by Dick Cavett
Joe says every man he tells this to has a similar schooldays story and longing. I know I do. Would we have been better off? Anyway, Joe, you have at least a sitcom episode here, if not the core of a feature.
Glad that so many writers liked the column and applauded the school’s efforts, warnings, and advice about that old devil, sex. Many wish they’d had it. Such a document, I mean, of course.
(A few practical souls pointed out that it is also greatly in the school’s legal interests to be able to say to thundering parents, “We told them.”)
Predictably, I guess, I was taken to task (what in hell does that really mean?) by some readers for committing humor within such a topic. This always puzzles. The old “There is no place for humor here.”
You have it almost right. There is no place for no humor. At what boundary must humor halt? I commend you to my friend Mark Twain on the power of humor: “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.”
As further assertion of the place of humor being everywhere, let us close with the wise, wise advice about life given by the great George S. Kaufman to his young daughter Ann.
“Sample everything in life. Except incest and folk-dancing.”
OCTOBER 11, 2013
Tough Way to Lose a Friend
Every writer knows that unless you were born gifted with either supreme confidence or outsized ego, handing in your work holds, in some cases, admitted terror. If that’s too strong, at least fairly high anxiety. Even if what you wrote seems unusually good to you, part of you is vulnerable to the suggestion that you may have laid an egg. A bad one. As W. C. Fields might have put it as your editor, “Sadly, my little lad, you have contrived in this instance to produce a specimen of odoriferous hen fruit.”
Sometimes you don’t realize the degree of your insecurity until you get back those warming words from an editor-type person. The simple “Nice one” warms the doubting heart. Even just “Nice” is eagerly embraced. “Good one” does wonders.
But there’s one comment I never expected to get, but did last week.
“We really can’t publish this.”
Reading on, through rapid heartbeat came the kindly meant “Don’t worry. It happens when you’ve written so many…”
I had written that column before.
It was about a time in Hollywood, years ago, when—with perhaps too much interest in the legendary imbibers the Scott Fitzgeralds—I decided to try getting monumentally drunk.
Being in show business, I’ve encountered drunks of every stripe. Often funny, usually sad, some tragic.
I don’t get being a drunk.
One of my best friends, colleagues, and just an all-around delightful person to be with was a drunk. He—Tom—and my late friend Pat McCormick, sometimes together with Jonathan Winters, would improvise hilariously, backstage at the Jack Paar Tonight Show, or in Hurley’s legendary bar, or on the sidewalk, convulsing a swelling crowd.
I loved them collectively and individually. They were all drunks. All were, in that selected euphemism for being one, “recovering alcoholics.”
Tom was somehow the saddest. Jonny and Pat got it under control. Tom, intermittently.
Having worked all over television, most notably for Paar and for Allen Funt on Candid Camera, Tom was a sweetheart: amiable, genuinely funny, a good, good friend, and a fanatical Chicago-accented Cubs fan, sticking with them through thin and thin.
When Tom delighted me by joining my PBS show staff, it was cause for (alcohol-free) celebration. He was the leading master, from years with Jack, of the art of preparing a guest, big or small, for appearing on a talk show. He should have published his techniques. I once heard him say to a guest he was prepping, “Now say the last line of that story in the same words and the same way you just told it to me. Leave out the word ‘very’ before ‘embarrassing.’ It’ll get a bigger laugh.” He was always right. Everyone liked him. And I liked his frankness in letting my producer know that he knew his drinking reputation preceded him. My producer was frank in return. Reassurance from Tom came in the form of a single bit of information. Tom’s doctor had told him if he drank again he’d die, so great was the physical punishment already self-inflicted. Things went nicely for a good long while.
Then, the first troubling signs. Nothing blatant, just an odd habit of vanishing from the office at odd times.
And then other signs.
We all suspected Tom had slipped off the wagon. Distressed, I suddenly surprised him in an otherwise enjoyable phone call full of humor: Tom, if you’re drinking now and I asked you for the truth, you’d deny it, wouldn’t you? A long pause. “Yes.”
