For a smooth mover, as I was often called, I was less than suave when it came to handling individual stardom, which was never my thing. My favorite example of my awkwardness in such situations occurred one rainy morning on the freeway as I was on my way to work. Suddenly, in a burst of blue and gray smoke, my Jaguar seized up and sputtered to a stop. Oil had leaked out of the crankcase and the car was dead in the middle lane.
Although rush hour, I stepped out of the car—and that’s when the real problems started. As I waved at cars to stop so I could push my Jag across the lanes to the side, people began to recognize me. Not only did cars stop, but a few got out and asked for autographs as well. A producer named Tom Naud appeared from out of nowhere and handed me a script, explaining that he had been trying to get it to me and wasn’t this a lucky break.
For everyone but me. Two cops showed up to assist me and both turned out to be amateur dancers who couldn’t wait to show me a few steps. A former vaudeville performer ran the garage where I was towed, and he dusted off his old act as I waited for one of his servicemen to examine the car. Despite hours of inconvenience, it turned out to be an interesting morning.
In early 1964, we purchased a thirty-five-year-old California-style ranch home in Encino. The family home, with property that included a swimming pool and majestic old oak trees, satisfied my craving for normalcy. (I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how much the cat loved hiding out in the oak trees and then terrorizing our dogs by jumping down onto their backs.) I decorated my office with my first Emmy, which I won that May, and Margie continued doing a terrific job keeping the kids grounded and on track.
She had no fondness for show business. She appreciated Hollywood, but was not drawn to it. I knew events like the Emmys were hard on her. She was, as with many spouses, constantly shunted to the side by people wanting to chat with me or by reporters who stepped between us even if we were mid-conversation. She was earthy and artistic, with an array of interests. She wore her hair short and eschewed makeup. We were often mistaken as brother and sister since many people thought of me as being with Mary.
She came to tapings every so often but otherwise felt no need to go every week. As she frequently said with a laugh, I was pretty much the same there as I was at home. Once, when I was on the cover of a magazine, she went to the grocery store and bought six copies. The woman ringing her up at the counter said she must know someone in the magazine.
Margie said, yes, she did. “Dick Van Dyke.”
“Isn’t that wonderful.” The woman grinned. “Are you his mother?”
So Margie’s attitude to the glitz and glamour was a simple “no, thank you.” I wasn’t much better. Among those in Hollywood, I was regarded as a square—a funny square, but a square nonetheless. I preferred to think of myself as grounded, sensible, and an everyman who hadn’t lost touch with the small town, mid-American values that I’d learned in childhood.
I took pride when Mary told a reporter that I was “the nicest actor” she had ever met. “Even-tempered, considerate, almost saintlike.” Hardly saintlike. In a story I wrote for U.P.I., I painted a pretty normal, if not boring, picture of myself, explaining that I “spent most of my spare time with my family. We don’t go to big Hollywood parties, and we don’t give them, either.”
If that made me a square, so be it. “I take that as a compliment,” I wrote.
I was concerned about doing a good job as a husband, father, and human being. As far as I was concerned, children learned right and wrong and how to behave more from watching their parents than from anything they were told, and I wanted to be a good role model at home. I spent weekends with the family. I surfed with the boys in Malibu. I played music and sang with the girls. I led family sing-alongs, and play-alongs for that matter, as everyone seemed to be involved in learning an instrument.
Every Sunday, we attended the Brentwood Presbyterian Church. I didn’t teach Sunday school as I had in New York, but I spoke to the congregation on occasion. My brief interest in becoming a minister was far behind me, but I was intensely curious and even passionate about God. I had read and continued to read Buber, Tilich, Bonhoeffer, and Tournier, all theologians whom I thought helped explain religion in a practical, rational sense as far as everyday life as opposed to the strict doctrines of religion.
