Brief Encounters

by Dick Cavett

  Quite a few Lincoln High reunions went by, at five-year intervals, before I ventured again.

  This time, maybe a decade or so ago, there were only a couple of classmates in the registration room. One said, “You don’t recognize us, but we know who you are.”

  Then I saw it.

  A large bulletin board panel displayed rows of 8x10 photos of some of our classmates. The shock was immediate. They were those who had—as the world’s favorite euphemism puts it—passed away. Even as a kid I wondered, is “passed away” better than being dead? Away to what? Or where? (I still wonder.) There was poor Tom H. and unlucky Ted P.—a car crash—and, oh, no! Not Sally L.!

  Too many rows of them grinned out at us from their old, beaming graduation photos, faces full of life and eager promise.

  Arriving at Lincoln’s Cornhusker Hotel a little late for that night’s big dinner, I was greeted by the cheery lady at the desk: “Mr. C., you’ll find your classmates at the bottom of that escalator.”

  “Still standing, I hope,” I said. I was Bob Hope again.

  From just a little way down the escalator, looking at the people below entering the big dining room, I saw that the nice lady had clearly misdirected me.

  There were several events in the Cornhusker that night, and this one was obviously one for old folks. An elderly wife helped a lame husband.

  And yet there amid the elderly, was that not Karen Rauch, looking great as ever? What event was Karen attending with what looked like elderly relatives?

  I didn’t get it.

  I ran the few steps back up against the tide of the torpid escalator and said to the woman at the desk, “I think you sent me wrong. That looks like a reunion of the Early Settlers Club.”

  “That’s your class,” she said. “I guess that’s what happens.”

  Noticeable shock. Poetry came again. “Time, the subtle thief of youth” ran in my head.

  These oldies were me, and I was them.

  The strangest part of aging is that, as with suffering, people don’t experience it equally.

  A goodly number looked recognizably as they had in high school. Others, like those people’s parents. The ages seemed to range a decade or more above and below what our common age really was.

  It was as if the casting department had been told by a movie director, “I need a few hundred extras who graduated high school in the fifties. Throw in the usual number of good-lookers, some not so well preserved. And, of course, toss in a few shipwrecks.”

  Another bad moment. Some parents had been invited and I said to a man whose badge said, let’s say, Jim Parks, “Young Jim and I were in French class together.” His face changed.

  You guessed it. This was young Jim. My brow hottens, just typing this. I’ve almost gotten over it.

  There were side events, including a walking tour of our old high school. Seeing again the old corridors, lockers, and even drinking fountains exhumed long-lost memories. Like the time poor Leland (last name gone), during a fire drill, while the deafening siren drowned any talk or sound, decided to scream, “Hi, Dickie!”

  I should have only seen, not heard, this. But in the instant between Leland’s intake of breath and his deafening scream, the siren had stopped. His “Hi, Dickie!” had no competition. Leland seemed to shrink about five sizes. I was weak with laughter.

  Every head turned as Leland was taken somewhere.

  Suddenly, there was my picture. Part of an “L.H.S. Hall of Fame.” My fellow “successes” were largely in business or state politics, I gathered—except for me and a pretty blonde. My friend Sandy Dennis—yes, that one. Also departed.

  Now, sex.

  I still can’t reconcile my guiltless world in grades seven through nine, when sex was only rumored, at least for me. There’s no avoiding “How times have changed.”

  In an earlier column I wrote about the variously worded newspaper headlines that year reporting, as one put it, “Fellatio on Junior High Bus—While Others Cheered.” Would my Welsh Baptist minister grandfather—upon being informed what the key word meant—have expired on the spot?

  Considering that naughty trick of Mama Nature’s of endowing the male with his sexual peak at ages fourteen to eighteen, the question becomes why—with virginity now a rarity in high school—didn’t way more than the few in my graduating class knock (or get knocked) up? Or did they? Keep your answer brief and to the point.

  A group of us had opted for the tour of our old school’s halls. The sharp young principal ultimately led us to a certain door in the “new section.” It was inset and locked, so only a pair of people at a time could peer in the window.