Ron Fried, the author and television producer, including for me, was back then a lowly PA (production assistant) on my staff. The trouble grew, and Ron got it firsthand.
Tom got spooked somehow about some show problem. At an early morning editing session, he asked Ron to smell his breath. Ron noticed its two main ingredients: “Chewing gum … of course!… and booze. I didn’t tell him.” I doubt that I would have either, though I’m not sure why.
During one of Tom’s absences, Ron was sent to his home to pick up notes. Tom, he said, looked as if he had been in a fight and did not want that fact reported. One day at work he, with a lame excuse, sported a comic-strip black eye. That standard stock character, the boozing, brawling Irish drunk with a deteriorating liver, was an image Tom loathed while, on occasion, exemplifying it.
It fell to my producer at the time, Chris Porterfield, to deal with the problem. It was no fun for any of us. He and I think I may have been the one to suggest calling the wonderful Malachy McCourt, actor, popular barkeep, restaurateur, and good friend of Tom’s. Malachy—and I hope he won’t mind being called an expert on the subject—was terse.
After we ran through a number of “signs”—chewing a lot of gum, keeping his office door closed, sudden disappearances, uncharacteristic errors, sloppiness in his work—Malachy knew.
I remember his chilling assurance that, all those signs being present, “You might have to remove the grill on the ventilator in his office to find the bottle that is surely there.”
I’m pretty sure Malachy said that the word for how to treat the situation was “brutally.” His advice was to corner him. Not by literally blocking the door but by knowing he was drinking, allowing no argument on that point, and saying what had to be done.
To spare embarrassment, the staff and others could be told Tom was taking a two weeks’ or so vacation. He would, without argument or denial, enter treatment. I think it was St. Vincent’s detox program.
In what would be considered a good actor’s or director’s touch in a performance, Tom suddenly covered his face in both hands. Was he going to cry? Throw a punch? Either was possible. Instead, he simply spoke.
“God. This is so … humiliating.”
Perhaps the doctor was wrong. Tom didn’t die. Or not just then. Staff memories have dimmed on what followed Tom’s treatment at St. Vincent’s. He did come back in good shape. He may have fallen again.
When that show ended I lost touch with Tom for a long stretch of time. Then I heard he was dead.
I wish I understood the workings of the alcoholic mind. While taping in San Francisco, Robin Breed (one of my producers), Chris, Tom, and I went for a daytime stroll in the sunlight. Tom was sober then. On a corner was an inviting-looking cocktail lounge bar. Tom said, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to just spend the whole afternoon in there, drinking whisky sours?”
No one responded. Had it been a cartoon, three “balloons” would have appeared over our heads, each bearing the word “No.” And not meaning no you can’t, but no it wouldn’t.
If you’re an alcoholic in show business, you’re at least in good company—the Burtons, Sinatra, doubtless Judy, and enough more that the list would extend this piece another page. And, surprisingly, not Dean Martin, I’m told.
I guess I’m undeservedly lucky, whether it’s my genes or that my swimming-pool booze binge in the
twice-written article and, mainly, the hangover that would have killed an ordinary man inoculated me against a life of tippling.
The German for an awful hangover is Ein furchtbarer Katzenjammer. And that’s just how it feels.
When I think of the aftermath pain that next morning, it reminds me of a line in Johnny Carson’s socko nightclub act. A line written for him, I’m sure, by my late friend David Lloyd. Johnny said this line got the biggest obvious identification laugh from the sadly experienced in the audience. About the next morning agony, he said, “Your hair hurts and you can’t make a fist.”
I wonder what strange brain quirk just popped a line from somewhere in Shakespeare into my head:
“Poor Tom’s a-cold.”
NOVEMBER 15, 2013
Cavett on Booze, Again
Judging from your e-mails and from other in-person comments, it seems to be a rare thing not to have been touched by problem drinking somewhere among family or friends or business associates.
