Brief Encounters

by Dick Cavett

  But our goofy enthusiasm for an assault on poor old Bryan grew. Fortunately, we had no access to dynamite or nitroglycerine. We settled on a less violent course.

  Whitewash.

  We agreed on a night. There were but three malefactors in the car. Henkle and Breslow had to miss our D-Day for some kind of graduation ceremony, I think it was. But we had set our date and seemed possessed with some sort of near-fanaticism so gripping that, probably, like Macbeth’s hired murderers (paraphrasing), our spirits shined through us.

  Dickie A. (nod to possible statute of limitations) drove. We pulled up about half a block away from the front of the capitol’s four-hundred-foot tower, irreverently nicknamed by numerous would-be wits “the Penis of the Plains,” with a direct view of the offending Colossus of Bryan.

  Monroe U. supplied the disfiguring liquid. (If the case still had life in it, I’m sure even Inspector Clouseau would be able to discover the probable number of Monroe U.’s in my class.)

  On the night of nights, three of us pulled up about a half block from the front of the building. I can still summon the tingling thrill of sitting there in the car, about to commit our nasty bit of mischief (“crime” seems a bit strong, but then—).

  For a moment, we all sat in a sort of meditative silence. There was only the rustling of the breeze in the elm trees—that wonderful background sound effect that, in memory, still evokes the adventures of summer nights and misdeeds in the delicious dark.

  “Well, let’s get this show on the road!” said Monroe U., and I thought he sounded like John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima.

  The stars and partial moon lent just enough light to make out the figure of Monroe, slinking away in the dark. We could just see him making his way toward the illustrious victim, toting what must have been at least a two-gallon can of a home-brewed, gooey combination of whitewash and real white paint.

  In the dim light, Monroe faded more. Then we could just barely see him crouch below the base of the statue, then straighten.

  Suddenly—seemingly in slow motion—what looked like a beautiful, gleaming, lengthening white ghost rose eerily before the dark figure of Bryan. It glided gracefully upward into the air. And then froze in place.

  In the car, someone taking French said, “Fait accompli.”

  We quickly gathered Monroe and his empty vessel into the car, and I think it’s then we started to get scared. An uneasy night’s sleep followed.

  Arising early, I drove in alone to see our handiwork. Maybe it would be barely noticeable. Or have evaporated to nothing. No such luck.

  The eloquent and pompous orator had been robbed of all dignity. It looked as if, perhaps in mid-declamation, he had vomited on himself.

  Voluminously. Stark white-on-black.

  One vast splotch was at about chest level, with nasty drippings down the coat and trouser legs. Dignity was cruelly besmirched.

  I went and got Marvin, telling him only that I had a surprise for him. I didn’t tell him we had actually done it. We approached the rudely decorated orator and he blurted, “You really did it!”

  As we passed right in front of the spectacle—and I didn’t want to be spotted lingering there too long—what looked like almost life-threatening paroxysms of laughter seized Marvin. We were both in hysterics as he took off his glasses to dab tears.

  We hadn’t anticipated the next surprise. We stopped at the Cornhusker Hotel for coffee and there it was on the newsstand. The early-bird edition of the Lincoln Journal, front page, upper-right corner. A good-sized picture of our handiwork with the caption “Bryan Sloshed.”

  I’ve lost my beloved copy. If the now-named Lincoln Journal Star can find it, I’ll pass it on, perhaps in my next confession from my criminal past.

  Under the caption, it went on to say (more or less, if memory serves), “Early risers on their way to church services were greeted by a startling sight. Vandals had been at work. The controversial statue of William Jennings Bryan had been sloshed with white paint.” Etc.

  It was starting to get scary. Thoughts of our parents intruded on the fun, and mine were teachers in the Lincoln school system.

  But, happily, the tale pretty much dwindles away here. We were not caught. (Unless we are now.) There was one chilling moment at school when someone not connected to the thing whispered, passing in the hall, “Nice going,” causing me to recall the Wordsworth line, “Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy.” Lincoln High Schoolers from back then still ask me if I had anything to do with it.

