Brief Encounters

by Dick Cavett

  Later, I seriously wondered what they might have charged me with. Impersonating a father?

  I emerged from the booth in a mental state that combined both disbelief and a kind of foolish pride at the apparent success of my fourth acting role of the day. Then I went back in the booth and squandered another nickel, passing the good news to Tom to tell the other guys.

  For a couple of days I had some doubts that this stunt had worked. But apparently it had. The sense of relief was indescribable. Guilt is not a desirable companion, and a particularly unpleasant bedfellow. The sky was open again.

  It’s unlikely that officer still lives and breathes. Something in me, over the years, wanted to call him and confess the whole charade. But I never did. I wish to hell I had.

  Is it a bit hard for you to believe this youthful ruse, born of pain and desperation?

  And what would an ethicist say?

  MARCH 11, 2011

  My Liz: The Fantasy

  The setting is the Starlight Roof, or whatever it is or was called, at the top of what to me will always be “the RCA Building”; just as the MetLife Building remains “the Pan Am Building.” (I resist all alterations to my adopted city.)

  The scene is some sort of upscale fancy dinner party up there in the sky—sometime in the late eighties?—and I’m in the spotlight doing my trophy-winning rope routine from my old magic act, just as I’ve done it countless times since learning it from a master magician in my high school days. (Two-fifths of it could be seen for a while on YouTube, on Jimmy Fallon’s show. The segment ran out of time and I owe Jimmy three-fifths of the classic “George Sands Rope Routine.”)

  Back to the party. At the point of completing one cut and restoration, I would toss the rope into the audience to lure the person who catches it up to the stage to do the rest of the cuttings, with me miraculously restoring the rope each time to astonished gasps and applause.

  That night, about halfway back among the dimly lit diners, I’d glimpsed a female figure who, in the near-darkness, could almost have passed for Elizabeth Taylor, if you squinted.

  In a merry jest, something made me say, “I’ve done this trick a hundred times and I keep having this fantasy that some day the person who comes up and helps me will be some famous, luminous movie star. Like Elizabeth Taylor.”

  Just before tossing the rope out front, I detected movement in the dark. I could see a striking apparition in white, gliding smoothly like a Rose Bowl float toward the floor-level stage.

  It was.

  And it was true what’s been said so often. Her beauty would take your breath away.

  (Better, I guess, than if her breath would take your beauty away.)

  I’d love to know the technical explanation of a strange phenomenon. First gazing upon that sublimely gorgeous face, you were struck by the fact that she was even more beautiful in person. Yes, the camera and screen did not—and how silly it sounds to say—do Elizabeth Taylor justice.

  Looking at each other, I could feel palpitation. (Mine, of course.)

  Suddenly I was all thumbs, but figured she was probably used to having that effect, and that relaxed me. Some.

  What was nice about her was that she seemed to be genuinely enjoying the moment, fascinated by the trick and earnestly and conscientiously following my instructions. A less classy celebrity might have clowned and tried to screw me up.

  Then I said something I regretted.

  On about the fourth cut-and-restore, she had some trouble severing the rope and I heard myself say, “You can cut it, Miss Taylor. Just think of it as the marital bond.” She was so concentrated I hoped she might have missed it.

  There was a noticeable murmur of disapproval from a few, but before I had completed a wince, thanks to whatever gods may be, she laughed.

  Heartily is hardly the word. The Taylor laugh wasn’t just any laugh; certainly not that of a refined lady. She gave out with the great full-throated guffaw known to her friends. It was a robust and delightfully bawdy thing, more appropriate to a stevedore than a beauty.

  The renowned Liz Laugh was surely part of what endeared her to crews and stagehands, with whom she liked to exchange ribald humor the way Carole Lombard did, both of them reportedly preferring to hang out with “the workers”—the folk Joan Crawford graciously referred to when accepting an Oscar as “the little people behind the scenes”—rather than with their illustrious colleagues.

