by Dick Cavett
Here’s a grim little parlor game. Ask someone how many United States shootings they think there have been since Newtown. I got answers ranging from not having heard of any to guessing probably a dozen or so.
Wanna play? Before you make a bet, here is but a handful of Googlables that might help.
“Over 1600 Hundred Gun-Related Deaths Since Newtown”
“3 School Shootings Since Newtown”
“Shootings killed 18 people in US per day since Sandy Hook, study shows”
So what is the melancholy conclusion to be drawn from all this?
Doesn’t it appear that the best thing you and I, as Americans, can do as protection against getting shot at any moment is to, without delay, move to any other country on the planet? So it would seem.
Is it too dramatic to ask what rough beast is gnawing at the soul of America?
Let us close with something in a lighter vein.
When I was a kid in Nebraska, a cantankerous farmer, known for plinking with his .22 at passing cars in which he perceived enemies, ingeniously rigged up a shotgun in his house, trained on the inside of his front door so as to widely distribute any intruder.
It seems he was a touch forgetful …
I’m sure my brighter students can finish this story.
FEBRUARY 8, 2013
And the Oscar Doesn’t Go to the Oscars
Well, here we are again. Oscar has come and gone.
Words to gladden the heart. E’en so, fair warning. This will be about Oscar. I won’t be hurt if you decide to read something else.
My problem with Oscar always begins with the first utterance of those dread words, “I’d like to thank…” My hands involuntarily reach for the Bayer bottle and a Tum.
When they come to their senses and make me commissar of the Oscar show, I promise you this: anyone uttering those brain-numbing words and attempting to thank more than three people will be instantly dropped through a trapdoor.
It will be well padded down below. No one wants anyone to get hurt.
There’ll be coffee down there, and magazines. But there will be no egress from the nice and comfortable subterranean chamber until the show has faded from the screen. No reclaiming the stage, clutching what looks like a toilet paper roll of thank-you’s.
Why was this fungus allowed to creep all over what used to be a lot of fun to watch?
Get ready to Google or iPad or whatever, young folks, but there was a time before Oscar became the Festival of Thanks, when a man who went by the name Bob Hope delivered such gems as, “Well, here we are again at Oscar Night. Or as it’s known at my house, Passover.”
I’m not sure I’ve recovered fully from the night the divine Julia Roberts thanked all but four people in the Los Angeles phone book. They got halfway through Beethoven’s Fifth trying to play her off.
The same question arises about Oscar that I ask myself every year about the Bowl that is allegedly Super. Why do I watch it? (Okay, this year’s game was good.)
I really need to know why we inflict such punishment on ourselves.
Can I say nothing nice about old Osky? I can. They do, in one area at least, seem to have given me less and less reason to mutter aloud, “Will they never learn?” I’m talking about those dreadful, invariably bombing two-person “comedy” bits that, over the years, they’ve saddled the presenters with. They are blessedly fewer, but still.
You know the ones I mean.
Tom: Hi, Jan. Say, that’s some dress you’re wearing. (Delivered while staring straight out front by a guy who seems to be wearing a tux for the first time. And welded to the prompter, which always seems to be a yard too far away. The dialogue is of pure wood.)
Jan: Oh, thanks, Tom. I’m so glad you care for my dress, as I made it myself at my home.
Tom: Wow. (Delivered without emphasis or energy.) Well, I sure hope you make it home still in it. (Strangled mercy laugh.)
I’m sorry. My made-up example is far too funny to be typical of the genre, but you know what I mean.
And I’m sorry to say that some very good actors, when dipping a first-time toe into comedy, need to be given, as foreign actors do, “line readings.” In order, that is, to prevent the “That was no lady, that was MY wife” problem.
How old an oldie must you be to remember that there was a time before innocent awards viewers, just looking for a little fun, were subjected to these paralyzing paroxysms of imaginary gratitude?
Imaginary, I say, because what is it all really saying?
It’s saying, “I really don’t deserve this award. No, no. It’s not for me at all. Not at all. It really belongs to a lot of people…”
Like hell. You gave the performance, they didn’t. The false modesty is thick and of high viscosity.