  Coming away, they looked puzzled.

  My turn came. It was a room that looked like a large kiddies’ toy store, all in bright colors with everything padded to prevent injury: tiny tricycles, fluffy, short ladders for climbing, and enough stuff to supply a sizable number of small people with playthings. People guessed at its purpose.

  A woman asked if it was a nice charity project where poor kids could come and play.

  I don’t think anyone guessed the correct answer.

  It was for the children of the students of Lincoln High School. There was a collective intake of breath.

  Surely a boon for teenage day-care needers.

  I haven’t been to another L.H.S. reunion. I’m not sure why, but I have an odd theory.

  Could it be an irrational fear of walking into that registration room on Day One and—in a moment out of The Twilight Zone—discovering my own picture on the “Those Who Have Left Us” wall?

  (Cue theremin music.)

  I thought I had finished with reunions. Years passed, and then …

  “Are you going?”

  “I’m not sure. Are you?”

  My friend Chris Porterfield and I had tossed that ball back and forth for weeks.

  Our Yale reunion.

  Was it worth the increasing-year-by-year bad news of classmates and friends who were no longer with us? And of living ones to whom time and chance had happened … badly?

  Of yakking, cocktail-quaffing classmates, even more boring than we remembered them?

  Having endured the common but bitter shock of visual reminders of our advancing age at earlier reunions, both high school and previous college ones, we’d decided and hoped that enough fun could be conjured up to rate the time—and the expense—of going.

  I arrived a day late. Checking in to the hotel, it was nice to see in the lobby a few unrecognized classmates with their name badges on. They looked remarkably fit. In a virtual sitcom moment in the elevator, I was on the verge of congratulating two of them. They were definitely fit. They were also, alas, from an appreciably younger class, also reuniting that week.

  As with the high school reunion, the apparent age range of my contemporaries was dramatic. The changes in the Yale men were predictable: balding and acquired paunch. There was also a contrast between the gym-goers and those who don’t. White hair was everywhere. (Mainly on heads, a comedian might say.) Is hair turning whiter sooner these days? Even at my earlier high school reunion, to look out from the stage over the crowd was to risk snow blindness.

  Oddly, since we were Americans, I saw no shocking obesity. Most looked vigorous enough, with, here and there, a few walking wounded. Of course, who knew who had stayed at home?

  Laughed myself silly at dinner with my old friend and classmate David Adnopoz. We had been a sort of team in plays, musicals, and scenes we did together for acting class, and we giggled foolishly, recalling the on- and offstage mishaps that had dotted our theatrical careers in those four wonderful years.

  Deliciously, we recalled an event that, in an age of vastly less erotic opportunity than is readily available to today’s young folks, had a whopping impact, never to be forgotten. The play was Schnitzler’s La Ronde, which consists of a progressive series of seductions.

  In one of them, a gorgeous, pulchritudinous actress, who went on to bigger things in theater and films, chose to
play her scene moving about on her knees in a bed, nekkid from the waist up.

  Deftly, E. (one of her initials) managed to cheat the unsuspecting folks out front of even a glimpse of her twinned treasury, but there was full view from the stage-right wings.

  Somehow every male in the cast—and crew members who could leave their posts—managed to coincide nightly, crowding and pushing, in that dark stage-right wing for that scene.

  I can recall nothing that has happened to me since more vividly.

  Again, remember that this was the late fifties, when undergraduate male virginity not only existed but was, in appalling contrast to today, rampant. Without categorizing myself, I will say that this counted heavily in our appreciation.

  I doubt that a comparable bunch of healthy young fellows of today would stand there, as we did, going quietly mad.

  It must have been wicked fun for E. “Do you think E. knows that we can see her breasts every night?” one piping, beardless, callow youth asked.

  “Guess,” I said. Correctly.

  Is it sort of sad in a way that such an adventure couldn’t really happen today, now that every sexual aspect, perversion, position, and practice, normal and kinky, is—in living color and sharp focus—available to young folks of all ages from the time they’re able to press computer keys?

