Dear Donald, Dear Bennett

by Bennett Cerf

  As for general business, we are doing all we possibly can and more. The sudden decision not to draft men over 26 for a while gives Joe Aaron a respite but, of course, this whole thing may be upset overnight. The draft board issues a new set of rules about three times a week and everybody within draft age is living in a state of confusion and suspended animation.

  Yesterday was Thrup’s 29th birthday and we celebrated with dinner at “21” where at least ten people asked for you and sent you their love, including one very beautiful girl whose identity was a complete mystery to me—probably one of the 9000 dames that you collected in that sophomore year of yours, every detail of which makes me shudder.

  We all miss you terribly and have got enough things piled up for you when you get back to keep you occupied 27-½ hours a day for your first nine years back at the office. One thing you had better steel yourself for, my boy: Jezebel’s fanny is definitely not what it used to be. It simply can’t take it any more.

  Sorrowfully,

  Bennett

  May 1–44

  Dear Bennett—

  I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that we have seen many a busy time of it and I haven’t had either the energy or inspiration for much correspondence. We’ve been blessed with a kind of good weather which has enabled us to operate every day and two missions on some days. The boys are getting pretty well worn out, but they seem to be able to go just as well when they’re a bit tired. May Day has come and gone with no invasion but I guess it can’t be too far off now. I wish they’d start and succeed so we could get the hell out of here and on our way to the final phase of the whole thing. Your friend Jones, the silent one, just led a beautiful mission in which they kicked the s——out of a target. What a pleasure! I guess it must be beautiful in town and down at the country now. I wish I could get out more but my hours are so impossible that I don’t move off the base. Love to the gang & Thrup—and yourself—

  Congrats on your Spanish statement.

  Donald

  May 7–44

  Dear Bennett:

  Just received your letter of April 14—together with Bob’s of the 27th. I’m sorry you are now being pestered by the censor. I can’t imagine what I wrote that could be censored but we’re dependent on the digestion of the censor and that is that.…

  We’re in a continual grind now—missions every day that the weather possibly allows. We’re all steamed up to run enough missions per day to support an invasion. I was down in London to a meeting this week and I went to theatre and dined with Lynn. He’s doing a good job, I believe—Didn’t have time to see any one else in London as I had some shopping to do plus not much time.

  You’re slipping, Cerf, to have a beautiful girl ask for me and not even find out her name. I could use a beautiful girl over here, yes, even two or three.

  Life is not too exciting here right now. To us it’s something of a lull altho’ we are very busy.

  My best love to all—and yourself, of course.

  Donald

  May 12–44

  Dear Bennett—

  This should reach you vaguely around your 46th birthday. We seem eternally fated to spend our birthdays apart, my lad—but I guess this time there’s a good reason for it. Anyway you know that I wish you all the luck, good things and happiness in the world. I don’t have to tell you that. I’m sorry I can’t celebrate with you but I’ll have a drink to you at the Officers Club Bar—you can buy me one when I get back!

  Things around here are going along at a steady pace—the steady pace meaning working the ass off all of the combat crews—we ground personnel can take it all right but it’s a terrific strain on the crews. Daily flying of long tough missions just can’t be done—and that’s what the boys are doing—But to-day they did some of the best bombing I’ve ever seen in a long penetration deep into the Third Reich. They really plastered a synthetic oil plant and I have the pictures to prove it! We take vertical photos of all bombing and it’s amazing what the damned things show up.

  Of course the only thing on every one’s mind these days is “When will it start?” We’re all set for it, have lots of new planes and are all set for a really grueling couple of weeks. I do wish that it may be successful as I want to get out of this theatre and home if possible—or if not home at least on to the next phase—China or India. Life is dull around here.

  Had dinner with Lynn in London last week—he seems sort of fed up, too. Saw a terrible show with him.…

  My very best love to Thrup—bounce Chris once on the big knee for me.

  And again—Congratulations!

