Bennett Cerf - Oral History - Notable New Yorkers - Part 1
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- Опубліковано 14 жов 2024
- Bennett Cerf - Oral History - Notable New Yorkers
Interviewed by Robin Hawkins, 23rd of January 1968
The quality of the original recording isn't amazing, but I think it's very interesting to hear Bennett Cerf speak about WML - so I wanted to share it with all of you WML-fans out there :D
I have tried to improve and equalize the sound, so you don't have to turn the volume up and down all the time - Hope it works...
Part 1:
Bennett Cerf describes how he became a part of the WML panel
He then talks about:
Stopette
Arlene Francis, John Charles Daly, Dorothy Kilgallen
Louis Untermeyer
______________
Bennett Cerf, eminent publisher and punster, was a founder and chairman of Random House Books, a writer and editor of many humor books, and a popular panelist on television's long-running game show, What's My Line?
At the time this aired I was 18 and tn Vietnam around the city of Hue as the TET Offensive broke out and for a month it was a crippling mind numbing maddening darkness fighting house to house block by block back and forth with dozens of U S Marines killed or wounded each day; a horror show trapped in my mind the past 50 years. What a tragic waste of precious innocence and life!
I would've giggled ridiculously if I'd've met Bennett! Bennett's my fave male panelist on WML.
Bennett was suave.
@@MrJoeybabe25 and self-deprecating and his puns 😂😂😂 John Daly's expressions were just hilarious
Thanks for this interview...it's just like we are hanging out with Bennett and hearing what you'd ask him about WML! (to me, the greatest show on TV in its 1950-67 version!)
Very interesting clip. It shows how memory can play tricks on us as we get older. Bennett said that on his first appearance on WML (October 15th, 1950) he substituted for Louis Untermeyer, who was away lecturing. The episode is up on YT and we can see that both Untermeyer and Cerf are on the panel. One wonders how many of his other memories played him false.
This is fascinating. Thanks for uploading it.
Glad Bennette didn't totally rag on Dorothy. He just didn't like the gossip stuff.
@liberty Ann - Bennett was too kind to totally rag on much of anybody. Hal Block was not a gentleman and was way out of his league with that audience and show. Bennett was often kind to Dorothy on the show, like once when she thought there was something burning and he calmed her. He gave her a huge advance for a book on crime reporting in the early 1960s that she never finished for him and he'd been giving her deadlines for years. He respected her as a crime reporter and for the quality of her writing. But, he and the other panelists did not trust her because she told tales out of school. Her column was godawful. If she heard something even whispered, like that Bogie was suffering from terminal cancer, she would print it and cause all sorts of anguish among humans in trouble, regardless of how wealthy they were. He did not speak of dying, even to Lauren Bacall or his pals Tracy & Hepburn who visited at cocktail hour every night they were in town while he was ill nor to the famed agent Swifty Lazar, who was a totally phobic hypochondriac and feared cancer yet showed up every Saturday for lunch. Her gossip column was what got her into trouble with Sinatra and he got her back good. He called her "the chinless wonder," which she never got over because she was a terribly insecure woman. So, you are right: the other panelists felt constrained in the Green Room before the show not to bring up anything about friends or acquaintances that could end up in her column in any form. And she had made a total enemy forever of John Daly a few years into the show. So, Bennett was a gentleman and just noted the horror of a column, which anyone who read it had to know of.
I like how he says 'rather disgusting column' ...
My Mom has told me about the "Famous Writer's School." She spent what was to the family (before I was around), a great deal of money. I wish she had kept her "critiques." She told me how upset she was once she heard about the article from Jessica Mitford.
There is a major irony. As a teenager in the 80s, I took my first job in a small independent bookstore. And the owner, who was also an author of the "Manual on Bookselling" had met Mr. Cerf and considered him a kind of mentor (she didn't believe about the Famous Writers scandal). I grew up believing the Bennett Cerf was not only great for creating a major house by publishing books "at random," but as a man who was an humanitarian. I know now, as a more cynical middle-aged guy, that he was flawed.
I have enjoyed every episode of the network-broadcast of WML?. It's sad to know that WML hosted the conspirators of the Blacklist - but it was necessary then. And that Dorothy Killgallen died so young. I don't know if she was murdered or happened to die from an accidental OD of barbiturate and alcohol. Either way it's a sad story. And with Arlene dying form Alzheimer's it's just more sad.
So cool to hear the old school Manhattan accent.
Oh, is THAT what it is! I could not place that accent for the life of me. Thanks!
+Chris -- there are times when he sounds just like Arnold Stang (the comic actor and later voice of Top Cat)
The mid Atlantic accent
@GJNCA According to Wikipedia, Killgallen thought that Sheppard was innocent and said the prosecutor "didn't prove he was guilty any more than they proved there are pin-headed men on Mars." She also gave a deposition in the Sheppard murder case that helped him to get a new trial, according to the book, "Murder One."
he's got to stop crunching on the ice cubes...reminds me of me!
I'm not talking about the first episode, but Cerf's first appearance on the show. Just check it out on YT, Untermeyer is there on the panel with him.
He sounds just like Moe from The Simpsons.
Weirdly, his New York accent sounds somehow way thicker when you can't see him speaking!
It was often posited that her column was a bit of a gossip rag. She also (according to Bennet in other interviews) couldn't tell when things were on or off the record.
His first, not the first episode.
I am a fan of Bennett’s but he sounds like Elmer Fudd’s city slicker twin.
this is excellent. cerf was a class act, although i hear there was some unfortunate scandal about his writing "school" toward the end of his life. yet and still, he was among the cream of the crop.
Here's the information about his dishonorable dealings with this "school."
mentalfloss.com/article/64671/famous-writer-who-brought-down-famous-writers-school
This formed the basis for the book "At Random," which was Bennett's memoir created after his death in, I think it was 1971. Interesting book. Don't believe all of it.
I don't mean to belittle Mr. Cerf but he came across as arrogant and seemed to have trouble with anyone who didn't pander to his ego. Dorothy Kilgallen seems to have been a strong woman (something Cerf probably couldn't handle) and a tenacious reporter. Anyone who has dealt with reporters -- personally or professionally -- knows you have to measure your words around them. There are all kinds of rumors about both Cerf and Kilgallen but few alive now would know the truth.
He's stopped.
Why disgusting? What did she do??
@Mary C how do you know that he wouldn't sit by her?