Dick Van Dyke

by My Lucky Life In;Out of Show Business

  “No, it’s worse than suicide,” Byron said.

  “Worse?” I asked. “What could be worse than suicide?”

  “Thursdays at ten P.M.,” he said. “Nobody is watching a show like yours at that hour.”

  But I was too old to care about ratings. After reassuring Bob and Allan and the rest of the staff that I was not afraid to try anything, we premiered the new season with guests Flip Wilson, Chevy Chase, Dinah Shore, and Andy Kaufman, one of our staff writers, who played the loser in a Fonzie look-alike skit that was typical Andy. We kept up the zaniness with Carol Burnett, John Denver, Sid Caesar, Tina Turner, and our own staff, including Andy, Pat Proft, Marilyn Sokol, and Bob, who debuted his “Super Dave” character in a bit where he gets sick on a Disneyland roller coaster.

  We amused ourselves more than anyone. In the middle of a production number, for instance, Andy wandered onstage, looking like he had just beamed down to the planet from an alien culture. The confused audience laughed nervously as I tried to figure out why he had interrupted my song. Andy just shrugged. I pretended to be upset by the interruption and walked offstage, leaving Andy to stare blankly at the audience. Of course, it was planned—or at least to the degree you could plan anything with Andy.

  My young, smart staff of silly, subversive, upstart writers continued to break all the rules of prime-time variety shows. One skit turned TV itself inside out by examining how an imaginary sitcom titled Honey, I’m Home would be written for three different time slots, and I acted out each variation. At eight P.M., I walked through the front door and my wife said dinner was nearly ready. At nine P.M., I came home and found her kissing another man. At ten P.M., I came home to another man who was fixing us dinner.

  My favorite piece was a sketch we did each week about a family of morons, the Bright Family, and the dumber we made them, the funnier it was. I rarely got through those without busting up. Unfortunately, the jokes were lost on other people and ratings failed to materialize. A move in November to an earlier time slot did not improve the numbers, and the following month NBC canceled the show.

  Was I surprised?

  No, you can see the writing on the wall when your show is shuffled around in the schedule.

  But vindication was just around the corner. Van Dyke & Company received three Emmy nominations and then Bob, Allan, and I left the September 1977 gala holding statues we had won for Outstanding Comedy-Variety or Music Series. I couldn’t believe we had beaten The Carol Burnett Show. Allan couldn’t believe we had beaten Saturday Night Live and The Muppets. Bob shook his head as if the two of us were missing the point and then quipped, “I can’t believe we won and we’re out of a job.”

  I feared I might have been out of more than just a job, though, as my risk taking was not confined to the show. I am talking about Michelle. Over the four months we worked on the show, I was drawn into a relationship with her. I was five days in L.A., two on Coronado. Our phone conversations turned into lunches and those evolved into low-key dinners in dark restaurants where we could avoid attention. If anyone had asked, I was ready to explain that Michelle was my agent’s secretary and we had met up to sign papers.

  But no one asked. Fortunately, no one saw us in the corner of Dan Tana’s or any of our other nighttime haunts. Michelle and I would talk throughout the day. She loved show business and wanted to hear about what had happened on the set, the bits that worked and those that did not work, who the guests were, and all that stuff. She had ideas and opinions and understood my ambitions and frustrations.

  It was the opposite of Margie, who liked Coronado but loved the isolation of the desert even more. Margie took up painting and weaving and she became quite good at them. I worked harder going back and forth between my two worlds than I did on the show. I lost seven pounds in the first two months. I told people it was the work. In truth, it was the stress of dividing my time between two extremely strong, attractive women.

  Margie kept trying to pull me away, out of Hollywood. She wanted us to go somewhere. We had already gone to the desert, then to the beach, but that was not enough. Forget about show business, she said. As far as she was concerned, I had already done Broadway, television, and movies. What more was there to prove? What more was there to do?