  Love,

  Donald

  May 19, 1944

  Dear Donald:

  Your birthday letter arrived a whole week early and pleased me more than I can say. How the hell you can remember a birthday in the midst of what you are doing passes my understanding; if it weren’t for that undependable creature called Jezebel I would never remember an anniversary or birthday from one end of the year to the other! I echo your sentiment that this may be the last of our natal days that we spend apart for a long, long time to come. I grant you that the odds are against our being together on January 23rd, but after that I cling to the hope that our chances are good!

  …

  I have finally completed the manuscript for the new Pocket Book of Anecdotes that I have been slaving over, and now I will be able to take it a little bit easier for a while. The Fall catalogue has gone to press and we’ll have a number of weeks to devote exclusively to the Lifetime Library and the Modern Library. We are going over the latter series title by title, examining the plates, introductions, translations and all that sort of thing so that, by the end of this year, although we may be out of stock of a lot of titles temporarily, we’ll be ready to shoot full strength as soon as conditions right themselves. On the Lifetime end, as I think I have already told you, we are ploughing ahead with the plate setting on a three-volume unabridged ARABIAN NIGHTS and the two-volume Wheatley Pepys. Bruce Rogers has designed a beautiful new title page for a Lifetime Gibbon for the text of which we will, of course, use our Modern Library plates.

  The new titles for the Modern Library this Fall I think are fine. We have finally gotten permission to do the Commager-Nevins SHORT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES in the Modern Library. The book now ends with Pearl Harbor, but Commager is doing a new introduction for us bringing the story right up to the minute. For our second title, Edgar Snow is revising RED STAR OVER CHINA, bringing that one up to date too. The third title is TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST. You may recall that James D. Hart did an introduction for this project way back in 1936. This seemed a good time to carry it through because a big movie version of the tale will be released in the Spring. The fourth title is THE COMPLETE POETRY OF DOROTHY PARKER, which we finally wangled from Viking. Her Short Stories have been one of our best-selling titles this year. We are only doing one Giant because of paper difficulties, and that one is the THREE MURDER NOVELS that has gone so well in the Random House edition. (Do you remember the time Pop* bound up all 5000 copies of the first edition? How he’d chuckle if he could see the sales record today!)

  The graft on subsidiary rights grows more and more staggering all the time. The Literary Guild is using THE CURTAIN RISES as one of four current bonus books. Their first print order is 100,000 copies! That means $6000.00 for our share without turning a hair. Milo Sutliff [at Doubleday] is certainly riding high these days. All of his clubs and promotions are coining money, and I daresay he had more than a little to do with the sudden resignation of Malcolm Johnson from the Doubleday outfit last week. That news came as a bombshell to the publishing world. Harry Maule’s face was a study when he heard it. Nobody knows what Malcolm’s future plans are going to be.

  Linscott has already made himself a permanent part of the outfit here. He is busy lining up young authors for post-war operation, a task for which I believe he is better fitted than anybody else in the whole publishing business. I have also got him and Saxe tearing their ha
ir out over a new American dictionary for Random House. We want to be sure we’ve got the right setup for this project and then, by God, we are going ahead with it come hell or high water.

  In short, my dear Major, current books are taken care of and, as you can see from the above, we are now all devoting ourselves principally to the dream that we share with you: a firm, solid backlist that will support us, I hope, for the rest of our lives.

  Don’t be a God damn fool and overdo it. Remember that there are a few million other guys in the Army besides Donald S. Klopfer!

  My deep love to you.

  As ever,

  Bennett

  June 3–44

  Dear Bennett:

  Just received your most heartening letter of the 19th—My birthday letter must have really romped on to you. That’s quite some service, but you can see it’s not as fast coming this way.…

  Had a vacation to-day, consisting of only one mission this morning and an inspection by the General. He was most complimentary about my section—it’s the best in the Division—and paid the final compliment of not even bringing his A2 along. Consequently we’re the white haired boys these days and will be unable to get the smile off our CO’s face for at least 48 hours. I got a great kick out of the first heavy bombers to land in Russia yesterday. I knew those bases were being built but I didn’t know when they’d get going. We are at greater strength now than we were before and will have to keep up a steady ground until it’s over. But it certainly agrees with me. I don’t know if I’ll ever get back to going to bed and sleeping a whole night thru’—but I’d like to try it sometime in the future.

