Oh, you really are a punk.
You’re as _________ as a_________
You’re as _________ as a _________
Again on the right-hand side, still trying out words, Geisel had written contempt and contemptible, neither of which he was happy with. This page, too, would finally be abandoned, with the exception of three words Ted had written in, almost as an afterthought, to rhyme with punk, and which he would use memorably in the final song: stink stank stunk.54
Ted eventually completed the Grinch’s song, “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” a tour de force of over-the-top gross-out images—a bad banana with a greasy black peel, a dead tomato with moldy purple spots, a sauerkraut and toadstool sandwich—that made the Grinch seem even more deliciously nasty than he had in the book. With the addition of the Grinch’s song, the animated feature suddenly transcended its source material, giving the cartoon its own unique place in the Dr. Seuss oeuvre, beyond that of a mere adaptation.
Geisel worked on the songs with Albert Hague, who wrote the music, then passed them off to Eugene Poddany, who orchestrated the songs and conducted a thirty-four-piece orchestra and twelve-voice chorus. In his notes for the Grinch’s song, Geisel had written that he wanted it sung in a “very low, hoarse gravelly basso.” Jones had already hired seventy-eight-year-old horror movie icon Boris Karloff as the narrator and to provide the speaking voice of the Grinch, a decision Geisel supported. But the singing would be assigned to a voice actor Jones had called in to perform several other background voices for the cartoon: Thurl Ravenscroft, a rangy fifty-two-year-old with the basso voice Geisel wanted. “[Chuck Jones] handed me the song sheet and we made it in about three takes,” said Ravenscroft.55 Both Geisel and Jones sat in on the recording sessions. Photos taken that afternoon show Jones in a tweed coat and bow tie, with a slightly impish smile on his face, while Geisel listens intently, in a dark bow tie and jacket. After Ravenscroft finished singing, the crew gathered in the control room to listen to the playback.
“I liked what I heard,” said Geisel as Jones queued up the tape.
As the song started again, Jones turned to Ravenscroft with a wry smile. “Thurl, what do you think?”
“If you’re happy, I’m happy,” said Ravenscroft diplomatically.
“Well,” said Geisel, “we think it’s perfect.”56
The only remaining point of contention was the story’s ending. Geisel knew how he wanted the last scene to play out; in his copy of the Grinch script, he had circled the Grinch’s great epiphany—“Maybe Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from the store . . .”—and had written “slow delivery, as if dawn is breaking.”57 Geisel wanted the final moments to be deliberately paced—he had worked hard when writing the book in 1957 to make it as non-preachy as possible, and didn’t want the cartoon going for an easy, saccharine, Technicolor Christmas ending. It was Noble who came up with an elegant solution, by having the Whos join hands and “create” a star as “a manifestation of their love and joy,” said Noble. “The star then moved up and joined with the Grinch, and he was transformed.”58 Perfect.
Nearly everyone involved loved the final product. “Everything seemed to come together beautifully,” said Noble.59 Although Phyllis Jackson and Bob Bernstein were still uncertain—Noble, with some hyperbole, recalled that “Dr. Seuss’s agents screamed and yelled”—Geisel was standing by the project, convinced that he and Jones had something special on their hands. Jones, too, would always regard the Grinch with considerable pride. “How could anyone—how could I—not love the Grinch?”60
As the December airdate neared, Jones negotiated a deal with the CBS network, which paid $315,000 for the rights to air How the Grinch Stole Christmas! in 1966 and 1967. TV critics snickered, convinced CBS had paid far too much for a cartoon that would surely be forgotten and shelved, never to be seen again. Jones joked that on a per-minute basis, the twenty-four-minute Grinch had cost the network more than rival ABC had recently paid to show the two-hour-and-forty-minute Oscar winner The Bridge on the River Kwai. All they could do now was wait.
