I'm at my worst when I come out of a nap, and I can see with some kind of crystal clarity the existential absurdity of life. You can never do one-millionth of what's available. There's a sense of lassitude and emptiness about it all. And there's a clarity about it, which doesn't last very long, when I think, oh God, it isn't worth it. It's almost like seeing life from a photograph in the planetarium, where the earth is a small thing in all that space.
NO, Jean-Paul Sartre didn't say that, and it certainly wasn't Spiro T. Agnew. It was Dick Cavett. There is something curious about a $15,000-a-week entertainer who is afflicted with Weltschmerz instead of narcissism. Gloomily, he keeps wondering how it has come to pass that he is a big TV star? What's he doing there anyway?
Here he is, a star-struck Nebraska kid who still keeps his nose pressed against the show-biz windowpane, almost innocently eager to talk to all the big celebrities on his very own show. It amazes him that they even remember his name, let alone want to be seen with him; yet he harbors an uncomfortable disdain for the shallowness he finds among so many "stars." He thinks of himself as an actor-writer-comic; yet he works best as a ringmaster of conversation heightened by the prodding of an acute mind—free associating, Perelmanesque, almost surrealistic. He does battle five times a week with Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show, which claims an audience more than twice the size of Cavett's (7.7 million viewers v. 3.4 million).
In a format that has become tiresomely predictable in the hands of others, Dick Cavett at 34 has produced the best mixture of literate repartee, information, entertainment and urbane wit to be found on late-night television. Those who dig good-natured buffoonery and the chitchat of West Coast showfolk go for Competitor Merv Griffin. Viewers who want to see briskly organized quasi-journalistic interviews watch David Frost's excellent syndicated talk show, a two-time Emmy Award winner. Those who tune in Carson do so mainly to watch a consummate comedian scoring off guests who might as well be dummies, and often are. Cavett lacks Frost's effusiveness and Carson's one-man showmanship; his fans turn him on because he and his guests tend to be the most interesting.
The Dick Cavett Show gets its share of dummies too; the entire talk-show circuit on radio and TV is overloaded with people who are plugging their books, plays, movies, recordings and, if nothing else, their egos. But for the most part, Cavett's guests are intelligent, entertaining and at times controversial. Sir Noel Coward and Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne once treated Cavett's audience to an evocative and amusing evening. On a two-week series taped in London, Cavett produced an extraordinary constellation of British humorists, theater people and politicians. Fred Astaire, Jack Benny and Robert Mitchum have each received a full 90 minutes of attention, instead of sharing their appearances with two or three others. Cavett once put Black Footballer Jim Brown on with Georgia's Lester Maddox, occasioning such heat that Maddox got into his huff and walked away.
Too Late to Retreat