Not according to some. After the play, I was the recipient of an atypical amount of bad press. There were small, nasty items and asides in features. They were like paper cuts, lots of little annoying cuts. I couldn’t figure out why. I guessed for some reason various writers decided that I was, at nearly fifty-five years old, fair game, and therefore eligible to be called temperamental and bitter.
I wasn’t any of that, though I was clearly something. What that was, I didn’t know. I had hoped Margie would return from her voyage with a fresh perspective, but she was not in any hurry to divorce.
I didn’t argue, and when our son, Chris, was sworn in as district attorney of Marion County in September 1980, the two of us stood side by side in Salem’s city hall, beaming like parents who had never been prouder, which was true. With a few minor contributions from Carl Reiner, Mary Tyler Moore, and Carol Burnett, Chris got himself elected by running a grassroots campaign emphasizing character, honesty, and dedication to the law. Most people never knew he had a famous father until I showed up for the swearing-in.
I wasn’t surprised. In high school, Chris played on the football team. One day after practice, as he and some of his teammates were cleaning up the equipment, a kid suddenly hit him in the nose. Blood was everywhere. When Chris asked why he did that, the kid said, “I wanted to see if a Van Dyke would bleed.” It was senseless.
I met him in the emergency room at the hospital. After I heard what had happened, I was livid. I wanted to know the kid’s name. But Chris refused to tell me. He said, “Dad, he’s from a dysfunctional family. He’s really screwed up.” Chris was well into his term as the DA before he finally told me, and even then he still made me promise not to track the guy down.
Of course, he was joking. But that’s the way he was.
He once accompanied a group of police officers on a drug raid in the country. As they snuck up on the house, they came upon a dead hog lying in the thick grass. Chris muttered, “Officer down,” and it nearly blew the operation as they all laughed. But he was tough. A year after he was elected, he won his biggest case, convicting a serial killer known as the I-5 Murderer.
In August 1981, the truth about my marriage began to leak out. A showbiz gossip column ran this item: “Just watch Dick Van Dyke finally get a divorce from his wife, Margie, and marry his longtime friend, Michelle Triola Marvin (of Lee Marvin palimony fame).” The reality that the public was now privy to my long-kept secret jarred me.
At the time, I was talking on and off to a therapist. I had started seeing her about my drinking, which I had convinced myself was due to emotional problems, not alcoholism. She quickly disabused me of that notion, though, and said flat out that I had a disease. As far as emotional problems, she got me to confront the obvious, the real reason I had started to see her: my marriage. As she said, I was caught between two strong women, and like it or not, I had to make a choice or else I would continue to torture myself.
The choice was almost made for me in August when the California State Court of Appeals ruled that Lee Marvin did not have to pay Michelle the $104,000 judgment handed down two years earlier. She was extremely upset. After years of fighting a fight that would affect numerous women but doing it very much alone, Michelle saw the only victory she had won taken away from her. I felt terrible for her and gave her the money. But that irked Margie. In fact, it was the last straw.
It seemed that Margie, despite all that we had talked about, held on to a thread of hope that I might return to our marriage, go back to the desert or wherever we might live. But when I said it was my half of our money to do with what I wanted, including give it to Michelle, she knew it was over.
And it was. Even though it took us another three years to finalize the divorce, our marriage was, at that point, officially through. Though Margie was angry—she feared I was leaving the family for another, separate life—our split was still amicable. I made sure she knew that she could have anything she wanted, everything she thought she might need for her comfort and security, and as time passed she saw that I was not abandoning anyone.
In many ways, we became better friends. No longer constrained by a marriage that was not working, we could accept that we had grown apart and instead focus on growing up. Both of us started over. There was nothing wrong with that.
In fact, it felt good. It was time.
24
EM-VA-ZEMA
I once told my children that if not for them, I probably would have ended up on the streets because I did not have any strong ambition pushing me to earn a living. So I could not have been any happier when I found myself not having to worry about supporting my children or even earning a living. The slow lane fit me like one of my custom-made suits. Michelle and I, tired of shuttling between our separate residences, got a condo together in Marina del Rey, and we whiled away afternoons on a new sailboat.
We sailed every day we could. One day we were on the ocean when a storm kicked up and the water turned rough. Ordinarily I handled all the sailing chores myself while she enjoyed the sun, but this time, needing her help, I began barking orders. I sounded very much like a captain as I told her to take the line portside, wait for me to come about, and then move starboard.
Instead of jumping into action, as a good first mate would, Michelle stood still, glaring at me as if I was speaking to her in gibberish.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Never mind the bullshit nautical terms,” she said. “Just tell me right or left.”
I cracked up and continued to laugh all the way back to the dock. I loved her, and the life we were living together. This was not a new me as much as it was the lazier version of the me that I had always imagined—carefree, suntanned, waking up without a plan, enjoying life. I got offered sitcoms but none that grabbed me. I stayed involved by hosting the annual People’s Choice Awards and starring in Showtime’s remake of The Country Girl, the Clifford Odets play about an alcoholic actor and his wife.
