At Random, page 2
As I write this, it’s been thirty years, almost to the day, since Bennett Cerf died. Unlike so many other children of famous or successful parents, I admired my father unabashedly, and I adored him almost without reservation. And I miss him as much as ever.
CHRISTOPHER CERF
September 2001
EDITORS’ NOTE
Between September, 1967, and February, 1968, Mary R. Hawkins of the Columbia Oral History program held twenty-one lengthy question-and-answer interviews with Bennett Cerf. These were tape-recorded and transcribed, and after his preliminary corrections, they were retyped. In March, 1971, he wrote additional notes to bring the History up to that date.
It was his intention to write At Random (his title), working from that typescript of over a thousand pages, cutting out the questions, rearranging, correcting and embellishing the text and adding things that had not come to his mind during the interviews. Before his sudden death in August, 1971, he had already started, and during the last months of his life he talked frequently with us and others about his plans for the book. If he had lived to write it, we would certainly have been involved with him in the process, instead of sadly trying in his absence to carry out his intentions.
Though the Oral History is the principal source of At Random, it is by no means the only one. We were greatly aided by the fact that probably few people have ever documented their lives as methodically as Bennett did: daily diaries that began during his student days at Columbia and longer ones for trips abroad; elaborate and massive scrapbooks that are a reference library in themselves, containing clippings of news stories about Random House and later about himself, as well as the hundreds of pieces he wrote for publication; numerous bulky files of correspondence which he kept neatly in order (he threw away very little, apparently).
All of these have been invaluable in straightening out dates and facts when Bennett’s memory occasionally faltered. More important, they have contributed materially to the contents of this book. When we found pieces that he wrote long ago to be superior to his treatment of the same subjects in the Oral History, we included them instead. Several sequences from his trip diaries, written on the spot, were more interesting and circumstantial than what, many years later, he remembered in the interviews, and they have therefore been substituted. Finally, in selecting from the great bulk of the Oral History, we have been guided by his own title for the book and by what we think he would himself have done, so that the result is primarily about publishing and his preeminent role in it.
PHYLLIS CERF WAGNER
ALBERT ERSKINE
Birth announcement. Annotated in Bennett’s scrapbook: “and that’s how the trouble started” (fm1.1 illustration credit)
I am a rather unusual specimen in that not only I but all four of my grandparents and both of my parents were born on the island of Manhattan. My father’s family were of Alsatian extraction and my mother’s family were Germans named Wise. My father’s father, Marcel Cerf, was a jeweler. The Cerf family was loaded with charm but little money, while the Wise family had very little charm but a lot of money. My grandfather, Nathan Wise, owned a tobacco-distributing business called the Metropolitan Tobacco Company and in his very conservative way amassed a fortune of over a million dollars. The way that money was eventually divided was very important in the beginning of my career.
Everybody kowtowed to my Grandfather Wise, a rather stern man with a beard—he looked like one of the Smith Brothers then pictured on cough-drop boxes. I saw him mainly on Sundays, the day reserved for having dinner with him and the rest of the family. My mother was one of six children, three boys and three girls. Grandfather had a private house and lived in some elegance, and he had the first automobile I ever saw. He also had a great backhand. At the dinner table he’d reach across and wallop you so fast, you couldn’t see it coming. So the object was to sit as far as possible from Grandpa at Sunday dinners. In the afternoon when he would take a nap, the house had to be silent as a church. I never was quiet in my life, and I was usually the one who woke him up and got the back of his hand.
My father, Gustave Cerf, was a very handsome, charming, wonderful man—I absolutely adored him and so did everyone else. He was a lithographer by profession, gave elocution lessons on the side, and at one time even contemplated being a professional ballplayer. He had been a semi-pro catcher on weekends, and in 1892 he even got a tryout with the Brooklyn Dodgers. For the rest of his life we teased him about not being able to hit Big League pitching, and no matter how many times we kidded him, he’d always give a long explanation as to why he hadn’t made it.
My father and mother met each other in a rather curious way. Not too many girls went to college then, not in the circles my family moved in, anyway. But when my parents were young, it was considered quite the thing for respectable young ladies to take elocution lessons and recite things like “The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck.” So a teacher was hired for my mother, Frederika Wise, and the gentleman who gave her those elocution lessons was my father. The teacher and pupil fell madly in love, and eloped—to the outrage of my grandfather, who looked upon my father as a charming fly-by-night. And these two people were gloriously in love for their entire life together. So I was born into a very happy family.
Bennett with father, October 1, 1899 (1.1 illustration credit)
The house I was born in is now in one of the most run-down sections of New York—118th Street, just off Seventh Avenue—but at the time it was mostly a prosperous Jewish neighborhood. Then, very early in my life, we moved to a nearby apartment house called the Douglas, which was at 201 West 121st Street.
My father was a very proud man and we lived only on what he made himself. I was brought up as a city child, playing stickball in the streets with a bunch of tough little kids, a lot of whom became very famous. Playing in the streets wasn’t as dangerous then as it is today; automobiles were just beginning to appear. We used to roller-skate all over the town, hitching onto ice wagons. It was great to reach in and grab little pieces of ice. And you could also play “punch the ball” out in the middle of the street and not have to run to the sidewalk too often.
