Cerf Bennett - At random: the reminiscences of bennett cerf

Copyright 1977 by Random House, Inc.
Introduction copyright 2002 by Christopher Cerf

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously
in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

R ANDOM H OUSE T RADE P APERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This work was originally published in hardcover by Random House in 1977.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cerf, Bennett, 18981971.
At Random : the reminiscences of Bennett Cerf. / introduction by Christopher Cerf.
p. cm.
Originally published: 1977.
eISBN: 978-0-307-81999-4
1. Cerf, Bennett, 18981971. 2. Publishers and publishingUnited StatesBiography.
3. Random House (Firm)History. I. Title.

Z473.C45A36 200 070.5092dc21
[B] 2001048540

Random House website address: www.atrandom.com

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My father, Bennett Cerf, is universally recognized as one of the publishing giants of the twentieth century, a man whose unique mix of talents, passions, and attributes led him to cofound Random House and, with his partner, Donald Klopfer, propel it from a company that published a few collectors editions per year at random into one of the most important and influential media conglomerates in the world.

Unfortunately, my dad, who died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1971, was denied the opportunity to finish assembling and polishing the memoirs he had begun working on in the late 1960s. But thanks to my mother, Phyllis Cerf Wagner, and Random Houses longtime editor in chief, Albert Erskine, who brilliantly crafted the book from my fathers notes, diaries, and scrapbooks, and from the oral history he had recorded for Columbia University, every facet of my fathers remarkably diverse character shines through in At Random.

Impeccable literary taste; uncanny business instincts; boundless energy and enthusiasm; a genius for publicity and salesmanship; a relentlessalbeit cheerfuldetermination to seize every opportunity; boyish charm; disarming honesty; an astonishing knack for finding humor even in the face of adversity; unswerving fairness and generosity; an almost painful desire to be recognized and liked; an absolute refusal to take himself too seriously; and an unshakable joy at his own good fortuneAt Random reveals, in my fathers own highly entertaining words, how he managed to turn all of these often contradictory traits to his advantage in achieving the success he craved and so hugely enjoyed.

Who, for example, but Bennett Cerf would have had the courage and resolve necessary to attempt an American publication of James Joyces Ulysseswhose importation into the United States had been banned on the basis of obscenityand the business acumen to challenge the ban in court by arranging for his firm to get caught trying to smuggle a contraband copy of the book into the country? (The alternativeprematurely producing an American edition that might have subsequently been declared illegalwould have been prohibitively expensive for a firm the size of Random House.) Would any other publisher have been clever enough to have favorable essays on Ulysses by leading English and French critics glued into the smuggled copy before it was seized by U.S. customs officials? (Only by having these reviews pasted inside the copy, he explained, were we able to quote from them when the case actually came before the court.) And who among my fathers competitors would have exhibited the brashness and charm necessary to convince celebrated attorney Morris Ernst to waive his fee for handling the case (He loves publicity as much as I do, my father noted), or to elicit the support of Joyce himself, whom he had never previously met, by offering him an advance that, he pledged, would be nonreturnable even if Random Houses court case proved unsuccessful? (Joyce, my father reported, was so excited at the prospect of earning U.S. dollars on a book that Viking, who had issued Joyces other novels in America, was too afraid to publish, that he got hit by a taxicab on his way to the meeting and arrived with a bandage around his head, a patch over one eye, his arm in a sling and his foot all bound up and stretched out on a chair. The eye-patch, I learned later, he always wore, he added.)

Its also hard to imagine anyone else with the taste and foresight to publish Gertrude Stein who would also have been honest enough to confess, as my dad did in the jacket copy he wrote for her Geographical History of America, that I do not know what Miss Stein is talking about. I do not even understand the title. That, Miss Stein tells me, is because I am dumb. Gertrude Stein, who relished my fathers candid humor, was even more delighted when, after a particularly glamorous picture of author Kathleen Windsor appeared on the cover of Publishers Weekly, Random House ran an advertisement featuring a somewhat less alluring photograph of Stein and Alice B. Toklas with the caption Shucks, weve got glamour girls too.

Since W. H. Hudsons Green Mansions had never been copyrighted in the United States, there was no legal requirement to pay Alfred A. Knopf, whose firm had introduced the book to American audiences, for the right to reprint it. But in part because Knopf was my fathers publishing hero, my dad and Donald Klopfer met with him shortly after they acquired the Modern Library in 1925 and agreed to pay him a six-cents-per-copy royalty, something Horace Liveright, the previous owner of the series, had steadfastly refused to do. This uniquely fair and generous gesture was the beginning of a friendship that led, more than three decades later, to Alfred Knopfs decision to merge his firm into Random House.

And would any other serious publisher have so freely admitted his disappointment at meeting Dr. Havelock Ellis, whose Studies in the Psychology of Sex had recently been issued by Random House (He was a very nice, charming man, my father wrote, but he didnt want to talk to a young publisher about sex); or so guilelessly reported his pride, while attending William Faulkners funeral in Oxford, Mississippi, at finding a copy of his own anthology, Reading for Pleasure, lying on the deceased authors bedside table? ([William] Styron found a copy of his Lie Down in Darkness, my father noted, and he, too, was pleased.)

Of course, my dad was known as far more than a publisher. He was, among other pursuits, a columnist; an anthologist; an author; a lecturer; a radio host; a collector of jokes, anecdotes, and unconscionably terrible puns; a perennial judge of the Miss America contest; and a panelist on the fabulously successful television game show Whats My Line? To those who criticized him for spreading himself too thin, or complained that his TV shenanigans werent exactly appropriate for a dignified publisher, he would point out, quite correctly, that his outside endeavors were incredibly good for Random House.

His lectures, for example, allowed him to travel all over the country, to towns where no book publisher had been beforeno publisher of a big firm, that is. And once there, that rare combination of playfulness and aggressiveness that marked his entire career came to the fore. I would always go to the bookstores and meet the booksellers and chat with them and see where they had The Modern Library, he wrote. I might say, What do you mean putting Modern Library in the back of the store? If they said they hadnt gotten around to moving it, I would help them. And when they werent looking, Id pull some of our new books out from where they were and put them in the front of the stand.