Brief Encounters

by Dick Cavett

  Reiner: But humans can’t fly.

  Caesar: How do you know? You might be the first one. Anyway, you can always go back to screaming.

  (This and much like it can be found in Ted Sennett’s book Your Show of Shows.)

  But I, and others, knew Mel big-time from the bestselling comedy album, The 2,000-Year-Old Man.

  Ballantine Beer, starting a new commercial campaign, had hired Mel to be “the 2,500-Year-Old Brewmaster.” They needed a Carl Reiner stand-in to interview the old gent, whose voice resembled, not entirely coincidentally, the 2,000-year-old man’s.

  I’ve never had more fun.

  First, I stood around nervously. Then Mel Brooks himself walked into the studio. He eyed my slight, twentyish self with suspicion. “Spectacularly gentile!” he observed. We’ve been friends ever since.

  There was not a word of script. The ad agency guy directing our sessions urged, “Just hit Mel with anything that comes to mind, the way Carl does. He’s best when he doesn’t know what’s coming.”

  I played an eager young interviewer, bringing his hand mike to the old man’s cave and peppering him with questions, challenges, skepticism, and, once, mock hurt feelings, asking,

  D.C.: Why are you rude to me, sir?

  M.B.: Why are you wearing a cardboard belt?

  Example of a challenge:

  D.C.: Sir, I don’t think you’ve ever actually tasted the beer we’re selling. Do so now.

  M.B.: All right, Fluffy. (Sipping sound: voop! voop!)

  D.C.: How would you put it, sir?

  M.B.: My tongue just threw a party for my mouth!

  I could never corner Mel. God knows I tried. I sat there and watched him go comic-mad before my wondering eyes, scoring every time he opened his mouth.

  There was no dross. The first session went three hours, at the end of which both of us were exhausted but high.

  Once an engineer in the control room laughed so hard he fell against the recording equipment and it had to be reset. Mel broke me up in such helpless laughter, and so many times, that the agency was forced—or someone was hip enough—to leave some of my laughter in. I’ve seen this faked, but it was obvious that I was genuinely convulsed by my partner.

  If the raw, unedited tapes from which the commercials were cut are not preserved somewhere, it’s comparable as a cultural loss to the burning of the library at Alexandria.

  The commercials were loved. The agency said it had never gotten such a volume of fan mail as poured in from people mad for them, demanding to know when they were scheduled so as not to miss any. Men told their wives to listen all day and record them.

  I decided I could soon retire, thanks to the storm of residual checks that jammed my mailbox.

  But there was a problem.

  The product was not equally adored. I was shown a letter from one fan: “I don’t know how long I can afford picking up six-packs of Ballantine to keep those commercials on the air. It tastes like piss.”

  Soon, alas, the brewmaster and his young quizzer / tormentor were out of work. There are those who contrived to somehow collect the commercials. (They’re on a DVD Mel and Carl put out for Shout! Factory.)

  Happily, this greatly gifted man and I have been reunited. On HBO you can now catch a hilarious hour (yes, I do say so) called Mel Brooks and Dick Cavett Together Again.

  It was an evening of seemingly nonstop laughter that we did together in a grand and glorious old theater in Los Angeles earlier this year. Mel had the wit to have it recorded.

  A moment I’ll never forget: standing backstage at the fifteen-hundred-seat showplace before we went on, I don’t think either of us was full of confidence. Mel’s in his eighties, and when I looked at him standing there with just a hint of a stoop, I thought, at this point in his life he may really need this to go well.

  Suddenly, we were introduced from the stage. I looked at Mel. The stoop had vanished. “Hey, this might be fun,” I said. Mel: “Good audience.” I let Mel walk out first, and held for a bit as he was bathed in roaring applause. He dropped a couple of decades. Then I did much the same.

  It was a case of two performers sparking each other. When Mel laughed at me—genuinely, not false breakup—I felt a surge and got better. It worked both ways and, of course, much of that mutual sparking had to do with mutual affection.