  My late wife, the actress Carrie Nye, made a dreadful movie called Divorce His, Divorce Hers with the Burtons in 1973. She was a gifted writer, and when she got back from Germany—where the movie was made for some Burton-related tax reasons—she penned, for friends’ amusement, a comic piece called “Making It in Munich.” It’s laugh-out-loud funny.

  My friend Chris Porterfield read it and passed it to Henry Grunwald, then the top editor at Time, who said, “This goes in the next issue.” Time introduced the piece by saying that Miss Nye had appeared with the glam pair in the two-part movie, adding that, “incredibly,” it was about to be rebroadcast.

  Carrie Nye was especially pleased when Gore Vidal called with praise, complaining, “I can’t get things Time asks me to write into the magazine and you get in without trying.”

  She liked both Burtons, saying she felt sorry for Elizabeth and that, being from the South, she knew the problems of women married to alcoholics. We never knew if either of them read “Making It in Munich.” The piece’s humor derived from such matters as the director’s awful dilemmas, like the fact that by the time Liz got to the studio, Richard would be too drunk to continue work, while her own hearty imbibing disqualified her by the time he sobered up. A dilemma because they had scenes together and simultaneous sobriety was rare. I think my favorite line was about the beleaguered director, “who was 4 ft. 11 in. tall, or at least he was when we began.”

  At the risk of a sudden change of tone, you can be sure that legions envied them their fabulous, in the true sense of the word, lives. (For astonishing details, see the page-turner book Furious Love.)

  Think how many folks would say they’d trade their own dreary lives in an instant to have been one of Those Two. The glamour, the celebrity, the adoring (and often life-and-limb-threatening) throngs, the caviar and champagne, the travel, the passel of dogs and children hauled along, the sex, the yachts, the mansions and castles and whole floors of hotels, the walnut-sized diamonds and rubies …

  But before making that somewhat Mephistophelean bargain, I would caution those who’d readily shed their own drab existence to be Liz or Dick to think twice. You’re talking about a woman plagued all her life with ten people’s medical horrors, heroically endured. He, too, had awful illnesses, some not publicly known. Like hemophilia and epilepsy.

  We’re also talking about two greatly gifted people, of course. Also about two drunks, constant smokers, spouse dumpers, and pill takers, reckless with their health and often with their careers; with Richard—who at one point would put away three bottles of vodka a day—dead in his fifties.

  I feel lucky to have crossed paths with them. She was wonderful and he was wonderful.

  To envy them you have to be nuts.

  MARCH 25, 2011

  In Defense of Offense

  Brief dialogue:

  Network executive: We’re afraid some viewers might be offended.

  D.C.: So?

  Thus began, with my shocking impertinence, my first lesson in network nervousness.

  It couldn’t have come at a more discouraging time. I had just finished taping my very first show on ABC.

  I was proud of the lineup of guests I had managed to snare for the scary maiden voyage on the stormy seas of hosting a ninety-minute talk show. The guests booked were three distinct personalities. What is known in the talk show game as “a good mix.” Muhammad Ali, Angela Lansbury, and Gore Vidal.

  The talk was brisk and lively and there was much gratifying laughter from the studio audience. I came offstage relieved not to be dripping flop sweat and delighted to
have the first one down and at having it go so well.

  I expected a cheery slap on the back from the network man, and more or less got it. Only it was applied elsewhere.

  “Nobody gives a goddamn what Muhammad Ali and Gore Vidal think about the Vietnam war.”

  Shock preceded anger.

  Hadn’t I done what I was supposed to do? Booked remarkable guests, kept the conversational ball in the air, and entertained the viewers?

  Apparently not.

  I asked what it was about the show I had just done that the network could be worried about.

  “We just don’t want to offend anyone,” he said to my wondering ears. So that was it. Someone somewhere might be offended.

  I’ve never quite understood why this word—“offended”—is so horrifying. What doesn’t offend somebody? And who wants to see, read, or write anything that is simon-pure in its inability to offend those dreaded “someones”?

