By DICK CAVETT
Dick Cavett on his career in show business, and more.
Tags: celebrity, elizabeth taylor, magic, richard burton
The setting is the Starlight Roof or whatever it is or was called, at the top of what to me will always be “The RCA Building”; just as the MetLife Building remains “The Pan Am Building.” (I resist all alterations to my adopted city.)
The scene is some sort of upscale fancy dinner party up there in the sky — sometime in the late ‘80s? — and I’m in the spotlight doing my trophy-winning rope routine from my old magic act, just as I’ve done it countless times since learning it from a master magician in my high school days. (Two-fifths of it could be seen for a while on YouTube, on Jimmy Fallon’s show. The segment ran out of time and I owe Jimmy three-fifths of the classic “George Sands Rope Routine.”)
Back to the party. At the point of completing one cut and restoration, I would toss the rope into the audience to lure the person who catches it up to the stage to do the rest of the cuttings, with me miraculously restoring the rope each time to astonished gasps and applause.
Tags: celebrity, elizabeth taylor, magic, richard burton
The setting is the Starlight Roof or whatever it is or was called, at the top of what to me will always be “The RCA Building”; just as the MetLife Building remains “The Pan Am Building.” (I resist all alterations to my adopted city.)
The scene is some sort of upscale fancy dinner party up there in the sky — sometime in the late ‘80s? — and I’m in the spotlight doing my trophy-winning rope routine from my old magic act, just as I’ve done it countless times since learning it from a master magician in my high school days. (Two-fifths of it could be seen for a while on YouTube, on Jimmy Fallon’s show. The segment ran out of time and I owe Jimmy three-fifths of the classic “George Sands Rope Routine.”)
Back to the party. At the point of completing one cut and restoration, I would toss the rope into the audience to lure the person who catches it up to the stage to do the rest of the cuttings, with me miraculously restoring the rope each time to astonished gasps and applause.
Bill Cunningham/The New York TimesElizabeth Taylor and Calvin Klein, right, at a benefit.That night, about halfway back among the dimly lit diners, I’d glimpsed a female figure who, in the near-darkness, could almost have passed for Elizabeth Taylor, if you squinted.
In a merry jest, something made me say, “I’ve done this trick a hundred times and I keep having this fantasy that some day the person who comes up and helps me will be some famous, luminous movie star. Like Elizabeth Taylor.”
Just before tossing the rope out front, I detected movement in the dark. I could see a striking apparition in white, gliding smoothly like a Rose Bowl float toward the floor-level stage.
It was.
And it was true what’s been said so often. Her beauty would take your breath away.
(Better, I guess, than if her breath would take your beauty away.)
I’d love to know the technical explanation of a strange phenomenon. First gazing upon that sublimely gorgeous face, you were struck by the fact that she was even more beautiful in person. Yes, the camera and screen did not — and how silly it sounds to say — do Elizabeth Taylor justice.
Looking at each other, I could feel palpitation. (Mine, of course.)
Suddenly I was all thumbs, but figured she was probably used to having that effect, and that relaxed me. Some.
What was nice about her was that she seemed to be genuinely enjoying the moment, fascinated by the trick and earnestly and conscientiously following my instructions. A less classy celebrity might have clowned and tried to screw me up.
Then I said something I regretted.
On about the fourth cut-and-restore, she had some trouble severing the rope and I heard myself say, “You can cut it, Miss Taylor. Just think of it as the marital bond.” She was so concentrated I hoped she might have missed it.
There was a noticeable murmur of disapproval from a few, but before I had completed a wince, thanks to whatever gods there may be, she laughed.
Heartily is hardly the word. The Taylor laugh wasn’t just any laugh; certainly not that of a refined lady. She gave out with the great full-throated guffaw known to her friends. It was a robust and delightfully bawdy thing, more appropriate to a stevedore than a beauty.
The renowned Liz Laugh was surely part of what endeared her to crews and stagehands, with whom she liked to exchange ribald humor the way Carole Lombard did, both of them reportedly preferring to hang out with “the workers” — the folk Joan Crawford graciously referred to when accepting an Oscar as “the little people behind the scenes” — rather than with their illustrious colleagues.
My late wife, the actress Carrie Nye, made a dreadful movie called “Divorce His, Divorce Hers” with the Burtons in 1973. She was a gifted writer and when she got back from Germany — where the movie was made for some Burton-related tax reasons — she penned, for friends’ amusement, a comic piece called “Making It In Munich.” It’s laugh-out-loud funny.
My friend Chris Porterfield read it and passed it to Henry Grunwald, then the top editor at Time, who said, “This goes in the next issue.” Time introduced the piece by saying that Miss Nye had appeared with the glam pair in the two-part movie, adding that, “incredibly,” it was about to be rebroadcast.
Carrie Nye was especially pleased when Gore Vidal called with praise, complaining, “I can’t get things Time asks me to write into the magazine and you get in without trying.”
She liked both Burtons, saying she felt sorry for Elizabeth, and that, being from the South, she knew the problems of women married to alcoholics. We never knew if either of them read the “Making It In Munich.” The piece’s humor derived from such matters as the director’s awful dilemmas, like the fact that by the time Liz got to the studio, Richard would be too drunk to continue work, while her own hearty imbibing disqualified her by the time he sobered up. A dilemma because they had scenes together and simultaneous sobriety was rare. I think my favorite line was about the beleaguered director, “who was 4 ft. 11 in. tall, or at least he was when we began.”
At the risk of sudden change of tone, you can be sure that legions envied them their fabulous, in the true sense of the word, lives. (For astonishing details, see the page-turner “Furious Love.”)
Think how many folks would say they’d trade their own dreary lives in an instant to have been one of Those Two. The glamour, the celebrity, the adoring (and often life-and-limb-threatening) throngs, the caviar and champagne, the travel, the passel of dogs and children hauled along, the sex, the yachts, the mansions and castles and whole floors of hotels, the walnut-sized diamonds and rubies ….
But before making that somewhat Mephistophelean bargain, I would caution those who’d readily shed their own drab existence to be Liz or Dick to think twice. You’re talking about a woman plagued all her life with 10 people’s medical horrors, heroically endured. He too had awful illnesses, some not publicly known. Like hemophilia and epilepsy.
We’re also talking about two greatly gifted people, of course. Also about two drunks, constant smokers, spouse-dumpers and pill-takers, reckless with their health and, often, with their careers; with Richard — who at one point could put away three bottles of vodka a day — dead in his fifties.
I feel lucky to have crossed paths with them. She was wonderful and he was wonderful.
To envy them you have to be nuts.
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