  Lest you worry about me and my flawed character, I’m not what you would call proud of this dumb prank.

  But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

  Poor old Willy Bryan’s frock coat and trousers and shoes and pedestal were cleansed, and after a while he was no longer there at all.

  What a distant world it is from today’s, in which kids don’t slosh statues, they hack computers. We’re probably lucky that in those primitive times, before even the electric typewriter, there was no possible e-mail trail for our prosecutable stunt.

  Am I foolish to feel glad I was a kid then, rather than now? The “now” when a sixteen-year-old recently said to me, “I doubt that any of my friends and I have ever seen a black-and-white movie.”

  There’s a singular aftermath.

  Years later, on one of my weekend theater-district-haunting trips down from Yale (all the real men spent their weekends at Smith or Vassar), there, coming out of a restaurant, was the wonderful actor Ed Begley (Sr.).

  I’d just seen him as the loudmouth bigot in the film Twelve Angry Men. Suddenly, I had a strange, momentary urge that I couldn’t explain: the urge to apologize to him for something. And then the sensation clarified, explaining why I didn’t, in my usual manner, walk up and meet him.

  I had seen him a year earlier on Broadway with Paul Muni in Inherit the Wind.

  He had played the William Jennings Bryan role.

  JULY 8, 2011

  Sorry, W.J.B., to Bring This Up Again

  You—collectively, and perhaps you specifically—delighted me with your thoughtful and articulate responses to my confessional column involving the William Jennings Bryan jape committed by me and my rascally friends.

  It always fascinates me when your replies range widely among delighted glee, reported laughs out loud, puzzlement, prim disapproval, outright excoriation, and those from readers willing to throw themselves between me and the snarls of the e-mailer “spikethedog.”

  At least I can fulfill a promise. You may have already noted, below, the photo I hoped last time I might be able to unearth to verify the lamentable deed. (A few suggested I had made the whole thing up, which, if true, would now include an ingenious bit of Photoshopping.)

  Anyway, it appears on the following page, thanks to the well-run archives of the Lincoln (Neb.) Journal Star.

  Marv Breslow, whom you met in the original column, and I are both recovering from the shared realization that we are the only remaining survivors of the dubious project.

  Our reactions were various. We were both pleased that our lamented buddy-in-crime, the late Roger Henkle, who went on to better use of his fine mind at Harvard, was touchingly recognized by name by surprised and admiring former students of his at Brown.

  Others deserving a place on this somewhat-less-than-honorable-mention list were Dickie Andrews, who went into, ironically, the law, and the only one of us who could supply the necessary parents’ car; Charles Beans (Lincoln High School–mate, then Princeton), who had to attend a prom but financed the paint expenditure; and Monroe Usher, the only one of us with the apparent strength, coordination, and physical adroitness to accomplish the “delivery” of the viscous white substance, which the photo shows was voluminous and must have weighed half a ton.

  Both Marv and I were shocked at the photo. Neither of us remembered anywhere near accurately how much paint was really dispatched Bryanward, thinking it had been more like one big blotch on the Great Commoner’s co
at.

  Not something that looked as though he had collided with a tank truck of the gleaming substance.

  What I didn’t misreport last time was that, driving by and viewing our handiwork clearly for the first time in broad daylight the following sunny morning, I had to pull over and park the car because further driving would have been hazardous to our health, so helplessly dissolved in boyish laughter were we.

  A few readers, deploring the escapade, wondered if it ever occurred to my allegedly bright mind back then what some of the consequences might have been if we’d been caught. Shamefully, it hadn’t until just about now.

  My wife, Martha, although entertained by the story, chilled me with “There would have been no Yale.”

  Yikes!

  Everything in my life after high school until today stems from the Yale scholarship, the unexpected thing that got me to the world of my dreams and yearnings: the east, New York, theater, showbiz, television, everything I was sure, then, I wanted. (And just think. You would be reading someone else right now. A disturbing thought. But at least it wouldn’t be News of the World.)

