By PHILIP GALANES The NY Times
The “21” Club was packed when Dick Cavett, the longtime television talk-show host and a regular contributor to the Opinionator blog for The New York Times, and Alec Baldwin, star of TV (“30 Rock”), film (“Blue Jasmine”), theater (“Orphans” on Broadway) and, most recently, his own talk show on MSNBC, “Up Late With Alec Baldwin,” arrived.
The maître d’ led the men through the dining room, into the kitchen and down a narrow flight of stairs with a perilously low ceiling. (“Wait a minute: How are people going to ask for our autographs down here?” Mr. Cavett asked.) The stairwell was lined with special bottles of wine reserved for special patrons (T. Boone Pickens and Chelsea Clinton, to name two). After one final hurdle, they were seated in the private wine cellar at a long table with bottles of wine from floor to ceiling.
Over lunch — an omelet for Mr. Baldwin and Dover sole for Mr. Cavett — and after some debate about who would sit where (Mr. Baldwin: “I think Cavett should sit at the head of the table.” Mr. Cavett: “I couldn’t possibly, just because I’m your senior by three years”), the men spoke of talk shows, Richard Nixon, being chased by the paparazzi and dealing with depression.
PHILIP GALANES: When I first heard that you were hosting a talk show, Alec, I thought: I must not understand how celebrity works. I thought the whole point of being the host of one was access to people who wouldn’t normally sit down with you. But you’re a star. You could set up nice dinners with any of your guests. Why add the cameras and the pancake makeup? What about a talk show appealed to you?
ALEC BALDWIN: When Dick was in his big run at ABC, I watched his show, and I couldn’t watch other things. I turned off the TV when “Gilligan’s Island” and “F Troop” were cresting, and I never got into the Aaron Spelling shows. But I liked talk shows, and I loved Cavett. How he wasn’t all preproduced and let the conversation breathe. So, when I started doing my podcast — —
PG: Do you know that Alec did a podcast for WNYC [“Here’s the Thing”]?
DICK CAVETT: Oh yes, I was on it.
AB: On the talk show, I want to introduce, or reintroduce, the viewers to people I appreciate. I want Herb Alpert to tell them what it was like to have a successful career as an instrumentalist. Or talk with Leonard Bernstein’s kids about what it was like to grow up in that world. Or introduce you to somebody who’s relatively new like Lena Dunham.
PG: Now you, on the other hand, Mr. Cavett, grew up in the world of talk shows, correct? Your first job was writing material for Jack Paar.
DC: I never missed a Jack Paar show until I made my ludicrously ballsy move and got myself hired by him. I was a copy boy for Time magazine, and someone left The Herald Tribune open on the copy boy desk, and I read Marie Torre’s column about Jack Paar. It said he worried more about his monologue than anything else. So I went home and typed one up, then took it to the bowels of the RCA Building and sneaked up to NBC. Of course, if there was security like there is now, I’d never be here today.
AB: This is back when security was a guy named Pat, and he was 80 years old.
DC: So, here comes Jack Paar, walking out of the men’s room, and I had the wits to put the monologue in a Time magazine envelope, and that caught his eye. I hand it to him. “I wrote a monologue for you, Mr. Paar.” “Oh yeah?” he says. And I think that’s that for my monologue. But that night, he ad-libbed three of my lines on the show.
PG: Had comedy writing been your goal?
DC: I was a starving actor. And I wanted to be a comic, I thought vaguely. But most of all, I wanted to be on a talk show — as a guest — and even if I’d done it only once, I could go back to Nebraska and say: I made it, just like Johnny [Carson], who left Nebraska 12 years before me.
PG: Of course, you went on to write for Johnny Carson, when he took over the “Tonight” show from Jack Paar. Have you read the new tell-all about Carson by Henry Bushkin?
DC: I rather liked it. I thought it must be true. There were sides of Johnny that I didn’t know. But I know he was one of the unhappiest men in the world. But he loved me, so I felt good about him.
AB: Why do you think he was so unhappy?
DC: Oh, God, he had a wretched mother. One time, Johnny wins some great prestigious award, and she says, “I guess they know what they’re doing.”
AB: The mother said that?
DC: Yeah. She never encouraged him. And when I worked for him, there was an awful lot of tension. He was like a wire, a tight wire.
PG: You can see it in the early clips.
