Dick Cavett on his career in show business, and more.

The scene is a freshman room at Yale, mid-’50s. Four occupants. First week of classes.

The dialogue:

“They must be kidding. We’re supposed to go over to the gym and do WHAT?”

“We all have to go over to the gym and have our pictures taken. Naked.”

“C’mon. This isn’t Princeton.” (Laughter.)

“Are you serious about this? Is this April Fools’ Day?”

Of course it was preposterous.

It was also true.

There were several things a Yale freshman was supposed to be able to do. You had to demonstrate in the Olympic-size Yale pool that you could swim 50 yards or be inducted into swimming class. (A sore memory: hearing, while panting, “You made it, Cavett, but if you fell in 51 yards from shore, you’d drown.”)

Who’d have guessed that another requisite for being a true-blue Yalie was, strange as it seemed, good posture. Hence the phrase that yet lives in infamy, “The Posture Pictures.”



Every single member of the freshman class in those days was required to strip for the prying camera. Then they put you up against a graph on the wall and photographed you, front, side and back. Or as I put it years later in a comedy routine I did about this in my early nightclub act — and in an appearance on the old “Merv Griffin Show” — “You got three provocative poses.”

In profile, the subject appeared to have a vertical row of needles sticking out, up and down his spine. In fact, the needles were held in place by adhesive tape and were “non-invasive.” The needles had something to do with the wall graph. There was, in this uncomfortable and decidedly unerotic adventure, no penetration. Mr. Cold Hands, a man whose job it apparently was to affix the needles, pressed the tapes firmly against your bare skin; a bit, I thought, too enthusiastically.

I remember — as a new comedian — killing ‘em on the Griffin show with this subject, and wish I could recall more of my admittedly exaggerated-for-comic-effect punch lines. But it almost doesn’t need any jokes.

One sequence I can recall went, “Some guys hated it; some seemed to enjoy it. One guy tried to go through twice [reasonable laugh]; one guy fainted [sizable laugh]; one guy tried to buy his pictures [laugh]; and one guy tried to get his re-touched [boffo].”

It was cold in there and I had somehow gotten next-to-last in line in my group of embarrassed, mother-nekkid shiverers. Turning to say, “Wish me luck” to the last guy, behind me, I caused the poor fellow to turn crimson. It was awful for both of us. I had caught him, how to say, making an effort to present a more impressive image for the camera. Blushing, he came up with, “There was some lint on it.”

Should anyone think this bizarre undertaking was solely the product of the mind of some demented old sod closeted somewhere in the Yale administration, this coerced participation in a soft-porn enterprise was intermural. And Ivy League-wide.

Of course, the screwball posture pictures practice has been long discontinued, and years ago Harvard announced a total destruction of its boxes of years of photos, as did other schools. And yet diligent journalists have unearthed caches of them over time, still simmering out there.

Think of those who have risen to prominence in all fields whose sheepish full frontals are, many of them, still findable. Actors, judges, presidents, husbands and wives of the prominent.

There are said to be collectors who claim to have prized specimens from the big women’s schools. (Imagine, “I’ll trade you a Meryl Streep for a Hillary Clinton.”)

People are shocked to learn that this was definitely not a boys-only phenomenon. Yes, the young “girls” (as they were still called back then) attending the finest women’s colleges were told to drop their drapery and their drawers and exhibit themselves to the merciless lens.

Getting just a little serious for a moment, there are some astonishing facts here, one being: nobody protested. I never heard of a single case of anyone at any school saying they flatly refused to participate in this loony, outrageous, forced violation of individual privacy.

Somehow it isn’t so surprising that guys played along. (A woman once asked me, “Is it true that men parade around naked in front of each other in locker rooms?” She said women didn’t.)

Is it sexist to think this ordeal may have been more psychologically unpleasant, distressing — even damaging — for young women? Particularly those embarrassed by their less-than-ideal physiques? The awkwardly constructed and the obese?

According to someone who discovered a surviving cache of the racy pix of the young women of either Smith or Wellesley, many exhibit, by their expressions, combinations of acute discomfort, deep embarrassment, humiliation and livid anger. But they “went along.”

But surely not without troubling thoughts about who all gets the treat of ogling these, how many copies are made, what sort of security prevents prankish circulation — and what finally becomes of them.

I’m sure there are conclusions to be drawn here by deeper thinkers than I about obedience to authority, reluctance to rock boats with protest, etc. People hearing of this crazy caper on the part of major American universities say, “I wouldn’t have stood for this for a second!”

If that’s true, why did everybody go along back then? Were admissions committees’ principles of selection inadvertently selecting the meek in vast numbers? Were “the times” so different? Woodstock, “Hair” and countless plays and movies with the naughty bits on view were at least a decade in the future. Is that significant here?

Full disclosure department: I’ve never heard of anyone who saw his own picture. But I did. One of my roommates, Ron Wille, had the dubious honor of having as his scholarship job developing the damned things and sneaked me mine, temporarily. In it, I looked cowed. And there was about it a redolence of something greatly unpleasant, not immediately identified, having to do with the stark lighting (and the stark nakedness) and the chart and the pins that, combined, supplied a whiff of — not to get too melodramatic about it — the concentration camp.

Finally, doesn’t all this vast embarrassment and fuss about a word you stop hearing as a third grader — “posture” — seem just a touch on the nutty side?

If you think so, you may have guessed it. There is another whole, hidden dimension to this story. The word “scandal” applies.

And “sinister” is not entirely inappropriate.

Stay tuned.