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."