In his recent review in The New Yorker of a number of books about the entity known as late-night television, Louis Menand recounts the famous evening when Dick Cavett hosted Gore Vidal, Janet Flanner and a drunken, obsteperous Norman Mailer. I don’t recall if I saw the original program in 1971 (my senior year of high school), but I know that over the years I have seen clips of Cavett’s famous slap at Mailer. But until I read Menand’s article, I don’t think I had ever heard of the delicious final exchange between the great battleship Mailer and fast, funny PT boat Cavett. writes Menand:
“[T]though he was criticized for being obsequious in the presence of theatrical royalty and other V.I.P.s, [Cavett] was nobody’s fool. His management of the on-air fracas, in 1971, between Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer is properly renowned. . . .The short version of a long and ravelled story is that Mailer came drunk to the taping of a show featuring Vidal and The New Yorker’s Paris correspondent, Janet Flanner, who was then almost eighty. Mailer glowered and blustered and abused the other guests and the audience, which began abusing him back.
“At the time, Mailer was deeply embroiled with the women’s movement. He was aggrieved by a piece that Vidal had written for The New York Review of Books in which Vidal associated him with Henry Miller and Charles Manson. “The Miller-Mailer-Manson man (or M3 for short) has been conditioned to think of women as, at best, breeders of sons; at worst, objects to be poked, humiliated, killed,” Vidal wrote. Mailer was entitled to think that he had wrestled with the questions raised by the women’s movement honorably, and that Vidal was high-handedly slandering him; but he was unable, in the condition in which he had entered the ring, to lay a glove on his opponent. Vidal feigned perplexity at Mailer’s distress, joined forces with Flanner (who clearly found him très gentil), and made Mailer look ridiculous the way a cat makes a dog look ridiculous.
“Mailer’s fatal insult, though, was to Cavett. “Why don’t you look at your question sheet and ask a question?” Mailer said to him at one point, after the swords had been drawn all around. “Why don’t you fold it five ways and put it where the moon don’t shine?” Cavett said. “It was received as the remark of the evening,” Mailer later conceded, though Cavett’s follow-up was equally inspired:
MAILER: Mr. Cavett, on your word of honor, did you just make that up or have you had it canned for years and were you waiting for the best moment to use it?
CAVETT: I have to tell you a quote from Tolstoy?”
A brilliant rejoinder; if only it was included in the clip. (And a writerly salute to Menand for that nifty cat-dog line.)