As for materials Ted didn’t want included, he prohibited any mention of his abandoned Seven Lady Godivas musical, and asked that there be no displays of merchandise from the Revell and Coleco deals. “He was concerned [the exhibit] would become a Disneyesque celebration of fluff and frivolity,” said Brezzo. “You could see his jaw set when we started making selections. He knew this would be his retrospective, and like any artist, he dreaded what it might say about his life.”19 Privately, too, Hibben worried about Geisel’s health and urged Brezzo to try to have the exhibit ready by May 1986—a staggeringly short six months to prepare a major exhibit.
Geisel spent the early months of 1986 ferrying You’re Only Old Once! through production and marketing at Random House. To his surprise, the book had started something of a turf war. Because the book was aimed at older readers, not his usual audience, Random House’s Adult Trade Division wanted to oversee its production and marketing, instead of the Juvenile Division. But Ted cringed at the very suggestion. Janet Schulman, Cathy Goldsmith, and their staffs were the only ones he trusted with his work; they knew his style and his quirks—and after all, he argued, it was still a Dr. Seuss book. He would eventually agree to a compromise, with the Juvenile Division managing the production of the book, while allowing the Adult Trade Division to oversee its marketing.
Perhaps fittingly, You’re Only Old Once!—subtitled “A Book for Obsolete Children”—would be published on Geisel’s eighty-second birthday. On its first page, he had dedicated the book to his fellow Members of the Dartmouth Class of 1925, of which there were approximately 200 left of the original 500 or so graduates.20 To Ted’s amusement, Random House had cleverly marketed the book as “Dr. Seuss’s first book for grown-ups! (the grown-upper, the better)” and for “Ages 95 down.”21 “I can now go among the grown-up people and say, ‘I’m a grown-up author!’” he joked.22
Just as he had on the release of The Butter Battle Book, Ted celebrated both his birthday and his new book with a party hosted by Random House at the New York Public Library. He had spent three hours earlier that morning signing more than 1,300 books at a local bookstore, but arrived looking happy and well pressed in a gray three-piece suit with a paisley bow tie. Random House had kept the party small—there were less than a hundred guests in attendance, including some Dartmouth alumni—and Geisel seemed to appreciate the intimacy of the event, casually sipping white wine as he chatted with old friends. When finally pressed to make some impromptu remarks, he reminded guests of the similar party two years earlier. “At that time, I called you all together to help abolish nuclear weapons,” he said. “Now we have a new goal—to abolish old age! Our lobby is having a hell of a time getting it by the White House.”23
Critics were slightly confused by the very idea of a Dr. Seuss book for grown-ups. Reviewing the book in The New York Times, sixty-seven-year-old cartoonist Edward Sorel found “something amiss in the blithe assumption that the sort of rhymes which delight a four-year-old (or an adult reading to a four-year-old) will still entertain when read alone through bifocals,” but admitted the book was “not my cup of Geritol.”24
But readers, like always, came to Dr. Seuss without question. You’re Only Old Once! quickly sold out of its first print run of 200,000, which sent it soaring to the number one spot on the New York Times adult nonfiction bestseller list. While the book was marketed to adults, Geisel met plenty of young fans at book signings who also loved the book for its funny illustrations, even if they didn’t always understand all the health and hospital references. “I tried to take the books away from them, but it didn’t work,” he told The Washington Post playfully.25 With both obsolete and non-obsolete children eagerly buying the book, You’re Only Old Once! would sell a million copies in less than a year. Geisel joked that with his new, significantly older fan base came new responsibilities. “The book is wrecking my social life because prior to this, the only places that I was ever invited to go were to have cocoa in kindergarten,” he said. “Now I’m getting invited every day to have martinis in old folks’ homes.”26
Geisel was trying hard to be comfortable with his advanced—and advancing—age. He was still relatively fit, carrying only 150 pounds on his six-foot frame, with a full head of silver hair and a neatly trimmed matching beard. Compensating for his erratic vision problems required him to wear large eyeglasses with thick frames, which only made him look even more studious, and very much in line with what journalists expected Dr. Seuss to look like. He still spent some mornings answering mail, usually sending out short, pithy Cat Notes, and often joked that he had been writing in verse so long that even short notes or letters came out in rhyme. “It’s becoming a normal method of expression,” he said.27 He was also trying to keep up with the latest technology—he had even made a reference to video games in Hunches in Bunches—but he would never embrace the new word processors, faxes, or even an answering machine. His only real high-tech equipment was a photocopier he would sometimes use to reduce the size of a drawing. He wouldn’t even write with an electric typewriter, preferring his old reliable Smith Corona.
