The party was sensational. We had a piano player. My daughter sang. Actually, all of us sang. I blew out the candles on my cake and wanted to know how everyone else had gotten so old when I was still a kid—or at least acted like one. I chalked it up to good genes and a sense of humor.
Even my mother, at ninety-one, though having begun a marked decline that eventually led to her death in 1993, still had a good outlook. I had visited her over Mother’s Day at Jerry’s farm in Arkansas, where he had moved after remarrying and she had soon followed. We were on the porch, talking with one of my cousins, and my mother turned to me and asked, “Who are these people?” Her voice was so sweet and curious.
“That’s your son Jerry,” I said.
“Well, he looked like a nice man,” she said. “I’m glad to meet him.”
She once called me in a panic. I heard the alarm in her voice and started to look for my cell phone, thinking I should call my brother while keeping her on the line. Then I heard the problem.
“You know your dad has left me,” she said.
“Mom, …” I said.
“No, listen to me,” she continued. “I fixed him breakfast and then he left. I thought he had gone to take a nap, but he’s not in the bedroom.” She paused. “Dick, I think he’s run off with another woman.”
Finally, it was my turn to speak.
“Mom, Dad has been dead for fifteen years,” I said.
“Really?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Oh, thank God!” she said.
Having run nearly every television network on the planet—or at least seeming to have—Fred Silverman knew the TV business and also the business of TV. He was a throwback to the days when I started out and there were just a few guys in the executive suites who made all the decisions according to taste and gut instinct, as opposed to what the business had become now, with shows passing through a sieve of executives, committees, and focus groups before getting on the air.
I did not want to be seen as difficult, but I was spoiled by working with the best writers in the business, Carl Reiner, Aaron Ruben, Garry Marshall, Jerry Belson, Sam Denoff, and men of that ilk. As I told People magazine, it seemed to me that networks now pandered to an audience afflicted with “attention deficit disorders”—that is, if shows even made it through all the committees and testing—and so you needed someone with Fred’s know-how to get a show on the air.
Like Warren Beatty, Fred also had a talent for hearing what he wanted to hear. Even when I refused his offer to star in a spin-off of his show Jake and the Fat Man, he kept right on talking as if I was going to change my mind, which eventually I did.
“I don’t want to do an hour show,” I said. “I think at my age—you know I recently turned sixty-five—it’s going to be too much.”
“Just do the pilot,” he said.
“But that could turn into a commitment I don’t want to make,” I said.
“It could turn into an excellent series if we do our jobs,” he said.
In 1991, I went on Jake and the Fat Man and introduced the character Dr. Mark Sloan, a free-spirited, iconoclastic physician who solves crimes in his spare time at night with his police detective son. Instead of picking up the pilot, CBS ordered three made-for-TV movies they called Diagnosis Murder. I made them contingent on casting my real-life son Barry as my TV son. The whole thing rode on that; otherwise I would not have agreed.
But they readily wrote him in and we went to work in Vancouver, planning to do the movies one after another. Cynthia Gibb and Stephen Caffrey were cast in the other key roles, and guest spots in the first movie went to Bill Bixby, Ken Kercheval, and Mariette Hartley. You could tell I had a say in developing my character. I had to play myself one way or another. I wanted him to be very human, very vulnerable—a little absentminded, caring, and funny when appropriate. Oh, and lest anyone miss all that, he danced.
For that first movie, I got Arthur Duncan, the great tap dancer from The Lawrence Welk Show, to come in and play a janitor. He secretly teaches me tap dancing in exchange for medical treatment. Nobody knows it, though. They keep hearing something going on in my office and wonder what it is. At the end of the show, we appear in the hall and do our number.
It was such a treat to dance with Arthur. I indulged myself. But while rehearsing, I did a move where I stepped on my heel and toe and all of a sudden my foot flopped. I could not step on my heel.
