To revisit “The Dick Cavett Show,” which ran late night on ABC from 1969 to 1975 (and in various other incarnations before and after), is to enter a time capsule—not just because of Cavett’s guests, who included aging Hollywood doyennes (Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn), rock legends in their chaotic prime (Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix), and squabbling intellectuals (Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer), but because Cavett’s free-flowing yet informed interviewing style is all but absent from contemporary television. Late-night shows are now tightly scripted affairs, where celebrities can plug a new movie, tell a rehearsed anecdote, and maybe get roped into a lip-synch battle. But Cavett gently prodded his subjects into revealing themselves. Though he was pegged as the “intellectual” late-night host, he resisted the label. He was a creature of show business: spontaneous, witty, and interested in everything.
Cavett’s interviews with the likes of George Harrison, Orson Welles, Lily Tomlin, and Richard Pryor have racked up millions of views on YouTube, providing a unique window into a raw, freewheeling, contentious time. A Nebraska native who went to Yale and got his start writing for the late-night hosts Jack Paar and Johnny Carson (before becoming Carson’s competition), Cavett presided over an era split between culture and counterculture, squares and hippies. He wasn’t quite either, but he was somehow at home with both. Two of his most frequent guests, each of whom became a close friend, were Groucho Marx and Muhammad Ali—who represented either pole. On December 27th, American Masters will air a documentary about the former, “Groucho & Cavett,” the filmmaker Robert S. Bader’s follow-up to “Ali & Cavett: The Tale of the Tapes.”
Cavett, now eighty-six, has spent the pandemic in his palatial 1912 Greek Revival mansion in Connecticut. When I drove there recently, his second wife, Martha Rogers, led me to an ornate dining room: maroon walls with white crown molding, oil paintings in gilded frames, and a swan sculpture inside a Corinthian-columned fireplace. In a New Yorker Profile of Cavett from 1972, L. E. Sissman wrote, “At close range, Cavett seems both similar to and different from his television image. On camera, he appears slight and boyish; his gestures are subtly gamin, even elfin, his poise is catlike. In person, all this is amplified into something larger than life and possibly even more magnetic.” Half a century later, this remained true. Cavett sat at the end of a long dining table, a walker by his side, wearing a flannel shirt and headphones connected to an amplifying device, to make up for hearing loss. His voice was familiar from old TV clips—nasal, refined, with an audible “H” in “what” and “while”—but sonorous enough to carry across several rooms. Sipping from a “Dick Cavett Show” mug, he couldn’t resist a pun, a clever aside, or an anecdote about a cultural titan. A few times, he clutched his chest and gasped, suddenly awestruck by his own star-studded life. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I was reading a New Yorker Profile of you from 1972.
You know, I haven’t seen that since then. Would I like it? Tell me about it.
Well, there’s an interesting quote from Marshall Brickman describing you: “He’s always unruffled, calm, bland, and he just sort of moves ahead at his own speed. I think he’s not unaware of a kind of adjustment that he’s made. He’s aware that he has to be in a certain frame of mind to withstand the pressure of doing this kind of a show. . . . Disengagement—that’s his particular style.”
My God, Brickman’s even smarter than I thought! I like that. What year was that, ’72? Jesus. [He contemplates the time gone by.] Lately, I keep seeing people who are well known who have aged dramatically. I’d rather not name any names, but at this audience last night [at a screening of “The Fabelmans”], Martha spotted a couple of people, and I said, “No, that’s not who that is.” It was. Some of us change more than others. Have you lost friends, relatives, to the curse?
No. A friend’s father died, though.
Two really good friends of mine have died in the last couple of months. One lived in a very small town in Nebraska, and about a year before he died he had written me a note. Roger Welsch—he used to appear on “CBS Sunday Morning” in overalls, doing a “Postcard from Nebraska.” Anyway, he wrote that the people around him, because of an insect invasion, were “dropping with flies.” [Laughs loudly.]
This is partly me trying to get some advice, because I interview people for a living, but do you have a guiding philosophy for interviewing?
