Nothing Random

Nothing Random

Chapter 1

Inheritance

Go downtown, toward New York’s early days, and head east along Rivington Street from the Bowery. Five-story walk-ups with dangling fire escapes—utterly gentrified now, boasting hip cafés and expensive boutiques—give way to a phalanx of towers erected during the 1960s, in the name of urban renewal. In buildings that once stood here, numbered 170 and 258, the two sides of Bennett’s family lived after they arrived, three decades apart, in the nineteenth century. Serendipity, yes, but not so surprising: during most of its existence, Rivington was a street for starting over, a cramped, narrow foothold on the ladder of immigrant dreams. Some of the American dreams these ancestors harbored there came true—and helped make Bennett Cerf’s possible.

When he was sixty-nine, his alma mater asked Bennett to record his New York story for posterity in a series of interviews, and he agreed. “I’m rather an unusual specimen,” he began. Not only he and his parents, he proudly explained, but also his four grandparents, had been born on the island of Manhattan. To an establishment figure of his time, in a country deeply ambivalent about its immigrant roots, a three-generation born-in-America pedigree brought advantages and silenced prejudices. Still, he cautioned, his background was “shrouded in some mystery,” and he’d never bothered poking into the history of his forebears. He did know that his father’s father, Marcel Cerf, was a jeweler, and his mother’s father was in the tobacco business.

New York, a city adept at covering over its past, hosts many citizens adept at covering over theirs, and Bennett’s background wasn’t such a mystery to him after all. In 1941, he was a man of forty-three when he had to give the City of New York vital family details after his father, Gustave, died. The death certificate specified that Gustave’s mother was born in Germany, not America. A few days after losing his dad, Bennett was inspired to jot down a brief “Cerf Family” tree, where he noted that his father’s father was born in a village in upstate New York in 1834. However, the grandfather wasn’t called Marcel, the name Bennett had cited in his oral history; he was Benoît. The likely explanation is that Bennett was putting distance between himself and the embarrassing foreign name on his own birth certificate. In the Jewish tradition, a child is named after a deceased relative, and when Gustave’s son was born on May 25, 1898, the man Americans would know as Bennett Cerf was officially “Benoît.” His grandfather had died three years earlier.

In the mid-nineteenth century, many denizens of growing Gotham found each other through annual directories brought out by enterprising printer/publishers. In 1843–44, out of a total population of 371,000 persons, Doggett’s New-York City Directory listed 55,000 of their names, one being Lazarus Cerf, Bennett’s great-grandfather, a peddler at 258 Rivington. A year later, Caroline, his newly widowed wife, is listed at that address.

Lazarus and Caroline had come to America from France, probably Alsace; at times, Bennett joked that his ancestors had been Strasbourg horse thieves. Their surname, derived from Hebrew, literally means “deer” or “stag,” and was not unusual for French Jews. (On the German-speaking side of the border, the name would have been “Hirsch” or “Hart,” carrying the same meaning.) Lazarus had probably made clocks and watches in the old country: certainly, in 1850, his sixteen-year-old son, Benoît, was listed as a clockmaker living with his mother, and a year later—along with a brother—had become a watchmaker. Once the Civil War broke out, Benoît served in the New York State Militia. After he returned home, the brothers expanded into jewelry. By 1870, he’d married Bavarian-born Mathilda Newwitter and fathered four children. Two-year-old Augustin was later known as Gustave. Benoît had amassed real estate worth $3,500, a fair sum; within a decade, he’d moved home and business across the river to Brooklyn.

Bennett’s mother, Fredericka Wise Cerf, was the fifth of nine children of Nathan and Delphine Wise. Grandmother Delphine was born in Luxembourg or Germany—boundaries were fluid, depending on the latest war—but definitely not in New York. She died in January 1893, twenty-nine days after giving birth to her last child, Herbert, so Bennett never knew her, but he did know her husband. Until he was ten, Bennett had to spend every Sunday at his grandfather’s home. Nathan Wise sported a beard “like the Smith brothers,” Bennett recalled—that iconic WASP pair whose image adorned boxes of cough drops sold all over twentieth-century America. But Nathan was no WASP: he was a stern Jewish immigrant who’d arrived from Bremen while the Civil War raged. His passport application said he was big-nosed, long-faced, bearded, and his first known address was 170 Rivington. Therefore, despite Bennett’s boast, only one grandparent had been born in America (and not in Manhattan). An unusual specimen indeed.

“Cerf was a great exaggerator,” the former New York Times managing editor Arthur Gelb once said. He knew how to play to an audience of thousands, or to a tape recorder and audience of one. Like every successful salesman, he was above all selling himself, and as both public man and publisher, Bennett’s blurring of the line between fact and myth would be a defining characteristic—and prove immeasurably useful.

Christopher and Jonathan Cerf don’t recall their father, the great storyteller, telling them anything about the maternal side of his family. Nonetheless, Nathan Wise, forgotten though he may be, isn’t so easily lost. Between his arrival in the United States in 1863 and his death in 1908, Wise made a small fortune. His shadow not only loomed over Bennett’s childhood, but extended across his life, and the legacy he left was what enabled his grandson to buy into the book business. To some extent, Bennett’s self-imposed forgetting was a reinvention typical of Jews of his era, when antisemitism was rife. Instead of digging up roots to examine, easier to bury them under ancestral amnesia and Americanized names. But it’s likely more came into play in this case.

Nathan Wise started in the tobacco trade. During the nineteenth century, the cigar was most men’s smoke of choice, and New York became the country’s manufacturing center. Virtually every immigrant nationality was involved, but Germans predominated, Jews among them. Once the cigarette began its ascent in the 1860s, Jews were heavily involved in that, too. In an 1874 city directory, “Nathan Wise, tobacco” is listed at 170 Rivington Street, but by 1880 he’d helped form a trade group, the Wholesale Tobacco Association in the City of New York, and had joined another German Jew, Adolph M. Bendheim, to deal in tobacco at 254 Canal Street.

Soon, however, there was a new tobacco player in town. James Buchanan Duke arrived from North Carolina in 1884 with huge ambition, and within a few months the tough young man had established a factory to mass-produce cigarettes. Five years later, Duke made and sold almost half the country’s cigarettes, and had pressured four competitors to join him in starting the American Tobacco Company. He conspired to take over the cigar business, too, using independent competitors who cooperated to crush the rest. In 1899, both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal announced the arrival of a “big new” firm, Metropolitan Tobacco. Its eleven directors included three Bendheims, a Bendheim spouse, and Nathan Wise. However, the Brooklyn Eagle, on its front page, rebuked Metropolitan for what it was: a smokescreen for a robber baron, the trust that Duke used to control tobacco distribution in the entire New York area.

Bennett glancingly referred to this in his oral history, saying that a young man had offered Nathan a partnership that his “conservative” grandfather didn’t think good. “The man’s name was Duke. . . . My grandfather thought [him] a wild young fellow, which indeed he was. But at that, my grandfather when he died had amassed a million dollars.”

The description of the proposed partnership is oddly equivocal. Initially, it sounds as though Nathan rebuffed Duke, yet the phrase “but at that” does imply Nathan made his money through Duke—and of course, Duke amassed a great fortune. It’s also odd that Bennett, an inveterate name-dropper, was so ambiguous, given that RH had published a Duke biography that mentioned Metropolitan. He’d even written a brief article about the book, and Duke’s “hydra-headed trust.” But though he undeniably enjoyed being linked to the famous, Bennett always said he believed in “being good.” The ruthlessness most likely inherent in the business between Wise and Duke was something else entirely.