RIDGEFIELD — The deep and growing anxiety ahead of interviewing arguably one of the world’s greatest living interviewers was palpable as I dialed up Emmy-winning talk show host Dick Cavett for a quick chat ahead of the debut of a new Ridgefield Playhouse series in which he will interview a number of entertainment industry luminaries.

But before I even had a chance to stumble through a brief introduction, my stress was disarmed as Cavett interrupted, saying, “Oh, that’s today? You’ll have to call me back in five minutes, I’ll need to sit down.”

Agreeing (of course), he continued to dampen any remaining jitters when he answered my callback by picking up the phone and saying, “You again?”

So that’s how the conversation started — quickly shifting to the subject at hand: the Saturday, March 23 opening of his planned set of sessions live on stage, starting with Emmy and Tony Award-winning actress Blythe Danner.

Danner is best-known for her role as Dina Byrnes in Meet the Parents and its sequels, Meet the Fockers and Little Fockers. She has collaborated on several occasions with Woody Allen, appearing in three of his films: Another Woman, Alice, and Husbands and Wives.

Along with countless theater appearances, Danner’s celebrated television roles include Showtime’s Huff (for which she won two Emmy Awards), Will & Grace, We Were the Mulvaneys, and Back When We Were Grownups. She is also the mother of actress Gwyneth Paltrow and director Jake Paltrow.

Cavett told The Newtown Bee that he will be playing a role in choosing his Playhouse guests, and he is hosting a familiar acquaintance when he welcomes Danner to the 7:30 pm sit-down.

“Years ago...my God, I can say decades ago, we were at the Williamstown Theatre Festival up in the Berkshires. I don’t remember how many summers we were up there at the same time,” he recalled.

Going back to the many odd jobs Cavett took on as he worked to become a television writer, and eventually a household name, a stint as a store detective stood out among the many decidedly non-entertainment related endeavors.

"What I had to do, was spy on the staff and salespeople and observe whether their technique was good, and whether they were polite," he said. "I felt like a rat most of the time [laughing]."

He was also a caddy, and a big childhood fan of the incomparable Bob Hope.

"I was actually a caddy at a golf club that Bob Hope liked," Cavett said. "He would sometimes, while criss-crossing the country, put the plane down at Lincoln [Nebraska] and round up four or five Republican friends and hit the golf course. I didn't meet him on his golf trips, but once he came to Lincoln for an evening show. My friend and I thought he was just going to be on film because why would Bob Hope come to do a show in Lincoln.

"Hope was the headliner and came on second — but as kids, what did we know from show business, so when the opening act went off and the lights came on we thought, what a gyp. Then we got up to leave and the guy sitting next to us said, 'what, don't you kids want to see Bob Hope?'

"And suddenly the lights went down and a voice came booming out — 'And now here's the star of our show — Bob Hope.' "Thanks for the Memories" starts playing and my pulse quickened as he came gliding out onto the stage. We were probably in eighth grade at the time and neither of us ever thought we were really going to see Bob Hope.

"Then, after the show we ran around to the stage door and he came walking down the steps, and I remember saying to him, 'Fine show, Bob.' And he replies, 'Hey, thanks son,' and he gets in the car and drives away. So the next day I told all my friends I chatted with Bob Hope the night before," Cavett said. "Years later he was supposed to do my show, we were coming back from a commercial and you could see me looking for him in the wings making sure Bob Hope was really there waiting to come on — I still couldn't believe it up to that point. So he came out and I told him about the 'Fine show, Bob,' remark from my childhood in Lincoln, Nebraska, and he looks at me and says, 'Hey was that you?' [laughing] What a memory..."

Danner will be the latest in a litany of hundreds of conversations Cavett has completed over the course of his five-decade career. In that time, he has engaged in in-depth, mostly television interviews with some of the greatest talents of the last century, including Salvador Dali, Groucho Marx, Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland, Marlon Brando, Frank Zappa, and John Lennon.

