Word: geisel
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...ashes of Dr. Seuss have settled in a small wooden box in La Jolla, Calif. Audrey Geisel--who is sometimes referred to simply as the widow--has placed them there, neatly and lovingly, on a heavy wooden hutch in the sunny foyer of the home they shared high on a hill by the ocean. They were married in 1968, long after the rest of the world had fallen in love with him, and still she keeps him close, just steps from the study where a hat-wearing cat and a Christmas-stealing Grinch and a Who-hearing Horton once scampered...
Theodor Seuss Geisel, who is best known as Dr. Seuss and has sold up to 400 million books, would approve of his final resting place, for there was a bit of the Grinch in him. He cherished the solitude of his mountaintop retreat, and he never had children of his own. ("You make 'em, I amuse 'em," he famously said.) He doted instead on the menagerie of misfits and mischiefmakers who have populated his children's books since 1937's And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. Unlike Walt Disney and Charles M. Schulz, Geisel kept...
Lately, though, Dr. Seuss is getting out more--a lot more. Since Geisel's death at age 87 in 1991, his widow has taken control of an empire long considered a sleeping giant in the licensing realm, shaken it awake and issued strict marching orders. And oh, the places Seuss is going! Even as we speak, the Cat in the Hat is ushering children through an elaborate ride at Seuss Landing, the 110-acre theme park that opened last year at Universal's Islands of Adventure in Orlando, Fla. The great green spoilsport stars in Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch...
...this Seuss all of a sudden? For the answer, go to the top of the mountain, to the petite, 79-year-old blond, blue-eyed widow. When she met Ted Geisel in the mid-1960s, she was still married to physician Grey Dimond, with whom she had two daughters. After her divorce, and after Ted's first wife Helen committed suicide in 1967, Audrey and Ted were married. Until the end of his life, Audrey devoted herself to his care. "The idea was to keep the body there so it could take that mind as far as it wanted...
...anything," she says, speaking of the avalanche of adaptations and licensing. "It all comes to me." She volunteers this information to avoid the rap that she's exploiting Seuss and explains that by creating trademarks in various media, she's protecting her husband's creations. Yet some of Geisel's decisions, notably to publish some material that her notoriously perfectionist husband left unpublished, are difficult even for her to explain. "Because everyone out there wanted it," she says, "and because Random House wanted...