At Random, page 18
The series books are the ones which make money for a company, for if a child likes one, he’ll go back to the store for more. We found that to be true with the Walter Farley books about horses, Ira and Mae Freeman’s science series, and others such as the Shirley Temple storybooks, the Alfred Hitchcock mystery and ghost stories, the Wonder Books, Pop-Up Books, Dollar Flats, and my special favorites, Landmark Books.
Our son Chris suggested that we add numbers to each volume of our Landmark series so children would know there were more to be had. It was quite a suggestion. Actually, Chris was responsible for the whole Landmark series. I got the idea for them in the summer of 1948, when Chris was seven and Jonathan was two. We were up on Cape Cod, between Provincetown and Barnstable, in a house on the bayside. I was sitting on the beach one day with Chris—Jon was playing around somewhere—and I asked Chris if he realized that where we were sitting was where the Pilgrims landed. Chris, who had learned differently at school, said, “You’re wrong, Dad. They landed on Plymouth Rock.” I said, “They did not land on Plymouth Rock. They landed right here at Provincetown, and they stayed here for about two weeks.” I could see that Chris didn’t believe me, so I said, “We’re going down to the bookstore and get you a book on it.”
Jonathan, Bennett, Phyllis, Christopher (27.5 illustration credit)
The bookstore in Provincetown was run in the summer by Paul and Bunny Smith, who also had one in Chapel Hill at the University of North Carolina in the wintertime. Theirs was a first-rate shop because they were real book people. When we walked in I said to Paul, “I want to see all the children’s books you’ve got about the Pilgrims.” Paul said, “We haven’t got any.” I said, “What do you mean? In Provincetown you haven’t got books about the Pilgrims?” He said, “I haven’t got them for a very good reason. There aren’t any.” It was hard to believe, but it was true.
I began thinking about it, and suddenly it struck me that there should be a series of books, each one on some great episode in American history. By the time we left Provincetown, I had made a list of the first ten titles and had a name for the series: Landmark Books. I also decided not to get authors of children’s books, but the most important authors in the country.
When I discussed this with Louise Bonino, she was a little dubious, and said, “In the first place, you won’t be able to get such people to write books for children. Second, I don’t know whether there’ll be enough demand for a whole book about the Pilgrims or, say, a whole book about the first transcontinental railroad.”
I went from one author to another, and every one of them jumped at the chance. They thought it was a great idea. The keystone of the whole thing was Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who, in addition to being a distinguished novelist, was a noted authority on children and a judge of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Bob Haas had a place up in Vermont right next to the Fisher home, and they were great personal friends. I wanted a book by Mrs. Fisher desperately. Bob said, “She’s such a busy woman. I don’t think you ought to disturb her.” Despite Bob’s apprehension, I made a lunch date with Dorothy. I told her about my idea, and then I said, “My dream is, Dorothy, that you would do one of these books for us.” She said, “Do one of these books? You’ve shown me your list of the first ten, and I want to do two of them!” I almost fell off my chair.
She did one about the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and one about Paul Revere and the Minute Men. Another of the first ten was The Pony Express by Samuel Hopkins Adams, one of the most successful, and Sam later did The Santa Fe Trail and The Erie Canal. Landmark Books took off like a rocket, and as the series grew, more and more well-known writers were happy to participate. Even those repetitious Westerns on television create a desire for knowledge of American history. For example, when the Daniel Boone craze was on, we had a Daniel Boone in Landmark Books by John Mason Brown. That book sold by the thousands and is still one of the most popular.
Then we got the idea for the All About Books—All About the Weather, All About the Stars, All About the Sea—and they hit the jackpot too. Television was booming, and kids had begun to ask questions about the sea and the stars and the weather and other things they’d seen on the screen and wanted to know more about. To the American history group we added World Landmarks; by the mid-sixties there were nearly two hundred titles available in the combined list, including books by such famous correspondents as William L. Shirer, Quentin Reynolds, John Gunther, Robert Considine, Richard Tregaskis and Vincent Sheean—many of whom had written books for us about World War II.
