“Yeah,” he said, “but you’re the only one here still working.”
That was true. After a few months of puttering around the house and checking the calendar to see which couple we were meeting for dinner, I told Michelle that I was going back to work. “I knew it,” she chortled, her laugh echoing through the house. I made two Diagnosis Murder movies that aired on CBS in early 2002, one of which featured my daughter Stacy in a pivotal role, and the other included my grandson Shane, a budding actor and filmmaker whose energy and creativity made being on the set feel like the playground it had been for me forty years earlier.
After continuing to screw up my retirement with a guest spot on the NBC sitcom Scrubs, I reunited with Mary Tyler Moore for the first time since the sixties in a PBS production of The Gin Game, the Pulitzer Prize–winning play that Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn had made a Broadway hit in 1977. Before Mary and I had bid good-bye to the sitcom that made both of us household names, we’d said, “God, it would be fun to do a play together.” Well, neither of us thought it would take nearly four decades.
The two-act play that brought us back together was about a couple of lonely people who meet at an old-age home and play gin rummy. Over the course of thirty-two games, their new friendship turns competitive, dark, and bitter—and in the end the two stubborn old mules miss the whole point of their second chance at companionship. Someone told me that Jessica and Hume had notes with dialogue hidden all over the stage, and I believed it.
Although Mary and I instantly recaptured our special chemistry, I could tell a couple days into the two weeks we set aside for rehearsal that we might have picked the wrong material. The director didn’t give us much to work with, and I had problems with the coarse language. It never felt right calling Mary a bitch even though we were acting. We did a lot of takes and in the end it wasn’t there, not the way I’d hoped.
Others disagreed. The play aired in May 2003 to mixed reviews, though it got a rave from actress Anne Bancroft. I bumped into her and her husband, Mel Brooks, one night at a restaurant shortly after the play aired and Anne was full of compliments and even a little envy.
“Why didn’t you ask me to do it?” she said.
My jaw dropped.
“If you’re telling the truth, I’m going to kill myself,” I said.
As much as I enjoyed working again with Mary, I also would have loved to have worked with Anne.
Afterward, instead of rushing into more jobs, I tried behaving like an actual retiree for a change. An early riser, I worked out at the local gym, brought coffee to Michelle, and then disappeared for much of the rest of the day into the guesthouse, where I had a sophisticated computer setup to indulge my passion in computer animation and CGI. Few people realized it, but I had been the computer graphics specialist on Diagnosis Murder.
In my so-called retirement, I made short films, including some in 3D. I was like a mad scientist in his lab. I put my present-day self in an old Dick Van Dyke Show episode, and I cut and pasted myself into famous movies, which I then showed to my kids and grandkids, though their amusement hardly matched mine. I felt as if I had entered my second or third … make that my fifth or sixth childhood.
28
CURTAIN CALLS
It was Carl’s idea to do one more show. For years, we had resisted the idea of a Dick Van Dyke Show reunion. Although we understood the desire fans and network executives had to see all of us back together, it never appealed to most of us. Those things generally don’t strike the right note with actors. Sure, fans get to take a nice, well-produced walk down memory lane and remember everything they loved about a show. They also get to see how everyone looks years later. But the actors don’t want to be reminded of what they have lost or who looks more pickled than preserved.
We were a different bunch, too. We knew The Dick Van Dyke Show was really all about Carl Reiner. The show had started with him writing a full season of scripts and it had succeeded because of his genius as a writer. You can compare those shows with any great work of literature. It started and ended with the writing, and all of us knew it. That’s why it ended after five special years. Carl wanted to move on. He was done with those characters. Like any ambitious writer, he had more he wanted to explore. And all of us knew that our roles in the show started and ended with his desire to continue breathing life into the characters he had created for us. We knew great TV began with great writing, not great acting, and that is a distinction that can’t ever be ignored or underestimated. TV just won’t work any other way. It all starts on the page.
And so when Carl stood onstage at the 2003 TV Land Awards and accepted that network’s “Legend Award” by expressing his desire to do one more episode with the original cast, we paid attention. All of us heard about it immediately. Those who were not there in person received phone calls. Since reporters began contacting me almost as soon as he walked offstage, I got more details from Carl, who explained that he was going to write one more episode, the 159th as it were, bringing the characters up to date. He said he had an idea, and he sounded excited. That was enough for me.
“Count me in,” I said.
Mary had the same reaction. So did Rosie. Sadly, the ensuing phone calls we made to one another and the rehearsals that followed reminded us of more than just the good times. We had lost some members of our TV family. Richard Deacon, who played Mel Cooley, had died in 1984. Two years later Jerry Paris, who had gone on to direct more than two hundred episodes of Happy Days, succumbed to a brain tumor that went undiagnosed until it was too late. He had called me from the hospital and was gone days later. Afterward, I wondered if the headaches he had always suffered from, as well as his sudden flare-ups of temper, were a result of the nascent tumor. Morey Amsterdam was our most recent loss. He died of a heart attack in 1996 at the age of eighty-seven. On the set, we spent a few minutes recalling some of his jokes, including a favorite—that he had moved into a Beverly Hills neighborhood so exclusive, the police had an unlisted phone number. We also missed Sheldon Leonard, who passed away in 1997.
