Dick Van Dyke

by My Lucky Life In;Out of Show Business

  After a certain point, I never hid the fact that I had a drinking problem. I may not have been open about the long struggle I endured in giving it up completely, but once it happened I never wanted a drink again. Over the years, people would ask how I stopped and I would shrug, as mystified and curious as anyone. It was as if my body did what my mind couldn’t: It said, “Enough!”

  Sometimes I wonder if I no longer needed it, if the intricate complications within me somehow, finally, straightened themselves out.

  At sixty-one, I was happy and content in my life—and with myself. There were no more internal fires to put out. The conflicts I had battled for years had been resolved. Good decisions had prevailed, and time had proven the strongest medicine. Margie had moved to a lovely house on the Oregon coast. The kids were all doing well, and so were the grandchildren.

  Now a decade into our relationship, Michelle and I bought a Spanish-style hacienda in Malibu. We wanted to get married, something we never got around to doing even though it was always on our to-do list. We were either too busy sailing, relaxing at home, or visiting with friends, and time flew by. As friends such as Richard Deacon and Jerry Paris passed away, I counted my blessings. I wanted another series. I read numerous scripts and treatments, but nothing resonated in a way that motivated me to give up my life of leisure.

  It made me appreciate even more the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that had come my way back when Carl Reiner sent me not a treatment or a script but eight completed scripts for a new series—and they were all brilliant in every way. What had changed since then? Were there fewer geniuses? Was it the business? Or were expectations off? Did every decade have only a few gems that would stand the test of time, and those of us who were part of them simply have to thank our lucky stars?

  George C. Scott lived near us for a while and the two of us wanted to do a series together. We came up with an idea that would have us playing two retired attorneys who opened a tiny law office and did pro bono work, except we were on opposite sides of the political fence. He would be the conservative who helped tax cheats and white-collar criminals, and I was the liberal with the bleeding heart. We thought it would be great, but we could not get anyone at the networks to bite.

  Instead, I made the rounds as a guest star on other series, starting with Andy Griffith’s show Matlock. For years, Andy had periodically checked in from his North Carolina home and said, “Let’s do something.” For this first and only time we actually did. I played the bad guy, the judge in a murder trial who turned out to be the murderer.

  Next was Highway to Heaven with Michael Landon, who ran the perfect company, since practically all of his crew started with him on Bonanza. They were like an extended family. I played a homeless guy who had a little puppet show on skid row. It was perfect for me: dressing up like an old man, entertaining kids. I think it was one of my best performances ever. But my favorite moment was off-camera.

  We shot late at night on skid row in downtown L.A., and during a break I took a walk slightly beyond the production and the cops who were protecting us. I wanted to stay in character for the next scene. I sat on the curb and placed my props—a brown sack of puppets and a bottle—next to me. Soon a couple of real-life homeless guys sat down and asked if I would share my drink.

  “It’s—” I was going to explain that it was not booze, that it was actually a prop. Then I thought better of it.

  “Here, take it,” I said, after which I walked away so I would not be there when they realized it was tea.

  I got another dose of the streets when I worked with comedian and Sanford and Son star Redd Foxx on the TV movie Ghost of a Chance. I played a detective who misfires his gun while chasing a drug dealer in a nightclub and accidentally kills the club’s piano player. Naturally, the musician comes back and haunts him—but with the charge to turn both of their lives around. Some network executives saw it as a possible series. We would not have survived twenty-six episodes. The one was dangerous enough.

  On the set, Redd fueled his funny bone with Grand Marnier and cocaine. Always high, he was volatile and unpredictable. You never knew what might set him off. One day, he thought he overheard the director make a racial slur. The director had said the word “boy,” as in “boy oh boy,” while speaking to a black guy on the crew, but it was not a slur.

  Only Redd heard it that way. But that was enough to incite him. First he glared at the director. Then he pulled a large knife out from a sheath in his pant leg and said, “I’m going to cut him up.”

