The Author Himself Was a Cat in the Hat
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
Published: February 3, 2013
The Cat wore a hat. Everyone knows that.
Dr. Seuss Enterprises L.P.
This hat from Theodor Geisel's collection resembles the one worn by the Cat in the Hat.
Dr. Seuss Enterprises L.P.
A hat familiar to readers of the Dr. Seuss book "The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins."
But so did Sam-I am, the mooing Mr. Brown and the fat fish from “One Fish, Two Fish” — a tiny yellow hat.
The Grinch disguised himself in a crinkled Santa hat.
All over Dr. Seuss’s beloved children’s books, his characters sport
distinctive, colorful headwear — unless they are the kinds of creatures
that have it sprouting naturally from their heads in tufted, multitiered
and majestically flowing formations.
So it’s no surprise that the real Dr. Seuss, Theodor Seuss Geisel, was a
hat lover himself. He collected hundreds of them, plumed, beribboned
and spiked, and kept them in a closet hidden behind a bookcase in his
home in the La Jolla section of San Diego. He incorporated them into his
personal paintings, his advertising work and his books. He even
insisted that guests to his home don the most elaborate ones he could
find.
“Believe me, when you get a dozen people seated at a fairly formal
dinner party,” his widow, Audrey, said in an interview for an 1999
educational video, “and they’ve all got on perfectly ridiculous
chapeaus, the evening takes care of itself.”
Now, as part of their efforts to keep the Seuss brand fresh in the eyes
of young readers, Random House Children’s Books, his longtime publisher,
and Dr. Seuss Enterprises have collaborated on an exhibit that for the
first time will display some of his hats to the public.
The show, timed to the 75th anniversary of his book “The 500 Hats of
Bartholomew Cubbins,” will open Monday at the New York Public Library on
Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street and then travel to 15 other locations over
the course of the year. About a dozen hats will be displayed.
Paintings done by Geisel for his own enjoyment that include the hats are
also part of the exhibit, but because of space constraints in New York
those paintings will be shown separately at the Animazing Gallery in
SoHo.
Theodor Geisel was born in 1904 in Spingfield, Mass., at a time when
hats were a much more common part of a man’s wardrobe. Still, Geisel,
who was something of an iconoclast and prankster, enjoyed them more than
most, largely because of their costumelike quality.
During a brief time studying at Oxford University, he wore a cap. As he
traveled to 30 or so countries in his 20s, he wore a Panama hat. It was
then that he started his collection.
After his sister Marnie returned from visiting him in the autumn of
1937, The Springfield Union-News quoted her as reporting: “Ted has
another peculiar hobby — that of collecting hats of every description.
Why, he must have several hundred, and he is using them as the
foundation of his next book.” She added, “I have seen him put on an
impromptu show for guests, using the hats as costumes,” and “he has kept
a whole party in stitches just by making up a play with kitchen knives
and spoons for the actors.”
Robert Chase, co-founder and president of Chase Art Companies, which
represents modern and contemporary artists, is the curator of the hat
exhibit. He said the hats showed up early in the advertising work and
editorial cartoons of Geisel, who died in 1991. “By putting a hat on a
character” Geisel “realized he could give that character a lot of
personality,” Mr. Chase said. “In some cases the hat became a punch
line.”
In one of the humorous ads he did for the insecticide Flit, for example, Geisel showed
a mosquito busting a hole through a surprised woman’s tiny
flower-decorated hat. The ad helped jump start his career as a
commercial artist and copywriter and became part of one of the
longest-running campaigns in advertising history, built around the line
“Quick, Henry, the Flit!”
While hats in Mr. Geisel’s personal collection clearly make appearances
in his paintings, it is harder to draw a straight line from his hat
collections to his children’s books, Mr. Chase said, although there are
examples of where the connection is clear.
The collection does feature a red Robin Hood-like cap with feather that
is exactly like the one that kept reappearing on Bartholomew Cubbins’s
head. A tall blue military cap with red yarn balls that is also in the
show under the name Triple Sling Jigger, seems to have been the
inspiration for a hat in “The Butter Battle Book,” Mr. Chase said.
Then there is the striped, red-and-white stovepipe hat that is clearly
the twin of the one worn by the most famous, mischievous cat of them
all. Mr. Chase said he has no documentation as to which came first — the
hat on display or the illustrated one in “The Cat in the Hat.”
But even when the hats in the collection did not directly inspire the
drawings in the books, they certainly seemed to inspire the man. The
exhibit quotes from a book called “Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel” to
illustrate how this sometimes worked:
As editor in chief of Beginner Books at Random House in the late 1960s,
Michael Frith worked closely with Geisel, sometimes into the early hours
of the morning. When they were stumped by a word choice, Mr. Frith
said, Geisel would often bound to the closet and grab a hat for each of
them — a sombrero, or perhaps a fez. There they would be, sitting on the
floor, Mr. Frith remembered, “two grown men in stupid hats trying to
come up with the right word for a book that had only 50 words in it at
most.”