Dick Cavett talks to Antonio Mora

You were born in Nebraska, a child of educators, in small-town Nebraska. What were your dreams back then?

Problem not to be an educator in Nebraska, because every time my father told me about how during the Depression "your mother and I would have to decide if we could spend a dime to go to the movies or to buy bread or lettuce or something with it." He taught for $600 a year. Boys and girls. Unbelievable. No, I actually love Nebraska. I love going back there. And you find wonderful things about a place you lived in that you didn't know when you lived there. But then I got aware of a young man at the University of Nebraska famous for getting certain dirty jokes into things that he emceed. And his name was Johnny Carson. And it was the same Johnny Carson for viewers ...

Whom you ended up meeting. Because he was a magician. You did some magic.

That's right. I met Carson as a magician backstage. Church basement. I took my two little magician friends with me. And there he was. And he gave us the filthy look that every magician would give you when he's concealing a dove in his coat and setting up the egg and the thing. I said, "That's all right, Mr. Carson. We're magicians." "Oh, OK, fellas." And he was so nice to us. And he taught us card fans and did things, introduced us from the audience to the church basement audience.  

Well it's incredible. Because you stayed in touch with Carson. And he was then a significant help to your career. That's one of the things that really struck me about your life — the amazing amount of incredible people that you managed to somehow connect with early. A lot of it was because you were incredibly persistent. You'd do things that most of us wouldn't have the guts to do.

I was known for going into Judy Garland's dressing room at the Palace and saying hello after a show. In fact, at one point, she said, "Is this an interview or something?" I was still in college. But I did that. I wanted to be with them in their world.

So you end up going to Yale. You come to New York City. And your introduction to the late-night talk shows was because you sneaked your way into the RCA Building and you somehow find your way to Jack Paar, who was the host of "The Tonight Show," and you go up to him and give him an envelope full of jokes.

That's what you do, young people. You hand 'em your writing and hope they hire you and not boot you out. But you just made me realize something — that you would be talking to an empty chair now if there had been security at 30 Rock in those days. But I had cased the joint. And I knew how to go up the Sixth Avenue elevators, make a switch, get off, go through a double door and find Jack Paar's office right around the next corner.

Can you imagine that — these days being able to do that with Jimmy Fallon?

No, you'd be shot.  

But it is an example. You know, you had that persistence with him. You wrote letters to Stan Laurel. You somehow befriended Groucho Marx at a funeral. It's things like that. You were in your 20s.

I know. I don't know why I was not beaten up more frequently than I was. I never really got thrown out of anywhere. I watched the world premiere of "My Fair Lady" in New Haven — and on its way to New York to run for years and years — from backstage.

Somehow talked your way in.

That was almost my masterpiece. No. Well, I just said to the stage door guy, "How's it goin'?" I threw a coat over my shoulders rather than put my arms in it because I had seen Moss Hart very theatrically wearing a coat that way. He directed it. And I stood in the wings and watched Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews and everybody do "My Fair Lady" until the doorman got wise.

In that time, though, was when you first struggled with depression, which you've written about, been very public about, were very public about it before it was something that people really talked about that much.  

Yeah, I don't know if I opened the door, at one point after I had been on two or three shows talking about it, a doctor said to me, "Are you sure you want be the poster boy for depression?" But the reward is when people come up and say, "You saved my daughter's life. She saw you talk about that and thought, 'If you can do it …'" Another woman said, "My husband said, 'If Cavett can admit this and get through it, I'll bet I can.'" That's rewarding. That's good. It's a dreadful agony and has to be treated, as we see in so many show people. I wrote an article for Time about Robin Williams' death, about the fact that it seems to inordinately strike the show folk. And I could fill a page with names you know and don't.

Right. And you do address anxiety and depression in your new book, especially when you write about James Gandolfini.

It's interesting [what] people say when the emails come in on the column. And on the Gandolfini piece, many people said, "I cried reading it." Now, I don't know if you're supposed to make your readers cry. But it's interesting. It's better than just saying, "That was funny," in a way. You feel you really got to them.  

