Like me, she had done a handful of films, but thanks to the considerable success of our show and its continuation in reruns, Mary was still primarily thought of as my on-screen wife, a perception that short-changed her considerable talents. Our special, titled Dick Van Dyke and the Other Woman, set out to change that. Produced and written by Bill Persky and Sam Denoff, along with Arnold Kane, the show was an hour of dance and comedy that was meant to play easily and show off Mary.
I told Bill and Sam to let her do whatever she wanted, and I tossed in a few suggestions of my own, too. Hey, I would have been nuts not to take advantage of singing and dancing with Mary.
“It’s my chance to fool around with her,” I joked.
In one scene, Mary and I played a couple on a wedding cake, and in another she did a tour-de-force dance through the history of the modern woman, from the flapper era to the start of women’s lib. We also took a moment to acknowledge the show that made us household names, when I strolled into the Alan Brady Show office—all of the set had been in storage at CBS. I played it with a wink and a smile, as if I were taking the viewers at home back to a familiar time and place, which of course I was.
“I wish I had a nickel for every hour I spent here,” I said, and then, after a brief pause, added, “Oh, I guess I do.”
Mary got her own series the following year. The Mary Tyler Moore Show debuted on CBS in 1970 and became another TV classic. All of us who knew and loved Mary expected as much from her. While she was the perfect actress for those changing times, I was, like so many people back then, just trying to keep up with them. One night my wife and I drove to Eagle Rock, just outside of downtown Los Angeles, to have dinner with our oldest son, who was studying at Occidental College. Our second oldest, Barry, was about to graduate from high school, and the girls, Stacy and Carrie Beth, were sixteen and ten.
Chris, a junior, was living off-campus in a house with his girlfriend. He had the place decorated like a hippie den, with batik-like fabrics on the ceiling and Moroccan rugs on the floor. The lights were low and there were candles lit. It was all very nice as we sat down and visited. Then my wife caught my attention and raised her eyebrow ever so slightly, a movement that was the equivalent of a dog whistle, imperceptible unless you have been trained to respond to it, but after twenty-plus years of marriage I knew exactly what it meant.
I had already taken note. In the middle of Chris’s coffee table was something that looked at first glance like a vase—except it did not hold flowers. When Chris and his girlfriend went in the kitchen to prepare dinner, I turned to Margie and whispered, “It’s a bong.”
“A bong?” she asked.
“For smoking marijuana,” I said, quickly pantomiming someone taking a hit off a joint before Chris returned and saw me.
Margie’s eyes were full of concern and questions. Was Chris smoking pot? How did her straight-arrow husband know about this? I assured her that I’d never tried pot, and I was just as curious as she was. Over dinner, though, the four of us talked about everything except the one subject we wanted to talk about most. I don’t know how Margie and I managed to ignore the two-foot-high water pipe on the coffee table behind us, but we did.
Then we got in the car and it was like the dam burst.
“Oh my God, he’s smoking pot,” Margie exclaimed. “What’s going on?”
“I think he’s smoking pot,” I said.
19
THE NEW DICK VAN DYKE
Speaking of smoking, I smoked too much. While I also consumed too much alcohol, I had yet to recognize it as a problem. But cigarettes were different.
In 1964, the U.S. Surgeon General came out with a report that linked smoking cigarettes to cancer, and it was as if that report spoke directly to me. I had smoked a pack or two every day since my late teens. I knew that I needed to quit smoking cigarettes. But knowing you have a problem and actually doing something about it are two different things, and it took me six years from the time the Surgeon General released his report to finally making a concerted effort to quit.
I tried on my own, and then I tried every device and program that came on the market. It may as well have been a full-time occupation. First, I went to SmokEnder, and when that failed I signed up for an even more intense program called Schick. There, they put me in a phone booth–sized room, sat me in a chair situated by a big tub of sand full of cigarette butts (yes, as if I was in a giant ashtray), and instructed me to smoke.
“You want me to smoke?” I asked.
“Yes,” the counselor said. “A whole pack.”
“A pack of cigarettes?” I said.
“Yes.” She nodded. “And do it as fast as possible.”
The idea was to have the smoker overdose on nicotine, get seriously ill, and create an association in the brain that cigarettes were bad. It was severe, extreme, and sudden behavior modification.
I became ill just thinking about it, but I did it. A dutiful scout, I smoked an entire pack as quickly as I could and immediately got violently, grossly sick to my stomach. I was dizzy, nauseous, and an ugly shade of green as I staggered outside the room and into the hall, where I was met by my counselor and another of the Schick attendants, both of whom were clearly inured to the sight of people holding on to the wall so they did not keel over.
“Man, what an ordeal that was,” I said.
Then, without thinking, I reached into my pocket and took out a cigarette.
The attendant turned ghostly white.
“Here’s your money back, Mr. Van Dyke,” he said.
I was not the only person I knew who was trying but failing to quit. I heard all sorts of stories. It struck me that millions of people across the country were also struggling with the same filthy habit, and I thought the story of someone going to great lengths to give it up might make a good movie. I wrote up an idea and gave it to Norman Lear.
