Sandra Harmon sounds like she’s had an interesting life. A writer and producer who worked in TV in the 60s, 70s and 80s, she was once married to Bozo the Clown. But it was her position as a writer on Dick Cavett’s old late night talk show where she had the most fun, apparently. That’s the impression one gets, anyway, from an interview she did with the New York Post over the weekend.
In the interview, she talks about how she boned many of the show’s guests, from rock stars like Jimi Hendrix to writers like Norman Mailer: “Five guests a day, some of the most fabulous men in the world. That only happens on a talk show, and ‘Cavett’ was a top-notch talk show that was above the rest in taste and intellect.” Without question, the most LOL-worthy tidbit from the Post interview involved a backstage encounter with Burt Reynolds.
“Cavett” regular Burt Reynolds and Harmon were getting frisky in the dressing room after a show when a follicular faux pas ruined the mood.
“At some point, I don’t know what I touched, but his toupee flew off. I was shocked. I was turned off. He was turned off. Everyone was turned off. It was over. That ended the romance,” she said.
That, in spite of Burt’s publicist giving her a road map to his head.
“She knew he wore a toupee, and as a joke she sent me the glossy with red pencil marking where his toupee was attached and where I should not tug in case I had sex with him. I had no intention of having sex with him, so I didn’t pay much attention to it except to laugh, and then I forgot all about it,” Harmon said.
Somewhere out there Sterling Archer is crying, but Burt will always be Burt in our eyes.
Also kind of hilarious to me is how Harmon says that Donald Sutherland was the best lover she ever bedded.
“I had just seen ‘Joanna,’ and I read about Donald Sutherland, and when I first saw him for our pre-interview at The Plaza hotel, I thought he was glorious,” she said.
Before they parted, the Canadian actor took her hand and told her she was “nubile.”
That evening, he called her at home.
“I have experienced pure joy only once in my life, and it was with him. I was 31 years old, and I knew, finally, what it was like to lie with a man whose mind I respected and whose wit I adored. I lay beside this lovely, shy giant and felt totally and absolutely satisfied as a woman,” she said.
The two saw each other for the next year and a half, whenever he was in town — until around 1970, when he met someone else, Harmon recalled.
“He couldn’t make love to me. He said he had just met Jane Fonda and he had fallen in love,” she said. “The one guy I picked left me for the Hollywood princess. There was nothing I could do.”
Jane Fonda ruins everything.