One more question about depression, though. Do you think that somehow success actually made it worse? And it's something that you've alluded to when you write about Robin Williams.

I think I said, it didn't surprise me that Robin committed suicide. That his personality had many earmarks. I knew him. He was in manic comic state, easily diagnosable to people who have been there. There will be many more such deaths as show business goes on and not in show business too, of course. But the incredible numbers of people we know and don't know in the biz who are fighting it. The great Stephen Fry, the British comedian and actor — I did a piece on Huff Post Live with him where he talks about it. And a good point came out in that. 'Cause I said, "You know, in depression, someone will inevitably say to you, 'But you've got all these wonderful things in your life. What have you got to be depressed about?'" And he said, "The proper answer to that is, What have you got to have asthma about?"

You can catch it, I mean, get it. And no amount of good — so-called good — advice and saying "Why don't you just play tennis?" and it'll go away, you know? Well, I mean, you feel better after the tennis game but not for very long.

And to feel better, you took extreme action. You had electroconvulsive therapy.

I had everything. It really more should be, the shock involved is more like insulin shock or something. It's radio waves. They don't plug you into the wall or make you stick your bobby pin into the socket. But it certainly is a miracle. It doesn't work for everyone. But there are people who just come back. And I got a good reaction.

When late night exploded in the late 1960s, you got your own show.

I did. And I got it a strange way. It started as a daytime show. And then they moved me to nighttime, following Joey Bishop. And I only found out last year how I got into talk. My biggest goal hanging around all the talk shows I worked for was maybe someday I'd be a guest. And then I could go back to Nebraska and say, "I made it." Never dreamed of hosting one.

And you were young.

Well, yeah, many of my guests are dead. I was 33 … Yeah, I was the kid on the staff in some places, one particularly where there was a hateful schmuck who was the head writer. I'm tempted to say, "His initials are," and then say his name.

Go ahead.

All right. He's gone now. And people always say that nonsense, "You can't speak ill of the dead." Why the hell not? Does that make 'em great suddenly? Anyway, the great David Lloyd, comedy writer, and I were were walking down the hall at NBC once. And Paul — oops — came out of the men's room.

And David Lloyd — genius writer, wrote "Mary Tyler Moore" and "Taxi," and we were at school together — he said, "Do you remember what you said when Paul came out of the men's room on his own?" And he said, "I asked you, 'What do you think Paul does in there?' And you said, 'That's where he puts his best stuff on paper.'" Has that taken you off the air, do you think?

That wit got you sort of identified as the thinking man's talk show host.

Oh, I had to be very careful to not get one more label as intellectual, simply because I guess they figured, "He went to Yale. He's gotta be an intellectual." I can prove to you how untrue that can be. And that I was dumb enough to think you had to read the guest's books all the way through. I would read a 400-page book and spend eight minutes with the person and have 99 percent of my notes unused. But "intellectual" is a dreadful anchor to have hung upon you for the populace. 'Cause I feel sorry for anyone who thinks I'm an intellectual. Have they ever seen a real one?

The audience Carson had at his peak is double what [David] Letterman and [Jay] Leno combined were at their peak. So it's incredible how that viewership has dropped. But that did allow you to do these interviews that you would never see before, including possibly your most infamous one, if not even maybe also your most famous one, which you had, you know, two authors, Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, which already you don't see very many authors on television. 

And who would have thought that the show that came closest to blows and violence and nasty words would happen with three authors, a deadly word in talk television?  Somebody wrote, "When Cavett has a show, he'll have the author on first." That was supposed to be a stick to hit Johnny with or Merv [Griffin] or something. But yeah, that was a spectacular show. I watch it once a year. I've gotta put it out where people who haven't ever seen it can see it. Mailer and Vidal. Norman came on pissed to the gills in his pugilist walk. I knew we were gonna have trouble as he walked to Gore on the air.

