More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About Bennett Cerf

The name of publisher Bennett Cerf is largely forgotten in 21st century pop culture, but this baby boomer has never quite forgotten him. He was, most importantly, the co-founder and public face of Random House, probably the biggest publisher in the country for much of the last half of the 20th century (rivaled only by Simon & Schuster). It still survives as part of Penguin Random House. He also wrote some best sellers of his own, mostly collections of jokes and humorous anecdotes. But he found pop culture fame as a panelist on the TV quiz show What's My Line for over fifteen years. By way of this show, Cerf was a visitor in our house when I was growing up every Sunday night in the sixties. Several years ago, my husband and I watched literally every episode that still exists (over 700) when the Game Show Network broadcast them, and most are still available on YouTube. Later, I worked in retail bookselling and became familiar with much of the publishing history of Random House and the houses that merged with it, like Knopf and Pantheon, and its imprints such as Modern Library and Beginner Books (publisher of Dr. Suess),

When I read that a new biography of Cerf was coming out, I knew I was the perfect audience member for the book, but first I went to my basement and dug out a copy of At Random, Cerf's own quasi-memoir, which I had been carting around for years. The book, published in 1977, several years after his death, is made up mostly of passages from an oral history he contributed to. You do get a fairly strong sense of his public persona (gregarious, smart, happy, but also quick to anger) as he recaps his career highlights and drops lots of names: Eugene O'Neill, Ayn Rand, William Faulkner, Truman Capote, James Michener. It's a fun read, but this was not the book he would have written if he hadn't died so suddenly in 1971 at the age of 73.

There has been little written about Cerf since he died with the exception of a few magazine articles and some mentions in books about American publishing. As soon as my copy of the book arrived (published by Random House—and sadly, with a spine that started deteriorating the moment I opened the book), I jumped right in. This book is welcome for the Cerf fan, but it has lots of problems. First, it's trying (as the author Gayle Feldman admits in an afterword) to be several things: the editor who signed the book up in 2002—who has since passed away—thought of it as a celebration of Random House; Feldman was thinking of it primarily as a biography; it also winds up being a pop culture history of the American book business. All of those are admirable goals, but at over 1000 pages (800 pages of text and 200 pages of footnotes and an admirably complete index), it's just way too much to plow through. I don't have much of a head for business so I skimmed most of the sections on mergers and such, but even just focusing on Cerf's life, there is so much minutiae here that I grew bored. It feels like we hear about every single business lunch he had, every party he and his wife threw, every celebrity he interacted with. Feldman did a huge amount of impressive research, but it seems like she couldn't decide what to leave in or take out, so having twenty years so put it together, she left it all in. (Not quite true, however, as she says she cut some 500 pages from her original manuscript!!)

I don't want to sound too negative. I did make it to the end and I loved learning a lot about Cerf and Random House. In addition to the authors I mentioned above, all of whom had substantial contact with Cerf, we hear stories about friends like Arlene Francis, Moss Hart and Frank Sinatra; fellow publishers Alfred Knopf and Richard Simon; his gay uncle who served as a mentor to him in his youth; and Toni Morrison who started work as an editor at Random House under Cerf. But it's overwhelming. Feldman is fairly good at keeping things in chronological order, though there were times, especially in the last half, when I had to skip back 10 or 20 pages to find out what year we were in. Much of the first half amplifies anecdotes from At Random, which was welcome, but there is a lot of repetition of the theme of Cerf not being taken seriously by history. This was partly because the books he actually wrote were joke and humor books, and partly due to his need to be a celebrity (largely fed by What's My Line) being considered by some to be inappropriate for his lofty position. I had not realized how instrumental Cerf was in clearing the way for James Joyce's Ulysses, once banned for being obscene, to be published in the United States. The historical information here about American publishing is quite interesting. His life sounds like a merry-go-round that it might have been fun to hitch a ride on for a time. Ultimately, I would recommend this—if you want to know more about Bennett Cerf than Wikipedia will tell you, this is really the only place to go—but not for a casual reader who doesn't already have some background in the history of the publishing business. Below is a picture of the 2 books side by side: 1000 pages versus 300 pages. Cerf's memoir is still available from Amazon.

