Actors - Dick Cavett

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	Actors - Dick Cavett

Richard Alva Cavett (born November 19, 1936) is a television talk show host known for his conversational style of in-depth and often serious issues discussion.

Childhood

Besides his birthplace of Gibbon, Nebraska, Cavett also spent parts of his youth in Grand Island (during World War II when a German prison camp was located there) and Lincoln. His maternal grandfather was a Baptist preacher originally from Wales. Both of his parents were schoolteachers and postgraduates at Colorado State Teachers College in Greeley.

When the family lived in Lincoln, their garbage man was future serial killer Charles Starkweather, whom Dick's father got to know. When Dick was 10, his mother died of cancer.

In eighth grade, Dick directed a live Saturday-morning radio show sponsored by the Junior League. He was elected state president of the student council, won two gold medals as state gymnastics champion, and played the title role in The Winslow Boy
. One of his classmates in high school was actress Sandy Dennis.

He claimed to have been high school gymnastics champ on an appearance on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson when he performed a routine on the pommel horse.

Before leaving for college, he worked as a caddy at the Lincoln Country Club. He also began doing magic shows for $35 a night under the tutelage of Gene Gloye. He attended the 1952 convention of the International Brotherhood of Magicians in St. Louis and won Best New Performer trophy. Around the same time, he met fellow magician Johnny Carson, eleven years his senior, who was doing a magic act at a church in Lincoln.

As a result of his Nebraska upbringing, Cavett has had a strong affinity for the culture of the Sioux and other native tribes of the Great Plains and has owned many artifacts. This interest ultimately would lead to his TV interview with Dr. John Neihardt.

Yale

Cavett applied to Yale University only because of the urging of an Omaha high school teacher, Frank Rice, a friend of his parents.

"My Nebraska clothes set me apart. I remember I actually wore brown-and-white shoes. They were impractical, though. The white one kept getting dirty."

He won the Louis H. Burlingham Memorial Scholarship, in return for which he worked 15 hours a week as a busboy in the Trumbull College dining hall. Later he continued working off his scholarship at the Yale library, assisting Robert Barlow, curator of the Yale Musical Theatre collection.

He played in and directed dramas at the campus station, WYBC, and appeared in Yale Drama productions. In his senior year, he changed his major from English to drama. He had grand ambitions of getting into show business and was envious of fellow Yale students such as Bill Hinnant and James Franciscus who already were acting professionally.

While a drama student, he always took advantage of any opportunity to meet stars, routinely going to shows in New York to hang around stage doors or venture backstage. He would go so far as to carry a copy of Variety or an appropriate piece of company stationery in order to look inconspicuous while sneaking backstage or into a TV studio.

His distinctive voice, which had always set him apart in school, proved effective in attracting the attention of celebrities as well. He and his Yale roommate, Christopher Porterfield (later his executive producer) met Marlene Dietrich's daughter, Maria Riva, backstage after Tea and Sympathy
at the Shubert Theater, and Cavett convinced her to meet them at the Taft Auditorium at Yale. He also met Sir Peter Ustinov after a reading at YMHA Poetry Center in Manhattan and got him to accept an invitation to come speak to the Drama School.

During his last two summers at Yale, Cavett apprenticed at Shakespeare festivals in Oregon and Stratford, Connecticut. He had one line in The Merchant of Venice
, in which Katharine Hepburn played Portia.

At Drama School, he met his future wife, Caroline Nye McGeoy (known professionally as Carrie Nye), a native of Greenwood, Mississippi. After graduation, the two of them acted in summer theater in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and he worked for two weeks in a local lumberyard in order to buy an engagement ring.

Four years later, on June 4, 1964, they were married in New York, at which time Carrie Cavett was already playing a leading role in The Trojan Women off-Broadway.

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