I’m almost embarrassed that I don’t, because I guess you’re supposed to. The first show I ever taped, I was nervous. My fear was: I was funny with friends last night, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to be funny on the show. As luck would have it, one of the guests was an ant expert, and I remember his wonderful name: Elmer Bursby. We go to commercial. They were going to go back to me to introduce him, and I thought, Johnny [Carson], Jack [Paar], whoever, would usually have something amusing in an introduction. I wonder if I ever will. The red light went on, and I said, “No show is complete without an ant expert.” This got just the laugh I needed.
This was Day One?
Yeah, Day One. The show went pretty well. I was relieved that I got through ninety minutes of unscripted television. I went back to be complimented, I thought, but the guy from ABC said, “Nobody gives a shit what Gore Vidal or Muhammad Ali think about Vietnam.” This sort of stunned me. They decided they would not air that as my first show. I objected. But they took one that I had taped a week later, when I was more broken in. That show aired first, and the “controversy” show was five shows later. I saved a clipping from somebody who said, “Cavett has gotten a lot better”—and they were talking about the first show!
What was the hardest part of learning the job?
I really can’t claim I ever found it difficult. I just seemed to fall into it, looked forward to the next day’s show, but found that you have to forget the one you did the night before, because the audience may not have seen it and any references to it wouldn’t work. Once, somebody said, “How’d your show go? Who was it?” And I said, “Jesus! Oh, my God, she sat right there.” And it took longer than you would guess for me to remember the somewhat obscure name Lucille Ball.
And yet the name of the ant expert has never left you.
When I was working for Johnny, when he was rather depressed, I said, “Is something bothering you?” And he said, “I went home last night, and my wife said, ‘Who were your four guests?’ ‘Well, we had—Jesus!’ Couldn’t come up with one!” So maybe that’s a vital blessing when you have to start all over the next day. There’s a lot of crazy mental things in this business.
The New Yorker Profile suggested that the monologues were the hardest part for you, and you were much more at ease doing interviews. Do you think that’s true?
I probably felt that at the time. I worried about them. And then they seemed to almost always go well. [This reminded him of the story of how he got his first job writing for the “Tonight” show, when he saw a newspaper headline that inspired him to sneak on set with sample jokes.] “Jack Paar Worries More About His Monologue Than Anything Else in Life”—that’s what spurred me to take my writing for him, as a copy boy at Time making sixty dollars a week, and catching him on the way to the men’s room. Luck! I was carrying a CBS envelope, which I grabbed up at the last moment, with the big logo. I thought that might catch his eye, and it did. He said, “I’ll read them.”
I love that story, because it’s the kind of classic stumbling-into-show-business tale you never hear anymore.
It might not have happened, and everything would be different. Sat in the audience, he came out in his jacket, took out a folded paper. I thought, That’s it! But it was not. It was something about mothers-in-law or something. So I began to sink down into the seat. But a woman he was speaking to in the audience said, “Hey, how about this pirate ship?” It was the first of several hijackings. And Jack said [a line I wrote], “It must have been surprising to the passengers to hear, ‘Attention, please! This is your pirate speaking!’ ” This got a big laugh. And then he did another one. And then another one. So I made a point to be near him as he left the studio. Got in the elevator. He said, “You want to write? Send something.” I did, and I got the job. The odds against a newspaper being open on the copy boy’s desk, and I saw that item. If not, you’d be sitting here talking to nobody!
Wasn’t this around the time you met Groucho, while you were writing for Jack Paar?
Oddly enough, I saw one day in the paper, “All Hail. George S. Kaufman Died.” I loved Kaufman, and he was Groucho’s god. In the anteroom they had to put people in at the funeral, I looked up and volts went through my body: there in profile was Groucho [whispers] fucking Marx.
How did you break the ice with him?
I didn’t hear anything anybody said for a while after recognizing him, but Moss Hart was in charge, and he did about ten minutes of eulogy. It featured his saying, with the Kaufman casket behind him, “I think I heard George’s voice just now, saying, ‘It needs cutting!’ ” Groucho liked that. When the festivities had ended, everybody headed for the exits, and I headed for the one Groucho had headed for, went out onto Eighty-first Street, and saw him departing with I think Art Carney on one side and Abe Burrows on the other. And I thought, I wish I were with those guys! But they left. I got to Fifth Avenue and greeted him. He said, “You seem like a nice young man. I’d like you to have lunch with me.” The world turned over in my head, and we went to the Oak Room, had lunch. Groucho insulted the waiters, to people’s amusement. We probably talked for two hours. I had to pinch myself the rest of that day.
