In Nick Tosches great book,The Devil and Sonny Liston, the author identifies his subject’s main problem: “In the Saturday night cigarette smokehouse neon dark of that dive, Charles Liston, who neither knew his age nor felt any ties of blood upon this earth nor saw any future beyond the drink in front of him and the smoky dark spare refuge of this barroom from the bone-cutting, river-heavy dank and freezing chill, knew only that he was nobody and that he had come from nowhere and that he was nowhere. He did not see that one could be nobody with a capital ‘N.’” Smokin’ Joe Frazier, who just passed away, and his two greatest opponents, Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, became not just important nobodies but cultural kings.
Frazier, who could barely get a word in, with Ali and Dick Cavett:
Martin Scorsese’s documentary about George Harrison aired on HBO this past week. Here’s a look back at what’s likely Harrison’s most famous post-Beatles interview, with Dick Cavett in 1971. He was not on good terms with John and Yoko at the time.
In 1970, Dick Cavett and Marshall McLuhan discussed the importance of TV image to politicians, using the Nixon-Kennedy debates as a starting point. Television image means little now, since media culture is 24/7, ubiquitous and HD, and everyone comes off poorly. FYI: The other guests on this Cavett episode were Truman Capote and football player Gale Sayers.
Dick Cavett conducted a 1970 interview with a very drunk John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara and Peter Falk, the latter of whom just passed away. Best known as Colombo, but much more diverse than that, Falk played a special role in the work of Cassavetes and Wim Wenders.
The first graph ofRichard Brody’s smart Falk postat the New Yorker blog: “It’s surprising to learn, from reading biographical sketches of Peter Falk on the occasion of his death, at the age of eighty-three, that he got a master’s degree in public administration and was working in Connecticut as an efficiency expert when, in his mid-twenties, he decided to take a chance on an acting career. It’s equally odd to note that he had two Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor in consecutive years—1960 and 1961—for his roles in Murder, Inc. and A Pocketful of Miracles. They hardly helped. He was working mainly on television, doing some movies but not getting plum roles, when, in 1967, he met John Cassavetes at a Lakers game and then had lunch with him at the Paramount commissary. As Marshall Fine writes in his biography of Cassavetes, Accidental Genius, ‘Falk had a script by Elaine May, Mikey and Nicky, that he thought Cassavetes would be perfect for.’ At the same time, Cassavetes pitched Husbands to Falk. Each actor thought the other had agreed to the projects, and each had misunderstood.'”
"Have you ever been analyzed? I was afraid of it at first." (Image by Carl Van Vechten.)
Longform made an incredible find with “The Duke In His Domain,” a 1957 New Yorker profile of Marlon Brando by Truman Capote. The former was already an icon thanks to Streetcar, The Wild One and On the Waterfront; the latter was still roughly a decade from publishing his masterpiece, In Cold Blood. Capote traveled to the set of Sayonara in Tokyo to interview Brando, who was at the start of a long personal decline, still somewhat accessible but increasingly less so. An excerpt:
“The maid had reëntered the star’s room, and Murray, on his way out, almost tripped over the train of her kimono. She put down a bowl of ice and, with a glow, a giggle, an elation that made her little feet, hooflike in their split-toed white socks, lift and lower like a prancing pony’s, announced, ‘Appapie! Tonight on menu appapie.’
Brando groaned. ‘Apple pie. That’s all I need.’ He stretched out on the floor and unbuckled his belt, which dug too deeply into the swell of his stomach. ‘I’m supposed to be on a diet. But the only things I want to eat are apple pie and stuff like that.’ Six weeks earlier, in California, Logan had told him he must trim off ten pounds for his role in Sayonara, and before arriving in Kyoto he had managed to get rid of seven. Since reaching Japan, however, abetted not only by American-type apple pie but by the Japanese cuisine, with its delicious emphasis on the sweetened, the starchy, the fried, he’d regained, then doubled this poundage. Now, loosening his belt still more and thoughtfully massaging his midriff, he scanned the menu, which offered, in English, a wide choice of Western-style dishes, and, after reminding himself ‘I’ve got to lose weight,’ ordered soup, beefsteak with French-fried potatoes, three supplementary vegetables, a side dish of spaghetti, rolls and butter, a bottle of sake, salad, and cheese and crackers.
‘And appapie, Marron?’
He sighed. ‘With ice cream, honey.’
Capote, world-weary in 1959. (Image by Roger Higgins.)
