Brief Encounters

by Dick Cavett

  On the memorable night, Pfc. Eddie Fisher—in uniform, looking about sixteen—laid out his problem. It was a complaint. He said he was appearing at the Copacabana nightclub and because of his extreme youth and boyish looks, none of the gorgeous showgirls would consent to go out with him. Then he sang, probably, “O Mein Papa” and sat down to receive the panel’s remarks and advice.

  It began with “the Gloomy Dean of American Comedy,” as Kaufman had been labeled by someone. (My guess would be the wit Oscar Levant.) Kaufman’s dark countenance as he balefully gazed upon the juvenile Mr. Fisher promised something good—but what? Though I’m working from memory, the thing is so indelible in my mind that I can just about guarantee you that what follows is no more than—here and there—a few words off. At a measured pace, Kaufman began:

  “Mr. Fisher, on Mount Wilson there is a telescope. A powerful telescope that has made it possible to magnify the distant stars to approximately twelve times the magnification of any previous telescope.

  (Pause.)

  “And, Mr. Fisher, atop Mount Palomar sits a more recently perfected telescope. This magnificent optical instrument can magnify the stars up to six times the magnification of the Mount Wilson telescope.”

  (Where is he going? I wondered, glued to the screen, back in Nebraska.)

  He went on:

  “As improbable as it would doubtless be, if you could somehow contrive to place the Mount Wilson telescope inside the Mount Palomar telescope, Mr. Fisher … you still wouldn’t be able to see my interest in your problem.”

  (Pandemonium.)

  The laugh seemed to go on long enough for me to go make a sandwich and come back before it had stopped.

  I never met the man. At about age eighteen, I did once see Kaufman plain—with the trademark high-piled black hair—enter a Broadway theater on an opening night, with a beautiful lady on his arm.

  A dear friend, the actress Leueen MacGrath—then a former but still devoted Mrs. George Kaufman—used to unwittingly torture me by saying, “George would have enjoyed you so.” It gets to me, just typing it.

  Leueen said that, seemingly aloof, he was softhearted and sentimental beneath the forbidding exterior. He is known to have personally financed, quietly and anonymously, the escape of many Jews from Hitler’s Germany.

  I still regret not having bought—years ago and short on funds—from a New York autograph dealer a single sheet of notepaper from the Ritz Hotel in Boston. Kaufman would have been directing a Broadway-bound play there. In jet black and boldly inscribed with a broad-nibbed pen, it read:

  The Ritz, Boston

  I don’t want any German plays.

  Geo. S. Kaufman

  A young generation, conspicuously ignorant of everything before the day of their birth, would know nothing of this great wit, prolific playwright, and director. (I’d love to teach a course called “Kaufman, Benchley, Thurber, Perelman, Parker, Lardner, and, of the Numerous Comic Allens, Fred, and Others You Were Too Dumb to Have Been Born in the Time of, 101.”)

  Who can fail to love a man who could suddenly pun in the middle of a poker game, “One man’s Mede is another man’s Persian.”

  Who was stopped at the stage door of a play he was directing by a new doorman who challenged, “Are you with the show?” Kaufman: “Let’s just say I’m not against it.”

  Who could tell a shifting and fidgeting stage actor, “Don’t just do something; stand there.”

  Who could say to a woman endlessly chattering at a dinner table, “Do you have any unexpressed thoughts?”

  I should include here a story Groucho liked to repeat. It was his favorite about Kaufman. It is fairly well known, but I hate to think there’s anyone who hasn’t heard it.

  (This story as well as one or two more of these have occasionally been attributed to others, but who wouldn’t want to claim them? Groucho’s word is good enough for me.)

  Alfred Bloomingdale—of New York’s great department store—decided to dabble in the world of theater and produce a Broadway play. One of Kaufman’s great talents was as a “play doctor,” and with his revising and rewriting and editing skills, he was renowned for turning more than one person’s potential turkey into a play with a chance.

