Norman Mailer & Gore Vidal
Dick Cavett couldn’t help noticing Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal were engaged in a tit-for-tat feud played out in print media. So, he invited two towering intellectuals to face each other on his show in 1971.
It was vicious. At one point, Mailer accused Vidal and the rest of the panel of being intellectually inferior to himself. It was then when Cavett suggested, “Perhaps you’d like two other chairs to contain your giant intellect.” By the end, the entire audience vociferously turned against Mailer.