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.

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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.

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

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

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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

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