Becoming Dr. Seuss

by Brian Jay Jones

  On November 9, the La Jolla Museum, where Helen had recently served as president, held a memorial service in her honor and announced that its reference library would be renamed the Helen Palmer Geisel Library. Ted, still shaken, attended the service with Peggy Owens and with Grey and Audrey Dimond. “It was a hard winter for him,” said Julie Olfe, who had decided to remain at her post as Ted’s secretary. “It was terrible. He was not happy in those days.”9

  Partly he was becoming more and more aware of both the sideways glances and the furious gossip swirling round about him and Audrey—chatter that had only grown louder in the weeks since Helen’s suicide. Even among friends there was hushed speculation about what had driven Helen to take her own life. The word affair was whispered. Had Helen learned of Ted’s relationship with Audrey? And now that Helen was gone, would Ted and Audrey drop any pretense and publicly begin a relationship?

  Neighbor Stanley Willis thought Helen had surely known of the affair all along. “She was always cheerful, right up to the time she began to realize someone was moving into . . . what shall I call it? . . . her marital territory?”10 said Willis. Friend and journalist Judith Morgan, who was tasked with writing Helen’s obituary for the San Diego Union, thought Helen had long suspected Ted and Audrey’s relationship, but had only recently had her suspicions cruelly confirmed. “My first thought was, ‘Someone told her,’” said Morgan, “[with] ‘someone’ being Ted or Audrey.”11

  Ted attended Helen’s memorial service in the company of the Dimonds. If he felt even partly to blame for Helen’s death, he never said. There would be no self-reflection in public or confessions in private journals; that simply wasn’t Ted’s way. Meanwhile, Audrey seemed to believe her relationship with Ted had been inevitable from practically the moment they met. “He fell in love,” she said later. “I have to feel that in the big picture, it was meant to happen.”12

  Within six months, Geisel would put an end to at least some of the speculation—and further divide the La Jolla social community. In the spring of 1968, with contractors ready to begin another renovation and remodeling of the Tower, Geisel informed the crew that there had been a change of plans. The neutral colors he and Helen had selected in 1967 were to be discarded, he said, in favor of a bolder and brighter palette. When the architect came to consult with Geisel to confirm the new designs, he discovered Audrey was living at the Tower, happily selecting the new colors and overseeing the remodeling.

  Only weeks earlier, in fact, Audrey had informed Grey Dimond that “something was lacking” in their marriage, and that she would be moving to Reno long enough to meet the residency requirements necessary for a quick divorce. Dimond was stunned but had presence of mind enough to drolly ask that she not get into any car if Geisel, a notoriously bad driver, was behind the wheel. “I don’t want any wife of mine marrying a man who drives the way Ted does,” he told her.13

  Geisel, too, would sardonically inform one acquaintance that, “My best friend is being divorced and I’m going to Reno to comfort his wife.”14 The news of the pending nuptials sent Ted and Audrey’s social circles into yet another maelstrom of gossip and controversy. Longtime friends squared off into separate camps, either approving or disapproving of the relationship. “[It caused] a rather large ripple in the community of La Jolla,” said Audrey.15

  Writing to Donald Bartlett in late May 1968, Geisel assured his old friend that “I have not flipped my lid”:

  . . . let me put it out, flat on the line, without any comment or begging for understanding.

  On the 21st of June, Audrey Dimond is going to Reno to divorce Grey Dimond . . . Audrey and I are going to be married about the first week in August. I am acquiring two daughters, ages nine and fourteen. I am rebuilding the house to take care of the influx. I am 64 years old. I am marrying a woman eighteen years younger . . . This is not a sudden nutty decision . . . This is an inevitable, inescapable conclusion to five years of four people’s frustration. All I can ask you is to try to believe in me.16

  Later, Audrey would muse that “it would’ve been nice if we’d met and married earlier.”17 Now, however, “the feeling was that at his age, you grab for the gusto,” she said. “You don’t wait. You don’t think you have much time.”18

  On June 21, 1968, as renovations began at the Tower in La Jolla, Geisel and Audrey Dimond checked into the Ponderosa Hotel in Reno, taking a room in the charmless midtown hotel where the two of them would remain for six baking-hot weeks. Since both of them had only a passing interest in gambling, there wasn’t much to do. Some days Ted would review the manuscript pages of a Bright and Early Book he had brought with him, Al Perkins’s The Hand Book—later to be retitled Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb—writing Perkins pithy letters encouraging him to make the book “more exciting.”19 Other times, he would meet with attorney Frank Kockritz to take care of all the necessary legal paper work to finalize Audrey’s divorce and make arrangements for marriage.