A McCartney Festival, Part 3

After my recent binges on books about Paul McCartney, an Amazon algorithm brought to my attention a new documentary about McCartney called Man on the Run. Interestingly for me, it covers much of the same period that the McCartney Legacy books did, from the Beatles breakup to the formation of Wings to the release of Band on the Run in 1973. Though this doc is "authorized," with McCartney, listed as an executive producer, providing some narration, it largely views those years in the same way the the Legacy books do: McCartney, wounded, unhappy and depressed, stumbles around trying to kickstart a solo career, and has ups and downs along the way to what is certainly his post-Beatles masterpiece, Band on the Run. Both projects wind up viewing Wings as a vanity project that was doomed to failure because McCartney was too controlling to allow any real freedom for his bandmates (in reality, sidemen). 

Of course, failure here may seem an odd term to use. Over ten years, Paul and various iterations of Wings produced eight albums, all of which went gold and most of which hit number 1 on the Billboard album chart, spinning off some twenty singles, most of which hit the top 40, twelve winding up in the top 10. Within four years of the Beatles breakup, all four of them would have top 10 singles and albums as solo artists, and from our vantage point today, it could seem like their successes were destined to happen. But if it hadn't been for the help of his wife Linda, Paul might have sunken into a much longer period of depression and drunkenness, though it seems doubtful that he would have given up music altogether. His first solo album was a somewhat ragged do-it-yourself project that someone in the documentary says makes Paul the grandfather of the lo-fi pop genre. The second album, Ram, was billed as by Paul and Linda and it's definitely a step up, with the glorious "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" sounding like a really good Beatles outtake. The first Wings album, Low Life, was a critical disappointment with no hit singles. Due to the critical drubbing it took, I didn't buy it back then and to this day have never heard it in its entirety. Luckily, the album Red Rose Speedway (credited to Paul McCartney and Wings) and the single "My Love" were commercial hits, even if the critics still weren't really warming to Paul's solo music. Band on the Run would change everything.

This film features lots of previously unseen photos and videos with background narration mostly from present-day interviews (we don't see faces but the voices are identified), and we hear from some of the Wings guys who are allowed to be mildly critical of Paul—they are more critical in the interviews collected in the Legacy books. What we don't get is much about the songs and albums themselves, which are covered in detail in the Legacy books and McCartney's 2-volume Lyrics book. One of my bugaboos about current day docs is that most do not use a single narrator who leads us along and ties things up (Paul comes close to providing this). I'm glad that Ken Burns still uses this style—see his latest series on the American Revolution. Doc makers may think that this lack of a godlike narrator gives their work a more authentic feel, but it also allows for the omission of anything that the interviewed people don't bring up. Still, I recommend this to McCartney and Beatles fans; viewers not already steeped in Beatles knowledge might find this rough going at times. I think I'm ready to bid farewell to Paul as an object of study for a while. I could see myself reading a third volume in the Legacy series, but frankly after the mid-80s, I lost interest in his music, even as I kept up on his output and his interviews. Seeing him sing "Hey Jude" at the 2012 London Olympics made me quite teary, and I can't promise that I wouldn't read more biographical material someday. After all, I'm still on the watch for new Beatles books (and, I'll admit, more unnecessary remasters and repackagings).

A McCartney Festival, Part 2

As I was returning the 2-volume Paul McCartney Lyrics books (Dewey Decimal number 782.42 for 'songs') to the library, I happened to stroll past the biography shelf and two more volumes stood out to me: The McCartney Legacy, Volume 1 covering 1969-1973 and Volume 2 covering 1974-1980. Beatles scholar Allan Koznin was the motivating force behind these two books which began, I assume, as an attempt to do for McCartney what Mark Lewisohn did for the Beatles: to provide a day-by-day account of Paul and associates in the recording studio, beginning with his first solo sessions occasioned by the imminent splintering of the Beatles. But the project grew from just a record of the recordings to a record of McCartney's daily life during these years, hence its placement in the biography (though as a former library cataloger, I might have been inclined to put it in a popular music number (781.66 for 'rock music'). 

These two books are absolutely stuffed with interesting tidbits about McCartney, his music, his sidemen, his social engagements, his drug use, his run-ins (friendly and not-so-friendly) with journalists and with ex-Beatles, and his family life. I have always maintained that, when McCartney insisted that Wings was a real group and not just a shifting band of sidemen, he was lying, to the public and maybe to himself, and these books prove that. The testimony of the various members of Wings tells us that, despite telling the guys that they were in this whole hog, Paul rarely let any of them write material or even make suggestions about songs or performance style, except for Denny Laine, formerly of the Moody Blues, the only person besides Linda McCartney who stuck with Wings for the whole decade. They also weren't paid quite as well as you might have expected.