There were days he was feeling every one of his eighty-two years. His neck and jaw were sore, and his eyes still bothered him, but with a steady regimen of daily medication—he was taking eight pills every day—he felt he had most of his ailments under control. When a concerned reporter asked what his specific health problems were, Geisel refused to elaborate. “It’s not out of modesty,” he explained, “but if I began listing what I had that was wrong, I would get fan mail from everybody in the United States who had the same thing wrong and I would go absolutely nuts trying to answer it all.” The main malady, he explained, was mostly just “old age.”28
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• • • •
On May 17, 1986—almost exactly six months after pitching the idea to Geisel—the Dr. Seuss retrospective opened at the San Diego Museum of Art. Officially titled “Dr. Seuss: From Then to Now,” the exhibit featured more than three hundred items—taken from the Tower and plumbed from the archives at UCLA—representing the entirety of Dr. Seuss’s career. The morning before, Geisel had slowly walked through the exhibit by himself, stopping to look at old cartoons from Jack-O-Lantern, Liberty, and PM—all lovingly displayed under glass—advertisements for Flit, paintings, animation cels, and rough drafts and mock-ups from nearly every book, all the way up to You’re Only Old Once! and including the little-seen The Seven Lady Godivas. Large banners hung from the ceiling, bearing words of wisdom from Dr. Seuss, including one reading, “Dr. Seuss’s advice to all young, starting artists: Don’t start your career when a Great Depression is also starting.” Outside, a twenty-two-foot Cat in the Hat peered down at guests over the roof of the museum. It was an elegant exhibit and a fine tribute to his long career. Geisel told everyone he thought it was “terrific.”29
Unfortunately, the first critical review was devastating. “This simply is not an art exhibition,” said critic Robert Pincus in the San Diego Union disparagingly. “The chief function of an art museum is to show art.”30 That one hurt—and it was from his hometown newspaper, no less. Despite all of his success—even despite a Pulitzer Prize—Geisel still believed his work wasn’t being taken seriously. He badly wanted to be regarded as a Great Artist, on the same level as Picasso, and not as a novelty act, relegated to the realm of children’s artists or entertainers—as he would often derisively remark, he wasn’t Walt Disney. Still hanging on the wall of Geisel’s studio was one of his father’s target-shooting bull’s-eyes, put there, he said, “to remind me of perfection.”31 He would never feel he had achieved such a state, largely because criticism from highbrows like Pincus devastated him. He scarcely realized that, in the long run, their opinions mattered little when it came to his artistic legacy.
Yet while the critics yawned, the public thronged. Nearly every morning, museum staff found crowds of excited fans waiting outside the building for the doors to open. By the end of the exhibit’s te
n-week run, more than 250,000 visitors had streamed through the museum’s doors—the kind of crowd most museum curators could only dream of. It was inevitable, then, that the exhibit would be sent on tour—and Geisel would try to go with it as it made its way through Pittsburgh, New York, Baltimore, and New Orleans. He was particularly excited about seeing the exhibit on display at the New York Public Library and was upset to learn it wouldn’t be featured in the main library gallery—a display of medieval manuscripts was already there—but would instead be shuffled upstairs to a third-floor corridor. Geisel canceled his plans to attend.