I called my doctor and he said get back here now if you don’t want to lose the use of your leg. It was a pinched nerve, with some minor complications. We had to postpone the other two movies while I returned to L.A. and underwent several weeks of traction. By the time we finished the recast with Victoria Rowell and Scott Baio, there was talk about a series. And before long there was an order for eight episodes.
It was like the old Camel and the Arab fable: An Arab pitches a tent in the desert at night and leaves his camel outside. Complaining that he’s cold, the camel asks if he can put his head inside. Then he asks if he can put his feet in. Before long, he’s completely inside the tent. And so it was with Diagnosis Murder and me.
27
DIAGNOSIS FUN
On a mild afternoon in February 1993, I stood facing a crowd on Hollywood Boulevard, feeling a mix of nostalgia and celebration. I was receiving a star on the city’s Walk of Fame, the best part of which was sharing the moment with Michelle, who was at my side, as well as my former Dick Van Dyke Show costars Rose Marie and Morey Amsterdam, and the man responsible for the whole thing, Carl Reiner, who, when I turned to him and said thank you, quipped, “When I saw all of you here, I thought, Hey, we can do a show.”
Given the chance, we might have. At any rate, we laughed and reminded ourselves of numerous good times from the old series. We reminisced about the production numbers we used to weave into some of the shows. Funny how all of us recalled those scenes as our fondest, especially Carl, who reminded us that they meant less writing and shorter scripts. But Morey was a musician, Rosie was a singer, and of course Mary was a dancer, who back in the day continued to do her barre exercises at lunchtime. And all of us were hams.
As we stood on Hollywood Boulevard, I almost felt transported back in time as I remembered rehearsing a dance number with Mary that was set in a prison. Our legs were tied together, and as we practiced, I yanked her too hard and she fell. “Sorry, Mary,” I muttered up into the sky now, hoping that wherever she was, she was able to hear me.
Oh, and then I remembered going to a recording studio with Mary after work one night to lay down vocals for a song, but the music had been prerecorded in the wrong tempo, way too fast, and we spent hours trying to get it right. It happened to be my fourteenth wedding anniversary that night and I never called home, sent flowers, or did anything. When I finally walked through the front door, my wife was waiting at the dining-room table for me, wearing a gorgeous evening gown, her candlelit dinner on the table, ruined.
Carl, Morey, and Rosie all felt my pain as I recounted that story thirty-some years later.
“I never knew that,” Carl said.
“Boy, I was in deep trouble,” I said.
“And so was your marriage,” Morey said. “But things worked out. You still got your star.”
My star was placed next to that of my idol, Stan Laurel, but when Hollywood’s honorary mayor, Johnny Grant, finally unveiled it, there was an unexpected silence, followed by a clap of laughter. My name was misspelled. It read Dick Vandyck. Embarrassed, Johnny quickly handed me a Sharpie and I drew a line where there should have been a space and told him not to worry. It had happened before. When I opened in Bye Bye Birdie, the name on my dressing-room door was Dyck Van Dyke. I survived—and looking back, I learned not to sweat the little stuff.
Indeed, I rather enjoyed the reminder that even those immortalized are mortal, though there were those who were saying that I was looking more like TV’s iron man. I was almost sixty-eight years old and had a show on CBS’s fall schedule. Granted, it was
Friday night at eight P.M., normally considered TV’s dead zone, but I was content in trying to transform the graveyard into an old-age home, and who knows, maybe bring in some younger viewers, too.
It worked. Although the Washington Post described Diagnosis Murder as “prime-time television as it was twenty years ago,” they were not criticizing me for that. On the contrary, they pointed out that there was an audience for NYPD Blue and one for my brand of entertainment, and added, “Buddy Ebsen didn’t need to walk around bare-butted to make Barnaby Jones worth watching.” I was pleased to find that viewers felt the same way. As a result, CBS ordered more shows beyond the initial eight.
For cost purposes, we’d shot the first round in Denver at a facility that had once been home base for the show Ironside. I stayed in Raymond Burr’s former hotel penthouse, which had unobstructed views of the Mile High City. I could watch the sun rise and set from different sides of the glassed-in perch. I felt like I was suspended in the clouds, and I probably carried some of that lightness into the way I played this funny doctor who danced and roller-skated when he wasn’t solving crimes.
