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Pursuit. In 19^5^ Cerf married Actress Sylvia Sidney. The marriage lasted all of six months. "I fell hopelessly in love," he explains. "It was a short and tempestuous affair. It was very good for me—took some of the arrogance out of me." Four years later, he met Phyllis Fraser, a sometime actress and columnist. As Cerf tells it, New Yorker Magazine Editor Harold Ross "called one day and told me Ginger Rogers had brought 'her goddam kid cousin' out to his house and that I had to come out and 'take care of her goddam kid cousin.' " Cerf agreed to go—after extracting a promise of three New Yorker reviews of Random House books.
Phyllis and Bennett were married a year later in a ceremony conducted by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. They have two sons: Chris, 25, who is now an editor at Random House, and Jonathan, 19, a junior at Harvard, who has recently begun making rock 'n' roll records with a couple of friends. Phyllis once wrote a magazine article called Living with Bennett Cerf Is No Joke, and occasionally she declares Laugh Day: no matter what Bennett does or says, she and the boys break into hysterical laughter. It is their way of wreaking revenge for having had to play captive audience to his puns.
But the Cerfs enjoy their tireless pursuit of the full life. The chase begins either at their 42-acre country home in Mt. Kisco (near New York City) or their East 62nd Street Manhattan town house, from which Cerf often strolls to his office. Says his wife, an editor in the children's department at Random House: "Walking with Bennett is like walking with a dog. Only with him it's stopping at bookstores instead of fire hydrants." After business hours, the Cerfs usually give a dinner party or go out to one. "It is Bennett's theory," Phyllis once said, "that if you are going to have two people for dinner you might as well have 40."
On a recent Sunday evening, after drinks at home with Mia and Frank
Sinatra and House Guest Claudette Colbert, Bennett left for What's My Line?, later met the Sinatras, the Salvador Dalis and the Adolph Greens at the St. Regis Hotel. Next night, he took Colbert to a Broadway opening (Phyllis was out of town lecturing to educators in Florida), then dropped in at the "21" Club for an after-theater drink and a little hobnobbing with Barry Goldwater, who is preparing a volume of photographs for Random House, and Gina Lollobrigida, who had appeared on What's My Line?
On the following day he was lecturing (fee: $1,500) in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., before the Metropolitan Dinner Club. "I'm not going to be very serious tonight about world affairs," he began.
"I don't know any more about Viet Nam than President Johnson does." The next 70 minutes were sprinkled with plugs for Random House authors and Random House books.
Book Factories. The industry that Cerf represents, for all its lingering, old-fashioned ways, is in the early stages of a thoroughgoing transformation. More and more publishers are combining with electronics companies to find new ways to keep up with the information explosion and