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Well, he liked my feeble jokes. You remember that with love. He liked a pun, too. Later on when I started doing columns, whenever I included some puns, Sherwood would call up and groan, “Bennett, this time you've gone too far.” Then I knew I was in.
Did any of these people refer others to you? When you were at Liveright, were there any occasions--?
Well, I began meeting them, and Liveright began taking me with him to parties. And Tommy Smith took me down to Greenwich Village, and I met some of the riff raff he circulated with. Later on Noel Coward wrote a play about Tommy Smith and Liveright called “The Scoundrel,” which was the story of Liveright and Tom Smith and these days when we were all young!
We've never discussed Albert Boni at all.
Boni was gone by the time I got there. They had started the firm and they had started the Modern Library. But shortly before I came there, they had a great argument. And this was Liveright: they tossed a coin for who would buy out the other one. They settled what the price was going to be, and they tossed a coin to see who paid who this rather small price. Liveright won the business and Boni went down and started his own firm with his brother, Charles Boni.
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