The episode where Groucho Marx annoyed the hell out of Truman Capote was very special.

The Dick Cavett Show that 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-titled 1974 memoirs (a book-long interview with his friend Christopher Porterfield), the host recalls the 1970 show when Georgia Governor Lester Maddox stormed 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 the Pickrick 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 say knout?–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.”