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After the bandages were removed, Joyce turned out to be yet another genius with a domineering wife, and Nora objected when he tried to entertain Cerf with his Irish ballads. "A great fight started when Joyce went over to the piano," Cerf recounts. "There was a long bench in front of it, and Nora grabbed one end and Joyce the other—both pulling in opposite directions. Suddenly she deliberately let go, and Joyce went staggering back and landed on his behind. Nora said, 'Maybe this will teach you a lesson, you drunken ...' " As she saw Cerf off, she added: "Some day I'm going to write a book for you, Bennett, and I'm going to call it My Twenty Years with a Genius—So-Called."
The egos of writers, Cerf discovered, were as big as his own. George Bernard Shaw refused to let him put St. Joan into an anthology until he was promised a fee twice as large as O'Neill's—whatever that was. "Isn't that pretty babyish?" Cerf shot back. "All right, it's babyish," Shaw agreed, not at all put out by his effrontery. "Do you want it or don't you? Twice as much." Cerf paid up.
One night Cerf was having dinner with Sinclair Lewis when a phone call interrupted with the news that William Faulkner had suddenly appeared in town. Cerf thought the two famous authors might Like to meet, but Lewis would have none of it. "No, Bennett. This is my night," he declared. "Haven't you been a publisher long enough to understand I don't want to share it with some other author?" For pure ego, however, no one could match Ayn Rand. When Cerf tried to persuade her to cut a 3 8-page speech from Atlas Shrugged, she simply replied, "Would you cut the Bible?" Cerf once again gave in.
Still, in nearly 50 years in publishing, Cerf never fell afoul of an author as severely as did his first boss in publishing, Horace Liveright. Just as he was about to leave for California in the '20s, Liveright persuaded Theodore Dreiser to let him try to sell An American Tragedy to the movies — with Liveright to get the agent's commission. Dreiser, who was convinced that no one would nibble, readily agreed.
When he returned, Liveright invited Dreiser to lunch and announced his triumph — a movie deal for the sum of $85,000. Dreiser was delighted at the unexpected windfall, but considerably less delighted when he was reminded of Liveright's commission. "Do you mean you're going to take my money?" he asked. "Just at this moment, the waiter brought the coffee in," writes Cerf, the ever faithful reporter. "Suddenly Dreiser seized his cup and threw the steaming coffee in Liveright's face. [He] got up from the table without a word and marched out of the restaurant." Liveright turned to Cerf and said, "Bennett, let this be a lesson to you. Every author is a son of a bitch."
It was a lesson the ebullient Cerf never learned — and writers by the score knew it. They flocked and clung to him instinctively, sensing correctly that they had found in him that rare creature, a publisher who was not only sympathetic to authors but found it in his heart to like them as well.