My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business

by Dick Van Dyke

  With a girlfriend, I got more serious about my life and went into the advertising business with Wayne Williams, the son of a prominent physician in town. Wayne was older than I was, elegant, well-educated, and ambitious. We opened an office, hired a secretary, and sold advertising for an hour-long radio show that I did five days a week. The show featured one of my earliest characters, an old man named Bartholomew Cuzy, who did man-on-the-street bits.

  In my free time, I joined an amateur theater group in town, the Red Mask Players, and starred in a number of plays, including No Time for Comedy. I was swimming along pretty comfortably until shortly after my twenty-first birthday, when Wayne moved to Chicago to work for another, bigger advertising company.

  I understood. We were running our business in a small town and there was very little margin. Although profitable, the business wasn’t going to grow much beyond where we’d already taken it. We couldn’t simply add 15 percent to costs as companies in New York and Chicago did.

  I returned to the radio station full-time. I just didn’t have the head for business. Without Wayne, I knew that I would starve. I enjoyed being on the radio, not selling.

  But I had a sense that television was coming on strong, that it was going to be the next big thing, and I thought I could do well as an announcer. It wasn’t that different from what I was already doing. I heard about an opening at WBBM in Chicago and arranged for an audition. I took a train there the night before and stayed in a cheap hotel. My wakeup call never came and I slept through my appointment.

  Upset, I went to the station, anyway. I knew I wasn’t going to get anywhere without at least trying. Dave Garroway worked at WBBM, and I wondered if I’d catch a glimpse of him. As it turned out, I did. At the station, I wandered into the announcers’ lounge and there he was, the great man in his horn-rimmed glasses. He turned to me and said, “Kid, this is private.” I knew that he meant Get lost. I didn’t even have a chance to say hello.

  I later auditioned at an ABC station in Indianapolis. They turned me away, too, saying my voice didn’t sound folksy enough. Getting into TV was not as easy as I thought.

  It was about then, the summer of 1947, that I crossed paths with Phil Erickson. Though our families were friendly, Phil was four years older than I was, old enough that I didn’t know him in high school. But I knew of him. He had been active in dramatics and then developed an act called the Three Make-Believes. They lip-synced to songs and turned into a novelty that did quite well across the country.

  But they’d recently broken up following a booking in Chicago. One of his partners decided to go to law school and the other guy made plans, too. So Phil returned to Danville and came into the theater one afternoon looking for a new partner. I was rehearsing The Philadelphia Story. He introduced himself and asked, “Do you want to do an act with me? I have a booking in California.”

  I wanted out of there so badly that I didn’t bother asking about specifics. I just said, “What time will you pick me up?”

  4

  THE MERRY MUTES

  The funny thing was that Phil never auditioned me. He never asked, “Can you lip-sync to a record? Can you perform?”

  He just pulled up in front of my house one day in a beat-up Chevy, I hopped in, and we drove west. Phil was married, with two babies, and had left his family in Danville. He fell asleep a few times on the drive and I quickly had to grab the wheel to keep us in our lane. Even today I can still hear myself yelling, in an alarmed voice, “Phil! Phil! Wake up!”

  We stayed in a couple of cheap motels along the way, and when we got to California, we pooled together what little money we had to rent a little tract home in Venice. It was a dull-colored cracker box without any landscaping—no trees, no shrubs, and brown patches of weeds where there once might have been a green lawn.

  I didn’t care. Phil had taken a risk by asking me to partner up, and even though for me it was more of a lark and an adventure, I felt a responsibility to him and an obligation to our partnership as the Merry Mutes. The prospect of getting up in front of a paying audience also filled me with a mix of fear and excitement that would prove to be a lifelong addiction.

  Would they like us?

  Could I make them laugh and have a good time?

  We would see.

  We were booked into the Zephyr Room at the Chapman Park Hotel, an old, odd place that was all tiny cottages spread across a block near the Brown Derby restaurant and across the street from L.A.’s landmark hotel, the Ambassador, which was home to the famous Coconut Grove. The Zephyr was quite a bit smaller, to say the least.

