Clifton Paul " Kip" Fadiman (May 15, 1904 – June 20, 1999) was an American intellectual, author, editor, and radio and television personality. He began his work in radio, and switched to television later in his career.
Background
Born in
Brooklyn,
New York, Fadiman was a nephew of the émigré Ukrainian psychologist
Boris Sidis and a first cousin of the
child prodigy William James Sidis.
[ "My perspective of Amy Wallace's The Prodigy (1986)". Doug Renselle. September 1–16, 1998.] Fadiman grew up in Brooklyn. His mother worked as a nurse; his father, Isadore, immigrated from Russian empire in 1892 and worked as a druggist.
[One of "Kip's" older brothers, Edwin, taught him how to read. Edwin later married Celeste Frankel and became the brother-in-law to Margaret Lefranc (Frankel), who was a future recipient of the Governor's Award for Painting.
]
Fadiman attended Columbia College at Columbia University. One of his teachers was lifelong friend Mark Van Doren; his undergraduate contemporaries included Jacques Barzun, Mortimer Adler, Lionel Trilling, Herbert Solow, Arthur F. Burns, Frank S. Hogan, Louis Zukofsky, and Whittaker Chambers. Although he entered with the Class of 1924, his graduation was delayed until 1925 because of financial constraints.[
]
He graduated Phi Beta Kappa.[Carolyn Heilbrun. ''When Men were the Only Models we Had''. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002, p. 29.]
Career
After graduation from Columbia, Fadiman taught English at the Ethical Culture High School (now known as the "Fieldston School") in the Bronx from 1925 to 1927.
Literature
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Fadiman worked for Simon & Schuster, ending as its chief editor. At his interview with Max Schuster (a fellow alumnus of Columbia), Fadiman pulled out a folder with a hundred ideas for books. Among Fadiman's original one hundred was to turn
Robert Ripley's newspaper cartoon,
Believe it or Not! into book form. The series has gone on to sell over 30 million copies.
While at Simon & Schuster, he started the translation career of Whittaker Chambers by having him translate
Bambi from German:
My college friend, Clifton Fadiman, was then circa a reader at Simon and Schuster, the New York book publishers. He offered to let me try my hand at translating a little German book. It was about a deer named Bambi and was written by an Austrian, of whom I had never heard, named Felix Salten ... Bambi was an instant success, and I suddenly found myself an established translator.[
]
In the September 1932 issue of ''[[New Masses]]'' (shortly after Chambers left the magazine to begin his underground career), Fadiman contributed with sixteen other prominent writers to the Symposium "How I Came to Communism." He wrote: "History–mainly in the form of the crisis–became my teacher while I was still young enough to learn."
[
]
Fadiman then took charge of The New Yorker's book review section, 1933–1943. He became emcee for the National Book Award ceremonies in 1938 and 1939, at least, and again when those literary awards by the American book industry were re-inaugurated in 1950.[
][
] The awards were inaugurated May 1936, conferred annually through 1942 (publication years 1935 to 1941), and re-inaugurated March 1950 (publication year 1949). Fadiman became a judge for the Book of the Month Club in 1944. In the 1970s, he was also senior editor of Cricket magazine, where he wrote the book review column for children, "Cricket's Bookshelf".
Radio
While still at the
New Yorker, Fadiman became well known on radio, where he hosted a well known and popular
quiz show,
Information, Please! from May 1938 to June 1948. A regular trio of pundits, Franklin P. Adams,
John Kieran, and
Oscar Levant, plus one guest expert, conducted each session with erudite charm and good-natured wordplay under Fadiman's nimble control. Guest
John Gunther's mention of the then-current Iranian potentate prompted Fadiman to ask, "Are you shah of that?", to which Gunther quipped, "Why, sultanly!" Fadiman also made frequent appearances on the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts from 1949 to 1960. During the intermission segments he would discuss the opera being broadcast and interview famous opera singers.
Television
In 1952,
Information Please! was briefly revived for
CBS Television as a 13-week summer replacement for the musical variety program
The Fred Waring Show. During that June–September period, devoted fans of the departed radio program could finally not only hear, but also see Fadiman, Adams, and Kieran in action.
His longest-lasting TV program was
This Is Show Business, which ran on CBS from July 15, 1949, to March 9, 1954. Called
This Is Broadway during the first four months of its run, the show mixed song, dance, and other musical entertainment, with information. Host Fadiman, celebrity guest panelists, and regular raconteurs/intellectuals Kaufman,
Abe Burrows, and
Sam Levenson commented on the musical performers and chatted with them. In late September 1951,
This Is Show Business became the first regular CBS Television series to be broadcast live from coast to coast. The continuing need in 1950s TV for summer series to replace live variety shows likewise brought this show back in 1956 for a 12-week period (June 26 – September 11). Fadiman and Burrows returned along with new panelists
Walter Slezak and actress Jacqueline Susann, the future author of
Valley of the Dolls. Susann's husband, TV executive
Irving Mansfield, produced the 1956 revival for
NBC television.
Fadiman was also the last master of ceremonies to host the ABC-TV game show The Name's the Same. Robert Q. Lewis had presided for three years until the show was temporarily canceled. When it returned eight weeks later, Lewis was no longer available so producers Mark Goodson and Bill Todman hired different hosts for the final 39-episode cycle: Dennis James for 18 weeks, then Bob and Ray for 10 weeks, and then Fadiman for the remaining 11 weeks. The series, broadcast live, featured namesakes of celebrities and other "famous names". On August 16, 1955, when a woman contestant was discovered to be "Hope Diamond", Fadiman personally orchestrated an astounding surprise: he arranged for the real 45-carat Hope Diamond to be displayed to the amazed panelists and the national television audience. Chico Marx teased the audience as the show began: he had the diamond in his pocket. Fadiman committed an unfortunate faux pas when he asked Chico, "Are you working, or are you still living on Groucho's money?" Chico, taken aback, replied, "Groucho's money I have never seen."[2]
Fadiman filled in for What's My Line? host John Charles Daly for two weeks in 1958 when Daly was on assignment in Tokyo.
