The Tragedy of Mrs. Dr. Seuss

Ted Geisel was a great artist and a lousy husband

Thanks for checking out this post. So many people have subscribed to these Dispatches from the Rare Book Trade! I’d love to have you join, but please keep in mind that I am a rare book dealer and this is a Substack about book collecting, so don’t be surprised if my next post is called Tax Strategies for Selling Your Books. Now, for Helen Palmer, a.k.a. Mrs. Dr. Seuss.

Unless you are very deep into children’s books, you’ve probably never thought much about Helen Palmer. I hadn’t either, until I bought inscribed copies of two of her books. Then I fell into the quicksand of research that so many antiquarian booksellers get sucked into.

I thought you might also be interested in the story of the woman behind Dr. Seuss and everything she did so that millions of us could delight in The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham.

Helen Marion Palmer (1898–1967) met Ted Geisel (1904–1991) at Oxford University, where they were both studying for advanced degrees in English. Ted dropped out, not being much of a student. He wanted to write the great American novel and went to Paris where so many American writers lived in the 1920s. His book went nowhere; Helen earned a master’s degree. Instead of writing novels, Helen had other ideas for her future husband. “I set to work diverting him,” she said. “Here was a man who could draw such pictures; he should earn a living doing that.”¹

Ted and Helen returned to America and married in 1927. Under the pseudonym Dr. Seuss, Ted drew freelance cartoons, picked up advertising work, and wrote a few books, relying on Helen as his editor.² They lived a fairly average life on a mid-list writer’s income. The Geisels didn’t have children because Helen had her ovaries removed as a young woman, probably due to cysts.³ Ted always joked that he didn’t want kids anyway. “You can’t write books for children if too many of them are looking over your shoulder.”⁴

When the Second World War arrived, the Hollywood director Lt. Col. Frank Capra recruited Ted to work on films for the Signal Corps. None of Dr. Seuss’s early books—like Horton Hatches the Egg and To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street—were earning much in royalties, and the Geisels couldn’t make it on Ted’s army salary.⁵

With the excuse of helping make ends meet, Helen turned to writing for the Walt Disney Company, adapting movies into picture books and Little Golden Books. She kept her work separate from her husband’s, adopting the nom de plume H. Marion Palmer, a plausibly masculine name. Later she settled on writing under her maiden name, Helen Palmer. Given the chance to write her own books under the cover of financial necessity, she poured herself into it, publishing at least ten books in six years.⁶ Helen’s books were considered “successful but more or less conventional.”⁷

In 1948, Helen and Ted won Academy Awards for writing a documentary about pre-war Japan, but with her husband back at the drawing board, Helen gave up her own work. As E. J. Kahn Jr. explained in The New Yorker in 1960:

“Mrs. Geisel stopped writing books of her own fifteen years ago, so she could concentrate on helping her husband with his. This she does in part by keeping a vigilant critical eye on his output, in part by giving him the reassurance and praise for which he, like many another writer, has an insatiable need, and in part by shielding him from distractions.” One Suess biographer added, Ted “did not know how to make coffee, cook, or manage a checkbook.”⁸

As Ted approached fifty, his career finally started to take off. He earned three Caldecott honors in quick succession.⁹ That’s when Helen’s health failed for the first time. In 1954, she suffered sudden and near-total paralysis, affecting even her breathing. She spent months in an iron lung, viewing the world through a small glass window. Ted was frantic and doted on his wife during her long recovery. She was diagnosed with a rare auto-immune disorder, Guillian-Barré syndrome, although the paralysis could have been a complication of her childhood bout with polio.

Helen recovered but lived in constant pain thereafter. It also seems that the illness caused a fracture in the Geisels’ marriage, which gradually grew wider.

Dr. Seuss, as we know him today, arrived in 1957, with the publication of The Cat in the Hat (which I wrote about previously). Then came the founding of Beginner Books, the enduring imprint for early readers that remains popular today.

Helen and Ted Geisel at work. Image from The Dr. Seuss Foundation.