Here’s the kind of thing you endure. Effusions of thanks and salivating affection for such household names as:
Henny Goldfarb. And Janey Dillman … and Clyde Whale … and Sneed Hearn … and Tomm, my best buddy … and the incredible Eldridge Endrubber … and, of course, Alvira Winkle … and dear, dear Conchita for, well, just about everything … and the girls in the Huppman office, and darling “Chummy” … you know who you are. Oh, and André, my masseur [oddly, pronounced “massooss”] … oh, and at the Morris Agency, Schmul Yamazaki … and Cheech Bolander, my neighbor who never fails to, like, water my plants, oh, and Floyd for, well, just for being Floyd … and for undying affection when I need it most, dearest Pootie and Tootie, my two Shih Tzus … and of course a very special Mom … and Dearest Dad, who I know is looking down on us right now [from where, up in the flies?] and, oh, don’t play me off, I’ve got one more list somewhere here. Ah, yes, and … [a shot rings out] …
A fantasy? An exaggeration? Just ask yourself.
A radical idea I know, but couldn’t Sneed and Eldridge and that whole lot be thanked off-camera, with a nice note and maybe a modest gift or two? A caringly wrapped case of Tootsie Rolls and some nice hollyhocks?
Here is a typical Oscar thank-you from the good old days, an artifact from a far-off, happier time before it occurred to anyone to bore us to idiocy with a list of unheard-of strangers. Somewhere on the Net I found an acceptance speech by the great David Niven. It went:
“And the winner is … David Niven!” (Affectionate ovation.)
Niven: “Thank you. I’m so weighed down with good luck amulets and charms from friends that I was barely able to struggle my way up here onto the stage. I’m very grateful.” (Exits.)
Where are the Nivens of yesteryear?
A shame, in a way, that he didn’t say more, because I recall Niven as a scintillating guest on an early show of mine. His talk simply sparkled and was compared favorably—presumably by some rather elderly people—to that of Oscar Wilde.
Nobody that year read a gratitude laundry list. Though a helpful friend reminds me that Greer Garson, in 1943, established the all-time record for speech length. When she got home, two of her children had grown up during it.
I confess I still retain some affection for Oscar. I know the reviews weren’t very good this year and I know it’s easy to kick Oscar when he’s down.
But then when is he up?
MARCH 1, 2013
Tonight, Tonight, Its World Is Full of Blight
Once again, The Tonight Show rears its hoary head in the headlines. (Unintentional wordplay.)
The dear old thing, the brainchild of the great Pat Weaver (Sigourney’s pop), has endured as if it were a World War II veteran surviving health crisis after health crisis over the years, defying demise.
For me, addicted watching began with Jack Paar. When Jack departed the show for good in 1962—having left it temporarily once already—it was predicted that Tonight would die on the vine. Who could replace that sentimental, explosive, compellingly neurotic master of late-night? And where would you even begin to look for such a one?
The answer came. The boyishly nice-looking guy from Nebraska, collegiate and witty, who killed ’em out of the public eye
at Friars roasts and trade lunches while hosting the ungrammatically named game show Who Do You Trust? (TV’s earliest dumbing down?)
The powers could breathe easily. The Tonight cash cow, without Jack, would not one day be found dead in the pasture.
And now, for a little-remembered fact: It didn’t go well for Johnny Carson at first. Hard to believe in light of his smashing thirty-year endurance record at that desk.
Let me take you back. A now forgotten summer passed between Jack’s exit and Johnny’s debut. There were contract matters, but Johnny also well knew it would have been unwise, with Jack’s departing good-bye wave still fresh in bereft viewers’ minds, to pop brightly onto his predecessor’s stage as the clean-cut but resented new boy.
And there was another factor. It was called Merv Griffin.
A virtual mob of substitute hosts that summer—and oh, did I write for them—included not only Merv but various comics, movie stars, Groucho Marx, Mort Sahl, Art Linkletter (let’s keep moving), Donald O’Connor (!), Jerry Lewis, a Gabor, and on and on, all trying their variously talented hands at what Jack made look easy.
