloud in Cerf’s office, “suitably the grandest in that very grand building,” remembered Michael Frith. “High-ceilinged, wood paneled . . . it looked by then like a classic, old-line men’s club library, [with] his large desk in front of the tall windows looking out on Madison Avenue with St. Patrick’s Cathedral across the street.” Ted would carefully read each page, holding up the drawings as he did so. “They were, of course, as integral to the experience as the text,” said Frith warmly.22

  Despite his year of reworking and revising, Geisel was still unhappy with Solla Sollew, calling it “not one of my more successful books.”23 Parents tended to enjoy it more than younger readers, perhaps appreciating its more complex plot and what seemed like a constant stream of new characters on every page. “I have a secret following among adults, but they have to read me when no one is looking,” said Ted.24

  But if Solla Sollew failed to find the kind of crossover appeal typical of most Dr. Seuss books, that certainly couldn’t be said of the Beginner Book Geisel delivered that same year, the rocking and rollicking Fox in Socks. “Take it slowly, this book is dangerous!” joked Geisel25—and the cover copy actually dared kids to “READ ALOUD to find out just how smart your tongue is.”26 With a come-on like that, it was little wonder the book would become one of the bestselling and best-loved Dr. Seuss books, with sales surpassing three million copies by the end of the twentieth century. Most readers, however, paid scant attention to Ted’s dedication page, which proclaimed the book was for his neighbors “Mitzi Long and Audrey Dimond of the Mt. Soledad Lingual Laboratories.” Ted and Audrey’s devotion was there in plain sight, if one knew where to look.

  Geisel would make another appearance as Theo. LeSieg that summer, writing the Beginner Book I Wish That I Had Duck Feet, with art by Barney Tobey. The LeSieg books were still the recovery room for manuscripts Ted felt he had to rescue and rehabilitate—sometimes with hard feelings. While the worst thing Geisel could tell an artist was that something in his or her work “made my teeth hurt,” for a writer, it was learning that a submitted manuscript had been deemed so unusable that it would be completely rethought, rewritten, and reassembled, often Frankenstein-style, and published under the LeSieg pseudonym. Geisel, in fact, had had a falling-out with Mike McClintock over a Beginner Book at some point—an experience that left such a bad taste in Ted’s mouth that when McClintock died suddenly in 1967, Ted refused to donate to a memorial service for the man who had given him his first big break in publishing in 1937.27

  Helen, too, was working hard on Beginner Books—“toiling busily away,” she said, while at the same time “tiptoeing around the house so as not to disturb” Ted.28 For some time, they had slept in separate bedrooms—mostly an accommodation to Ted’s late hours, so he could retire to bed at two in the morning without disturbing Helen—but lately it seemed each was being particularly mindful of staying out of the way of the other.

  Bennett Cerf, meanwhile, was actively wooing a suitor of his own: the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which he hoped would purchase Random House for his asking price of nearly $40 million. Despite Cerf’s ambitions, it was an odd transaction. “Large corporations like RCA and IBM were buying up publishers in the 1960s because they thought the computer would be primarily a teaching tool,” explained Bob Bernstein. “The thinking was that educational publishers would provide the software for the hardware owned by these corporations.”29 Oddly, however, RCA couldn’t have cared less about Beginner Books as a potential educational publisher; its executives instead were more excited about the textbook publisher L. W. Singer that Random House had recently acquired at a fire sale price. RCA would make the deal official in early 1966, and Bennett Cerf would slide over to a seat on the RCA board of directors, while Bob Bernstein would take over as Cerf’s handpicked successor. For Geisel, who also owned stock in Random House, it was both a profitable and happy transaction: he had gone from working for Cerf, who admired him, to Bernstein, who adored him.

  It was a benevolent, beneficent, and significantly wealthier Cerf who showed up in San Diego that February to attend, at Ted’s request, a Dr. Seuss–themed charity ball benefitting the San Diego Children’s Hospital. Ted and Helen, both fighting the flu, attended as guests of honor, with Ted in a tux and Helen looking elegant in a white dress with pearls and gloves. More than a thousand guests danced among gigantic cutouts of Dr. Seuss characters, with Seuss animals serving as centerpieces, hanging from the balconies and chandeliers, and marching across the front of the menu, which featured items like “roast beast au jus Seuss.”30 Cerf made a brief but rousing speech in which he remarked that “when a country stops laughing at itself, it’s in trouble,” and only slightly scuttled his goodwill by endorsing Democrat Tom Braden in his ultimately unsuccessful bid for governor of California.31

  One of Ted’s original oil paintings, an abstract titled Chase in the Forest, was auctioned off for $2,800, though the winner was not one of its most persistent bidders: Phyllis Cerf. But the one item nearly everyone wanted to take home that evening was the program Ted had designed for the event, filled with Seussian characters climbing around ads purchased by local businesses, and “so clever that no one would want to give one up.”32 One of those local businesses with a large ad in the program was Marvin K. Brown Cadillac—a name Geisel would file away and use, in only somewhat modified form, several years later.