Something he had written about him. And they showed the key moment. It distresses me a little 'cause the show builds like a play. But [I] remembered [my] always misquoted insult to Norman, when he said that he was more — implied that he was more intelligent than the other people here.

And I said, "Maybe you'd like an extra chair to contain your giant intellect." This got a huge laugh, of course, at his expense. Norman has trouble with humor. I liked him. And then he said — I think I've never confessed this before — I think he took me to be David Frost by saying, "Cavett, why don't you just read the next question off the question sheet?"

And I heard myself say the immortal "Why don't you fold it five ways and put it where the moon don't shine?" It's often misquoted "stick it where the sun." Every word wrong. And you will agree that "stick it" would have been vulgar. 

Going back to some of your famous interviews — another important one was with John Kerry, now secretary of state. Back then, he was a young Vietnam vet. And he was on the show with another Vietnam vet. And [Richard Nixon's] White House wasn't happy with you. 

Well, the Nixon White House, imagine I could use this word about a presidency, sneakily prepped a guy, a young guy who was a right winger to oppose Kerry, a left winger. That's called TV booking. They saw it. And Kerry was very effective. So was the other fellow. But the White House wasn't thrilled … I am just sorry Nixon is not with us. Or — let me take that back instantly — what I mean is I am sorry he didn't live long enough to see my "Dick Cavett's Watergate," which was on PBS. And you can find it online. And you must see it.

You can find the whole show. Somebody found that I had tons of Watergate stuff on my show. I had [John] Mitchell. I had G. Gordon Liddy, crazy G. Gordon. Everybody. 

And you can see him ask if I'm a Jew, ask somebody. And, if you wanted just a sample, YouTube has the moment where Nixon says to his lickspittle, an Elizabethan term, H.R. Haldeman, "Cavett — what can we do to screw him?" Now, have you ever seen your name mentioned by the president, the most powerful man in the country?

But they went after all your staff as a result too.

He went after the staff. The vile filth from his mouth on the tapes is simply record breaking. And on the special, on "Dick Cavett's Watergate," Carl Bernstein points out that ... the first day of the administration, we had, for the first time that we know, a criminal administration in the White House.

And instead of celebrating his great victory the night before, he was talking about how "We gotta get this guy who didn't help, and we're gonna ruin this guy's business by screwing him this way" and so on. And at one point, he wants to know if I'm a Jew. Isn't that fascinating?

Of all the people you've interviewed, who have you liked the most?  

[Audrey] Hepburn, Bette Davis, [Marlon] Brando, Orson Welles and hundreds more — that one of them is a favorite? But if you persist in your folly in pressing me with this, I would have to confess that Groucho [Marx] meant the most to me.

Who did you dislike the most?

Spiro Agnew was a piece of nothing. And it kills me that I had him on. And they put him on the show. This is before we learned that we had two criminals in the White House, the president and the vice president. A great moment in our history. And they put him on. And they said, "He's got a good sense of humor. And we've got a lot of his cartoons. They cartoon him a lot. And you will point to them. And he'll say funny things about them." And he would look at one and he'd say, "Look what they did to your eyes in this one." Yeah, interesting. 

I know you also had a close relationship with Muhammad Ali.

Ali was just about my best friend for years. He stayed at my house one night out in the country. My wife was in New York. She called, and he was alone in the house. I had gone to get his wife and bring her over. They were at a motel, and they wanted to stay at my house. Phone rang. Ali picked it up and heard, "Darling." And he said, "This ain't darlin'. This is this the only three-time heavyweight champion of the world, and I'm lyin' in your bed, and I'm watchin' your TV, lady."  And she said, to her credit, "I'm gonna put a plaque on that bed, Mr. Ali." Which is more than she ever did for me, but never mind.  

I want to end with a quote from Clive James, "There will be no Dick Cavett of the future. We should content ourselves that there was one of the past." I think we're very lucky that we're of the present and that you are always so generous with your time and that you come and join us and talk to us, because it's such a pleasure.

I like you as much as I did Stan Laurel and Clive James. 

This interview has been edited and condensed.