Publishing: A Cerfit of Riches

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"Bennett was an extraordinarily handsome young man. It was murderous. He had a Cadillac—what more did you need?—and his dark, soulful eyes were even more soulful because he couldn't see out of them. They were magnified by the glasses he'd always worn."

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 at the Round Table! I was delirious! In the middle of the lunch, I called Wall Street and told them I was never coming back!"

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!"

By 1925, Liveright, still strapped, was ready to unload his Modern Library, a shelf of 950 reprint classics whose only liability was a distinct and unpleasant odor emanating from the binding glue. Cerf rounded up Donald Klopfer, put the arm on his Wall Street uncle, and snapped up the Modern Library, smell and all, for $200,000. Within three years, Klopfer and Cerf, having retired their debts, decided to branch out by publishing a few new books at random. Thus was Random House born.

Seized at Customs. Brash, even impudent, Cerf barreled out to sign up the best authors he could find. With the Depression whittling away at Liveright, other publishers were swooping down on the agents who represented two of Liveright's most famous authors, Eugene O='Neill and Robinson Jeffers. While they haggled, Cerf piled into "a rickety plane," flew to Sea Island, Ga., and signed up O'Neill. Ah, Wilderness! soon became the first major Random House book. "And then," says Cerf brightly, "I took a train to Carmel, Calif., and signed up Jeffers." Shortly after that he went to England and called upon George Bernard Shaw, who had always refused to let his plays be included in anthologies. When Cerf cannily ob served that he was publishing O'Neill, Shaw relented, agreed to let Cerf have Saint Joan, provided that "you pay me twice as much as you pay O'Neill." Cerf gladly obliged.

In 1932, he sailed for Europe to see James Joyce, whose Ulysses had stunned the literary world with its brilliant stream-of-consciousness technique. The book was also studded with four-letter words and some swinging sex scenes, and had been barred from the U.S. After talking with Joyce, Cerf brought back a copy, which was promptly seized at customs. With Attorney Morris Ernst, Cerf took the Ulysses case to court. The now famous decision by Judge John M. Woolsey not only gave Cerf—and Joyce —an impressive victory, but it landed a staggering blow against censorship. For