At Random, page 21
Books Are Bullets (32.1 illustration credit)
Again one thing led to another, and one day I got a telephone call from Colston Leigh, a lecture agent. He said he had heard me on a couple of the radio programs and asked if I’d ever thought of lecturing. I replied that I hadn’t, and he said, “I think you’d be all right at it, and you can make quite a lot of money out of it.” Of course I was intrigued. The mere thought of talking even for nothing delights me, and getting paid for it made it all the better! I said, “I’d certainly love to try it.” So under Colston Leigh’s management I did a couple of trial runs. I think the first one was up at some club in Pelham, New York. Since then I’ve done hundreds—all over the country. I found the time to do it because I’ve never prepared a lecture in my life; I’ve never even had any notes. I have an idea of what I’m going to say, and I just get up and talk.
I had learned something about lecturing from a very, very important gentleman. When I was at Columbia the students would invite people up to give talks; and being the Columbia School of Journalism, we got some pretty prominent people. Our all-time star attraction was one of my great heroes—Will Rogers. I was the chairman of the lecture committee that year, and I went downtown to collect Mr. Rogers, bringing him up in style on the subway. In those days we weren’t fancy at all. He was quite content, and it never occurred to me to take him in a taxi.
Will Rogers attracted a crowd unequaled in Columbia annals. At that time his column was appearing in about every city in the United States. Two things impressed me deeply. One, he had no notes. Two, he didn’t lecture to us—he talked to us. When we subwayed downtown together—I took him back to his hotel—I said, “You didn’t use any notes!” Will Rogers said, “Of course I didn’t. When a man gets up on a platform to talk, if he can’t get by without notes or reading a speech, he’s not a lecturer, he’s an amateur. The way to intrigue people is to talk to them, not to lecture to them.” Wonderful advice! I’ve never forgotten it.
Later on, luckily for me, I signed up with the Lee Keedick Agency. Lee Keedick was dead, but his son, Bob Keedick, owned the agency and there was a lady there, Elizabeth Schenck, who became a very important person in my life. She took care of all of my lecture activities and was absolutely wonderful. I became a top lecturer, getting very high fees, although I wasn’t when I started, because you have to work your way up the way you do in the theater. I then brought Keedick lots of other people. One was Kitty Hart, who has now become a very successful lecturer. They already had John Mason Brown and Norman Cousins. I guess it was Norman who said, “Why don’t you go to my agent—Lee Keedick.” At that time John Mason Brown was the biggest lecturer in the United States; and Brown, Cousins and I made quite a trio.
The lecture business is a very peculiar one. The standard commission the agent gets is one-third of the fee, not ten percent, like theater or literary agents—they get thirty-three and a third percent, and you have to pay your own expenses. That’s a mighty big take, but they do a great deal for you. They not only have to book you, but when you go out, they give you a dossier of every place you’re going, what time your planes leave and all the necessary tickets and hotel reservations.
What is essential when you go on tour—I’ll go out for a week, and I want to do as many lectures as I can during that time—is that the bookings and the reservations are planned so that you can make the jumps. For instance, once in a five-day period I did eight lectures in eight different cities. Now, that took a lot of arranging. These things have to be booked six or seven months in advance, because most of the forums in colleges, or wherever, plan their programs a season ahead and print up literature and sell season tickets based on the attractions they’re going to present. Since I pay my own expenses, I feel perfectly free to take the best suite in the hotel and live like a lord.
Lecturing became an important part of my life—and an extra dividend developed from it. I went to towns where no book publisher had ever been before—no publisher of a big firm, that is. I would always go to the bookstores and meet the booksellers and chat with them and see where they had The Modern Library. 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. For my own books, I’d sign anything they had in stock. In fact, there was a joke that if I ever got out of town leaving an unsigned Bennett Cerf book, it would be a rare and valuable volume!
Furthermore, when I talk and tell stories, a lot of them, of course, are about authors whom I know, Random House authors, and I consequently have to mention a lot of Random House books in the course of a lecture. So I’m selling at the same time; and I’m meeting heads of college English departments, hearing about any budding geniuses on campus—and you never can tell, you could be planting seeds. Of course, every time I go out our editors groan because a flood of trash starts coming in from people who have heard me say we like the young writers. They usually say, “Well, I’m a young writer and I have a work of genius,” and in comes this unbelievable junk. But you never can tell: Gone With the Wind was found that way.
The only thing that had hampered our business during the war years was that paper was scarce and rationed by the War Production Board. We could have published many more books, but we couldn’t produce them because our paper quota was based on what we had used in certain previous years. This led to a very interesting chain of events that had important consequences for Random House.
We had been preparing for publication a book called The Basic Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, edited for us by Anton Pegis. The writings of Aquinas were available at that time only in a set of some twenty-odd volumes put out by a Catholic publishing house. By the time Pegis finished his work—two volumes containing over twenty-six hundred pages—we were right in the middle of the paper shortage, and had just enough for ten thousand sets. It was a very costly project, and with that size printing we would just about get our money back, but from then on, we’d have clear sailing.
