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would ship off the minute the show was over. Five minutes after the show was over I was on my way out, dressed like a normal human being. What fun it was;

I loved it from the start because, as I've told you again and again, I have a streak of pure ham in me and this appealed to every part of it. Within about six weeks, I was a national figure. As a publisher nobody knew who I was. How many people do you think look at the name on the spine of a book that has been published? They don't know whether a book's published by Scribner's or Harper's or Doubleday or Random House. What do they care? They want to know what's in the book and who wrote it. What difference does it make who published it? Even when I started writing books, and some people came to know my name, they didn't know what I looked like. But after you've been on a national television show for a little while, a popular one like “What's My Line?” everybody recognizes you. Everywhere that I went, people would yell, “Hey, Bennett.” Truck drivers would stop and yell. Every taxi driver would greet me by name, and I loved it. Anybody who says that he doesn't like it, I think is a liar.

Did you begin to get fan mail?

Like a movie star; You know, requests for autographed pictures, people coming up for autographs, stuff like that... I never knew that this would happen to me.