Cavett has been nominated for ten Emmy Awards and has won three. He is considered the thinking man’s talk show host, owing to his in-depth and intelligent interview style.

But to some extent, Cavett still regards the art of the interview as just that — an art that can certainly be improved upon through repetition and experience but borne out of a talent that is hard to parse from among today’s plethora of video sensations and reality television flavors of the week.

His mentor was another talk pioneer, Jack Parr.

“Parr told me, ‘You don’t want to look like David Frost up there, wearily reading from a script board. Make it a conversation.’ He said it almost pleadingly,” Cavett said. “And he’s right.”

The incomparable Johnny Carson was yet another early Cavett mentor, who tolerated the young creative splitting his attention between writing for The Tonight Show and his own fledgling stand-up routines.

“I was concerned that he would find out and be upset because I wasn’t giving him my full attention writing for him,” Cavett said. “But he was very good about it. He’d ask me how it went the night before when he knew I had a show, and I’d ask him for advice when this or that happens on stage. He was like a friendly coach, really.”

Cavett said bouncing between doing stand-up and hosting his early interviews was like doing two completely separate jobs that had little or no commonality between them.

"Woody Allen was the one who warned me. He said you can write anything about anybody else you want to, or for anybody else you want to, but when you have to sit down and crank out an act for yourself, that's hard-ass work," he said. "I finally got comfortable doing both writing for others and writing for myself, but it's really like penal servitude."

As TV interview shows began morphing into promotional vehicles for guests to make the rounds on — touting their latest film, book, or record — Cavett developed a unique talent for quickly but diplomatically steering them back the direction he wanted the interview to take. And he seemed surprised to have this nuance pointed out.

“I don’t think anybody has ever said that about me before in an interview, but it’s true,” he said. “I felt I had to if things were just becoming all about promoting their latest whatever. I always wanted something fresher and newer than what they talked about on their last talk show appearance the day before or earlier that day. You just have to tolerate enough that they’ll feel satisfied they got their plug in and then change the subject as far away from their project as you can.”

The one constant — from Cavett’s earliest days as an eighth grader hosting his own small town radio show, up to his latest endeavor with Ridgefield Playhouse — has been his awareness of the audience and the realization that no matter how fascinating the guest, if he can’t hold an audience’s attention, all is lost.

“The audience is obviously very important to how things go,” he said. “Actors will always argue with you and say ‘if it’s a bad audience, then it’s your fault,’ but I’ve had the chance to ask a number of actors who said they had experiences when despite their best efforts, nobody laughed. It’s a mystery. If even one person laughs, that’s one thing, but if nobody laughs, there’s just something weird going on!”

In closing, Cavett said one of his few regrets was never having a chance to sit down on screen with Frank Sinatra.

"We were cordial when we met at events, I knew he may be uncomfortable with it, but I knew I could put him at ease," Cavett said. "I had a number to get a hold of him once, and I thought I'd try to make one more stab at inviting him on my show.

"So I called this New Jersey number and introduced myself, and the person on the other end who certainly wasn't Sinatra said, 'Well Frank doesn't do [expletive] like that show...so I hung up after saying 'Thank you, ma'am'...and it was not a lady.

"I pictured this guy with a stub of a cigar sticking out of the side of his mouth sitting by Sinatra's phone reading a racing form. So to make a long story short, I never got Sinatra."

A portion of the proceeds from the "Dick Cavett Presents... " series will go to benefit the Leir Foundation Arts for Everyone outreach program. The Leir Foundation Arts for Everyone program helps make the performing arts available to economically disadvantaged residents of Fairfield County.

For tickets ($40-$90, including Meet & Greet), call or visit the box office at 203-438-5795 or CLICK HERECheck out a clip of Dick Cavett 'training' with Muhammad Ali here

A young Robin Williams offers some sadly foretelling words to Dick Cavett here