  On opening night, Phil and I arrived early and checked out the stage. We were well-rehearsed by this point, yet we still went over our act again before anyone was there. I was beyond nervous. My skin was pale and my knees knocked like shutters in a windstorm. After I threw up my dinner, I am sure Phil wondered what he had gotten himself into.

  But he was understanding and patient. He gave me space to be sick, then talked me through my jitters, assuring me in a soft, steady, confident voice that we were going to be fine, and then, before I had a chance to think, I was staring into a spotlight.

  Our act was deceptively simple. We satirized the popular songs and singers of the day, like Bing Crosby, Mary Martin, and Spike Jones and the City Slickers. If a song was hot, we worked it into the act. The opening night audience at the Zephyr loved us, and so did audiences on subsequent nights. We were a hit. We were booked there for weeks, long enough that Phil moved his family to L.A.

  Margie was still back in Danville. She regularly asked when I was going to send for her. We were engaged, so her hints became less subtle as time passed. I did not blame her. But I knew sending for her meant we would get married, and to be frank, I couldn’t afford it.

  Phil and I were making $150 a week and he took a little more than a fifty-fifty split since he had a family. Even with all of us sharing a house, we were still barely getting by. I did not know what to do.

  On the one hand, I wanted to settle down and get married one day. On the other hand, I worried whether I could afford that day anytime soon.

  I was in a spot.

  The solution presented itself in a most convenient fashion one day after Phil and I got to work. It was early, well before showtime, and I was wandering around the hotel when I began talking to this wonderful guy who produced a radio show called Bride and Groom. Broadcast from the hotel’s chapel, each show told the story of a couple’s courtship and then culminated with their wedding. As a gift, the couple received a free honeymoon.

  I mentioned that I wanted to get married but couldn’t afford it, and the producer, who dropped in on our act all the time, invited me to get married on his show. They would pick up the whole tab, plus send us on a honeymoon.

  It sounded like a deal to me. Margie was all for it, too.

  Borrowing money, I sent her a one-way train ticket, and on February 12, 1948, we exchanged “I do”s in front of a minister and two radio microphones as an estimated 15 million people listened in. For our honeymoon, the show sent us on a ten-day skiing vacation to Mount Hood, in Oregon. I had never skied before, but we had a wonderful time. The best part was that it didn’t cost us a nickel. Which was perfect, since we didn’t have a nickel to spare. Back in L.A., Margie and I lived with Phil and his wife and their two kids. We had one small bedroom to ourselves, no car, and if we wanted to do something, we had to walk or hop on the trolley.

  After a while, we finally rented our own apartment in Laurel Canyon. It was actually a guesthouse behind someone else’s home on Lookout Mountain Road. We had a room and a kitchenette—and privacy.

  L.A. was gorgeous back then. There were no high-rise buildings, and the words traffic and smog were unheard of. In the morning, the canyon filled with fog that gradually gave way, as the sun rose, to breathtaking views, almost as if a curtain were being lifted on the day. Depending on the time of the year, the air was ripe with the fragrance of orange blossoms, honeysuckle, and other flowers, a
nd the mostly undeveloped hills were still home to deer and other wildlife that made it seem as if you were far from the city.

  One day I came home and Margie rushed out to meet me. She was as surprised as I’d ever seen her, and for good reason. She had been startled out of the house by a strange noise—our new car. I had driven home in a 1935 Ford Phaeton convertible that I’d bought for $125. After inspecting our new car, she gave me a puzzled look.

  “Where is it?” she asked.

  “What?” I said.

  “The top.”

  “That’s why I was able to afford it,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “It doesn’t have a top,” I explained. “It’s long gone.”

  It didn’t have a second gear, either. It only had first and third, making it difficult to get up the steep hill to our house. Getting down was only slightly easier. Every morning the battery was dead and I had to coast down the hill to the gas station to get a jump. And when it rained, which fortunately was not often in L.A., I got drenched. But I drove that thing for a long time.

