Becoming Dr. Seuss

by Brian Jay Jones

  More seriously, Geisel had recently drawn fire for his use of the derogatory word Chinaman in the fifty-year-old Mulberry Street—and even he agreed that the term was in poor taste. “That’s the way things were fifty years ago,” he explained—and in 1978, he had quietly changed the phrase to Chinese man. He also tinkered slightly with the art, erasing the character’s pigtail, and instructed the Random House production department to remove the character’s yellow skin tone (“Now he looks like an Irishman,” Geisel said, somewhat unhelpfully.47). However, even with Geisel’s alterations to the character, Mulberry Street’s Chinese man would remain controversial. In 2017, a Mulberry Street mural at the Dr. Seuss museum in Springfield would draw sharp criticism for containing the offending character and would eventually be replaced with a Seussian montage.

  Critics also revived the observation that very few Dr. Seuss books contained female protagonists—and those that did contain female characters portrayed them either as villains—such as the lazy bird Mayzie in Horton Hatches the Egg—or lacking in imagination, such as the sister in The Glunk That Got Thunk. Geisel, who considered himself a feminist, tried to lay low, but couldn’t resist carping about what he considered sanctimonious nitpicking. “I’m in favor of women’s lib,” he said, “but a lot of members of women’s lib have decided that they’re going to clean up everything.”48 When critic Alison Lurie took Ted to task in The New York Review of Books for sexism, Geisel couldn’t resist pointing out that most of his characters were simply fantasy creatures—and “if she [Lurie] can identify their sex, I’ll remember her in my will.”49

  While he couldn’t pull the transaction off in time to make it part of Dr. Seuss’s fiftieth anniversary, Bernstein and Random House completed their acquisition of Vanguard in 1988, obtaining an impressive five-hundred-title backlist that included works by Saul Bellow and Joyce Carol Oates. But Bernstein always said he had purchased Vanguard for one reason: he wanted the two Dr. Seuss books the company had published five decades ago. With the acquisition of Mulberry Street and Bartholomew Cubbins, Random House officially owned the entire Dr. Seuss catalogue. “That was really the main reason I did it,” Bernstein said proudly.50

  Even as others were celebrating his life and work, Ted was in perpetual agony. Despite increasingly stronger doses of medication, Geisel was in constant pain from the surgeries to his neck and jaw. In late 1987, he canceled a planned trip to Baltimore for the opening of the touring “Dr. Seuss: From Then to Now” retrospective, citing health problems. His doctors continued to urge him to undergo treatment in a hyperbaric chamber to speed his recovery and noted that there were now chambers large enough to seat eight—Ted wouldn’t have to lay on his back in the coffin-sized enclosure that so frightened him. In 1988, Audrey even managed to get Ted to the University of San Diego Medical Center, where he could visit the room-sized chamber and hear from doctors, who enthused about its ease and effectiveness—but Ted defiantly walked out in the middle of the discussion. Audrey pled with him to reconsider, but Ted wouldn’t budge. “All you’re offering me is logic,” he growled.51

  The only room in which the pain ever seemed to abate was his studio, where he could lean back in his chair, looking out at the ocean, or existing in silent conversation with the loyal Theophrastus, waiting for inspiration. But it was harder now to come up with ideas; he would rummage through his bone pile over and over again, looking for possibilities in discarded drawings or half-developed manuscripts, without much luck. After taking on doctors in You’re Only Old Once! he briefly considered going after lawyers, relishing the idea of mocking the profession that had permitted Liberty magazine to—in his opinion—steal his work in the name of a petty profit. But the more he wrote and drew, the more he realized he was only getting “angrier and angrier . . . I found I was being mean. I knew that wouldn’t work.”52 Next, he worked at a story about a little boy with a square balloon, but couldn’t figure out where it was going, either. “I’ve got an idea here, and an idea here,” he wrote to Ted Owens in frustration, “but I have no idea in the world how to make them connect.”53

  In March of 1988, Geisel turned eighty-four. He was feeling old and feeling tired; friends thought he was looking frail. Geisel likely knew his next book might well be his last—but despite his constant aches and pains, he wasn’t fixated on death or dying. Instead, he wanted his final book to be a benediction—a book that embodied the one theme, he said, that ran through all of his books, starting with that very first moment Marco set foot on Mulberry Street.