How the Grinch Stole Christmas! aired on CBS on the evening of Sunday, December 18, 1966—and for a moment, it appeared the skeptics might have been right. “Fell a trifle short of expectation,” sniffed the feared TV critic Jack Gould of The New York Times. “It may just be that the Grinch is a creation that should be left undisturbed on the printed page.”61 On the West Coast, Hal Humphrey, writing for the Los Angeles Times, tended to agree, calling it “a disappointment . . . It is my opinion that the book was better than this expensive half-hour color TV adaptation proved to be.”62 But their voices, it soon became clear, were in the minority. Most critics, like most viewers, loved the Grinch. Cynthia Lowry, writing for the widely circulated Associated Press, directly refuted the assessments of Gould and Humphrey, enthusing that the story had “lost nothing and even gained its transition from the printed page to television.”63 The Indianapolis News called it “beautiful,” the Orlando Sentinel found it “whimsical and tuneful,” while the Philadelphia Inquirer hailed it simply as “classic.”64 Closer to home, Donald Freeman, writing in the San Diego Union, thought it “a triumph of major proportions.”65 How the Grinch Stole Christmas! would become a beloved and perennial holiday classic, rivaled only, perhaps, by Charles Schulz’s A Charlie Brown Christmas.
That Christmas, Geisel’s La Jolla neighbors embraced the Grinch as their very own; volunteers at the La Jolla Museum decorated the building to look like the pre-Grinched Whoville. Meanwhile, up at the Tower, Helen’s annual Christmas Eve party—now one of the most desirable invitations of the season—had swollen to a guest list of sixty-five. Next year’s party, she vowed, would be even larger and grander.
* * *
• • • •
It was hard for Ted and Audrey to be alone together. While Geisel could walk down the streets of New York and not be recognized as Dr. Seuss, he was easily recognized in La Jolla, so sneaking around their town with Audrey—who was also a prominent member of the community—was going to be out of the question. “I cannot imagine anyone having ever seen them coming out of a hotel or whatever,” said Judith Morgan, though that didn’t stop tongues from wagging.66 For the most part, then, they would have to take what they could get at parties or other social events, huddling together off to one side of the room, or engaged in chatter over a chicken dinner at one of the countless La Jolla fundraisers or charity events. While some friends had their suspicions—“it wasn’t the best-kept secret,” said Morgan67—Ted and Audrey managed to keep their relationship low-key enough that the Geisels and the Dimonds continued to socialize, making it appear from the outside, at least, that both couples were still blissfully happy.
Still, the cracks were starting to show. On the evening of Friday, March 24, 1967, a San Diego police officer in the Mission Bay region pulled Geisel over after witnessing him changing lanes three times. Geisel was questioned briefly, then arrested and booked at city jail. Here he was given a sobriety test, in which his blood alcohol level registered at .13, just under the so-called indisputably impaired level of .15.68 He was released and the embarrassing incident blew over without much notice or damage to his reputation, beyond a few newspaper headlines that tittered, “Dr. Seuss Was Soused?”69 But the episode stirred a flurry of gossip and speculation about Geisel’s mental state, as well as unanswered questions about what a notoriously bad driver was doing driving by himself—if he truly was by himself—in San Diego in the first place.
Still basking in the success of Grinch, Geisel and Jones had immediately negotiated a deal to follow up with an adaptation of Horton Hears a Who! Phyllis Jackson, no longer skeptical of Jones and MGM, wanted Geisel to hold out for more money than he had taken for selling the rights to Grinch, but Ted waved her off. He didn’t care about or need the money; at this point, he just wanted to write the songs.
His most recent book, in fact, The Cat in the Hat Songbook, wa
s made up entirely of songs, with Ted’s lyrics scored for guitar and piano by Eugene Poddany, who’d orchestrated the music for Grinch. If Grinch and 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. had proven anything, it was that Geisel was capable of writing catchy songs, with fun-to-sing lyrics and catchy hooks—and Ted was rightly very proud of the songbook. But parents, it seemed, didn’t want songbooks from Dr. Seuss; they wanted funny stories, with bouncy rhymes they could sing without picking out a melody on a guitar. As a result, The Cat in the Hat Songbook bombed on its publication, and Bernstein quietly permitted the book to go out of print—the only Dr. Seuss book, along with Seven Lady Godivas, consigned to such a fate during Ted’s lifetime. Even as the book sank from sight, many had silently noted that Geisel had dedicated the book to Audrey’s daughters, Lark and Lea of Ludington Lane. He was continuing to openly show Audrey his devotion wherever he could.