The Beginner Books company was owned and run by three partners, Ted Geisel, Helen Geisel, and Phyllis Cerf. Phyllis, who came up with the idea, was married to Bennett Cerf, the co-founder of Random House, Dr. Seuss’s main publisher. Ted wrote many Beginner Books and served as the creative director. Helen and Phyllis made the business run and patched over the many disagreements Ted had with the writers and illustrators commissioned to produce Beginner Books titles. In 1960, Random House acquired ownership of the firm but kept Ted, Helen, and Phyllis in their jobs.

Helen also returned to writing. In 1961, Helen Palmer published A Fish Out of Water, with illustrations by P. D. Eastman, a book that remains in print. Next, she collaborated with the San Diego photographer Lynn Fayman on three books illustrated with staged photographs.

Dr. Seuss’s many biographers give passing mention to Helen’s Beginner Books, but none of them stop to consider them as serious creative efforts by a woman in her sixties. Helen, past retirement age and never 100% well, was running one of the most successful publishing ventures in the country. She was under no obligation to write books in addition to her heavy workload, she just wanted to.

A page spread from Do You Know What I’m Going to Do Next Saturday?

Palmer and Fayman’s Beginner Books are ambitious. While they weren’t the first to stage and photograph scenes as children’s book illustrations, they staged bigger and more elaborate scenes than anyone before them. Their experiments with the form of picture books suggest that Helen wanted to do more in life than help her husband, as important as that was to her.

The books sold well initially but as with many Beginner Books published in the 1960s, they gradually went out of print. Their day passed.¹⁰

One of Palmer and Fayman’s comic animal houses, constructed for their book Why I Built the Boogle House

Helen’s last book, Why I Built the Boogle House, was published in 1964. This story involved constructing and photographing ever larger homes for animals, from a turtle to a horse. The book came out about the time that Ted decided he couldn’t work with Phyllis Cerf anymore. Phyllis’s husband, caught between his wife and his bestselling author, chose Dr. Seuss and fired Phyllis from Beginner Books.

Decades later, after Ted died, Phyllis explained her view of the events. “It wasn’t really Ted… It was his maleness of not wanting to be bossed by all women. He had an agent [Phyllis Jackson], he had a partner [Phyllis Cerf], he had a wife—you know, he was surrounded by women telling him what to do. And he really was the genius—none of us were. But I think that we all guided him to where he needed to go.”¹¹

With Phyllis Cerf gone, running Beginner Books fell largely to Helen. Ted and Helen worked from their home in La Jolla, near San Diego. “The demands of the book business remained unyielding,” wrote Dr. Seuss’s first biographers. “The West Coast office of Beginner Books still operated with one secretary and minimal equipment, not even an electric typewriter.”¹² Ted considered electric typewriters “too sophisticated,” even though his wasn’t the job that would be made easier with one.¹³

As her publishing responsibilities increased, Helen stopped writing and her health worsened. She may have been going blind.¹⁴ By 1967, her paralysis began to return.¹⁵ One of the editors at Random House assigned to Dr. Seuss described Ted and Helen’s relationship and the atmosphere in the Geisel household: “They had so much in common, but they were driving each other crazy… Helen wasn’t well, and she probably depressed Ted. She had been very, very good for him, but I could not say she was good from him at that time.”¹⁶

Ted apparently agreed with that assessment. Audrey and Grey Dimond were perhaps the Geisels’ closest friends in La Jolla, yet Mr. Geisel and Mrs. Dimond started an affair. In 1965, Ted dedicated Fox in Sox to Audrey. As a recent biographer put it, “Audrey soon replaced his relationship with Helen as his primary emotional attachment.”¹⁷

The animator Chuck Jones, a friend from Ted’s army days and his collaborator on the 1966 TV special How the Grinch Stole Christmas, found Ted’s attraction to Audrey perfectly reasonable. Audrey was twenty-three years younger than Helen. “Audrey came along and she was vital and pretty and young and had a wonderful charm about her. As one side went to the gray the other side came into the sunlight.”¹⁸

On Saturday, October 21, 1967, the Geisels attended a dinner party. At the end of the evening, one of the hosts hugged Helen, and she told him, “You don’t know how I needed that.” The next night, a month shy of her fortieth wedding anniversary, Helen went to her bedroom—the Geisels slept apart—and swallowed an overdose of sodium pentobarbital capsules, which had been dispensed to her in 1,000-pill bottles.

