Dick Cavett's 'Talk Show' is Much More Than A Collection of Columns

Dick Cavett  dedicated his new book Talk Show to “M.” and qualified it with, “who knows who she is.” Pressed by Imus to reveal M’s identity, Cavett admitted it was Martha Rogers, a woman to whom he was wedded just 10 days ago.
 
“She looks more like Nicole Kidman than the late Eleanor Roosevelt,” Cavett remarked about his wife, acknowledging the wide range of beauty implied by such a description.
 
Talk Show is a collection of Cavett’s columns from his New York Times blog, an assignment he initially thought would be easy. After just three contributions, however, he found himself wondering, “What am I going to do now?”
 
In looking back at his vast array of columns, he came across one he wrote in 2008 about then-Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, about whom he wrote, “She seems to have no first language.”
 
He has been accused of picking on Palin, “a phony,” according to Imus. “As Richard Nixon would say to you at this moment, ‘You’re entitled to your opinion,’” Cavett, who was once a target of the disgraced 37^th President of the United States, said.
 
Not long ago, tapes of Nixon saying he wants to “screw” Cavett surfaced, as tapes of Nixon are wont to do. “This was a shock to me,” Cavett confessed. Known for using the IRS to get back at people, it was not until years later that Cavett learned Nixon had used this method against him.
 
During a chance encounter with a former staff member, Cavett learned that this person and almost ever other employee of The Dick Cavett Show had, in fact, been audited. “No one had spoken to anyone else about it,” he said, noting that he, too, had been audited, because Nixon “was not pleased when I testified that there might be better people to deport from this country than John Lennon.”
 
Of all the people Cavett has met and interviewed in his life, Groucho Marx “may have meant the most to me since childhood,” he said, and quoted his friend Woody Allen, who called Groucho “the most gifted comic of all—with movement, with wit, with facial brilliance, comic singing ability.”
 
Having spent some time with Groucho, Cavett noticed that he would laugh a little bit at his own jokes, seeming surprised at what he had just said. “It was reflex,” Cavett said of Groucho’s humor. “And he would enjoy it as much as the rest of us.”
 
Cavett and Allen met when Cavett was sent by The Tonight Show to see a young comic who had written for Sid Caesar. Though Allen “kind of hid behind the mike,” Cavett said he also had “the most brilliant line-for-line comic material I have ever heard before or since. By anybody.”
 
On one particular episode of his show, Cavett hosted the writer Norman Mailer, and the atmosphere quickly became contentious. “Mailer came on—drunk, I think, is the correct word—to cut Gore Vidal on the air for something Gore had written about him,” Cavett recalled. Mailer became annoyed with Cavett, at one point insulting the host by saying, “Why don’t you just read the question off the question sheet?”
 
To which Cavett had replied, “Well, why don’t you fold it five ways and put it where the moon don’t shine?”
 
He admitted having no idea where that phrase came from, but said about Mailer, “humor seemed to have been left out of him.”
 
Thankfully, it wasn’t with Cavett, as Talk Show, and his many appearances on this program, rightly prove.
 
-Julie Kanfer