Not all the pieces in Talk Show are about Cavett?s talk show. There are reminiscences of his childhood in Nebraska and the early days of his career in show business. There?s a great one about his high school career as a magician when, he says, he was the richest he?s ever been. There are some that touch on current events---the essays were written over a three year period that includes the 2008 Presidential campaign and John McCain and Sarah Palin make irritating appearances; they irritated Cavett to the point that he couldn?t write about either one with any amusement. There are ghost stories and travel stories. There are meditations on sex, The Sopranos, death, and anger management or, more accurately, mismanagement. There are two pieces on Don Imus in which Cavett makes a fairly persuasive case that outraged liberals (like me) over-reacted to Imus? insulting of the Rutgers University women?s basketball team and we may not have done the cause any favors by running him off the air the way we wished we could Rush Limbaugh. But of course the talk shows and their guests are at the center of the book and most of the pieces are about them in one way or another.
Cavett doesn?t rehash particular shows and only goes into detail in remembering a few particular interviews---or conversations. Shows either come up in the course of his writing about other things or he uses them to launch himself onto other subjects. Mostly, though, the shows are the reason for his being able to write about what he really wants to write about, the people who came on the show who were his friends or with whom he became friendly after they appeared as guests.
Cavett wants to tell us things about these famous people we would not have learned from watching them on his show. He wants us to know that Norman Mailer did not hold that infamous on-air argument with Gore Vidal, the one in which Cavett told Mailer to fold it five ways and put it where the moon don?t shine, against either Cavett or Vidal, that Mailer actually felt bad about what happened while it was happening. He wants us to know that before he went off his rocker, Bobby Fischer was a cheerful, decent, funny man. He wants us to know that Bill Buckley was a good friend and not just in the sense of being Cavett?s good friend but as in a good friend. He wants us to know that Richard Burton was a kindly and humble man and a loving family man, not necessarily a good husband and besides being a good father. Burton was a loving son and brother, perhaps happiest when in the company of his many relatives back home in Wales.
He wants us to know John Wayne played chess and played it pretty well.
According to a note on the copyright page, the essays in Talk Show ?originally appeared, in slightly different form, on the Web site of The New York Times?. There?s a two word name for essays that appear on a web site. Blog posts. I?ve had the link on my blog roll for a couple of years. Cavett began posting for the Times in early 2007. He agreed to post weekly but it hasn?t quite worked out that way. Closer to every other week, with a week missed here, an extra added there. Still, it?s added up to a full book?s worth of material. The last essay/post in the book is dated April 9. 2010, but I can?t be sure if Talk Show includes every single post Cavett wrote over those three years. Some might have been left out, and a number of the longer ?essays? in the book appear to be several sequential posts edited, for the most part seamlessly, together, but there?s no editor?s note to tell me one way or the other. Still, by my count, there are sixty-eight unnumbered chapters, plus the introduction. That dark night of the soul?or soulless, as the author of the brain book keeps insisting, to my middle of the night dismay---after racing through three essays of Talk Show, full of gratitude and relief, I shut the book. Not out of disappointment, disgust, anger, or boredom. Out of fear. I was afraid that if I didn?t make myself stop I would stay up all night and finish Talk Show in one sitting. I didn?t want to do that because I?d had an inspiration.
If I restrained myself and read only one chapter a night, skipping weekends, I could enjoy Cavett?s company for the next two months. Think of all the dark, lonely hours this would get me through.
My plan was working fine for a couple of weeks. Then a little more than halfway in I read this:
[Last week] I addressed a group of noble citizens whose job is aiding and counseling poor devils suffering from depression. CAVETT RETURNS HOME TO DISCUSS ?THE WORST AGONY DEVISED FOR MAN? read the next day?s headline in the Lincoln paper. depsite the subject matter, I got quite a lot of laughs. My credentials? Having been there myself.
The year before I had talked to a similar group of caregivers in Omaha in front of an audience that included what you?d think would be an entertainer?s nightmare: a hundred or more people in the throes of the disease. I expected no laughs.
Miraculously, I kept them laughing for perhaps and hour. clearly the fact that I knew about their plight from own experience had a lot---or maybe everything---to do with it.