  Bloomingdale’s play was—in the nightmare phrase—“in trouble out of town.” At such times, the cry was “Get Kaufman!”

  Bloomingdale transported Kaufman in limousined style to the Shubert Theater in New Haven, where his play was “trying out.” When the curtain came down, Kaufman was seen heading for the car to go home to New York. Observers reported the following:

  Bloomingdale bustled over, blocked Kaufman’s way, and breathlessly confronted him with “Well, George, you’ve seen my show. Please, tell me! I’ve put an awful lot of money into this show. What should I do?”

  Kaufman: “Close the show and keep the store open nights.”

  That night, in that New York theater lobby so many years ago, when I only saw him, couldn’t I have at least walked over and said hello?

  OCTOBER 8, 2010

  Match Him? Not Likely

  He was devilishly fun to be around.

  Whatever his dark side may have been, in the times we spent together I saw only the effervescence. Bernie Schwartz appeared to be having the time of his life being Tony Curtis.

  I suppose I say “appeared” because despite the exuberance, his life was not unadulterated bliss, and the marital sort terminated five times. The sixth marriage lasted. He said once, “I wouldn’t be caught dead marrying a woman young enough to be my wife.”

  He was a man who admitted that his one driving early ambition in life was simply to be a movie star, and he managed to achieve that (some would say) shallow goal.

  But he did more. He went on to become not just a dapper guy for whose looks women tumbled in droves. He also proved he was more than only—in one of several phrases that plagued him—a “pretty boy” of the screen. He became a fine realistic film actor.

  (Any doubts? See Sweet Smell of Success. Or, if that’s not enough, The Defiant Ones.)

  Before he managed to moderate his marked Bronx accent, he was stuck with a line uttered in an early costume drama in which he allegedly committed, “Yonda lies da castle of my fodda.”

  He was sensitive about it. When I asked him about that, Tony declared it a bum rap. He blamed Debbie Reynolds for popularizing it by inventing and spouting it on a talk show and in a context he also took to be shaded with “maybe a little anti-Semitism” when she included the words, “Tony Curtis isn’t his real name.”

  I asked him if in fact he ever said it. He said he didn’t, but confessed to a similar line. It was in the negligible film Son of Ali Baba. I wish I knew the line he admitted to. Could it have contained the words “valley of the stream” or some such? Perhaps a costume drama idiot savant reading this can supply the answer? It’s early as I type this, and I hate to awaken Robert Osborne.

  In a memoir called American Prince, he complained of often being made to feel like a second-class citizen in movieland, receiving haughty snubs from the likes of, among others, Reynolds, Ray Milland, and Henry Fonda. This apparently made him feel like a slum kid at the prom.

  He and I did a memorable magic act on my ABC show. I lay on a low table, Tony dramatically made incantations and sorcerish gestures, and I slowly floated upward a few feet. He passed a solid hoop over me and I descended. The audience was stunned.

  As an International Brotherhood of Magicians card carrier, I can’t reveal the details; but what I am about to say will be understood by magicians. Owing to hasty rehearsal and, um, slightly erroneous head placement on my part, not only did I levitate but so did, separate from me, a small piece of the table. To the layman, perhaps puzzled by the small fragment of gravity-defying lumber accompanying my rise, nothing was thereby revealed. (Cross my heart there were no wires.)

  On an earlier show I told Tony that among magicians, at least some of them forgave him for the dreadful, phony film Houdini. He laughed. />
  He made a big public show of quitting smoking, and came on the show distributing buttonhole pins with “I.Q.” for (“I Quit”) on them. Whether or not cocaine replaced nicotine, I don’t know, but an actor friend of mine, more staid than Mr. Curtis, was appalled at Tony’s apparently openly snorting magic nose powder on the set between takes in, as I recall, the 1970s.

  On another show, Tony took questions directly from the studio audience. Considering that we taped “to time” and did no editing, it took a certain amount of guts to take unrestricted questions this way, but Tony was willing to do it. I’d have liked to do this on my show more often, but there were few takers. For those fearless ones, it was not only fun, but obviously you got more credit for a line born on the spot.

