Indelible Imprint

A new biography examines a giant of 20th-century American book publishing.

Review by Dennis Drabelle  

Reading this illuminating biography has brought out a commonality that my partner of 38 years and I never knew we had: flirtations with twin outfits known as the Famous Artists and Famous Writers Schools. As teenagers, he and I each sent away for a Famous test, which, depending on our scores, could qualify us to enroll in a three-year correspondence course designed to make us either a successful artist (his dream) or writer (mine). You may not be shocked to learn that, like almost every test-taker, we passed; we also passed up the chance to be tutored that way because the price tag—$418, nonrefundable even if you dropped out—was beyond our means. After muckraking journalist Jessica Mitford exposed the dual scams in an article for the Atlantic Monthly, the parent firm filed for bankruptcy.

The Famous Writers School was overseen (lightly) and endorsed (enthusiastically) by Gayle Feldman CW’73’s subject, Bennett Cerf, a dynamic book publisher who moonlighted as a TV star. I bring up Cerf’s connection with the Famous Schools not so much to castigate him as to highlight his far-flung interests and the insouciance with which he pursued some of them. 

Born in Manhattan in 1898, as a kid Cerf got the nickname “Beans” because of his unflagging energy; he lived up to that moniker for the rest of his life. His Jewish parents were well-to-do. As Cerf’s friend the actress and singer Kitty Carlisle observed, “Most of us [Jews] had to struggle; what’s amazing is that [his] family had money, and yet he did everything he did with so little a kick in the pants from fate. To be born with money is a handicap, from the point of view of extraordinary accomplishment in the intellectual fields…” Cerf overcame that handicap with élan.

After he graduated from Columbia University, Cerf and his acquaintance Donald Klopfer became rivals for a young woman who introduced them to a Jewish milieu in which, Feldman writes, “country clubs were taken for granted and girls had coming-out parties at the Ritz.” Klopfer got the girl, but Cerf got Klopfer—they became best friends and cofounders of perhaps the most influential 20th-century American book publisher, Random House.

Among other things, Nothing Random is a chronicle of Jews’ increasing participation in what had been a WASP-dominated field, with Cerf as one of the pioneers. He got his start by using inherited money to buy into Boni & Liveright, whose Modern Library imprint was among the first to publish the classics in relatively cheap editions. Cerf’s canny assessments of authors and books made him a comer, and Horace Liveright dealt with his financial problems by selling the Modern Library to the talented young man and his buddy Klopfer. In 1925, their first year at the helm, the partners increased sales by 8.5 percent, and in 1927 almost half a million copies of their books were sold. Cerf and Klopfer founded Random House, a cavalier name suggested cavalierly by Cerf, to publish their line of new titles.

In arguably his greatest contribution to literature, Cerf shepherded Irish writer James Joyce’s daunting, sprawling, bawdy novel Ulysses through a long battle with censors. It helped that the work’s countless word plays, parodies, digressions, and allusions made it an unlikely polluter of susceptible minds. As Feldman succinctly puts it, “Ulysses didn’t behave like a dirty book,” and in 1933 a perceptive federal judge gave Random House the go-ahead to import Joyce’s masterpiece into the United States.

Under Cerf and Klopfer’s leadership, the combination of Modern Library and Random House published an enviable array of, well, Famous Authors, such as Eugene O’Neill, Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, James Michener, Truman Capote, Ayn Rand, Ralph Ellison, William Styron, Cormac McCarthy, and Dr. Seuss. One of Feldman’s set-pieces features the chronically overextended Faulkner, who felt compelled not only to support a slew of relatives but also to maintain his mansion and other trappings of Southern squiredom. The novelist had been “mortgaging mules one at a time to buy essentials,” Feldman writes, “and had just about run out of animals,” so he begged Random House for a loan. (Instead, the firm gave him an advance on three books yet to be written.)

Cerf owed his celebrity status to being a fixture on What’s My Line?, a half-hour TV game show whose 17-year run started in 1950. Broadcast from New York on Sunday nights, it challenged four panelists to guess what one guest after another did for a living by asking yes-or-no questions. Except for comedian Fred Allen, at first none of the panelists was famous (that word again!), but soon they all were. Dozens of What’s My Line? episodes are available on YouTube, where Cerf delivers his quips in a surprisingly thick New York accent. Fizzy as Prosecco, the program still offers first-rate light entertainment.

After his brief marriage to the film star Sylvia Sidney ended in divorce, Cerf wed a gentile, Phyllis Fraser, who chafed against the marital paradigm of the era—husband as breadwinner and boss, wife as child-bearer and support staff. A literary type herself, Fraser teamed up with Ted Geisel (Dr. Seuss’s real name) to found a children’s imprint called Beginner Books, but her husband went along with a corporate decision to force her out—a betrayal for which she never forgave him. After Bennett’s death in 1971, Phyllis married former New York City mayor Robert Wagner Jr.

There is much more to Nothing Random, notably Cerf’s sideline as a compiler of anthologies (in my personal library is a copy of his Reading for Pleasure, which, by the way, contains nothing by either James Joyce or Gertrude Stein); and acquisitions and mergers that resulted in Penguin Random House, a British-American conglomerate that remains a mighty force in the book trade. Some readers will be intimidated by the length at which Feldman goes on, but I noticed very little fat in the telling. Her blend of a crash course on the history of 20th-century American publishing with the hectic, messy, book-smart life of Bennett Cerf is a formidable achievement. 

Dennis Drabelle G’66 L’69 was a contributing editor of The Washington Post Book World from 1984 to 2015.