  But suddenly I was involved with a woman who loved what I did for a living and not only knew all the people in the business, but understood that performing was in my blood, somehow part of my DNA, and that all my talk of retirement was bunk. I wasn’t going to stop. I couldn’t.

  In December, Michelle talked me through the sting of Van Dyke & Company’s cancellation and I helped her celebrate when California’s Supreme Court ruled in her favor, saying that an agreement to share assets between a nonmarried couple living together was binding. With the holidays upon us, I woke up to what was happening to me, or in reality what had happened. I was involved with a woman other than my wife. It was unbelievable. I was writhing in guilt. I had to do something.

  23

  DIVORCE AMERICAN STYLE

  In the spring of 1976 I stood alongside fifty prominent figures from politics, entertainment, sports, and the clergy in front of the Washington, D.C., press corps and acknowledged that I was a recovering alcoholic. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, former baseball pitcher Don Newcombe, Representative Wilbur Mills, and TV host Garry Moore were among those at the event also helping to eliminate the stigma and shame that often prevented people from owning up to the disease.

  With all those individuals shedding their anonymity and sharing personal stories, it was a powerful, well-managed spectacle, and afterward I had dinner with one of the event organizers and his wife. We ate in their hotel suite, and to my astonishment, they had a pre-dinner cocktail, opened a bottle of wine, got absolutely smashed, and then fought. I finally excused myself.

  I considered going public about their hypocrisy but thought better of it, and put the unpleasant incident out of my mind. One night, months later, though, actually toward the end of the year, the memory returned with all the subtlety of a car wreck as I sat across from Michelle at dinner, sipping my second martini of the night, and I thought, Oh my God, I am just like them—a hypocrite.

  I don’t know why I was surprised that I was drinking again. The booze spirited me away from the guilt and unpleasantness I felt for betraying the vows I had taken to be faithful to my wife. I had never cheated on her before. In fact, I had never come close to it. It was just like when I first realized I had a drinking problem. I would be in the shower, driving my car, or sitting in front of the TV and suddenly say to myself, “This can’t be happening to me.”

  The few people I let in on the secret all said the same thing: I was fifty years old and was undergoing a stereotypical midlife crisis. Indeed, I had to consider that a strong possibility. How could I not when I woke up every morning and asked myself, “Am I going in the right direction?”

  For fifty years, I never worried about which direction I was headed. I went any way the wind blew. Now, all of a sudden, I had no idea. However, I knew that Michelle and I, despite being opposite personalities—she was a strong-willed force of nature while I was content to stand in the back and smile—got along as if we were meant to be together. As a result, I asked myself how something that felt so right could also feel so wrong.

  After much soul-searching and many nerve-racking months, I wanted to get on with my life, and there was only one way to do it. I needed to be honest with Margie. We were on Coronado one day and I told her. I said that there was another woman whom I liked a lot. Margie was terribly shocked, as I had expected, and both of us were confused. We had known each other so long that we could not conceive of a divorce.

  After many emotional but productive talks, Margie and I agreed to do what we had basically been doing for years; live our separate lives, or more accurately, live our lives separately. She returned to the desert and I went to my rental in Hollywood. I made sure Margie knew she would never want for anything materially or financially. My one regret was leaving
her alone. For myself, I was confident that I was making the right decision.

  My oldest son, Chris, now a deputy district attorney in Salem, had recently gone through his own divorce, and the other children were wiser and more understanding and accepting than I had expected. In April they helped me celebrate the opening of Same Time Next Year at the Huntington Hartford Theater in Pasadena. Stacy, twenty-two, noted that she had not seen me onstage since Bye Bye Birdie, prompting Carrie Beth, sixteen, to remind all of us that she was not even born then.

