Dick Cavett

(Excerpt from Dick Cavett interview)

It seems you had a tremendous hunger to escape the Midwest and make it in show business. What did you want to escape from?

I don’t know. I wasn’t one of those kids whose life was a nightmare until he escaped into showbiz or comedy. I never thought of it as escaping a terribly unpleasant place. There was never a feeling of “I can’t stand it here another minute.” I just knew there was another place I wanted to be. I probably could have stayed and lived in Nebraska, but it never would have happened. I wasn’t a suffering child, except when my mother died, when I was ten.

Do you think your mother’s death affected your comic sensibility?

I’ve never even thought about that.

Really?

I’m not sure I have any reason to think that it did. But my mother was probably more responsible for my becoming a performer than anyone else. She got me hooked on applause. When I was very young—almost in my pre-conscious existence—she would prop me up on an easy chair to perform soliloquies.

Almost like the young Mozart.

At these recitals I got my first big laughs and didn’t know why. I learned later that what made my “act” so popular was my habit of saying at the end of each selection, “Everybody clap.” But I had a slight speech problem with the letter “l,” causing it to sound like, “Everybody crap.” This feature probably netted extra bookings—in every living room in Gibbon, Nebraska.

My mother really was a huge fan of show business and entertainment. She loved going to shows and would even direct dramatic scenes starring the neighborhood kids. And she instilled that love in me.

Did you perform comedy when you were in school?

In my magic acts, I did. I would join extra-curricular clubs I didn’t give a shit about, such as student council, just for the opportunity to get up onstage and give a speech. The other candidates would give dreary, straightforward speeches, and I would write a funny poem and get virtually every vote available.

A lot of humor writers and comedians seem to have taken up magic as kids. Do you think there’s a connection between comedy and magic?

Only that most writers are shy when younger, and magic gives them an opportunity to be funny while hiding behind props.

It’s that perfect crutch. I used to get paid up to $35 for performing magic at neighborhood birthday parties and for friends. One time, I was booked into a 1,000-seat auditorium at a state fair to open for Ed Stibe and His Wonder Horse. Do you know how many people showed up to see us? None. I never went on. And I don’t think the bastard even paid me.

What did your parents do for a living?

They were teachers. My father actually taught in the same high school I attended. How I envy people who had his class! I still run into his former students all over the world, and they tell me how great a person and teacher he was. But I was such a self-conscious little twerp. I was embarrassed with the idea that my father taught in my school. My father used to laugh, because between classes I would pass his classroom, and I would always avert my eyes for fear of anyone making the connection.

Why do you think students loved your father so much?

He was terribly smart, and he was also very funny. He had this important trait of making people like him and making people feel liked. He was a great man. He attracted the most forlorn loser types. People would say, “Al Cavett was the only person I’ve ever liked in the whole world.” This even extended to Charles Starkweather, the serial killer from the late fifties.

Charles was our garbageman. I was at Yale when the murders happened, and I was walking past a newsstand one morning when I saw the headline, “Lincoln, Nebraska Murder.” I called home, and my stepmother said, “Yeah, your dad used to talk to Charles every single time he picked up our trash. Charles didn’t talk to very many people, and your dad felt sorry for him.”

It turns out Starkweather slaughtered a gas-station attendant about five blocks away.

So your father took in Charles Starkweather like a stray puppy?

I guess in a way he did—if a puppy can slit throats. My father had always said that Charles was a pitiful person, misled and kind of lost…