As co-founder of Random House, Bennett Cerf published works by many of the biggest names in 20th-century fiction and nonfiction. But he was more than just a shrewd and immensely successful businessman. He was also part Gatsby, part glad-handing salesman and part starstruck fanboy of figures as different — and similarly self-centered — as Gertrude Stein, Ayn Rand, Truman Capote and Frank Sinatra.
Consequently, “Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built” isn’t just a biography. In its pages, Gayle Feldman depicts a lost world, at times a lost paradise, when New York, Hollywood and the literary life were at their most glamorous and privileged. It’s quite a story, and because of the book’s length, reading it will see you through the rest of January and possibly the entire winter.
In his lifetime, Cerf grew famous both as a jovial panelist on the popular game show “What’s My Line?” — underwritten by Stopette, an underarm deodorant — and as the author of more than a dozen collections of jokes, anecdotes and riddles. Older readers will recall his syndicated humor column, “Try and Stop Me,” which ran in many newspapers. His smiling face also appeared in magazines throughout the 1960s in a group photograph promoting the Famous Writers School, a mail-order writing program later eviscerated by Jessica Mitford. (Cerf privately mocked those who paid for its expensive three-year course, but he cynically kept pocketing his yearly honorarium of what today would be roughly $100,000.)
Toward the end of his life, the versatile Cerf — believing that growth was essential — acquired rival publishing house Knopf. A few years later, he arranged for Random House to become a subsidiary of the RCA Corporation, then an electronics and communications leviathan. This move, Cerf soon recognized, was a mistake: Random House had lost its soul. As he was once heard murmuring to himself, “This is the only goddamn company to go from the major leagues to the bush leagues overnight, on purpose.” By the time Cerf died at 73 in 1971, New York publishing was increasingly overseen by dour number-crunchers from international corporations focused on profit margins and the bottom line. One might as well have been working for an insurance company.
It certainly wasn’t that way when young Cerf entered the business. In the first 50 pages of her book, Feldman — a longtime staff writer at Publishers Weekly — carries the reader back to the experience of the New York Jewish community in the early 20th century. Cerf, born in Harlem in 1898, was the only child of Gustave Cerf, a lithographer, and Fredericka Wise Cerf, whose father was a wealthy wholesale tobacco distributor. When publisher Horace Liveright offered the young Columbia graduate a job at Boni & Liveright in 1923, Cerf was able to invest the 2026 equivalent of half a million dollars so he could start as a vice president of the company. Two years later, the debt-ridden, alcoholic Liveright sold his firm’s crown jewel, the Modern Library, to Cerf and his lifelong friend and business partner Donald Klopfer for $200,000 (roughly $3.7 million today). The pair soon expanded and repackaged that popular line of classic reprints, using it as the financial springboard for what ultimately led to the creation of Random House.
During the 1920s and ’30s, Cerf began to appear in gossip columns, squiring beautiful women around New York, frequenting fashionable restaurants such as Sardi’s and 21, and carousing at nightclubs into the wee hours. He even married — and divorced six months later — the popular movie actress Sylvia Sidney. Not surprisingly, “the playboy publisher” generally got to his office in the late morning, did deals over drinks and three-hour lunches, and regularly took long vacations in Europe, California or the Caribbean, ostensibly arranging book contracts when not sunning himself on warm beaches.
In short, fun — ideally in the company of the famous, rich and powerful — was the engine that powered Cerf’s personal life. Still, he also recognized that schmoozing with celebrities would help promote Random House publications. He became, in effect, a supersalesman for its books and writers. The more intellectual Klopfer oversaw day-to-day production, while the revered editor Saxe Commins — a nephew of socialist Emma Goldman — came to be the literary heart of the company.
Being a self-described “ham” who couldn’t help regaling any captive audience with his wisecracks and puns, Cerf was often perceived as lacking intellectual substance, an impression later reinforced by his weekly appearances on “What’s My Line?” and his never-ending stream of joke books. Many writers — including Nathanael West, W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Paul Bowles, Nancy Mitford and Norman Mailer — regarded him as silly and second rate. It would be more accurate to say he was simply an ambitious businessman who also wanted to be a star in his own right. As Feldman writes in relating Cerf’s pride in being close to J. Edgar Hoover, “Underneath the liberal politics and extrovert’s bravado lurked the gee-whiz admiration for anybody talented or important.”
“Nothing Random” devotes many chapters to Cerf’s interactions with some of the era’s best-known writers and thinkers. For instance, he and Klopfer recognized that a carefully orchestrated — and ultimately successful — campaign to lift the ban on James Joyce’s then-controversial “Ulysses” would raise the literary status of its American publisher and make Random House a lot of money. Again and again, Cerf egregiously flattered and babied the firm’s big-name authors, including the troubled playwright Eugene O’Neill, the insecure John O’Hara (whose bestsellers “Butterfield 8” and “From the Terrace” brought in millions), the youthful Capote (who referred to him as “Big Daddy”) and even the formidable Stein.
While Klopfer judged Ayn Rand “wacky as a fruitcake,” Cerf, unable to resist the writer’s intellectual charisma and steely personality, found himself enjoying her company. Even if he regarded Rand’s philosophy as “abhorrent,” he published “Atlas Shrugged,” and it proved a steady cash cow for years. Meanwhile William Faulkner, usually falling-down drunk when visiting New York, grew so reliant on his editor, Commins, that the novelist appointed him his literary executor. (Commins is even thought to have drafted much of Faulkner’s famous Nobel Prize speech.)
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