  I was starring with my pal Carol Burnett. We set new box-office records, some of which were due to the anticipation generated by the announcement that I was joining her long-running variety show. Carol and I had a special chemistry dating back to when we teamed up on the game show Pantomime Quiz. Now, nearly thirty years later, we still spurred each other into new realms of silly. In Same Time Next Year, instead of taking a bow at the end, she jumped into bed as an old lady and I scrambled after her as an old man with a bottle of Geritol. Then the curtain came down. Even though the playwright, Bernard Slade, disapproved of the way we hammed it up, the audience screamed. On closing night, we took it a step further. After I got into bed, Tim Conway shuffled across the stage dressed as a butler and holding a tray with a bottle of champagne. People laughed for an hour.

  Carol’s and my partnership had been rekindled when she came on Van Dyke & Company. We had pantomimed a fight at the end of a skit that ended up with the two of us rolling on the ground in slow motion as we traded punches and kicks. It was such fun that she suggested we do a show together. Instead of that happening, we did the play, and then Harvey Korman left The Carol Burnett Show after ten years and suddenly I found myself replacing a multitalented actor who was also the world’s greatest second banana.

  But Harvey proved irreplaceable. Despite the fanfare in the press as the new season began in September, I was uncomfortable in the skits and unable to find a rhythm among a cast that had been together for a decade. It must have been the same for actors who came on to The Dick Van Dyke Show. Even though we were welcoming, we had our own ways of communicating that resulted from having been together every day for years.

  Carol and the others did everything they could to help me, but the writers were still producing sketches with Harvey in mind and I could not on my own figure out where I fit in. At the end of September, I told the AP’s Jerry Buck that my timing was getting better. Tim also offered encouraging words. Privately, though, he came to my dressing room and commiserated.

  Finally, at the end of November, I called off the experiment. My final show was December 3, 1977. I blamed it on the difficult commute between Arizona and L.A., saying I spent too many hours in the airport or on the road and too few with my family. Carol’s executive-producer husband, Joe Hamilton, released a statement saying they hated to lose me. In the end, it was sad but a nice try and quite simply not my cup of tea.

  In late spring 1978, Stanley Kramer, the Oscar-winning director responsible for such classic films as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Inherit the Wind, and Judgment at Nuremberg, took me to lunch at the Brown Derby, a landmark Hollywood watering hole, and put a copy of the script for his next movie, which he was directing and producing, on the table. Based on the dramatic 1976 Broadway play, The Runner Stumbles was a strong, complicated look at a priest in a small mining town who falls in love with a young nun. Stanley had already cast Kathleen Quinlan as the nun, and he wanted me as the priest.

  I had read the script several times prior to lunch and related more than Stanley knew to the mysterious forces that weighed on the priest. But I wanted to pass.

  “It’s out of my reach,” I said. “This is heavy drama and I fear that I’ll embarrass all of us.”

  Stanley ordered dessert and kept on me about the role. That summer, after he agreed to take full responsibility if the film bombed, I let him talk me into a deal and started work on the picture. Along with Kathleen, Maureen Stapleton, and Beau Bridges, we shot in Roslyn, Washington, a rural little town that oozed charm and was full of warm locals who took lots of photos, asked for autographs, and went slack-jawed this one memorable day when they overheard me greet Maureen, who was poised on the steps of her dressing-room trailer with a little bottle in her hand.

  “Where the hell are you off to?” she asked.

  “Getting a cup of coffee,” I said. “Do you want anything?”

  “I want you to come in here and fool around with me,” she said.

  I turned white, as did those standing nearby.

  “Consider it a mercy mission,” she said.

  “Can I get you anything else?” I said, laughing nervously while continuing to walk briskly away.

  There were few other highlights. Stanley was a marvelous producer, but he did not do much as a director beyond telling me that he didn’t want to see “a vestige of Dick Van Dyke, not a word, not a body movement.” Then why cast me? He made me so self-conscious that I couldn’t get into a single scene. I was lost. At night I brooded and read the Bible and Carl Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul, looking for thoughts and information that might help me reach more of an understanding of the role.

  The superb actors around me also tried to help, and Kathleen, a serious actress who knew her business, felt so sorry for me. She knew I was trying and gave me everything she could. But I could not get a hold of the part. Today I could do it. Back then I was not ready.