I was all about living a kind, righteous, moral, forgiving, and loving life seven days a week, not just the one day when you went to church. I thought about it quite a bit, noticed the differences in others, and I shared my opinions when the appropriate opportunity arose.
I had a little bit of “defender of the universe” in me. I felt—and still feel—that there’s a higher intelligence up there, something greater than us, something we might have to answer to, and most people would be wise to keep that in mind as they hurry through their day.
And if there’s not a higher power, no one’s going to be worse for the wear for his or her effort.
Was there one way?
No, not as far as I could tell—other than to feel loved, to love back, and to do the things that make you feel as if your life has meaning and value, which can be as simple as making sure you spend time helping make life a little better for other people.
I decided if I could manage that I wouldn’t have any serious problems were there to actually be a Judgment Day.
I found a kindred spirit in the church’s youth minister, Charlie Brown. Bright, energetic, and forward thinking, he was active in Young Life, a group that ran summer camps for junior-high and high-school kids. The idea was to get kids on the right path. It was spiritually influenced but not religious; they didn’t cram religion down anyone’s throat. It was about walking the walk, and Charlie did that with a grace and conviction that impressed me.
It interested me, too. He was young himself. He surfed with the kids, he hung out with them, and he talked their talk.
At that time, being able to relate to young people was especially important. A younger generation was questioning traditions, biases, and social covenants. New ideas were surfacing and clashing with the old. It was clear that the world, as most of us born before World War II knew it, was in flux. That point had been driven home on November 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I had returned to the set from lunch in the commissary with a few people from the show and immediately noticed a change in the atmosphere.
I will never forget it. The usual lightness in the air had disappeared, and the mood was somber and heavy. We all knew immediately that something had happened, something bad and dire. I looked around, trying to figure it out, and then someone asked if we had heard.
“No,” I said.
“The president was shot.”
“JFK?”
“Yes.”
We were all stunned.
I turned to Carl, John, Morey, Rosie—everyone. JFK assassinated? Dead? It was unfathomable. All of us shared an expression that conveyed the same sense of disbelief, horror, and tragedy unfolding in front of our eyes. We couldn’t do anything but stare at the television and mutter, “Oh my God.”
Later that night, I went to the recording studio and made my first album, Songs I Like. Although it was the last thing I wanted to do that evening, and I’m sure the musicians shared that sentiment, we went through with the recording session anyway, and the resulting album, at least to me, sounded that way.
In the months that followed, I found myself, like the country as a whole, in a serious frame of mind and searching for answers and meaning. Many nights I stayed up until two or three in the morning, talking with Charlie Brown about why Kennedy had been killed, why such an act of violence happened in our country, where it stemmed from, what it meant, and what we should do about it.
As was often the case, I heard myself asking questions that I had asked many times in the past: Who were we as a country? Who were we as human beings? What was really important in life? What do we tell our kids and future generations to make sure they do better?
As a
middle-of-the-road Democrat, I knew where I stood. I was pro civil rights. I was against the Vietnam War. In fact, with two boys nearing draft age, I was deeply worried about the escalation of the fighting there. I didn’t see the point of the United States being there. Margie was also active in a group called Another Mother for Peace.
When President Kennedy’s former press secretary Pierre Salinger ran for the U.S. Senate from California, I joined his campaign efforts. He had been flying to Japan when JFK was slain and then worked briefly with Lyndon Johnson. After leaving the White House though, he returned to his native California and defeated Alan Cranston in the primaries. He ran against former actor George Murphy, a Republican.
The cornerstone of Salinger’s platform, which I very much agreed with, was his opposition to Proposition 14, a ballot effort intended to overturn the California Fair Housing Act, legislation that had been passed the previous year. It prevented property owners from discriminating for reasons of race, religion, sex, physical limitations, or marital status.
My sense of the way people should be treated was thoroughly offended by those who supported overturning the proposition. I loathed bias of any kind. How could people support such measures? How could Americans openly support the right to discriminate for reasons of race, religion, and so on? Salinger was asking the same questions and fighting the good fight. I didn’t know him until I pledged my support, and I grew to like him very much.
