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Bennett CerfBennett Cerf
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Session:         Page of 1029

Cerf:

Mr. Hayes brought these crazy musicians up to the party. Well, the racket in this small apartment--this fellow with a great big French horn wrapped around his fat belly, you know, and what not! It was really ridiculous. In the middle of the party a stranger came in and said, “Which one is Mr. Liveright?” and when he was identified he came up to Horace Liveright and said, “I have a message here for you from Joe Schildkraut,” and he hauled off and socked Liveright on the nose, knocked him down, and walked out of the apartment. It was very dramatic-- Horace bleeding profusely. It put a damper on the proceedings, but the party went on nevertheless. It was a shocking incident.

The bride figures in the end of the story, because they began fighting, and after a couple of weeks she grabbed his hand and bit it. Her teeth almost met in his hand. She just bit him the way an animal or mad dog would--sank her teeth into the palm of his hand. He was taken to the hospital and poison set in. A human bite is a very dangerous thing. He was in the hospital for weeks, and when he came out he was a shadow--a frail, broken man. He took a couple of rooms in one of these converted private houses just around the corner from the scene of his former glory.

Manuel Komroff tells the story of the last time he went to see Liveright. He walked in--the door was partly ajar--and Horace was sitting in his shirt sleeves with a blue serge coat on his desk in front of him and with a bottle of fountain pen ink and a rag he was covering a threadbare spot in the sleeve of his coat where the white showed to make it look like the





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