Transcription
[Music] Dr. Seuss's ailing wife took her own life after she found out he'd been having an affair with her friend. As if that's not bad enough, the note she left behind revealed the depth of his depravities. It turns out the identity of Seuss's mistress was the biggest bombshell of all. We wouldn't have the Dr. Seuss that we know and love if his first wife, Helen, hadn't seen talent in him and pushed him to become an author. He owed his career to her, and that makes what he did to her so much more cruel.
Theodore Seuss Geisel was born and raised in Springfield, Massachusetts. The family owned a brewery, so Teddy got to enjoy a nice, stable upbringing until Prohibition put an end to their business. Luckily, Theodore Senior had friends in high places, so he landed on his feet. But while the family had some friends, they definitely had enemies as well. At the outbreak of World War I, the Geisel kids faced severe anti-German prejudice from the other children at school. Ted persevered through the torment, eventually graduating and enrolling at Dartmouth. And that's where he started getting into trouble.
Ted fit right in at Dartmouth. He quickly started writing for the school's humor magazine, The Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern. He rose through the ranks, and pretty soon he became the editor and chief. His career was on the fast track, and then a single mistake almost derailed everything between his fraternity and the magazine. It's clear that Ted was very social in college, and being social in college invariably means alcohol. But Ted went to school during Prohibition. One night at Dartmouth, school authorities busted into his room; they found the dorm crowded with Ted and nine of his friends sitting around drinking gin. The dean wanted to expel Ted, but he offered the young writer a life raft: he could stay at the school, but he had to resign from all extracurricular activities—all that time rising to editor and chief of the magazine—and just like that, he was being forced to quit. But Ted Geisel wasn't going to go quietly; he was going to keep writing for the magazine, and he knew just how he was going to do it.
[Music] Ted's name was no longer appearing anywhere in The Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern, but devoted readers probably would have noticed that some of the writing had his familiar flair. But instead of his name at the bottom, they'd find just a single, enigmatic word: [Music] Seuss.
After Dartmouth, Ted enrolled at Oxford, hoping to get a PhD in English. It must have been overwhelming moving across the Atlantic, so meeting a pretty girl from New York must have been just what the doctor ordered. Her name was Helen Palmer, and she immediately saw something in Theodore Geisel. Before meeting Helen, Ted was planning on becoming an English teacher; he wanted to make a difference in young people's lives. But when Helen took one look at his notebooks, she knew he was destined for something more. In the early days of their romance, Helen had a secret motive: she was going to make sure that the world saw his drawings. In 1927, with Helen's convincing, Ted dropped out of Oxford, moved back to the States, and started trying to make it as an author. The moment he got back to the US, he started sending his writings and drawings to magazines, publishers, and advertisers. By July of that year, he already had a nationally published cartoon. The Saturday Evening Post paid him $25 for his work, and that alone was enough to convince him to move to New York City and do this thing for real.
[Music] Ted went from strength to strength. By October, he had landed a job as a writer and illustrator for the humor magazine Judge. He wasn't rich and famous yet, but he had steady paychecks coming in. With a little bit of stability, he popped the question, and he and Helen tied the knot in 1927. With a steady job and his new wife on his arm, it seemed like Ted Geisel had it all figured out. There was just one thing missing: he still signed his work with the mononym Seuss, and it just had something missing. So, because his dad had always wanted him to go into medicine, Ted decided to start calling himself Dr. Seuss in the pages of Judge. Judge was a steady paycheck, but it wasn't what got Dr. Seuss noticed. That, weirdly enough, was bug spray. One of Seuss's early Judge cartoons mentioned the popular bug spray brand, Flit. One woman who enjoyed the cartoon also happened to be married to the executive in charge of advertising for Flit. That was very good news for one Dr. Seuss. His first Flit advert appeared in early 1928, and that gravy train continued until 1941. People loved the ads, and the catchphrase "Quick, Henry, the Flit!" quickly became the "I'm Lovin' It" of its day. So, in a bizarre twist of fate, a bug spray ad turned Dr. Seuss into one of the most sought-after artists in America. Helen clearly had a good eye for talent; telling Seuss to quit Oxford and bet on himself paid off huge, and the money was now rolling in.
[Music] The couple moved into a nice new place in New York City, and they were ready to start living the high life. Fame and fortune meant that Seuss and his wife got to travel the world. He never kept regular office hours; his success giving him the freedom to go wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted. Without any children, he and Helen were able to visit 30 countries together by 1936. They seemed like the perfect couple, but it wouldn't last forever. It's not just that their financial troubles were over; becoming the world-famous Dr. Seuss opened doors that are closed to most people. He and his wife started rubbing shoulders with New York's upper crust, particularly becoming close friends with the incredibly rich and powerful Vanderlip banking family. But while they were doing well, neither of them had any clue what real success was just yet. That was coming.
Even today, everyone knows the name Dr. Seuss, and not for bug spray ads. Sooner or later, Dr. Seuss was going to have to start writing books. But there's a good chance you haven't heard of his first book; it's called Boners. Maybe it didn't become an instant classic, but it did become a best seller, as did the sequel, More Boners. But it was the next book where things finally clicked. Thinking back to what Helen first saw in him to begin with, Seuss came up with an idea for a new book featuring very strange animals. There was just one problem: his new book was fictional; Boners had been non-fiction. Apparently, that was a hurdle for publishers. Despite the fame and success that preceded him, Seuss couldn't convince anyone to take a chance on his strange animals. Depending on when he told the story, his third book received anywhere between 20 and 43 rejections from publishers, but he wasn't going to give up. One day in 1937, Seuss happened to bump into an old classmate from his days at Dartmouth who just happened to now be an editor at Vanguard Press. Seuss finally found someone to publish his book. He named it after a street near where he grew up: To Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street became an instant classic. He quickly published four more books, and it looked like he was finally going to be a successful author, just as Helen had envisioned. But there was one thing they didn't count on: when World War II broke out, Dr. Seuss put his career on the back burner and devoted his efforts to political cartoons, drawing over 400 in two years. In these cartoons, he denounced the Axis leaders and criticized isolationists like Charles Lindbergh, who opposed the US joining the war. Those cartoons largely hold up today; his cartoons about Japanese Americans not so much. Some of Dr. Seuss's cartoons denounced racism as prejudice against Jewish and Black Americans would hurt the war effort. Unfortunately, that tolerance didn't extend to all Americans. One of his cartoons featured caricatured Japanese Americans being handed explosives and told to wait for a signal from home. The message was clear: your Japanese American neighbors can't be trusted.
