My friend Brian Jay Jones’s
deft and delightful new biography, Becoming Dr. Seuss, shows how writer and cartoonist Theodor Geisel transformed
children’s literature, making it far funnier and more visually compelling than
anything that had gone before. In the process he ended up revolutionizing the
way generations of kids have learned to read. For these accomplishments, he won
the love of countless fans. Yet on a personal level, his life had more than its
share of sadness, even though Geisel was someone who kept his emotions locked up
tight. Brian presents us with all the details, then lets us decide whether the
good doctor was in fact a good man.
I leave it to readers to
discover the heartache that marred Geisel’s life. Instead, I’m focusing on how
this writer and artist was shaped by Hollywood. As he once explained to the Saturday Evening Post, “I learned more about writing children’s books when I
worked in Hollywood than anywhere else. For in films, everything is based on
coordination between pictures and words.” From the time of his earliest picture
books, like Horton Hears a Who, Geisel was struggling to make his
whimsical drawings mesh with his love of wacky words. But he hardly started out
planning to be a children’s book author. His first career was in advertising,
and he made a nice living promoting unlovable products like pesticides. (His
“Quick, Henry, the Flit!” campaign made the phrase into a national mantra.)
World War II changed
everything. Geisel was recruited to join the U.S. Army by none other than Frank
Capra, the Oscar-winning director of You
Can’t Take It With You, Mr. Deeds
Goes to Town, and It Happened One
Night. Once the ultra-patriotic Capra enlisted, he was named a lieutenant
colonel in the Signal Corps, charged with overseeing a unit that produced
training films and other materials to help in the war effort. Geisel’s
cartooning talents and story sense were quickly put to use in animated shorts
that found colorful ways to instruct G.I.’s about the ins and outs of life in a
combat zone. (One favorite Geisel creation, the lovable but inept Private
Snafu, led him to work closely with talented young animators Ray Harryhausen
and Chuck Jones.) Geisel never forgot
his debt to Capra. As Brian explains, “It was Capra who helped him understand
the need for tight pacing and concise storytelling and—most important—the
wonderfully useful skill of storyboarding.
We don’t tend to think of Dr.
Seuss as a maker of movies, but Geisel had a role in three Oscar-winning films within
the span of five years. In 1946, he
seethed when the Oscar for Best Documentary Short went to something called Hitler Lives?, a film cribbed almost
entirely from Geisel’s own Your Job in
Germany. The following year, while writing and illustrating one of his
early children’s classics, McElligot’s
Pool, he was also revising another of his wartime films, Your Job in Japan, into an RKO
documentary feature re-christened Design
for Death. This muddled project was lambasted by critics, but still won a
1948 Oscar. Then in 1950, a character he’d created, the very noisy Gerald
McBoing-Boing, became the hero of an Oscar-winning animated short of which he
could be legitimately proud.
Geisel’s Hollywood dreams
continued when he was paired with a young producer named Stanley Kramer for the
making of a live-action musical, The 5000
Fingers of Dr. T. Geisel’s tale of a sinister piano teacher and his
two-story piano must have sounded fresh and original, but I’ve actually seen this
creepy film. Children (and grown-ups) would be well advised to stay away.
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