  At 5:00 P.M. on Monday, August 5, 1968—six weeks and three days after their arrival in Reno—Ted and Audrey were married at the Washoe County Courthouse by a justice of the peace, with no one else in attendance. Ted was sixty-four years old; Audrey would turn forty-seven later in August. The Geisels would honeymoon for two days at South Lake Tahoe before returning to La Jolla. Duke and Luba Johnston, who had been with Helen the night before her death, hosted a dinner party for the newlyweds, but the community—“full of broken glass,” as Audrey put it—would remain divided on the Geisels for some time.20

  While marriage to Audrey also meant an instant family of two young daughters—Lark was fourteen, Leagrey nine—Ted found the concept of parenting daunting. “It slicks his hair back,” Audrey told one journalist cheekily,21 but the truth was less amusing, as Audrey sent her daughters away to live with their father, who had relocated to Washington, D.C. “They wouldn’t have been happy with Ted, and Ted wouldn’t have been happy with them,” Audrey said later. “Ted’s a hard man to break down, but this is who he was. He lived his whole life without children and he was very happy without children.” As far as her decision to relinquish custody of her daughters, Audrey admitted she had “never been very maternal. There were too many other things I wanted to do. My life with him was what I wanted my life to be.”22

  In time, Ted and his stepdaughters would become friends, and then learn to adore and eventually love each other. He and the dark-haired Leagrey—who he jokingly called “Leagroo”—would tease each other mercilessly, hurling such savage insults at each other over breakfast that Audrey would leave the table, slightly terrified. Lark, meanwhile, was her sister’s opposite, blond and willowy, with an artistic streak. When Lark graduated from boarding school in Arizona in 1972, Ted, bursting with pride, presented her with an oil painting of a bird with long blond hair wearing a cap and gown. And both daughters remembered the joy in receiving the funny notes or drawings that seemed to show up everywhere. “You saw him at his desk making these things,” recalled Leagrey. “He would drop little notes on your bed or put them in your coat pocket. Everybody has memories of their pop and their mom. Those are your memories if Ted was your step-pop.”23

  The disapproval of some of his La Jolla neighbors didn’t necessarily bother Geisel all that much. He was far more concerned about how Audrey would be accepted where it really mattered: at Random House, where Helen had been as much a part of the Dr. Seuss and Beginner Books empire as Ted. While Audrey wouldn’t be formally involved with Beginner Books, it mattered to Ted that the staff at Random House liked her. Ted was relieved to find the Random House crew was generally charmed by Audrey, who could easily chat up nearly anyone. Anne Marcovecchio—now Anne Johnson—signed off on the new Mrs. Geisel by declaring that Audrey “gave [Ted] new vitality and kept him alive longer.”24 Most also noted with some amusement that Audrey already had Ted dressing better, abandoning his neutral tones and staid suits or slacks for brightly colored pants and plaid jackets.

&nb
sp; At Beginner Books, Helen’s death had left Ted as the last man standing in what had originally been a three-way partnership. While Ted was trying to shoulder some of Helen’s workload, Bernstein was moving around staff to try to get Ted both the editorial and managerial support he needed, especially with the Bright and Early Books imprint nearing its debut in the autumn of 1968. Anne Johnson had been promoted to vice president of Beginner Books, while Michael Frith was assigned the role of editor in chief—with Ted, of course, remaining as the final arbiter on everything.

  Though the two had been thrown together by Bernstein, Geisel found he enjoyed working with the twenty-seven-year-old Frith. They shared a similar sense of humor—both had worked at their college humor magazines and both, said Frith, had “this absolutely mutual delight in . . . loving absurd verse.”25 Frith was also a talented writer and artist who had illustrated several Step-Up Books for Phyllis Cerf, and he and Geisel had a mutual respect for the power of words and images working harmoniously to educate and entertain. There was also just the slightest hint of father-son in their relationship—each could find each other exasperating—and Frith thought it was no coincidence that Geisel and his own father were not only the same age but had even been at Oxford at the same time, where neither one of them had done much studying.