  I sometimes wonder how this may have affected the collective psyche. In those “old days” was there more or less sexual health? More or fewer batty Anthony Weiners and Bob Filners? I’d love to know.

  Before the farewell breakfast on the sparkling, sunny last day there was a ceremony for the dead.

  A chapel-like setting, a hundred or more attending. A brochure for the occasion contained the predictable shocks. Graduation photos with, ironically, lively and grinning faces of those who had died since the last reunion, five years earlier.

  I opened the booklet of those who had joined the silent majority, hoping for a minimum of shock. And there was Jim.

  He was one of my freshman year roommates. He’d written to me in Nebraska during the summer before Yale, announcing himself as a roommate-to-be and inviting me to his home in Bronxville, New York, for a day and night before motoring with his parents to New Haven.

  (I just remembered that when Jim’s telegram arrived in Lincoln, I saw that he had the same last name as a famous comedian. I hoped, in vain, that he was Jim’s dad.)

  On another sparkling, gorgeous day—all but unheard-of in New Haven, Connecticut—together, Jim and I stepped through Yale’s Phelps Gate and into our new life.

  His parents were always friendly and very nice to me, albeit a touch anti-Semitic. Jim, too. His wealthy Bronxville lawyer father noticeably so. This fact gave birth to a frequently remembered line in my earliest nightclub act, where I talked about all this. The line: “Bronxville has nothing to do with ‘the Bronx.’ (pause) Ever.”

  Jim was clever and we shared the odd gift of being able to ad-lib song lyrics with correct rhyming and scansion. More of a quirk than a gift.

  Once, to the tune of “Davy Crockett” and a few beers, he improvised on the spot a song beginning, “Davy, Dave ben Gurion / King of the Hebrew Hordes.” I recall fully only one couplet: “He’s writing to business friends in the states / They’re sending him rifles in gefilte fish crates.”

  A talent that might have been put to better use.

  Jim came wobbling back to our room one morning freshman year, bleary from an all-nighter of booze and poker.

  He had just had an epiphany, he said. “I realize, from last night, that I’m capable of something I shall never allow to happen. I shall never allow myself to get swallowed up in a swamp of irresponsible drinking, card playing, and debauchery. I shall not flunk out, sacrificing the ability to say, for the rest of my life, ‘I went to Yale.’”

  The “went” part became true some months later when Jim flunked out in his freshman year. Owing to the above-named vices.

  I never saw Jim again, but I got one letter some years after graduation. He was living somewhere in Europe and announced his marriage. “I’ve changed a lot, as evidenced by the fact that I’ve married a Jewish girl. Mercy! What would Mom and Dad have said about their darling boy?”

  At the memorial ceremony, as the names of the departed classmates were read, anyone who wanted to stood up and spoke about them. I told Jim’s story. It got laughs and a nice approving murmur about his transformation.

  A row of candles were lighted one at a time as each person was dealt with and spoken of. I can’t have been the only person in that room wondering which of us might be candle-represented five years from now. Time to reread Philip Larkin’s masterpiece on death, the poem “Aubade.”

  On the last night, in a big tent, we dined. And the Whiffenpoofs serenaded us. Against actuarial probability perhaps, all but a couple of the original fourteen members (from my class) of this great a cappella group were there.

  They sang the famous song, the great pitch and harmony required for membership in that elite group—as part of which you got to tour world capitals—still intact.

  Finally, we all stood, arms around waists, and all together, swaying from side to side, rendered the famous words and melody. Right from the opening line, “From the tables down at Mory’s,” there was lachrymosity among grown men.

  I was sorry we didn’t also sing the sentimental “Bright College Years,” but I heard that it had been sung earlier at an event I’d missed. At the end of that old heart-tugger you take out your hankie and wave it in sync with the ultimate words, about how naught can avail “to break the freh-eh-end-ships formed … at … Yale.” Much eye wiping was reported.