At the time the war broke out in Europe, Donald and I had been partners for about fifteen years. At first very little changed in this country or in our business, and the Random House list looked much like those of the years before. In the spring of 1941 we published two hits—Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? and Sally Benson’s Junior Miss—as well as books by such authors as William McFee, Mignon Eberhart, W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice. We also brought out The Basic Works of Aristotle and a generous selection of new Broadway plays. But the war was already beginning to show up in our catalogue, with entries like The Battle for Asia by Edgar Snow; A Faith to Fight For by John Strachey; and A London Diary, an eyewitness account of the blitz by Quentin Reynolds.
Then came the Sunday afternoon we won’t ever forget. By this time Harry Scherman, head of the Book-of-the-Month Club, and his wife, Bernardine, had become close personal friends of ours (we had published Harry’s extremely successful book The Promises Men Live By in 1938). That Sunday, Phyllis and I were sitting in the Schermans’ house in New Jersey, playing bridge, fighting over a hand, when somebody called up and told us Pearl Harbor had been bombed. We all felt very foolish to have been squabbling over something so trivial, completely unaware that such a terrible and world-shaking event had taken place.
Harry and Bernardine (Kielty) Scherman (28.1 illustration credit)
We were now in the and though Donald was thirty-eight, he immediately applied for a commission in the Air Force, and in the spring of 1942 Major Klopfer went off to England for the duration. He just barely made it: his fellow officers called him “Pop.” (One of them was Jimmy Stewart, the movie star.) I was already too old for military service—forty-three in 1941—so I had to stay home and mind the store, which turned out to be quite a job.
(28.2 illustration credit)
It was soon clear to everybody that our entry into the war would bring about great changes, changes not only in American life in general, but in personal lives as well; but what exactly these would be was impossible to predict, and people were worried. Things were going very badly for this country and our Allies at first, because, as is usually the case, the dictators were ready and the liberty-loving people were caught unprepared, as we were. Until we could catch up, we were in bad trouble. Publishers were concerned and uncertain. We had weathered the Depression all right, but would people who were preoccupied with the war, and deeply disturbed by the way it was going, still read? Before long, we knew the answer.
Soon a flood of books on the war began to be written, and we managed to get some of the best of them. Our first really big one was Suez to Singapore, the story of the sinking of two of Britain’s biggest and newest battleships—the Prince of Wales and the Repulse—at Singapore a few days after Pearl Harbor. It was a black day in Allied history, another sweeping victory for the Japanese, who were now free to walk into Singapore, which in two months they did.
The author, Cecil Brown, a correspondent in the Far East for NBC-Radio, happened to be on the Repulse when it was sunk, and his broadcasts had been attracting a lot of attention. I hadn’t heard him, but Howard Lindsay and his wife, Dorothy Stickney, who were in the middle of their long run as the stars of Life with Father, were up late every night and listened to Brown’s dispatches. When they told me how good he was, I immediately sent him a cable saying “We want your book.” I thought there was one chance in twenty it would reach him, but it did; and he commissioned his wife, Martha, to come to see me and draw up a contract.
Suez to Singapore was an immediate best seller. Cecil came back to New York and was with us on publication day in October, 1942. It was like celebrating the opening of a play. The Browns and the Cerfs had dinner together at the Stork Club and waited, the way show people do, for The New York Times to appear with a review. After dinner we had to go over to Third Avenue and 59th Street to find an open newsstand. The Times had a rave review, and the four of us literally danced down the street.
A few months later came Guadalcanal Diary, an example of energetic publishing. The author, Richard Tregaskis, was a correspondent for International News Service and his pieces were syndicated by King Features. Acting as agent, Ward Greene, head of King Features, had copies made of Dick’s manuscript and sent them to nine publishers at the same time, asking for bids—something that had never been done before.