I was able to say to them, I know that everyone here knows that feeling when people say to you, ?Hey, shape up! Stop thinking about your troubles What?s to be depressed about? Go swimming or lay tennis and you?ll feel a lot better. Pull up your socks!? And how you, hearing this, would like nothing more than to remove one of those socks and choke them to death with it.
(Such inane advice of the ?socks up? variety, by the way, can only be excused by the fact that if you?ve never had it you can never begin to imagine the depth of the ailment?s black despair. Another tip: Do not ask the victim what he has ?to be depressed about.? The malady doesn?t care if you?re broke and alone or successful and surrounded by a loving family. It does its democratic dirty work to your brain chemistry regardless of your ?position.?)
I didn?t know this about Cavett, that he suffered from depression.
It was an open secret for some time. The story that made the rounds decades ago was that Cavett was on an airplane parked on the runway, bound for Europe, and he undid his seat buckle, apologetically removed himself from the plane (this was before such an act would have triggered a terrorist alert and a Homeland Security scurry), and checked himself into a clinic or sanitarium. There was a Bartleby-ish dignity to it, a quiet resolution in the face of more than he could then bear. Lance:
Talk Show is not a memoir of depression. I wouldn?t call it a depressive?s book. But the fact of Cavett?s depression is a reminder of the fact of the man. This is a particular man?s book and it was written out of that man?s moods and experiences. Once I was alert to the fact that he has suffered from depression, I began to be on the look out for other things he might be feeling. And I came to see that often what he might have been feeling as he wrote was sad and lonely.
Not depressed.
As Cavett was quick to remind one of his doctors, sadness and depression are different, with sadness not coming close in its debilitating effects on a person. Also, something else he points out, for some reason people are much better able to mask their depression than they are their sadness. He remembers Woody Allen asking him one time, in all seriousness, wanting to know, ?How am I supposed to know you?re depressed?? Cavett had no answer, because you?re not supposed to know. With that in mind, you might wonder if the funniest, liveliest, breeziest pieces in the book were written when, to use one of Cavett?s own phrases for it, his ?brain was busted.?
[snip]
But while Talk Show is far from a melancholy book, it is touched throughout by sadness. And how could it not be? Start making a list of all the people Cavett writes about with such affection who are dead. It?ll be a long one, and it?ll start with his wife, the actress Carrie Nye, who died of lung cancer five years ago, less than a year before Cavett began writing these pieces for the Times. It isn?t surprising that so many of his subjects are dead. Our interest in them has a lot to do with their being dead. We want to know about them because their reputations, their legends, and their bodies of work have lived on so long after them. And several---[Paul] Newman, [William F.] Buckley, Bobby Fischer---are in here because they?d just died and Cavett naturally took the occasion to eulogize his now absent friends. But the dead far outnumber the living in these pages and Talk Show is a book crowded with ghosts. For all I know Cavett has scores of friends and relatives still solidly walking the earth, but only a few show up here with any frequency, and Woody Allen seems to be keeping a wary distance, while Cavett and his best friend from his childhood and youth back in Nebraska see each other on rare occasions, and his old comedy writing friend David Lloyd has died since the last essay in the book was written. I can?t imagine that Cavett could have written about his departed without feeling their absence and that?s a lot of absence to feel. Once I became aware of that, Cavett began to seem a man alone with his ghosts.
I started reading Talk Show for the pleasure of the company, but I can?t get over the feeling that Cavett was writing in order to have some company for himself. Since he wrote them originally to be posted online, he in fact did have company. The posts have comment sections and Cavett is aware of his commenters and solicitous of their opinions and quite clearly grateful for their company.
One of the reasons I find Lance's appreciation of the book and the man so restorative is because the book got such a rough going-over in the Times, as if it were nothing more than a grab bag of nostalgia and anecdotage. Lance locates the river of emotion underneath the deceptive surface meander. Also, I have Cavett on my own mind a lot these days for reasons that require no detailing here and now. Besides, I don't want to make everything "about me," not on such a gorgeous Saturday.
*No, not the character names of the Ambiguously Gay Duo, so wipe that smirk off your face, soldier.
Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2011/05/another-worthy-whose-tip-jar.html
Bill Frist Newt Gingrich Rudolph Giuliani Al Gore Chuck Hagel
No comments:
Post a Comment