"Ah! There is the archvillain." said Publisher Bennett Cerf when he encountered Author Jessica Mitford a few months ago in Manhattan. "I hope you are not going to murder us."
Cerf had ample reason for apprehension. The scourge of the profession of undertaking had recently turned her journalistic skepticism toward one of Cerf's sideline ventures. As a result, in the current issue of the Atlantic, Miss Mitford dexterously deflates the Famous Writers School, a heavily promoted mail-order concern in Westport, Conn.
The school's "guiding faculty," as its advertisements stress, includes Cerf and such other U.S. literary figures as Faith Baldwin, Bruce Catton, Clifton Fadiman, Phyllis McGinley and Max Shulman. "There is probably nothing illegal in the FWS operation," writes Miss Mitford judiciously, but she encourages would-be writers to take state-university correspondence courses for a fraction of the cost.
High-pressure advertising and sales methods, she suggests, are largely responsible for the school's current enrollment of 65,000 students, each of whom is paying $785 to $900 for a three-year course. She concludes that a dropout rate of 66% to 90% (with few refunds) is largely responsible for the school's financial success. Prospective students are wooed by ads that imply guiding faculty members will help judge aptitude tests; there are also brochures that claim "all these eminent authors in effect are looking over your shoulder as you learn." In reality, writes Miss Mitford, the guiding faculty does no teaching and does not even take a hand in recruiting the school's regular instructors.
Ham in the Papers. Miss Mitford reports that when she spoke to guiding faculty members about the ads, they "seemed astonished, even pained, to think people might be naive enough to take the advertising at face value." She quotes Cerf: "If anyone thinks we've got time to look at the aptitude tests that come in, they're out of their mind!" And Faith Baldwin: "Anyone with common sense would know that the 15 of us are much too busy to read the manuscripts the students send in." And Cerf again, on mail-order selling in general: "The crux of it is a very hard sales pitch, an appeal to the gullible." Then why does he lend his name to the school's hard-sell proposition? "Frankly, if you must know, I'm an awful ham —I love to see my name in the papers!"