Publishing Was His Line

By Gerald Clarke

AT RANDOM by Bennett Cerf; Random House; 306 pages; $12.95

Before he came along, publishing was a gentleman's profession, and books were sold with dignity and decorum, like vintage antiques or old-master drawings. But Bennett Cerf s ego was a volume in itself, and he hawked his wares as if he were conducting the 1812 Overture--with dash, brass and lots of exploding canons. "Everyone has a streak of pure, unadulterated ham," he proclaimed. "Many won't admit it. I revel in it!"

Other publishers waited for authors. Cerf sought them out and flattered, charmed--and signed up--some of the biggest names in the literary world. Together with Partner Donald Klopfer, he turned Random House, which they founded in 1927, into a pantheon of stars: Eugene O'Neill, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, Isak Dinesen, Truman Capote, John O'Hara and W.H. Auden. Now, in this posthumous volume, Cerf tells what goes on behind the bookshelves. Using tapes of his interviews for Columbia's oral history program, along with his diaries and scrapbooks, his widow, Phyllis Cerf Wagner, and former Random House Editor Albert Erskine have compiled a breezy and vastly amusing memoir--identical, one suspects, to the one the gregarious panelist on TV's What's My Line? might have written himself.

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.

Eugene O'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 his eye, his arm in a sling and his foot all bound up and stretched out on a chair."

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 off, she added: "Some day I'm going to write a book for you, Bennett, and I'm going to call it My Twenty Years with a Genius--So-Called."

The 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 up.

One night Cerf was having dinner with Sinclair Lewis when a phone call interrupted with the news that William Faulkner had suddenly appeared in town. Cerf thought the two famous authors might Like to meet, but Lewis would have none of it. "No, Bennett. This is my night," he declared. "Haven't you been a publisher long enough to understand I don't want to share it with some other author?" For pure ego, however, no one could match Ayn Rand. When Cerf tried to persuade her to cut a 3 8-page speech from Atlas Shrugged, she simply replied, "Would you cut the Bible?" Cerf once again gave in.

Still, in nearly 50 years in publishing, Cerf never fell afoul of an author as severely as did his first boss in publishing, Horace Liveright. Just as he was about to leave for California in the '20s, Liveright persuaded Theodore Dreiser to let him try to sell An American Tragedy to the movies -- with Liveright to get the agent's commission. Dreiser, who was convinced that no one would nibble, readily agreed.

When he returned, Liveright invited Dreiser to lunch and announced his triumph -- a movie deal for the sum of $85,000. Dreiser was delighted at the unexpected windfall, but considerably less delighted when he was reminded of Liveright's commission. "Do you mean you're going to take my money?" he asked. "Just at this moment, the waiter brought the coffee in," writes Cerf, the ever faithful reporter. "Suddenly Dreiser seized his cup and threw the steaming coffee in Liveright's face. [He] got up from the table without a word and marched out of the restaurant." Liveright turned to Cerf and said, "Bennett, let this be a lesson to you. Every author is a son of a bitch."

It was a lesson the ebullient Cerf never learned -- and writers by the score knew it. They flocked and clung to him instinctively, sensing correctly that they had found in him that rare creature, a publisher who was not only sympathetic to authors but found it in his heart to like them as well.

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