Merv did two weeks sensationally. Johnny spent a goodly amount of awkward between-jobs time that summer in his high-rise apartment over the East River with his drums, his telescope, and his compulsive reading, practicing his card sleights and then having to endure a gradually rising tide of articles and column items about how Merv had clearly demonstrated that he should have been the one to get The Tonight Show.
I could never figure out why there seemed to be an almost organized campaign to take the show back from Johnny before he ever got it. Merv, not above, shall we say, dedicated self-interest, was to my mind probably quietly instrumental in much of this. But then who, in our business, never known for being full of selfless sweethearts, would not fight at least tooth, if not nail, for the Big Prize?
If you were around then and aware, I’ll bet you’ve suppressed, repressed, or forgotten that Merv, while not getting the show, did get his own duplicate of Tonight on NBC daytime. The two shows made their debuts at the same time. Merv got the good reviews.
(Being a brash lad, I summoned the testicularity at the time to ask Johnny his thoughts on Merv as chat show host. Came the reply, “A case of the bland leading the bland.”)
In the words of the TV scribes, Johnny was “stiff,” “awkward,” “uncomfortable,” and even “phony.” Merv, on the contrary, was hailed with a list of “up” adjectives: “bright,” “clever,” “sharp,” “sincere,” and “a good listener.”
I insert a name-drop here: I was startled to hear the astute “Fat Jack” Leonard say, backstage at a benefit, “I’m sorry, but that Carson guy ain’t makin’ it.”
He wasn’t all wrong. Johnny took a slow slide into the job before hitting his stride. At first it was painful to watch, and agony for him. Who would believe this now, familiar with only his later years?
Pundits agreed, NBC had made a mistake.
Hard as the fact is to digest in light of Johnny’s decades on that throne, insiders assured us it was, as one columnist put it, just a matter of time for Mr. Carson.
And of course, how right that was.
It was a mere three decades.
I’ve been asked for comments by various columnists and publications these days, what with the T. Show back in the news with the Leno-Fallon-Kimmel eruption. NBC must have a bushel-sized bottle of Bayer product in their infirmary labeled “Recurrent Tonight Show Headaches.” There’s probably enough material for a series in the various Tonight traumas over the years, with episodes titled, “Jack Walks”; “Jack Returns”; “Johnny Arrives”; “Johnny Struggles, Then Triumphs”; “Jay Soars”; “Jay Demoted”; “Conan at Bat”; “Bye-Bye, Conan”; “Jay Redux”; “Kimmel Threatens”; “Fallon on the Rise”; “Jay Re-Threatened”; and so on, into the late night.
Ironically, all this takes place at a time when there are articles, including one in 2010 in The New Yorker, about how late-night talk is doomed to be a fading commodity.
I’ve been widely asked about the reported building of a new set for our East Coast Jimmy—whether I’m among those who think Tonight belongs in Manhattan. Yes. And it always did.
James Barron quoted me in The New York Times as saying that for me the show was always “a lifeline to New York.” When home in Nebraska on visits during college, it was my fix.
(I, too, shared the lifeline honor. More than once I’d hear from a touring actor tired of the exhausting town-to-town trouping: After our show, on the road, we’d go back to the hotel room in Detroit or Omaha or Klamath Falls, pour a drink, and say, “Switch on Cavett, quick, for some New York oxygen.”)
Jack started it and all of us took our shows to L.A. from time to time for a fortnight. I can’t say why, exactly, but Tonight just means Gotham, in the same way that Grand Central would just look wrong in Burbank.
Bit of a scoop? Once when I was on with Johnny out there after his coast move, in a moment of confidential frankness during a commercial, he whispered, “Richard, I’m not convinced yet that this was one of my genius ideas.”
Another time, when I was a guest with Johnny not long after he’d started his cut-down-to-an-hour shows, he told me backstage that he’d convinced himself that the cutting back would seem easier and shorter. And that, to his surprise, it didn’t. And sadly, he was happiest, by far, when “on.”
