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Bennett CerfBennett Cerf
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Session:         Page of 1029

Cerf:

That's again the ham in me, always objected to by my wife and rightly. It's undiginfied. But I did do one for Lucky Strikes once. I did one for Hertz, too. Then I did one for some office copy machines for Eastman Kodak. These are all very big sponsors.

Q:

Why did you decide to do them?

Cerf:

They offered me impressive deals and, you know, you get your picture in full-page ads and I like that. I told you that this is the cheap side of me, the ham side of me.

The funny, funny story, though, concerns the time Moss Hart told me that the Heublein Vodka people were running a whole series of odd-ball ads depicting well-known people doing ridiculous things, and wanted us to pose fighting a duel with each other! “They'll pay us a lot of money and give us each two cases of vodka,” Moss assured me. “Won't it be fun?" I demurred, “Phyllis will kill me.” He said, “Oh, Kitty would kill me too. Let's not tell them.” So we sneaked down to the specified photographer one day and put on long black capes and clowned around brandishing long swords. We had a ball! When we were finished I was ashamed to go back to the office so the two of us sneaked off to an afternoon movie. We went home and I never said a word about our adventure to Phyllis and Moss never told Kitty.

Then the campaign broke and there were full pages in color in Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker,





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