  Taking him at his word, I moved quickly to head off any bloodshed that wasn’t fake by wrapping my arms around Redd and physically restraining him until I was able to convince him that he had misheard things. It was the most tension I had ever experienced on a set and the first physical altercation I’d been involved in since kindergarten.

  At the end of March 1987, I flew up to Vancouver to work with my son Barry on the series Airwolf. The show, starring Jan-Michael Vincent, Ernest Borgnine, and Alex Cord, had been canceled by CBS after three years, but the USA network picked it up for a smaller-budgeted fourth season. They moved production to Canada, recycled helicopter shots from old footage, and recast the show with Barry, Geraint Wyn Davies, Michele Scarabelli, and Anthony Sherwood. I was cast in an episode as a mad scientist, and we were finishing up work when tragedy struck the family some 2,500 miles away.

  My son Chris’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Jessica, was at home in suburban Cleveland, Ohio, where she lived with her mother. She was fighting a mild fever brought on by chicken pox. Feeling crummy, she took four baby aspirins. I’m sure she thought she was helping herself. Instead, by taking those aspirin, she inadvertently triggered a fatal infection that went straight to her liver and brain. Three days later, she fell violently ill and was rushed to the hospital, where exactly a week after taking the aspirin, she died, the result of a rare disease known as Reye’s syndrome.

  First reported in 1963, Reye’s was and still is a medical mystery whose cause is largely unknown but connected to people—mostly children—who take aspirin when they have viral infections like the flu or chicken pox. At the time, there were warnings in small print on most but not all bottles of aspirin. “God knows,” Jessica’s stepfather told the L.A. Times, “we never knew about Reye’s syndrome.” None of us did.

  But it changed all of our lives forever. Chris came in from Annapolis, where he was a lobbyist for Nike. By the time I jetted back east from Vancouver, Jessica was gone. The loss destroyed everyone—Chris, Jessica’s mom, her stepfather, me, Michelle, Margie, the whole family, and countless others in her school and community who knew her.

  My first grandchild was a bright, vibrant girl just coming into her own. She played sports, liked the outdoors, and wrote poetry. Always precocious, Jessica had been putting her thoughts on paper for years. Her feelings reflected an old soul, someone concerned with the big, more profound issues of love and death and the relative brevity of life. “A special girl,” her parents said of her—and indeed, that was true of the eleven-year-old who wrote this poem titled “Dreams”:

  All is white,

  Objects floating everywhere,

  People sleepwalking through life,

  Stopping, picking up reality, walking on.

  Suddenly a flash,

  Out of a dreamworld into reality;

  Nothing can last forever.

  Only some people never see the flash.

  My mind drifted back to a day a year or two earlier when she’d been staying with Chris and his wife, Christine, on the boat where they lived in Annapolis. Both of them had gone to work and left me to watch Jessica. She was all questions, nonstop questions about life, religion, our family history, the universe, everything. She kept me talking all day. It was one of the best and most challenging conversations of my life.

  That night, I took her out to dinner and she was absolutely fascinated that everyone knew me. All night long people asked for autographs or said they had enjoyed my work, and each time
Jessica looked at me with wide eyes, trying to figure out what was going on. She couldn’t believe it.

  “Are you special, Grandpa?” she asked.

  “No more or less than anyone else,” I said.

  “Can I be like that someday?” she asked.

  “You already are,” I said.

  Time lessened the immediate pain of losing Jessica, but there was no getting over the loss of someone with so much potential at such a young age. I could not begin to count how many times I asked myself “Why?” The poets have talked about sorrow reminding us of the stuff that matters in our life, but still, why? Why a child? I returned to the many theologians and philosophers I had read, brilliant people who had explored the existence of God, His will, and the meaning of life. Had they said anything about the meaning of life in the aftermath of such a shattering experience?