Helen’s suicide note began, “Dear Ted, What has happened to us?” She was depressed, feeling as if she were “in a spiral, going down down down, into a black hole from which there is no escape.” From every side she heard, “failure, failure, failure.”¹⁹

To me it looks like Ted had broached the idea of divorce. “I am too old,” Helen wrote, “and enmeshed in everything you do and are, that I cannot conceive of life without you.” Suicide, she concluded, would allow Ted to say that Helen “was overworked and overwrought.” He shouldn’t worry. “Your reputation with your friends and fans will not be harmed.” Helen ended her note by asking Ted to “sometimes think of the fun we had all thru the years.”²⁰

A few months after Helen’s death, Ted sent a letter to one of the friends he and Helen met at Oxford University in 1925. He wanted to “put it out, flat on the line, without any comment or begging for understanding.” Ted wrote that he and Audrey would marry as soon as possible. She was moving to Nevada, where divorces could be obtained more quickly in 1968 than in California.

Ted then came nearer than he or Audrey did at any other time to admitting their relationship began long before Helen died. Ted wrote, “This is an inevitable, inescapable conclusion to five years of four people’s frustration.”²¹ Audrey later claimed that the relationship started nine months before Helen’s suicide, during a whale watching trip. “Along came this big old heave of a wave,” she said, “and I was absolutely, honestly, inadvertently thrown at Ted… He caught me and we looked at each other and the awareness was mutual.”²²

To another friend, Ted offered an explanation that seemed plucked from one of Dr. Seuss’s gag cartoons from the 1930s, “My best friend is being divorced and I’m going to Reno to comfort his wife.”²³

The reactions of the Geisels’ friends and relatives were probably meant to honor Helen’s devotion to her husband, but I find them a bit creepy now. Ted’s niece Peggy Owens, who was close to the Geisels, said of her aunt’s decision to end her life, “Whatever Helen did, she did it out of absolute love for Ted.” A friend called Helen’s suicide, “her last and greatest gift to him.”²⁴

It would not be fair to blame Helen’s suicide on Ted and Audrey; Helen made her own choice, and her worsening health probably played a role. Adults have affairs, and they fall inconveniently in love. Most people find a way through. Some spouses stick around and stay loyal when their partners get depressed or sick. Ted Geisel wasn’t that person. He felt his work was too important. He proved to be a rather lousy husband who probably took the tremendous support Helen gave him over the years for granted. When she started needing help he—to put it brutally—replaced her, and that’s why we have books like The Lorax and Oh, the Places You’ll Go!, written with Audrey’s support.

What’s surprising is that Theodor Geisel’s three main biographers more or less adopted Ted’s view of the situation—that it was “inevitable.” None of them wondered about Helen’s aspirations beyond assisting her husband. Her fourteen books are considered little more than footnotes, as side projects to make money during the war or to fill holes in the Beginner Books publishing schedule.

Al Perkins, a Beginner Books author, predicted that Helen would “be mourned by thousands.” Instead, Dr. Seuss’s legion of fans quickly replaced Mrs. Geisel One with Mrs. Geisel Two in our collective memory.²⁵ Perkins also said Helen deserved to be remembered “as a brilliant writer, editor, and critic in her own right.”²⁶

That we can still do. Helen merits the attention and admiration that Vera Nabokov earned for supporting her husband and that Alice B. Toklas has for her life alongside Gertrude Stein. Helen also reminds me of Lucille Ball, who ran a TV studio in the 1960s, much as Helen Palmer Geisel ran Beginner Books.

Phyllis Cerf may have been right that Helen Palmer wasn’t a genius like her husband, but it’s hard to imagine Dr. Seuss succeeding without her.

