Unknown to most people alive today, Bennett Cerf was at one point one of the most famous people in America. Cerf, who co-founded the publishing firm Random House, was a columnist, best-selling author, and regular participant on CBS's What's My Line? He was also, despite his WASPy name, a Jew.
Many of the major publishing houses were founded by Jews. Besides Random House, there were also Simon & Schuster, Knopf, and Viking, among others. Cerf named his company Random House in part to avoid a Jewish-sounding name but also because he planned to publish Modern Library classics and other books "at random."
Cerf was born on the Upper East Side in 1898. After attending Columbia, he co-founded his company in 1927. Although the "at random" books were initially intended to be secondary to the Modern Library classics, they quickly became the focus of the firm. Americans had an increasing appetite for cultural betterment, and Cerf had a good sense of what they wanted to read next. Over the course of his 40-plus years in the business, he published many notable American authors, including William Faulkner, Frank O'Hara, Sinclair Lewis, Gertrude Stein, Truman Capote, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, James Michener, and Theodor Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss.
Cerf was also a master of publicity. He was heavily involved in the campaigns behind the books he published, and he advanced his own celebrity as he worked. He wrote multiple columns, on publishing and on humor, and released more than two dozen humor books of his own, beginning with 1944's Try and Stop Me. The fact that he stole jokes caused some grumbling but didn't diminish his mystique.
Cerf's fame went stratospheric when he started appearing on television. He was best known for his appearances on the game show What's My Line? Cerf himself was often interviewed on TV and was always good for an erudite quote or a humorous anecdote.
Cerf relished his TV fame. In one amusing story, he was dining at the home of the Connecticut writer Eleanor Clark, wife of Robert Penn Warren. Cerf asked Clark, who disdained television, if he could watch his appearance on What's My Line. Clark considered Cerf's willingness to absent himself from a dinner party, as well as his interest in watching himself on TV, "disgusting." Regardless, she told Cerf of a nearby home that had a television. Cerf set out in the snow, found the house, and knocked on the door. A woman answered and exclaimed, "It's Bennett Cerf! I'm watching you!" She of course invited him in—and called a bunch of her friends to join—and they all had a great time watching Bennett Cerf on TV with Bennett Cerf there with them.
All of this and far more is chronicled in Gayle Feldman's Nothing Random, her 1,000-page biography of Cerf, more than two decades in the making. Feldman, a writer for Publishers Weekly, delves deeply into Cerf, his education, business, family life, and his endless list of famous friends, from Cardinal Spellman to Frank Sinatra.
The most interesting aspects of the book involve Cerf's intermittent brilliance as an editor and acquirer. He challenged Geisel to use fewer and fewer words, leading to the triumph of Green Eggs and Ham, which uses only 50. He promised Ayn Rand that he would let her publish her books without being censored by the liberal staff at Random House, a promise he ultimately could not keep when she sought to write a book in 1963 accusing John F. Kennedy of being a fascist.
In the late 1960s, Cerf acquired and initially championed longtime COMMENTARY editor Norman Podhoretz's first autobiography, Making It, after Farrar, Straus and Giroux dropped it. The book was controversial because Podhoretz revealed "the dirty little secret" of relentless ambition among his fellow writers. According to Feldman, though, "Bennett read the manuscript and didn't think in theoretical or political terms. What he saw was a fascinating tale, uncommonly candid and well told, with sales potential." Random House gave Podhoretz $25,000 for the book. Bad reviews and a nasty anti-Podhoretz campaign dampened sales, but Cerf's instincts were correct: Making It is now recognized as a classic.
While Cerf was an influential character and perhaps more responsible than anyone for the rise of the modern publishing house, he has a more complicated legacy than one would think. In 2001, Joseph Epstein wrote in these pages about how the publishing industry changed forever in October 1959, when Cerf and Donald Klopfer took Random House public. The move was a financial success. The stock went from 11¼ to 45, making Cerf even richer than he already was. But the move also opened the publishing industry to the acquisition craze, in which ever larger corporations purchased publishing houses, reducing their independence and increasing their focus on the bottom line. As Epstein wrote, "These corporations believed that the publishing firms would help them flourish in the imminent 'knowledge explosion' that would see more and more school children requiring more and more books." Unfortunately, Epstein concludes, "the great knowledge explosion proved a dud."
Nothing Random has a lot of excellent information about its fascinating subject. Unfortunately, it is simply too long at 1,000 pages—considering that Andrew Roberts used a similar length to cover the far more consequential Churchill and Napoleon. It is bedeviled by oversharing on matters only tangentially related to its subject. Yes, Cerf published Eugene O'Neill—but it's not clear why a biography of Cerf needs to share Cerf's reaction to the sad story of O'Neill's rejection of his daughter Oona over her marriage to a much older Charlie Chaplin.
Feldman notes that she and her editors—at Random House, of course—cut the manuscript by 500 pages. The great irony is that this biography of one of the best known of all American editors could have benefitted from Bennett Cerf himself trimming it down.