AVC: Since you were on so often, it seems like the shows would bleed together for you.
DC: Oh, absolutely. I've seen 8x10 photos of me with people, and I could pass a lie-detector test saying that I never had them on the show.
AVC: Living 60 minutes of your life on television per day has to be kind of strange.
DC: Or 90 minutes. Nobody does that anymore. You know, the Tonight Show, by tradition—this is a trivia question. How long was The Tonight Show when Jack Paar started doing it? It was an hour and 45 minutes, and it started at 11:15. Jack hated that, because not all the stations carried the first 15, so he'd blown his monologue for a good portion of the country. So eventually, he just stopped coming out at that time; they changed it to 11:30.
AVC: The Jerry Lewis Show was 90 minutes, wasn't it?
DC: Oh God, The Jerry Lewis Show was two fucking hours. I want you to print that just that way.
AVC: The Jerry Lewis Show is kind of this legendary showbiz farrago that you worked on.
DC: It's almost like the Hindenburg.
AVC: In Jerry Lewis' 1984 autobiography, there's a page leading up to The Jerry Lewis Show, and then a paragraph like, "Yeah, then the show was on—let's talk about something else." What was it like to write for that show?
DC: It was the first time I made four figures a week, which in those days was almost unheard of. I'll have to ask Woody [Allen] sometime what he made on Caesar's Hour, when he wrote for Sid Caesar. He never wrote for Your Show Of Shows, though people always said he did.
Actually, it was great fun. I didn't thoroughly hate California, so it was sort of an adventure to be living out there with a big new show and all. And [Jerry Lewis] was ideal, not a schmuck to writers as some big names are, were. And I enjoyed it. What did I get, $1,200 a week I think it was? And I nearly shat when I heard my manager Charlie Joffe working the deal over the phone. I heard him say, "No, no, that's no good, my client doesn't work for under $1,000 a week." I thought, "Jesus Christ, I work for $480!" But he got to $1,200, so that made it very pleasant.
It was a weird, weird experience. Jerry was having a lot of problems personally, and it was awful to watch good stuff get blown or not used at all. But I had a decent time doing it, and then Kennedy was shot, and though Kennedy being shot was not what made The Jerry Lewis Show go off the air, it kind of darkened everything in life. I think right after that, we did two more shows and bagged it.
AVC: Why was it such a failure?
DC: Jerry's difficult. He often didn't know what he wanted to do on the show. I think it dawned on him that he had bitten off a very great deal of time to fill. The producer Perry Cross pulled out large clumps of his hair every week. He had to deal with [Jerry] and the guests and changing his mind about stuff. I don't know. It was not a great idea to begin with; I think Jerry realized that after a while, and realized he was stuck with a 200-ton bomb.
AVC: Do you have a favorite Groucho anecdote?
DC: It's hard to think of a favorite. Oh, we were in Lindy's one day having lunch, when I was still in disbelief that I knew Groucho and that he would call me and ask if I wanted to have lunch. A famous columnist came over while we were waiting to be seated and said, "Hey, Groucho, say something funny." And rather than knocking him down, Groucho just said, "Oh for Christ's sake." And he began to talk, and he finally said something that the guy thought was funny enough, so he walked away with his pencil and pad, no "thank you" or anything. This columnist was famous for getting things wrong. So I said to Groucho, "You know he'll screw it up." He says "Yeah, I know, the only way to get him to print a joke right is to tell it to him wrong." What a mind!
AVC: Speaking of one-liners, do you have a favorite joke that stands out from your stand-up routine?
DC: No, I don't, but if I had to pick one, it might be the fact that Woody saw my fledgling act, and I had written one or two new things, and he said about one of them, "Great joke, Cavett." That's how Woody laughed. It was about a Chinese-German restaurant. Greenwich Village had all these restaurants with two nationalities, an Italian-German restaurant and all that, and "There's a Chinese-German restaurant," I said, "The food is great, but the problem is, an hour later, you're hungry for power." That joke was stolen by a couple of comedians. Guys would come see Woody's act, then sell his jokes to columnists and comics because he hadn't used them yet on television. His jokes appeared on The Red Skelton Show and that great thievery-of-material center, Laugh-In. They had a great business in stolen comic merchandise.
AVC: What was it like seeing Woody Allen perform for the first time?
DC: It was astonishing, because I had never heard him before. The Tonight Show told me to go down and see this comic at The Blue Angel, and when I heard that he wrote for Sid Caesar when he was 17, I thought, "I want to make a friend of this guy, whoever he is." Saw his act, it was new, he was new to stand-up, hating most of it. He would stand with the mic covering his face or most of it, and he did his act, and it was one brilliant joke after another, just like a string of pearls. Every joke was better than any one joke that any other comic had in his act, and the audience talked mostly. We were there in a big ballroom, and there was a speaker, and he starts, and about two minutes in, the audience starts talking to each other. They weren't listening, they tuned him out, except for me standing in the back. He's a tough fellow and he took all that. He vomited a few times, he admitted.
AVC: Did you get stage fright when you were a comedian?
DC: Only at the beginning. Or opening in a new place when I went to a real nightclub like Mr. Kelly's in Chicago, or the hungry i in San Francisco. Although Woody had written me a note exploding the myth of the hungry i. He was there way ahead of me. He said it's not hip any more, it's not the place that gave birth to Mort Sahl and Nichols & May. It's a tourist audience, largely. It had fallen from grace. That was all I needed on my way there, a pep talk.
AVC: What was it like watching all the old episodes of The Dick Cavett Show on DVD?
DC: It was curious. It was strange, because it was almost all new to me. I didn't remember it in detail. God, it's been a long time. Often I would say, "God, I hope he's gonna say this," meaning me, and I either did or I didn't. Sometimes I thought of an answer and I'd go, "Shit, why didn't I say that there?" In another way, it's greatly entertaining; I can watch it as an audience member now rather than as the other guy on the screen. I'm often pleasantly surprised at how good they are. Maybe you can put that in your mouth.
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