What we did not know was that every Jesuit institution in the country was waiting for this two-volume set. Within a week of publication we got two orders for twenty-five hundred sets each from two we’d never even heard of. That was half the entire edition, and in about three weeks our entire printing was gone. We had thought they’d last five years. That’s how brilliantly we figured!
We didn’t have paper for any more at the time, and I thought we’d have to wait until the war was over, but one day my phone rang—it was a Monsignor from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He began in a deeply resonant voice, “Is this Bennett Cerf?” I said, “Yes.” (Let’s say that his name was Murphy.) He said, “This is Monsignor Murphy from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I just want to tell you that you’re the stupidest publisher in the United States of America.” I said, “Well, thank you for that sweeping compliment. What do I owe it to?” He said, “You’re a fool. You bring out this beautiful two-volume St. Thomas Aquinas, and we’re wondering how we can help you fellows, when what do we hear, three weeks after publication, you’re out of print!” So I explained to him how we hadn’t counted on orders coming in from Jesuits all over the country. He repeated, “You’re a fool. I’ll be right over to see you.”
I went to our sales department and said, “This Monsignor can be coming from St. Patrick’s for only one reason. He’s going to offer us some paper!”
Well, in he came. There used to be a big movie star named Thomas Meighan, and this fellow was his double: a tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed, handsome, compelling person—hard to resist. He marched in and sat right down at my desk and lit a big cigar and began bawling me out, but I could see that it was all just an act. It was obvious that he understood the whole story. I waited patiently, and sure enough, the time came when he said, “It just so happens that we have some paper. If we give it to you, how do I know you’ll use it for St. Thomas Aquinas?” So I did a little acting of my own and said indignantly, “I hope you’re not accusing me of dishonesty. If you did happen to find some paper and gave it to us, we’d give you a printer’s affidavit.” He said, “I was only joking. Of course I know you’ll use it for Aquinas. We have enough for about another five thousand sets.” (They sold it to us for exactly what it cost them—and getting extra paper at any price was a miracle in those days.)
I said, “That’s wonderful, Monsignor.” He said, “Well, now are you happy?” And because something entirely unrelated was on my mind, I said, “No, I’m not.” He said, “What else is bothering you?” I said, “As a matter of fact, we’ve just had notice that we’ve got to give up this office. IBM has bought the building. We all knew that we were living on a day-to-day basis—we couldn’t get new leases—and we knew that somebody was going to buy the building, but we didn’t know it was IBM and that everybody would have to clear out.” In those days space was as unavailable in New York as paper. I said, “I’ve been looking at warehouses over in Gowanus … anyplace to go until the war’s over. Next time you come up to tell me I’m the worst publisher in the United States, you’ll probably find me operating from a rowboat in Central Park lake.”
He said, “Well, let’s see what we can do about it. How about the big building across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral?” I said, “What building?” He said, “The palazzo, the brownstone building.” I said, “That mansion with the courtyard?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “Monsignor, besides being the stupidest publisher in America, I’m probably one of the poorest. We couldn’t afford a building like that.” He said, “Oh, nonsense. It’s not one building—it’s five.” That was the first time I knew there were two wings, plus three separate buildings behind the wings. He said, “That north wing would be just about right for you. Joe Kennedy owns it now. We’ll make him give it to you for what he paid for it.” I said, “Wait a minute. I don’t care what you could make Joe Kennedy do. We can’t afford a building like that.” He said, “You haven’t even heard what it would cost you. Keep your shirt on!” He phoned his assistant at the cathedral and ordered, “Get me Joseph Kennedy.” Kennedy was just a name to me. He had been ambassador to Great Britain, but the days of his great fame lay ahead.
The Monsignor and I sat talking for a while. I liked him more and more. He was a wonderful man. About fifteen minutes later the phone rang and he was told that Joe Kennedy was playing golf in Palm Beach. He said blithely, “Get him off the golf links.” My eyes were popping. About fifteen minutes later Kennedy called up from Palm Beach. This Monsignor, whom I had just met for the first time, said, “One of our good young friends is in trouble and needs office space, and we want you to sell him that building across the street from the cathedral for what you paid for it.” Well, I could hear Joe Kennedy fuming at the other end of the phone. He didn’t think it was a good idea at all.
The building had been designed by Stanford White for Henry Villard, the father of Oswald Garrison Villard, and completed in 1885. At that time it was practically out in the country. Since it was intended for the whole family, it was built as five separate units. Shortly after it was finished Villard was wiped out in one of those Wall Street panics and had to sell the whole thing. Whitelaw Reid bought the south wing. Harris Fahnestock bought the north wing.
North wing of mansion: 457 Madison Avenue (33.1 illustration credit)
Courtyard entrance (33.2 illustration credit)
As the years went by, the Fahnestock family dwindled down to just Mr. Fahnestock and his son, who until the war started were living in that great big mansion with about twenty servants. Then the servants began disappearing, and it became ridiculous for two men to live in that big barn. In fact, they couldn’t, so they sold out to Joe Kennedy, who then let the Free French use it as their office headquarters, and they had just moved out when this transaction took place. The building cost us somewhere around $420,000.
