Lucking Out Read Free

Steve Allen, and Jack Paar shows were rinsed down the void. But this ninety-minute show from December 2, 1971, has not only survived but evolved into a time capsule that, opened, still emits a white-blast radioactive force, like the atomic suitcase in
Kiss Me Deadly.
It was shown in 2007 as part of the Paley Center for Media’s film and video retrospective
The Mistress and the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer
, triggering a slew of commentaries and remembrances, including a memory-lane recap by Cavett himself, who had no idea that what was intended as a literary evening with three accomplished practitioners would soon require the services of a lion tamer. What transpired was like a tension-headache grenade going off on Cavett’s tiny set (Cavett himself being quite the clever teacup) with the audience rooting and booing as if at an old-fashioned melodrama, Mailer eating up his role as villain.
    [
Mailer turns his chair away from us and to the audience.
]
    Mailer: Are you all really, truly idiots or is it me?
    [
A chorus replies, “You!” Then, applause.
]
    Cavett: Oh, that was the easy answer.
    (Forgotten today is that one of the
Cavett
show’s most frisson-y highlights belonged to Flanner, who, after describing how the dancer Isadora Duncan died when her scarf got tangled in the wheels of a car, noted, “She was nearly decapitated”—producing an audible intake of breath from the audience.)
    Riveted by the most lacerating exchanges of rancor since the Gore Vidal–William F. Buckley skate-off at the convulsive 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago (where, as one of the ABC News commentators, Buckley, making a fist, snarled, “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered,” and Vidal didn’t even
flinch
), I decided to write about the show for Frostburg’s student paper, the
State-to-Date.
I analyzed the verbal punches and bristling subtext much as Mailer would cover a prizefight or a gunslingers’ duel, as if he were wired into the opponents’ nervous systems, their jabs the extensions of his own perceptions. Decoding comments that in the original context sounded cryptic and were (as when Mailer disapprovingly alluded to Vidal’s revealing in his nonfiction novel
Two Sisters
—excerpted in the
Partisan Review
—that he had sex with the Beat novelist and lumberjack bodhisattva Jack Kerouac), I reconstructed the evening as if it were a clash of two storm fronts within whose black clouds the motives were buried. The piece was called “O.K. Corral Revisited,” and why the
State-to-Date
thought a meditation on an episode of
The Dick Cavett Show
by a sophomore was worth publishing across an entire page wasn’t entirely apparent then, but there it was, my first appearance in college print, and I thought, Why not send a copy to Mailer? He had gotten such a drubbing for his boorishness that I thought he might appreciate someone who was tuned in to his broadcast frequency covering the verbal fisticuffs. I looked up an address for Mailer in the college library’s edition of
Who’s Who
and sent off a copy of
State-to-Date
, not sure if the issue would even reach him and expecting nothing in return.
    Here is what I received.
    “I think you have a career,” Mailer’s letter began, and external noise washed away, as if my brain needed to be rid of sound to take in what it was reading. It was so clear-cut, what he was saying, that I couldn’t from that moment imagine my future heading any other way. Mailer went on to compliment me for peeling back the tense skin of Cavett’s show and perceiving the blood currents and nerve wiring underlying the animosity between him and Vidal; and for noting the significance of his allusion to Vidal’s outing of Jack Kerouac in an excerpt from
Two Sisters
that had been published in
Partisan Review
, and his shooting down of Vidal’s echoing of Degas’s rebuke of Whistler—“I’m going to give you a