Of all the talk show hosts, Dick Cavett had the oddest long-running career, with series on nearly all the networks for more than 25 years without ever being a significant ratings draw.
He began with a daytime show, debuting under the title This Morning. Cavett had an eclectic taste in guests (Buckminster Fuller, Patricia Neal, and Jack Albertson on the premiere), and his talks with them could rarely be confused with the grovelling occasionally dispensed by other talk show types like Mike Douglas and Mery Griffin.
For example, Newsweek reported that when Harvard professor Timothy Leary said the Old Testament was written “by a bunch of nuts on a bad trip,” Cavett shot back, “Dr Leary, you’re full of crap.” By May 1968, the show was retitled in his name.
The series had great reviews but poor ratings, a characteristic all his shows would share. Cavett presented highlights of his daytime show on a nighttime ABC special on 14 June 1968 with Groucho Marx and Dionne Warwick, but even this did not boost ratings substantially.
Neither did winning the Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Daytime Programming in 1969, by which time ABC had cancelled the show and stopped programming before noon daily for about a year in order to cut costs.
Cavett went on to do a thrice-nightly hour-long series on ABC from May to September 1969, then a late-night show on ABC from December 1969 to December 1972, continuing as an occasional offering through January 1975.
In the summer of 1975, he had a variety show replacing The Carol Burnett Show on CBS, then went to public television from 1977-1981. In 1985 he did another chat show on the USA cable channel, then returned to ABC for another late-night talk show in the fall of 1986.
His final go-round was yet another nightly talk show on the CNBC cable channel from 1989-95.
His wide range of provocative interview subjects included John Lennon, Katharine Hepburn, Marlon Brando, Janis Joplin, Fred Astaire, Orson Welles, Muhammad Ali, Woody Allen, Bette Davis, Norman Mailer, Groucho Marx and Jimi Hendrix.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono gave Cavett their first interview after the break-up of The Beatles, and when a wired David Bowie sat down with an unflappable Cavett, it led to some of the most surreal repartee in television history.
