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The Dick Cavett ShowThe Dick Cavett Show has been the title of many talk shows hosted by Dick Cavett on several television networks, including: - ABC daytime (March 4, 1968-January 24, 1969) (originally titled This Morning)
- ABC prime time (May 26-September 19, 1969)
- ABC late night (December 29, 1969-January 1, 1975)
- CBS prime time (August 16-September 6, 1975) (actually more of a variety show)
- PBS (1977-1981)
- USA prime time (September 30, 1985-September 23, 1986)
- ABC late night (September 23-December 30, 1986)
- CNBC (1989-1996)
When used without qualification, the title most often refers to the first three shows on ABC and especially the late-night show, which ran opposite NBC's popular The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Cavett took the time slot over from Joey Bishop. The Cavett show is generally acknowledged as the most noble and worthy attempt to go head-to-head with the unassailable Carson. On all three of the early ABC shows, the bandleader was Bobby Rosengarden and the announcer was Fred Foy of The Lone Ranger fame. The morning show was produced by Woody Fraser, the late-night show by John Gilroy. Cavett's writer (when any was needed) was Dave Lloyd. The late-night show's 45-minute midpoint would always be signaled, in between commercials, by an excerpt from Leonard Bernstein's Candide. The very first show (in daytime) featured Gore Vidal, Muhammad Ali, and Angela Lansbury, though this show was aired second, as ABC executives were unhappy with it. ABC pressured Cavett to "get big names," even though the shows without them got higher ratings and more critical acclaim. In addition to the usual monologue, Cavett opened each show reading selected questions written by audience members, to which he would respond with witty rejoinders. ("'What makes New York so crummy these days?' Tourists.") - "I have some good news and some bad news for the balcony. I'm not going to tell you the bad news, but here's the good news. It will take several minutes for the flames to reach you."
The show was often unpredictable and produced some notoriously tense moments. - Artist Salvador Dal was behaving so eccentrically that at one point Cavett interrupted him by waving his hands in Dal's face and saying "Boogie, boogie!" The audience broke up, and Dali appeared at a loss. A female viewer in a DC hospital bed reportedly had to have her stitches partially resewn from laughing so hard.
- An interview with Norman Mailer was not going well. Mailer moved his chair away from the other guests (Vidal and Janet Flanner), and Cavett asked whether he'd "like another chair to contain your giant intellect." Mailer dismissively said to Cavett, "Why don't you just read the next question on your card there" (or words to that effect), to which Cavett replied, "Why don't you fold it five ways and put it where the moon don't shine?"
- In December 1971, former Georgia governor Lester Maddox walked off the show in the middle of a conversation about segregation after Cavett refused to apologize. (This had little effect on the proceedings, since it happened at the end of the show.) Truman Capote was on the show and said he got more comments about it than any other TV he had done. Cavett suspected that the walking off was mere showmanship and a calculated publicity stunt. It was reported in the news before it aired that night, increasing viewership. In Greenwood, Mississippi, the home town of Cavett's wife, Carrie Nye, the guests at a country-club dance abandoned the dance floor to watch the show on the TV in the lounge. Matters were patched up and Maddox returned on a later night, and this time Cavett himself walked off the show as a joke. Left alone on stage, Maddox cued the band and began singing "I Don't Know Why I Love You Like I Do" as Cavett reappeared in the wings to join in.
- Cavett told Timothy Leary, "I really think you're full of crap," and to Elliott Roosevelt he said, "Perhaps you could now bring yourself to answer the question."
- Critic John Simon revealed on the air to the home audience that during the most recent commercial break, fellow guest Mort Sahl had threatened to punch him in the mouth.
- Clement Freud, a popular talk-show guest in the early 1970s, abandoned all decorum while on the stage with gossip columnist Rona Barrett and verbally attacked her, calling what she did "appalling."
- Publisher J.I. Rodale, an advocate of organic farming, died of a heart attack during taping, and a rerun was aired. The death occurred while journalist Pete Hamill was the next guest.
- Cavett did a two-part show on pornography, both parts taped the same day and shown on two nights. During the first part, he was discussing the depiction of oral sex in movies and made a parenthetical utterance: "oral-genital sex...mouth on sex organs." A flap ensued where executives demanded that the censor cut the second phrase. An angry Cavett described the ongoing situation at the beginning of the second part, reusing the phrase. One of the guests, legal scholar Alexander Bickel, sided with Cavett. The rather ridiculous result was that the show aired with the phrase cut the first night but left in the second night.
- Angela Davis was pressured into cancelling a scheduled appearance. Cavett did not know exactly who was exerting the pressure, but suspected that ABC had received a phone call from Washington. Similarly, the White House compelled the show to book William Magruder, of the Department of Transportation, in order to counterbalance a stream of guests who had been critical of SST (Supersonic Transport). Reaction was mixed, and the show created at least as many enemies of the SST as it did friends. The White House blamed the show for the bill's defeat.
- A show with Secretary of the Interior Rogers Morton resulted in nine animals being added to the endangered species list after Cavett commented on them.
- Marlon Brando, right after the show, got into a brawl with a photographer (Ron Galella) and ended up in the hospital with a bite wound.
One of the shows that received the most compliments was one with Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, and Noel Coward, the three's last appearance together. Laurence Olivier and Ingmar Bergman made their first-ever appearances on an American talk show. Groucho Marx on the show discussing the musical Hair, which had just opened: "I was going to see it, but I went home, took off my clothes, looked at myself in the mirror, and saved seven dollars." Occasionally Cavett would devote an entire show to a single guest. Among those receiving such special treatment (some more than once) were Marx, Olivier, Katharine Hepburn (without an audience), Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Fred Astaire, Jerry Lewis, and even David Bowie. These shows helped promote Cavett's skills as an interviewer who could attract guests who otherwise might not do interviews, at the expense of some of the excitement that ensued from the multiple-guest format. The Cavetts owned a Yorkshire-cairn terrier mix named Daphne, after whom his production company was named. In January of 1973, despite a vociferous letter campaign, ratings forced the show to be cut back to occasional status, airing one week a month under the umbrella title ABC's Wide World of Entertainment. By the end of 1974, it was airing only twice a month. The PBS series featured single guests in a half-hour format and was produced by Christopher Porterfield, a former roommate of Cavett's at Yale University who had coauthored the book Cavett published in August 1974, shortly after he had become executive producer of the ABC show. References Cavett by Dick Cavett and Christopher Porterfield, Bantam Books, August 1974.
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