When growing up out there in the West, both Johnny and I (at separate times) dreamed the traditional dream of the bright lights of Broadway and the glamour of Manhattan. New York, New York was our craved Shangri-la. Not the La Brea Tar Pits.
If my friend Dave Letterman should decide next contract time that he’s sat through one too many starlet guests who come on to plug their movies, exhibit seemingly a yard of bare gam, pepper their speech with “like” and “I’m like” and “awesome” and “oh, wow” and “amazing,” and list at least seven things they are “excited” about despite the evidence, from who knows what cause, of their half-mast eyelids, I’ll regret his going.
And speaking of Dave’s presumably stepping aside some sad day, if CBS is smart, there is in full view a self-evident successor to the Big L. of Indiana.
The man I’m thinking of has pulled off a miraculous, sustained feat, against all predictions—descendants of those same wise heads who foresaw a truncated run for the Carson boy—of making a smashing success while conducting his show for years with a dual personality. And I don’t mean Rush Limbaugh (success without personality).
I can testify, as can anyone who’s met him and seen him as himself, how much more there is to Stephen Colbert than the genius job he does in his “role” on The Colbert Report. Everything about him—as himself—qualifies him for that chair at the Ed Sullivan Theater that Letterman has so deftly and expertly warmed for so long. Colbert is, among other virtues, endowed with a first-rate mind, a great ad-lib wit, skilled comic movement and gesture, fine education, seemingly unlimited knowledge of affairs and events, and, from delightful occasional evidence, those things called the Liberal Arts—I’ll bet you he could name the author of Peregrine Pickle. And on top of that largesse of qualities (and I hope he won’t take me the wrong way here), good looks.
Should such a day come, don’t blow it, CBS.
MARCH 29, 2013
With Winters Gone, Can We Be Far Behind?
No more Jonathan Winters.
What did we do to deserve this?
I’m just antique enough to remember when Jonathan first hit. Or at least for me. It was the Jack Paar Tonight Show and no one had ever seen anything remotely like it.
A slightly chubby, amiable, Midwesternly looking man who could have been an accountant or a bus driver, nicely dressed in dark suit and tie, stepped out, a bit timorously, from behind the curtain and, on the spot and before our eyes, created a whole mad little world.
There were sudden, instant changes of character, gender, and manner, each with a new face, a different voice, even different p
hysique, it seemed.
Make that lightning character changes, switching in less than an eye wink from an old person to a juvenile, from tough drill sergeant to mincing hairdresser, from adult human to feisty feline, from bumpkin to society type to rube to sophisticate; from iron-jawed right-winger to gelatinous liberal, from adult to child to repellently cute baby; each change so fast and total it was as if frames had been cut from a film.
Here was originality personified. And unprecedented.
Never had a comic done anything remotely like this. Jonathan was born full-blown from the head of no one. He was in no known comic tradition. No familiar style. No pre-existing category of humor. He stood on no predecessors’ shoulders.
Here, suddenly, was a comedian who never told a joke.
Into the world of humor a new planet had been born.
Later, when working for Paar, I loved watching Jonathan backstage at the show, near airtime and still trying to decide what he was going to come on as that night: A drunken kitty cat? The queen of the Vikings? A doorknob?
One night, probing in the costume room, he had found a sort of wraparound turban-shaped piece of headgear, helmet-sized and seemingly made of dark, fresh earth with twigs and sprigs of little plants protruding. Jack didn’t know what was about to hit him.
Jonathan daintily flounced into the chair beside an astonished Jack and announced, giggling and crinkling up his eyes, “I’m the Spirit of Spring!”
The hat thing had two little horns, which he’d tweak now and then, with seductive winks at Jack.
Because of the character’s, shall we say, lack of testosterone, there was the following exchange:
Jack: “What are you, anyway?”
Jonathan (sweetly): “They know in the forest.”
The line killed.
A troop of Tonight employees would repair, after the show, with Jonathan and his Tonight staffer friends John Carsey and Bob Shanks and Tom O’Malley and other imbibing buddies of Jonathan’s, along with assorted stagehands, musicians, and members of the crew, to Hurley’s bar downstairs.