  I appreciated Thrup’s letter very much. I love to hear good things often. Damn—I miss you & Pat.…

  Give my best to Linscott. I know he’s doing a superb job for R.H.—Love to Bob, Pauline, Saxe, Lew & all the gang—and a special bit for you!

  Donald

  June 21, 1944

  Dear Klopf:

  Your letter of June 10th [letter missing]—the first line to reach us from you since the invasion—arrived an hour ago and has already made the rounds of the entire office. We were sure that you were okay, but it was mighty good to see that illegible scrawl of yours anyhow.

  It is harder than ever these days to concentrate on business, but everything is banging along almost automatically in wonderful shape. We have sold Chris Massie’s THE LOVE LETTERS to Hal Wallis for his first production. (He used to be top man at Warner Brothers, but is now going in for himself. His pictures will be released through Paramount.) Wallis paid us $35,000 for the property, of which 20% is ours. Not bad for a guy whose two previous books failed to reach the 4000 mark! The new book is a rather queer one too and, before this sale, I wouldn’t have bet a plug nickel it would go higher than THE GREEN CIRCLE. Now, however, there is no telling what we’ll do with it.

  Reader’s Digest has bought a hunk of Dick Tregaskis’ new book, INVASION DIARY. The book is a peach. It may be hurt, of course, by all the subsequent developments in the war. Last year we’d have sold 100,000 of it. Now we’ll be very happy if we can get it up to the 30,000 mark.

  In the next letter I hope to have some definite news for you about the organization of a staff to really get to work on our long-dreamed-of Random House Dictionary. If possible, I want to call it the Random House Concise American Dictionary, and have it more or less uniform in size and scope with the Oxford Concise Dictionary. The mere word that we were working on such a project brought inquiries from the Grolier Society (publishers of the Book of Knowledge) and the Britannica people, who would like to work out a deal with us of some sort or other. It is obvious that if we ever do get a good dictionary we’ll make a modest fortune on it and, in my mind, this is now Project Number One on the Random House future possibilities chart.

  Lewis Browne has delivered the final manuscript of THE WISDOM OF ISRAEL. It should be a 1945 leader and sell in a class with the Lin Yutang WISDOM OF CHINA AND INDIA. We are also scheduled to get Walter Clark’s finished manuscript of Trembling Leaves next week, but I believe we’ll hold it for 1945 too. We really are strapped for paper for the rest of this year.

  The big laugh of the month is that I am now a Simon & Schuster author. Dick and Max read the manuscript of THE

  POCKET BOOK OF ANECDOTES that I turned in and informed me that if I would let them do it as a S & S book first, they thought they could sell 50,000 copies or more. Big hearted Cerf was very generous about it and told them to go ahead. The book will be called TRY AND STOP ME, and if I am not run out of town when it appears, I may have some fun out of the whole thing, not to mention quite a bit of dough. I would say that the average age of the stories in the book is 67½ years— which, by sheerest coincidence, happens to be the age of the young lady who is typing this note. (Jezebel said that this would lead you to believe that I have a new secretary, but I assured her that that dumb you weren’t.)

  Our social life is pleasant but unexciting. I had lunch with Marion yesterday, prior to her departure for Reno. This seems to be getting to be a tradition with us, but she wasn’t too pleased when I pointed the fact out to her. She is really in pretty good shape, all things considered, and, in fact, informed me (1) that she is changed, and (2) that she now has a sense of humor. Where did we hear these words before, Klopfer?

  As Phyllis wrote you, your daughter Lois has suddenly become a rather stunning and self-possessed young lady. She is really a wonderful kid.

  That’s all, you hyena, except that I wish the hell you’d get finished with that piddling around in England and come home to do a little work. It’s getting so that I have to come in mornings at 10:30.