  Hope.

  * * *

  • • • •

  Geisel would spend much of 1988 and early 1989 in the Tower and at his desk, working slowly on the book he would come to call Oh, the Places You’ll Go! His workday had shortened slightly again—most mornings, he wouldn’t sit down in his studio until at least ten—but for Ted, old habits were the best habits; he couldn’t imagine doing a book any other way, no matter how tired he might get. “You have to put in your hours, and finally you make it work,” he said plainly.54 Pages still went up on the wall for him to lean over and squint at, hands thrust into his back pockets, and the trash can still overflowed with crumpled drawings and discarded pages of typed manuscript.

  From the opening page, Geisel was there to greet his readers warmly, then take them by the hand for an expedition through endless possibilities:

  Congratulations!

  Today is your day.

  You’re off to Great Places!

  You’re off and away!

  “The theme is limitless horizons and hope,” he explained—and perhaps knowing this would be his final journey with his readers, Oh, the Places You’ll Go! is a tour de force of Seussian architecture and Seussian characters, with subtle nods to work from his six-decade career. Smiling elephants resembling Horton march across the page; oddly bent houses, castles with soaring arches, and mazes of roads crisscross the landscape. Dragon-like creatures pop out of manholes, while gigantic Hakken-Kraks yowl from the ocean. There were even pages that seemed to recall his magazine work from the 1920s and 1930s, with men in derby hats and long dark coats standing in line while being watched by a cow, and small black cats—straight out of his Life magazine cartoons—studiously eyeing a fishing hole. On another page, bearded men play fantastic instruments, similar to those in The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. Elsewhere, struts resemble the fanciful letters from On Beyond Zebra.

  As the book’s main character, a little boy in yellow with a stocking cap, overcomes slumps, negotiates the Waiting Place, and conquers fears of being alone, Geisel cheers him—and the reader—on wildly, ending the book on a note of triumphant encouragement that Ted had written and rewritten countless times, until he had it just right:

  . . . you’re off to Great Places!

  Today is your day!

  Your mountain is waiting.

  So . . . get on your way!55

  While Geisel was finishing up Oh, the Places You’ll Go! in early spring 1989, he called Cathy Goldsmith and asked her to come to the Tower to help him with the book’s final layout. Goldsmith lived out of the Tower’s guest room as she and Ted spent their days with his pages spread out on the floor of his studio, checking his colored pencils against the Random House color charts, and marking every circle and squiggle with the appropriate color number, “until even my eyes hurt,” said Goldsmith.56 As Goldsmith helped Ted pack his completed manuscript into an oversize box for transport back to New York, Geisel gently informed her that he wouldn’t be coming to Random House to deliver the book or read it himself. She left the Tower with tears stinging her eyes; it was clear the book was Dr. Seuss’s goodbye. “It seemed so clear that he was not knowing where he was going to go pretty soon,” she said.57 As she boarded her plane back to New York, a flight attendant asked if she could take the large box Goldsmith was carrying. Goldsmith refused, aghast at the idea of handing over her precious cargo.

  As Ted wrapped up Oh,
the Places You’ll Go!, Audrey was moody and slightly depressed. Ted worried that he was to blame; he knew he could be testy when finishing a book. “She’s mad at me for something,” Ted whispered to Janet Schulman over the phone. “I can’t find out what.”58 But Audrey assured him that things were fine, even as she began taking antidepressants. As the summer of 1989 wore on, Audrey found it difficult to remember things, and privately, she was concerned she might be developing Alzheimer’s. Her mood blackened, and she began taking Prozac and sleeping until nearly noon—a sure sign that something was wrong with the normally lively and active Audrey. Finally, at the urging of her daughters, she agreed to undergo an MRI, where doctors discovered a benign tumor lodged between her skull and her brain.