Before the US entered World War II, Dr. Seuss was just a concerned citizen. In 1942, he started supporting the war effort directly; he enlisted, but he wasn't heading to the front lines. Seuss became the commander of the Army's first motion picture unit's animation department, and once again he set his sights on the Japanese. He eventually earned the Legion of Merit for the films he made during World War II. The most notable was Our Job in Japan, which, after the war, was expanded into the Oscar-winning documentary Designed for Death. While Dr. Seuss was working directly for the war effort, propaganda was the name of the game. Our Job in Japan was a skewed description of Japanese culture designed to teach American soldiers that their Japanese enemies were vicious, would never stop, and had to be defeated at all costs.
Perhaps World War II made Seuss want a little sunshine in his life, because soon after it ended, he and his wife packed up and moved to California. Maybe Helen thought that this was going to be a fresh, new start for them. Sadly, it was the beginning of the end. Seuss made movies during World War II, so now that it was back to civilian life, he tried his hand at making one for general audiences. The final product was The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, and it looks exactly how you'd expect a Dr. Seuss movie to look. Unfortunately, America wasn't ready for the surreal imagery of the film, and it was both a critical and financial disaster. It was so bad that Dr. Seuss never made another movie again. But while the movies didn't really work out, his books were doing better than ever.
[Music] Dr. Seuss wrote many of his most famous books in the 1950s, including If I Ran the Zoo, Horton Hears a Who!, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas! But there was one book in particular that really sent Dr. Seuss into the [Music] stratosphere. A 1954 Life Magazine report on illiteracy came to the conclusion that children weren't learning to read because their books were too boring. An executive at Dr. Seuss's publisher saw this report and gave Seuss a challenge: he compiled a list of 250 words he thought all first graders should know, then he told Dr. Seuss to write a book using only those words. The book was The Cat in the Hat, and it turned Dr. Seuss from a success story into a legend. His imaginative art and writing made the perfect combination with his publisher's simple language, and The Cat in the Hat remains one of the most popular early reader books in the world. For instance, it sold 452,000 copies in 2009, over 50 years after its publication.
[Music] His follow-up educational books, Green Eggs and Ham and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, only built on this success. But as his career was peaking, his marriage was crumbling. Helen, even while shepherding her husband through his rise to glory, started feeling ill around the time of The Cat in the Hat's publication. The years began to pass, and for some reason, she simply couldn't seem to get better. She persevered for years until 1967, when tragedy [Music] struck. Helen took her own life in 1967. Anyone who knew of her illness might have thought that it was the cause, but the truth is much darker. She left her husband a note which offers insight into her pain: "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'm too old and enmeshed in everything you do and are that I cannot conceive of life without you. No one will be surprised to learn the loss of Helen hit Seuss hard. He later wrote that he considered taking his own life or burning down their house and starting completely fresh somewhere else. But it wasn't just heartbreak that hurt Seuss so much; there was also the guilt over what he did to her. Helen finished her note with a cryptic message: '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 all through the years.'"
So why did she think her death would leave a rumor? Why was his reputation threatened? Well, after she was gone, the truth finally came out. Eight months after Helen's passing, Dr. Seuss did something shocking: he married a woman named Audrey Diamond. If that seems like he's turning things around a little quickly, well, here's the thing: Dr. Seuss and his wife first met Audrey Diamond and her husband at a party. From the first moment they met, Dr. Seuss became infatuated with Audrey, and she felt the same way about him. They wasted little time making their relationship official after Helen's [Music] death. Dr. Seuss knew very well what it looked like, marrying his wife's friend so soon after she took her own life. He wrote to his friends and begged for their understanding: "I'm 64 years old. I'm marrying a woman 18 years younger. I have not flipped my lid. This is not a sudden, nutty decision. This is an inevitable, inescapable conclusion. All I can ask you is to try to believe in me."
Seuss and Audrey didn't invite a single friend to their wedding. Audrey essentially abandoned her entire life to be with him. She had two daughters, but after she married Seuss, she immediately shipped them both off to boarding school, as she put it: "They wouldn't have been happy with Ted, and Ted wouldn't have been happy with them." The only ray of light in this incredibly dark story is that Seuss and Audrey remained happily married for the rest of his life. Even if it looks bad, it seems that Audrey gave him something that Helen couldn't. With the 18-year age gap between them, Audrey became Dr. Seuss's caretaker as his body started to fail him, especially when glaucoma started robbing him of his sight. [Music] The couple remained together until 1991, when cancer finally claimed Dr. Seuss's life. His fantastical stories are beloved the world over, so it's easy to understand why this incredibly dark chapter of his life has mostly been erased. But there's another part of his story that you probably don't know about, and that's how to say his name. Turns out we've been saying it wrong this whole time. According to the man himself, Seuss actually rhymes with "zoes." Good to know, but no one is ever going to pronounce it that way.
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