During the 70s, McCartney released his two best albums, Band on the Run and Venus and Mars, and the stories of those recording sessions are highlights of the books.  Wings Mark I broke up just before Paul and Linda and Denny went to Lagos, Nigeria to work on Band on the Run. Paul always put a good face on that experience but it was a wild and wooly ride, with Paul and Linda becoming the victims of a roadside mugging during which some demo tapes were stolen. They also spent much of the summer of 1974 rehearsing and recording in Nashville with Wings Mark II and met, among others, Dolly Parton, Chet Atkins, Vassar Clements, and Roy Orbison. The Wings fellas also did quite a bit of drinking and getting in trouble. The stories of Wings' initial informal concert trek in England also make good reading. The Wings Over America tour is dealt with, as is the rough handling of Linda in the press and by most of the Wings guys (deserved to some degree, but I always felt sorry for what she went through). The two books were exhaustively researched, and it's a little exhausting reading them, but for a McCartney fan, rewarding. Though, if there is ever a Volume 3, I'm not I'll need to read that one.

A McCartney Festival, Part 1

I was 7 when I saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and I've been a fan ever since. After their breakup, I followed the careers of all four of them, but mostly Paul McCartney who certainly had the most commercial success of the four and who has maintained the respect and love of fans and critics to this day. Recently I had the occasion to consume three different McCartney artifacts. I'll start with the 2-volume hardcover set Lyrics, in which, over several hundred pages, McCartney presents the lyrics to over 150 of his songs, from the early days of the Beatles to his most recent solo albums, and writes brief commentaries about each.

Of course, he leaves out lots and lots of songs, and to my mind, he included too many from his 21st century works. But his commentaries are spotty. Some give us nice tidbits: Helen Wheels was the name of his Land Rover; Got to Get You Into My Life was about wanting to smoke dope, wanting literally to get more pot in his life; Picasso's Last Words was based on a bet with Dustin Hoffman; The Two of Us, despite seeming to be a bittersweet song about Paul and John, was actually written about Linda. But too often the commentary winds up being about a time or place or person, sometimes only tangentially related to the song under discussion. It feel like he started the project with energy and good intentions, and things eventually sort of sputtered out. Some fans have posted long lists of historical points that, based on previous evidence, he seems to get wrong. The bulk of the pages in the two large volumes are taken up with photos and drawings and handwritten lyrics. Much as I love the Beatles, and McCartney in particular, I'm glad I got this from the library and didn't spend $100.00 on it. Apparently there is now a paperback edition in one volume that costs $30.00 (pictured above), but still, though it was fun to flip through, this seems on the whole to be a non-essential work.

Statues in a Garden

I have piles and piles of books in the basement that I've kept for years that I told myself (and others) I would read in my retirement. Now that I'm retired, I've been trying to make good on that promise. I picked this slim novel up on a whim years ago at a second-hand bookstore in East Lansing and as I was about to pitch it in a mini-frenzy of weeding the other day, I decided to give it a go. It's one of the best novels I've read in years. 

I read Colegate's The Shooting Party way back in the 1980s and saw the movie, and liked both. This one, written earlier, shares some of the atmosphere of that book. It's set in England during the summer of 1914, leading you to believe that WWI will play a part, but it doesn't really, except for a handful of contact points. It's been described as being about scandal overtaking a high class family, but really, it's about what happens before the scandal. The aftermath, though important and devastating, is dealt with mostly in brief in the final pages.  The story concerns the aristocratic Weston family: Aylmer Weston, a cabinet member who is used to a busy life, his wife Cynthia who is used to a life of ease, their two children and their nephew Philip whom they adopted as a child. Philip, though much loved by Cynthia, has never quite fit in. This summer, Philip starts a chain of actions that threatens to blow up their perfect sleepy summery family life. To say more would be spoiling a surprising narrative.

As interesting as the story is, I was captivated by the narrative style. One Goodreads review refers to Colegate's technique as "Virginia Woolf lite" and that's a perfect way to put it. There is a narrator of sorts, though we don't learn who it is until the end, but most of it is told third person with shifting perspectives with the first person coming up only occasionally. It's more like it's being told by a hive mind, so to speak, of all the characters. It takes a few pages to get used to this style, but it's very effective. At under 200 pages, it can be read in a couple of sittings, though I tried to stretch it out because it was so good. I will try to dig up more Colegate.