  But would arrest have spelled calamity for all of us? Meaning, would the University of Nebraska and Yale and in fact all of our respective schools have taken the fatal view of this blot on our record? A few readers assure me that that would certainly happen with today’s schools and in these times—with schoolkids pleading for the erasure from their record of even a minor infraction that would doom any chance at college for them.

  Was it always thus? Or were we lucky to have lived in a more relaxed, lenient, less disapproving time, when college admission was not cutthroat? Marvin was smart enough, he now admits, to have worried about this at the time. I, not so much.

  Who knows? Suppose we had been pinched by John Law. Instead of passing on into the glory days of college, we might both have found ourselves flipping hamburgers at KenEddy’s Drive-in, out on O Street in Lincoln. And then gone on to lesser things.

  Before kissing this subject good-bye (as some of you have done to me for telling this story), I have one other chore.

  Should there, to my surprise, prove to be a hereafter, I might be wise to work up and have handy a couple of things to say, just in case I run into, in the Sweet By and By, the imposing (statuesque?) figure of W.J.B. himself standing before me. I’ll need something to say when he casts a steely gaze upon me and intones, “Well, young Mr. Cavett!”

  (I will not bring up the subject of his cleaning bills.)

  JULY 29, 2011

  Flying? Increasingly for the Birds

  “I’ll be passing the back of my hand over your buttocks and then come up the insides of your legs up toward the private parts. Is that okay?”

  “Sounds peachy to me,” I knew not to say. You’re not supposed to joke with airport security, as people have learned the hard way.

  This makes sense, but as with so much about airport security—or as someone has called it, “Security Theater”—it seems a bit silly. Are terrorists known for their tendency to joke? (Is there a paperback called Jokes for Jihadists?)

  When you refuse, as I do, to be ordered into the big scanner with its “safe” amount of X-ray, you are made to feel like a wimp and told to “Stand over there!” And over there—with maybe one or two others who have also noted that whatever X-rays you are urged to get in life are invariably “safe”—you stand, a little ashamed, waiting until the patter gets back from the toilet.

  On a recent patting (and the patters, I should say, are a nice lot, picked perhaps for their demeanor), the description “toward the private parts” had a grain of inaccuracy. The rising hands didn’t stop short, causing a slight “ow” on my part. “Sorry” was delivered feelingly (no pun intended).

  Another time, after having been felt up in public, I fell into a pleasant chat with the man with the businesslike hands. He’d recognized me, and there were no other pattees waiting.

  I asked, “What sort of jokes are you tiredest of by the one patted?”

  “Oh, you can probably guess,” my guy said cheerfully.

  “Something like ‘Hey, cute stuff, whatcha doin’ after the show?’” I guessed.

  “You got it.”

  “Any of the would-be humorists ask what sort of man would seek a job patting other men?”

  “You got it again.”

  “How are you supposed to behave in the face of such wit?”

  “Smile and keep patting.”

  I’m sure no professional patter lives in fear that an accumulation of such microerotic experiences will endanger his orientation. Or the passenger’s.

  As you know, if you endure the increasingly dismal experience of flying, some airports are markedly better than others.

  Detroit Metro Airport deserves a valentine.

  My wife, a million-miler out of Detroit from years lived in Ohio, views it as an oasis. The employees seem to have been picked for their helpfulness. And you never stand in a line that seems to stretch to the horizon while additional lanes are closed for no apparent reason. (Saving money with fewer employees?)

  And the security is just plain better. They find things other places don’t. A friend states, “I’m horrified at stuff I mistakenly put in my carry-on. And it’s been missed everywhere. Except Detroit.”

  In my case, a lethal-looking metal letter opener stuck to the lining of my carry-on bag had passed undiscovered at various less diligent airports by who knows how many previous “inspectors.” In Detroit it was rightly seized; but seized in a nice, unnecessarily apologetic—but professional—manner, rather than with that cold air of enjoyed power so often seen in the airport worker. Bringing to mind Shakespeare’s “Dress’d in a little, brief authority.”