In late spring, Geisel planned to travel to Connecticut to accept an honorary degree from the University of Hartford, a scheduled appearance that had not gone unnoticed by Richard Neal, the savvy thirty-seven-year-old mayor of Springfield, Massachusetts, who noted that Hartford, Connecticut, was less than thirty miles away. Geisel’s hometown was in the midst of celebrating the 350th anniversary of its founding, and Mayor Neal thought a visit by its most famous living son would be a highlight of the monthlong festivities. Months before his Hartford visit, then, Ted had found the Tower swamped with mail bearing a Springfield postmark, most of it from schoolchildren asking Dr. Seuss to visit—including a letter from eight-year-old Joel Senez, whose family now occupied 74 Fairfield Street. It was all too much for Geisel to resist—and with Springfield only a half-hour drive from Hartford, Ted promised he’d come home in May.
On Sunday, May 18, 1986, Geisel received his ninth honorary doctorate from an American university as he was hooded at the University of Hartford in front of 1,800 whooping students. At age eighty-four, Geisel gave very few speeches and simply bowed respectfully to the crowd and sat down. “That’s part of the deal I make when I come to these things,” he told the Hartford Courant later. “I like coming and talking to young people who have to solve problems I don’t have to worry about solving anymore.”32
Two days later, Dr. Seuss was on Mulberry Street.
On a day filled with official receptions, lunch and dinner with Springfield’s leaders, and endless crowds of excited children, Geisel requested that there be no formal interviews or any scheduled book signings or appearances; he simply wanted to enjoy his hometown—the one he’d left nearly sixty years ago. “I’m very sentimental about Springfield,” he admitted.33 Ted and Audrey were driven around town in an antique bus, with Mayor Neal helpfully pointing out key landmarks and major changes in the cityscape. There was a short stop at Sumner Avenue School—where children dressed like Bartholomew Cubbins or the Cat in the Hat filed out onto the front lawn, cheering excitedly as Ted waved from the bus—and then a brief visit to Geisel’s childhood home at 74 Fairfield Street. “I just stopped by to make sure you’re taking proper care of the house,” Geisel said merrily as he shook hands with its current owner, Ron Senez. For a while, he sat in his old bedroom with Senez’s two young sons, pointing out places where he had poked holes in the plaster, and left them with a tantalizing story, claiming there was a mural of “a lot of crazy animals”34 that was now covered by their bedroom wallpaper.35
As the bus slowly turned off of Maple and onto Mulberry Street, Ted could see it lined with hundreds of schoolchildren and teachers, cheering loudly and waving a long banner reading And to Think That I Saw Him on Mulberry Street! Audrey nudged her husband. “Give them a good wave, darling,”36 she said gently—but to her surprise, Ted asked the bus driver to stop. Geisel stepped out of the bus and onto the sidewalk, looking dapper in his checked gray suit and paisley tie, and the crowd excitedly roared its approval and pressed forward slightly—and suddenly, Dr. Seuss was being mobbed like a rock star. Small hands reached out to touch him as he walked past, and he reached back, trying to shake as many as he could. As Ted waved goodbye, hundreds of voices shouted in unison the final line of Green Eggs and Ham: “Thank you! Thank you, Sam-I-Am!” Ted boarded the bus, choking back tears. “Wow,” he said quietly.
As the sun began to go down, Mayor Neal took Ted to Forest Park—one of the many parks Geisel’s father had overseen in his half-century as park superintendent—and presented him with an item that had recently been discovered thirty feet up a tree: a rusted iron sign reading GEISEL GROVE, the picnic park created by Ted’s father a lifetime ago. Before Geisel left, a librarian shook his hand warmly. “Thank you for being so good to the kids,” she said.37
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• • • •
Ted was still trying to keep to his regular work schedule, diligently going into his studio every day, but it was clear he was slowing down. Breakfast was still around nine-thirty, though health problems had forced him to stop eating eggs and switch to cold cereal or oatmeal. “He rants and rails at the change,” noted Audrey, “but man does not live by cholesterol alone, although he sometimes dies by it.”38 After breakfast, he would head for the familiar desk, with a short break for lunch. The cork walls were still lined with drafts of books in various stages of development, the drawing table covered with sketches of unusual characters or half-finished typewritten manuscripts. He was still trying to work on three or four books at a time. “They’ll fight with each other until finally two of them win and I’ll finish those,” he explained. “The others will go back into the files for a while and then come out eventually.”39
Some days, Audrey caught him in what she called “a state of flux,” kicked back in his chair, with a vacant stare. Ted explained that he was merely “puzzling my puzzler,” as he thought through troublesome plot points or difficult rhymes while staring at the Pacific coastline beyond his studio windows. “I can’t imagine Ted being productive without that view, and the way his seat knocks back and his feet go up—and [then] he gets a thought and slaps forward,” said Audrey. “That is all part of his creativity.”40 The only interruptions Geisel permitted were telephone calls from Random House; at the moment, he was working with Schulman on the final touches of a Beginner Book called I Am NOT Going to Get Up Today!, which he’d written, but had been too tired to illustrate, handing those duties over to artist James Stevenson.