It could not have been easier. But then, I feel as if every role is always a version of me.
The earliest version of me was put back on display on Nick at Nite, the bloc of nighttime programming the cable network devoted to classic shows. Some thirty years after its debut, The Dick Van Dyke Show was a hit again. I don’t mean this egotistically, but I was not surprised. However, others were. A reporter from the Los Angeles Times asked me why I thought the show was popular with a whole new generation, albeit a very different type of viewer from those who originally saw it.
The question made me laugh. Wasn’t it obvious?
The show was funny.
It was the same reason kids still giggled through Laurel and Hardy movies. Some humor is timeless. Clever people like Carl Reiner come along and figure out new ways to find the funny in human behavior, and then all of a sudden you have another hit.
With two shows on the air, I supposed sticking to family entertainment all these years had paid off. I was hot.
And then I got too hot. At the start of November, as I was promoting both shows and an NBC Christmas special I’d narrated, Malibu was engulfed by wildfires. Michelle and I watched nervously as the flames danced slowly but steadily down the brush-covered hills. This happened every five or ten years; it was almost like payback for living amid such beauty close to the ocean.
Later that day, the sheriffs evacuated our neighborhood. There was no time to pack up the house, not even to gather more than a few photo albums. Michelle and I shut the door on all of our furniture and clothing, as well as a lifetime of possessions, artwork, and awards. We had no idea whether any of this stuff would be there when we returned—whenever that would be—or if it would even survive the rest of the afternoon.
Standing on the porch, I looked at her and shrugged. What were we going to do?
“We’re leaving with each other,” I said. “That’s what’s most important.”
A short time later, I was updating my publicist, Bob Palmer, when he put me on hold to talk to another client, Anthony Hopkins. A moment later, Bob came back on the phone and said that Anthony, who also lived in Malibu, had called from London to get the latest news on the fire. Hearing that Michelle and I were suddenly homeless, he offered us an apartment that he kept in Westwood. Fortunately, we only had to spend one night there before we were able to return to our house, which survived the close call, as had all of the other homes in the neighborhood.
We were lucky. The flames had burned right into some of the backyards. It was a lesson for all of us on how much you can control in life, or rather, how little control you sometimes have. As I’d found time and again throughout my life—and would continue to find—you do what you can, say your prayers, and hope for the best.
Defying predictions, we were renewed for a second season, and production for Diagnosis moved to L.A., where we shot at an old mental hospital off Coldwater Canyon Boulevard in the Valley. The place was not haunted, but holes in the walls, urine stains on the floor, and other damage made the torment of its former occupants feel very close by. A moderate earthquake hit one day and shook pieces of the ceiling loose. As they crashed to the floor, it prompted jokes about the show’s shaky status with the network.
I turned seventy in the midst of the show’s third season. I joked that it was as hard to get out of the business as it was to get in it. That season, Charlie Schlatter joined the cast in place of Scott Baio. He added a personality that was like a missing ingredient. I had spotted him when we were auditioning actors to replace Scott. Fred Silverman had said, “I wish we could get a Michael J. Fox type,” and I said, “I’ve got just the guy. You couldn’t get any closer to Michael J. Fox than Charlie Schlatter.”
He fit in with Barry and me. The three of us would get all of our laughter out during rehearsal and then play the scenes as straight as possible. It was the same with Victoria. Off-camera, the three of us had a running joke. We used to wonder who was running the hospital while the three of us were out chasing a criminal or looking for clues. Luckily, I suppose, nobody ever asked.
I think the primary reason Diagnosis Murder succeeded was the relationship people saw on-screen between Barry and me. That was real. So was the bond I had with Charlie and Victoria. It was not your typical detective show. It felt more like Rob Petrie playing a detective. It may have looked that way, too, when we tossed in the roller-skating, singing and dancing, and wrapped it in a little cat-and-mouse mystery.
