The 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 across the drawing board.
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 the T shirts and adaptations to a minimum--one fabulous exception being animator Chuck Jones' 1966 TV version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas!--and kept himself and his creatures close to home.
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 Stole Christmas, a big-screen adaptation costing well north of $120 million and opening Nov. 17. And on Nov. 30, Seuss's beloved elephant, Horton, will hatch his egg on a Broadway stage in Seussical The Musical. Universal and Imagine Entertainment also have plans to put Seuss's classic cat in movie theaters, with Tim Allen wearing the hat, and a movie version of Oh, the Places You'll Go! is in development.
Why all 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 to go," says Audrey, who trained as a nurse in World War II. "I kept the Band-Aids going." After a life of playing doctor's wife, then nurse, Geisel today is empowered with the estate. She's being courted by Hollywood and has danced with Jim Carrey. By all appearances, she's having a ball.