Bennett Cerf | |
|---|---|
.JPG) Cerf on the set ofWhat's My Line? in 1952 | |
| Born | Benoit Cerf (1898-05-25)May 25, 1898 New York City, U.S. |
| Died | August 27, 1971(1971-08-27) (aged 73) Mount Kisco, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation |
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| Alma mater | Columbia University |
| Years active | 1925–1971 |
| Spouse | |
| Children | Jonathan Cerf,Christopher Cerf |
Bennett Alfred Cerf (bornBenoît Cerf; May 25, 1898 – August 27, 1971) was an American writer, publisher, and co-founder of the American publishing firmRandom House. Cerf was also known for his own compilations of jokes andpuns, for regular personal appearances lecturing across the United States, and for his weekly television appearances for 16 years on the panel game showWhat's My Line?[1]
Cerf was born on May 25, 1898, on 134 East80th Street[2] inManhattan, New York City, to aJewish family ofAlsatian andGerman ethnicity.[1][3][4] Cerf's father Gustave Cerf was alithographer; his mother, Frederika Wise, was heiress to a tobacco-distribution fortune. She died when Bennett was 16; shortly afterward, her brother Herbert moved into the Cerf household and became a strong literary and social influence on the teenager.[5]
Cerf graduated fromTownsend Harris Hall Prep School inHamilton Heights in 1916, the same public school as publisherRichard Simon, authorHerman Wouk, and playwrightHoward Dietz.[6] He spent his teenage years at 790 Riverside Drive, an apartment building inWashington Heights, which was home to two of his friends who became prominent as adults:Howard Dietz andHearst newspapers financial editorMerryle Rukeyser. Cerf received hisBachelor of Arts fromColumbia College ofColumbia University (1919) and his Litt.B. (1920) from itsSchool of Journalism.
After graduating fromColumbia University, Cerf worked briefly as a reporter for theNew York Herald Tribune and for some time in aWall Streetbrokerage. He then was named a vice president atBoni & Liveright, a publishing company.
In 1925, Cerf andDonald S. Klopfer formed a partnership to purchase the rights to theModern Library from Boni & Liveright, and they went into business for themselves. The two increased the popularity of the series, and in 1927 they began publishing general trade books that they had selected at random.
Cerf and Klopfer's acquisition ofModern Library was the beginning of their publishing business, which they later namedRandom House. The publishing company used as its logo a little house drawn by Cerf's friend and fellow Columbia alumnusRockwell Kent.[7]
Cerf's talent in building and maintaining relationships brought contracts with such writers asWilliam Faulkner,John O'Hara,Eugene O'Neill,James Michener,Truman Capote,Theodor Seuss Geisel, and others. He publishedAtlas Shrugged, written byAyn Rand, though he vehemently disagreed with her philosophy ofObjectivism. He admired her "sincerity" and "brillian[ce]", and the two became lifelong friends.[8]
In 1933, Cerf wonUnited States v. One Book Called Ulysses, a landmark court case against governmentcensorship, and thereafter he was the first in the United States to publishJames Joyce's unabridgedUlysses. (Originally published in Paris bySylvia Beach in 1922. One chapter from its previous serialization in Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap's Chicago-based literary magazine,The Little Review,had led to its being found "a work of obscenity".)
Random House had the rights to publish the book in the United States in 1932, and they arranged for a test case to challenge the implicit ban so as to publish the work without fear of prosecution. The publisher, therefore, made an arrangement to import the book and to have a copy seized by theUnited States Customs Service when it arrived. After seizure, the United States attorney took seven months before deciding whether to proceed further; although the assistant U.S. attorney assigned to assess the work's obscenity considered it a "literary masterpiece", he also felt it was obscene within the meaning of the law. The office then sued under the Tariff Act of 1930, which allowed a district attorney to bring an action against obscene literature. Cerf later presented the book in question toColumbia University.[9]
In 1944, Cerf published the first of his books of jokes and anecdotes,Try and Stop Me, with illustrations drawn byCarl Rose. A second book,Shake Well Before Using, was published in 1949. Then, he became a member of thePeabody Awards board of jurors, where he served from 1946 to 1967 and 1970–1971. He was chair juror of the Peabody Jurors Board from 1954 to the end of his first term in 1967, and published a weekly column, "The Cerf Board", in the Sunday supplement magazineThis Week.[10] Cerf was also inducted intoOmicron Delta Kappa in 1967 atFlorida Southern College.