And then you ended up writing material for him, right?
When Jack left the “Tonight” show, they did a series of guest hosts. Some just awful, some wonderful. Then somebody said, “You know who’s coming in next week? [Whispers.] Groucho Marx.” So I wrote for Groucho for the “Tonight” show that night he was substitute host. I remember, I sort of turned Groucho on in my ear and typed, “But enough of this bridled hilarity.” I could hear Groucho saying that. He got a huge laugh with it, and I felt affirmed.
What did you learn about comedy from him?
Greatest wit, greatest man, never at a loss for a response. Twice when I was with him, priests were encountered, I think both times in elevators. One said, “My mother’s a great fan of yours, Groucho.” And he said, “I didn’t know you fellas were allowed to have mothers.”
When you were working as a standup comedian, after leaving “The Tonight Show,” you talk about some advice that Groucho gave you about your stage persona. Can you explain what it was?
I had letters from Groucho, and he began one, “Saw you on ‘The Merv Griffin Show’ last night and got that old feeling. I think you’ve hit on a mother lode”—which he spelled correctly, of course—“the idea of a”—I don’t know which word he used, a bumpkin? A hayseed?—“in the Ivy League.” The idea of a kid, unsophisticated, from the Midwest, thrust into the awesome Ivy League. And he was right. I had done a couple of jokes about that.
Let’s hear.
I said, “I didn’t know all the Ivy League practices of the time. In fact, my first appearance on the campus, I wore brown and white shoes.” Kind of a murmur. “Which is not practical, because the white one kept getting dirty.” There were some like that. Some more refined than that. When I was new to the audience in the night club, I’d tell people that I went to Yale, which makes some people hate you. But the fact that you come from Nebraska seems to get their sympathy back.
Were you a good standup? Was that what you wanted to do with your career?
I never set out to be a standup comedian, but I had a lot of experience before I left Nebraska as a magician. I made twenty dollars for my hour of magic, but I did it enough that I was able to loan my parents eight hundred dollars toward buying a new car. I realized that I could ad-lib. My hero then was Bob Hope. Do you know about his coming to Lincoln when I was in high school? A friend of mine and I went, sitting as close as we could get. “And now the star of our show, Bob Hope!” He walked out on the stage. [Clutches chest, shuddering.] I just felt it now—a horripilation or something. Afterward, I went around to the stage door at this Hitlerian-size coliseum. Bob Hope came down the steps, and I said, “Fine show, Bob!” And he said, “Thanks, son.” I told people I had been chatting with Bob Hope at school the next day.
When you started your show, you had been steeped in these great comedians—Bob Hope, Groucho Marx, Jack Paar—but you were fairly young. How did you think about the persona you wanted to create on your own show? Were you modelling it after those old-timers?
I just thought, How do I do this? Well, I did my magic act and I was that funny person, and I guess that’s what I do here. And that seemed to work. I’m not analytical. When people called me that awful name—the worst thing you can be called in television—an “intellectual,” I cowered. There’s a “cowered”/”coward” pun, isn’t there? I felt a little sorry for people who thought I was an intellectual. It meant they maybe hadn’t ever really seen one.
How consciously was your show an alternative to Carson? Did you have to give the audience something that they weren’t getting from “The Tonight Show”?
Not in any way that I consciously thought of. The press began to say, “This guy’s a great answer to Carson.” Somebody said, “When Dick would have”—some brilliantly intellectual guest—“on, Johnny would have Charo.” I hated that, because I liked Johnny, and he was encouraging to me in the beginning. He was smarter than he thought. I always felt kind of sorry for him in that way, because he really was. But he didn’t think so. Maybe that’s his mother. Once, he got a big award, and he proudly told his mother. She said, “Well, I guess they know what they’re doing.”
Jeez. You had written for Carson before getting your own show and got along with him very well. You’re both from Nebraska, you both were magicians. Were you able to maintain a friendship once you became his competitor?
Yeah. I almost wish I had pushed it more. I feel awful guilty, because one day I was in the NBC parking lot in Hollywood, and I was getting in my rental car, and Johnny had just gotten—what was the car where the sides went up?
