by Dick Cavett
This is a silly sort of speculation, but would anyone suggest that given the magical choice of reliving his life Parkinson’s-free, Ali would gladly make the trade-off? Forsaking all those years of glory as the Most Famous Person in the World?
In that notorious survey, the Ali face proved to be the only one among the world’s most famous visages past and present instantly recognized in even the remotest parts of the planet. No other face was. Not Elvis, not JFK, not Mickey Mouse, not Jackie, not Honest Abe, Mick, or Marilyn. In the most far-flung regions, there was only one face pointed to by the Bantu tribesman and a farmer’s wife in rural Tibet. Pointed to with “Ali, Ali.”
Had you come from way down, as young Cassius Clay did, would you trade all that? For health? I don’t suggest that the answer is an obvious one.
At this point, a self-imposed word count prevents me from detailing some of the ways the Champ and I had offstage fun together. Another time?
OCTOBER 26, 2012
Ali, Round Two
One day, the champ asked if I’d like to see his training camp—he was preparing for his 1974 fight with Joe Frazier—and someone suggested taking cameras and making a show out of it. Whoever that was was smart.
The camp was unique, situated in a delightful rural setting in Pennsylvania. Great effort had gone into making the place primitive, as Ali says, twice, “like in the days of Jack Johnson.”
He delighted in showing me his private cabin, and in using the words “antique” and the tautology “old antique” to describe the furnishings. He was like a big, exuberant kid, showing off his hideout. He was—and there’s no other word—sweet. And it was also, of course, a skillful performance by a master.
There was a bit of acting on my part, too, as in pretending in his gym, for alleged comic purposes, that I couldn’t jump rope.
(And I can’t conceive of why I said to him that I wrestled in high school when one could plainly see from my bared body that I was a gymnast.)
I was put into a bedroom with the décor of a western lodge. No sign of Ali. Suddenly the door exploded open and a rowdy gang of my host and a group of his buddies burst into the room and flopped and draped themselves on the ample bed. They were a lively bunch, carousing like high school or fraternity pals: mock insults, playful punching, and general horsing around, all the elements of adolescent boy fun with plenty of laughter.
Ali kept announcing, with an artful-seeming seriousness, “I can’t believe Dick Cavett came all the way to Pennsylvania just to see me!” Oddly, I can’t recall for sure if I stayed overnight. He did once at my place, but that’s a separate story.
His mother somehow cooked and served a hearty lunch for about twenty: TV crew, hangers-on, the jostling buddies, assorted relatives.
Halfway through lunch I noticed a certain conspiring and giggling among Ali and his buddies and then, lowering his voice so his mom wouldn’t hear, he whispered, “We got some company for you, Dick. Look what just came in.” I turned toward the door to see two of the most pleasant-seeming and startlingly unattractive women ever created. Had the pranksters used Central Casting?
Ali: “No hurry, Dick. They can stay all night.”
Delight at my discomfort filled the room. One of the buddies nearly choked to death on a combination of my consternation, his laughter, and a half-swallowed chunk of soul food. The merry jest over, the ladies were whisked away, in transportation that had been neatly arranged, and they were, I learned, generously rewarded.
I never figured out how to get even. Maybe that’s why I used the word niggardly to him on a show, rewarded by the famous hands closing about my neck as he pretended not to know what it meant.
I promised last time to report some of the odd, fun, goofy sort of things that would happen between us. What follows won’t sound, at first, like fun, but it gets there.
We were both part of some documentary back in those wonderful healthy days, and when I arrived on the “set” (a dune by the sea in Montauk), although the weather was fine, there was thick gloom. Muhammad was in a funk. I’d heard about these.
The filmmakers were looking desperate. “He won’t talk to anybody and he just stands there gazing out to sea. We can’t get to him. It’s like he doesn’t hear you.” They were about to pack it in. They asked me to try to do something.
The champ stood there staring out to sea, statue-motionless, looking like an extraordinarily handsome cigar-store Indian. (I refuse to say “cigar-store Native American.”)