By 5:30 P.M., he would be done for the day and would exit his studio, loudly announcing, “I have now left the office, now hear this!” Then he and Audrey would have cocktails—lately his preferred beverage was a vodka tonic—and watch the evening news together. While Ted preferred to stay at home most evenings, Audrey could still persuade him to accompany her to dinner parties or charity events from time to time, telling him it helped him “stay rounded.” And if Ted groused that he was feeling old and tired, she would dismiss him playfully, telling him that going out in the evenings kept his mind young. “After the children’s hour, the crazy little kid grows up, and he’s a crazy grown-up,” Audrey said warmly. “[Ted’s] mind just keeps flipping out . . . getting kind of crazier all the time.”41
Ted was still a good dinner guest, though he did more listening than talking these days, especially when it came to politics. “I stay out of politics,” he said flatly, “because if I begin thinking too much about politics, I’ll probably . . . drop writing children’s books and become a political cartoonist again.”42 While he liked Reagan personally, Ted’s own politics were still fiercely liberal, and he couldn’t bear listening to anyone defending the president’s brand of fiscal or social conservatism. Rather than argue, however, he would simply sit back and stew, one eyebrow slightly cocked—“the twinkle went out,” as Judith Morgan put it.43
He also found himself getting bored easily and looking for other things to do. At a charity gala at the high-end Neiman Marcus department store in San Diego, Ted disappeared for hours. When Audrey finally found him, he was sitting in the women’s shoe department, happily switching all the prices around. At that moment, he informed Audrey he was done attending charity balls and galas.
As Christmas of 1986 approached, Ted found he was having problems hearing and grudgingly began wearing a hearing aid. His hand-drawn Christmas card to Audrey showed the Cat in the Hat with a matching he
aring aid, with the caption “Damn it all, Audrey, I heard you! You said, ‘Nerry Jistmas!’ And so do I.”44 He had also developed gout, and was—understandably—feeling suitably grouchy enough that he refused an invitation to serve as the honorary chairman of the Holiday Bowl football game in San Diego. Typically, however, Audrey talked him into reconsidering—and on December 30, Ted found himself in the traditional red jacket, waving dutifully during the parade, and watching the game from a comfortable private box. Despite his initial misgivings, he was all smiles afterward. “I’m delighted to have been chosen,” he told the San Diego Union. “I was completely surprised—my athletic prowess has never been terrific.”45
Still, his mood continued to sour as his health continued to decline. Everything, it seemed, was a problem. In early 1987, Geisel went in for root canal surgery and developed a major infection, which led to further deterioration of his already fragile jawbone. More rounds of poking and prodding followed, but Ted was tiring of doctors—and they were tiring of him, too. Ted was such a notoriously grumpy patient that Audrey even caught one physician trying to sneak out a back door rather than have to diagnose Dr. Seuss. Through it all, Ted refused to have surgery on his aching jaw. He would eventually be put on a medication cocktail heavy on antibiotics to fight his infection.
Nineteen eighty-seven would mark a major anniversary in Dr. Seuss’s career, as it was not only the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of The Cat in the Hat, but the fiftieth anniversary of his first book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street! With a body of work spanning five decades, Geisel worried some of his work might now be deemed outdated or old-fashioned—especially a book like The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, which he considered an archaic “literary fairy tale.” “If I didn’t have a reputation, I couldn’t sell it today,” he said of Cubbins. “Kings and fairy tales got old fashioned. People began walking on the moon and there were no kings.”46
Becoming Dr. Seuss Page 45