  A chilling note: Another affable patter in another major city, when I asked him if anyone was still dumb enough to try to get bad stuff through security, said, “Mr. Cavett, you’d be amazed at how many guns we get this way.” I gulped and asked what would be happening to me now if I had one. “See that guy at the coffee counter? He’s a cop. I raise my hand and next thing you know you’re wearing his bracelets. You go away for a good long time.” “Thanks,” I said, too stunned to ask who those reckless heat toters were. From his manner it was clear they weren’t merely licensed gun carriers who wear them all the time and just forgot.

  Another thing about Detroit: they don’t run out of those plastic tubs so you stand around in your stockings until a new load eventually arrives, apparently from another state.

  Why should there be such a contrast between flying from Detroit and, say, from that bad dream posing as an airport, grubby LaGuardia?

  Is there a director of some special genius behind the Detroit operation? If so, would that person please publish his secrets in a book and pass it around?

  At LaGuardia, my wife, the seasoned traveler, dutifully presented the see-through plastic bag containing a few small bottles of the approved size containing liquid. One was seized. It contained something she valued. Pointing out that it was regulation size, she got, “It ain’t labeled, lady.”

  Supposing whatever possibly dangerous substance it contained had, say, “olive oil” written on it, I inquired, then would it be okay?

  “Yes.”

  “Do you see anything a little stupid about that?” I asked in my sunniest manner. He appeared not to. He dropped the bottle into the barrel beside him.

  “One more question. Do you ever feel a little funny about standing eight inches from a barrel full of possible explosives for the rest of the day?”

  He went into that mode of looking into the distance instead of at you. I leaned into his gaze, just for fun.

  “Move on,” he sort of belched.

  Security Theater. That funhouse, LaGuardia.

  AUGUST 19, 2011

  The Great Melvino, or Our Mr. Brooks

  Have you, perchance, decided—as I have—not to spend the weekend re-wallowing in 9/11 with the media? Aside from allowing Saint Rudolph, former tenant of Graci
e Mansion, to trumpet once again his self-inflated heroism on that nightmare day, the worst feature of this relentlessly repeated carnival of bitter sights and memories is that it glamorizes the terrorists.

  How they must enjoy tuning in to our festival of their spectacular accomplishments, cheering when the second plane hits and high-fiving when the falling towers are given full-color international showcasing for the tenth time.

  Who wants this? Surveys show people want to forget it, or at least not have it thrust down their throats from all over the dial annually. It can’t have to do with that nauseating buzzword “closure.” There is no closure to great tragedies. Ask the woman on a call-in show who said how she resents all this ballyhooing every year of the worst day of her life: “My mother died there that day. I’m forced to go through her funeral again every year.”

  Is all this stuff a ratings bonanza? Who in the media could be that heartless?

  Let’s turn from tragedy to a somewhat lighter subject—say, comedy.

  Years and years ago, when I was writing for Johnny Carson during the day, I was moonlighting (with permission) after sunset, beginning the fretful route to hoped-for comedy stardom in the prescribed starting place in those days: clubs and coffeehouses in Greenwich Village.

  My manager, the great Jack Rollins, brought a woman from a big ad agency to catch my act at the Bitter End. I was beginning to develop some skill at ad-libbing, and my dealing with a heckler impressed her.

  That’s how, a few days later, I found myself in a recording studio across a table from—yikes!—Mel Brooks. I knew the name from his writer credit on Your Show of Shows, where, still mute and inglorious behind the scenes, Mel once had Carl Reiner ask Sid Caesar’s German professor character what to do if your rope breaks while mountain climbing.

  First he recommends, “Scream and keep screaming all the way down … this way they’ll know where to find you.”

  Carl asks if there’s maybe anything else you can do.

  Caesar: Well, there’s the other method. As soon as the rope breaks, you spread your arms and begin to fly.