In 1959, Maco Magazine Corporation published what became known as "The Cream of the Master's Crop", a compilation of Cerf's jokes, gags, stories, puns, and wit.
Before 1951, Cerf was an occasional panelist on theNBC game showWho Said That?, on which celebrities tried to identify the speakers of quotations taken from recent news reports.[11] In 1951, he began appearing weekly onWhat's My Line?, where he stayed for 16 years, until the show ended its run on CBS in 1967. Until his death, Cerf continued to appear regularly on the CBS Films (nowViacom) syndicated version ofWhat's My Line?, along with Arlene Francis.
Cerf was known as "Bennett Snerf" in aSesame Street puppet parody ofWhat's My Line?
During Cerf's time on the CBS version ofWhat's My Line?, he received anhonorary degree from theUniversity of Puget Sound, and an honorary doctorate of letters in November 1965 from William Jewell College, in Liberty, Missouri. For the latter, he was present on the William Jewell campus while his television colleague Dorothy Kilgallen's funeral was taking place in New York. His second wifePhyllis Fraser was among numerous attendees at the funeral who were mentioned in a November 11, 1965 article in theNew York Journal-American,[12] for which Bennett regularly wrote a humorous column. It had published Kilgallen's newspaper work before it was reprinted outside New York. Cerf's column with jokes and riddles expired five months after Kilgallen's funeral as a result of theJournal-American shutting down.[13]
Cerf twice was a juror at theMiss America pageant.[14]
Cerf was interviewed in 1967 and 1968 by Robin Hawkins, a freelancer working for the Oral History Research Office atColumbia University. Cerf said that he was "genuinely proud of" the awards that had been bestowed on him byThe Yale Record andThe Harvard Lampoon.[15]
In July 1970, Cerf was the subject of an exposé byJessica Mitford, published inAtlantic Monthly, which denounced the business practices of theFamous Writers School, which Cerf founded.[16]
S. J. Perelman's 1945feuilleton "No Dearth of Mirth, Fill Out the Coupon", describes Perelman's fictionalized encounter with a jokebook publisher named Barnaby Chirp. Perelman's 1962 playThe Beauty Part features the caricature Emmett Stagg of the book-publishing empire Charnel House, who was based on Cerf and played on Broadway by William LeMessena. He was similarly portrayed as publisher Bennett Blake onThe Patty Duke Show in the 1964 episode "Auld Lang Syne". In 2006,Peter Bogdanovich portrayed Cerf in the filmInfamous.
Cerf married actressSylvia Sidney on October 1, 1935; they divorced six months later, on April 9, 1936.
On September 17, 1940, he married actressPhyllis Fraser, a cousin ofGinger Rogers, with whom he had two sons,Christopher and Jonathan.
In the early 1950s, while maintaining a Manhattan residence, Bennett and Phyllis Cerf bought an estate atMount Kisco, New York, which became his country home for the rest of his life. A Mount Kisco street named Cerf Lane, named after him, runs from Croton Avenue in Mount Kisco.
Cerf died of natural causes in Mount Kisco, on August 27, 1971, aged 73. He had undergone surgery shortly before his death. He was survived by his wife and sons.[1]
Random House published his posthumous autobiography,At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf, in 1977, which Phyllis Cerf and a former Random House Editor Albert Erskine put together from his interviews for Columbia's oral history program along with his diaries and scrapbooks.[17]
The biographyNothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built by Gayle Feldman (ISBN 9780593978375) was published in 2026.
Bennett Cerf Drive, just outside theCity of Westminster inCarroll County,Maryland, is named after him. This is the location of the Random House Westminster Distribution Center and Offices, one of two Random House distribution facilities in the U.S., as well as the location of Bennett Cerf Park.
The band Shadowy Men On A Shadowy Planet have a song called "Bennett Cerf" on their 1988 album "Savvy Show Stoppers".
Bennett Cerf, one of the country's foremost book publishers, died late Friday night at his estate in Mount Kisco, N.Y. He was 73 years old.
One thing that has changed is personal - there isn't anti-Semitism in the profession, Mr. Klopfer said.In the '20s and '30s, Bennett and I and other Jewish publishers were looked down upon.