We lucked into something special, something you can’t act, and when that happens, people will sense the fun you’re having and tune in. They want to experience it, too.
We chugged along, the little TV show that could. When I looked up, we were in our sixth year. Then our seventh. In terms of longevity, the series surpassed The Dick Van Dyke Show. Astonished writers and TV insiders asked how that happened. People magazine called it “remarkable” that at nearly seventy-three years old I had a show. Was it remarkable?
Not to me. I just kept showing up and having fun.
I added to the fun by inviting many friends and contemporaries on as guest stars, including Mike Connors, Andy Griffith, Dick Martin, Sally Kellerman, Robert Vaughn, Tim Conway, and even Jack Klugman when he was recovering from throat cancer. I took pride in the easygoing, comfortable atmosphere. In fact, the only argument I ever had during the entire run came when the line producer tried to save money by cutting back on the sandwiches we put out for the crew in mid-morning.
I heard grumbling right away. One thing you do not want on a TV series is an unhappy crew. I went straight to the producer and told him that if he was not going to pay for the sandwiches, I would out of my own pocket. Embarrassed, he had the food back the next day and smiles returned to my crew.
The only other problem I had came when the network brought on two young executive producers who tried to make the show hipper. All of a sudden a show opened with a guy in bed with a naked girl. And gun battles were written into the script. I told them that they were on the wrong show if they wanted to write cutting-edge stuff, and then I took my case to CBS president Leslie Moonves. Michelle had known Les many years earlier when he was a struggling actor, and that was probably why this powerful and astute man in TV who would have fit in nicely at the network back in its Tiffany heyday gave me ample time to air my complaint.
Indeed, Les listened as I told him that we did not need the sex and violence. I said that the people who tune in to the show did not expect it from me. Nor did they want it. Nor did I. In fact, I feared we would actually lose our audience if we kept it up.
Les heard me, and once that was straightened out, we chugged along for several more seasons. We finally wound down in 2001. By then we had spent ten years on the air.
But I did not go gently into the sunset. When we shot our finale, I invited a writer from the Los Angeles Times to come on the set for the purpose of giving him a pie
ce of my mind about the poor treatment given us codgers by youth-obsessed TV and media outlets like the Times, who only seemed to care about the next big—and usually younger, sexier—thing. A few years earlier, I had accused the Times of having “it in for us old folks” and sent one of their writers a letter that said, “Growing old is not a leper colony where an unfortunate few are sent to die. It is a precious gift given only to some lucky human beings.”
At seventy-five, I thought I was ready to indulge in the gift of my dotage. I had been in the business for more than fifty years. “It’s time to go out to pasture,” I told the Associated Press. “Tastes have changed.” I often felt like an anachronism because I stood for wholesome family entertainment, the stuff I had practiced and preached for half a century. But if that went out of fashion, well, what kind of society were we?
On the morning after our wrap party, where I had harmonized with the guys one last time, I stood on our front porch shaded in bougainvillea, draped my arm around Michelle, took a deep breath of ocean air, and for something like the fifty-seventh time in my career I announced my retirement.
Michelle laughed.
“How long do you think you’ll be out in the pasture?” she asked.
I checked my watch and raised an eyebrow.
“What time is it now?”
Michelle was an excellent cook. She specialized in Italian food. The richer the sauce and the more garlic, the better. But for her, cooking was an artistic endeavor, and if she wasn’t in the mood, we ate out. We also enjoyed a rich social life with Dolly and Dick Martin (they would always pretend to bicker, but it was an act and they were a wonderful couple), Tim Conway and his wife, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, Mike Connors and his wife, and Richard Crenna, who was a prince.
For a time, we also enjoyed poker night on Sundays at Barbara Sinatra’s, though it was Michelle who played, not me. I kibitzed with Larry Gelbart, Jack Lemmon, and Veronique and Gregory Peck, who laughed at me when I said that I was the only one there who didn’t play cards.
Dick Van Dyke Page 21