The Dick Cavett Show is the title of several American television talk shows hosted by Dick Cavett between 1968 and 1996. The programs aired in daytime, prime time and late night on ABC, CBS, PBS, USA Network and CNBC.
The best-known version aired late nights on ABC from December 29, 1969, to January 1, 1975, opposite NBC's The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. The program featured extended interviews and conversations with actors, musicians, writers, politicians and other public figures. Guests included Groucho Marx, Katharine Hepburn, Orson Welles, Muhammad Ali, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, David Bowie, Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer.
Show history
The Dick Cavett Show began as a series of television programs hosted by comedian, comedy writer and author Dick Cavett. Although Cavett later hosted versions for CBS, PBS, USA Network and CNBC, the title is most closely associated with the programs he hosted for ABC between 1968 and 1975.
ABC, 1968–1975 Daytime series Cavett's first ABC series premiered on March 4, 1968, as a 90-minute weekday morning program originally titled This Morning. The title was subsequently changed to The Dick Cavett Show, and the series continued until January 24, 1969. The first daytime show featured Gore Vidal, Muhammad Ali and Angela Lansbury. ABC pressured Cavett to get prominent celebrities on the show, although subsequent shows without them got higher ratings and more critical acclaim.
Although normally based in New York, Cavett also took the daytime show to Hollywood. Groucho Marx, who had appeared on the program in April 1968, appeared again when Cavett broadcast from Hollywood on June 19.
Prime-time series After the daytime series ended, Cavett returned to ABC with a summer replacement prime-time series that aired three times per week from May 26 to September 19, 1969. The series was sufficiently well received for ABC to give Cavett a regular late-night program later that year.
Late-night series The late-night Dick Cavett Show premiered on December 29, 1969, and ran until January 1, 1975, opposite NBC's The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Cavett took over the ABC late-night time slot from The Joey Bishop Show. Bobby Rosengarden served as the show's bandleader and musical director, while Fred Foy, best known as the announcer and narrator of The Lone Ranger, was the announcer.
In addition to his usual monologue, Cavett opened each show by reading selected questions submitted by audience members and responding with jokes or improvised remarks. One question, "What makes New York so crummy these days?", prompted the response "Tourists."
While Cavett and Carson shared many of the same guests, Cavett was receptive to rock and roll artists to a degree unusual at the time, as well as to authors, politicians and other personalities outside the entertainment field. The wide variety of guests, combined with Cavett's literate and intelligent approach to comedy, appealed to a significant enough number of viewers to keep the show running for several years despite the competition from Carson's show. Carson's move to southern California in the early 1970s to focus on Hollywood celebrities also helped to minimize guest overlap.
The late-night show's 45-minute midpoint was signaled by "Glitter and Be Gay" from Leonard Bernstein's Candide. The piece became associated with Cavett and was subsequently used as the introduction to his PBS series and played by house bands during his later talk-show appearances.
Typically each show had several guests, but occasionally Cavett devoted an entire program to a single guest. Among those receiving such treatment, some more than once, were Groucho Marx, Laurence Olivier, Judy Garland, Katharine Hepburn (without an audience), Bette Davis, Orson Welles, Noël Coward (who appeared on the same show with Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, Tammy Grimes and Brian Bedford), John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Janis Joplin, Ray Charles, Alfred Hitchcock, Fred Astaire, Woody Allen, Gloria Swanson, Jerry Lewis, Lucille Ball, Zero Mostel ("on some shows I've had just one guest, but tonight I have Zero"), Bob Hope and David Bowie. These shows helped showcase Cavett's skills as a host who could attract guests who otherwise might not give television interviews, at the expense of some of the unpredictability of the multiple-guest format.
Wide World of Entertainment In January 1973, despite a vociferous letter campaign, ratings forced the show to be cut back to occasional status, airing one week a month as part of ABC's Wide World of Entertainment. Jack Paar, whom ABC had tried to recruit as Cavett's successor, insisted that both he and Cavett be given at least one week per month as a sign of respect for Cavett. The rotating schedule made it difficult for either show to retain an audience. Jack Paar Tonite ran from January until November 1973. By the end of 1974, Cavett's program was airing only twice per month. The ABC run ended on January 1, 1975.
CBS, 1975 Cavett returned to network television later in 1975 with a short-lived Saturday-night series on CBS. It aired from August 16 to September 6 and differed from his earlier programs by incorporating more elements of a traditional variety show.
PBS, 1977–1982 In 1977, two years after the end of his original ABC run, Cavett returned to television with a new version produced by New York public television station WNET/Thirteen. The PBS series featured single guests in a half-hour format and was produced by Christopher Porterfield, a former roommate of Cavett's at Yale University who had coauthored the book Cavett, published in August 1974.