Web sites on alcohol and drinking statistics abound. Numbers vary, but clearly millions are suffering the tortures of the damned. No less an authority than Don Imus, sober for long years with the day-at-a-time method, having read the last column, imparts the sad news that “rehab works for one out of four.” Every bit as disturbing is the statement of a highway patrolman I know that one out of five drivers heading toward you—or your kids—in the oncoming lane on Friday and Saturday night is over the intoxication limit. Or, less politely, drunk. One Saturday night, traveling east on Long Island, my car became the fifth in a line of cars to peel off into the right-hand ditch rhythmically, one after the other like Rockettes, as a speeding oncomer decided he preferred our lane.
One Web site puts the number of people deeply suffering at 15 million. Keep that in mind when those weekend cars come at you.
I all but forgot that years ago, in my early days on ABC, I did a two-part show on alcoholism. Standing out most clearly in memory is an attractive, intelligent, well-spoken mother of three who survived shooting herself in the forehead while drunk.
Readers made the point that “too smart to be a drunk” cuts no—pardon the expression—ice.
It’s a shame that such a heavy price is paid by both the drinker and his victim for a substance that is so wonderful in its good ways: a lubricator of conversation, a steadier of nerves, a remover of that little edge of anxiety, an uninhibitor of the lover. And the lovee. In movies, anyway, a steadier of the trembling hand of the drunken doctor, usually played by Thomas Mitchell.
(Though of course loss of inhibition, pushed too far, can release the inner rapist as well.)
I wish I’d discovered earlier that with my weak head, a mere tablespoon’s worth of wine before going on took away that annoying little edge of performance nerves.
For a while I felt guilty about this, or about recommending it. Would that make me an enabler? The greats don’t need a drink, I thought. (I was very young.)
Then one night, backstage at The Tonight Show, I saw Jack Benny—yes, Jack Benny—seemingly the calmest, most assured, and relaxed man in all of show business, quite casually call for and down a couple of inches of scotch, with one ice cube, before sauntering with that wonderful walk calmly onto the set with Johnny. I stared in disbelief.
I appeared on the old Kraft Music Hall with George Burns. Just before airtime I was nervous as hell. George came to my dressing room and offered me a snort from his hip flask as if that were traditional. Brace yourself: I held it in my mouth, nodding thanks, and as he left I spat it into the dressing room sink, terrified that I would come reeling onto the stage. Dressing room sinks, time out of mind, have served multiple purposes.
(Remember George Gobel’s rationale for taking a stiff drink before going on? “You don’t expect me to go out there alone, do you?”)
The world of showbiz has always had a heavy population of drunks. Fine actors like Jason Robards, Bogie, Maureen Stapleton, Trevor Howard, most Barrymores, Veronica Lake (drunk on my show), Robert Newton, Dana Andrews (reportedly needing to have his head held in a brace for close-ups), Dick and Liz, Peter O’Toole, and Robert Mitchum represent a tiny percentage of the showfolk apparently plagued with “the cup that cheers.” And how did I leave out the great Spencer Tracy, who suffered alcohol seizures, bellowing and hurling furniture and glassware and having to be needled by a doctor into unconsciousness?
Burton’s vivid eloquence on my PBS show on what it is to be the slave of alcohol was recalled by readers, some of whom found it on YouTube, I think. Obviously people vary in their capacities. Mitchum explained, in one of two wonderful shows I did with him, that he could drink large quantities of alcohol with no apparent effect of any kind. Hardly a blessing, liver-wise, I should think.
I told an AA friend of mine that by just licking the surface of a martini—not even taking a sip—I can feel it down to my toes. He paled, saying, “My God, I had to drink three to feel anything!”
He’s the same one who told me a profound thing that sticks with me, certainly in relation to Tom of my “Tough Way to Lose a Friend” column. He said, “An alcoholic is so devious, he will even quit drinking to prove he’s not an alcoholic.”
We needn’t recite the list of famous alcoholic writers that usually starts with Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Faulkner.
