At random, p.1
At Random, page 1
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.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS 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, 1898–1971.
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, 1898–1971. 2. Publishers and publishing—United States—Biography.
3. Random House (Firm)—History. I. Title.
Z473.C45A36 200 070.5’092—dc21
[B] 2001048540
Random House website address: www.atrandom.com
v3.1_r1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Editors’ Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
List of Illustrations
INTRODUCTION
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 House’s longtime editor in chief, Albert Erskine, who brilliantly crafted the book from my father’s notes, diaries, and scrapbooks, and from the oral history he had recorded for Columbia University, every facet of my father’s 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 relentless—albeit cheerful—determination 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 fortune—At Random reveals, in my father’s 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 Joyce’s Ulysses—whose importation into the United States had been banned on the basis of obscenity—and 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 alternative—prematurely producing an American edition that might have subsequently been declared illegal—would 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 father’s 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 House’s 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 Joyce’s 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.)
It’s 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 father’s 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, we’ve got glamour girls too.”
Since W. H. Hudson’s 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 father’s “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 Knopf’s 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 didn’t want to talk to a young publisher about sex”); or so guilelessly reported his pride, while attending William Faulkner’s funeral in Oxford, Mississippi, at finding a copy of his own anthology, Reading for Pleasure, lying on the deceased author’s 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 What’s My Line? To those who criticized him for spreading himself too thin, or complained that his TV shenanigans weren’t “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 before—no 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 hadn’t gotten around to moving it, I would help them. And when they weren’t looking, I’d pull some of our new books out from where they were and put them in the front of the stand.”
More important, the forum of a weekly live appearance on network television gave him an unparalleled opportunity to publicize Random House, and its authors and books. He never tired of reasserting this point, and I will always remember his delight when John O’Hara validated it by calling up in a rage after he’d heard my dad plug William Faulkner’s new novel, rather than O’Hara’s, on a weekly What’s My Line? broadcast.
My father’s friend and colleague Jason Epstein, whom my dad calle
But as Epstein himself has pointed out, publishing throughout the first half of the twentieth century remained “a cottage industry.” Indeed, when I went to work at Random House in the early 1960s, everyone on the staff had two-digit telephone extensions, and the entire company directory fit on a sheet hardly larger than a postcard. (A copy of it still hangs today on the wall of legendary Random House editor Bob Loomis.) What perhaps hasn’t been noted enough is that my father helped guide Random House—and publishing in general—through a second revolution: He understood and turned to his advantage, earlier and far more thoroughly than any of his contemporaries, the seismic changes in mass culture, technology, business, and media that began with the advent of television in the late 1940s and that reshaped the book business, at an ever-quickening pace, through the remainder of his lifetime. One wonders if, some day, a “Postmodern Library” shouldn’t be inaugurated in his honor.
To the end, my father attributed much of his success to good fortune: “I’ve been as lucky as I can be!” he says, summing up his life in the final pages of At Random. And indeed luck did play an important part in some of his greatest triumphs. Consider how his deal to purchase the Modern Library from Boni & Liveright was sealed. Just as Julian Messner, the firm’s sales manager, was on the verge of talking Horace Liveright into rejecting my dad’s offer, a literary agent who suspected Liveright of having seduced his wife barged into the lobby brandishing a pistol. A shaken Liveright dispatched Messner to deal with the agent—a process that apparently involved a trip to a nearby speakeasy—thus removing my father’s “most vehement adversary” from the negotiations. “It was an incredible break for me,” my dad reported.
My father was also lucky enough to meet the still unknown James Michener only a few days after the aspiring novelist had been advised by Macmillan’s president, George Brett—who in addition to employing Michener as a textbook editor had published a little-noticed book of his short stories—to “stick to his editorial job and not waste his time and effort on writing.” “We got along immediately,” my father reported, and he promptly signed Michener to a Random House author’s contract. Less than two weeks later, Michener’s collection of short stories for Macmillan, Tales of the South Pacific, won the Pulitzer Prize, and overnight he became, in my dad’s words, “one of the great literary properties of the world.”
And whenever he was asked how Random House’s initial public offering in 1959 came about, my dad would inevitably credit the happy coincidence that Charles Allen, one of the nation’s most successful investment bankers, just happened to be “one of the boys” who worked next to him in the cashier’s cage when my father, newly graduated from Columbia, was briefly employed by the brokerage firm of Sartorius, Smith & Loewi. “I consulted my old friend Charlie one day,” my father wrote, as if every publisher had experience working on Wall Street, and could have easily found a former colleague to call upon when the time came to launch a major underwriting, “and he said, ‘Sure. We’ll get out a stock issue for you.’ ”
Indeed, to my always optimistic father, even bad luck was a source of opportunity. When a fire swept through the storage room of Boni & Liveright while my dad was working there in the early 1920s, his first thought was that it might reduce the huge overstock of The Story of the Bible, whose sales potential the firm had grossly overestimated. But his hopes were dashed; the firemen arrived and put out the blaze “just as it reached the huge pile of unsold books.” “Luckily, though,” he wrote, “a few thousand copies were destroyed by water.”