As I knew from working with him on Divorce American Style, Norman had his finger on the pulse of the culture—and the sense of humor to find what’s funny in the pathetic helplessness of all those who knew they were killing themselves every time they lit up. I also knew that he was a smoker who had tried umpteen times to break the habit.
After reading my treatment, Norman called me up and said he couldn’t write a story about one guy. He didn’t see it carrying an entire movie. But it had given him another idea, one that he thought would work better. Instead of one guy trying to quit, what if it was an entire town?
Norman explained that he had read Margaret and Neil Rau’s novel I’m Giving Them Up for Good, a cynical satire about a disingenuous cigarette company’s brilliant PR ploy of offering $25 million to a town that can quit smoking for an entire month, knowing full well that no town can possibly quit, since cigarettes are addictive. That, along with my idea and Norman’s own futile efforts, made the subject ripe for satire.
“That’s brilliant,” I said.
Before long we had decamped to Iowa to make the movie Cold Turkey, one of Norman’s best and I think most overlooked comedies. It falls into that category of biting social comedies that range from Catch-22 to Thank You for Smoking. In the movie, I played the Rev. Clayton Brooks, who leads the town of Eagle Rock, Iowa, in their effort to meet the tobacco company’s challenge. A first-rate team of comics and funny actors rounded out the cast, including Bob Newhart as the cigarette company’s opportunistic PR man, Tom Poston as the town drunk, Jean Stapleton as the mayor’s nervous wife, and Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding—better known as Bob and Ray—as TV newsmen from New York who descend on the town to cover the drama.
It was just as funny off-screen. Norman started the picture smoking a pipe, as did I. Both of us were using the picture as a motivation to quit. He was, in fact, having a better time of it than I was. He had about two weeks—that is, until it came time to shoot a scene featuring a room full of people, all locals cast as extras, who were chain-smoking fiendishly. There was one woman who wasn’t a smoker and it was obvious. So Norman showed her how to do it.
“No, you take it like this,” he said, putting the lit cigarette in his mouth, “and then you inhale like this.”
Well, as soon as he took that first drag, I saw his eyes glaze over. Before the day was finished, he had smoked an entire pack.
I wasn’t much better. One day I decided to drive to Danville, but I underestimated the distance and forgot to check the gas in a car I borrowed, and I ran out of fuel in the middle of nowhere. A neighborly farmer came to my rescue. On the way to the gas station, he offered me a cigarette. I said no thanks and explained that I had quit.
“I’ve quit fifteen times myself,” he said while lighting up. “It’s impossible.”
“You’re right,” I said.
I was soon smoking again, too. But I tried to keep it to a minimum. As a way of distracting myself, I rented a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and rode it to the set every day. I found the fifteen-mile drive to be an invigorating way to wake up. On one of my rare days off, I rode into the northern part of the state. While exploring the countryside, I came upon a ceremonial gathering of members from the Sac and Fox Nation in a remote part of the woods.
Although this didn’t appear to be an event for non–Native Americans, I stopped and watched from the edge—that is, until the chief spotted me. He turned out to be a fan of The Dick Van Dyke Show. He invited me in, and I ended up eating dinner and dancing with them late into the night. Before I left, they made me an honorary member of the tribe, dubbing me White Bear. Later, many of them attended the premiere of Cold Turkey in Des Moines.
A few months later, Margie and I were exploring the perimeters of our Arizona ranch when we spotted a pile of what seemed like oddly shaped stones. They turned out to be pieces of Native American pottery, stone jewelry, and arrowheads. Some researchers from the University of Flagstaff recognized the relics as belonging to the Hohokam, a tribe that disappeared from the area in the 1400s. Hohokam, we were told, was Pima for “the vanished ones.” But our discoveries showed they were not entirely gone.
I loved thinking about these people who had inhabited our land hundreds of years earlier. Just the fact that it had been inhabited. If you looked in any direction, the land appeared barren, empty, yet it obviously wasn’t. There were shadows from another time. I had always been fascinated with the bigger picture, and here was a connection to it.
We decided to move to the ranch full-time. After the Encino home sold, Stacy and Carrie Beth started new schools in Scottsdale. For Margie and me, it was probably the beginning of the end of our marriage, though we had no inkling of it then. Cognizant of Margie’s dislike of Hollywood, I convinced myself that I could live anywhere and still work, and looking back, I did enjoy the quiet and solitude on the ranch more than I had imagined.
People never believed me when I described myself as lazy, but I could spend hours sitting on the rocks under the large desert sky, following birds as they rode the thermals up and down like an invisible roller coaster, and thinking about life. The broken pottery littering the ground confirmed for me that material success, although great, was not the be-all and end-all. There was more.
I didn’t know the answers, but I could feel that the things that gave life meaning came from a place within and from the nurturing of values like tolerance, charity, and community.
I nurtured more than values, though, when I added ten head of cattle to the ranch. I bought them just to tell people that I had cows. Cows from neighboring ranchers already grazed on our land; I wanted my own. As they ate in the late afternoon, I sat next to them on hay bales and sang country songs while accompanying myself on the guitar. I knew four chords—enough to play almost any country song. The cows were like a nightclub audience. They stared and chewed.