At one point, Dan Blocker from Bonanza, several actresses, and I were on a whistle-stop tour from L.A. to San Diego, and at a speech in Orange County, we were met by a pro–Prop 14 crowd that pelted us with tomatoes and eggs and held up signs displaying vile slogans of hate.
In San Diego we attended a dinner with some of Pierre’s wealthiest backers. I happened to be sitting next to Pierre when one of the bigwigs told him that he had to drop his opposition to Prop 14 and stop talking about fair housing if he wanted a shot at winning. If he didn’t, the backer said, he and several others were going to drop their support.
Pierre didn’t flinch.
“I can’t do that,” he said. “I’m running on that platform. It’s fair, it’s right, and I believe in it.”
Hearing that, I admired him even more as a politician and as a man. Not enough voters shared my opinion, though, and he lost the election and went on to a successful career in journalism.
At work, Carl was excellent at pushing the boundaries in subtle ways, like acknowledging that Rob and Laura were intimate, as husbands and wives are, or allowing others to venture into new and dicey territory. For instance, the third season had opened with the Persky and Denoff–written episode “That’s My Boy?” In it, Rob recounts how he had believed that, after Ritchie was born, he and Laura had brought the wrong baby home from the hospital. He insisted on meeting the other family, and in the end they turned out to be black.
It was a brilliant, socially relevant twist to an extremely funny episode. Initially, though, the network rejected the episode, explaining that a family sitcom was not the place to address the issue of race. However, Sheldon persuaded the network’s executives to change their mind, and we all were proud of that episode’s message.
Work was a great place to search for, and occasionally find, answers to some of life’s big questions. Failing that, it was just a great place to be. As I told a group of people one day in a question-and-answer session for Redbook magazine, “Material success isn’t too important [to me]. I suppose it would be if you were a businessman or a broker making investments and the money you accumulated was the symbol of your success.”
But that wasn’t me. I was fairly simple and basic. “I like acting,” I said. “I like my work. I just love it and try to get better if I can.”
15
SEEING STARS
Paris was supposed to be partly a vacation—and it was, sort of. I went there to make the movie The Art of Love, a comedy about a down-and-out artist who fakes his death to increase the value of his work. With Angie Dickinson, Elke Sommer, and James Garner costarring, and Norman Jewison directing, it looked like a good time. I arranged for Margie to join me on location, since we had never gone on a proper vacation other than our honeymoon to Mount Hood. I envisioned us visiting the city’s museums, restaurants, and sites.
However, as with all of life, whether you’re making a movie or running to the market, there are the plans you make and there is the way life actually unfolds. In this case, shortly after we checked in to the palatial Raphael Hotel off the Champs-Elysées, I had to shoot a scene where my character fled from the authorities after getting word that he was to be guillotined. We did numerous takes. For days, I ran behind a camera truck. For someone who smoked heavily and enjoyed cocktails and wine at night, I was not in terrible shape. But this was different. I may as well have been training for a marathon.
Upon returning to the hotel after work, I encountered Margie waiting to go out with me. We had museums to see, cafés to visit, and stores to peruse. But I would look down at the ground to avert her expectant gaze and shake my head pathetically. I couldn’t walk. I could barely stand. So she trudged off alone while I slipped into a hot bath and soaked my achy muscles.
After that scene was behind us, our time improved. Carl also came over to act in a small part, rewrote major portions of the script, and added erudite amusement to the day. The only serious blemish on our otherwise well-deserved vacation occurred when a tabloid printed a story that I was having an affair with Angie Dickinson. They followed that with a story that Jim Garner and I had gotten into a fight over her.
Both stories were complete fabrications, containing not one single morsel of truth beyond the fact that we all were making a movie together. This was the first time I had been snared in the ugly trap of celebrity gossip and it offended me in countless ways.