I had just said the day before that the first book that came out about Guadalcanal was going to be a knockout because Guadalcanal marked the turning of the tide. Then in came this manuscript on November 11, 1942. I took it home, read it immediately, called Ward Greene at nine o’clock the next morning and said, “I’ve got to have this book.” We signed it up before any of the other eight publishers had even started reading it. Guadalcanal Diary was just a day-to-day diary and the author was absolutely unknown, but within a week of our accepting it, it was chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club; then Twentieth Century-Fox bought the film rights before our rush publication date, January 18, 1943. It was the first Random House book to sell over a hundred thousand copies.
While we were rushing Guadalcanal Diary into print, we already had in our office safe the manuscript of an even more sensational war book, but one which, for security reasons, we definitely couldn’t rush. It was Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, the story of the famous group who, under the leadership of General James Doolittle, had bombed Tokyo on April 18, 1942. The author, in collaboration with Robert Considine, was Ted W. Lawson, one of the pilots who had participated in the raid. Ted’s plane was one of those that came down in China. He, like many others, was led to safety by friendly Chinese. Ted’s leg was badly injured in the crack-up and an infection developed before he could get proper treatment, and it had to be amputated.
We had the manuscript long before anybody knew, though many already suspected, that the planes that had carried out the surprise attack had come from a carrier. President Roosevelt had made his often-quoted remark that they had come from Shangri-la—the imaginary country in James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon. We were told that we couldn’t publish the book until we got clearance from the Air Force, and naturally they were going to keep the lid on until all our airmen were brought to safety or otherwise accounted for.
Here we had a hair-raising book, but we were thwarted. I had to keep this secret and it was burning my tongue. I’m not very good at keeping secrets, but I kept this one because all the details were top security. Finally, on April 20, 1943—a year after the raid and months after we had received the manuscript—the Air Force released its official communiqué and we were free to produce Thirty Seconds over Tokyo for June publication. Again we had a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and this time our first printing was a hundred thousand copies.
By the fall of 1942 I had become very friendly with Bob Considine, and he told me he wanted to write a book with a photographer named Sammy Shulman, who had been all over the world. He followed everybody. In fact, he was so omnipresent that one time in North Africa, when President Roosevelt was there for one of his big conferences with Churchill, F.D.R. looked around and said, “Where’s Sammy?”—he was that accustomed to seeing him. And that’s how Bob came to call the book Where’s Sammy?
We had a date to meet Shulman one afternoon to draw up a contract, and that was a day Bob and I never forgot, because I said I had promised Dick Rodgers that I would go to an audition of a new show he’d done with Oscar Hammerstein. The Theatre Guild was producing it and they were looking for backers. I told Bob, “They’ve got some rich people coming to see it, and it might be fun. We’ll see Sammy Shulman later.” So we went to a performance of a musical called Away We Go (by the time it played up in Boston, it had been renamed Oklahoma!). There we sat while they sang “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” and “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” and “People Will Say We’re in Love.” The Guild was desperately trying to raise money. Bob and I could have put a few thousand dollars into the show and made a fortune. We didn’t. It never occurred to us to invest. First of all, Donald and I had that strict rule never to invest in plays, and as for Bob, he was a newspaperman and didn’t have that kind of money.
But we’ve often thought back. That was the day that fortune beckoned us. All we had to do was put up five thousand dollars. I think that if we each had put up that much, we would by this time have gotten back, probably, at least three hundred thousand. Everybody who went into that show became rich on it.
We met Sammy Shulman afterward and signed the contract for the story of his wartime experiences. When we published it in November, 1943, nobody bought it, and the reason I remember it at all was Oklahoma!
There’s a nice story about Bob Considine. He had started in Washington, where he was a tennis champion, as a reporter on the Times-Herald, working for its formidable publisher, Eleanor Medill Patterson, who was known as “Cissy.” She was very fond of Bob, and when he got a chance to go to New York to work for Hearst at a much bigger salary, she blessed him and said, “Go ahead. I can’t afford to pay that much, but you’re on your way.” They remained great friends.
