Word: cerfs
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...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...
Birth of a House. Liveright, who had a penchant for backing Broadway flops, needed cash, so he sold Cerf a vice-presidency for $25,000. "My first job," remembers Cerf, still awestruck, "was to take Theodore Dreiser to a ball game. Theodore Dreiser! Those were the '20s! Things were popping, and publishing was popping too! Oh God, it was a glamorous place...