“[Bennett] Cerf was a great exaggerator.”
Arthur Gelb, a former managing editor at The New York Times and biographer of Eugene O’Neill, thought he was helping a neophyte (me) with this revelation when I was a year or so into writing Nothing Random, my biography centered on the life of Bennett Cerf, the co-founder of Random House and famed publisher of O’Neill, Truman Capote, Gertrude Stein, and so many other canonical authors. But it wasn’t quite the ta-da! Gelb had imagined. I’d already discovered that Bennett was an unreliable narrator of his own life when I did his genealogy and learned that the consummate New Yorker who’d boasted that his grandparents had all been born on the island of Manhattan knew full well that three of them were immigrants. To be fair, he didn’t exactly hide his proclivity for narrative embroidery: Bennett always maintained that, for him, the story was paramount (not a bad thing for a publisher, but not great for a biographer dependent on facts).