  A while after our Zephyr Room debut, Phil and I were booked into Slapsy Maxie’s, one of Hollywood’s hottest clubs, as the opening act for the Delta Rhythm Boys. We signed for two shows a night. It was our biggest gig to date. On opening night, I looked out and saw Lucille Ball in the audience. She was not laughing. Nor was anyone else. We died. We weren’t sophisticated enough for a club drawing from Hollywood’s upper tier, and nobody applauded when we finished. Oh, it was painful.

  Afterward two guys knocked on our dressing-room door, gave us thirty bucks, and told us to get out. We never even made the late show. Adding insult to injury, I went outside and found my car had been towed. I eventually found it in a muddy field, buried up to the hubcaps, and spent the rest of the night trying to get it out. It was one of those moments when you ask, “Jeez, am I in the wrong business?”

  Word of that debacle spread through the nightclub world and we lost a number of bookings. During that fallow period, Phil bought a TV, one of the seven-inch sets that were on the market. We watched Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theater, The Ed Sullivan Show, Candid Camera, Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour, and the news. Our dry spell was broken when a local station booked our act. One of the few TV stations in L.A. at the time, it broadcast from the top of Mount Wilson, about ninety minutes northeast of L.A.

  Phil and I drove there in my ’35 Ford. We got about halfway up the mountain, one of the tallest peaks in Southern California, when the car died. It didn’t just wheeze and cough. It literally passed out. We took our junk out and hiked the rest of the way up.

  Less than a year later, Margie and I found a duplex in Malibu. We moved in and for about eight months loved living at the beach. We found out she was pregnant with twins while Phil and I were working at the Georgian Hotel in Santa Monica, which was much closer to where I lived than Hollywood, and I carved out an easy routine with the shorter drive.

  A problem arose when my share of the Merry Mutes’s take failed to cover all of Margie’s and my expenses. I fell behind on the rent, and though I always felt like something would happen that would allow me to catch up, our bills piled up until I had what was easily the worst day of my life.

  It started one day with Margie experiencing severe cramps. When she began to bleed, I drove her to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. I am sure our old Ford had never been pressed to go as fast as I implored it on that gray afternoon. I had gone to church and Sunday school every week through childhood, right up until I joined the Air Force, and there in the car I said every prayer I had ever learned.

  Half of those prayers were for Margie, and the other half were for our car. “Please, God, get her through this.” It didn’t matter if God understood which was which; I covered all bases.

  Shortly after we got to the hospital, Margie miscarried, and it was a very bleak time for us. You figure things happen for a reason, and that was one of those times. I left her resting at the hospital and returned home to find all of our belongings stacked up in front of our place, on the shoulder of the highway. Our landlord had thrown us out.

  He was apologetic, more so than might be expected from someone who was owed three months’ rent. But he was also being practical. As he explained, he needed the money.

  Well, I didn’t have it. I turned around and, with cars speeding past, began piling our belongings in the back of our Ford.

  I went back to St. John’s and spent the night with Margie. In the morning, I used most of the last eighty-five dollars I had to my name to pay the hospital bill. With the meager amount left over, we got a room with a hot plate in a shack of a hotel on Sawtelle Boulevard. Margie was lactating, bandaged, sore, and tired. I bought cheap hamburger meat and cooked it on that small griddle. It was a pretty bad moment in our lives.

  A few nights later, I stared at the ceiling while Margie slept. I didn’t know if we could make it. I wondered if we should go back to Danville, where we had family to help us through tough times.

  “Guess what?”

  It was Phil, calling a week or so later with good news. We met at a nearby coffee shop and over breakfast he broke the good news. We had a job in San Diego. Not only did we have work, but the club was putting us up as well. We had free lodging. Hallelujah, I thought. My prayers had been answered.

  Margie and I were so broke, though, that my father-in-law, who worked at a Chevrolet dealership outside of Chicago, brought a 1941 Chevy to L.A. and handed me the keys so we would be able to get to San Diego. I can’t imagine how events might have played out if we hadn’t been able to get there.