DC: You can. And he had a wife on the ledge, and drinking troubles. His happiest hour was when he was out there on the set, and the rest of his life was really horrible.
AB: Once someone told me about the ex-wife of a famous television star. He was the star of a family show, he played the dad, and the ex-wife said that he went to work and he gave everything he had to give to his TV children, and when he came home, there was nothing left for his own child. I thought to myself, That’s absurd. Now I see how that happens all the time. The curtain opens, and they say, “Here’s Johnny!” And that’s the moment you’re free and alive and know exactly what’s going to happen for the next 90 minutes.
DC: You don’t have to make any decisions about what to do next.
AB: Someone said to me, “Why do you like doing theater so much?” Though after my last experience [a troubled and short-lived Broadway production of “Orphans”], I don’t like it as much as I used to. Trust me.
PG: I thought it was quite good — you and Ben Foster.
AB: It was a horrible experience, and it took years off my life. But to answer that question, why do I love theater, it’s because it’s the only place in life where you walk out onstage, and by and large, you know what’s going to happen. What you’re going to say, what the other people are going to say to you, whether the audience is going to laugh or feel deeply moved. You don’t have to figure anything out.
DC: I remember being in a play once, and there were just 30 minutes left, and I thought, I don’t want this ever to end. It’s like being in a protective womb for a couple hours, then the poor actor has to go home.
PG: It’s interesting how in tune you are on performing. It brings me back to your talk shows. Physically and temperamentally, you’re very different. We have Cavett’s Mr. Sly and Twinkly-Eyed and — —
AB: I can’t wait to hear what you’re going to say next.
PG: And Alec’s more full-throated, upfront delivery. But the tone of your talk shows is very similar. I watched Dick’s interview with Marlon Brando — in 1973, maybe the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. But he didn’t want to give anything away. He spoke in monosyllables. But you just waited and waited, and finally, he opened up and gave the best interview I’ve ever seen with him.
AB: There must be some technique.
PG: And I saw the same thing in your interview of Debra Winger, Alec. She launched a few stories, and I thought, She has no idea how to land this plane. But you gave her room and were so kind that she found her way to a beautiful point about processing disappointment that she wouldn’t have if you’d rushed her.
AB: What I find is that when you push or try to take something from them, it doesn’t work. But when you let it breathe, when you let your segments run a little longer, they give it to you. They give it to you if you let it be their choice.
DC: Some people thought it was zany to do 90-minute shows with one person: “You’re doing 90 minutes with George Harrison [shortly after the Beatles had broken up]? I don’t envy you.” I didn’t envy myself for the first couple segments.
AB: But by the time it’s over, they look at you and go, “We’re done?”
PG: He was quite funny.
DC: I remember saying to him, “Yoko Ono sat in that chair.” And he knew to jump out of it, horrified. And by the end of the show, he was as interesting as anyone I had met. If you can convince them that you’re not going to hurt them, that security led people to say: “I’ve never felt this good on a talk show. My God, I don’t know how you got me to talk about my abortion.” And that was a man.
PG: So, have you got a tip for Alec?
DC: Well, I guess it’s obligatory to rehearse the advice Jack Paar gave to me: “Hey kid, don’t do interviews.” I thought, What do I do then: sing, read poetry to the audience? Don’t do interviews, kid: What’s your favorite this or that, like David Frost and his clipboard. He meant make it a conversation. I didn’t get it right away, but I realized that’s what Jack did. And he was the most electric personality I’ve ever known on TV.
PG: Did you have any reluctance about doing your show on MSNBC, Alec? Cable news channels are so tribal now. Are you kissing off half of your audience?
AB: First of all, there’s a certain part of the American public that if I walked out onto the ice and Barbara Bush had just fallen through, and I saved her from drowning and carried her to shore and performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and saved her from hypothermia, people would say, “He rumpled her coat!” My original conversations were with NBC, but they didn’t have a slot for me, and may not have a slot for some time. They’re shuffling their whole late night with Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers. Then Phil Griffin [the president of MSNBC] popped up and said, “I’ll give you a slot now.”
PG: Do you think MSNBC was hoping for a more combative Alec Baldwin than they’re getting?
AB: No, I told Phil what I wanted to do. They want to explore some different programming.
PG: How about your famous TV combat, Dick — the near fistfight between Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal? Did the network say, “More of that, please!”?
