Until now, we’ve given a pass to Dick Cavett, the former talk-show host, whose latter years have amounted to a creepy nostalgia tour--a regular New York Times column that endlessly reminds us of the icons and walking cliches he’s interviewed, always with some anecdote about how so-and-so returned the admiration (see his ode to John Wayne) . Although Cavett can never be accused of originality, he can be nailed for smarmy self-aggrandizement and re-using the same tired lines (he once told Norman Mailer to “stick it where the sun don’t shine,” then claimed later that this unfunny put-down came to him in a burst of inspiration, though he used it at least one other time previously--after Lester Maddox walked off his show). In other words, Cavett represents the kind of squareness that is everything we once disliked about Manhattan--the wannabe wits and celebutards who frequented Elaines and Studio 54 and slummed with Woody Allen. Still, we’ve given him a pass because his stories are interesting in the way rotting corpses are interesting: we know they’re dead but we wonder what they looked like alive.
Until now. His little essay on the passing of Art Linkletter is a new level of smarmy. We weren’t big fans of Linkletter--we watched him mainly when we were home sick from school--but he was good at what he did. Everyone, except maybe Cavett, understands this. Cavett, for some bizarre reason, goes after Linkletter for being a lousy monologist (long story short: Linkletter was one of many who hosted the tonight show during the gap between Jack Parr and Johnny Carson, and he stunk up the monologues). Cavett takes particular pleasure in recounting a lousy joke that Linkletter made lousier by over-telling the punch line. Yet Cavett does the same thing when he excuses himself for going after a dead man:
Someone, I guarantee, will react to this with the pre-recorded, “How can you speak disrespectfully of the dead?” Truth is, I have always found it remarkably easy. Why anyone, by dying, should thereby be declared beyond criticism, innocent of wrongdoing, suddenly filled with virtue and above reproach escapes me. And the minor crime of smothering jokes hardly puts Art Linkletter in the pantheon of history’s malefactors.
We get it, Dick. You’re irreverent. Except irreverence only counts when someone is sacrosanct. If you’d gone after Ronald Reagan or even Johnny Carson when they died, we might have liked you better. But Linkletter has been so long out of the picture that probably less than 10% of the population knows who the hell he is.
What makes the column a true example of Cavettonia--I-want-to-let-you-know-I-met-this-celebrity-but-I’ll-pretend-this-story-is-really-about-something-else--is his adendum about Linkletter losing three of his five children. Something about writing a column that supposedly has us in hysterics (yes, he actually pre-warns us that the Linkletter story he’s about to tell is a thigh-slapper) to mock a man who never did anything worse than entertain the masses, then ending with unfathomable tragedy strikes us as truly fucked up.