  As Geisel prepared to launch the first four titles in the Bright and Early Books imprint that autumn, Frith found that much of his job required acting as mediator—and emollient—between Geisel and his stable of talent. “Ted wasn’t easy to work with,” said Frith. “He had very little patience for . . . a lot of the people with whom he worked because Ted knew better. Whatever was going on, they couldn’t be as good, and as smart, and as inventive, and as good a designer, and all those things as Dr. Seuss—and where Dr. Seuss is concerned,” added Frith, “I have no argument.”26 Moreover, Geisel didn’t believe in managing his writers and artists so much as he believed they needed to be corralled. Ted’s style, explained Frith, was “you’ve got to . . . I won’t say crush them, but you really have to sit on them, step on them, make sure they do it exactly your way, or it won’t be what it could be.”27 As Julie Olfe put it, “In his head, he had such definite ideas about books he wanted others to do, but they could not carry out ideas that he could not express.”28

  Whether he had crushed them or not, the corralling seemed to have paid off, as Bright and Early Books would debut in October 1968 with four strong and memorable titles. As expected, a Dr. Seuss book was among them, The Foot Book, Geisel’s spry study in opposites (“Wet foot / Dry foot / Low foot / High foot”), but so, too, was a LeSieg title, The Eye Book, featuring art by Roy McKie. The reliable Al Perkins had provided The Ear Book, with illustrations by Henry Payne, and the ever-dependable Berenstains rounded out the four with their bubbly Inside Outside Upside Down—and once again, despite Geisel’s initial admonition, their book featured the Berenstain Bears. They were simply too good not to use at this point.

  Reviews of the new Bright and Early Books were positive, often fulsome, and usually focused mostly on The Foot Book. “With an extremely limited vocabulary, Dr. Seuss as usual, manufactures a masterpiece,” a reviewer for the Cincinnati Enquirer wrote enthusiastically.29 “A new book by Dr. Seuss is always an occasion for celebration,” said another critic, who hailed The Foot Book as a “witty and rhythmic romp with hilarious illustrations.”30 Geisel was relieved; his new imprint was a success—so successful, in fact, that over the next five years, he would write more books for the new Bright and Early imprint than he would for Beginner Books or his own “Big Books.”

  And yet, in December, following the success of Bright and Early Books, came hardship, both professional and personal. At the urging of Bob Bernstein, Geisel agreed to appear on The Dick Cavett Show, a relatively new talk show, hosted by the droll but always engaged Cavett, a former writer for The Tonight Show. It was one of Dr. Seuss’s first major national television interviews—and Geisel, understandably nervous, spent several days putting together a series of prepared questions for Cavett, writing them on one numbered note card after another and then memorizing his own pre-written responses. On December 5, with a thunderstorm raging outside Cavett’s ABC studio, Geisel waited in the wings for more than an hour—he was the final guest, following director Jules Dassin, singer Mitch Miller, and critic Rex Reed—but his nerves were fraying, especially as the power began to flicker off and on inside the studio. Once he took his seat next to Cavett, however, he was dumbfounded when the host casually began asking the prepared questions out of order. Ted sat speechless, unable to recall any of his answers. “I laid the most colossal bomb,” he said later, and vowed that The Dick Cavett Show would be his final television appearance.31 Bernstein, to his credit, wisely concurred, conceding that Dr. Seuss was not an act made for television.

  Then, four days later, on December 9, 1968, Ted’s father, Theodor Robert Geisel, died at a nursing home in Agawam, Massachusetts, at the age of eighty-nine. Ted and Audrey had visited T.R. in August to move him into the nursing home—but Ted had a larger agenda in mind: he wanted his father to meet and approve of Audrey. To Ted’s delight, his father had given the marriage his blessing, even as he forcefully resisted his relocation to the rest home in Agawam, stubborn to the very end.

