Chatting with Dick Cavett about his latest Talk Show
Anyone who’s ever expressed a wish to be a guest on “The Dick Cavett Show” can now fulfill it, after a fashion, by joining the robust conversation at Cavett’s Talk Show blog.
Since February, the former ABC and PBS talker has established himself as one of the most remarked-upon bloggers behind the New York Times’ TimesSelect subscription wall. His entries, which read like columns, often generate more than 100 comments.
In fact, his first piece (a wry discursion on the misuse of language) set the TimesSelect record by eliciting more than 770 responses, Cavett said during a phone chat from his home in Montauk, N.Y. And a July 25 post warning against societal acceptance of obesity prompted more than 420 readers to weigh in.
He was reading through the latest batch of comments when I called him. “I have up on the screen … the 340th reply to my recent, highly controversial blog about obesity, which has struck an enormous nerve,” Cavett said.
“The writers are (carping) at each other,” he continued. “The dumb ones took it to be a column about how we should hate fat people, of course. And yet many very thoughtful writers wrote essays that are virtually publishable. … And then there’ll be one that says, ‘Well, I don’t like short talk-show hosts.’ “
The voice remains rich and distinctive. The wit’s still sharp, quick and dry. And Cavett, 70, continues to leaven his show-business anecdotes with self-deprecating humor that touches on everything from his physical stature to how he ended performances as a toddler in his Nebraska home by telling his parents, “Now everybody crap.”
The one-time magician is still picking up new tricks as well – such as the blogger’s penchant for courting controversy.
“I’m not doing another piece right away – the guy who edits me is on vacation and it’s sort of the dog days of August,” Cavett said. But he promised the next entry will revisit the obesity issue “unless something just un-ignorable happens in the next couple weeks.”
Although he called blog “kind of a gloppy-sounding word,” Cavett doesn’t mind being known as a blogger. “You can get high in writing in a way that you’ve forgotten if you haven’t done it for a while – a certain elevation of the various bodily functions, like pulse and heartbeat, that are very, very close to when you’re performing and it’s going well,” he said.
When Charlie Rose asked Cavett in 2001 if he’d achieved his full potential, the reply came, “I wish I had written more.” After co-authoring “Cavett” and “Eye on Cavett” in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively, might he return to publishing with a collection of blog entries?
“I’ve expected somebody to mention that, but so far you’re the first,” he quipped before adding that he’d been approached about possibly expanding his thoughts on the misuse of language into a book.
Interviewing Mel Brooks last year for Turner Classic Movies (tied to the DVD release of several Cavett chat collections) sparked the host’s interest in getting back on the air.
“I would love to be doing a show now,” he said. Bantering with Brooks “felt good. It felt like no time had passed. But Jesus, an infinite amount of time has passed.” Not quite, but it has been 25 years since Cavett ended his late-night run.
The time might be ripe for a broadband revival, however. The Times site now tapes interviews with noteworthy figures for later use in video obituaries. “The Last Word” series kicked off in January with its initial subject famously proclaiming, “Hi, I’m Art Buchwald and I just died!”
Why not set Cavett up with a studio at the new Times HQ and give him a real online talk show, complete with highbrow sponsors and ancillary cable distribution? I know I’d watch.