How author Dr Seuss who was behind Christmas classic The Grinch hated children, was a recluse and had an affair while his wife was dying from cancer
Theodore Seuss Geisel has sold more than 600million children's books across the globe and the upcoming Grinch movie, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, will be the fifth screen adaptation
TO millions of kids, Dr Seuss was the kindly author of colourful tales packed with nonsense rhymes and anarchic characters.
But just as one of his most popular characters the Grinch hated Christmas, the writer could not stand children and valued his devoted first wife so little he had an affair while she was dying from cancer.
Even his second wife decided it would be better if she sent her two daughters to boarding school so he would not have to face them.
Today, the Grinch returns to cinemas with Benedict Cumberbatch voicing the grouchy green monster who tries to steal Christmas.
After Jim Carrey’s live-action version in 2000, the animation is a classic Seussian morality tale that puts family values rather than commercialism at the forefront of the season of goodwill.
Not that chain-smoking Dr Seuss, aka Theodor Seuss Geisel, would mind it being the other way around.
Since his death in 1991, the American’s second wife Audrey has turned her late husband’s work into a multimillion-pound venture.
He has sold more than 600million books worldwide and this is the fifth film to be released that is based on one of them.
Put simply, there were two sides to the writer: The fun Dr Seuss whose characters continue to inspire children across the world, and the far more Grinch-like Theodor, who preferred to live as a recluse up a mountain and was prone to depressed thoughts.
Audrey, now 97, said: “He was a little frightened by children. He always said, ‘You have ’em, I’ll amuse ’em!’
‘His expression was just, Oh my God!’
Audrey Geisel
“One time, they got an old bus out and took him around to the schools. As Ted stood on the first step of the antique bus, the skies cleared.
“And from every orifice of that school came droves of children, running as fast as they could, shouting. And when he saw these hordes of children just tearing in his direction, he turned to get back in the bus.
“I was there. His expression was just ‘Oh my God!’ He was scared.”
Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, to a family of brewers, Theodor lost his editor’s role on the Dartmouth College magazine for drinking gin chasers during US prohibition.
Instead of quitting the publication completely, he started to write under the pen name Dr Seuss.
After graduating from the Ivy League university in New Hampshire, he moved to England to study English literature at Oxford, with the intention of becoming a teacher.
It was there he met first wife Helen Palmer, who persuaded him he had a future in drawing after seeing some of his doodles.
He left without a degree and returned to the US, forging a career in creating cartoons for firms such as Standard Oil and General Electric.
For a man who would go on to write environmentalist book The Lorax — later turned into a play here and in the US — and anti-bigotry story Horton Hears A Who!, he was anything but right-on.
When not drawing for the US industrial powerhouses, he wrote controversial material for Judge magazine. One 1929 illustration showed black people with exaggerated lips being offered to a white shopper under the sign “a n***** for your woodpile”.
During World War Two he was asked to write propaganda for the US government, including derogatory cartoons of Japanese-Americans that played on stereotypes and accused them of being a dangerous enemy.
He would later apologise for these negative portrayals. Attempts at writing something more racy proved to be embarrassing as well.
His adult picture book The Seven Lady Godivas, featuring sketches of naked women, was a flop.
When his career as a children’s author started to take off in the Fifties, Helen, who had also been a successful children’s writer, gave up her career to focus on Theodor, who she had married in 1927.
Unable to have children after having her ovaries removed during emergency surgery, Helen looked after Theodor instead.
She was his editor, spokesman, financial adviser and general helper.
But after 40 years of marriage everything fell apart when Theodor, known as Ted to friends, grew close to his beautiful and much younger neighbour, Audrey Dimond. Audrey and her doctor husband Grey were already close friends of the Geisels, often coming over for dinner to the couple’s mountain-top home in La Jolla, California.
During a whale-watching trip in the early Sixties, Audrey and Theodor “came into contact” as the boat shifted about.
Realising that something was amiss in her marriage and crippled by a series of illnesses, including cancer, Helen took an overdose of pills in October 1967.
In her suicide note she hinted at the reasons for giving up on life, writing: “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 . . .’ My going will leave quite a rumour but you can say I was overworked and overwrought.
“Your reputation with your friends and fans will not be harmed.”
Within a year, Audrey had divorced her husband and married Theodor, 18 years her senior.
Committing to a life with the grouchy author, who also wrote The Cat In The Hat meant putting him before her family. She sent her daughters, then aged nine and 14, away to boarding school.
In an interview Audrey admitted: “They wouldn’t have been happy with Ted and Ted wouldn’t have been happy with them.
“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.
“I’ve never been very maternal. My life with him was what I wanted my life to be.’’
One of his step-daughters recognised that there were two sides to Dr Seuss. Lark Dimond-Cates said in a speech in 2003: “I always thought the Cat was Ted on his good days, and the Grinch was Ted on his bad days.”
Helen’s death had, in fact, hit him hard. Theodor considered ending his own life and suffered from bouts of depression.
Audrey has said: “I have a theory that if you look at Theodor Geisel’s life, then everything was meant to happen.
“When I came into
his life I was very necessary. His general health was bad and he needed more and more assistance.”
Up in his secluded retreat he threw himself into his work, often writing for up to ten hours a day.
The author had a reputation for being a perfectionist, poring over his words and sketches well after he was supposed to have handed them in for publication.
His rhyming, phonics-based approach has been credited with helping millions of children to read. Since 1998, Read Across America Day has been held every March 2 to coincide with Theodor’s birthday.
The Cat In The Hat was written in 1957 after an educational publisher challenged Theodor to create a book using no more than the 236 words that every six-year-old should know.
most read in film
His main intention was to entertain children.
Theodor, whose grandparents had emigrated from Germany, claimed the only book he wrote with a deliberate moral was Yertle The Turtle in order to criticise Adolf Hitler.
He said: “Morals are never put in as morals, and children don’t read them as such.
“Kids gag at having morals crammed down their throats.”
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