  Allen (Woody) had no fear of this. Once a female audience member, apparently egged on by her school chums, yelled out, “Woody, do you think sex is dirty?”

  Allen: “It is if you do it right.”

  Perhaps on that same show, a question from a complaining out-of-towner ended with “What makes New York so crummy?”

  D.C.: “Tourists.”

  A funny, funny story about Tony has come down in more than one version. Here is how it reached my ears from one of the two principals, the great Walter Matthau.

  Bernie Schwartz, poor kid from—to say the least—humble beginnings, had only recently morphed into Tony Curtis. His friend Matthau was still in the New York theater and Tony had just done a couple of bits in movies.

  Walter came out of Sardi’s, “the actors’ restaurant” on West Forty-Fourth Street, from lunch. It was a Wednesday afternoon and the area was populated with both white- and blue-haired matinee ladies.

  Amidst a group of them, across the street, stood one man.

  Matthau said that suddenly his name was being shouted. Above the sounds of traffic, he heard:

  “Walta! Hey, Walta! Over here! It’s me, Bernie! I just—”

  I’m afraid that certain restrictions, understandable (mostly to others), apply here that render me unable to complete this anecdote in its original verbiage. But let’s just say it involved Yvonne De Carlo.

  In pace requiescat.

  OCTOBER 22, 2010

  I Wrote It, Must I Also Hustle It?

  There is a price to be paid when your book comes out.

  You have to go out and sell it.

  I just did twelve—or was it fourteen?—back-to-back radio interviews from New York to Seattle and, so it seemed after five of them, all points in between.

  Somewhere around number eight you begin to lapse into a kind of dream state, wondering if what you just said was something you had said to the same person ten minutes ago; or was that said to the previous host? Maybe he is the one you said it twice to? Or do you think you just said it now but in fact only thought it?

  You want to go back to bed.

  Not every aspect of the thing is that bad, of course. It’s fun for me to go on other folks’ talk shows. When you’ve endured the ups and downs and tensions and pitfalls of hosting, being a guest is a piece of angel food.

  And should it go badly, it’s not your show.

  And you must remind yourself that television sells books. In my day, I made a goodly number of overnight bestsellers of other people’s books. It’s a sort of scary experience in a way, partly because you can’t help thinking how many deserving books might have achieved bestsellerdom if they’d gotten the chance.

  In many worthy cases the TV boost helped overcome the notorious skills of publishers at killing book sales for the author.

  A favorite publishing technique for ruining years of hard work is to fumble getting the book into stores until after its limited “shelf life” has expired and it’s all too late—and the maddened author wishes to assemble a Molotov cocktail and …

  (Should the idea of a major publishing house seemingly forgetting to put a book in bookstores until too late seem far-fetched, there’s a way you can verify this: ask anybody.)

  Way back I learned that some enterprising entrepreneurs were offering a service teaching how to plug your book on TV. I had on my show one of their graduates, apparently, who had gone a little overboard on one piece of advice. See if you can guess what it was:

  Mr. Cavett, when I conceived of my book Misadventure [let’s call it] I thought, I want Misadventure to be different. I want people to say, I bought Misadventure because Misadventure sounds like the kind of book … etc.

  Have you guessed? Somewhere near the dozenth chiming of the title, the audience began to make a sort of audible wince. I let it go and moved on to one more guest, but in thanking the guests and bringing the show to a close I allowed myself a minor pleasure. I thanked the author and added, “Did I give you a chance to mention the title of your book?”

  The burst of laughter seasoned with scattered applause caused me momentary guilt. It soon passed.

  In turning a collection of earlier columns into a book it was necessary to read through them all again, something I might never otherwise have done. I’m glad it happened, because there were quite a few surprises. I’m almost afraid to ask other writers if they, too, have found themselves surprised when doing this at how many things were themselves surprises. The first time you come across a passage that is as new to you as if its author were someone else, it’s a bit unsettling. “I don’t remember having that thought” is, well, a strange thought.