A DeLorean?
Yeah. And he yelled at me from across the way, “Come on, Richard!” I said, “That’s all right, I’ve got my car.” As if he thought I needed a ride! He wanted to be friendly, and I blew it. But I was grateful that, sometime after, we had a dinner together in California. I was taping out there, and somebody said, “Johnny Carson just called.” And I said, “Find out who it really was.” He invited me to meet him at a restaurant, and I said, “God, I don’t know how I can do it. I’ve got my crappy daytime clothes on—I have muddy white tennis shoes.” He said, “It’s all right, Richard.” I got stuck in traffic trying to meet him. When I got there, I didn’t see him, and I thought, Who could blame him? Then I saw him at the bar. He was having a 7 UP, and, as I approached him in his bespoke suit, he had muddy white tennis shoes on. It was so touching. He was so proud of his joke! We talked about all sorts of things, including early erotic desires and nostalgic Nebraska stuff. It really cemented the friendship.
Carson famously stopped talking to Joan Rivers once she became a competitor of his. Why do you think that that didn’t happen with you?
I guess because we did have this background, and I had worked for him. Though I remember one day I had a chill, when I had taken my stuff down to his desk as usual. I got a call later, in the office, and he said, “Richard, I think you’re capable of a little better monologue than this.” [Shudders.] And I thought, Jesus, am I going to be fired? He was right—I had sloughed off that day. Wrote some “feebs,” as my great friend David Lloyd said.
People often attribute Carson’s staying power to his ability to float above the culture wars and contentiousness of that time period, while you really barrelled right into it on your show.
I couldn’t not. And then I got overpraised for it, I felt. There was a column somewhere: “Dumb it up, Dick.” Cavett, you’re not playing to the Yale Alumni Associates! Dumb it up, Dick! I hated being a stick with which they beat Johnny—or Merv. I like them. It all seemed like an improbable dream, anyway.
That was such a divided time in the culture, and you had both Golden Age stars on, like Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn, and emissaries from the counterculture, like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. And you seemed equally conversant with both of those groups.
I’m not sure why that is, but I’m grateful for it. Janis, I think investigation would show, started a lot more rock people coming on. So I got to have Jimi Hendrix and say to him, “Do you get up every day and try to do some work on your career?” And he said, “I try to get up every day.” It’s funny how I remember only that.
How did you place yourself in that divide? You were young, but you were clean-cut. You weren’t of the counterculture, but you weren’t of nineteen-thirties Hollywood, either.
I loved that the rock acts would come on and get along with me, and I with them. I forget which one—[the episode] had multiple people in it, and, when they left, the custodian at the studio building said, “Come here.” He showed me their dressing room, and it had pot butts, regular cigarette butts, an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and a pair of men’s jockey underwear.
Oh, my goodness. There’s a moment when you were interviewing George Harrison where you ask him if he thinks about the responsibility of talking about drugs, when it could lead to impressionable young people wanting to do them. The audience boos you, and you turn to them and say, “Shut up.” You were playing the role of the square, essentially.
Yeah, my audience didn’t want that! I really began television in—in the words of the oft-quoted, probably fictional Chinese proverb—“interesting times.” Once I started that show, assassinations began, one after the other. It was pretty hard to go out and do a comedy monologue. You had to talk about it. But, yeah, I remember the audience saying, “C’mon, Dick! Don’t sell out!”
It’s interesting that your two most frequent guests, Groucho Marx and Muhammad Ali, are the two sides of that divide.
Together again, Marx and Ali! I liked them both, and it took me a while to realize, especially with Ali, that we were becoming friends. We would get together not on the show—once in Montauk, where he stayed overnight in my house. My late wife called. I had put him in the main bedroom. He picked up the phone. “Darling,” she said. And he said, “This ain’t darling. It’s the only three-time heavyweight champion of the world, and I’m sleeping in your bed and watching your TV!” She was hip enough to say, “Well, Mr. Ali, I’ll have a plaque put on that bed.” Which, I have jokingly said, she never offered to do about me.
With Groucho, there’s a thing I can always look at and feel better: a letter from his daughter Miriam, which ended, “My father thought the world of you.” [Shudders again.] God, I must be getting sentimental. But that’s one of the treasures that my career brought me, knowing Groucho. He invited me to the house once, and I didn’t go. I probably would have spent a week with him there. I don’t know why I didn’t. Do you ever think of things you didn’t do? What’s the cure for that?
