Word: cerfs
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...Cerf was a supreme gossip, and he had the gossip's alert eye for tattletale details. D.H. Lawrence's wife Frieda was a sloppy housekeeper, he noted, and years later he remembered a dirty milk bottle lying on its side in the middle of the Lawrence parlor. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas were so grubbily dumpy that, on a visit they paid to Random House, an elevator boy automatically deposited them on a floor below, thinking they were going to an employment agency for domestic servants...
...Neill kept a player piano, which he had found in a whorehouse, covered with pictures of naked women, and when he could sneak away from his bossy wife Carlotta, he would go down to the basement, drop nickels into the slot and listen to ragtime. Once when Cerf was visiting, the ailing playwright crooked his finger and beckoned him downstairs, like a mischievous little boy. In the middle of a tune, Carlotta came down. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself," she screamed, "bringing Bennett down here! You're in pain, remember...
Other publishers were afraid to take a chance with James Joyce's Ulysses, which had been banned from the U.S. for obscenity. Cerf thought he had found a way to end this embargo, however, and went off to Paris to try to sign up Joyce. For once he had no need for cajolery. Joyce was so eager to sell his masterpiece in the U.S. that, in his haste to make the appointment, he was run over by a taxicab. When Cerf met him, he was "sitting with a bandage around his head, a patch over...
After the bandages were removed, Joyce turned out to be yet another genius with a domineering wife, and Nora objected when he tried to entertain Cerf with his Irish ballads. "A great fight started when Joyce went over to the piano," Cerf recounts. "There was a long bench in front of it, and Nora grabbed one end and Joyce the other-both pulling in opposite directions. Suddenly she deliberately let go, and Joyce went staggering back and landed on his behind. Nora said, 'Maybe this will teach you a lesson, you drunken ...' " As she saw Cerf...
...egos of writers, Cerf discovered, were as big as his own. George Bernard Shaw refused to let him put St. Joan into an anthology until he was promised a fee twice as large as O'Neill's-whatever that was. "Isn't that pretty babyish?" Cerf shot back. "All right, it's babyish," Shaw agreed, not at all put out by his effrontery. "Do you want it or don't you? Twice as much." Cerf paid...