I approached warily.
“Ali?” I ventured. He turned. And he burst into glee. “Dick Cavett!” he shouted, arms around me. Had he forgotten I was in it?
All was fine now, and the director, virtually in tears of gratitude, seemed to shed ten years.
“What’s this effect you have on him?” he wondered.
I can’t begin to explain it. What was I to him who, then, had everything? What was our curious bond?
Opinions solicited.
At the end of the documentary shooting in Montauk, it was getting dark and I volunteered to drive the Champ to his motel where his (then) wife, the beautiful Veronica, was waiting, and we all had dinner.
I like watching people’s behavior when they recognize the famous, but with Ali it was unique.
He saw me to my car in front of the motel. Sometimes I would sort of forget who it was I was with until, as in this case, a couple going for their car saw him standing by mine and lost the power of speech.
The woman could only unconsciously keep pointing while her dumbstruck husband, trying to exclaim, only managed to phonate a sort of protracted “oooorg” sound, his eyes having dilated to a larger size. I guess it was as Woody Allen said when he first laid eyes, at his new job, on Sid Caesar: “It was like looking at a god.”
Later, as I started the car, Ali suddenly said, “Hey, Dick, how far’s your house? I wanna see it.” He jumped in. (No mention of Veronica.) It was only five minutes away.
He loved the place and I said, “You don’t want to stay in a motel tonight, man. Why don’t you stay here?”
“Hey, Dick, you really mean that? My friends won’t ever believe I stayed in Dick Cavett’s house.” As I was about to match him with what my friends wouldn’t believe, he added, “My mama really won’t believe it.”
“She wouldn’t accusing you of fibbing, call you ‘Cassius,’ and, as they say down in Dixie, ‘slap you upside the head’?” (Big laugh.)
“Hey, Dick, you not only sound like my mama, you starting to look like her.” (My turn to convulse.)
He asked if there was a bed for him and his wife. Of course, the master bedroom bed was offered and he got into it. “Will you go get Veronica while I lie down?” I did. He switched on the TV.
When we got back he was giggling to himself over what had just happened.
My late wife, Carrie Nye, was then in a play in New York. The phone had rung and Ali had picked it up.
My answering machine recorded this much of the conversation:
(Ringing.)
Ali: Hello.
C.N.: Darling?
Ali: This ain’t Darling.
C.N.: I’m sorry, I—Who is this?
Ali: Who is this? It’s the only three-time heavyweight champion of the world and I’m sleepin’ in your bed and I’m watchin’ your TV.
C.N. (after a moment): Well, Mr. Ali, I shall have a plaque placed on that bed.
(An offer she never made me.)
The answering machine cut out there. Glad I had a wife who knew what—and especially who—the “heavyweight champion” was. How things have changed. How many wives today could name the heavyweight champion? And how many husbands? I can’t.
I told this story on television and one night after that, at about 2 a.m., my phone rang. A gravelly, menacing, unfamiliar voice said, “Hey, Dick Cavett. I hear you lettin’ niggers sleep in your bed.”
While I was trying to think what a book on anger management might advise as to the best thing to do or say here, there
was an ominous silence. Then a kind of chilling gurgling sound. Then the Voice of the Anonymous Coward let out a laugh that was both hearty and, now, somehow familiar.
Perhaps you can guess who it was?
Writing this stuff continues to dredge up memories and subjects about this great man. I sometimes think I may have enough good stuff to write about him until the next Romney administration.
Looking at him in the old clips, he is in the midst of the best part of his life. Being with him, I felt that I was, too.
NOVEMBER 16, 2012
Back When I Was Packing
I know what it feels like to be a gun lover.
As a kid watching Saturday afternoon World War II movies in Nebraska, I fell head over heels in love. With the Luger. I don’t expect more than a handful of folks to know what I’m talking about. But it was real and it was intense; terms usually associated, I know, with a love affair. The human sort.