  “What could be more offensive than an offense-free show?” I sincerely inquired of the network suit.

  That was considered offensive.

  My favorite first dose of offended reaction is one I may have reported here before. It came from an apparently ruffled resident of Waco, Texas. My secretary was reluctant to show it to me. Hand-printed in pencil and all in caps, it read: DEAR DICK CAVETT YOU LITTLE SAWED OFF FAGGOT COMMUNIST SHRIMP.

  A lot of thought went into that.

  Untypically, there was a return address and I shot right back, “I am not sawed-off.”

  Anyone working in the media can tell you that there seems to be an always-ready-to-explode segment of the populace for whom offense is a fate worse than anything imaginable. You’d think offense is one of the most calamitous things that could happen to a human being; right up there with the loss of a limb, or just missing a parking space.

  What is our obligation to the offendees? To help them limit their suffering by avoiding all offense? With what advice?

  You could stay in the house, watch no TV, read nothing of any kind including potentially upsetting snail mail or e-mail, and you just might manage to glide through an offense-free day. No surly neighbor, no near misses by unpunished, demented, sidewalk-riding cyclists, no cabdriver letting other cabs in ahead of yours while distractedly nattering on his phone in no known language. Stay cocooned and you will risk no insults from rude waiters, no pain from gruff clerks, no snarls from any employees of United Airlines.

  “What sort of thing offends you, Mr. Cavett?” an interviewer asked me recently. “In other words, what to you is politically incorrect?”

  “Anything that is politically correct.”

  Such as?

  Well, the infantilism of the phrase “the n word,” for example, and of those of less than fully formed cerebral development who have bowdlerized Mark Twain’s masterpiece because of the references to Huck’s beloved friend Jim as a “nigger,” in the authentic vernacular of the time. I hate to spoil the fun of the benighted and alleged educators who have even pulled this great book from the school shelves, but Jim is the moral center of the story.

  Presumably those same people would deny students the pleasure of Joseph Conrad’s The [what? “Person of Color”?] of the “Narcissus.” Why endow a word everyone knows with such majestic power that, like Yahweh of the Old Testament, it cannot be uttered?

  A current example of offense ready to spring is the reaction of some to Julian Schnabel’s remarkable and stirring new movie, Miral. Anything set in the always simmering Middle East is going to be a lightning rod. But the nay-saying here is upsetting.

  Taken from Rula Jebreal’s excellent novel of the same name, much of the expressed heavy criticism of it is all wrong. The movie has had rained upon it the ire of the offense brigade. (Embarrassingly, some prominent Jewish organizations have not felt the need to see it in order to denounce it. Others, though, have praised it.)

  Those who take Miral as an out-and-out political screed don’t seem to get it. It’s a dramatic rendering of the life of a girl caught up in a troubled world of violent passions. Not, as some fevered detractors have seen it, a venomous assault on Israel.

  I have at least two sets of friends who’ve announced that they are definitely not going to see the movie.

  I was taken aback. “Shouldn’t you have seen the movie in order to be able to say that?” I said, jesting partially, inspired perhaps by Mark Twain’s opinion that three specific literary scholars who lavishly praised James Fenimore Cooper’s writing might have done well to read some of it.

  As to Miral, I suggest you see it.

  How sad when art is viewed through a dreary political lens. In a world with a better grip on itself, the proper reaction to Schnabel’s and Jebreal’s touching movie would be, “What a hell of a good story!”

  I hope that doesn’t hurt anyone’s feelings.

  APRIL 15, 2011

  The Week That Was

  This is not the column I was going to write, but because of the recent days of relentless saturation—and I don’t mean by or about the Mississippi River—whatever I try to type, my fingers, unbidden, produce the letters “Osama bin” etc.

  Will the day ever come when we will find it hard to recall his name?

  My first unwholesome thought was, “I hope he knew he was being killed.” And not, say, shot in the head from behind while thinking pleasant thoughts, or enjoying a Nestlé’s, and so going bye-bye without ever realizing that his goose was well done.

