Save Dick Cavett

NEWS THAT the American Broadcasting Company may cancel the Dick Cavett Show in July touches the program's admirers in a way which entitles them to more serious consideration from the network than that given to Star Trek fetishists several years ago.

The effect of late-night talk shows on the TV generation currently at college would make a nice termpaper topic for David Riesman's course. But it might be fair to suggest meanwhile that among those who occasionally daydream of great achievement in whatever field (an affliction especially prevalent among the readers and writers of this newspaper), a common denominator of such daydreams is that they often take the form of telling it to Dick Cavett.

For some, no doubt, while watching the show, the daydream (nightdream?) actually is that of being Dick Cavett, L.E. Sissman suggested in a recent New Yorker:

Because of the coolness with which he shields an implied commitment. Cavett may be on the verge of becoming an exemplar, and, by extension, a mentor, of the high school and college generation of Americans; the closest historical analogy might be that cited by William H. Whyte, Jr., author of "The Organization Man," who said that many of his Class of 1939 Princeton undergraduates modelled their actions on the cool stylishness of Fred Astaire.

Not without reason did Sissman identify Cavett's current residence as "East Egg, Long Island," for Cavett is a modern-day Gatsby who this time has really made it all the way, coming out of the Midwest and through the back door (show biz, instead of bootlegging) to genuine social and financial success in the East. What aspiring Harvard undergrad, watching the show stoned during exam period, could ask for more?

THE MOST damaging charge against the Cavett show seems to be that it's "intellectual." This, of course, is absurd. If anything, it is anti-intellectual in that it degrades intellectuals by treating them like movie stars. ("Tell me, Mr. Auden, when did you write your first poem?") But to keep ABC from thinking that the show is appealing to intellectuals, you'd better misspell a few words and mail from outside Cambridge when you write them to say how much you enjoy it.