Cavett, Dick (1936—)
"Sophisticated," "witty," "urbane," "intelligent," and "literate" are among the adjectives commonly used to describe Dick Cavett, the Nebraska-born talk show host who experienced fame during a relatively brief period of his early career and professional struggle thereafter. The Dick Cavett Show was seen five nights a week for seven years on ABC-TV from 1968 until 1975 and then once weekly on Public Television until 1982. Cavett won three Emmy awards during these years. His interviews with such individuals as Lawrence Olivier, Katharine Hepburn, Noel Coward, Orson Welles, Groucho Marx, and Alfred Hitchcock are classics in the field, as Cavett's lively mind allowed a degree of candor and spontaneity generally lacking in the attempts of less gifted colleagues. For many viewers, his show was the saving grace of commercial television and a good reason to stay up late.
A Yale graduate, Cavett began his career as an actor and standup comic without great success. While working as a copy boy for Time magazine in 1960, he decided to try his hand at comedy writing. Since Jack Paar was one of his early idols as a performer, he wrote a series of jokes designed for Paar's opening monologue on the Tonight Show and finagled a plan to deliver the jokes directly to Paar. The plan succeeded, Paar liked the jokes, and Cavett landed a job writing for the show. From the Paar show, he got his first chance as a talk-show host on morning television and soon moved on to his spot opposite Johnny Carson (Paar's successor) on ABC.
After the Cavett show's demise, its host found various other venues but never again reached the same level of visibility. An attempted variety show series predictably fell flat, as scripted sketches were not Cavett's metier. Through the years since 1982, he has hosted numerous talk shows on cable stations including Showtime and CNBC, taken cameo roles in the theater, and narrated a PBS series on Japan. His gift for conversation keeps him popular on the lecture circuit, and his clear, uninflected Midwestern diction makes him an ideal candidate for commercial voice-overs. In short, Cavett has kept relatively busy, but his varied activities go mostly unnoticed by the general public.
Cavett's name came into the news in 1997 when he was sued for breach of contract over a syndicated radio talk show he was scheduled to host. He left the show after two weeks, and word went out through his lawyer that Cavett's premature departure was due to a manic-depressive episode. The civil suit was eventually dismissed.
Prior to this turn of events, Cavett had been relatively open about his chronic suffering with depression, even going on record about his successful treatment with controversial electroconvulsive (otherwise known as "shock")therapy. As a spokesperson on psychiatric illness, Cavett, like William Styron, Art Buchwald, and others, has put his verbal skills to use in articulating his experiences with the disease that has plagued him intermittently throughout his career. He recalls, for instance, in an interview for People magazine, a time before his "big break" when he was living alone in New York City, and "I did nothing but watch Jack Paar on The Tonight Show. I lived for the Paar show. I watched it from my bed on my little black-and-white set on my dresser, and I'd think, 'I'll brush my teeth in a minute,' and then I'd go to sleep and wake up at three the following afternoon." It is ironic that this brilliant conversationalist, the life of a sophisticated nightly party, would once again enter the public eye by virtue of his melancholia.
Further Reading:
Cavett, Dick, and Christopher Porterfield. Cavett. New York, Harcourt Brace, 1974.
——. Eye on Cavett. New York, Arbor House, 1983.
Cavett, Dick, and Veronica Burns. "Goodbye, Darkness." People, August 3, 1992, p. 88.
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