  As near as I could figure, no one had ever said anything on the subject better than Jessica herself. I got out her poems, a little book she put together called Collected Poems, which I had saved for years, and I reread the verse that had flowed from her heart. I saw that she got it, she understood, she knew that life was love.

  Loving each other forever,

  Orchestras of heart-beats,

  Visits to paradise—

  Every word is a kiss.

  PART FOUR

  Everybody wants to laugh—you know that. They need to laugh.… People need to laugh.

  —Carl Reiner

  26

  THE OLD MAN AND THE TV

  For years, Michelle was a holdout smoker. Long after I gave up cigarettes, long after almost everyone we knew gave up the cancer sticks, she continued to puff away. Her big concession to all the health warnings was to give up her preferred brand of unfiltered smokes, though she continued to purchase stronger brands while turning a deaf ear to my harangues to take better care of herself. Once, I even caught her smoking in the shower.

  But then she got a message she couldn’t ignore.

  While out shopping one day, she was carrying an armload of clothes when suddenly she felt a sharp pain in her chest and lost her breath. Scared, she dropped everything and drove to the CBS studio where I was working on a new sitcom for the network’s 1988 fall lineup. I took one look at her and somehow knew she was having, or had just had, a heart attack.

  I laid her down in my dressing room and made sure she was comfortable while Grant Tinker, who, though no longer Mary’s husband, still ran their MTM production company, called an ambulance. Michelle chewed both of us out. She didn’t want the attention, and she made it abundantly clear that she didn’t want to go to the hospital. The paramedics, in turn, made it abundantly clear that she didn’t have a choice in the matter.

  A few hours later, she was in surgery, undergoing a bypass procedure. It all went well, she recovered, and after a few days Michelle was allowed to go home. And guess what? She never smoked again.

  “Just like that?” I asked her.

  “I have no idea why, but the craving is gone,” she said.

  “Just like that?” I asked again.

  “Just like that,” she said.

  Later, as she put more thought into it, Michelle attributed the change to a Jamaican nurse who came into her hospital room and said soothing, perhaps magical things to her as she fluttered in and out of the netherworld between consciousness and painkillers.

  “I think that nurse did some island magic,” she said.

  One thing Michelle did not lose was her sense of humor.

  Not long afterward, but long enough that Michelle seemed fully recovered from her surgery, I brought her a cup of coffee in bed. It was morning, and as I set the cup on her nightstand I noticed she was puzzling over the TV remote control in her hand as if she’d never seen it before. She looked up at me.

  “What does this do?” she asked.

  “I beg your pardon?” I said.

  “What does this do?” she asked again.

  I thought, Oh Jesus, something odd is going on—and it was. All of a sudden she lost the ability to speak coherently. It appeared she couldn’t focus properly. I could see her struggling to capture her thoughts. Quickly, I picked up the front page of the newspaper and asked if she knew what the headline said. She looked at it for a moment, then back up at me and shook her head no.

  I threw her into the car and rushed her to St. John’s. Within twenty minutes, a doctor was examining her. He took her vitals, checked her heart, then did a neurological workup that included simple questions, such as asking her to name the president of the United States.

  It was as if she could see it was Ronald Reagan, but couldn’t translate the picture into words.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But he’s an asshole.”

  According to the doctor Michelle had suffered a transient ischemic attack—a kind of warning stroke whose symptoms would pass within twenty-four hours. And thank God the symptoms did pass and she became herself again, otherwise I might have spent much of my dotage playing nurse.

  Once she was given the all-clear sign, though, I returned to work on The Van Dyke Show, a new series I agreed to do only in order to enjoy the pleasure of working with my son Barry, who was cast as my on-screen son. Interestingly, that fall, Mary Tyler Moore also had a new series, Annie McGuire, and the two of us were scheduled back-to-back in the same hour on CBS.