  It might be illegal or something for me to quote from the program—though I will say that the conversation and stories ranged from Alfred Hitchcock to Cary Grant to Mel’s theatrical debut—so let me have a free go at your funny bone with an earlier recollection from Mel.

  Years back, I tuned in once just in time to see Mel describing—almost certainly to Johnny Carson—how dismal were his nine months stuck in Yugoslavia shooting The Twelve Chairs. He said you couldn’t really do anything at night “because all of Belgrade is lit by a ten-watt bulb. And you couldn’t go anywhere because Tito had the car.”

  I remember laughing so hard I spilled something.

  He went on to say that the food in Yugoslavia ranged between very good and very bad: “One day we arrived on location late and starving and they served us fried chains. When we got to our hotel room, mosquitoes as big as George Foreman were waiting for us. They were sitting in armchairs with their legs crossed.”

  After our reunion show a woman from the audience said, “I wonder what it would be like to be married to a man like that.”

  The late Anne Bancroft, who was, when asked a similar question had replied, “When he comes home at night and I hear his key in the lock I say to myself, ‘Oh good! The party’s about to begin.’”

  How many of us can claim such a tribute?

  SEPTEMBER 9, 2011

  Tough Sell

  “How does it feel to be Dick Cavett?”

  That’s what he said.

  What a dumb question, I thought. This guy can’t be very bright.

  The “guy” was named Steve Jobs. Turned out he was reasonably bright.

  The odd question was uttered in a posh New York restaurant a few decades ago. I’d been hired, or maybe was about to be hired pending Steve’s approval, to do the first Apple commercials on television. He was a fan of my ABC show and had asked to meet me.

  Herewith, a snippet from Wikipedia:

  Under Steve Hayden’s leadership, Apple hired New York hipster talk show personality Dick Cavett as a spokesman and put Apple commercials on mass-audience television programming.

  Hipster or not, I knew a fair amount about Steve Jobs and the mythic garage story. The garage in which young Steve and his friend Steve Wozniak put together not model airplanes but the prototype of what became that historic object, the Apple computer.

  I was a little sorry Wozniak wasn’t along that day because I’d read that he had lived in a tree. I’m partial to tree dwellers, having as a kid hoped to be one, when my little friend Bob Nelson (we were both little, of course) and I, out of sight of our parents, set to constructing a tree house.

  We wanted ours to be as much as possible like Johnny Weissmuller’s arborial dwelling in the Tarzan movies we worshipped on Saturdays. Our carpentry skills were not advanced. What we ended up with, and had to settle for, was more of a tree platform.

  The major-domo of the forgotten fancy restaurant may have taken Steve himself for a bit of a tree dweller. I can still see his caustic sneer of cold command—sizing up Steve full-length—at what may still be the only pair of jeans ever to inhabit those four elegant walls.

  There was another man with Steve. Memory fails here, but I think it was most likely the great Jay Chiat of Chiat / Day; a jovial class act if there ever was one. In an aside to me he whispered, “Sorry about that question.”

  As with so many times in my life, I wish I’d kept some notes on the dinner conversation. In relative youth we assume we’ll remember everything. Someone should urge the young to think otherwise.

  Among the fragments I recall are a couple of Steve’s wordings in his curiosity about how a talk show was put together. “How mu
ch do you go in with?” is how he put it. “How much is ad-lib? Partially ad-lib? Canned?”

  He laughed when I objected to the word “canned” and suggested he rephrase it to “artfully prepared.”

  Interruption: In line with the French saying l’appétit vient en mangeant (“appetite comes while eating”), memories come back when writing. One minute ago, I didn’t remember the following nice conversational exchange.

  Knowing I was in the presence of genius, and thinking of the dopey edict of motivational positive-thinking charlatans that “you can do anything you want to do if you just put your mind to it,” I wondered if maybe all brains are really alike. Could the right stimulus awaken previously dormant skills in us all? In other words, could I have invented the Apple computer?

  It went this way:

  D.C.: Mr. Jobs, from meeting me, does it seem possible that just the right cerebral spark in my head would have made it possible for me to have developed the Apple computer?