  * * *

  • • • •

  Only days before the charity ball, Geisel received a note from an old friend who wanted to discuss adapting a Dr. Seuss book into an animated cartoon. It wasn’t the first time such an entreaty had been made. “Everybody wanted to make a series,” said Geisel, but he was skeptical; most television producers, he said, wanted to “bat ’em out fast and use up my whole life’s work in a year.”33 But this plea was different from the others. It came from someone Ted knew and respected—someone he’d worked with on Private Snafu cartoons during the war, and who knew exactly what he was doing. “Maybe you don’t think I can draw your character,” said the note, under which was a nearly perfe
ct rendering of the Cat in the Hat to prove otherwise.34 And underneath that was the author’s crabbed signature: Chuck Jones.

  Jones, now fifty-four, had recently been let go from Warner Bros., after more than thirty years of turning out one iconic cartoon for the studio after another. Now he was in charge of MGM Animation, where he was revamping the shopworn Tom and Jerry series. Knowing Geisel as he did—and well aware of his penchant for perfection—Jones knew it was going to be a tough sell and decided to take on the task in person. “Unsurprisingly, Dr. Seuss was not eager to have more of his books made into film,” Jones said later.35 Jones drove from Los Angeles to La Jolla, and as he came up the winding road leading to the Tower at the top of the mountain, Ted was standing at the end of their long driveway to greet him. Jones, who hadn’t seen Geisel since 1946, thought his old friend looked “not very different. He didn’t change a lot.”36

  Geisel’s initial strategy was simply to stonewall Jones. “He had planned that we’d talk about old times,” Jones recalled, “and then I’d go home.” But Jones was persuasive. “I told him it was time to put Dr. Seuss on television,”37 said Jones, who was as passionate and as meticulous about animation as Geisel was about writing children’s books. Like Geisel, Jones had put serious thought into what did and didn’t work in his craft, and had even developed a series of hard rules he expected his designers and animators to follow, like “All living creatures, fictional or not, have anatomy.”38 Ted could respect that kind of discipline. The more Jones talked, the more excited Helen became about the project—and with both Jones and Helen now enthusiastically double-teaming him, Ted finally wore down. “I decided that if I was going to go on TV, I’d better do it before I’m 70,” he said later.39

  The only real question was which book Jones would adapt. “It was early enough in the year that we could get it done for Christmas,” said Jones, “so it had to be the Grinch.”40 Geisel was fine with that—but on the condition that he would be permitted to serve as a producer of the film alongside Jones, so he could keep a close eye on as much of the production as possible. The two shook hands and Jones left satisfied. “I climbed the mountain to meet this wonderful hermit and persuaded him to allow the Grinch off the hill,”41 said Jones, then immediately went to work on the character designs and storyboards he would need to sell the show to a sponsor. Geisel, meanwhile, called on agent Phyllis Jackson to have her draw up the contracts between him and Jones, then notified Bob Bernstein of the deal. To Geisel’s surprise, Bernstein, who rarely saw a marketing opportunity he didn’t like, was hesitant, asking Ted over and over again to make sure he was comfortable with Jones. Even Jackson’s heart wasn’t quite in it, though she diligently drew up a low four-figure agreement between Geisel and Jones.

  It took two months to storyboard the Grinch. Geisel and Jones worked together closely, with Jones making regular trips to the Tower to consult with Geisel over the Grinch’s design, and Geisel shuttling over to Jones’s offices at MGM to help develop the storyboards. For the most part, the two were in sync, picking up without missing a beat the collaborative rapport they’d developed two decades ago working on Private Snafu. The only real disagreements had to do with the design of the Grinch. Color was the first issue to be resolved; in the book, the Grinch had been uncolored, with only his eyes a burning red color. After much discussion, Geisel agreed the Grinch could be green—which, Jones later confessed, matched the color of every rental car he had driven around La Jolla that summer.42

  Color decisions aside, bringing any character from the page of a book to an animated cartoon required some serious thought. On the TV screen, the Grinch couldn’t just be a series of poses, as he was on the page; Geisel and Jones had to really think about how he moved and how he walked and sat and frowned. The two passed drawings back and forth for some time until Jones—exercising a rare veto authority—approved the final design. “Ted was very patient with me. He felt that my Grinch looked more like me than his Grinch,” said Jones. “Well, something had to give, so we ended up with a sort of mélange of all the Grinches.”43

  With the storyboards complete, Jones began the thankless task of carting his boards around town to meet with potential sponsors, displaying the storyboards on an easel as he enthusiastically acted out scenes before rooms full of skeptical candy company executives. For a while, Geisel tagged along to watch, but Jones, who “kept seeing his poor face” as they were rejected by one executive after another, finally told him to stop attending the pitch sessions.44 Jones remembered approaching twenty-six uninterested sponsors, including Nestlé and Kellogg’s, before finally finding a home for the Grinch with the Foundation for Commercial Banks. Jones could barely contain his amusement at the irony. “You have to be kidding!” Jones wrote later. “The bankers bought a story in which the Grinch says, ‘Maybe Christmas doesn’t come from a store’??!! Well, bless their banker hearts!”45