There is none, I don’t think. You only live once.
It’s good if you can have no regrets.
Is there anyone you regret not getting on the show?
Oh, yeah. Mostly three names: Mike Nichols, Cary Grant, and Frank Sinatra. At one point I asked if Nichols could come on, and he said, “I can’t for the next few weeks. I’m on my way to England for a while, but maybe when I come back I’ll be in the mood to share and share.” Talked to Cary Grant on the phone, and he uttered the line, “I’m afraid they’ll find out how dumb I am.”
What happened with Sinatra?
We had gotten along at events in the biz. I called, thinking, I’m close to getting him, and the voice on the other end said, “Yeah?” I thought, Oh, boy, he’s in a bad mood. But it was some pug-nosed bodyguard or something. I told him what I wanted. He said, “I don’t know your show, but Frank doesn’t do shit like that.” And I said, “O.K., thank you, Ma’am.” I’m not sure what that ill-aimed insult meant. We would have had a good time. I mean Sinatra, not that guy.
Was it different to interview the Old Hollywood greats versus the counterculture people? For instance, Bette Davis had a whole persona that she’d practiced for decades. Is that different from having Jimi Hendrix on? Did you have a different approach?
I must have, but I’m not very thoughtful, in the sense that I don’t analyze things people maybe think I do, or don’t have a technique when people think I must have. But I kind of surprised myself at how comfortable I was with the rock people.
I particularly love the Bette Davis interview—she did great talk-show appearances in the last years of her life. What was it like to sit across from her?
I would remember that when I went home that night, unlike poor Lucille Ball. It was a dream. It was a breeze, too. It was probably her second time on that I did something people were startled by. She said, “You’re a gentleman, Richard, and I feel comfortable with you.” Which led to [my saying], “How’d you lose your virginity, Bette?” I scared myself a little bit, but I knew I’d get away with it somehow, and of course she said, “I’ll tell you!” and went on, “I waited until I married.” Applause, applause, applause. “And it damn near killed me to wait.” She was perfect.
That generation of stars could seem very adrift in the new world of seventies counterculture.
They were hipper, often, than I thought they might be. That was a relief. But, my God, the list of people whose names I could mention today to a room full of people whose ages would prevent them from knowing any of those names—it startles me. I mentioned Groucho to someone I took to be only twenty years younger than I am, and he said, “I know that name.” And I said, “Oh, good for you.”
There’s a moment in the documentary where Groucho is on your show and he talks about “Hair,” and how he heard there are five guys who are naked in it—which is probably an undercount. It’s a great moment of old culture crashing against the sixties.
Was that the one where he said, “I took off my clothes, looked at myself in the mirror, and saved eight dollars”? He had the wrong price for tickets at that time, but it didn’t matter. You couldn’t not laugh at a line delivered with the Groucho delivery.
Speaking of the Old Hollywood stars that you had on, I’m pretty obsessed with the first five minutes of your time with Katharine Hepburn, when she rearranged your entire studio.
No guest had ever said, “I’ll come around before the show and see where I’ll sit and what the lighting is.” But she did that, ostensibly, then said, “Why don’t we just do [the interview] now?” Which is why I’m in rolled-up sleeves and khakis, instead of my usual, elegant costume.
When she was complaining about the hideousness of the rug and wanting to nail down the table so she could put her feet up, I can’t imagine what you were thinking.
I can’t, either! It didn’t scare me. I thought it was funny, but I had no idea that that day was going to contain taping a show with her. There was a kind of wooden fence on the set, and she said, “Do we need that?” The stagehand went, “Well, we’d have to unscrew—” “Don’t tell me what’s wrong, just fix it!”
It’s like she’s the Queen. Who does that? It would be like me coming into your dining room here and saying, “These chairs have got to go.”
“That lamp is awful!” I know. She says something in the actual show—maybe I crossed my leg and my white tennis shoe was moving—like, “You’re going to keep doing that while I’m talking?” I talked to her [after the interview aired], and she said, “I’ve got a problem. You’ve made me a goddam saint! Wherever I go, people open their windows and yell down at me about that show.”