Most of the summer of 1967 was spent working with Jones on Horton Hears a Who! “What Jane Goodall is to baboons and Dian Fossey to gorillas Dr. Seuss is to the mind and heart of the male elephant,”70 said Jones. Geisel had taken his songwriting duties seriously, scribbling rough notes in blue pen and red pencil all over the back of Beginner Books stationery. Lyrics were also scribbled on the back of pieces of cardboard, yellow paper—anything he could find.
He was also using a hardcover copy of Horton as his working script for the cartoon, marking passages with paper clips, rewriting some sections, and scribbling notes in the margins. Unlike Grinch, Horton wouldn’t be a word-for-word adaptation; Geisel agreed to rework some of the book’s verses to give Horton more dialogue in the cartoon, and chose to flesh out the character of the astronomer at the expense of mayor, who had carried much of the plot in the book. Ted was also responsible for crafting the new “slingshot ending,” in which the astronomer catches a speck of dust as a little voice cries out “HELP!” “Oh no!” says the astronomer as the screen irises in on him. Fin.
For Jones’s part, he was working hard to sand some of the rough edges off characters in the original book that he thought were too mean or too scary—and there were lots of them. One of Jones’s writers, a recent film school graduate named Nick Iuppa, recommended in a memo that Ted give a new name to the eagle who carries away the clover, suggesting that while Vladikoff—the eagle’s name in the book—was acceptable, “[it] should be preceded by a name so un-Russian that the content is humorous.” Just below Iuppa’s suggestion, Ted had written Whizzer MacWoff in large print, a name that would stick.71 Still, the characters in Horton Hears a Who! remain some of the most unlikable and most malicious in the Dr. Seuss menagerie—and even Jones, with his whimsical, wide-eyed sense of design, couldn’t seem to make them any more endearing. Horton would air in September to generally positive reviews—“Another gem,” was a typical response72—but would never reach the level of adoration attained by the Grinch.
In August, Bernstein and his wife came out to La Jolla to visit the Geisels. It was an opportunity for Bernstein to get a peek at the latest project Ted had pinned to the corkboard in his studio—at this time, it was The Foot Book, one of the first titles in the new Bright and Early Books imprint, which Ted was hoping to finally launch in 1968. “He would rush me to the studio and show me the pages, still mounted on the cork wall,” said Bernstein excitedly. “He would then read them to me and then anxiously ask what I thought. This can be an uncomfortable moment with some authors, but I looked forward to it with Ted—his work always thrilled me.”73
The mood at the Geisel household, however, left Bernstein concerned. Ted was grumbling that he was finding it difficult to work in the Tower and that he was “considering leasing a studio” somewhere in town. Bernstein thought Ted seemed “strangely down and jumpy,” and wondered if perhaps the Geisels’ marriage was in trouble. Editor Walter Retan also sensed trouble during his visit to the Tower that summer. “They had so much in common, but they were driving each other crazy,” said Retan. “Helen wasn’t well, and she probably depressed Ted. She had been very, very good for him, but I could not say she was good for him at that time.”74
On September 23, 1967, Helen turned sixty-nine years old. Shortly thereafter, perhaps in an effort to reset their relationship, Ted and Helen left for an extended vacation in Colorado. Helen loved the remoteness of the Rocky Mountains and marveled at how they could drive for hours and rarely see another car. She and Ted stayed for three nights at the Garden of the Gods Club near Colorado Springs, then drove to Golden for a long stay with Orlo and Libby Childs, who had served as Ted’s tour guide in Utah in 1947 and to whom he had dedicated Scrambled Eggs Super! in 1953. Libby remembered Helen as being “in such high spirits,” with none of the indicators of the Geisels’ souring relationship that had so concerned Bernstein and Retan.75
The Geisels returned to La Jolla in mid-October, and by the afternoon of Sunday the fifteenth were sailing with friends around Point Loma in San Diego. Photos show Helen in a turquoise bandanna and sunglasses, with a white sweater over a dress, and pearls around her neck, looking reserved, but impeccably dressed, as usual, even on the water. Six days later, they attended a dinner party at the sprawling Rancho Santa Fe estate of Luba and Duke Johnston—one of Ted’s favorite prankster cronies. Duke thought Helen seemed “strangely low” that night, and as the Geisels prepared to leave that evening, Duke wrapped Helen in a bear hug. Helen seemed taken aback. “You don’t know how I needed that!” she told Duke.76
The following evening, Helen retired to her bedroom around eleven. Ted was still working in his studio, fussing with The Foot Book, and would remain there until two in the morning, when he finally headed to bed in his own room. The following morning—Monday, October 23—the Geisels’ housekeeper, Alberta Shaw, arrived at the Tower around ten to begin her usual shift. She found the house locked and quiet; while it wasn’t unusual to find Ted still in bed when she arrived, Helen would usually have been up for several hours, working in her office or having coffee out by the pool. Alberta let herself into the house, where she found the door to Helen’s bedroom closed. She quietly opened it and went inside.
