Bennett Alfred Cerf (
May 25,
1898 –
August 27,
1971) was a publisher and co-founder of
Random House, also known for his own compilations of jokes and
puns, for regular personal appearances lecturing across the
United States, and for his television appearances in the panel game show
What's My Line?.
Biography
Bennett Cerf was born and brought up in
New York City in a
Jewish family of
Alsatian and
German descent. His father, Gustave Cerf, was a
lithographer; his mother, Frederika Wise, was an heiress to a tobacco-distribution fortune.
Cerf attended the same public school as composer
Richard Rodgers, the publisher
Richard Simon, and the playwright
Howard Dietz, and he spent his teenage years at 790 Riverside Drive; this apartment building in
Washington Heights was home to two other friends who became prominent as adults, Dietz and the Hearst newspapers financial editor
Merryle Rukeyser. He received his B.A. from
Columbia University in 1919 and his Litt.B. in 1920 from its
School of Journalism. On graduating, he worked briefly as a reporter for the
New York Herald Tribune, and for some time in a
Wall Street brokerage, before becoming vice president of the
Boni & Liveright publishing house.
In 1925, Cerf formed a partnership with his friend
Donald Klopfer; the two bought the rights to the
Modern Library from Boni and Liveright and went into business for themselves. They made the series quite successful and, in 1927, commenced to publish general trade books which they had selected "at random." Thus began their formidable publishing business, which in time they named
Random House. It used as its logo a little house drawn by Cerf's friend
Rockwell Kent.
Cerf's talent in building and maintaining relationships brought contracts with writers such as
William Faulkner,
John O'Hara,
Eugene O'Neill,
James Michener,
Truman Capote,
Theodor Seuss Geisel, and others, who were among the greatest writers of the day and who supported Random House just as Random House supported them. He published
Atlas Shrugged, written by
Ayn Rand. Even though he vehemently disagreed with her philosophy of
Objectivism, they became lifelong friends.
In 1933, Cerf won
United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, a landmark court case against government
censorship, and published
James Joyce's unabridged
Ulysses for the first time in the United States. Critical reviews of the book were pasted into a special copy, which was duly imported and seized by U.S. Customs. Cerf later presented the book to
Columbia University.
In 1944, Cerf published the first of his collection of jokebooks,
Try and Stop Me, with illustrations by
Carl Rose. A second book,
Shake Well Before Using, was published in 1949.
In the early 1950s, while maintaining a
Manhattan residence, Cerf managed to acquire inexpensively an estate at
Mount Kisco, New York, which became his country home for the rest of his life. Cerf married actress
Sylvia Sidney on October 1, 1935, but the couple divorced on April 9, 1936. He was married to former Hollywood actress
Phyllis Fraser, a cousin of
Ginger Rogers, from September 17, 1940 until his death. They had two sons,
Christopher Cerf and
Jonathan Cerf.
In 1959, Maco Magazine Corporation published what has since become known as "The Cream of the Master's Crop." This groundbreaking compilation of jokes, gags, stories, puns, and wit became recognized, in time, as the essence of Bennett Cerf and his humor.
Cerf began appearing weekly on
What's My Line? in 1951 and continued until the show's CBS network end in 1967. Cerf continued to appear occasionally on the
Viacom syndicated version with
Arlene Francis until his death. Cerf was known as "Bennett Snerf" in a
Sesame Street puppet parody of
What's My Line?. During his time on
What's My Line?, Cerf received an
honorary degree from the
University of Puget Sound.
Late in life he suffered the embarrassment of an exposé, written by
Jessica Mitford and published in the June 1970
Atlantic Monthly, denouncing the business practices of the
Famous Writers School, which Cerf had founded.
Cerf was portrayed in the film
Infamous (2006) by
Peter Bogdanovich.
S.J. Perelman's feuilleton "No Dearth of Mirth, Fill Out the Coupon" describes Perelman's fictionalized encounter with a jokebook publisher named Barnaby Chirp who is a vicious caricature of Cerf. A somewhat less vicious caricature of Cerf, named Harry Hubris and portrayed by
Bert Lahr, appears in Perelman's 1962 play
The Beauty Part.
Cerf died in
Mount Kisco, New York, on August 27, 1971, at the age of 73. In 1977, Random House, the company that Cerf had co-founded, published his autobiography, which he had titled
At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf, posthumously. A street (Cerf Lane) off of Croton Avenue bears his name.
Bibliography
- Shake Well Before Using (1948)
- Bennett Cerf's Book of Riddles
- Bennett Cerf's Bumper Crop (2 volume set)
- Famous Ghost Stories (anthology, 1944)
- The Unexpected (anthology, 1948)
- At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf (New York: Random House, 1977, ISBN 0-375-75976-X).
- Dear Donald, Dear Bennett : the wartime correspondence of Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. (New York: Random House, 2002). ISBN 037550768X.
- Bennett Cerf's Book of Laughs'' (New York: Beginner Books, Inc., 1959) LOC 59-13387
