Word: cerf
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Most of Cerf's puns and gags are better than bathroom humor-but not much. He tells about the fellow named Kissinger who had his name changed so many times that soon all his friends were asking "I wonder who's Kissinger now?" And about the piano tuner named Oppernockety, who never returns to fix a bad job because Oppernockety only tunes once. Or the Indian chief who was delighted to learn that his two youngsters had been invited to join the yacht club; the chief had always wanted to see his red sons in the sail...
...Some of Cerfs competitors readily suggest that he is a creature of his own publicity, a quipster who has parlayed his way into the publishing pantheon through the good offices of television and Joe Miller's joke book. "Bennett," says one fellow publisher, "is not an intellectual. He's not a literary man. He's an entrepreneur, an impresario." But that is only the surface of Cerf. Explains Epstein: "Bennett runs Random House as a conservative branch of show business. The company is vulgar to a degree. But what makes the difference with Bennett is how important...
...Delirious!" Cerf started out in an era when big publishers were still considered cultural rather than corporate figures. He was born in Manhattan, the only child of well-off Jewish parents whose ancestors came from France. His father, Gustave, was a successful lithographer who designed ketchup-bottle labels and cigarette cartons, and his mother had a comfortable income from her family's wholesale tobacco business. Neither of these pursuits entranced young Bennett at all. Nor did a literary career. By the time he graduated from Columbia in 1919 with a B.A. degree in journalism and a Phi Beta Kappa...
...Cerf endured that job for three years, while all around him New York was bursting with bright, talented people; his friends and former classmates were men such as Composers Howard Dietz, Oscar Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers. The theater and Tin Pan Alley were his passions. Says Donald Klopfer, 64, Cerfs Columbia classmate and now vice chairman of the Random House board of directors...
...Cerf was itching to get out of Wall Street, and at length, in 1923, he found the door. Another classmate, Richard L. Simon, had been working for the distinguished publishing firm of Boni & Liveright, and now he was planning to start his own house with Max Schuster. When Cerf showed interest in replacing him, Simon arranged for Cerf to meet Horace Liveright for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel, Scotch-and-watering place for the famous authors and wits of the day. "There," he says, "were Robert Sherwood, George S. Kaufman, Marc Connelly, Dorothy Parker-all of them! Sitting...