The rather odd Salvador Dali makes life difficult but fun for the panelists on one of my all-time favorite TV shows, What’s My Line? The show is from before my time, but thanks to GSN, which runs it at 3:00am ET, I can record it and watch at my leisure.

Incidentally, the panelist on the right is Bennett Cerf, one of the founders of Random House. I’ve always loved this guy. A political liberal, but in those days one could also be debonair, civilized, charming, and learned. He worked with Ayn Rand, whom Random House published. A couple Christmases ago I received as a gift his book At Random, his memoir as a publisher. In that book he describes his relationship with Rand, whom he described as having a “cockamamie philosophy” but as being “a brilliant woman.”

Cerf recalls confronting her over the John Galt speech in Atlas Shrugged. I don’t have the book handy, but I recall him saying that the speech added nothing new, and merely recapped themes that had been introduced repeatedly throughout the book. At the very least it needed to be substantially edited. Rand asked if Cerf would edit the Bible. He gave up.

Here’s an excerpt from the Rand section of At Random.

And now, finally, the video!