681. How to Host a Talk Show, with Dick Cavett

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1:45I have a confession to make. Back in 2020, when COVID hit and the world shut down, I saw a silver lining. The death and illness and uncertainty, those were all horrible. Early on, we had a bad COVID case in my family and things were touch and go for a while. But once we got through that, I was excited about spending every day in solitude. That's just the way I'm built. I've been a writer since I was a kid and writing requires you to be comfortable with long hours all by yourself. So I just focused on making the best Freakonomics episodes we could. And I did all my recording from a makeshift home studio.

2:22And for a while, this isolation did make me happy. There was no obligation to go anywhere or see anyone, but the happiness faded. And I thought of something the economist Gary Becker once said. Becker had studied the economics of addiction, and when he was asked to name the most addictive thing on the planet, Becker's answer was people. I never would have thought of that, but it makes sense. We are a social animal. We need other people the way we need food and water. So when the COVID restrictions lifted, I decided to get out of my home studio and take Freakonomics Radio on the road for some live shows.

3:00Those shows were fun, but I didn't find the connection I was looking for. When you're having a conversation on a big stage with a thousand people in the audience, the tendency is to scale up. Conversations get broader, but not deeper. There's more performance and less intimacy. But then one night in San Francisco, just before curtain time, I was looking through a big overstuffed bookshelf in the green room and I found an old biography of the talk show host Dick Cavett. I'd seen bits and pieces of the Dick Cavett show over the years, and these days you can find it on YouTube. He is smart, funny, and just the right amount of weird.

3:37So I decided to steal the Cavett book. I finished it on the plane home and I fell in love, not with Dick Cabot per se, but with the idea of making some kind of a TV talk show myself with a different kind of conversation than we have on Freakonomics Radio and a wider set of guests. And rather than filming it in a big theater, we would make it in my living room because I was looking for connection, not spectacle. It wasn't long before this show had a name, Better In Person. If Freakonomics is about how things work, Better In Person would be about how people work. I didn't want celebrities necessarily or people promoting their latest projects.

4:22I just wanted people who have done remarkable things and are willing to think out loud. I wanted to let the conversation be steered by curiosity, mine and theirs. We would talk, we'd eat and drink, we'd get out and play, maybe make some trouble together. And now that YouTube has become the world's TV, that's where we would put this show. So, yeah, all of that actually happened. Took us about a year and a half. Next week, Better In Person will launch on the Freakonomics YouTube channel. Trailer is already up. Go check it out and subscribe. And today on this episode of Freakonomics Radio, I pay a visit to the man who accidentally inspired the whole thing.

5:05My name is Dick Cavett, and I'm known as a talk show host. Dick Cavett is 89 years old, and he lives with his wife in an old mansion on a hilltop in southwestern Connecticut. I told him my plan for Better in Person. Well, I hope you do it. You're just saying that, aren't you? Yeah. Yeah. I just wanted to make your friends laugh. Dick Cavett was certainly better in person. I've come to think that most of us are. My conversation with Cabot starts now.

5:51This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.

6:09The Dick Cavett Show ran on ABC from 1968 to 1975. Later, there were other versions on other networks, but it was the ABC period that made his reputation. He spoke with musicians, athletes, artists, political figures, public intellectuals. Having attended Yale, Cavett was sometimes called an intellectual himself. which shows that people don't know what an intellectual really looks like. Here's how Cavett is described in a 1972 New Yorker profile. Off camera and in repose, Cavett so remarkably resembles his on-air self, cool, self-contained, poised, judging, that he may be the first show business character who is always off, always himself, in public or in private.

6:56He now spends most of his time in private. His wife, Martha Rogers, earned a Ph.D. in marketing and worked for years in consumer strategy. Their Connecticut mansion was built in 1912. It's got acres of wood paneling and a ballroom. Houdini's brother owned it. May have been other owners, but he's the known one. And Houdini came here, and kids would sneak in the bushes and watch him working on his underwater escapes in the swimming pool. Wow. They got kicked out a couple of times, I've heard. By the way, my wife, who is a brilliant finder of things, found this house. Apparently nobody wanted it.

7:41It's a great place. Is it corny to say the best thing that ever happened to me? it might make her blush, so you better keep it from her. It's nice when that happens. Better not to marry someone who's the worst thing that ever happened to you, as some of my friends have. The reason I'm here, if you don't mind me saying, is twofold. One is, I've always been a fan. Simple as that. Listen, don't be ashamed of that.

8:13Thank you. It's my advice. I appreciate it. And the other reason is, it's a little embarrassing to say, but I'm going to just tell you, which is that I've done a few things in my career. I've done music, but I've been a writer for a long time, then I started making radio, and I never liked TV. You mean as a kid, as a viewer, or ever? No, no, no. I mean, I liked it, making it. Yeah, I see. When Freakonomics came out, I was invited to do a lot of TV as a guest. And I didn't enjoy it so much. Because when you don't control it, you're just there like a circus animal. Just show up for eight minutes and talk about this.

