Famous Writers School

The school was founded by Bennett Cerf, a Random House editor and well-known television personality, Gordon Carroll, an occasional editor for Reader's Digest, and Albert Dorne, an illustrator whose school, the Famous Artists School, owned Famous Writers. It began operations in 1961, based in Westport, Connecticut. The ubiquitous advertising copy for the school, which was often found in the back of magazines, listed the following writers (who were also stockholders) as the school's "Guiding Faculty": Faith Baldwin, John Caples, Bruce Catton, Bennett Cerf, Mignon G. Eberhart, Paul Engle, Bergen Evans, Clifton Fadiman, Rudolf Flesch, Phyllis McGinley, J. D. Ratcliff, Rod Serling, Max Shulman, Red Smith and Mark Wiseman. Cerf is quoted in the advertisements as saying: "We approached representative writers, the best we could get in each field: fiction, advertising, sports writing, television. The idea was to give the school some prestige."

Between 1960 and 1969, revenue from tuition increased from $7 million to $48 million, and the stock increased in value from $5 to $40. Radio spots featuring Guiding Faculty, including Baldwin and Eberhardt, being interviewed by Cerf were aired. By 1964, they were offering four different programs: fiction, non-fiction, advertising, and business writing.

Scandal

The school came to the attention of Mitford after her husband, Robert Treuhaft, a lawyer in Oakland, California, began representing a 72-year-old woman who emptied her bank account to sign up for the course and later attempted to get a refund before the course had begun. Mitford began researching the school, touring the campus in Westport, interviewing members of the Guiding Faculty including Bennett Cerf, and placing advertisements looking for students of the school who could share their experiences. Several of the Guiding Faculty attempted to defend the school's practices, with Faith Baldwin saying "Oh, that's just one of those things about advertising.... Anyone with common sense would know that the fifteen of us are much too busy to read the manuscripts the students send in." Mitford's article on the school, "Let Us Now Appraise Famous Writers", was originally commissioned by McCall's, but it declined to print it for fear of offending Bennett Cerf. The Atlantic Monthly printed the piece in its July 1970 issue. (Mitford was already well-known for her 1963 investigative book about the American funeral industry, The American Way of Death.)