  My deep love,

  Bennett

  July 1–’44

  Dear Bennett:

  … Congratulations on becoming an S & S author. It lowers you in my opinion because you know what I think of them as “class” publishers—now you’re in the same class as Trader Horn … and the 200th Cross Word Puzzle Book. What are you going to do with all of your dough, or does Uncle Sam take care of that?

  I was down in London this week for a meeting and had my couple of days and nights with the “doodle bug.”* It’s a trim little ship and the most important thing about it is that it makes a helluva racket and you can hear it for quite a ways. Then there’s a couple of second’s silence and a big bang. Either you’re all right or you aint—and that’s that. But between the invasion and the doodle bugs London is now nice and empty—I stopped at the Savoy without reservations—they almost seemed glad to see me!

  The Russians say they will win the war in 90 days no matter what we do—the best opinion around here is about four months, so I guess we’ll be packing to go to China in the fall. I’m getting mighty optimistic but it seems to me that the war is actually in its final phase and things are going extraordinarily well!

  The pace has slackened a bit around here—we’re back to some strategic bombing rather than tactical—and I’m getting fed up. You’d better train down to get in at 10 o’clock because I don’t intend to do any work for a long time after I return. I’ll be no asset to Random House.

  My best to Bob, Saxe, Lew, Pauline and the gang.

  I hear Thrup has gotten beautifully thin. I think that’s great!

  Love,

  Donald

  July 12, 1944

  Dear Klopf:

  It’s been so hot in New York for the past ten days that work has been virtually at a standstill, and the various Mrs. Klopfers certainly knew what they were up to when they dispersed to Nantucket, Reno, and God knows where else. (I never have been able to keep track of the Klopfer women.)

  We will soon be in the midst of the presidential campaign. To the vast discomfiture of Mr. Robert K. Haas, a straw vote in Random House office last week resulted in fifty votes for F.D.R. and a complete zero for Dewey. The funniest crack about the latter was pulled by one of his own supporters, Alice Longworth. She said he looked exactly like the bridegroom on top of a wedding cake. The high spot
of the Republican convention came when Clare Boothe Luce got up to make a very nauseating speech. She was dressed in a simple little white frock and the ribald delegates began hollering “Take it off, take it off.” My own hunch is that the President will be re-elected in a landslide. In fact, I have given the aforementioned Mr. Haas four to one odds.

  De Gaulle’s visit to America resulted in the most spontaneous demonstration of enthusiasm that has been seen in these parts since Lindbergh came back from his original flight to Europe. I was invited to a reception for him and when he entered the room, I started pressing forward to see him at closer range. When I discovered that the lady next to me was Miss Marlene Dietrich, I started pressing in a different direction. A good time was had by all. The Little Flower was almost trampled in the rush. When the picture of him posing with De Gaulle came out the next day, it looked even funnier than Mutt and Jeff. Fiorello was caught with his tongue hanging out of his mouth—a ludicrous picture that reminded me of Wolcott Gibbs’ old crack that the Mayor had the peculiar knack of always getting himself photographed between expressions.

  There isn’t much business news. Perelman’s CRAZY LIKE A FOX has caught on like wildfire and will double his previous best sale. TALES OF TERROR has crossed the 20,000 mark and if we had the paper, I think we could sell 100,000 before the holidays. Ed Snow’s new book is an “A” book at the B.O.M.C. and we have got our fingers crossed. At the worst the Guild has offered to take it as a dividend so the book is in under any circumstances. Incidentally, the B.O.M.C. has just selected J. Marquand as the fifth judge, rounding out that body for the first time since Heywood Broun died. (In case you didn’t know, Fadiman replaced the late Bill White about a month ago.)

  Dick Tregaskis is thoroughly recovered and will be leaving for England in a few days’ time. I have told him a lot about you and he is anxious to meet you. Please drop him a line in care of: P.R.O., Supreme Allied Headquarters, London, and tell him how he can get in touch with you, either by phone or letter. I think he’ll have sufficient credentials to be able to come and see you at your base if you can’t get down to London. He is a wonderful guy and I know you’ll like him. Besides that, he’ll be able to give you all the latest dope on Random House and its merry minions (including Mignon Eberhart).