John Cheever said he could drink anywhere, anytime, except when working. I’d asked, “Does drink help writing?” His negative reply was wonderful: “I can detect a sip of sherry in a paragraph.”
Tom (of the previous column) had worked on many television shows and I’m not sure if my producer was the first or even the last to have to can him—as Tom himself had requested when coming aboard, if he tumbled from the wagon. My producer needed a bit of a nip himself after performing the hateful deed.
Tom was affable, wittily funny, and a hilarious storyteller. One day he came to work lamenting, once again, the gentrification of his beloved Columbus Avenue. He complained that he had just seen a new funeral parlor named “Death ’n’ Things.”
Strangely, I saw myself as an exception to the apparent rule that everyone has a drunk somewhere in their family. At first I could think of none. Then, in an eerie procession, they began to file into consciousness, coming into focus like ghosts in a story.
Here came Aunt Betty, a gorgeous blonde on my stepmother’s side who made a total mess of her life and family. My somewhat saintly stepmother somehow collared all of Betty’s bewildered grade-school-age kids, brought them to Lincoln from St. Louis while their mom was particularly bad, and gave them a birthday party. They’d never had one.
When she inevitably lost the kids, and kicked the booze well after her divorce, she got by on two other addictions. Chain-smoking and crappy television jewelry, which she ordered incessantly, saying, “I need this. It keeps coming in, making every day a birthday.” Not all of her wits survived the booze. When she died, from smoking, all the drawers of her desk were found stuffed with the shiny junk frippery. Most of it unopened.
Smoking, sadly, seems to be the favored other addiction of the alcoholic. Before being recognizable, I was sneaked into an AA meeting with a friend. You could barely see the walls for the cigarette smoke, with coffee consumed by the gallon.
Speaking of writers, I once drove the Pulitzer Prize winner Jean Stafford (the former Mrs. Robert Lowell and also the former Mrs. A. J. Liebling, as well as my late wife’s and my great friend) to her home in East Hampton. She was asleep, drunk, in the passenger seat. Suddenly she stirred and in her beautiful, almost baritone voice said, “I hate it. I hate alcohol. It is my seducer. And my enemy.” And went back to sleep.
I’m at a loss for how to close on this unclosable subject. I think I’ll let one of the readers have the honor. From “geomurshiva of cooperstown, ny”:
Being a critical care nurse for a long time, I have seen what alcohol can do to any one of us. We think most often of the long term drinker and the liver failure and the disorientation and the sad last days of co
ma and the family at the bedside crying so sadly for the loss of another life to booze. Thanks, Mr. Cavett, for the good read.… But, for most of us serving the sick we cry more for the younger ones who got drunk at a college party and then went driving only to die in a car crash or sustain brain injury and paralysis.… These victims of alcohol are forgotten all too soon. They become statistics only. Alas.
JANUARY 10, 2014
Only in My Dreams?
Those damned anxiety dreams again.
While you’re writhing and twisting in the bedclothes, dreaming that you’re late, never going to get there, everything gets in your way, your stuff’s all over the room, you’ll never get packed in time for the plane, your legs and arms aren’t even working right, and, and …
With a shudder, you’re awake. Relief. You may even say aloud, “Thank God that was only a dream.”
But it felt worse than if it had been real, and you remember, again, Freud’s observation that the psychic pain in dreams exceeds what the same situation would feel like in waking life.
There are disturbing dreams, painfully troubling dreams, and there are nightmares. I don’t, but some have dreams of hideous, pursuing monsters, thirsty vampires, slimy and enveloping webs of giant spiders. My anguishing dreams are invariably that I’m ill-prepared, not ready, and will make a fool of myself: in the play, in the speech, in the exam. And the pain of these seemingly mundane situations is a torture the CIA might envy.
A few of mine are more elaborate, with more exotic settings. How would you categorize the following?
The setting: Clothing and other clues tell us it’s somewhere in the mid-eighties. You are on a large, seaworthy river cruise ship, deep in China. You and your mate have opted to skip the next stop’s two-hour side trip to contemplate yet another essential temple.
