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By Root 807 0

our TV intake from the big ugly raised-up, bolted-down set in the basement rec room. My avid anticipation of the Cavett broadcast was unshared by my fellow primates. (My freshman year had been spent in an all-male dorm, providing an immersive experience in de-evolutionary living for which even growing up with three brothers hadn’t prepared me—it was like boot camp at the chimp house.) Those used to slumping with one leg slung over the chair at that late hour in front of the TV were less than captivated by the prospect of watching a ninety-minute program starring two novelists and some elderly bird embroiled in bladed repartee. But somehow I and a couple of confederates were able to commandeer the set from the jock contingent and ward off sporadic guerrilla attempts to change the channel, attempts that were preceded with comments along the lines of, “Shit, there must be something else on.” Finally, resistance melted, and we were able to watch the show in relative peace.

Who knew the show would go down in broadcast history? At the time TV programs were mostly preserved on kinescopes, and taped shows were routinely taped over, so that invaluable archives of the old Johnny Carson, Steve Allen, and Jack Paar shows were rinsed down the void. But this ninety-minute show from December 2, 1971, has not only survived but evolved into a time capsule that, opened, still emits a white-blast radioactive force, like the atomic suitcase in Kiss Me Deadly. It was shown in 2007 as part of the Paley Center for Media’s film and video retrospective The Mistress and the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer, triggering a slew of commentaries and remembrances, including a memory-lane recap by Cavett himself, who had no idea that what was intended as a literary evening with three accomplished practitioners would soon require the services of a lion tamer. What transpired was like a tension-headache grenade going off on Cavett’s tiny set (Cavett himself being quite the clever teacup) with the audience rooting and booing as if at an old-fashioned melodrama, Mailer eating up his role as villain.

[Mailer turns his chair away from us and to the audience.]

Mailer: Are you all really, truly idiots or is it me?

[A chorus replies, “You!” Then, applause.]

Cavett: Oh, that was the easy answer.

(Forgotten today is that one of the Cavett show’s most frisson-y highlights belonged to Flanner, who, after describing how the dancer Isadora Duncan died when her scarf got tangled in the wheels of a car, noted, “She was nearly decapitated”—producing an audible intake of breath from the audience.)

Riveted by the most lacerating exchanges of rancor since the Gore Vidal–William F. Buckley skate-off at the convulsive 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago (where, as one of the ABC News commentators, Buckley, making a fist, snarled, “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered,” and Vidal didn’t even flinch), I decided to write about the show for Frostburg’s student paper, the State-to-Date. I analyzed the verbal punches and bristling subtext much as Mailer would cover a prizefight or a gunslingers’ duel, as if he were wired into the opponents’ nervous systems, their jabs the extensions of his own perceptions. Decoding comments that in the original context sounded cryptic and were (as when Mailer disapprovingly alluded to Vidal’s revealing in his nonfiction novel Two Sisters—excerpted in the Partisan Review—that he had sex with the Beat novelist and lumberjack bodhisattva Jack Kerouac), I reconstructed the evening as if it were a clash of two storm fronts within whose black clouds the motives were buried. The piece was called “O.K. Corral Revisited,” and why the State-to-Date thought a meditation on an episode of The Dick Cavett Show by a sophomore was worth publishing across an entire page wasn’t entirely apparent then, but there it was, my first appearance in college print, and I thought, Why not send a copy to Mailer? He had gotten such a drubbing for his boorishness that I thought