[If you’d like to read something uplifting now, might I suggest “Requiem for a Tree,” my wife’s most-viral Substack post.

—Scott Brown, Downtown Brown Books

1. Brian Jay Jones, Becoming Dr. Seuss, p. 73.

2. Jones, p. 126 and 131. Also, Donald E. Pease, Theodor Seuss Geisel, Oxford University Press, p. 128: “She critiqued the coherence of his narratives, questioned the aptness of his illustrations, proposed alternative scenes, invented new characters, revised his sentences, and let him know when a story sounded finished enough to be named one of their imaginary children.”

3. Jones, p. 121.

4. Quoted in E. J. Kahn, Jr. “Children’s Friend” in the December 10, 1960, issue of The New Yorker.

5. Judith Morgan and Neil Morgan, Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel: A Biography, p. 108.

6. A list of Helen’s books written during and right after the Second World War: Walt Disney’s Surprise Package (1944), The Three Caballeros (1944), Donald Duck Sees South America (1945), The Wonderful Tar Baby (1946), Brer Rabbit Rides the Fox (1946), Walt Disney’s Uncle Remus (1947), Walt Disney’s Uncle Remus Stories (1947), Tommy’s Wonderful Rides (1948), Bobby and His Airplanes (1949), Johnny’s Machines (1949), So Dear to My Heart (1950).

7. Kahn.

8. Pease, p. 128.

9. His Caldecott nominations were for McElligot’s Pool (1948), Bartholomew and the Oobleck (1950), and If I Ran the Zoo (1951). The American Library Association, which sponsors the prize, didn’t put him on the Caldecott short list (or award him the medal) for any of his best-known and most beloved books, like The Cat in the Hat, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and Green Eggs and Ham. In 2006, the ALA started giving an award in his name.

10. It is widely reported on the Internet that The New York Times listed Palmer and Fayman’s second collaboration, Do You Know What I’m Going to Do Next Saturday?, as one of the best kids’ books of 1963. Wikipedia makes this claim and gives its source as Snopes, which provides no source. I made some effort to find the source, including searching the Times’s online archive, with no success. I found this list of NYT’s best illustrated books, which goes back to the 1960s, and Palmer’s book isn’t on it.

11. Jones, p. 320.

12. Morgan and Morgan, p. 192. While not billed on the cover as an authorized biography, the Morgans wrote it with the considerable assistance of Audrey, the second Mrs. Geisel. To the Morgans’ credit, they were the first to write seriously about Helen’s suicide and they supplied factual support for Ted’s affair, without calling it that.

13. Morgan and Morgan, p. 257.

14. Morgan and Morgan, p. 182.

15. Morgan and Morgan, p. 182.

16. Jones, p. 341.

17. Pease, p. 146.

18. Morgan and Morgan, p. 202.

19. A distinctive feature of Helen’s writing in her Beginner Books is the use of repetition. It is interesting that she employed the same literary device in her suicide note.

20. Helen’s suicide note is quoted in part in the Morgans’ biography, p. 195–196. The Morgans’ source is the San Diego Medical Examiner. No subsequent biographer has had access to the original. The Morgans cut the text in five places, marked with ellipses. As far as I can tell, no one has published the entire note.

21. Morgan and Morgan, p. 201.

22. Morgan and Morgan p. 201 and 192.

23. Morgan and Morgan, p. 201.

24. Morgan and Morgan, p. 198.

25. After I wrote that sentence, I stumbled upon an essay quoting an interview with Lawrence McGilvery, a member of the ABAA who has been a bookseller in the San Diego area since the 1960s. It perfectly captures my point about how “Mrs. Geisel” has become one role filled by two people. An interviewer asked McGilvery if he remembered Helen Palmer. He said he remembered the way she looked at people. Later he realized he had misspoken. “The first Mrs. Geisel! I was remembering the second. It was Audrey who looked up at me on our first and only meeting with the most seductive gaze I ever had encountered.”

26. Al Perkins quoted in Jones, p. 344–345.