Our menagerie also included four quarter horses, a Great Dane, and a pinto horse named Frijoles who thought he was a dog. He visited our back door throughout the day, hoping to get invited inside. He let the kids play on him as if he were a puppy, and ran next to me like a circus horse when I rode my dirt bike. He spent all his time looking for opportunities to play with us.
One summer night we had a family cookout way down in the pasture. As we prepared dinner over the fire, Frijoles sniffed at our steaks as they cooked in the skillet and burned the hell out of his nose. Poor guy. He wanted to be part of the family so badly.
While riding my dirt bike one day, I made a discovery that let me go back to work without going back to Hollywood. I was speeding down a dirt road that led off the ranch and into town where I picked up the mail, but sticking to the path I detoured across a dry arroyo and came upon the nearly completed Carefree Southwestern Studios, a complex of four soundstages for movies and TV. Workmen were putting the finishing touches on it.
“Why hadn’t I heard about this place?” I asked myself. I only lived about eight miles from the site.
But now that I knew about it, I saw things differently. I called both my agent and manager, Sol and Byron, and said that I could accept the longstanding offer from CBS to do a series. They were shocked and asked the reason for my sudden change of mind. I told them about the studio.
“Are you nuts?” Sol asked. “Why do you want to do a series in the desert?”
“So I can ride my minibike to work,” I said.
“That’s crazy.”
Crazy like a fox.
In the spring of 1970, I shot an NBC special with Bill Cosby there and things went so smoothly that CBS agreed to let me do a new weekly sitcom from there, too. Carl signed on as executive producer and came up with the premise for the show we called The New Dick Van Dyke Show. I played Dick Preston, a local TV talk-show host living in Phoenix with his wife and family. That it sounded similar to the original series wasn’t an accident.
But Carl made it clear that he was not interested in writing another series. That job went to Saul Turtletaub and Bernie Orenstein, two top comedy scribes who’d just ended five years on Marlo Thomas’s hit series That Girl. The hardest part of the whole process of putting the show together was pitching the idea to actors—not the idea of the show, but the idea of moving to the desert.
We lucked out when Hope Lange accepted the part as my wife, Jenny. I liked Hope on her previous series, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, on which she’d worked with my old friend Charles Nelson Reilly and also, not insignificantly, won two Emmys. She was also a real dame, with a career that included the movies Bus Stop and Peyton Place. She’d also had a long-term relationship with Glenn Ford.
As my agent said, there was a lot to like about Hope, and I agreed, especially when she joined us in the desert.
The supporting cast was rounded out by teenager Angela Powell as our daughter (another child was written to be away at college), Fannie Flagg as my sister, David Doyle as the station boss, and Nancy Dussault and Marty Brill as our neighbors. We set up shop on Stage 1 and rehearsed until a rhythm and chemistry emerged—not something that was guaranteed when you put a bunch of strangers together. But this group had talent on- and off-camera. Nancy was a well-known singer, Fannie was starting to write fiction (she would publish the bestselling novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café in 1987), and Marty was an amateur astronomer and former concert pianist, which captured my interest as a devoted self-taught noodler who could fritter away half a day playing jazzy chord progressions.
One day I noticed that Marty was missing a finger, and I wondered how he could still manage to play complicated pieces. He had lost the finger in an accident, he explained, then retaught himself to play.
“The fickle finger of fate,” he quipped, referencing a popular line from Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.
That reminded me of my own fateful story, which I proceeded to tell him.
One night after a taping of The Dick Van Dyke Show, I was driving home on Sunset Boulevard, and as I rounded the bend near UCLA known as “Suicide Curve,” I lost control of my car, a new Jaguar XKE. The back end spun out and all of a sudden the car itself was spinning and there was a crash. I had no idea exactly what
else happened.
When everything stopped, the car’s body and all four wheels were gone—basically scattered, blown out, or disintegrated—and I found myself sitting on the chassis. I undid my seat belt and got up. The guy who had been driving behind me rushed over to me. He said I careened off the road, hit a wall, spun in the air, and landed right side up on the street. The only things that held together were the engine and me.
Even though no one else was involved in the wreck and there was nothing to report, the police showed up. They asked me who was driving the car. I said that I was.
“No,” one of the cops said. “Whoever was driving the car is dead.”
You would have thought. But I was unbelievably, and inexplicably, lucky. My hair was perfectly combed and my suit and tie looked as they had earlier when I left the studio—at least from the front. When I turned around, the cops pointed out that the entire back side of my suit was ripped to shreds. It turned out I had a slight concussion, and the next day I was too sore to move, but in all the ways that mattered I was perfectly fine.
“How does that relate to the show we’re doing?” Marty asked.
I laughed.
“It means you never know what’s going to happen,” I said. “You do your best, then take your chances. Everything else is beyond our control.”
“Yeah, but how do you think we’re going to do?” he said.
My brother Jerry and me in the backyard. My father had piled up a bunch of rocks and called it a garden.
My mother, maternal great-grandmother, and me at about age two or three. I don’t remember the man in the picture.
My cousin Phyllis and me at my Aunt Katherine’s wedding. We were the flower girls.
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