There is something about a Luger that separates it from all other handguns, and Luger devotees and Luger society members speak of it in romantic terms that must sound plain nuts to those who consider themselves levelheaded.
I sat in the dark and watched Helmut Dantine, the downed German flier in Mrs. Miniver, menace Greer Garson with his Luger and, yes, I dreamed that night that he came to Grand Island, Nebraska, and gave the gun to me.
No other gun has ever appealed to me in the least.
Charles “Peanuts” Schulz said on my show that he “brought home a bag of ’em” from the war. Seeing me nearly swoon with envy, he added, “I’ll send you one.”
I gasped. I wish he had.
Time went by, about a decade’s worth, and I accompanied a friend to a gun show in Los Angeles.
And I bought a Luger. Easy. No questions asked. Like buying a candy bar. My friend was a friend of a dealer. I signed nothing other than a check.
If you prefer not to think me a loon, you might want to skip the next part.
I took my treasure back to my hotel and spent an hour or more in front of a full-length mirror being, alternately, Conrad Veidt, Ivan Triesault, Eduardo Ciannelli, Walter Slezak, and probably ten other of those splendid European actors who always seemed to be playing Nazi officers in the war movies of the 1940s and ’50s.
And you might as well know the worst: I slept with it.
I think the degree to which this resembles a sexual confession is not entirely coincidental. Learnèd (two-syllable pronunciation) papers and studies exist on the sexuality of guns, focusing always on the rather obvious phallic resemblance of the handheld gun and the male organ; comfortable grip, extension, ejection, consequences of improper use … the list goes on.
The gun-confiscation paranoid mind-set is seen in these studies as—what else?—castration fear. And there’s the unfailing potency of the gun as a substitute for the failing potency of, well, you know. As Gore Vidal said, you can always get your gun up.
Because I couldn’t take my prize possession to New York, I left it with my friend in L.A. He died, and I never saw it again. (I make do with a frighteningly perfect scale model.)
Hasn’t just about everything possible been said about the death of the children at Sandy Hook Elementary School? And the gun laws that have made this country the sick joke of the world?
And, as always, there were some things that shouldn’t have been said.
The raving speech by the NRA’s boy, Wayne La Pierre, for example, urging more guns in schools as the answer.
I had Wayne as a guest on the show once. He may not remember, because I’m not sure he ever saw me. His eyes and consciousness seem to bypass you somehow, and focus somewhere in an undefined middle distance. The words sound memorized; he has an affect that might best be described as “nobody home.”
Maybe you saw Bob Costas—before the roof caved in on him—make the reasonable observation, after the football player Jovan Belcher shot his girlfriend and then himself, that had he not had a gun, they might be alive. Many were outraged by Costas. You’d have thought he had painted obscenities on the Statue of Liberty. How dare a sportscaster sully the sacred atmosphere of a sports event with a thought?
Costas was berated on Don Imus’s show by the usually intelligent Laura Ingraham with one of those why-blame-the-gun mental quirks so compatible with the right-wing mind. (Her segment was wickedly utilized by Jon Stewart.)
As her version of “Guns don’t kill people…,” she wondered whether Costas thought the football player wasn’t strong enough to strangle the woman? Well, for one thing, there are survivable attempted stranglings. Significantly fewer folks survive close-range gun blasts. But let’s say that being gunless, he does manage manually to throttle the girl. Then what? He goes to that parking lot and, in front of two observers, strangles himself?
One of the worst things said in the awful succeeding days—though it wasn’t nearly at Mike Huckabee–level inanity—came, surprisingly, straight from the White House. I was appalled to see the president ruin a movingly delivered statement about the shooting of the kids by closing with “God has called them all home.”
Talk about not blaming the shooter. So it was God who did it. It’s not hard to imagine a kid hearing the president’s words and asking, “Mommy, is God going to call me home?”
One of the main tenets of the true gun-crazies—and the N.R.A. is not even the most rabid of the many gun-shielding organizations—is, as Rachel Maddow expertly delineated, that old standby “the first step.”