  Audrey went in for surgery in January 1990 to excise the tumor and was immediately herself again. “I had been in such total anguish and now I was better, just like that!” she recalled, snapping her fingers.59 Watching Audrey recover in her bed at Scripps Clinic, with her head wrapped in an enormous turban of bandages, Ted was overcome with emotion. Jed Mattes, Ted’s agent, fondly recalled how Audrey had always been able to “unobtrusively anticipate [Ted’s] needs so he never had to be aware of them.”60 Seeing Audrey helpless, Ted was now determined to take care of her as best he could—and every day he would visit her, dressed in his best suit and bow tie, bringing her a feather. “If you don’t deserve a feather in your cap today, you never will,” he would tell her as he inserted that day’s feather into her turban.61 By the end of her hospital stay, her turban was filled with brightly colored feathers sticking out in all directions.

  * * *

  • • • •

  Shortly after Cathy Goldsmith delivered Oh, the Places You’ll Go! to Random House, Michael Frith dropped by for a visit. As he stuck his head into the offices of the juvenile division, editor Janet Schulman beckoned him over. “You should see what Ted just sent,” she said, and pointed him toward the newly delivered manuscript. Frith slowly started reading through the pages and felt a catch in his throat. “Do you know what this is?” he said to Schulman. “It’s his valedictory. He’s saying goodbye to us.”62

  So he was. And when Oh, the Places You’ll Go! was published in early 1990, most critics and readers seemed to sense it, even if some weren’t quite sure how they felt about the book itself. One of the first and most widely circulated reviews, by Scripps Howard News Service writer Fredric Koeppel, seemed determined to be unimpressed, calling the book “slack and unimaginative,” and complaining that “the illustrations [are] typically Seussian but pale imitations of his best work”63—a sure sign Koeppel had missed at least part of the point of the book. Alison Lurie, writing in The New York Review of Books, issued an overanalyzed and overwritten critique, disparaging the book as “the yuppie dream—or nightmare—of 1990 in cartoon form.” Lurie further dismissed the book as encouraging children to pursue wealth and fame, rather than helping others, defeating tyrants, or calling out blowhards. “Who is buying this book?” she finally asked. “My guess is that its typical purchaser—or recipient—is aged thirty-something, has a highly paid, publicly visible job, and feels insecure because of the way things are going in the world.”64

  How wrong she would be, as Susan Stark of Gannett News Service—in another widely reprinted review—would immediately assert. As Stark saw it, Oh, the Places You’ll Go! had “both the depth and levity that seem likely to make it one of everyone’s favorites. It also has the greatest thematic breadth of any book in the entire extraordinary Seuss canon. This may well be a summing up on his part, his farewell with a flourish,” continued Stark. “If so, he’s surely going out in the high style to which he has made us all joyfully, gratefully accustomed.”65

  Most readers and critics saw the book exactly as Frith and Stark had—as Dr. Seuss’s final and beneficent words of encouragement and support for anyone, at any age, anxious to make their way in the world. As a result, it would regularly be given as a gift at graduations, read aloud at weddings, tucked into care packages for new college students, or signed by colleagues for a promoted or retiring coworker, making it both a perennial bestseller as well as one of the bestselling Dr. Seuss books of all time. On publication, it would race to the top of the New York Times adult fiction bestseller list and linger in the top twenty-five for two years, selling more than a million copies in that time. “This proves it!” Geisel said giddily, “I no longer write for children, I write for people!”66

  Producers at Tri-Star Productions immediately approached Geisel about turning the book into a full-length animated feature, and Ted would take several meetings with executives at the Tower to discuss fleshing his relatively short book out into a ninety-minute movie. Producers envisioned the film as a mash-up of every Dr. Seuss book, using all of his characters—an idea Geisel loved—and sweetened the deal with a promise that he could write several songs. But Ted’s enthusiasm for the project began to wane with every passing week; he just simply couldn’t find the energy to work on it at the rapid pace envisioned by Tri-Star. The project would be back-burnered and then abandoned for good.

