For a month or three now, Dick Cavett has been writing an enjoyable column for The New York Times which I'm not linking to because you have to be a Times Select subscriber to read it. Either that or have a friend who is and sends it to you on occasion. I'm in the latter category.
The other day, Cavett wrote about an incident that occurred at a taping of his ABC show in 1971. A guest actually passed away in front of the cameras. Here's an excerpt from that column…
When I'm doing an appearance somewhere and taking questions from the audience, I can always count on: "Tell about the guy who died on your show!" I generally say, "I will, and I promise you that in a few moments you will be laughing." (That gets a laugh.) I go on: "First, who would be the logical person to drop dead on a television show? A health expert." (Laugh.) I go on to explain that he was Jerome I. Rodale, the publisher of (among other things) Today's Health Magazine. (Laugh.) The irony gets thicker.
He'd been on the cover of The New York Times Magazine that Sunday, and we needed one more guest. He was a slight man, and looked like Leon Trotsky with the little goatee.
He was extremely funny for half an hour, talking about health foods, and as a friendly gesture he offered me some of his special asparagus, boiled in urine. I think I said, "Anybody's we know?" while making a mental note to have him back.
I brought out the next guest, Pete Hamill, whose column ran in The New York Post. Rodale moved "down one" to the couch. As Pete and I began to chat, Mr. Rodale suddenly made a snoring sound. Comics would sometimes do that, which got a laugh while another comic was talking, pretending boredom. His head tilted to the side as Pete, in close-up as it happened, whispered audibly, "This looks bad."
The audience laughed at that. I didn't, because I knew Rodale was dead.
I've never met Dick Cavett but if I did, I'd lay the following addendum on him because he might find it amusing. On the chance that he may Google himself some day and come to this site, here it is…
That episode, for obvious reasons, never aired. A rerun was hastily selected and it happened to be a rerun where the featured guest was Jack Benny, who was then still very much among the living.
So that day in '71, I'm watching the afternoon movie on Channel 7, the ABC outlet in Los Angeles. One of those little teasers comes up during a commercial break and a local newsguy comes on and says, "Famous guest dies during taping of Dick Cavett Show. Details on the news at five."
Don't you just love when they do things like that? Give you a little bit of important information but not enough to let you know what's really going on? Anyway, this is followed by another commercial for something, and then there's an ABC network promo. You see a slide with a logo for The Dick Cavett Show as an announcer says, "Join Dick Cavett and his special guest Jack Benny, tonight."
Immediate assumption: Jack Benny is the famous guest who died during the taping of the show.
It takes me a few seconds to realize it probably isn't so. If it had been Jack Benny, that would have been the headline; that Jack Benny was dead, not that some unidentified guest died while chatting with Mr. Cavett. But it takes a moment before that occurs to me and of course, I have to wonder if others are leaping to the same immediate and erroneous deduction.
Sure enough, a minute later, the local newsman is back on ABC, interrupting the movie to say, "Uh, just to clarify…the guest who died at the Dick Cavett Show taping today was not Jack Benny. So you can stop calling the station…"