The shorter format emphasized extended conversation with a single guest rather than the multiple-guest format used by many of the ABC programs. The PBS version received several Emmy Award nominations, including nominations in 1978, 1979 and 1982. The show remained on the PBS lineup until affiliates voted it off the schedule in 1982.
USA Network and return to ABC, 1985–1986 Cavett revived the program on USA Network in 1985. The prime-time series ran from September 30, 1985, until September 23, 1986.
While the USA series was still nearing the end of its run, Cavett returned to ABC late night. That version aired on Tuesday and Wednesday nights from September 22 to December 30, 1986. It marked Cavett's first regular ABC series since the end of his original network run in 1975.
CNBC, 1989–1996 Another version of The Dick Cavett Show premiered on CNBC in 1989 and continued until January 1996. The CNBC series returned Cavett to the interview format with which his earlier programs had become associated.
Production On all three of the early ABC shows, the bandleader was Bobby Rosengarden and the announcer was Fred Foy, known for his work on The Lone Ranger. The morning show was produced by Woody Fraser. Tony Converse was the producer of the 1969 ABC prime-time show and the original producer of the ABC late-night show, succeeded by John Gilroy. Cavett's writer was Dave Lloyd.
The programs were principally associated with New York, although individual editions were also recorded elsewhere. Cavett took the daytime series to Hollywood in June 1968, and later programs originated from other locations when the subject or guests warranted it.
Legacy The Dick Cavett Show became known for extended, often unscripted conversations with guests drawn from entertainment, politics, literature and the arts. Cavett's willingness to interview writers, political figures and counterculture musicians alongside traditional Hollywood celebrities distinguished the program from many contemporary talk shows. During the original ABC late-night run, the program developed a reputation as a more cerebral alternative to The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, with Cavett particularly associated with interviews of contemporary political and cultural figures.
Cavett's interviewing style emphasized sustained conversation rather than a succession of short promotional appearances. Episodes were sometimes devoted to a single guest, allowing discussions to continue for substantially longer than became common on later network talk shows. A 1972 profile in The New Yorker described Cavett's approach as deliberately avoiding formulas and clichés and noted the program's popularity with younger viewers.
The surviving programs have also become an archive of American political and cultural life from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. Interviews and broadcasts from the series have been reused in documentaries about subjects including the Watergate scandal and Muhammad Ali. The PBS documentary Dick Cavett's Watergate was constructed largely from Cavett's interviews with figures involved in the scandal, while the HBO documentary Ali & Cavett: The Tale of the Tapes drew on Ali's numerous appearances on the program.
The show's interviews have continued to circulate through home-video releases, television reruns and online archives, introducing later audiences to appearances by figures including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Katharine Hepburn, Groucho Marx, John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Cavett's PBS series, launched by WNET in 1977, also became one of the station's notable programs of that period.
Notable broadcasts 1968–69 March 4, 1968: The premiere of This Morning In the first broadcast of his 90-minute morning show, Cavett had as his first guest engineer, designer and futurist Buckminster Fuller. The two discussed how politicians would eventually become obsolete through technological advances, and the wide-ranging discussion included a comment from Fuller that a woman is a baby factory and that a man's role is to simply press the right button. Later on in the program, Cavett chatted with actress Patricia Neal, who discussed her long rehabilitation from a near-fatal stroke in 1965.
March 27, 1968: Christine Jorgensen walks off the show During an interview with Christine Jorgensen, the first widely known trans woman to have sex reassignment surgery (in this case a complete male-to-female vaginoplasty), Jorgensen walked off the show when she felt offended after Cavett asked her about the status of her romantic life with her wife; because Jorgensen was the only scheduled guest, Cavett spent the rest of that show talking about how he had not meant to offend her.
June 6, 1968: Robert F. Kennedy assassination As a result of continuing coverage of the Robert F. Kennedy assassination that took place earlier that morning, Cavett's show did not begin until 11 am, and was interrupted at 11:20 for 30 minutes of further updates on the unfolding tragedy. At 11:50, Cavett's show returned for its final 10 minutes. The assassination was the only topic discussed during the 30 minutes of the show. On the following two mornings, the show began at its regular time of 10:30 am, and was once again devoted exclusively to assassination coverage, and presented without commercial interruption.
June 13, 1969: Groucho Marx's one-man show Because of conflicting network broadcasts, Cavett pre-taped a one-man, 60-minute episode with Groucho Marx.
July 7, 1969: Jimi Hendrix In the July 7, 1969, interview, rock star Jimi Hendrix modestly downplayed his abilities and displayed his sense of humor. Perhaps most importantly, he revealed some of his aesthetic ideals and the purpose of his music when he discussed his concept of the "Electric Church":
Hendrix then performed "Hear My Train A Comin'" with the house band and played the guitar with his teeth at the end of the song.
August 19, 1969: The Woodstock Show