Dick Cavett's Most Memorable Guests | Big Think

Question: Who was your favorite guest? Dick Cavett: I must say that Groucho meant more for me. I missed it as a child, I grew up in the game program, my generation, my dad's generation grew up in Marx Brother's movies and then bets your life, but I had it the other way around. And we were in Hollywood once when I was a child, about 10 years old, visiting relatives and the farmers market, I bought a chicken leg in one of those positions, and the lady said: "Hello, boy, you should have been here about two minutes ago, Groucho Marx was stopped just where you are." And I thought: "There is no God.

There is no God, or He would not have let me urinate or have stopped doing something I did, but to get here two minutes before and meet Groucho Marx." But I met him many years later, and for many years, so it was good. Leaving a party once, I went to the cinema with him, I can't believe it, I went to plays with him, I had dinner at his house and worked for him for two weeks once. He didn't really care about Hollywood society or the actors. He loved writers, he loved to hang out with writers, he was a writer born.

And leaving a party once in California, he says: "Let's get out of here," and sneak up and the host came and said: "Well, Groucho, is he leaving so soon?" He said: "I've had a wonderful night, but this was not all." Anyway, there you are. Question: How did you get along with Bobby Fischer? Dick Cavett: Bobby Fischer the chess artist, yes. I got along very well, I

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I loved Bobby Fischer, he was such a sweet guy and a total diamethric contrast so absolute with the horror that became paranoid schizophrenia and wild hair and took away the fillings because he thought that the nefarious types sent messages to his head.

He went completely crazy and wanted to have known when he could have been on board, he would have found him and tried to help him or take him to some, nobody tried to get any therapy or none, whatever necessary, I don't know. I simply lost contact with him and the next thing I learned, everything had ended, virtually. He was brilliant in the program, had a great sense of humor in the program, and was obviously a genius and obviously had certain sides of him that were not developed, because his life was chess. Sometimes he was awake all night and the next day, with everything he knew, studying chess, studying more chess, older chess, chess of another country, was a sad case of a man, apparently a fragile mental condition that leaned in madness.

But surely I liked it and wanted to have called him and gone to the cinema with him or something, because he got it so that he only did my program, he did not like other people he was with, he said, and he did it three or four times before and after the game. Question: What was John Lennon like? Dick Cavett: It was not like anything, it was unique. I always wanted to listen to someone to say that, and I chose you as the victim. I liked John, I didn't know him much. Al

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all the time I spent with him was in the program, but also a couple of other meetings and I am still looking for two long letters that wrote to me and I met him, of course, when I went to the courts that we see by law and order to speak, to say that he should not be deported.

He didn't have the ingenuity to say, the president should, but he was later, so it's fine. But a very intelligent and very available guy. Very accessible, easy to speak with the first time you met him, it was that old thing, you felt that you had known him for a while, that kind of thing. Question: What about Orson Welles? Dick Cavett: What about Orson Wells? Oh, there is no way to cover Orson Wells, and this is not a joke about his weight of 400 pounds more or less when he died, but the guest of the Dream Interview program, of course, I still have a letter from a woman who says: "Thank you, thanks, Mr.

Cavett, for bringing Orson Wells back to his US audience." And I did not see Citizen Kane until I was in college in some way, and of course, I knew who it was of all kinds of other things. I saw him King Read on stage, City Center in New York, and was a great and excellent guest. And tragic figure too. It is curious how two great theater artists like Wells and Brando became obese morbids, and if there is a category beyond Morbidly, they both became that. I would love to know what the combination is, what could have been the connection between them.

In part it was a contempt of his professions. But it is too complex for my mind to Fathom. Question: Is it true that someone died in his program? Dick Cavett: Does it die in the program? What are you talking about? Yes. I

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I am the only presenter of interview programs, if there is such a category in, what is called, the book of the records, so that a guest dies while recording the program, yes. And, of course, if the gods are going to exercise their sense of humor as usual and I suppose he dies in an interview program, he would have to be a health expert, which he was.

It was Jay I. Rodala, Rodala Press, Prevention Magazine, all those, that editorial industry, and was very fun for half an hour, took the following assumption, Pete Hammel, Hammel talking about writing his column and this and that, and then Hammel suddenly turned to his right, and the audience at home, if the program had issued, but the audience in the study in the study in the study in the study in the study, the audience in **** and they fell back into their state. Question: Do you think your difficult questions played a role in this? Dick Cavett: Yes, it was, and there is always an aspect of humor sick of these things.

We saw the program, of course it did not air, it happened al

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two hours before the air time, so they threw it into the program, but, as I wrote about that in one of the blogs, at least every month I meet someone who says: "I will never forget my eyes on your face when that guy died in your program." And, of course, they never saw it, but they could pass a lies detector test they made. I don't know if I described it so brilliantly the next night, that it was in all newspapers, of course, and people only show that the value of eyewitnesses.

That there are people who could be able to pass a polygraph who saw this.