Dick Cavett: In The Hot Seat

It was a man-bites-dog moment for Dick Cavett a month ago when he found himself the one being interviewed (and on his 74th birthday to boot) at the Cinema Arts Center in Huntington. The occasion was “An Evening With Dick Cavett,” and the Q&A and the showing of clips from the interviews he has conducted over the years was followed by a reception that had him signing copies of his just-published book “Talk Show: Confrontations, Pointed Commentary, and Off-Screen Secrets.”

“I got a kick out of it,” said Mr. Cavett about the event, in an interview last week. “I felt I could be totally irresponsible because it wasn’t my show. If it went badly, that was someone else’s problem. But it went well. There was plenty of laughter, we showed clips from the old shows, and the audience seemed to have a good time.”

When asked if “An Evening With Dick Cavett” might become a regular gig, given the many hours of television interview he has to draw upon, he replied, “I would like it to, because it was so enjoyable. Maybe the folks at Guild Hall would be interested. The last time I performed there was in the play ‘Otherwise Engaged,’ which I had been doing on Broadway.”

Guild Hall would also be a familiar setting for Mr. Cavett because he has been a longtime resident of East Hampton Town. He and his wife, the actress Carrie Nye, owned the house known as “Tick Hall,” which was built on a cliff overlooking the ocean in Montauk in 1883 by the renowned architectural firm McKim, Mead & White.

In 1997, the house was destroyed by fire. The Cavetts embarked on a three-year project to restore Tick Hall to its original structure and features.

Ms. Nye passed away in 2006, and this past October Mr. Cavett was remarried, in New Orleans, to Martha Rogers, a marketing expert and adjunct professor at Duke University.

Students of television would certainly want to study the career of Mr. Cavett. The Nebraska native graduated from Yale University and repaired to New York to try for an acting career. While working as a copy boy at Time Magazine in 1960, he read that Jack Paar, then host of “The Tonight Show,” was looking for material for his opening monologues. The impudent Mr. Cavett wrote several jokes, put them in an envelope, and as luck would have it, while in the RCA Building he ran into Paar.

The television legend used Mr. Cavett’s jokes that night and he was soon on the payroll. He remained on it when Johnny Carson became the host. Mr. Cavett’s jokes ranged from the naughty—“Here they are, Jayne Mansfield”—to the cerebral, such as a caption he wrote for a photo that showed Aristotle Onassis gazing at the home of silent film comedian Buster Keaton—“Aristotle contemplating the home of Buster.”

The first incarnation of “The Dick Cavett Show” aired on ABC in 1968. There were several versions over the years, the most recent being on the Turner Classic Movies station in 2007. Recently, he has been cited by Jimmy Fallon and other present-day late-night talk show hosts as a major influence and a pioneer in the serious-interview format.

Mr. Cavett said this news is pleasing, though he had a caveat to add.

“It is satisfying to be honored by Fallon and others, considering that one always thinks of oneself as the younger generation until you suddenly find yourself on a ‘Pioneers of Television’ awards ceremony,” he said. “I pointed out to them that there were people ahead of me, and people ahead of them—someone named Jack Paar, Arthur Godfrey, Steve Allen and ever back to Jerry Lester. Maybe it boils down to who can you still get to show up for your night.”

Mr. Cavett’s new book, “Talk Show,” is only partly a memoir of his shows from the 1960s on. It is also a selection of columns that for the last three years have been posted on the New York Times website, nytimes.com.

“The Times said would I like to try writing a column for the month of August,” Mr. Cavett explained. “Two a week for the month, that’s eight. What the hell, I’d written daily for Carson and Paar and Merv Griffin, I can surely turn out eight columns. It was fine for the first three, then I wondered if I had a fourth in me, but what if I have to actually come up with a fifth and sixth. They seem to keep coming, and after more than three years, my brain has adapted to a schedule, even though there are times when the deadline looms and I have not the slightest idea what I will write about. Sometimes it can be easy, such as recalling my times with John Lennon on the anniversary of his death earlier this month.”

Mr. Lennon and Yoko Ono were just two of the famous and otherwise reclusive musicians, actors, and artists who agreed to be interviewed by Mr. Cavett. What was it that persuaded them to visit his show and not the talk shows hosted by others?

“I was always kind of mystified with it myself,” Mr. Cavett said. “From time to time someone would say, ‘I have no idea how you got me to open up like that. I don’t know why I told you what I did.’ I thought it might spook things to try and figure out what it was. I think I have a slight gift for knowing how people feel at that moment. If they’re nervous, I know how to calm them, and if they’re too calm, I know how to make them nervous. I was not competing with them for face time, let’s just hear them talk. No one expected to hear Laurence Olivier, Marlon Brando, Janis Joplin, Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn talk about themselves, so when they begin to do so, let’s listen to them,” he remembered, adding, “When I had my first talk show, Jack Paar called and said, ‘Don’t do interviews, kid. Make it a conversation.’”

When asked who was the one who got away, Mr. Cavett replied, “I’d love to have interviewed Frank Sinatra and Cary Grant. I was close to getting Grant, but then he told me, ‘Kate [Hepburn] was so wonderful that the audience will find out how dull I am.’”

While Mr. Cavett has written books before, the “Talk Show” experience has been particularly enjoyable because it combines traditional book publishing (the publisher is Times Books) with the expanding resources and visibility of the internet. Indeed, because of the extent of his archives, Mr. Cavett is especially well-suited for having a cyber-column.

“It’s so remarkable that unlike in book form, when you read a column online—and it could be about Richard Burton, for example —you can click on the link and watch the four half-hour segments I did with him. It’s giving the shows a whole new life,” he said.

When it came to selecting what columns made the cut for “Talk Show,” Mr. Cavett said, “Fortunately, I liked some of the pieces. There are others I didn’t, and there are a few that I don’t recall at all. I could pass a polygraph test claiming someone else wrote them, not me.”