him backstage. As the show began taping, a visibly belligerent Mailer, who admitted he had been drinking, goaded Vidal and Cavett into trading insults with him on air and continually referred to his "greater intellect". He openly taunted and mocked Vidal (who responded in kind), finally earning the ire of Flanner, who announced that she had become "very, very bored" with the discussion, telling Mailer and Vidal "You act as if you're the only people here." Mailer moved his chair away from the other guests and Cavett joked that "perhaps you'd like two more chairs to contain your giant intellect?" Mailer replied "I'll take the two chairs if you'll all accept finger bowls." As Cavett professed to not understand Mailer's "finger bowl" comment and made further jokes, Mailer stated "Why don't you look at your question sheet and ask your question?", to which Cavett responded "Why don't you fold it five ways and put it where the moon don't shine?" A long laugh by the audience ensued, after which Mailer asked Cavett if he had "come up with that line himself". Cavett replied, "I have to tell you a quote from Tolstoy?" The headbutting and later on-air altercation was described by Mailer in his short book Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling with Dots, including a description that does not jibe with the videotape and which was disputed by Cavett decades later in his New York Times online column. Cavett noted that Mailer said that he received more mail about this episode than for anything else in his career. 1971: John Simon vs. Mort Sahl Critic John Simon revealed on the air that during the most recent commercial break, fellow guest Mort Sahl had threatened to punch him in the mouth. 1971: The pornography episodes Cavett did a two-part show on pornography; both parts were taped the same day and shown on two nights. During the first part, he discussed the depiction of oral sex in movies and made a parenthetical utterance: "oral-genital sex...mouth on sex organs." A flap ensued when executives demanded that the censor cut the second phrase. An angry Cavett described the ongoing situation at the beginning of the second part, reusing the phrase. One of the guests, legal scholar Alexander Bickel, sided with Cavett. The result was that the show aired with the phrase cut the first night but intact for the second