  * * *

  • • • •

  Geisel spent the last part of 1968 and early 1969 in a courtroom, fighting for his creative rights against an unexpected adversary: Liberty magazine. While the periodical had ceased publication in 1950, Broadway producer Lorraine Lester had purchased all 17,000 copyrights owned by the magazine, in search of potential merchandising. Looking through magazines from 1932, Lester found the ideal materials in a few of the Dr. Seuss cartoons of the era and had partnered with Cincinnati manufacturer Poynter Products to produce a series of cheap and badly made plastic figures based on some of Dr. Seuss’s whimsical creatures. “My reaction was very black,” said Geisel, with some understatement, and he immediately took Lester to court.32

  The outcome was discouraging, and would be a lesson to other artists, at Geisel’s considerable expense. In a sixty-three-page ruling, Judge William B. Herlands determined that Geisel had signed a contract giving to Liberty “all rights,” which, Herlands added, could even include “skywriting on Mars.”33 The suit had cost Geisel nearly $100,000 in attorney’s fees—and made him only more determined to ensure he retained all subsidiary rights on his work and rigidly controlled any merchandising. Frith recalled with considerable glee how Geisel would become “one of the most despised people in the toy industry” for his refusal to permit most Dr. Seuss merchandise.34

  For now, Geisel would exert absolute control over the one product he could: his books. With neither Phyllis nor Helen to impose a strict adherence to the word list, Ted was determined to abandon the approved vocabulary altogether. Lately, he had become convinced that a limited vocabulary list was “insulting” to children anyway—that they could absorb a far greater number of words than those on any word list. “We just try to say what we have to say simply and concisely,” he told The New York Times. “If we’re successful in this,” he joked, “we’ll do prenatal books.”35 Instead, Geisel was all about the way the material was presented, striving for synchronicity between words and pictures.

  The Big Books, however, were an entirely different matter. While Geisel always worked hard to achieve the ideal relationship of verse to illustration, the Big Books were his opportunity to really stretch out. “They were Ted kind of freewheeling,” said Frith. “He was able to become much more silly and Seussy with the Big Books.”36

  That was certainly the case with the newest Dr. Seuss book for 1969, I Can Lick 30 Tigers Today! a collection of three stories, two of which featured the Cat in the Hat’s son—or was it the Cat as a kitten? Geisel had illustrated this one in a style different from any of his previous books, using gouache and a brush, and a bright palette of colors, instead of the more typical pen and ink with fl
at colors. The lead story—in which the little cat, wearing a familiar hat and gloves and bow tie, struts and boasts of his ability to beat up thirty tigers—was Ted’s brightly colored love letter to Audrey. The book was even dedicated to her, his none-too-subtle way of letting her know that she made him feel he really could take on thirty tigers.

  While Audrey wasn’t the kind of creative partner that Helen had been, Ted found her presence exciting and inspiring. “Sometimes he would bounce into the room in great excitement and say, ‘Something’s happening!’” said Audrey. “I learned never to ask what it was because his answer was always the same: ‘I can’t tell you until it’s all together.’”37 He was careful, however, never to ask her opinion directly. “If she says something is bad, it can destroy me for three days,” Ted admitted.38 And when everything finally did come together, “Audrey has to listen to revision after revision,” said Ted. “She’s my mainstay.”39

  And yet there were still days when Geisel sat at his desk for hours with the pages blank, the pens scattered on the desk, untouched. Lately, when lost for a word, he had begun filling in curse words to complete his rhymes—not to check if his editors were reading his work, as he had done with Dr. Seuss’s ABC, but simply for his own amusement. “I’ll come back and clean it up later, but my original manuscripts are some of the most pornographic things you’ve seen in your life,” said Geisel. Still, there were times when Geisel couldn’t resist teasing Bernstein. In March 1969, two months after Random House published Philip Roth’s groundbreaking and very sexually explicit novel Portnoy’s Complaint, Geisel sent Bernstein a two-page proposal for a children’s book with a similarly pornographic theme, then refused to answer Bernstein’s frantic phone calls for a few days. “If there was a title, it was so dirty I wouldn’t tell you,” Geisel told an interviewer later. “[Bernstein] was going crazy trying to figure out how to break the news that it wouldn’t be a good children’s book.”40 Geisel left Bernstein dangling for a week, then called to let him off the hook. “He’d caught on by that time anyway,” said Geisel.41