8:50Yeah. I see that. And I certainly never would have wanted to have a TV show. But then I started watching your show again, thanks to YouTube, really. And your channel on YouTube is so well positioned. Yeah, I don't know how much I'm on YouTube. Can't go on YouTube without finding Dick Cavett. Really? Let's do it now. It's weird for me to see stuff that way because often I have no memory of ever doing that. Or I think, why the hell didn't I say this? Or I hope I'm about to say, and I do. So it's a hodgepodge of emotions for me. That must be a good feeling when you now are thinking, I wish or hope he will say X, and you do.

9:36And I do. That's a good feeling. The opposite is bad feeling. So here's the thing I really like. Yeah. You're interviewing people plainly. You're asking questions. That's what an interview is. I don't think of it as an interview in the sense that you interview to elicit facts. somebody said it's a mistake to call what Cavett does interview because gratefully for us it's conversation it feels to me like we're at the fun end of the table at a great dinner party I like that remind me of that one problem is that I come from journalism not comedy and I'm not opposed to being funny but I'm not professionally funny you don't try to be funny Do I try to be funny?

10:23Doesn't everybody try to be funny? Yeah, you're right. People hope they are. People trying to be funny can be one of the worst things, except murder or somebody stepping on a mine. How much did you care about the response to a particular show? If you thought a show was great and people didn't respond, or vice versa, did you care? That never was really an issue. They were all fantastic, you're saying? Well, one wasn't, but I don't want to talk about it. I'm the only person I know of who had a guest die on the show.

11:00Tavitt is referring here to a 1971 taping with Jerome I. Rodale, a publisher and entrepreneur who championed organic food. The episode never aired, but Rodale's on-set death became late-night legend. Are we boring you, Mr. Rodale, is one of my immortal remarks. Wait, you said that? Yeah, because he did what guests often do will go, oh, sorry, Dick, what? They find it funny, and sometimes it is, to snore. And he snored in reality. I realized right after having said, are we boring you, Mr. Rodale, and I remember thinking, I wish I weren't the one in charge here. What do I do now? And what did I do?

11:46You wrote that you took his pulse. You acted as if you were taking his pulse, but you didn't actually know how to do that. I didn't know where the pulse was supposed to be or even where it was for sure, yeah. But he was dead. And then I said, is there a doctor in the audience? Later when I met Catherine Hepburn, she said, I want to know everything about the man who died on your show. And I said, why do you suppose I hesitated on the word and said, is there a doctor in the audience? When the well-known phrase, is there a doctor in the house? Is there a doctor in the house? I wondered that too. What was that about?

12:22She said, well, you knew that is there a doctor in the house was such a cliched line and often used in humorous settings. You knew that would get a laugh. The actress Katharine Hepburn refused interviews for most of her life, but she once came on Cabot's show for a two-hour conversation. There's a nice bit of tape from before the interview when Hepburn is checking out the set and finds it lacking. And can't we have a stationary table? Can't we have a table that nobody answers in this business? Can we get a table that doesn't wobble here? Sure. Right now? Yeah, nail it down. That carpet, if anybody can survive that carpet, You can.

13:09We're doing well.

13:16Someone once wrote that the reason you're so good at this is because you weren't insecure. The way that my mind took that is if a person is secure in themselves, you don't need to tear down other people. you can really try to draw out what makes them excited or i can identify with that do you think of yourself as performing when you're doing your show or mostly natural i guess no i don't think i think of it as performing that would be odd to think no i just got easy to do the show were you able to be yourself yeah how long did it take you to get there because coming up as a writer and then a stand-up, when you started hosting, did it take you a long time to feel like, I know how to do this?

14:08It took a while because various things like my friend Porterfield would say, you're sticking too close to your notes. Sometimes you don't seem to have heard what the other person said. You think he was right? Yeah, yeah, I could see it. There was times when I really wasn't listening and someone would say, you know, I just got over a very serious illness. And I would say, do you have any hobbies? I mean... How would you prepare for a taping? Well, I had four talent coordinators, a title somebody thought of, for bookers. And they would get with the guest if the guest would agree to it, or they'd talk on the phone with them or something.

14:52And you'd get notes. She's in town for such and such. She's worried about not having the right clothes for an opening night. or he's, there'll be maybe 10 things that you can talk to them about. Often I use all of them. Often I use some of them and sometimes none of them. The minute you start with some people, you know there's gonna go great and it does and you don't need your notes. How much do you just try to let your brain be present in the moment versus draw on your preparation? That's a good question. I would think that it's better when you're just ziggy-zag, snapping, snapping, yeah? Yeah, the first time I did a show, I looked at the notes afterwards of three pages of maybe six things or eight each per page, and I hadn't used any of them.