We kids were great baseball fans. (I was initiated by my father, who started taking me to games when I was five years old.) In those days the New York Herald had a branch office at 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, and out front was a baseball scoreboard. A boy used to come out every once in a while with a rubber pad and stamp the scores on that board. Since there was no radio then and, of course, no television, we would stand there after school and wait for that boy to post the scores. When he’d come out, we’d yell, “What happened?” But he always played God and wouldn’t answer us; he just stamped those numbers up. We were great N.Y. Giant fans and always hated the Brooklyn Dodgers, even though Pop had once come close to playing with them. They were the enemy.
At about age four (1.2 illustration credit)
At about age six (1.3 illustration credit)
I went to Public School 10, which was at 117th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. On my first day my mother dressed me in a Buster Brown outfit, and when I appeared with that big collar and flowing bow, I became the center of attention of the Irish kids from down around Manhattan Avenue and Eighth Avenue. I came home with the collar ripped and my nose bleeding, screaming with rage. I wasn’t angry at the boys who jumped me; I was furious with my mother for dressing me in such a manner. I was her pride and joy, her only child, and I am told that though I wasn’t exactly spoiled, on suitable occasions I sometimes resorted to holding my breath to get my own way. I have no memory of whether this was one of those times or not, but I do know that I never wore a Buster Brown collar and tie to school again. P.S. 10 was a great school. We considered it a privilege to be students there. We were proud of it, and there were a lot of smart kids in P.S. 10. Some of them became my lifelong friends. One of the boys was Howard Dietz, who became a well-known playwright. He wrote The Bandwagon. When he was head of the MGM publicity department, he changed the name of a little actress from Lucille Le Sueur to Joan Crawford.
One of the other graduates of that school was Morty Rodgers, who became a great gynecologist and delivered my two sons. His kid brother, whom we used to kick around the house and tell to “get out of here,” became reasonably well known, too. His name is Richard Rodgers, whose hit shows—Pal Joey, Oklahoma!, South Pacific, The Sound of Music—have enriched him and the world of music. The principal of P.S. 10 was a man named Dr. Birkens, whom everybody adored. One of the teachers, Abe Greenberg, was also the coach of the athletic teams, and he was so good that P.S. 10 won the interscholastic championship year after year after year. I have always been near-sighted, but I could run, so I was on the relay team.
A love of reading came when I was very young. At first it was magazines, and those that I remember with particular affection were called Popular and Top-notch. They had baseball stories and football stories and adventure stories—very tame by present-day standards, but I liked them. The Saturday Evening Post was a popular magazine then, and all of us used to peddle it. We’d put a white bag filled with copies of the magazine over our shoulders, then park ourselves at the entrance of a subway station or some other busy location. A copy of the magazine cost five cents, and we got prizes according to the number we sold.
The first books I remember were the Rover Boys and the Motor Boys and the Putnam Hall Cadets. And then I found there was a branch of the public library at 123rd Street and Lenox Avenue; my friends and I joined it and discovered together an author named Ralph Henry Barbour. I still recall the titles of some of his books: The Crimson Sweater, For the Honor of the School and Four in Camp and Four Afloat. This was a step up from Top-notch—a first step. My mother always liked books. She saw to it that I read the children’s stories of the day, like Black Beauty and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. But as to the really good books, my parents didn’t know much about them. My Uncle Herbert was the greatest influence on my young life. He was my mother’s brother—only five years older than I was and never terribly strong. He was one of the most brilliant people I have ever met—absolutely brilliant. I felt he knew everything.
At about age twelve (1.4 illustration credit)
In 1911 we moved up to Riverside Drive and 157th Street, just about the time I graduated from P.S. 10, salutatorian of my class. Our new home was in an apartment house called the Riviera, and I remember we were on the twelfth floor. We looked right out over Audubon Park on the Hudson River.
Back then, Washington Heights was not yet built up. Just south of where the George Washington Bridge is, the first of the big apartment buildings were beginning to go up, like the Riviera, which is still standing. You could look out our windows and see the trains go by on the West Side tracks of the New York Central, and another great pleasure was watching the river traffic, especially the night boat to Albany, with the searchlights playing from one side of the Hudson to the other. A lot of people took it to go to the Adirondacks. They’d go by boat to Albany, and then take a train. I remember going to camp that way, and the thrill of actually being on the boat instead of watching it from a window. From the time I was twelve till about fifteen, I went to camp every summer with Morty Rodgers, and when his brother Dick started to grow up, with Dick and his future collaborator, Larry Hart.
With mother and father (1.5 illustration credit)
I was almost thirteen at the time we moved to Washington Heights. Though both my mother and father were Jewish, I had never even been inside a temple. A lot of the kids my age in the neighborhood started announcing they were going to be bar-mitzvahed. When they all got bicycles after going through the ceremony, I demanded to be bar-mitzvahed too, to the absolute amazement of my parents. I got my bicycle, all right, but I wasn’t allowed to ride it in the city streets because my mother thought it was too dangerous.