  Did he cry out? Try for a gun? Utter anything?

  And if he heard gunfire downstairs, why didn’t he have a gun to hand? We know from that old piece of stock footage we’re all heartily sick of that he can fire one.

  Reaction has been all over the psychological map: somber, gleeful, humorous, nitpicky, and with plenty of food for lunatic obsessions.

  On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart wittily showcased what will easily win the trophy in the “All-Time Dumbest Remarks by a Politician” category. We’re treated to seeing former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf defensively insist that had his country been complicit in hiding bin Laden, they would not have been dumb enough to put him in so prominent and discoverable a place. It required but a portion of the Stewart astuteness to illuminate the point: “So the ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] is way too smart to put bin Laden in such an obvious place, but far too clueless to know he was there.”

  Stewart followed this by showing a clip of the same hapless gent guesting on the show several years ago. Jon greets Musharraf with great civility, politely offers him a cup of tea from his native land, and begins, genially, “Where’s Osama bin Laden?” There should be some sort of award for that.

  I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a word in German for having but two choices, both disastrous. Our weak “dilemma” isn’t up to the job. I’m thinking, of course, of Pakistan’s uncomfortable choice of being either a fool or a knave. Either (a) they sheltered bin Laden or (b) they were too incompetent to detect him. (Could someone closer to school days than I identify this as, perhaps, Logic 101’s “law of excluded middle”?)

  I’m surprised no one has suggested a second raid on Pakistan, this time with an Airbus to extract some of the billions of dollars we have sunk into this sinkhole. (I don’t mean to offend.)

  Eight feet to my right on TV it’s being announced that an angry Pakistan is threatening to cut off future intelligence sharing with the United States. Who at Comedy Central is writing their stuff? More intelligence from the crack apparatus that gave us the hit song “I Wonder Who Lives in That Mansion.”

  I keep looking back at one photo. What, as distinct from what we are told, was that group of fascinated viewers in the White House Situation Room, watching the thing go down with such rapt expressions, actually watching? Was Hillary Clinton, covering her mouth, witnessing (as they say in the porno film business) “the money shot”?

  Will commentators ever tire of irritating clichés like “laid their lives on the line” and “willing to die for the cause
” and “ready to sacrifice their lives for our security”? Wouldn’t it be refreshing to hear one of the heroic SEALs say, “Thanks for the praise, but like hell I was willing to die. I was there to stay alive and get the goddamn job done. Dead, I’m of limited use to my buddies. And my family.”

  And has political correctness struck here already? Headlines along the lines of NATIVE AMERICANS ANGERED BY “GERONIMO” have appeared. As a sort of honorary American Indian (adopted in both Sioux and Crow ceremonies), I’m surprised I wasn’t offended. But it never occurred to naïve me that giving bin Laden the code name “Geronimo” in this cleanly executed raid wasn’t in fact homage to the brave Chiricahua Apache so adept at raiding and killing his enemies—those Mexican and U.S. troops who had killed his wife, children, and people.

  (To a man, my Indian friends deplore that PC, euphemistic, illogical, stillborn label “Native American.” My friend John Running Hawk: “All my life we’ve been ‘Indian people.’ Now they’re telling Indian people we aren’t even Indians.”)

  One reporting highlight: Brian Williams rephrasing his question a third time before getting Leon Panetta to admit that waterboarding was involved. (Pass this technique on to some colleagues, Brian.)

  At times like this I wish I were back in my old Socratic-style humanist philosopher Paul Weiss’s class at Yale, seeing his lightning mind and mouth fire questions and field them from his charges. The air would be thick with provokers like Is there such a thing as a purely evil act? What does it mean to forgive? Is the sacrifice of something of infinite value—a human life—ever justified for a possible good outcome? Can you call anything justice without due process? Do we want young people taught that execution without trial can be called justice? And by a president who is a constitutional scholar? When is it okay to shoot an unarmed man? Would offering him a gun make it moral? Is torture ever justified? Particularly when it yields so much destructively false information?