Cavett's Return

Outside the studio on 58th Street in Manhattan hovers a claque of middle-aged women, shuffling their sensible shoes and swearing that the guy is the greatest thing since Clairol. Next to them is a gaggle of teen-age groupies eating their hearts out because their hero is married, of all things. But, as one matron said to a groupie, "It's all right, dear --he's ours only for an hour."

On ABC-TV last winter, Dick Cavett, the subject of that stage-door chatter, was caught in the coffeecake crunch of morning television. Up against such formidable foes as Dick Van Dyke, The Beverly Hillbillies and Andy Griffith --all rerunning for their lives--Cavett found himself and his talk program scrambling for ratings. While insisting that they liked the guy a lot, ABC nonetheless canceled the show. But not for long. Cavett is back on the network --in prime time.

Spade Cat. His new program may have the strangest schedule on network television (Monday, Tuesday and Friday, from 10 to 11 p.m. E.D.T.), but the show is better than ever: a limited number of guests (usually four) and commercial breaks.

In the first three weeks, Cavett has deftly handled such disparate talents as Truman Capote, Joe Namath, Candice Bergen, Rex Reed, Gloria Steinem and Mort Sahl. Coming on like an urbane Henry Fonda, he asks a few questions, grins puckishly now and again, then sits back to let guests earn their $350.

But he is always there when needed. Negro Actor James Earl Jones mentioned that he did not particularly enjoy being called a "spade cat." Cavett allowed as how he could understand that. After all, "The old maid in the apartment above me lives with a spayed cat." Caught on-camera taking a telephone call from the producer, Cavett flashed an exasperated look and ad-libbed: "I've told you never to call me at work, Miss Lollobrigida."

It is not all froth and fun, however.

When Correspondent David Schoen-brun appeared, Cavett deftly turned the talk to De Gaulle and the French elections. He put a bearded and denim-wearing Peter Fonda at ease and then drew him out about the American educational system ("It's a mess--but my old lady won: our kids go to school") and the generation gap ("My father and I have gotten much closer in the past few years." At least "we talk to each other on the phone every day").

Cavett, and perhaps even the whole talk-show format, reached something of a high point last week when he set up a confrontation between Columbia University Radical James Simon Kunen, author of The Strawberry Statement (TIME, May 9), and Yale Student Tony Dolan, a conservative who occasionally contributes to the National Review. "I eat my share of apple pie," insisted Radical Kunen when he was attacked by Dolan for being something less than the all-American boy. And so the debate continued. Kunen: "There are no hungry conservatives." Dolan: Today's campus radicals operate with "noise instead of intelligence."

Flu Fans. Cavett, who looks like a cross between Charlie Brown and a member of Our Gang, is a Nebraska boy who started in television as a gag writer, then graduated to performing. Mostly in jest, he credits his late-blooming success to the Hong Kong-flu epidemic that hit the nation just as his morning program was floundering. "It kept people home who otherwise wouldn't watch daytime television."

As Cavett sees himself and his show, "It gets me to read and do a lot of things I otherwise might not." The result of all this homework is an urbane and highly relaxed hour of television talk that promises to go far in making the long hot summer seem less so.

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