Word: cerfs
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...There is the archvillain." said Publisher Bennett Cerf when he encountered Author Jessica Mitford a few months ago in Manhattan. "I hope you are not going to murder...
...Cerf had ample reason for apprehension. The scourge of the profession of undertaking had recently turned her journalistic skepticism toward one of Cerf's sideline ventures. As a result, in the current issue of the Atlantic, Miss Mitford dexterously deflates the Famous Writers School, a heavily promoted mail-order concern in Westport, Conn...
...school's "guiding faculty," as its advertisements stress, includes Cerf and such other U.S. literary figures as Faith Baldwin, Bruce Catton, Clifton Fadiman, Phyllis McGinley and Max Shulman. "There is probably nothing illegal in the FWS operation," writes Miss Mitford judiciously, but she encourages would-be writers to take state-university correspondence courses for a fraction of the cost...
...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...