  Yes, C. Porterfield and I decided, we were glad we went.

  (We also agreed, emphatically, that we would like nothing more than to enter Phelps Gate again and do those golden four years over. Right through from the beginning.)

  I guess the “cast” of any large school reunion will include certain stock characters: the Class Goof, still goofy; the Disappointedly Unremembered (a little acting required here); the Class Witless “Comic”; the Class Braying Jackass, whose intense, punishing, too-close-to-face conversation feels like a high-speed dental drill on an undeadened molar; the still-at-it, almost-ducked Class Religious Bore, still with his wretched tracts.

  Oh, and the oily flatterer who causes you to be late for something while he describes and presses upon you the three-pound, four-hundred-plus-page manuscript of the allegorical play he has written, if that is the right word.

  An item that, were there were still incinerators, would keep mine humming merrily.

  Unpleasant moments are inevitable, but assuaged, in a wistful way, by things like the discovery of an opportunity missed; meeting someone delightful whom you didn’t know and realize you very much wish you’d gotten to know, way back then.

  Instead of some you did. Like the members, across the hall, of some fraternity, who somehow managed to stumble into our room just in time to vomit. (Is there one called DKE?)

  Someone said at the close of the dinner, “We hope you’ll all come back five years from now. Those who can”; looking as if he might have phrased that better.

  It was early evening, getting dark, and while I stood on the Old Campus, looking up at the window of my freshman room, ruminating on ancient events there with my roommates Jim, Karl Muller, and Bob Leuze, a voice startled me from behind with “Hey, you Dick Cavett?” A tough, menacing townie, perhaps?

  I couldn’t make him out very clearly in the failing light, and for whatever reason I chose to deny it.

  He went on, “Then how come you look so much like him? And sound like him?”

  I said I didn’t know. As he began to walk away, I thought why not give the poor guy a small thrill and said, “Okay, I am Dick Cavett.”

  “You wish,” he replied, moving on.

  JUNE 14 & AUGUST 9, 2013

  Good Night, Sweet Soprano

  The sudden death at fifty-one of James Gandolfini is intolerable.


  When he died, it never occurred to me not to go to his funeral. Until my wife pointed it out afterward, it also never occurred to me that I had “crashed” it. Standing in the sunshine in a long line in front of St. John the Divine I was spotted and we were ushered down front among family and colleagues.

  My first mourner encounter was with the great Dominic Chianese (Uncle Junior). We embraced. The procedure, repeated over and over, while the church filled, was to come face-to-recognized-face with one Sopranos cast member after another, wet with tears, speaking not at all or with great difficulty.

  And there they all were. I had, over the years, met most of them—Michael Imperioli, Steve Schirripa, Tony Sirico, Vince Curatola, Steve Buscemi, Vincent Pastore, et al.—and we exchanged hugs and kisses on the cheek.

  (The unruly mind being what it is, the thought occurred to me that I hadn’t been embraced and kissed by so many males since congratulating, backstage, the talented cast of a New Orleans drag show.)

  So much crying. A grown man weeping is a tough thing to see.

  There was a kind of through-the-looking-glass feeling standing there in a small group of Big Pussy, Paulie Walnuts, and Johnny Sack, plus, for seasoning, a noticeably reduced Governor Chris Christie. “Do you know all the Sopranos?” I asked him. “Most of them,” he said. “And arrested some of them,” the greatly gifted Curatola added, for a needed laugh. (It’s no secret that the phrase “done a little time” applies to a cast member or two.)

  The splendid Aida Turturro (Janice, Tony’s sister) sensitively observed that what made it all so unbearable was that “Jimmy was just beginning to enjoy his life.” He had turned down a movie this summer to finally spend some much-craved time in his vacation home on the water with his family.

  As people still poured into the church, I went over to where Edie Falco and Turturro were sitting together, both dabbing tears. We spoke a little about how there’s always something too anemic about the phrases people use in talking of mortality. Like the threadbare euphemism “passed away.” Preferable to dying, apparently, we sarcastically agreed.