  On the other side of the coin, there are the ones that make you cringe, seeing them now, as you realize what a much better wording would have been.

  Faithful readers may forgive me here for repeating that invaluable quote from Mark Twain: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

  The delightful side of the coin (we’re dealing with a multisided coin here) is the passage that makes you howl with laughter, again with that sense of seeing it for the first time and wondering who could have written it.

  I don’t feel guilty confessing to howling at my own humor, having once asked the great S. J. Perelman if he ever did so upon rereading himself.

  “Heavens to Betsy, yes,” said that genius, lapidary wordsmith. “Sometimes I find myself re-perusing a paragraph from former times and rolling over and over on the floor with laughter, marveling at the intricacy of the mind that wrought such gems.”

  Before getting ready for the next plugola session, let me toss in a special item.

  Gratified at how many loved the Kaufman / Fisher column, I here offer again, all too briefly, the great playwright and director (and Groucho’s personal god) George S. Kaufman.

  Again, the setting is that same variety / panel show This Is Show Business.

  A rather aggressive borscht circuit comic, vastly contrasting in style from G.S.K., came on the show to perform and plug his new book. Ill-advisedly, while facing the panel, he decided to match wits with the master. Let’s call the boisterous comic “Danny.”

  Danny: So how’d you like my book, Mr. Kaufman?

  Kaufman: I enjoyed it very much.

  Danny: No kiddin’. Who read it to you?

  Kaufman: The same person who wrote it for you.

  NOVEMBER 12, 2010

  Lennon’s Return

  When I entered their room, bed is where the Lennons were.

  I’m afraid that that sentence seems to promise more than will be delivered. Let’s come back to it.

  The buzz was all over town. The Lennons—yes, those two—had agreed to come on the Cavett show.

  In truth, they had all but fully agreed to. As a condition, they’d asked that we meet before they said a final yes; presumably as a test for possible incompatibility. There proved to be, mercifully, anything but.

  Had they not done the show I would have been sorry, of course, to miss enjoying the envy of all the shows that didn’t get them first. Or at all.

  Yoko was sweet and cordial, and John and I got on instantly. He was too complex a man to be described in a few
adjectives, but one of them would have to be “accessible.” He was easy and comfortable immediately, and I’m sorry I can only recall a single example of the sort of relaxed banter we exchanged from the start.

  He said, “I guess the reason we feel we’d like to do this is that you have the only halfway intelligent talk show on television.”

  “Are you sure you want to be on a show that’s halfway intelligent?” I ventured.

  John laughed. Then he put me in a movie.

  I stood against a wall with several other people and we simulated passing a whispered joke from right to left. I’m not sure what the joke was, but I’m told it did end up in the film. No other immediate movie offers poured in.

  John said that just before I got there they had filmed a dream sequence there in the hotel room in which Yoko imagines she is dancing with Fred Astaire. Yoko played herself and the male part was played by Fred Astaire. (They had run into him in the lobby.)

  Now, about that bed. They were not so much in bed as on bed. This was at the St. Regis Hotel.

  It was such a vast specimen that I wondered if they had had it specially constructed to be bigger than king-sized. (Kingdom-sized?) Its half acre of surface seemed to serve as their work area. Various notebooks and papers and odd objects and drawing pads and projects populated its surface. There must have been another bed somewhere in the regal suite for mere sleeping.

  They did the show. Twice, in fact. The first show was a smash, getting better as it went along. They were nervous at first, evidenced by their killing half a pack of Viceroys between them in the first few segments, settling down gradually into what proved a delightful and increasingly smoke-free ninety minutes.

  Later, I ended up testifying on John’s behalf when the Nixon White House was trying to have him deported.

  But I didn’t see much of the Lennons between those shows and John’s awful death.

  John and I exchanged a few letters, his in an entertaining and distinctly Joycean style. I tried to find them for a quote here. My optimistic view is that I have only misplaced them.