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Bennett CerfBennett Cerf
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Session:         Page of 1029

Cerf:

The first time I actually saw him was when I went down one day to the kidnap trial in Flemington, New Jersey. People fought for tickets to go. Beatrice Kaufman and I managed to get hold of two tickets this day. We had to leave New York at six o'clock in the morning to drive down to Flemington. The whole trial was really pretty disgraceful. The courtroom was full of television cameras. They were just beginning to do that sort of thing. They had reporters all over the place, and there was a circus air about the whole procedure. Lind- bergh's behavior was very peculiar. He sat through the whole trial just staring. He never missed one day of the trial. Through most of the gruesome testimony, he just sat there looking stolidly and stonily forward. The day that we were there the nurse was on the stand. Miss Gough--I think her name was. The trial ended, you remember, with Hauptman's conviction.

To go back to Alicia Guggenheim, there were certain people we'd always meet around there who became friends. George Abbott, the producer, had a place nearby. He would always bring around some little cutie from the theater to play tennis.

One time Alicia had down this delegate from the United Nations named Adlai Stevenson. Adlai, it turned out, had been in love with Alicia since he was a little boy. It was a childhood romance in Chicago. They both came from pretty well-known families. As I told you, Alicia was a niece of Col. McCormick of The Chicago Tribune. Her father, Joe Paterson, was the man who started The News.





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