There were three high schools that most of the uptown kids went to—Commerce, Clinton and Townsend Harris. Commerce and Clinton were downtown, relatively, in the Sixties. Townsend Harris was part of City College of New York, and the remarkable thing about it was that it provided a full curriculum which could be completed in three years, whereas in the other high schools you had to go for four. But to get into Townsend Harris you had to have superior marks in public school, and when you got there, you had to work like hell. I worked harder there than I ever did in college, which was a breeze after Townsend Harris. The dropouts were fantastic. In the first year over half the class would flunk out.
It was in high school that I began to read better books: Ivanhoe, Silas Marner, The Oregon Trail. I loved Ivanhoe, and that started me on Walter Scott. But I was still reading popular magazines. Also around this time I published my first piece in the St. Nicholas magazine; it was titled “How I Spent My Vacation” and I got a silver badge for it.
As I look back, it was when we lived at the Riviera that I started my real life, because in that building there was Howard Dietz, who had also moved uptown, and another friend, Merryle Rukeyser, who later became financial editor for all the Hearst newspapers. And across the street lived a boy named Elliot Sanger, of the Sanger family that owned one of the great stores in Dallas. Elliot would later be one of the founders of the radio station WQXR. We were a group of kids who in later life became quite successful—and we all went to Townsend Harris.
None of us boys were given much money to spend. I had an allowance, as I remember, of a dollar a week. We couldn’t really indulge ourselves too much. But there was a vaudeville house on Seventh Avenue between 125th and 126th, the Alhambra. This was big—time vaudeville, and we were regular patrons. We’d sit up in the balcony, where a seat cost twenty-five cents. There was a candy store called Simonette’s right next to the theater. We’d get a half pound of caramels in a light-blue box, and a whole bunch of kids would divide them up; that meant about three for each of us. I remember it with pleasure—I can still taste those caramels, chocolate and vanilla. They were great. Movies were just starting, and we began to go to those, too—we’d see three or four one-reelers for a nickel. These were shown in old abandoned stores; one was called the Nickelette, another the Nickelodeon.
Howard Dietz and I later found out about the cut-rate Leblang’s ticket agency at 43rd Street and Broadway, where you could get an orchestra seat for a play for about a dollar, way in the back, of course; we didn’t know there was anything in front of the fourteenth row. So we began to haunt Broadway on Saturdays because we both loved the theater, something I’ve never gotten out of my system. To this day, walking backstage gives me a thrill.
I think the first big show we saw was called something like Top o’ the World, a musical. Then Dietz entered a contest that was given by the Strauss Theater Program Company, which printed the programs for all the theaters. You were given three lines of a poem and had to write the fourth, some kind of little jingle. Dietz won one of the prizes. And the prize was two seats in the sixth row of the orchestra for the Astor Theatre Saturday matinée. I don’t remember the name of the show but I remember the theater. Dietz invited me—and I treated him to lunch. We both recall to this day that we ate at a place called Lauber’s on 39th Street, where we got an eight-course luncheon for sixty-five cents. We had to show the cash before they would feed us—we didn’t look like regular patrons. We were kids, a couple of kids in short pants. Then we went to the theater and sat in the sixth-row center of the orchestra. That to me was such a thrill, I still remember walking in and being ushered to those seats and the pride we had sitting there.
On the day before my sixteenth birthday my childhood ended abruptly. My mother died. She had always been desperately anxious to have another child. She’d had several miscarriages, but she persisted, and when I was fifteen a little girl was born who lived only about two weeks. The pregnancy and birth weakened my mother and she never really recovered.
From the day of my mother’s death I became the financial head of the family. My grandfather, a very shrewd man, had loved my father, but he didn’t trust him with money because he feared Pop would lose it in no time. Pop was the soft touch of the world, and anybody who asked him for anything got it. So my grandfather had left money to my mother in trust for me, and after she died I came into just about $125,000. One of the six children who inherited my grandfather’s estate was my Uncle Herbert, Herbert Wise—and when my mother died he came to live with my father and me, and all three of us adored each other.
With father at Pikes Peak, September 6, 1914 (2.1 illustration credit)
At the age of sixteen I decided I was going to learn to be a businessman, and that meant I’d have to go to another kind of school. My handwriting was very bad and I didn’t know anything about bookkeeping, but I was determined to become a tycoon. I hated to leave Townsend Harris for many reasons. By this time I was writing stories for the school magazine and was one of the top students there. Also, I was on the soccer team—even I could see a soccer ball! But I had made up my mind that I was going to make money, so I quit and went to the Packard Commercial School. This enraged Uncle Herbert, but I did it anyway. It was a mighty stupid move in some ways, but luckily it worked out well for me. For one thing, my handwriting improved: they taught the Palmer method in those days. I also learned double-entry bookkeeping and began to know something about the business world. After school I worked for a certified accountant and went around with him to check his clients’ books. In this way I got backstage of a big restaurant and learned that all the money’s in liquor, not in food. I saw how department stores and various other businesses operated, and I became interested in all of them. Thus I had a lot of experience while I was still in the business school.