One time Cissy had a big fight with her brother, Joseph Patterson, who founded the New York Daily News. (Colonel Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune was her cousin. It was quite a family.) She called up Considine and said, “I want to answer an idiotic editorial of Joe’s. I can tell you what I want to say but I can’t write it, Bob. You have to write it for me.” Bob naturally agreed. He loved her. She had started him on his way. She added, “I’ve got to have it right away. Get somebody on a train to bring it down here. I need it tomorrow.” So Bob dropped everything and wrote the piece, which she loved. She ran it on the front page under her own name, of course.
The next afternoon she called up and said, “It was great, Bob. You did just what I wanted. How much do I owe you?” Considine said, “Cissy, I wouldn’t take any money from you. This was for love.” She said, “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re a newspaperman, and I don’t get things for nothing. I ordered this from you and I’m going to pay you.” Bob protested a bit more, and finally Cissy, very angry, said, “Listen, Bob, you had an article in this month’s Cosmopolitan. What did they pay you for it?” Bob said, “I still tell you that I don’t want anything, but since you ask, they paid me a thousand dollars for it.”
She said “Okay” and hung up the phone. Two days later Bob got a check for seven hundred fifty dollars from Cissy Patterson with a little note pinned to it. The note read: “Dear Bob, I telephoned Cosmopolitan.”
Our most prolific author of books about the war was Quentin Reynolds, who had started his career the way Westbrook Pegler did: in the sports department, covering the Brooklyn Dodgers and writing color stories. He joined the staff of Collier’s magazine, and, at the outbreak of the war, was sent to London as a foreign correspondent. There it was discovered that he had a mellifluous and beautiful voice. So they transferred him temporarily into a star broadcaster, and with Edward R. Murrow he covered the big Nazi bombing raids over London. Murrow gave the news; Quent did the human-interest stories. He was very warm and colorful and a born optimist. He became a hero in England because his broadcasts brought hope to the people. It was very nice to hear his reassuring accounts of how the English were holding out—which, indeed, they were.
Quent was a very brave fellow. In August, 1942, he participated in the first invasion rehearsal at Dieppe. As expected, the raid was repulsed; the real reason for it had been to test the German defenses and plan for D-Day. We published Quent’s account of this campaign, Dress Rehearsal, in February, 1943. Then, a year later, came his The Curtain Rises, a report from all the major battlefronts of Europe and Africa.
Among other war books we published was Tunis Expedition by Darryl Zanuck, head of Twentieth Century-Fox, who was a colonel in the U.S. Signal Corps, in charge of a unit that filmed the American campaign in North Africa. We had a very big sale on the book because the studio bought twenty thousand copies. One wonderful thing I remember. Zanuck was always a great one for sending eight–page telegrams; he’d send one the way some lovesick girl would write a mushy letter. When he came back to New York from Tunis, and before he went on to Hollywood, he had nothing to do, so he’d hang around my office and talk to me. He had a loud voice and smoked great big cigars. You could hear him all over Random House. He was fun, but you couldn’t do any work while he was around. When he finally left New York, I gave him the galleys of Quent’s The Curtain Rises to read on the plane back to California. The next morning I got one of his long, long telegrams, which started off with something like: “Dear Bennett: On page so-and-so, Quentin Reynolds mentions the so-and-so hotel in so-and-so. It may interest you and Quentin to know that I was the first American officer to set foot in this hotel on the morning of so-and-so.” And he went on with long details about what he had done and had for breakfast—all in the telegram.
Quentin Reynolds and Bennett (28.3 illustration credit)
Quent Reynolds was in New York, and I knew he never got up before noon. He was usually around the town all night, having a few here and a few there, and would stagger to bed in the wee hours. But I woke him up at nine o’clock, and he came to the phone mumbling. I said I had something so important to tell him, I had to call right away. Then I read Zanuck’s telegram, and Quent gave forth a stream of profanity I’ll never forget.