It’s hard to imagine now, but at the end of 1981 and in early 1982, cable was new, premium channels like HBO and Showtime even newer. I wanted to be a part of the cutting-edge material they were putting on TV. When I started in TV you couldn’t even say the word pregnant.
I had high hopes for the gritty picture. It had earned Uta Hagen a Tony in 1950 and Grace Kelly an Oscar for the 1954 movie version. I would be stepping into the role Bing Crosby had played, and I thought Blythe Danner, whom I adored and had talked to over the years about working together, would play my wife. But I got to New York, where we were shooting, and learned I had a different leading lady, Faye Dunaway.
I would not have done the picture if I had known in advance. Nothing against Faye, but I wanted to work with Blythe. I understood the reasons for the change. Faye was a bigger name, and the producers assumed that would draw more viewers. As it affected me, well, Faye was a much different kind of actress than Blythe. Perhaps it was the project. She could have been concerned about reprising a role that two great actresses had already performed, which would have been understandable; I had my own issues about comparisons to Bing, something I did not ordinarily worry about.
But Faye was high strung, a handful as they say, and this cast a certain pall over the project. One day she ordered Michelle off the set, explaining that she did not want anyone in her line of sight. I liked Michelle on the set; she gave me excellent notes. After we wrapped, Faye insisted on reshooting a scene that I thought was my best dramatic work ever. Michelle speculated that might have been the reason for the reshoot.
When all was finally done, I had one question: Where were the comedies?
Drama was fine, but my first love was making people laugh.
I had long talks with Michelle about the changing state of comedy. Comedy was a world where the ground shifted every couple of years. New people arrived and the veterans moved to the side, but they did not disappear. Funny was funny. It would always be in demand. People seemed to need to laugh as much as they needed anything else. Did it
matter, she asked, if I never found another sitcom?
Her question was not an invitation to quit looking for the right project as much as it was a stake she hammered into the ground to mark a point in time, that being the end of my midlife crisis. I did not have to try to compete with anything I had done in the past, she said. Critics would always make comparisons to The Dick Van Dyke Show, but that was their job, not mine.
My job was to continue to be me and answer only to the voice inside me that knew whether something felt right.
I gladly said yes to a hodgepodge of TV movies, starting with Drop-Out Father, a satire that let me make light of a man going through a midlife crisis. Costarring with Mariette Hartley, I played an advertising executive who looks at his Greenwich, Connecticut, life and sees nothing worthwhile, nothing of substance and meaning. He reacts by locking himself in his bedroom for eleven days and reading War and Peace from start to finish.
After that accomplishment, he rejoins his family with a determination to drop out and start fresh. He quits his job and destroys his family’s credit cards. Today the movie’s references to the book Passages and to group therapy give it the feel of a time capsule. But it was a fun romp that made a few good points about something a lot of us were going through, and it was NBC’s highest-rated movie of the season.
A few months later, I partnered with Sid Caesar on the movie Found Money, directed by Bill Persky. Sid and I played a couple of guys at a bank who have lost their jobs to computers, but my character, a computer expert, figures out a way to turn the tables by using a computer to withdraw money from the bank’s dormant accounts and give it to deserving people. I hoped this latter-day Robin Hood tale might get turned into a series. It didn’t.
My favorite role, though, was off-screen: watching my kids. Actually, I no longer had children. I had four grown-ups. By the time Found Money aired toward the end of 1983, Chris was finishing up his term as DA, planning a new career with Nike, and getting remarried. Barry was acting in numerous pilots, Stacy had gotten divorced, and Carrie Beth got married.
In 1984 my divorce was also finalized under amicable terms and afterward Michelle and I left for a two-week sailing adventure in the British Virgin Islands. We got a forty-foot boat, threw a bunch of groceries on it, and took off all by ourselves. It would always remain our favorite vacation together ever. We put down anchor in uninhabited coves, Michelle cooked dinner, and we watched the sun set while the waves and the tropical air lulled us to sleep.
One day we found an island called Jost Van Dyke. We stayed there overnight and learned that a Dutch pirate had named the island after himself. A local rowed out to our boat and tried selling us seashell jewelry he had made. I told him that my name was Van Dyke. He was not impressed.
“Everybody on the island is named Van Dyke,” he said.
The solitude was a strange and wonderful experience. We were getting used to it when we pulled into a little island one night at sunset. I saw one other boat out a ways from where we dropped anchor. As we ate dinner, I said, “Man, this is getting away.” But a short while later, the silence was broken by the gentle sound of the guy from the other boat rowing toward us in his dinghy. When he got close, he said, “Are you Van Dyke?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I have a message,” he said. “Your agent is trying to reach you.”
He had gone on channel 16 on the shortwave radio and found me. I took a boat back to Tortola, then caught a bus into town, where I picked up a script he had FedExed. It stank. Before I left town, though, I saw a gorgeous home on the water and inquired with a local Realtor about its availability. He called me back ten years later and said it was for sale.
I passed. It was too late. Real estate is mostly about location, but like so many other things in life, it’s also about timing.