There are online forms you can fill out to send to your lawmakers, demanding that nothing—nothing at all or in any way—be done about any guns whatever, anywhere. Not assault rifles, not the supermagazines that allowed the kids to be ripped apart, nothing.
Why?
Because it is the first step toward confiscation.
The mind falls faint. Nobody is going to try to confiscate guns, although some Web sites know better: President Obama, they are certain, wants to.
And, of course, all first steps are but first steps. Thus, all kisses lead to pregnancy, a single joint leads to heroin, a Band-Aid leads to surgery. Can’t I take a first step toward China without going to China? Oh, well.
Reading this over, I’m not really sure what the first part about me and my Luger has to do with all this. Perhaps qualified people among you will tell me.
I’m not going to worry about it. After all, for me, it might just be a first step toward self-criticism.
JANUARY 11, 2013
More on Guns, with Readers
It’s happened again. I’m impressed by my readers.
Is this base flattery?
In spite of our ailing educational system, which allows our students to rank in discouraging positions like thirteenth, twenty-fourth, thirty-seventh, or whatever against the world in little things like math, science, engineering, etc., I keep seeing, right here, evidence that lots and lots of people have not dumbed down.
Or if they have, they must have been spectacularly smart and literate before.
I base this on the fact of so many splendid, thoughtful e-mails in response to this (and other) columns and articles. There’s nothing I want to do less than write on the subject of guns again. But the fact that “Back When I Was Packing” drew such a large number and sterling quality of e-mails changed my mind. I decided that a nice person wouldn’t ignore so many concerned readers.
Why do you suppose so many people in supposedly postliterate America—despite how many of our language and brain skills have been rubbed dull by overexposure to computer games and reality shows and iPods and John McCain running mates—can still just plain write well.
Here’s an example of clean writing that teachers wish they could easily teach; from Terry of Nevada.
I find the confiscatory argument strange. It’s usually put forward by folks who fear that their government will take their rights away and, lacking guns, they will have no defense against that.
Oddly these same people often advocate for a strong military. Do these
people seriously believe that some sort of people’s militia will be any match for the military they’ve helped to create, if the military were under the control of some despot? A few guys standing around with Bushmasters are going to defeat, say, the guys who took out bin Laden?
Yes, Terry, it would take extremely skillful Bushmaster wielders to hold out for long against that same evil government’s jet bombers, rocket grenades, tear gas, offshore gunships, heavy-duty cannons, and napalm. Not to mention drones.
And, of course, its well-trained militia.
We’re told that succeeding in making those military-style super guns with their massacre-a-whole-crowd magazines no longer readily available to our lunatics, or at least the lunatics who don’t already own them, is an admirable goal.
But apparently it would be but a minor step, owing to the fact that the more lowly handgun is still the real villain, far and away the weapon of choice in our countless killings. We’re told those he-man big-boy guns account for but 1 percent of our scandalous death rate. And not even all of our mass killers used them.
The thought hit me, after the longest time, that all the mass shooters have been men. Some will ask why that should surprise anyone.
I e-mailed the thought to Don Imus on the air and he asked his guests, two women, if they’d heard or read of female mass killers. They reached back and came up with the woman who drowned all her kids, and then farther back to Fall River’s famous citizen and skilled rap beater, Lizzie Borden. They’re women, for sure, and their murders were at least kept in the family, but they weren’t multiple shooters.
There have been, of course, numerous one-offs by women, mainly against erring husbands and lovers.
Ah, but we spoke too soon. Don’t miss the February 11, 2013, issue of The New Yorker for the chilling exception (“A Loaded Gun,” by Patrick Radden Keefe).
Someone pointed out that the NRA has more than one thing in mind when it diabolically proposes an armed guard in every school. As is well known, the organization—still humorously claiming to be about gun safety—and gun manufacturers are joined at the waist as securely as Chang and Eng, the famous Siamese twins. If only one hundred thousand schools subscribed to the plan, that would be … let’s see now … how many gun sales?