Of the rock stars on your show, who was the most unpredictable?
Maybe David Bowie, because I never knew what he was going to do or say next. I didn’t feel I was on the same wavelength as him. And I think he was a bit sniffly. I found him very weird, and I didn’t know quite what to do. That was probably the hardest of the rock people, but it looked O.K. to the audience, I guess.
People expect that from Bowie. They don’t want him to be quite human.
Fortunately, yeah. They don’t expect it from Lester Maddox, [the segregationist Georgia governor who stormed off the show]. God, I saw something the other day, a whole list of tributes to me—I had a birthday—and one of them was, “You have to take your hat off to Dick Cavett. He gave the country the immortal line [to Norman Mailer], ‘Why don’t you fold it five ways and put it where the moon don’t shine?’ ” That was the first time that’s ever been quoted correctly. It’s always the sun that’s shining, which ruins it. Or “where there isn’t a lot of sunshine.” Just a study in miswording. In fact, I saw one of Groucho’s great quotes in a list online, and it injured one of the most famous, “I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.” It’s quoted in this alleged list of quotes from Groucho, “I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that has such low standards that they would…”
No, no, no! Well, all the best quotes are misquoted.
People who misquote Groucho should— [Pauses.]
Should what?
Take a long walk on a short pier! I don’t know exactly what hearing he was at in the McCarthy days, but he ended by saying, “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like ’em . . . well, I have others.”
Cavett and his wife, Martha Rogers.
Your show now airs in reruns on the Decades channel, and your videos have millions of views on YouTube. How did that all happen?
At first, I didn’t know I was on Decades. Out here, if you punch in [channel] 940, there I am at nine o’clock. Last night, at the movie première, I ran into Michelle Williams, and she said, “I’ve made my children watch your show, because I had the opportunity at an early age.” That was a compliment I’ve never had before.
Do you remember how you found out that you were big on the Internet? Did young people start coming up to you?
Yes, or a fan letter would somehow get to me and say, “I loved you the other night with Bob Hope on Decades,” and others would say “on YouTube.” And I thought, They must be mistaken. I don’t have any reason to think I’m on YouTube. And there I was.
To me, the show is like something from another dimension, because nobody on TV is doing that right now—those kinds of spontaneous conversations. Do you see anything out in the culture that is doing what you were doing back then?
Not exactly. I figure anybody who does a talk show would do approximately that. Partly because I never had a philosophy of how to do a talk show, and certainly not “I will try to be intellectual, because nobody’s doing that.”
Well, the talk-show hosts now are certainly cursed with living in interesting times. They have to figure out what you did, which is how to deal with a world that’s gone crazy and a country that’s very polarized.
I’d like to know if any of them feel that intensely. Colbert to me does such wonderful [work]. We exchange amusing e-mails and stuff. He is so bright, so smart. His monologue I hate to miss.
Since I have to wrap up soon, do you have any strategies for ending an interview well?
Often I would do it very badly. I would rush it, hadn’t saved enough time. I almost called a guest by the wrong name but caught it, thank God, or whatever gods may be. What’s that from? “I thank whatever gods may be.” It’s a poem that’s often recommended as good religious thinking. “I thank whatever gods may be for my indomitable soul”? Hmm.
Should I Google it? “Invictus,” by William Ernest Henley.
“Invictus”! Of course.
“I thank whatever gods may be / For my unconquerable soul.”
“Unconquerable”! Yeah. What’s the first line?
“Out of the night that covers me, / Black as the pit from pole to pole, / I thank whatever gods may be / For my unconquerable soul.”
It’s an un-God poem, but it’s used as one. Funny about that. For some reason, I remembered the other day my great, great philosophy professor Paul Weiss. God, he was brilliant. He taught Socratically: “Come on, ask me anything.” He was on my show with James Baldwin. It was as close to knowing Socrates as you’re going to get.
And you say your show wasn’t intellectual!
Smartasses would sometimes try to surprise him or corner him, and one time I said, changing the subject rudely, “Mr. Weiss, can you name any act that would be completely immoral?” And Weiss thought for a second or two and said, “You can’t use a man to stuff a hole.” I’ll never forget it.
Oh, my gosh. That may be our ending.
It’s a good one! ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
