(6 of 7)
In the course of her acting career, Carrie Nye has lodged some fine credits (Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams). While Dick is ambitious but unobsessed with his work, she is not driven at all. She spends most of her time reading, and by choice has not acted in two years. She prefers loafing at the Cavetts' old, ramshackle house at Montauk, on the eastern tip of Long Island. "I like falling-down dilapidated houses, unrestored and unregenerated," she says. "Maybe we're the Snopeses."
The Cavetts' relationship allows for a kind of respectful distance. In town they see only a small number of friends at home and rarely go out together. Dick, who used to enjoy partygoing, now much prefers privacy and books. Carrie Nye will often spend a week alone at Montauk ("It's like taking your brain out of your head and laundering it"). Dick, too, will take a weekend there alone, wandering among the dunes. A friend calls it "tactful withdrawal." At the same time, both see a wry absurdity in the outward aspects of their marriage. Sometimes they play a talk-show game of their own:
Host: Tell me, Miss Nye, what do you think of the failure to communicate in our marriage?
Miss Nye: I think it's terrible.
Host: I see.
Miss Nye: Yes . . .
Cavett sometimes seems to be in the same state of unresolved dialogue with himself. He has been known to let his temper flare over a staff member's goof, despite his own wild disorganization and vagueness about money matters. He says he is apolitical and generally avoids taking firm positions on the air; yet once, faced with a guest who defended U.S. policies in Viet Nam, he ignored the rest of his guests and argued against the war. In his most publicized flap, he succumbed to pressure from ABC and the White House and put an SST proponent on the air unopposed. But with skill, and unconcealed anger, he fenced off his argumentative guest's attempts to turn the program into a full-fledged debate.
Perhaps his greatest conflict is between his intellect and his show-biz passion for a commercially successful program. He says: "I always feel torn between viewers who call or write and say they're so grateful to be able to switch away from yakking actresses and the necessity of having the yakking starlets for the ratings. It would be an awful lot easier to just not give a damn. It's such a drag. I sometimes wish I had made a clear decision that I was going to be strictly commercial or that I was going to provide a radical alternative. But either would have been a false decision. I'm not all that enthralled by show business, and I'm not that much of a highbrow. I hate the idea that acting like a jackass is beneath me, that I'm some kind of cultural uplifter."