DC: The network never said anything good.
DC: Exactly. All they said was, “Can’t you get more big stars?” And I got every big star there was that I wanted: Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Groucho Marx, Orson Welles, Lucille Ball, Alfred Hitchcock. The only ones I didn’t get were Cary Grant and Mike Nichols. But all they ever said was, “Why do you keep booking authors?”
PG: Let’s talk about your famous opponents. Did you ever find out what you did to make poor Richard Milhous Nixon so angry with you?
DC: Well, apparently the White House was furious about a show I did with John Kerry and John O’Neill, debating the Vietnam War. That started it. Then, your friend and mine John Lennon asked if I’d come down to court and assert that he should not be deported by the Nixon administration. That really did it.
PG: They wanted to deport John Lennon?
DC: Oh yes. You can even go to YouTube after lunch and listen to Nixon asking Haldeman, “What can we do to screw Cavett?” And years later, I learned from several members of my staff that he had used one of his favorite illegal hobbies and had the I.R.S. audit all of them, which was just hurting “the little people,” in the words of Joan Crawford.
AB: What enemies do you suppose I possibly have?
PG: The New York Post’s coverage of you is so operatic. What did you ever do to them?
AB: No. 1, you have to have some rap sheet that they can come at you with. You can’t be crystal clear and pure. And yes, I left an angry voice mail message for my daughter that my wife and her attorneys decided to release on the Internet. So there’s that. And as we all know, the Internet is the death of forgetting. You cannot reinvent yourself because it’s always there. You hit Google, and your cavalcade of misdeeds comes rolling back to the top of the page.
DC: Like the Great Pyramid.
PG: I live around the corner from Alec, and every week, it’s a mosh pit of TV crews and paparazzi. Why do they want wall-to-wall coverage of you?
AB: I don’t have any proof of this, and that’s important to say, but I think they’re there for harassment. I’m not J. D. Salinger. I’m out and about, having my picture taken. So when they come to my house and stake it out for days, they’re there to provoke. Then they ask: “Why are you so angry? You need counseling.”
DC: As a talk-show host recently said to Anthony Weiner, “What’s wrong with you?”
AB: Which I would understand if I was having altercations with FedEx deliverymen or meter maids. My bad luck is I’m having these altercations with people who just happen to have still and video cameras they’re ready to capture on film.
DC: There was an age when they didn’t exist, and it must have been wonderful.
PG: Speaking of this other age that Dick mentioned, I grew up in the ’70s. And there wasn’t a moment I didn’t know who Dick Cavett was. But I can remember as clear as day when I really honed in on you. It was just after my father killed himself, and you spoke out publicly about your own depression. I wonder if you know how much your words helped people, including me?
DC: At one point, I thought: I’m not so sure I want to become the poster boy for depression. But I still get mail about it, even today: “You saved my dad’s life.” “You helped me acknowledge my own depression.” “If Cavett can have this, then I guess it’s all right for me to.”
AB: But don’t you believe that the overwhelming majority of people are depressed at some time in their lives and they’re just not honest about it?
DC: Depression is epidemic because it’s still so undiagnosed. And even my analyst made the mistake of saying to me — after I’d told him I wished he knew for a minute what my depression felt like — he said, “Oh, that’s all right, I was pretty low when my dad died.” I sat up and said, “You think grief is even close to this?” He apologized.
AB: When I wrote a book about my divorce, I can remember writing about depression and wanting to kill myself. I felt like I was walking and walking in the woods, or in this vast open place, like Saskatchewan, and all of a sudden you come to this abyss that goes as far as the eye can see. And looking into it, it’s like death is inevitable.
PG: I’ve led us into a really cheery cul-de-sac, haven’t I?
DC: Sort of an Ingmar Bergman image.
PG: Let’s end on something cheerier: philanthropy. I don’t think I’m cheap. But I have a hard time giving money away. I’m afraid there won’t be enough. But your philanthropy is so large scale, Alec. Has it always been easy for you?
AB: Before “30 Rock,” I had always given a percentage of my income to charity. I’m not blowing my horn about it. Most people give, I think. But when I learned that “30 Rock” was going into syndication, I entered into a very lucrative agreement with Capital One, and I gave nearly every dime to charity. That’s why I did the commercials. I got addicted to giving the money away.
DC: Put down, at this point, Cavett said, “What a guy.”
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