Talk Show: Confrontations, Pointed Commentary and Off-Screen Secrets

By Dick Cavett. Times Books, 2010. 304 pages.

I really wanted this to be the antidote to Bill Carter’s The War for Late Night—a discourse on what talk shows were like in the old days, before they were overscrutinized for their moneymaking and youth-mongering potential, when they were just a cheap and relaxing way to wrap up a programming day.

Imagine my disappointment when this turned out to be a collection of Cavett’s online columns for the New York Times website. The book has much less to say about talk show hosting in general than Cavett’s long-ago autobiography and subsequent books did. The title “Talk Show” is more a device to remind us why Dick Cavett is famous. Years ago, I’m not sure he would have taken a title that pigeonholed him thus. Now he uses it for a book which is more freewheeling than that title allows.

In any case, Cavett takes his position as columnist seriously, even stating his trepidation at taking on the assignment in the book’s introduction. He doesn’t behave like a blogger—his style is more composed and formalized, in the manner of magazine columns of yore. As for his penchant for namedropping and for retelling the tales of how J.I. Rodale dropped dead on his show—well, one imagines that’s exactly why he was given this gig, because he had an excess of ready material to spit out into the internet void.

As for Cavett’s rabid devotion to Groucho Marx, I share that particular enthrallment. So even though Talk Show is not the book I needed it to be, it warms me because of its frequent and worshipful references to Groucho.