Though Brando is not a teetotaller, his appetite is more frugal when it comes to alcohol. While we were awaiting the dinner, which was to be served to us in the room, he supplied me with a large vodka on the rocks and poured himself the merest courtesy sip. Resuming his position on the floor, he lolled his head against a pillow, drooped his eyelids, then shut them. It was as though he’d dozed off into a disturbing dream; his eyelids twitched, and when he spoke, his voice—an unemotional voice, in a way cultivated and genteel, yet surprisingly adolescent, a voice with a probing, asking, boyish quality—seemed to come from sleepy distances.
‘The last eight, nine years of my life have been a mess,’ he said. ‘Maybe the last two have been a little better. Less rolling in the trough of the wave. Have you ever been analyzed? I was afraid of it at first. Afraid it might destroy the impulses that made me creative, an artist. A sensitive person receives fifty impressions where somebody else may only get seven. Sensitive people are so vulnerable; they’re so easily brutalized and hurt just because they are sensitive. The more sensitive you are, the more certain you are to be brutalized, develop scabs. Never evolve. Never allow yourself to feel anything, because you always feel too much. Analysis helps. It helped me. But still, the last eight, nine years I’ve been pretty mixed up, a mess pretty much.'”
••••••••••
Dick Cavett interviews a reluctant Brando in 1973. After the show, Brando took Cavett to dinner in Chinatown, and the actor famously punched paparazzo Ron Galella, breaking his jaw. The photographer sued and ultimately agreed to a $40,000 settlement.
The episode where Groucho Marx annoyed the hell out of Truman Capote was very special.
The Dick Cavett Showthat ran evenings on ABC from 1969-1975 is my favorite TV program ever, even though I didn’t see a single episode until decades after it went off the air.
Cavett was an unusually honest and curious interlocutor who always had a fascinating mix of people on his panel(Lillian Gish, Satchel Paige and Salvador Dali shared the stage one night). And this was an era when notable personalities were willing to talk about a lot more than the latest product they were pushing. You owe it to yourself to watch or re-watch the shows that are on DVD. (Just don’t start with the Jimi Hendrix disc–it’s a butchered group of interviews that doesn’t contain the full programs.)
In Cavett’s self-titled1974 memoirs (a book-long interview with his friend Christopher Porterfield), the host recalls the 1970 show when Georgia Governor Lester Maddoxstormed off the stage. An excerpt about the incident:
“People ask me about the time Lester Maddox, the former governor of Georgia walked off my show because I refused to apologize for what he saw as an insult to his constituency.
Was he right to walk off? Yes. But not because I failed to apologize. He was right because it was theatrical and well timed, and got him more attention than he had since the old pick-handle-brandishing days of thePickrick Restaurant. I heard that he papered the wall of his office with the congratulatory wires he got. Maddox is as smart as a whip–or should I sayknout?–and knows how to exploit the media as well as or better than Jerry Rubin or Abbie Hoffman ever did. As I said on the next night’s show, he also knows the value of television time, walking off as he did a scanty eighty-eight minutes into the show.
Truman Capote, who was also on the panel that night, says that, of all the TV he has done, to this day people refer to that night wherever he goes.”
Never enjoyed the market dominance of Connect Four.
This print ad for a Mattel game called Stop Dot comes from the October 30, 1970 issue of Life magazine. The issue cost 50 cents and had a cover story about Dick Cavett, who was then turning out for ABC what still is the best talk show ever produced on U.S. television. Most of the Cavett article focuses on how nervous he was about performing on TV. There is a gallery of work by Austrian photographer Hans-Peter Klemenz. an advertisement for the unfortunately titled AYDS Diet Plan, an article about Ronald Reagan’s presidential aspirations, a piece about separatist violence in Quebec, a story about an Australian Outback tough guy Larry Dulhunty and a long piece about Double Helix scientist James Watson and his search for a cure for cancer.
The advertisement for Stop Dot game refers to the 3-D toy as “that op-art looking thing.” The instructions are as follows: “To win, you have to make a straight row of five dots in five different colors, without putting any dot next to a dot of the same color.”
The product apparently never caught on. According to Boardgamegeek.com, the game was manufactured by Mattel only in 1969. There are two for sale currently on eBay, one for $7.99 and one for $69.95. This particular issue of Life magazine currently sells on eBay for anywhere from $1.99 and $24.99.
Subscribe to my free Substack newsletter, "Books I Read This Month." It's published on the final day of each month. Some new titles, some older, some rare.