After the movie, I tried to sue the publisher. I went to New York and gave a deposition, though a judge threw out my suit, explaining that libel laws were applied differently to public figures. The decision didn’t make sense to me. Just because I was a celebrity didn’t mean a patently false and damaging story hurt my family or me any less. It was clearly unjust.
Although I bristled over that for a long time, it turned into one of those moments that forced me to gather my wits, adjust my perspective, and basically mature. It was a life lesson—a wake-up to the fact that, as I wrote at the beginning of this book, you can’t spread peanut butter over jelly. The whole thing made me relish the good fortune I had of returning to The Dick Van Dyke Show. It was like pulling into a safe harbor after weathering a storm. I was home.
What went unspoken was that this was the show’s fourth season and from the outset Carl had said we were going to do only five. I didn’t even want to think about the end. None of us did.
As an ensemble, from crew to actors to Carl and the writers, we were just hitting our stride. Episodes like “My Mother Can Beat Up My Father,” which showed Laura trying to best Rob in the art of self-defense, gently but pointedly tapped in to the currents of social change. So did “A Show of Hands,” in which Laura and Rob accidentally dye their hands black before attending a formal dinner. Other episodes that addressed everyday family issues, like Ritchie dealing with a girl who had a crush on him, continued to showcase Carl’s genius for mining laughs from suburban living rooms and kitchens.
My brother returned for another two-parter, and I was deeply amused when Jerry Belson and Garry Marshall wrote “Young Man with a Shoehorn,” an episode in which Rob becomes part owner of a shoe store and struggles as a salesman, based on a story I told one day about my own failure selling shoes in my uncle’s store. I was paid three dollars a day plus commission if I sold a hundred dollars’ worth, which I never did. The work was maddening. I would put twenty pairs of shoes on a woman, all of which fit perfectly, and she would walk out shaking her head that none of them was right. God, I hated that job.
One of the most memorable episodes we did that season and also one of the funniest was called
“Never Bathe on Saturday.” In it, Rob and Laura go away for a romantic weekend—a second honeymoon, as those types of getaways were called. After being shown into their luxurious suite, Rob grabs his wife by the waist with a hungry look in his eye.
“Darling,” she says, “what about the bellboy?”
“You first,” he says.
The risqué line got big laughs—and so did the rest of the show, depicting their weekend taking an abrupt downhill turn after Laura’s big toe gets caught in the bathtub faucet. Behind the scenes was a little less funny. Mary had decided to quit smoking earlier in the week and she hadn’t had a cigarette for several days. She was white as a sheet, shaking and nervous—like anyone going through nicotine withdrawal.
As an actress who was pretending to be stuck in the bathtub behind a locked door, she did not get much camera time. Normally it wouldn’t have bothered her, but she was on edge, a rarity for Mary. At one point she even had kind of a tiff. I was so startled that I said, “Mary, will you please go outside and smoke a cigarette.”
She scrunched up her face, looking frustrated but adorable and funny, and all of us laughed.
A side from the opportunity to work, the most enjoyable upside to the celebrity I received from starring on a top-rated TV series was entrée to some of my idols—the greats who had inspired me. I took full advantage of this and developed a good friendship with Stan Laurel, though my first introduction to him happened purely by chance.
We were shooting the second season of the TV series, and I was at home one day, looking up a name in the telephone book, when I came across the name Stan Laurel.
“Stan Laurel?” I said to myself. “It couldn’t be.”
But I called the number. A man answered promptly.
“Hello,” I said. “This is Dick Van Dyke. Is this Mr. Laurel?”
“Yes, it is,” he said.
It turned out that Stan knew the show and knew who I was. He invited me to the Santa Monica apartment he shared with his fifth wife, Ida Kataeva Raphael, a Russian woman who kept a careful eye on him. As I walked down the hallway and approached his door, it suddenly opened and there he was.
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