Does Cavett Have It?

    Published in LOOK, July 15, 1969, page 61-65.

A sometimes self-conscious, always uptight, but never uncool Cavett readies up backstage.

Dick is back as TV's newest nightcap, but the question still is Does Cavett Have It?

By Betty Baer

If you are a housewife, a nightwatchman or a kid under five, you remember Dick Cavett. He was the brainy one in brown-suede shoes, the same tie and (depending on the day of the week) a red, green or blue blazer, who hosted a morning-after show that matched, quip for gag, the blab of talk shows the night before. When the ratings failed, ABC shut him down. That was six months ago. Now, Dick has a tough new wardrobe, the network's best publicity talent, three hours a week of its prime time and a big chunk of its money. Why? Because the ABC heavies still quiver over letting go a guy named [Johnny] Carson. They were also out to lunch when the unexpected wit of Merv Griffin wandered to Westinghouse. This time, the corporation was determined not to be zapped. For six months, it negotiated Cavett into his new night spot while CBS and Group W bayed at the door.

In channel competition, ABC has always finished an ardent third. Recently, as with the fireside approach to the '68 election returns, it has made some admirable efforts to improve its stroke. The latest is an open-faced boy from Nebraska ("When I left Lincoln, I thought Passover was a Goodson-Todman game show") who has the personal attentions of Network President Elton Rule plus a new stage set designed by the man who conceived Jack Paar's couch. This is how a star is born.

Dick's office has been done up from its linoleum-and-metal baser beginningsto a carrpeted earnest blue and labored look of matching provincial woods. Poaching beside his desk is a bile-green, splay-footed, papier-mache aligator that some misguided fan sent along, because – the card read – "He looks like you."

Dick, meanwhile, is no mean talent. He is an enormously literate guy who can pepper his language with suitable quotes from Eng.-lit.-101's dustiest poets to the most recent droppings of Norman Mailer. On the air, he has the brass to use fancy phrases like "improvisatory powers" and ponderous words like "ponderous." So keen is his sense of language that he talks like a textbook. He is given to parenthetical addenda that hew his meaning to a precision point, and you get the idea that any of his sentences, diagramed, would be filigree. His unhurried speech flows with the perfect cadence of a good homeric translation. "You have excellent diction," Carl Reiner once told him, "and that sounds intelligent and fools people. Your voice is so mellifluous that when you say something, people believe you."

Cavett's head, however, is for real. He is a Yalie who has a kind of academic reverence that causes him to go around confessing he never read Alice in Wonderland or Joyce's Ulysses. When people ask Dick what he did those six months between shows, he says he learned to pronounce Nah-BO-koff, Leonard BURN-styne, CHICK-o Marx, ZIG-felld Follies and VISHY-swahz. He complains of never having enough time to read and likens himself to a character in an existentialist story who was so aware of the passage of time that he became paralyzed by the very sound of it whizzing past his ears. Like a lot of witty men, he is terribly serious, shy and introverted, yet sensitive enough to worry that he might, on occasion, be boring.

Cavett's humor, at its best, is low-keyed and classy. His finest jokes cut as sizzle-quick as the classic one-liner with which he capped off a dull discussion on the inevitability of General de Gaulle's memoirs. "I'll wait for the King James version," he said. But he is saved from a schoolboy's routine of clever scholastic groaners by his dimple-cheeked, moose-mouthed manner. How can you change channels on a guy who answers an audience question" "Are you self-conscious about your height (he is a tidy 5'8")?" with "No, but I'm conscious about other people's."

Cavett did time as a gag writer for most of the troupers – among them Johnny Carson, Jack Paar, Croucho Marx and Jerry Lewis. But he is neither a Carson cutout nor a standard comic cutup. He rarely rises to join in stage shenanigans, would never dress up like a swami, get in the acrobatic act or try on women's hats. Once, one of his more raucous lady guests, overcome by mothering instincts, bolted the desk to smother her host in hugs and kisses. It took Cavett several commercials to reclaim his cool. Some say he's too nice a guy. He interviews the dullest of guests, giving them ample air to grouse their gripe, pitch their book, or crusade their cause. When rigor tedium starts to set in, Cavett might pop up with "What's your favorite color?" But more time than not, he stays well-mannered and listens. For sure, he is too nice to be rude. His producer is continually distressed because Dick can't bring himself to interrupt for a commercial break. When forensic fiend Bill Buckley appeared on the show, Cavett asked, "Do any of the political candidates excite you?" Buckley inhaled a gabby two-lungs full, relied, "Yes," then sat back and smiled. Cavett paused, turned popeyed to the camera, and said, "Somehow, I expected a longer answer." To the question "Can you think of any disadvantage to being wealthy?" Buckley returned, "Yes, you have to answer questions like that." Cavett looked like a man about to go down for the third time. But suddenly he was off, running polite circles around his guest with a string of improbable queries: "Did you ever read Winnie-the-Pooh? What do you think of Tiny Tim? How do you knot your tie?"

According to plan, Cavett's show will go off to make room for the fall schedule. What happens in January's "second season" depends ultimately on what people think. Opinions vary. Mel Brooks thinks Cavett is "spectacularly Gentile," while one of his publicity men says is "a cold fish." His manager likes to label him "Mr. Television," and mentor Jack Paar rates him as "the closest to what I was trying to be." But perhaps the hippest judge of all is Henry Morgan, a man who knows his talk shows. Dick Cavett, he says, "has the most comfortable seat on television."