The special, which aired in May 2004, hinged on Alan Brady hiring Rob and Sally for one last writing job, helping him prepare his funeral. He wanted a joke-filled eulogy written before he died. As for everyone’s lives, Rob and Laura had moved into New York City, Ritchie was grown up (and bald), Sally had finally gotten married, and Millie was a widow who was dating my brother, Stacy (my brother, Jerry, reprised his role, too).
TV critics were kind and respectful, but most called it average and urged fans to revisit the original. I agreed with that assessment, too.
The show was just all right. But my attitude was this: If Carl, in his mid-eighties, wanted to tidy things up, I was going to help. At seventy-nine, I was still Rob Petrie, just like Mary was still the only one who fans wanted to hear say, “Oh, Rob!” As long as we were able to enjoy ourselves, we had to do it. Rosie said it was like a conversation we had picked up forty years later, and she was right. We had waited long enough.
All in all, I was glad we took the curtain call.
I liked to joke that I kept in shape to avoid assisted living, but I maintained a pace that would have had people half my age hiring an assistant. I made three detective movies for the Hallmark Channel and then I put my limber limbs to work on Night at the Museum, an innovative family-oriented movie that came about when its star, Ben Stiller, and director, Shawn Levy, called and said they not only wanted me but needed me as well. I was beyond flattered—and ready.
In the movie, which starred Ben, Carla Gugino, and Robin Williams, I played a security guard trying to acquire the secret that enabled the museum’s creatures to come to life. He was supposed to be the bad guy, but I played him as if he was misunderstood. Who wouldn’t want eternal life? But after I did a dance scene, Ben began referring to me as “Dorian Van Dyke.” The crew also joked that I must have found the secret to eternal youth when I insisted on doing all my own stunts—except for one that would have required me to fly on wires, stop
myself against a wall, and drop down.
Having done that kind of stuff in Mary Poppins, I knew better. But by doing as much as I did, I surprised myself, and better still, I impressed the picture’s young stuntmen, who cheered me on.
Awesome!
Would you look at that guy!
Did you see what that eighty-year-old dude just did?
They saw the part of me that only performers really understand. It was the part that came alive when the cameras were on and the director yelled, Action. Without a microphone, a camera, or a stage of some sort, without an audience to entertain, I withdrew into a place where I was more comfortable and recharged. I was aware that others saw me as private. On an A&E Biography, I was called a loner. People said that I was tough to know. If this was true—and I am not denying anything—it was not by design, not anything I did consciously. It’s just that I have always been like Stan Laurel and Buster Keaton—very shy and wary of exposing too much of a sensitive gooey center, that is, until an opportunity arose to put a smile on someone’s face.
Let me give you an example.
A few years earlier, I was sitting in my local Starbucks when a young man came up to my table and introduced himself. In his early thirties, Mike worked for director James Cameron, who had an office nearby. He had seen me around, he said, and always wanted to meet me. It turned out that he and a couple of other guys regularly got together to harmonize and, knowing that I also liked to sing, they wanted to know if I would join them sometime. I had them up to the house that same night.
Their repertoire was mostly hip-hop, which I could not do, so we tried some old barbershop things off sheet music I found in my piano bench. From there we improvised, added tunes from Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and other Disney films, and you know, it was the darnedest thing, but these three guys and I sounded pretty good together—so good that we made our get-togethers a habit. Soon we formalized our group as the Vantastix and sang at dinner parties and charity events.
My favorite venue, though, was the City of Hope, where we went room to room, singing for kids battling cancer. In fifty-plus years of show business, I never had a better audience. Most of those little kids were bald, and a fair number of them could barely sit up in bed, and there was a sad handful who could not even do that. We stopped at the bed of a very sick fifteen-year-old boy. We tiptoed into his room and quietly sang a song. He did not react. Thinking he was asleep, we began to file out when suddenly we heard a thin voice ask, “Could I hear another one please?”
We turned around and sang a whole bunch of songs. He barely opened his eyes, but after we finished “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” I saw his mouth curl into a faint smile.
As far as I am concerned, applause does not get any louder.
In 2007, Margie was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. A few years earlier, she had moved from the Oregon coast to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Both places shared a serenity that appealed to Margie and her taste for all things sparse and natural. She loved Santa Fe. But soon she was plagued by backaches. Despite treatment, they grew more debilitating and eventually she was diagnosed with cancer.
I arranged for her to get an apartment at the Motion Picture Home in Los Angeles. All the kids were here. It made sense.
Michelle and Margie never crossed paths, but they knew of each other almost as if they had met many times. Both were strong women. They shared a mutual respect.
We decorated Margie’s place with new furniture and paintings, and she started intensive treatment. For a while, we thought she might pull through. But then she began to fail. At the end, she lapsed into a coma. For two weeks, the whole family sat beside her bed until she finally breathed her last breath. Quietly, I said good-bye and joined with the kids in crying, though I knew that in the end Margie was done suffering and had gone to a better place.