  In my early fifties, I was going through a phase where few things felt right and I was trying to figure out those that did. It was not uncommon. In your twenties, you pursue your dreams. By your late thirties and early forties, you hit a certain stride. Then you hit your fifties, you get your first annoying thoughts of mortality, you begin more serious questioning of not just the meaning of your life but of what’s working, what’s not working, and what you still want, and all of a sudden you don’t know which way is up. You thought you knew but don’t. You just want to get to where life feels okay again.

  For me, that meant returning to the stage, the place where I found the most satisfaction: I agreed to star in Lawrence Roman’s play Tragedies/A Comedy, a play that resonated with me for many reasons. It was, as I told a New York Times reporter writing about the upcoming theater season, “about a man’s midlife emotional crisis. The character I play is confused. He realizes there’s not much time left and panics. He and his wife separate, and he runs into an old girlfriend and tries to recapture what he had with her in his salad days.”

  I was intrigued with the effect the play would have on me, mining that territory night after night. But I did not get the chance to see. The financing fell through following a production delay and I snapped up the lead in a revival of The Music Man, the beloved story of softhearted con man Harold Hill, which Robert Preston made into one of Broadway’s hottest tickets in 1957.

  I had always loved the play and they offered a decent weekly salary plus a sizable cut of the box office. Broadway veteran Michael Kidd, whose credits included Guys and Dolls and Finian’s Rainbow, directed and choreographed, and we had a show-stopper in Christian Slater, then a twelve-year-old boy, who sang “Gary, Indiana” with an enthusiasm that made people take note. I could tell he was going to be something.

  We opened with a nine-week run in Reno, Nevada, and I went up early to acclimate myself to the altitude. I was not too worried about losing my breath mid-song, but hey, I was going on tour and I was a grandfather—now three times over, thanks to Barry and his wife; Stacy, twenty-five, married, and performing a nightclub act with her husband in Phoenix, was about to add a fourth to the next generation of Van Dykes.

  Other family considerations were on my mind, too. While I was doing the play, Margie booked herself on an around-the-world cruise, an adventure lasting several months. Like me, she wanted to get away and think about her life, and with Carrie Beth now eighteen and in junior college, she could finally do so without worry. The long break worked for both of us. In February 1980, as the play debuted in
Los Angeles, Margie was arriving in China. I mentioned her adventure to reporters who asked about my marriage, but gave the impression that ours was the same, stable union as always.

  In many ways it was.

  Meanwhile, Michelle, who the year before had won a $104,000 judgment against Lee Marvin but lost her $3.6 million community-property argument, kept me company as often as her job permitted. She had been in Reno for the play’s opening, kept a regular but low profile at the Pantages Theater, where we played in Hollywood, and visited me when we took the play to San Francisco. With her encouragement, I looked up my first leading lady, Fran Adams, whom I’d worked with in TV back in Atlanta. Now she was Fran Kearton, a successful Bay Area artist.

  As we reminisced about our silly Fran and Dick Show, Fran reminded me of the time we’d booked Helen Hayes. Both Fran and I had been extremely nervous about the fabled first lady of Broadway visiting our humble local show. We rehearsed tirelessly and spruced up our studio with flowers.

  Then Helen arrived, admittedly and apologetically jittery. She explained that it was because she had never seen herself on TV. Thinking I would put her at ease, I said, “Don’t worry. You don’t look half as bad as you think.”

  I think it took me a couple weeks before I could pull my foot all the way out of my mouth.

  Reviews of the play were mixed, with most of the negative comments similar to those of the New York Times’ Walter Kerr, who declared me not enough of a scoundrel. “Mr. Van Dyke isn’t a dirty rotten crook,” he wrote. “He’s not even a natty gentleman crook. He’s not a crook at all. He’s a nimble performer, and an attractive one, and before the play is over he is able to bring into the play a good bit of the lively shtick he’s perfected over the years … [but] he is simply—and only—nice.”