  Our weeklong gig at Tops was a big, much-needed success. It turned into a total of four weeks, long enough for Margie and me to regroup, and then we headed to another job, a club in Pocatello, Idaho.

  In penny-pinching mode, I thought I could make the 1,200-mile trip, without stopping, in one twenty-four-hour swoop. I was wrong—a fact I was made aware of somewhere outside of Salt Lake City when Margie punched my arm and screamed at me to “wake up!”

  I was asleep with my eyes open and headed into oncoming traffic.

  “Oh Jesus, I’m on the wrong side of the road!” I shouted as I swerved back onto the right side.

  “Yeah, because you were asleep!” she said, alarmed and angry that I had stubbornly insisted on driving straight through.

  In Pocatello, we met up with Phil, and the two of us performed on the same bill with the folksinger Burl Ives. At the end of the week, the club owner skipped town and we never got paid. While we were driving back to L.A., the timing gear blew and our car broke down in the mountains outside of Reno. It was about one A.M., cold, and we were in the middle of nowhere. We got out to look around and heard coyotes howling. I thought we were done.

  After a while, a big old truck came along and stopped. The driver got out a long, thick chain, tied our car to the back of his truck, and pulled us down the hill. When we hit the curves, we were whipped to the very edge and several times thought we were going over the cliff. We made it to Reno, though, and checked into a hotel after dropping the car off at a mechanic.

  Then we had another problem. I had no idea how we were going to pay for the car repairs or our hotel. We were broke.

  I stepped into a phone booth outside the hotel and called my father and father-in-law, hoping one of them could wire us money. But neither had any extra funds. I slid the phone booth door open and lit a cigarette, wondering what I was going to do.

  As soon as I walked into the hotel room, Margie saw the worried expression on my face. I told her the facts. We had thirty dollars—that was it. I put the cash on the dressing table and took off my coat and collapsed on the bed. I had been driving all the way from Pocatello, then fretting about our fate. I could barely keep my eyes open.

  The next thing I knew, I heard Margie coming back into the room. She turned on the lights and I saw that her eyes were as wide as saucers.

  “You aren’t going to believe it,”
she said.

  “What?” I asked.

  She opened her hands and showed me a fistful of money.

  “I took the thirty dollars to the blackjack table,” she said, “and won!”

  It was not a lot of money. But it paid for the hotel, got the car fixed, and allowed us to get home.

  After we regrouped, Phil and I went back on the road, starting at the Chi Chi Club in Palm Springs. We were onstage, pantomiming to the Bing Crosby–Mary Martin hit “Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie,” when an earthquake struck and shook the ground beneath us, as well as the walls and ceiling, the tables and glasses, and everything else in the club, including our record. It skipped from one song to another. Rather than stop, Phil and I tried to keep up—changing lyrics every couple seconds and exchanging panicked looks—and the audience roared.

  Afterward, we hurried offstage, confused, dripping in flop sweat, and wondering what the hell had just happened. The club’s manager, a grin plastered across his narrow face, rushed over and threw his arms around us.

  “I loved the earthquake bit,” he exclaimed. “Keep it in the act.”

  Phil looked at me over the manager’s shoulder.

  “It was an earthquake,” he mouthed.

  “Oh my God,” I replied without making a sound. “Let’s not keep it in the act.”

  We continued to shake things up, though, at the Last Frontier in Las Vegas and the Golden Hotel in Reno, where I met the young piano sensation of the time, Liberace. He was packing them in down the street, but one night he caught a bit of our act and told me that he thought I had some talent. You wouldn’t have known that from our reception at New York’s Blue Angel. The weekend tourists lapped up our act, but the more sophisticated Manhattanites who showed up during the week thought we were rubes—and we were fired.

  Miami turned out to be our place. We headlined Martha Raye’s Five O’Clock Club for an entire season—all winter. I brought Margie, who felt like she was on a long vacation. It was a good time, one that got even better, almost too good to be true. One day, after leaving Margie in our room, I was on my way to meet Phil to discuss adding some new bits to the act when one of the men who ran the club directed me into his office.