15:45I thought, that is important than it was. I could have used them, and they'd have been fine, but I didn't need them for whatever lucky reason. So once you realized that you were good at it like that, Yeah, that was a big thing. Did that change how you prepared then? Knowing that I could do a show without him was a nice thing. People mentioned one particular show recently, by chance, that some columnist, somebody sent this to me, said, if in your life you only are able to watch one full talk show, just the one episode, be sure it's Cavett's Mailer Vidal show. There's nothing like it. I would agree.

16:32I'm going to have to watch it again. I haven't seen it a couple of years ago, and I just thought it was great. And there was that gal in the middle. Janet Flanner, the great Janet Flanner.

16:46Janet Flanner was the legendary Paris correspondent for The New Yorker. Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal were two of America's biggest novelists at the time, with egos to match. The night began with Mailer refusing to shake hands with Vidal. Mailer had recently published a provocative book on the women's liberation movement called The Prisoner of Sex, and Vidal had given it a negative review. Here's some tape from that show. You will hear Cavett first and then Mailer and later Janet Flanner and Gore Vidal. But you will admit that you were accused of being a chauvinist of the worst kind. Well, I know, but that's what's wrong with woman's liberation, which is it's a new and it's a young movement.

17:25Oh, for goodness sake. Now, let's not go back onto that. I'd love to talk about it for two minutes every day. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. We've heard it all. It's just nonsense. It's just ridiculous. You know, if I have anything at a wall, I have a complicated mind. In fact, I have a mind so complicated that Gore has said with some justice that my style is getting unreadable. You know, it's the one thing in his critique that I agree with. My style's getting difficult. You know, it's hard when you have a lot in your head to write something that's true. Gore has never encountered this problem. What did you say?

17:54I wasn't listening to him. What was I... What were you talking about? Small mind, no matter. No, don't be autobiographical all the time. Ho, ho, ho, ho! Well, well, well.

18:12So how are you feeling when the two of them, I mean, it was mostly Mailer going at Vidal, Vidal gave back once he was getting punched in the nose. What are you thinking during that? Oh, God, I don't know. I just, I remember thinking this is going to be good viewing. I don't think I thought during it. But Cavett picked a side. He, too, thought that Norman Mailer was being an ass. Let me turn my chair and join these three.

18:46Perhaps you'd like two more chairs to contain your giant intellect.

18:54I loved it when Mailer, what was his straight line? Dick, why don't you just read the next question off the question sheet? Why don't you look at your question sheet and ask a question? And that, for whatever reason, caused me to say, why don't you fold it five ways and put it where the moon don't shine?

19:22This has been much quoted, almost always wrong. People say the sun's not shining, which is no good at all. Where did that phrase come from? Did you make it up on the spot? I don't know where I ever heard that. When I saw it, I assumed it must have been some old saying, but I couldn't find anybody else saying it. I can't imagine. I know it had occurred in my life before that, possibly years earlier, and it just came to the surface involuntarily. But that was a wonderful moment that I'm very grateful he caused. Coming up after the break, I asked Dick Cavett why he was so beloved. It must be my lovability.

20:07Is that a good guess? I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back.

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22:33Dick Cavett grew up in Nebraska, the only child of two schoolteachers. His mother died of breast cancer when she was 36 and he was 10. Her death made me feel betrayed by life, he later wrote, and embarrassed. When I read that line, I stopped. My father had died when I was 10, and I too felt embarrassment. So there is at least one thing that I have in common with Dick Cavett. His father remarried another schoolteacher, and Dick got on with his life. He was good at many things. School, for sure, but he also played music, did magic. He competed in gymnastics, where his specialty was the pommel horse.

23:16You can't put the pommel horse aside lightly. Not only was I the state champion in the pommel horse, which is, and this is a fact, not an opinion, the hardest piece of gymnastics apparatus. I didn't pick it because it was the hardest. It was the only thing we had. We had some mats and a pommel horse. Everybody hated it, and I rather liked it and kept going with it. Cavett studied English and drama at Yale and then got a job at Time magazine as a copy boy. He read that The Tonight Show host Jack Parr was unhappy with the material his writers were feeding him. So Cavett wrote some fresh jokes, snuck backstage at The Tonight Show, and gave his jokes to Parr.

24:04That is a very Cavett move. From an early age, he was good at getting backstage. Parr used some of Cavett's material and then he hired him. Once Cavett got into television, he stayed with Jack Parr for a while and then Merv Griffin, Jerry Lewis and Johnny Carson. He did some standup comedy on his own. He started to develop a voice and a reputation. In 1968, ABC gave him a morning show. He moved to primetime and then late night. At its peak, the Cavett show had millions of nightly viewers and Cavett became a celebrity himself. If TV hadn't worked out for you, what do you think you would have done?