Helen was still in bed. On her nightstand was a half-empty bottle of sodium pentobarbital tablets, and a handwritten note.
CHAPTER 14
I INTEND TO GO ON DOING JUST WHAT I DO
1967–1971
Julie Olfe, the Geisels’ reliable secretary, pulled into the long driveway at the Tower around lunchtime. Olfe, now nearing thirty, was pregnant with her first child and had recently informed Helen that she wanted to retire from her duties to devote more time to family—a decision Helen supported, and had thus put Olfe to work on a final task of cleaning out old files and sorting correspondence to clear the way for a new secretary.
As Olfe approached the Tower on the afternoon of October 23, ready to dig back into the Geisel files, she could tell something unusual had happened. For one thing, there were several cars in the driveway—odd in itself, as guests were usually discouraged during the daytime hours when Ted was working. Then as Olfe approached the front door, she heard the gardener say in a hushed voice “something about Mrs. Geisel.”1 Olfe let herself in and found Ted in the living room, “grim-faced, with eight or ten friends in a loose circle around him.”2 Finally, Grey Dimond stepped over to Olfe to quietly break the terrible news: Helen Geisel was dead at age sixty-nine.
Before going to bed the night before, she had downed a handful of barbiturates—the bottle was still on the nightstand—then penned a final note, which she placed neatly on the bedside table:
Dear Ted,
What has happened to us?
I don’t know.
I feel myself in a spiral, going down down down, into a black hole from which there is no escape, no brightness. And loud in my ears from every side I hear, “failure, failure, failure . . .”
I love you so much . . . I am too old and enmeshed in everything you do and are, that I cannot conceive of life without you . . . My
going will leave quite a rumor but you can say I was overworked and overwrought. Your reputation with your friends and fans will not be harmed . . . Sometimes, think of the fun we had thru the years . . . 3
She had signed it with the name of the fictional law firm to whom she and Ted often threatened to refer problematic clients—a final private joke, and a last reminder of the fun she and Ted had had through the years.
Ted was stunned and visibly rattled. “I didn’t know whether to kill myself, burn the house down, or just go away and get lost,”4 he said later. Informed of the news in Los Angeles, Peggy Owens sped to the Tower and arrived late in the afternoon to find the living room still filled with people, still talking in hushed tones, but no one daring to use the word suicide. Peggy cleared out the house and spent the next few days sitting with her uncle, talking late into the evenings. Only then would Ted permit the word to be said aloud: “I guess you know it was suicide,” he told Peggy.5
As word of Helen’s death spread beyond La Jolla—the carefully crafted statement Ted issued to the media kept Helen’s cause of death intentionally vague—condolences and reminiscences flooded into the Tower. Bennett Cerf, who had learned of Helen’s death in The New York Times, remembered her as “one of the most wonderful women I’ve met in my whole life . . . We regarded Helen—as a worker, a creator—[as] the most unselfish person we’ve ever known.”6 Al Perkins, one of Helen’s favorite Beginner Books authors, wrote fondly that, “I am sure she will be mourned by thousands . . . who knew her, or knew of her not as Ted’s helpmate, but as a brilliant writer, editor, and critic in her own right.”7
Sometimes kindness came from unexpected places. One afternoon Geisel opened the front door in response to furious knocking, only to find two little boys gaping up at him. Finally one managed to ask, “Are you the man that wrote about the Grinch stealing Christmas?” Ted, expecting a request for an autograph, promised them that he was. “We just wanted to tell you we’re sorry your wife died,” said the boys, then turned and ran back down the mountainside.8
Becoming Dr. Seuss Page 37