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.