Barbra

I'm not exactly a Streisand fan, but I don't dislike her, either. I much prefer her as a singer. For my money, her best acting was in What's Up Doc in which she pulls off the feat of making the frantic screwball heroine likable—something Katherine Hepburn couldn't do in Bringing Up Baby, the model for What's Up Doc. This book took Streisand ten years to finish; at over 900 pages, it's an exhausting read, and was undoubtedly exhausting to produce. Much of it is fun to read, with some juicy tidbits about her co-workers. But for me, the biggest problem is that her overall point seems to be to rebut her reputation for being controlling, demanding, and egotistical. At this, she largely fails. Even as she insists she is not those things, many of her anecdotes show her to be exactly those things.

I will grant her this: her reputation has been made worse because she's a woman. As a director, Stanley Kubrick was certainly as demanding and controlling as Streisand, but rarely called out for being a pain in the neck like she has been. (Of course, she has not, to my mind, directed a movie as great as Dr. Strangelove or 2001 or Clockwork Orange or even his lesser films like Barry Lyndon or The Shining.) Her controlling attitude as as actor, singer and director (an attitude she has had since her first stage appearance in 1961) has hurt her reputation in ways that wouldn't have hurt a male artist. Still, she shows in this book that she is, indeed, demanding and controlling, sometimes in fairly petty ways. I'm not sure she's aware of how badly she comes off sometimes, though it is brave of her not to sugarcoat her behavior, beginning with her very first Broadway role right up to her latest concert tour. As a singer, she is spectacular. As an actor, she is fine. I can't judge her as a director, because Yentl is the only film she's directed that I've seen and I wasn't terribly impressed with that (though she did take on lots of directorial chores in A Star is Born which I liked). Still, despite wild overusage of phrases like "Point is" and "Needless to say," for a 900 page book, this is a breezy read and feels like it gives a fairly honest idea of what she is like, for better or worse.

A Queerish Earnest

We actually went out to a theater to see the National Theater Live production (recorded) of The Importance of Being Earnest. It's always fun to see filmed theater, and I wish there was more of it. The production had a campy style, which seemed appropriate for an Oscar Wilde play, and a gay subtext which seemed less necessary. It's like a queer veneer was laid over the action of the play at random, having little to do with anything that was actually going on (Algernon and Jack prancing about and bumping butts, Gwendolen and Cecily kissing on the lips). One reviewer called it "subversive-lite." I know some critics have detected a more serious gay subtext in Algernon's concept of "bunburying," making up a story or an identity in order to lead a double life. Algernon and Jack could have been presented with at least the actual possibility of a physical relationship. There seems to be no attraction between the two women, so their kiss and grabs are totally unmotivated.

But the production was colorful and well-acted by all. Lady Bracknell, the real star character of the show is often played in a campy manner (or sometimes by a man in drag). Sharon D. Clarke plays her a bit more realistically as someone who is ostentatiously used to having power over others and getting her way. Hugh Skinner (Jack/Ernest—the standing man in white in the photo above) looks and acts exactly like a young monied man of his time. Ncuti Gatwa as Algernon gives a very queer reading of the part, to the point where his sudden attraction to Cecily barely registers. But he is fun, and his character largely steals the show from Jack, who is sort of the title character (his name actually being Ernest is a plotpoint). Ronke Adekoluejo tries a bit too hard to toughen up the character of Gwendolen, and Eliza Scanlen, in mostly underplaying, is sometimes in danger of being disappearing.

I generally think that colorblind casting is a good thing. Here, Algernon, Lady Bracknell and Gwendolen are played by Black actors, which brings a Bridgerton tone to the play (realistically, there is a vanishingly small possibility that these characters would have been Black in the Victorian era). It makes mincemeat of one of the last plot revelations, but generally, the casting works. I should add that I have never been able to buy the ridiculous conceit of a woman assuming she can only be attracted to someone of a specific name (Gwendolen to Ernest). It's so stupid, it almost makes me mad—couldn't Oscar Wilde have thought of a better device? But the play has so many good laugh lines, it's hard not to just give in. (Pictured just above are Skinner and Gatwa.)