Cloris Leachman is a gifted actress, but she is an even more outstanding character away from the camera. I don’t recommend smoking cigarettes around her, though, as I did when we worked on the movie Breakfast with Les and Bess. Based on Lee Kalcheim’s off-Broadway play about a husband and wife who host a radio talk show from their apartment near Central Park, the film shot in Toronto, and almost from the time Michelle and I arrived, Cloris was on my case about the way I ate, drank, and of course smoked.
“I’m trying to quit,” I told her.
“What’s the problem?” she asked testily.
“I’m addicted,” I said.
She grabbed my cigarettes and tossed them into the trash.
“There goes your addiction,” she said.
If only it had been that easy. Our dressing rooms were at opposite ends of the building where we shot, but if I lit up, I would hear her scream from down the hallway, “I smell cigarette smoke.” Moments later, whether she was dressed or wearing a robe, she stomped into my dressing room and took the cigarette out of my mouth. When we had lunch together, she ordered for me. One day she told the waiter to bring me a baked potato, no butter, stuffed with vegetables. Another time she picked out all the croutons from my salad.
“The croutons, too?” I asked.
“They’re bad for you,” she said.
I never got to eat anything I wanted. Michelle, who had known Cloris for years, was thoroughly amused, and since she smoked, too, the two of us frequently found ourselves hiding from her. We felt like a couple of teenagers sneaking a smoke. You had to have a sense of humor around Cloris. She was a very free spirit, with many quirks, all of them endearing once you dialed in to her frequency.
She was also one of those actresses who worked from “business”—carefully contrived mannerisms intended to bring her character more fully alive. In other words, she made a life for her character, from the inside out, and worked off that palette of traits and idiosyncrasies. If her character liked tea, she’d want to make tea, then drink it in a scene. She added fifty little things that weren’t in the script. She drove the director out of his gourd; at one point he threatened to walk off the set, exclaiming, “I can’t take it anymore.”
But eventually he calmed down and understood, and you know what? Cloris was right. An actor has to do something as she stands there and talks. Her character needs a life. Cloris understood that, had her method, and that’s what made her so good.
Later, Cloris was happy to hear that I had given up cigarettes. I did not tell her why. I did not want to hear her say, I told you so. She would have had every right to say it, too.
Our movie aired in April 1985, but about six months before, I’d suddenly developed a problem in my neck—actually, a spur that caused pain in my arm. I had to undergo a minor operation. Prior to surgery, I went into St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica for X-rays. As I left, a radiologist stopped me. A small, slight man from India, he spoke with a mellifluous accent that made his invitation to step back into the examining room sound almost benign.
But it wasn’t.
“Do you see those spots?” he asked after putting my X-rays against a light panel so I could see my lungs.
“Yes,” I said.
“Em-va-zema,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“These are spots from em-va-zema.”
He shook his head as if it was weighted with the melancholy of a future only he could see. But I could see it, too. I pictured my father lying in his hospital bed, breathing through a tube as a result of em-va-zema.
“What?” I asked.
“I don’t want to lose you, Mr. Van Dyke,” he said. “You must stop the smoking.”
“I will,” I said.
And I did. After walking out of the hospital, I bought the patch and started chewing nicotine gum, and I have not smoked a cigarette since. That doctor’s prescience probably saved my life.
25
STRONG MEDICINE
Booze was the next thing to go.
It wasn’t like I had a checklist, though. Despite all the effort I’d devoted to giving up alcohol in the past, despite programs I tried and the promises I’d made to
myself, sobriety just happened as I was living my life.
In the fall of 1985, I made Strong Medicine, a TV miniseries based on Arthur Hailey’s novel about the pharmaceutical industry. We shot in London with a cast that included Dallas’s Patrick Duffy and Pamela Sue Martin, and also Sam Neill, Ben Cross, Annette O’Toole, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who, at eighty-five, provided a debonair air of fun by coming to the set every day dressed to the nines and hitting on all the actresses.
I hadn’t worked there since I made Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but the city and the countryside charmed me all over again. Michelle and I settled in a hotel around the corner from Hyde Park. She redid our room, made friends with the hotel staff, and eventually convinced them to redesign their restaurant’s menus. Basically, she took over the hotel and we were treated like royalty.
During downtime on the set, I indulged my interest in poetry, as well as reciting poetry out loud, and poor Michelle had to sit and listen to me recite verse in an English accent, which, I have to say, had improved since I first tried it out in Mary Poppins. As long as I was around people who spoke with an English accent, mine was more than passable. For a while, I entertained the idea of moving there, to a little place in the hills of Broadway, also known as the “Jewel of the Cotswolds,” and if not for the tax structure there we might’ve actually moved.
I don’t know whether it was because I was so relaxed in England and comfortable within my life or whether something in my body chemistry changed, but all of a sudden I lost both my taste and tolerance for alcohol. It first happened in England and continued after we returned to L.A. Instead of giving me a lift, a cocktail or glass of wine made me sick to my stomach.
Michelle still enjoyed a cocktail or two, and if we went to a party she’d get silly with the rest of them, but I began to pass. We were making dinner at home one night and after taking a sip of wine I put the glass down and said, “Boy, that’s making me ill.” From then on, I lost my desire to drink. Finally, I just stopped trying altogether and then I lost the taste altogether.
Dick Van Dyke Page 19