I was deeply affected. I had lost close friends like Richard Crenna, but Margie was the mother of my four children, someone who had been a part of my life practically since childhood, and even though we were long divorced, with her death I also lost a part of myself.
A year later, I was hit with more heartbreaking news. Michelle’s doctor found a spot on her lung and said he wanted to watch it. That was in January; by summer, it was determined that the spot was cancer. Michelle had surgery to remove the lower right lobe and we thought she was clean. But evidently she wasn’t; a subsequent checkup showed that the cancer had metastasized. Though devastated, we vowed to fight on.
Everyone familiar with Michelle knew that she was a fighter to the core. She’d had three or four angioplasties since her first heart attack, and even though she was not as physically fit as she had been twenty years earlier, she still had the inner strength of an Olympic athlete. I took her to the hospital every day for chemo and radiation. It was not the most pleasant of routines, but we clung to statistics and prayer.
Sadly, though, Michelle did not respond to treatment. Several months before the end, her doctor gave me the news that we had tried our damnedest to avoid, and then deny: My beloved companion of nearly thirty-five years was not going to make it. As full of hope and fight as she was, Michelle was also scared. Every so often she broke down and asked me if she was going to die. I said that nobody knew but the doctors were doing their best—and they would not tell me if they did know. It was the hardest acting I have ever done.
As she neared the end, though, Michelle knew. It was October 2009, and she spent that time at home talking to her friends. She spent the last week of the month in a coma. Her doctor told me that she could still hear, so I sang and talked to her until the hospice nurses who were helping in the final days told me that she was gone.
I believe the last words she heard were “I love you.”
I was completely unprepared for life without Michelle. I had read statistics showing that husbands rarely outlive their wives and I was prepared to leave her with a long to-do list, not the other way around. I mean Michelle was a world-class procrastinator. She postponed everything, including marrying me. You would think that the woman whose palimony suit made headlines for years would have insisted on cementing her future.
But no, not Michelle.
When she died, she left me a long list of unfinished projects. Like a bookshelf she wanted installed in the bedroom (it was three-quarters finished), a gazebo she planned to put on the hill in our backyard, and the wedding we had talked about for more than thirty years.
I’d wanted to get married at home, but when that seemed impossible to plan, I’d suggested a simple civil ceremony. I could still hear myself saying, “We don’t have to tell anyone,” and Michelle nodding, “Yes, that’s a good idea, let’s do it,” and yet I could never get her to put a date on the calendar. The only thing she did not put off was her garden. She worked in the flower beds every day, and they were gorgeous all year round.
After she passed, I told the gardeners to keep them up the way she had, and they have been in constant bloom. Right now, on this warm day in mid-July, I am looking outside from the dining-room table and I see Michelle’s garden full of vibrant color, full of life—just the way I remember her.
In the months that followed, I realized that I have not ever been without a companion looking out for me. There was my mother, then the Air Force, then Margie, and then Michelle. I found myself fumbling through the responsibilities of daily life, the little stuff they tell you not to worry about, which, I can tell you, is much easier to do when the closet is stocked with paper goods. On the bright side, only one of my credit cards was canceled before I got a system down for paying the bills.
Gradually, I found my footing. I turned into a hot commodity among the widows on the town’s party circuit who needed a designated driver. In lieu of pot roast, I received invitations to all the charity events. But old age, as my friends will attest, is not a role I am ready to assume. I recently had dinner with Don Rickles and his wife and Mike Connors and his wife, all great friends who have evolved into a kind of super senior
citizenship with good humor and all their marbles. If only the same could be said of their knees. When Don and Mike walked into the restaurant using canes, I cracked, “I have to hang out with a younger crowd!”
I was only half joking. Fortunately, though, the younger crowds still want to hang out with me. ABC’s hit show Dancing with the Stars came calling, but I turned them down. As I told them, I can learn one dance, but a new one every week, and often two new dances, would be too strenuous. I sang and hoofed my way through a couple numbers with the L.A. cast of the Mary Poppins stage show. And I began work on a one-man show that is actually four men since it includes the three guys with whom I still harmonize every week.
In the nearly ten years since Mike first approached me at Starbucks, we have made two albums and sung at dozens of events, including one for hospital workers held in Anaheim. When I noticed that women in their sixties and up comprised most of the audience, I turned to the other guys in my group, all at least half my age, and warned them that these were my groupies.
Sure enough, after the show, the women rushed the stage, albeit slowly and politely. We had to make a run for it.
At the end of June 2010, we took the act to Washington, D.C.’s, Ford Theater and performed at a pre–July Fourth celebration for a crowd of dignitaries and politicians led by President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle. At a reception beforehand, Michelle Obama gave me a great big hug and said, “Yours is my favorite television show of all time.”
President Obama, standing next to her, chimed in, “She’s not kidding. She won’t miss it.”
I asked if their daughters were going to attend the show.
“No, they have school tomorrow,” Michelle said.
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