The first thing that happened was that the fire department, learning that we planned to use the building for offices, said we needed a fireproof stairway, which indeed we did. The building had been put up in the days when they made things to last, and breaking through those thick walls and putting in an extra stairway was a major undertaking. And steel was just as hard to get then as paper. I called up the Monsignor and we got our steel. The Church helped us get the people to put in the stairway and they helped us get a mortgage—and in we moved to 457 Madison Avenue. So St. Thomas Aquinas became my patron saint, and I swore that the only way they’d ever get me to leave would be to carry me out.
We had many very pleasant dealings with Cardinal Spellman, whose residence was right across the street from us, behind the cathedral. He and I would have lunch together about twice a year. I’d usually take him out once, and next time I’d go over and have lunch with him. It wasn’t a set rule, but that’s about how it worked out. We were good neighbors, and I liked him even though he was so conservative. He was a decent man if you could get over his ideas, which I very often could not. But we knew when to stop talking. We understood each other and we had common interests, and both of us loved that building. That was one thing we shared. I would sometimes walk up Madison Avenue with him, and I always hoped we would meet somebody that I could impress properly, but somehow or other we never seemed to bump into anybody I knew.
When we had our lunches we talked about the stock market a great deal, and baseball too. One day he told me, “I once had to make a big choice: the Church or professional baseball.” I expressed surprise, and he said, “I was a great catcher.” Well, my dad had been a catcher too, so we had that in common. He said, “Where do you think I learned to kneel? I’ll show you. I can still catch.” He went out in the hall and called up and said, “Throw me my red cap.” Someone threw down his little red cardinal’s cap from way upstairs and he caught it and slapped it on his head. He was quite a human gentleman.
We often argued about books and movies and censorship—on which we were seldom in agreement. I remember one time when he seemed just a little bit put out with himself. It was just after a movie called Baby Doll, with Carroll Baker, had been released. It was a dirty picture, but nothing compared with what they do today. The Cardinal had issued a philippic against the picture, saying it was obscene and that nobody should go to see it. Until then it had done absolutely nothing at the box office, but within twenty-four hours it attracted lines two blocks long. He realized he had given the movie just the publicity it needed. He said he’d never make that mistake again.
A few years later we received a book by Honor Tracy, The Straight and Narrow Path—one of the funniest books I ever read. Honor Tracy, who is a Catholic, had been sent by the Times of London to write up life in a little Irish village, and had encountered some fascinating people. The priest had two new bathrooms in his house, and the rest of the town was starving to death because the priest was really using all the parish money for church purposes. The chapters were published first in the Times, and the Church in Ireland promptly sued them for libel. Well, the London papers had learned long ago that when this happened, you settled at once. You had about as much chance of winning as I would have of beating Rocky Marciano in the ring. So they settled immediately and apologized to the Church for the stories, saying that they were untrue; whereupon Honor Tracy sued the Times, saying that they had made her out a liar and that she could prove everything she had written. There has never been a case like it in literary history. She sued for quite a big sum, and the Times lost.
When the book came to us, we all read it, and laughed our heads off. At the last minute I got scared, and said, “Here we are across the avenue from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. What is Cardinal Spellman, what are they all, going to say about this book? They’re going to be outraged. I don’t think we ought to do it.” And Donald said, “All right. If that’s the way you feel, we won’t. But don’t you ever tell me again that you’re a liberal publisher.” That, of course, was a stab right below the belt. So we published it in 1956, and we never heard one word from Cardinal Spellman. The book was a great success. It’s still in Vintage Books, and I still think it’s gloriously funny. Honor Tracy has written several books since, but none of them has been as successful as The Straight and Narrow Path, although one, The First Day of Friday, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in 1963.
We’ve done a lot of books with the imprimatur of the Catholic Church, and they’ve even given us several to publish. It’s been a very pleasant relationship.
Gradually, the Church took over the other four sections of our building. They first got the Reid house and then one by one acquired the others. We owned the courtyard jointly with them—about twenty-five percent to their seventy-five. Nobody knew exactly which part we owned. It was an undivided interest, a partnership, and neither of us could do anything without the other.
The two people who held out for keeping that mansion were Cardinal Spellman and myself, and when he died, I became a loner. The property became more valuable every day, and a lot of people both in the Church and at Random House long thought we should sell out and make an enormous profit. Our part of the building, which with all the improvements had cost about a half million dollars, had come to be worth about two and a half million, and we could make about two million dollars by selling it—more than we made in publishing in twenty years!
Finally, it was efficiency rather than profit that dictated our decision to move. Our business had grown to such an extent that we had five separate addresses in Manhattan, so in the interest of getting as many operations as possible under one roof, we moved into our new building at 201 East 50th Street in April of 1969. It broke my heart to leave the old house, and I never stopped believing that we should have kept it for our editorial offices.
