Review: Dick Cavett Charms With ‘Brief Encounters’

Montauk resident and former talk show host Dick Cavett is known for his wit and charm. His charm, though, was mostly lost on Richard Nixon, who once asked his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, “Cavett—what can we do to screw him?”

I’m sure it was lost on Norman Mailer, who, as a guest on Mr. Cavett’s show, said to him, “Why don’t you look at your question sheet and ask me a question?” Mr. Cavett responded, “Why don’t you fold it five ways and put it where the moon don’t shine?” On that same show, he asked the egotistical author, “Would you like another chair for your giant brain?”

President Nixon’s animus stemmed from the fact that “The Dick Cavett Show” was second only to the news stations in devoting time to covering the Watergate scandal. In fact, Mr. Cavett is proud that he was mentioned 26 times in the White House tapes.

For the rest of us who don’t hold positions of power, or literary eminence, we can read his new book, “Brief Encounters: Conversations, Magic Moments, and Assorted Hijinks” (Henry Holt, 267 pp., $26). The title is a nod to the bittersweet classic film by Noel Coward, and the book itself is a collection of essays that first appeared in the New York Times blog, Opinionator.

Mr. Cavett began his show business career as a writer of jokes primarily for Jack Paar and Johnny Carson. In 1968, he became the host of ABC’s “The Dick Cavett Show,” which ran on several networks in succession until the late 1990s. He has also worked as an actor, most recently portraying himself in Brian Richard Mori’s play “Hellman v. McCarthy” about the lawsuit brought by playwright Lillian Hellman against literary critic Mary McCarthy. It was a feud that began on Mr. Cavett’s show, when Ms. McCarthy declared “every word [Ms. Hellman] writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’”

Mr. Cavett’s essays are often moving reminiscences of the talk show hosts for whom he worked, guests on his show, and meetings with some of his idols. He writes affectionately of Arthur Godfrey, a man who was an entertainment colossus in his day, but virtually unknown in ours. (Mr. Cavett contemplates teaching a college course called “Kaufman, Benchley, Thurber, Perelman, Parker, Lardner, and, of the Numerous Comic Allens, Fred, and Others You Were Too Dumb To Have Been Born in the Time of, 101.”) He tips his hat to John Lennon and Yoko Ono, whom he interviewed in bed. And to Jonathan Winters, a comic geyser who never told a joke, and whose imaginative and improvised set pieces could conjure all manner of hilarity.

Groucho Marx—“the most supremely gifted comedian of our time,” Mr. Cavett writes—is a hero, as is the great playwright George S. Kaufman. It was Mr. Kaufman who is responsible for “Don’t just do something—stand there!” He once said to a woman who never stopped talking, “Don’t you have any unexpressed thoughts?” Another hero is Stan Laurel; Mr. Cavett touchingly writes of visiting him in his modest condo in Santa Monica.

There is a delightful essay about Marlene Dietrich, who called Mr. Cavett out of the blue. They had never met. There was a series of calls. “Between talks #3 and #4, she bought the book ‘Cavett’ and read it overnight. For the fourth call, instead of ‘Hello’ I got ‘You are to eat up.’ ‘Excuse me?’ I said, hoping to hear it again, which I did. She said she loved the book (and by implication, me?) and could not put it down till the end.

“If it had been dark, I would have glowed.”

He writes with nostalgia about his Tom Sawyer-like Nebraska boyhood. We read with delight the story of whitewashing the statue of William Jennings Bryan on the front steps of the Nebraska state capitol building in Lincoln.

Mr. Cavett is true to his roots and returns for his high school reunion, where he barely recognizes his now-ancient classmates. He remarks to one man that his son and he were in the same French class, only to discover that the man he thought to be the father is, in fact, the son. At his reunion, he said, “to look out from the stage over the crowd was to risk snow-blindness.”

What Mr. Cavett says about Stephen Colbert could just as easily be said about him: “Colbert [read: Cavett] is, among other virtues, endowed with a first-rate mind, a great ad-lib wit, skilled comic movement and gesture, fine education, seemingly unlimited knowledge of affairs and events, and, from delightful occasional evidence, those things called the Liberal Arts.”

There are many more stories and portraits in “Brief Encounters.” They are often laugh-out-loud funny, but just as often kind and thoughtful. Mr. Cavett writes with considerable warmth and grace.

In a world filled with talk show hosts, he is one of a kind.