Or consider the case of one of Random House’s more embarrassing setbacks—the surprise revelation that the hero of Quentin Reynolds’s bestseller, The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk, who had allegedly performed incredible feats of derring-do for the French Resistance during World War II and then refused to break after being captured by the Germans, was a fraud. “I’m going to call a press conference tomorrow,” he told Reynolds. “We’re going to announce that this book isn’t nonfiction, but fiction, and we’re going to change the name of it immediately from The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk to The Man Who Talked Too Much.” The plan worked to perfection, my father reported: “The press played it up as a harmless deception, and the interesting thing is that the book sold about five times better after the exposure than it did before.”
The important truth is, of course, that my father had an uncanny ability to create opportunities—or recognize ones that no one else could possibly have noticed—and then seize them with an almost relentless glee. At a memorial service for his beloved friend Moss Hart, my father noted that “when anybody ascribed his success to luck, Moss would counter with ‘Nobody is sitting up there saying “Now what can we do for Moss Hart today?” ’ Luck is what you make it.” Had he been a bit less unassuming, Bennett Cerf might well have made the same remark about himself.
I remember my dad as a marvelous teacher, communicating, as part of his daily conversation, his feelings about life and work; explaining, clearly, fascinatingly, and with unerring humor, why he did just about everything he did; and imploring us—as he himself did—to make the best of, and learn from, anything that happened to go wrong. As one can imagine, he spent a great percentage of his time working, but he somehow always found a way to make my brother, Jonathan, and me seem important. He even contrived a way to spend time with me while writing his two weekly newspaper features, which he most commonly did on weekend afternoons at the columns-bedecked country house that his extracurricular journalistic endeavors had helped pay for (and which, ever the punster, he had named The Columns). Well, to be more accurate, he contrived an assignment for me that created the impression he was spending more time with me than he actually could: He made me his “official Yankee-game watcher.” My task was to summon him immediately if something was happening in the ball game that he might find worth watching; then, later on, he would argue with me playfully about whether I had been right to interrupt him or not. (I was always wrong, it turned out, unless the Yankees scored, or a Yankee pitcher managed to escape from a bases-loaded, nobody-out situation.) My dad’s only motive in this exercise, he assured me, was “to help me learn good judgment.” Whenever I dared to suggest that he might also have some small interest in seeing the crucial moments of Yankee games, he’d act terribly offended and then offer me the opportunity to present my case at a “family council,” an institution of his own creation at which, since my brother and I had one vote each, my mother had three, and my dad had six, his views tended to prevail.
When I reread At Random recently, it struck me that much of the wisdom my dad imparted to me as he talked about his daily activities can be found in its pages. His stories are wonderfully diverting, to be sure; he wouldn’t have had it any other way. But the book also serves as an autobiographical business manual: a “how-to-succeed” primer that offers refreshing alternatives to the prevalent ideas that, as Gertrude Stein might have put it, an executive is an executive is an executive; that a skilled manager from another industry can come into a company and run it as well or better than someone who has spent a career mastering every aspect of the specific business the company is in; that every deal is a zero-sum game where winning is all that’s important; and that business is war, devoid of spiritual value, and humor, and, yes, fun. “When people are decent, things work out for everybody,” my father instructs us. “That’s been my theory all through life. If you’re making money, let the other fellow make it, too.… If you can work a thing out so that everybody profits, that’s the ideal business.” How much more smoothly many contemporary enterprises would run if this philosophy were more widely adopted!
To me, my dad’s most endearing characteristic was his unflagging optimism—the joy that he found seemingly everywhere (“He was the happiest man I ever met,” his close friend Leonora Hornblow enthuses) and that he had the natural ability to impart to just about everyone around him. William Styron brought tears to my eyes when, at my father’s memorial at Columbia University, he referred to him as a “life-enhancer.” Bennett Cerf could not have imagined a more profound compliment. “A little humor can make life worth living” he tells us in At Random. “That has always been my credo. Someone once asked me, ‘What would you like your epitaph to be?’ I’ve always said that I’d like it to be: ‘He left people a little happier than they were when he came into the room.’ ”
