Jimi Hendrix and Dick Cavett (
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As a writer on “The Dick Cavett Show,” Sandra Harmon received a great salary, worked with smart colleagues and got one glorious perk — the chance to sleep with any guest she wanted.
So she did.
“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,” gushed Harmon, 74, who worked on the ABC show for about four years starting at the end of the swinging ’60s.
The Brooklyn-born gal with the movie-star mug recalled her romps with a smile, none more so than her time with a gangly Donald Sutherland — no ordinary person by Harmon’s account.
“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.”
Well, there’s one thing she could do — write about it. The author and relationship counselor is working on a memoir of her exploits, which she shared with The Post. In it, she explains how, sometimes, writers have all the luck.
Not all the guests were as mind-blowing as Sutherland.
“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.
Until they were doing the deed.
“In a moment of passion, I grabbed his hair in exactly the wrong place — and it popped off and fell on the floor,” she said.
Even before her time on the Cavett show — when she was a Midwood HS dropout working jobs in the Garment District — Harmon was getting attention from boldfaced names.
“Roy Cohn used to send a limo to my house on Avenue H to pick me up when we’d go out,” she said of the anti-communist crusader of the 1950s. “He began to date me, but he never tried to kiss me or anything.”
Unemployment was low and libidos were high in 1968, the year Harmon arrived at Broadway and West 58th Street to the Cavett show after divorcing Larry Harmon, better known to the world as Bozo the Clown.
A dead ringer for Sophia Loren but with no experience in showbiz, Harmon fell back on her wits, which she had in spades from growing up on Avenue H and East Ninth Street in Flatbush.
“Larry wrote the Bozo the Clown cartoons, and he wasn’t that smart, so I figured I could do it,” she explained.
She started on the show as a secretary but quickly rose to writer, becoming the only woman to hold that position on the show.
Her new job had her writing Cavett’s interviews, and to do that, she had to meet with guests — generally at posh hotels where she would schmooze them, determining which questions the host would ask on air.
It brought her face to face with men who could have any woman they wanted — and, in most cases, they wanted her.
“I have never come on to any man in my life — wouldn’t think of it! That is the man’s role,” she said. “The truth is that if you are beautiful — and I was beautiful — you don’t have to do much of anything at all. You just have to be receptive.”
Still, Harmon was a pro at non-verbal communication.
“My biggest seduction technique was that I had big boobs and kept the first three buttons of my sweaters open,” she said.
The rock gods took notice.
“I was interviewing Jimi Hendrix for our post-Woodstock show, and he decided he wanted to come over to my place. He brought his guitar, he played for me, turned me on to coke for the first time. We made love for a long, long time, which is what happens when you are on coke,” she said. “He was a lovely guy — a fragile body — very gentle and sweet. I saw him once again and not long after, he died.”
Harmon said she and her boss were also an item — albeit briefly.
She arrived at his tastefully appointed seven-room Fifth Avenue apartment one Saturday after an afternoon of shopping for sport coats and gobbling Chinese food.
The two found themselves in a bubble bath together.
“This is wonderful. It’s so good in here. So warm. I love taking baths. It makes me feel so good when you soap me like that,” she quotes him as saying.
Their night together was never spoken of again.
“He acted as if it didn’t happen. It never happened again.”
A night with writer Norman Mailer was great for the mind. But the body — not so much.
After a dinner at Elaine’s, it was back to Harmon’s bachelorette pad on East 53rd Street, where Mailer “got into my bed, began to undress me, touching me and kissing my naked skin,” she writes in the memoir.
But the literary titan was reduced to a mere mortal when he experienced a “growing” problem.
“He was embarrassed and angry at himself. ‘Too much to drink,’ he mumbled as he turned over and lay beside me for a few minutes, both of us silent, until he got up, put his clothes back on and walked out of the room.”
But orchestra conductor Zubin Mehta knew all the right notes.
“He cleverly conceived our first date for maximum effect, arranging for me to sit in a third-row center seat in the packed, glittering Metropolitan Opera House while he conducted a dazzling production of ‘La Bohème,’ ” she writes. “I’d been attracted to him at the green room, in awe of him at the Met, entranced with him at the ‘21’ Club and in love with him by the time we hit my bed.”
The two kept things spicy — with role play and Indian food.
“Zubin liked to enter my apartment on East 53th Street by pretending he was a burglar, while I pretended I was the innocent lady of the house in a revealing negligee,” she said. “After we made love, he would retrieve all the ingredients he had brought for a great Indian meal and begin to cook while we talked and laughed. The meal over, he would get into my bed and silently rehearse his upcoming concerts, with only the music sheets and a baton.”
Not every experience was a night to remember.
She spent a lost weekend with actor Oliver Reed at his countryside home in England, where he and chums “threw eggs from the roof of his house, because they were drunk and rowdy.”
“The sex was as good as it could be with a guy who was drunk — which means not very good,” she recalled.
Other dalliances were a flash in the pan, like her time with “Jurassic Park” author Michael Crichton, a mutual friend.
“It was a one-night stand in California — or one-hour stand,” she said. “He was 6-foot-9, and I am almost 5-foot-4. Not easy or comfortable and not that much fun. We never saw one another again.”
Actor Maximilian Schell was “rough” in bed, Harmon said.
“He was uncaring and nasty,” she recalled.
And, she said, “Green Acres” star Eddie Albert was even worse.
“I was talking to him like he was this great guy, and that’s when he jumped me, pinned me down on the bed, pulled off my clothes. I didn’t know what to do because I was a new writer and I was scared,” she said. “I was not screaming — I was clenching.”
She never reported the attack.
“I was busy trying to get it right in the early days. It was just something that happened.”
These days, Harmon has no regrets.
“How could I have regrets? It was the sexual revolution. The mantra was sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. There was no such thing as AIDS or HIV. I was 26 years old, very pretty, and just having left a marriage, I was eager for love and romance,” she said. “Who wouldn’t be attracted to them, and, happily, they were attracted to me. Remember, it was the sexual revolution for them, too.
“The only regret is that it was difficult to get used to regular guys after all the glamour and perks that came with being with a celebrity. But it did show me that I could become someone — instead of being the secretary my mother wanted me to be.”
After Bozo, she never married again, and from the Cavett show, she went on to write five books, work in film and become the head writer for “The Bill Cosby Show.”
Today, she’s a fit, single septuagenarian living on Roosevelt Island who works out, goes to parties and still occasionally leaves a button or two unfastened on her sweaters.
“There was no reason not to do it,” she said. “It was fabulous.”