Influence
Fadiman's witticisms and sayings were frequently printed in newspapers and magazines. "When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before, you see more in you than there was before", was one of the better known. Of
Stendhal, Fadiman wrote, "He has no grace, little charm, less humor ... and is not really a good storyteller".
With the advent of TV, Fadiman gained in popularity, quickly establishing himself as an all-purpose, highly knowledgeable guest and host. At ease in front of the TV camera and experienced from his years in radio, he frequently appeared on talk shows and hosted a number of upscale quiz programs.
Fadiman became a prime example of the "witty intellectual" type popular on television in the 1950s. John Charles Daly, Bennett Cerf, George S. Kaufman, Alexander King, and a number of other television celebrities personified, along with Fadiman, the highly educated, elegant, patrician raconteurs and pundits regarded by TV executives of that era as appealing to the upper-class owners of expensive early TV sets.
Awards
Fadiman received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.
[
]
"Distinguished Contribution to American Letters". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-12. (With acceptance speech by Fadiman and introduction by Al Silverman.)
He received the Clarence Day Award from the American Library Association in 1969.[“ALA Award Winners--1969.” ALA Bulletin 63, no. 8 (1969): 1169–76.]
Personal life
Fadiman's first marriage was in 1927 to Pauline Elizabeth Rush, with whom he had a son, Jonathan Rush. They divorced in 1949. His second marriage was in 1950 to Annalee Jacoby, aka Annalee Fadiman, an author, screenwriter for
MGM and World War II foreign correspondent for
Time and
Life. As a widow, she later used the name Annalee Jacoby Fadiman.
[
] She co-wrote
Thunder Out of China with Theodore H. White (1946). Clifton and Annalee had a son, Kim Fadiman, and a daughter, writer
Anne Fadiman. On February 5, 2002, Annalee committed suicide in Captiva, Florida, aged 85, after a long battle with breast cancer and Parkinson's disease.
Fadiman lost his eyesight when he was in his early 90s but continued to review manuscripts for the Book of the Month Club by listening to tapes of books recorded by his son Kim, after which Fadiman would dictate his impressions to his secretary.
Death
Fadiman died at the age of 95 of pancreatic cancer
[ on June 20, 1999, in Sanibel, Florida; he lived on nearby Captiva Island. In the year of his death, a fourth edition of Fadiman's Lifetime Reading Plan was published as The New Lifetime Reading Plan.][
]
Works
The catalog of the Library of Congress has more than 90 works associated with Fadiman's name.[
]
Translations from German
Books
Children's collections and stories
Prefaces, introductions and/or editions or readers
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Voice of the City and Other Stories by O. Henry; a selection, with an introduction by Clifton Fadiman, with illustrations by George Grosz (1935)
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Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton; with water-colour drawings by Henry Varnum Poor and an introduction by Clifton Fadiman (1939, )
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Reading I've Liked; a Personal Selection Drawn from Two Decades of Reading and Reviewing, presented with an informal prologue and various commentaries by Clifton Fadiman (1941)
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The Three Readers; an Omnibus of Novels, Stories, Essays & Poems Selected With Comments by the Editorial Committee of the Readers Club (1943)
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War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude with a foreword by Clifton Fadiman Simon and Schuster (1942)
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Short Stories of Henry James, selected and edited, with an introduction by Clifton Fadiman (1945, )
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Collected Writings of Ambrose Bierce, with an introduction by Clifton Fadiman (1946)
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Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Including Three Little-Remembered Chapters from Master Humphrey's Clock in Which Mr. Pickwick, Sam Weller & Other Pickwickians Reappear, Edited, with an introd. by Clifton Fadiman. Illustrated by Frederick E. Banber (1949)
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The American Treasury, 1455–1955 (1955, ed.)
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Dionysus; a Case of Vintage Tales About Wine. Collected & Edited With an Introduction by Clifton Fadiman (1962)
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Five American Adventures (1963)
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Fifty Years; Being a Retrospective Collection of Novels, Novellas, Tales, Drama, Poetry, and Reportage and Essays (1965)
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Ecocide—and Thoughts Toward Survival with Jean White (1971)
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The People and Places Book (1974)
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The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes, Clifton Fadiman, general editor (1985?)
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The World of the Short Story: A 20th Century Collection selected and edited by Clifton Fadiman (1986)
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Great Books of the Western World, Mortimer J. Adler, editor in chief; Clifton Fadiman, Philip W. Goetz, associate editors (1990)
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Living Philosophies: The Reflections of Some Eminent Men and Women of Our Time, edited by Clifton Fadiman (1990)
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The World Treasury of Modern Religious Thought, edited by Jaroslav Pelikan; with a foreword by Clifton Fadiman, general editor (1990)
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The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics, edited by Timothy Ferris; with a foreword by Clifton Fadiman, general editor (1991)
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Treasury of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1992, ed.)
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Foreword in Famous Last Words
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World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time, Katharine Washburn and John S. Major, editors; Clifton Fadiman, general editor (1998)
Recordings
The Library of Congress has many recordings of Fadiman, which include:
Notes
Further reading
External links