  That summer, after years of gentle nudging by Bob Bernstein and others, Geisel finally agreed to work with two longtime friends, the journalists Neil and Judith Morgan, on his authorized biography. Ted enjoyed sitting with them as they sorted through files of old artwork and manuscripts, and foraged through the archives at UCLA, but he dreaded the idea of being interviewed. His speech was now permanently slurred due to the damage to his jaw, and Geisel worried the Morgans wouldn’t be able to understand him.

  Still, beginning in December 1990, Geisel sat for nearly eight months of extended interviews, with the Morgans asking him questions about his Springfield childhood, his days at Dartmouth and Oxford, and his early years with Helen as a cartoonist and advertising man in New York City. To his surprise, he enjoyed talking about old times and old friends—and the Morgans, to his delight, seemed to have little problem understanding him. He was also intrigued by the laptop computers the Morgans used to type up their notes; after seventy years of pounding away on a typewriter, he wondered aloud whether he would even be able to learn to use a computer at his age.

  As they wrapped up one of their final interviews in the summer of 1991, the Morgans asked Geisel if there was any moral or message he wanted to leave with his readers that he didn’t think he’d included in any of his books. After sixty years and more than forty books, was there anything left Dr. Seuss wanted to say? At their next session, Geisel handed them a scrap of paper with his distinctive printing on it:

  Any message or slogan? Whenever things go a bit sour in a job I’m doing, I always tell myself, “You can do better than this.”

  The best slogan I can think of to leave with the kids of the U.S.A. would be: “We can . . . and we’ve got to . . . do better than this.”67

  Then, thinking better of it, he had darkly crossed out the kids of, thereby ensuring his message was addressed to everyone. “I no longer write for children,” he’d insisted. “I write for people.”

  * * *

  • • • •

  “Am I dead now?” Ted playfully asked Audrey.68 She assured him that he most certainly was not—but in early September 1991, he informed his secretary, Claudia Prescott, that he was done signing books and done sending Cat Notes. Any mail left in the Tower would have to be returned to Random House to be answered by form letter. It was then that Prescott understood: despite Audrey’s reassurances, Ted knew he was dying. “Claudia, you are going to stay on, aren’t you?” he asked. Prescott promised that she would and told him she’d come by to check on him.

  He was also done with hospitals. “He declared no more treatments, no more trips,” said Judith Morgan. “He was so tired of being put in a car and taken out for checkups and attempts to prolong everything and he said he just wanted to quit going to the doctor.”69 Geisel had no intention, then, of taking his last breath in a sterile hospital room, in an
unfamiliar bed. He knew where he wanted to die: the one place that he loved the most—the one place on Earth that he truly hated to leave. It wasn’t Springfield, nor was it New Zealand, nor any of the other exotic locations he’d visited in his eighty-seven years.

  It was his studio in the Tower at the top of Mount Soledad.

  The well-worn sofa in Ted’s studio—the one where he would writhe when stuck for ideas, or where he would sit for hours reading mysteries and biographies, waiting for his brain to kick-start—was converted into a bed. Here Geisel would sleep most of the day, even as the sunlight came streaming in through the windows and the waves of the Pacific Ocean crashed on the beach below. Audrey would serve as his nurse during the days, handing the evening shift off to a night nurse. Some afternoons, Geisel’s doctor, Ruth Grobstein, would sit with him, talking with him long into the night.

  His youngest stepdaughter, Leagrey, now thirty-three, came to stay in the Tower as well, quietly chatting with him and watching over him as he slept. In his old age, Geisel admitted that his views of children had changed. “I’m a failure in enough things that I would like to go on and make them better,” he said. “I would be a more amenable, lovable person than I am now. I probably would like children better than I do now; individually, I can handle them, but in mass . . . they terrify me.”70 Over the last twenty years, Geisel had cultivated a warm and loving relationship with Lark and Leagrey—a relationship that was all the more special because he’d had to work at it. One late September afternoon, as he sat with Leagrey, he took Theophrastus—his companion and muse since childhood—down from his perch near the desk. “You will take care of the dog, won’t you?” he asked as he pressed the well-loved stuffed dog into his daughter’s hands.71