A True Christmas Tale that Shows You’re One Project from Going Down in History
IN 1939, COPYWRITER Robert L. May was nearing rock bottom. His wife was battling cancer, and his salary from the Montgomery Ward department store came nowhere close to covering the medical bills.
“Here I was,” he would say in an interview later, “heavily in debt at [nearly] 35, still grinding out catalogue copy. Instead of writing the great American novel, as I’d once hoped, I was describing men’s white shirts.”
Then he was asked to take a break from product copy and instead create a story for a coloring book. Each Christmas, it seems, the store gave the books to children who came to visit Santa. And that year, the execs thought it would be cheaper to produce it in-house.
Because his daughter loved the deer at the Lincoln Park Zoo, May decided to make the main character a reindeer. He took out a sheet of paper and began scratching out a list of potential names:
Rodney
Roddy
Roderick
Rudolph
Rudy
Rollo
Roland
Reggy
Reginald
Romeo
May, who’d been bullied as a child, liked the idea of using an Ugly Duckling–style story arc, but he wasn’t sure how, exactly, his reindeer could triumph at the end.
Weeks passed, and then one afternoon, while he was staring out of his office window, a heavy fog rolled in over Lake Michigan. That’s when he locked in the plot.
He spent months writing couplets in the same meter as the famous “Twas the Night Before Christmas” poem. Meanwhile his wife grew weaker. She died in July, and his boss suggested they give the project to another writer, but May refused to give it up, claiming that he “needed Rudolph more than ever.”
A month later, he turned in “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”
It’d be nice if everything after that was a montage of fame and fortune, but in reality, his boss said, “Can’t you come up with anything better?”
In true corporate fashion, the company had shared the work with a focus group, and some of the participants thought Rudolph’s red nose might have “connotations of alcoholism.”
This is when, in my mind, May tipped over his desk and said, “Are F@#%ing kidding me?” But this detail can’t be verified. What we do know is he pressed on and asked a friend of his in the art department to create some sketches to prove the focus group wasn’t worth listening to.
Either because of those drawings or the fact that there was no other story, “Rudolph” went into production.
Montgomery Ward distributed more than two million copies that holiday season, and, based on its popularity, a publisher released a hardcover version that soon became a best-seller.
Despite the story’s success, May continued to struggle as a single parent mired in debt, as the department store still owned all the rights to Rudolph. For unknown reasons, though, the CEO of Montgomery Ward signed them over to May in 1946.
With the help of his brother-in-law, songwriter Johnny Marks, May adapted the story into the song Gene Autry recorded in 1949. It set record sales that year and went on to become one of the top-5 Christmas songs of all time.
From the profits of the song, May and his family could finally enjoy financial security. And, even though he now had the time, there’s no record he ever bothered trying to write the great American novel. Perhaps because he was already a best-seller.
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