Word: cerf
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...season's begun," said Kitty Carlisle. "It looks as if everyone's back from the beach." So it seemed. Many of the returned vacationers packed into TV Interviewer Barbara Walters' Manhattan apartment for her 41st birthday party. Among the celebrators: Walter Cronkite, Jacqueline Susann and Phyllis Cerf, Bennett's widow, with her steady escort, former New York Mayor Robert Wagner. Then the door opened and in walked a man who introduced himself: "I'm Martha Mitchell's husband." "Yes, how well you look," said Radio-TV Announcer Ben Grauer to former Attorney General John...
Died. Bennett Cerf, 73, book publisher (Random House), nonstop punster and professional TV gamesman; in Mount Kisco, N.Y. After graduating from Columbia in 1919, Cerf bought his way into the book trade as a vice president of Boni & Liveright; in 1925 he borrowed from a wealthy uncle on Wall Street to buy the Modern Library from that failing firm for $200,000, later used its reprint profits to form a new company that would publish books at random, hence the name Random House. Despite his latter-day public reputation as syndicated humorist and smirking jokester of TV's What...
...Jaycees, the young businessmen's organization. Ironically, the judges on the local level are usually more competent than those at Atlantic City, where the panel is stacked with national celebrities to add glamour and prestige. Not all of them have taken their jobs entirely seriously. Publisher Bennett Cerf, a judge in 1958, was overheard to inquire, "Do you think they're all certified virgins?" No such assurances are sought, although such extreme measures are taken to separate the contestants from the male sex that at times it seems as if the pageant were run by members...
...Papers. Miss Mitford reports that when she spoke to guiding faculty members about the ads, they "seemed astonished, even pained, to think people might be naive enough to take the advertising at face value." She quotes Cerf: "If anyone thinks we've got time to look at the aptitude tests that come in, they're out of their mind!" And Faith Baldwin: "Anyone with common sense would know that the 15 of us are much too busy to read the manuscripts the students send in." And Cerf again, on mail-order selling in general: "The crux...
Pained by the article, School Director John Lawrence compiled a long but quibbling list of alleged errors or omissions. Sample: the school might have had 800 salesmen at one time, but the number now is 670. Bennett Cerf ruefully confirms that he was quoted accurately: "She even reported what I asked her not to.' Adds Cerf: "I told her I was suspicious of direct mail advertising. Now I'm even more suspicious of people who go out and do hatchet jobs and get paid for it." Actually, Jessica was paid twice, once by the Atlantic and once...