  The network very cleverly announced we were “together” for the first time since the old days. We weren’t really together, of course, but it made for a nice, albeit contrived, reunion story. At the annual press tour, where we both promoted our shows, we traded fun, light banter in front of reporters. When someone asked if we’d remained friendly, Mary said she had “true affection and respect for me,” but cracked, “[Dick] never really liked me.”

  Even I laughed at that one.

  As for our series, both of us could’ve used a little more laughter. Mary’s show fared better than mine, which was, to put it kindly, a total disaster. The audience didn’t buy the premise, which featured me as a retired song-and-dance man who helps his son try to make a go of a fledgling theater in small-town Pennsylvania. Nor did I really buy the premise. And frankly, I don’t think the show’s writers bought it, either.

  Coming off that experience, it was easy for me to say no to Warren Beatty. I said it quite clearly, in fact.

  “No.”

  But Warren has a hearing problem. Like many successful visionaries he hears only what he wants to hear. So when I told him that I had read the part he had in mind for me in his script for Dick Tracy, which he had sent over, and did not think I could do anything with it, he said, “Oh Jesus, you’re leaving me up in the air.”

  Mind you, I had never committed. I had yet to even talk to him since he’d messengered the script to the house.

  “But—”

  “You can’t do this to me,” he said.

  Later I realized that he had already cast the part in his head. It was a fait accompli. He had already cast his girlfriend at the time, Madonna, and pals such as Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman. I was on his list, too, and what I eventually realized was that whether or not I liked it or even agreed, I was going to be in the movie.

  Indeed, the most remarkable thing was that though I had no intention of saying yes, I ended up in the movie anyway, playing the district attorney, D.A. Fletcher.

  I spent only three days working on the film, and it was still a strange experience. I had one scene where we were shooting in a small hotel room and I had to fall between a little nightstand and an iron cot. We did six takes and on the last one I hit my shoulder on the iron and it tore my clavicle loose. I took my coat off and the bone was sticking straight up. A doctor was called in and taped me up so I could continue work.

  I could have complained about the lack of a stunt coordinator, but I chose not to. The next scene was in the courtroom opposite my nemesis, Big Boy Caprice, who was played by Al Pacino. For the two days we worked together, he never spoke to me. At best, I got a nasty l
ook. After a while, I got it. Al was a Method actor and always in his role. He was not supposed to like me, so he kept his distance. But the moment Warren said, Cut, he stuck out his hand and said, “Dick, how are you? How have you been?”

  The whole experience baffled me. I never understood what I was doing there until finally, before leaving the set, I asked Warren why he wanted me.

  “We needed somebody above reproach,” he said. “We needed someone who was a good guy because of the twist at the end when he turns bad. I wanted someone nobody would ever suspect.”

  “And I’m the guy,” I said.

  “You’re the guy.” He nodded. “You’re the goody two-shoes.”

  Hey, I guess it worked. The movie won three Academy Awards, Al Pacino received a Best Supporting Actor nomination, and the picture itself was a box-office smash. Michelle, who had known Warren for years, had the proper take. She advised me not to think too much about it, adding, “He and Madonna were fun to look at—and the movie was pretty good, too.”

  Perspective was one thing you hoped to acquire with age, and I suppose I was getting my share.

  For my sixty-fifth birthday, Michelle threw me a party at home. She put a big tent up in the backyard and took care of the guest list without letting me in on who was coming. On the big day, I walked in and saw a mob of people, seemingly everybody I ever knew or had met, from all my leading ladies to Charlie Dye, the kid who had lived next door to me when I was twelve and did magic tricks with me. He had flown in from Indianapolis.

  “You’re not twelve anymore,” I exclaimed.

  “Neither are you,” he laughed.

  Beaming, Michelle watched us reconnect. She never explained how she had found him. The best part? Charlie had saved an old magic trick of mine all these years, the endless-scarf trick, and he gave it to me at the party. And I kept pulling and pulling … until both of us laughed the way we had fifty years earlier.