  S.J.: I might have to know you a little longer.

  (Mirth ensues.)

  Un-self-forgivably, I failed to keep up our friendship from those days. Why do we do anything so dumb? (Or, if you don’t, why do I?)

  Our friendship did keep on for a time because I did do the commercials, and each time a new Apple model came out, Steve shipped me one. I’d put it in a closet.

  After this had happened a few times, I got a call from Steve.

  “Dick, a question. If I send you the next one, will you learn to use it?” (How did he know about the closet?)

  “Sure,” I said, wondering if I could. I think I suffered from the same ignorance that still keeps some people I know from getting one. The root word “compute” somehow suggests math, and that was always my scholastic downfall. I thought computers were really only for MIT types, not English majors.

  Steve wised me up on that, sent me the new Macintosh—the white, upright one—and I loved it. In a note of thanks, I spelled the product’s name wrong. Some English major.

  Appalled, I called him to apologize. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “You didn’t spell it wrong. We did.”

  God, how I wish I’d kept in touch. So many subjects I’d love to have talked to him about, imminent death and how to deal with it not the least of them. Picturing Steve, I can still feel the intelligence that shone out from those eyes.

  I had no experience with his reported dark, nasty, tyrannical side. To me he was one of the nice guys who—contrary to the old saying—finished first.

  OCTOBER 21, 2011

  Up Against the Wall

  The scene is a freshman room at Yale, mid-fifties. Four occupants. First week of classes.

  The dialogue:

  “They must be kidding. We’re supposed to go over to the gym and do what?”

  “We all have to go over to the gym and have our pictures taken. Naked.”

  “C’mon. This isn’t Princeton.” (Laughter.)

  “Are you serious about this? Is this April Fools’ Day?”

  Of course it was preposterous.

  It was also true.

  There were several things a Yale freshman was supposed to be able to do. You had to demonstrate in the Olympic-sized Yale pool that you could swim fifty yards or else be inducted into swimming class. (A sore memory: hearing, while panting, “You made it, Cavett, but if you fell in fifty-one yards from shore, you’d drown.”)

  Who’d have guessed that another requisite for being a true-blue Yalie was, strange as it seemed, good posture. Hence the phrase that yet lives in infamy, “the Posture Pictures.”

  Every single member of the freshman class in those days was required to strip for the prying camera. Then they put you up against a graph on the wall and photographed you, front, side, and back. Or as I put it years later in a comedy routine I did about this in my early nightclub act—and in an appearance on the old Merv Griffin Show—“You got three provocative poses.”

  In profile, the subject appeared to have a vertical row of needles sticking out, up and down his spine. In fact, the needles were held in place by adhesive tape and were “non-invasive.” The needles had something to do with the wall graph. There was, in this uncomfortable and decidedly unerotic adventure, no penetration. Mr. Cold Hands, a man whose job it apparently was to affix the needles, pressed the tapes firmly against your bare skin; a bit, I thought, too enthusiastically.

  I remember—as a new comedian—killing ’em on the Griffin show with this subject, and wish I could recall more of my admittedly exaggerated-for-comic-effect punch lines. But it almost doesn’t need any jokes.

  One sequence I can recall went, “Some guys hated it; some seemed to enjoy it. One guy tried to go through twice (reasonable laugh); one guy fainted (sizable laugh); one guy tried to buy his pictures (laugh); and one guy tried to get his retouched (boffo).”

  It was cold in there and I had somehow gotten next to last in line in my group of embarrassed, mother-nekkid shiverers. Turning to say “Wish me luck” to the last guy, behind me, I caused the poor fellow to turn crimson. It was awful for both of us. I had caught him, how to say, making an effort to present a more impressive image for the camera. Blushing, he came up with, “There was some lint on it.”

  Should anyone think this bizarre undertaking was solely the product of the mind of some demented old sod closeted somewhere in the Yale administration, this coerced participation in a soft-porn enterprise was intermural. And Ivy League–wide.

