Dick Cavett got his majestic mansion — built on a Montauk bluff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean — for a steal.
Back in 1967, Cavett, then a writer for “The Merv Griffin Show” and his then-wife, actress Carrie Nye, rented the home, known as Tick Hall, for $1,000. Not per month, but for the entire summer. Now he’s selling the place, where he’s hosted some of the biggest, brightest names in pop culture, for a cool $62 million.
The talk-show legend, 80, told The Post about the first time he saw the dreamy house, which was built in the early 1880s by famed architect Stanford White — and which at the time sat on 96 acres. (Cavett has since sold 77 of those to preservationists.)
“We drove off a private road. There was nothing around. It was like entering the Witness Protection Program,” said Cavett. “Then the house loomed before you.”
The 6,000-square-foot spread had been used by the then-owner and his Wall Street friends as a fishing house. “The house was a mess. The floors were caving in,” Nye once said in a video interview. “Dick and I thought it was just beautiful. We had no problems with it.”
The 900 pristine feet of ocean frontage helped, no doubt.
At the time, playwright Edward Albee was also interested in moving in, but the owners turned their noses up at his plans to install a tennis court and a swimming pool. After a couple of years of renting for the summer and even into the fall — despite a lack of heating — the Cavetts bought it for $200,000.
Cavett, who had written jokes for Jack Paar and Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show,” wasn’t sure he could afford it. “I’m a struggling beginner in show business,” he recalled thinking. “I’m lucky to have a two-room apartment.”
Tick Hall quickly became his perfect refuge from “the hectic world of showbiz — and with almost nobody on your beach.”
When “The Dick Cavett Show” premiered on ABC in 1968, the writer’s star quickly rose as he established himself as the most intelligent talk-show host on network television. Hard-to-get New York and Hollywood celebrities such as Marlon Brando and Katharine Hepburn appeared, knowing that Cavett would not pander to them. Intellectual discussion could still hold sway on TV in those days and some high-end feuds — one between Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, and another between novelist Mary McCarthy and playwright Lillian Hellman — played out on the set of his show.
Cavett often taped two shows on Thursdays so he could decamp to Montauk for a long weekend, with his showbiz cronies as house-guests. One of the first “known persons” (as Cavett calls them) to visit him was his lifelong friend Woody Allen.
Cavett’s old boss, Paar, showed up to the house and found his way uneasily on the paths that led through the wooded acreage — all because he was afraid of mussing his toupee. Paar would “duck as he went [under the trees] in his elegant clothes, one hand holding his hairpiece in place. The branches were nowhere near [his head],” Cavett said.
Then there was the day Mick and Bianca Jagger, staying at the nearby Andy Warhol compound with the rest of the Rolling Stones, dropped by. “Mick drove his car off the edge of my road,” Cavett says. “I had to take the two Jaggers home. The next morning, six burly men were outside the house, lifting the car onto the road.”
When Muhammad Ali, a frequent guest on the Cavett show, was working on a documentary out on Long Island, the host invited the boxing legend to spend the night.
“My mother would never believe I stayed at Dick Cavett’s house,” Ali said. Cavett put the former Cassius Clay in the master bedroom and drove to a nearby motel to get Ali’s wife, Veronica, and bring her back to the house. In the meantime, Cavett’s wife called the house and Ali answered the phone.
“Darling?” said Nye.
“This ain’t ‘Darling,’ ” came Ali’s retort. “I’m the three-time heavyweight champion of the world. And I’m lying in your bed and I’m watching your TV.”
Nye recognized Ali’s voice immediately and replied, “I will have to put a plaque over that bed.”
Another notorious guest was Tennessee Williams. He arrived with “three amiable young men” who went skinny-dipping in the strong surf at the bottom of the cliffs. The Pulitzer-prize winning author of “A Streetcar Named Desire” did not join Cavett and the boys, explaining: “I’m sorry. At my age, for aesthetic reasons, it’s better to stay home.”
Robert Redford once took a 115-mile helicopter ride from Manhattan out to Tick Hall with his daughter, Shauna, suited up and spent the day in the surf. Cavett describes the ocean in this particular section of Montauk as “a glass tabletop” one day and “perfect for surfing” the next, but he also remembers overlooking the beach during one of the “big, big hurricanes” with his neighbor, painter Julian Schnabel, and watching “15-foot waves” break on the cliffs.
The years of socializing and hobnobbing with the likes of Lauren Bacall and “The Man from U.N.C.L.E” star Robert Vaughn came to a ghastly end when, in 1997, a conflagration burned Tick Hall to the ground, leaving only the home’s chimney standing — an “austere phallic symbol,” Cavett said.
Fortunately, neither Cavett nor Nye were home when the blaze, started by “a workman on the roof” with something like “a hot welding rod,” erupted. “I was in New York [City],” he recalled.
After it was all over, Cavett did ask himself, “What if I was here? I could have saved half the house.”
Nothing was salvageable. “The mind can’t quite take it in,” Cavett says. “It’s like the brain protecting itself. You just don’t believe it.”
Despite the home’s esteemed beginnings, no original blueprints were on record.
But Nye came up with a plan to “duplicate” Tick Hall, reconstructing the house through photographs — hers, Cavett’s, and those of their many guests — and memory.
Architect James Hadley of Wank Adams Slavin Associates, a firm known for its preservation work, led a team of conservators who recreated the home. In 2001, Hadley told Architectural Digest, “Carrie Nye presented the idea of reconstruction to me so persuasively that I didn’t hesitate for a moment, despite the fairly daunting scope of the task.”
Sifting through the rubble offered something to start with. Project architect Keith Gianakopoulos found one piece of a wall with “the old shingles, molding boards, window glass, twisted door hardware.” A fireplace tile bore the stamp of its manufacturer on the back.
In this forensic manner, the restoration was completed in three years. Eventually, a computer model had been fashioned and construction began in earnest.
Cavett admits that he had his doubts it would ever feel the same.
“When it began to go up, and there were just little skeleton bits of the house and walls you could see through, I thought ‘This isn’t going to work. I hope [Carrie] isn’t too disappointed.’ ”
The couple moved back in for what turned out to be the final years of their marriage. In 2006, Nye died of lung cancer.
In 2010, Cavett remarried, to Martha Rogers, an author of books on business. They listed Tick Hall earlier this year for the whopping price of $62 million — one of the most expensive houses for sale in the Hamptons.
Cavett recently told “CBS Sunday Morning” that he didn’t really want to sell, but at his age — and with no children to help — the day-to-day upkeep of the property was too much. He and Rogers have already purchased another, smaller home.
And while he still has his photos and memories, Cavett doesn’t even want to think about taking any pieces of furniture of sentimental value with him.
“I try to stay so far away from that.”