  With their backing secured, Geisel, Jones, and the crew at MGM ramped up production immediately and intensely. Geisel had made it clear from the start that he didn’t want Grinch to look “mass-produced,” with the assembly-line animation typical of most television cartoons. Jones assured him that there would be no scrimping on the production; whereas an average episode of the prime-time cartoon The Flintstones might use 2,000 individual drawings in thirty minutes—about three drawings per foot of film—Jones promised that How the Grinch Stole Christmas! would utilize 25,000 in thirty minutes, or fifteen drawings per foot. Jones also vowed there would be no hastily assembled cut-and-paste backgrounds, and called in an ace: his former colleague from Warner Bros., the designer and background artist Maurice Noble, whose panoramas had given Road Runner cartoons their magisterial sense of desert space, and ambitious cartoons like What’s Opera, Doc? their epic feel.

  Noble admitted to being somewhat starstruck during his first meeting with Geisel. “I was an admirer of Ted Geisel,” he said, “but I loved Dr. Seuss.”46 As with Jones, he and Geisel would also often go round and round, arguing over the look of Noble’s backgrounds. Noble tried to explain that part of his job was to expand on the limited backgrounds Geisel had provided in the original book—the backgrounds had to extend well beyond what was on the page and had to flow logically into each other from scene to scene. “You have to enrich the design,” explained Noble, “you’ve got to give it more schmaltz, and this is where I’d run into difficulty with Ted,” he recalled. “But you don’t argue too long with God.”47 Noble would eventually produce more than 250 backgrounds for Grinch, more than twice the amount used in the typical thirty-minute cartoon.

  While Jones intended to stay as faithful as possible to Geisel’s original story, Jones had timed the book as taking about twelve minutes to read out loud. That meant the pace of the story would have to be stretched to fill a full running time of twenty-four minutes. Neither Jones nor Geisel wanted the story to feel artificially padded, so Jones suggested they could spend some time using the character of Max, the Grinch’s put-upon dog, as “both observer and victim, at one with the audience.” Geisel, who already loved the character, enthusiastically agreed, saying Max was “Everydog—all love and limpness and loyalty.”48

  The remaining time would be filled with songs, and here Geisel was delighted to take on the task himself—he hadn’t written lyrics since Dr. T. in 1950—writing songs for the Christmas-loving Whos and the Christmas-hating Grinch. Sometimes writing by hand, sometimes typing them out neatly, Geisel filled page after page with snippets of lyrics, clever turns of phrase, and—more often than not—lots of long blank lines to fill in later, when he could think of a good rhyme.

  The songs for the Whos had been the easier ones, mainly because Geisel could make up what Jones called “Seussian Latin” to fit his rhyme schemes.49 Initially, Geisel had written a long Christmas concert, in which the Whos conversed with each other in their own language: “Qwee kon who bah. Multrew Fultrow! Fultrow Multrow!” Geisel had eventually abandoned that idea as overly compl
icated, and focused instead on an opening Christmas carol called “Welcome Christmas,” combining both English and Seussian Latin. Ted started off writing “Dah Who Deeno!” then crossed it out in favor of “Noo Who Frobus!”50 After a bit more fussing, he would finally arrive at “Fahoofores, Dahoodores” as the refrain.51 “[It] seems to have as much authenticity as ‘Adeste Fideles’ to those untutored in Latin,” said Jones encouragingly.52

  It was the Grinch’s song, however, that Geisel intended to be the showstopper, coming at the moment the Grinch actually steals Christmas, oozing around Whoville to poach their gifts and decorations. “You’re a grizzly, ghastly goon,” Geisel wrote at the top of one page, then played around with a few rhymes, finally circling “dried up prune.” But then, after writing “You brush your teeth with turpentine,” he scribbled the entire page out darkly, a false start. Starting again at the top of another page, he typed “You’re the king of all that rots,” then listed several possible rhymes down the right-hand side of the page: Knots. Tots. Spots. Pots. Lots. Tangled up in kinky knots. Once more, the entire page would be crossed out.53

  Other times, he would write out couplets—some of which rhymed, some of which didn’t—to see if anything amused him enough to remain intact through draft after draft. While the rhyming couplet “Mr. Grinch . . . We don’t adore you, / Mr. Grinch, we ABHOR you,” would be discarded, he was delighted with the nonsensical—and nonrhyming—“You nauseate me, Mister Grinch. / With a nauseous super-naus.” Whatever it meant, Geisel liked it; it would stay. Meanwhile, on yet another page, he struggled to find the closing lines to follow an opening couplet he liked, inserting long blanks to be filled in later:

  You’re a foul one, Mr. Grinch