  Of course, the screwball posture pictures practice has been long discontinued, and years ago Harvard announced a total destruction of its boxes of years of photos, as did other schools. And yet diligent journalists have unearthed caches of them over time, still simmering out there.

  Think of those who have risen to prominence in all fields whose sheepish full frontals are, many of them, still findable. Actors, judges, and presidents, husbands and wives of the prominent.

  There are said to be collectors who claim to have prized specimens from the big women’s schools. (Imagine “I’ll trade you a Meryl Streep for a Hillary Clinton.”)

  People are shocked to learn that this was definitely not a boys-only phenomenon. Yes, the young “girls” (as they were still called back then) attending the finest women’s colleges were told to drop their drapery and their drawers and exhibit themselves to the merciless lens.

  Getting just a little serious for a moment, there are some astonishing facts here, one being: nobody protested. I never heard of a single case of anyone at any school saying they flatly refused to participate in this loony, outrageous, forced violation of individual privacy.

  Somehow it isn’t so surprising that guys played along. (A woman once asked me, “Is it true that men parade around naked in front of each other in locker rooms?” She said women didn’t.)

  Is it sexist to think this ordeal may have been more psychologically unpleasant, distressing—even damaging—for young women? Particularly those embarrassed by their less-than-ideal physiques? The awkwardly constructed and the obese?

  According to someone who discovered a surviving cache of the racy pix of the young women of either Smith or Wellesley, many exhibit, by their expressions, combinations of acute discomfort, deep embarrassment, humiliation, and livid anger. But they “went along.”

  But surely not without troubling thoughts about who all gets the treat of ogling these, how many copies are made, what sort of security prevents prankish circulation—and what finally becomes of them.

  I’m sure there are conclusions to be drawn here by deeper thinkers than I about obedience to authority, reluctance to rock boats with protest, etc. People hearing of this crazy caper on the part of major American universities say, “I wouldn’t have stood for this for a second!”

  If that’s true, why did everybody go along back then? Were admissions committees’ principles of selection inadvertently selecting the meek in vast numbers? Were “the times” so different? Woodstock, Hair, and countless plays and movies with the naughty bits on
view were at least a decade in the future. Is that significant here?

  Full disclosure department: I’ve never heard of anyone who saw his own picture. But I did. One of my roommates, Ron Wille, had the dubious honor of having as his scholarship job developing the damned things, and he sneaked me mine, temporarily. In it, I looked cowed. And there was about it a redolence of something greatly unpleasant, not immediately identified, having to do with the stark lighting (and the stark nakedness) and the chart and the pins that, combined, supplied a whiff of—not to get too melodramatic about it—the concentration camp.

  Finally, doesn’t all this vast embarrassment and fuss about a word you stop hearing as a third grader—“posture”—seem just a touch on the nutty side?

  If you think so, you may have guessed it. There is another whole, hidden dimension to this story. The word “scandal” applies.

  And “sinister” is not entirely inappropriate.

  Stay tuned.

  NOVEMBER 11, 2011

  Last Nude Column (for Now, at Least)

  Hey, thanks for the well-considered, enthusiastic, thoughtful, skillfully written responses to last time’s “Posture Pictures” column.

  And thanks to those who pointed out that the definitive master treatise on the touchy subject was written by Ron Rosenbaum in The New York Times. In 1995. (Glad my report was probably a new subject at least to my readers sixteen and under.)

  Quite a few of you knew of Rosenbaum’s piece—told in gripping detective-plot style as he tracks down the story, the dopey reasons behind it, and even a truckload of the allegedly long-destroyed salacious photos.

  (Am I weird to wonder whether he found mine? Does Rosenbaum now know me better than I know him?)

  The dangled and promised secret I tantalized you with in last time’s column is thoroughly revealed by Rosenbaum.

  Shockingly, the whole charade had nothing to do with posture.

  It had to do, as some informed readers knew, with a man named Dr. William Sheldon (in sometime association with E. A. Hooton of Harvard) and his ability to somehow, back in the fifties, foist his screwball theories about body types and destiny on the highest levels of American academia. (Sheldon’s infamous “somatotypes.”)