My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business

by Dick Van Dyke

  I hopped in a taxi and implored the driver to hurry to Grand Central. That may work in the movies, but in real life, as anyone who has driven in Manhattan knows, it’s nearly impossible to hurry through crosstown traffic, and for some reason it becomes exponentially slower when time is a factor.

  When I finally hurried into the studio, the show had already been on for twenty minutes. Merv Griffin, a young singer and a regular on the show until the format was changed a few months later, was filling in and proving that he was a much better emcee than I was ever going to be.

  My bosses understood, though, and they hustled me on the air and let me keep my job. Live TV was like that. Every day you marched into the heart of the unknown, like one of those crazy people who purposely drive into the eye of a tornado. The only certainty was that something would go wrong, if not today, then tomorrow. It required nerves of steel and a sense of humor to match.

  The mistakes were not funny when they happened, but afterward they had a way of seeming hilarious. The great Dixieland trumpet player Bill Davison showed up one morning so stoned that I had to prop him in the corner. I had to look back after we went off the air to make sure he wasn’t still there. Guests came in all the time still drunk or stoned from the night before. I came to realize that that glassy-eyed look meant I was not only going to ask the questions but also have to figure out a way to come up with the answers.

  My most memorable disaster occurred when I interviewed a dogsled racer. I was going to question him about traversing Canada’s Laurentian Mountains. He had his team of dogs set up on the stage. They were gorgeous animals. Just before we went live, he warned, “Whatever you do, don’t say ‘mush’ to the dogs.”

  “Okay,” I told myself, and made a mental note. But of course during our interview, as I asked him about driving his team of dogs, I began clowning around and jokingly said, “Mush.” It just came out of me. His dogs didn’t understand it was a joke and they took off. They ran through the kitchen set, the weather set, and two other sets, knocking all of them down, before they stopped.

  I never thought I was good at reading the news or interviewing the more serious-minded people who came into the studio. It wasn’t my cup of tea. I got by only because my newsmen were two of the best who ever worked in television, Walter Cronkite and Charles Collingwood.

  However, six months into the show, the network removed Walter. I guess they thought he was busy enough with the Evening News and his own show, You Are There, but apparently that was not communicated to Walter. He called me as soon as he heard, looking for an explanation.

  “What did I do?” he asked. “What didn’t you like?”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “What did I do that got me fired?”

  Walter was ten years older than I was, far more experienced, and basically in a whole other universe at the network. But I realized he had no idea what was going on. I set him straight.

  “Walter, I can’t fire anybody,” I said. “I’m lucky to have this job myself.”

  My way out of the news and into a more comfortable role was to start doing a five-minute segment where I sat in front of a large easel, told famous children’s stories and fairy tales, and illustrated them with cartoons. A composer named Hank Silvern wrote me a theme song called “Mice on Rollerskates.” And viewers seemed to like the segment. But I went into work one morning and found all my belongings in the hall.

  In short time, I learned that the network had brought in a new producer, Charlie Andrews, a nice guy who actually turned out to be quite helpful. But they had given him my office without telling me. I was assured that it wasn’t a message; it was a mistake. I was also told not to read anything into the fact that they didn’t have a place to put me.

  Yet how could I not get upset? It was six in the morning and I was standing in the hall, without an office—and with a show to do.

  I got on my high horse and complained to the network’s vice president of television, Harry Amerly. It wasn’t fair, I told him. In those days, CBS was known as the Tiffany network, and it was. Network headquarters was located at Fifty-second Street and Madison Avenue, the heart of Manhattan, and the executives were gentlemen. They dressed to the nines and conducted themselves accordingly. There wasn’t any skulduggery. The network was run beautifully. And Harry reflected that sensibility. He responded to my ire by saying, “Let’s go out to lunch.”

  He took me to Louie & Armand’s, an upscale speakeasy on Fifty-second Street. I didn’t drink at the time. Harry nevertheless ordered me a couple of martinis, one right after the other, which I sipped until I felt a chill in my extremities and heard Harry’s voice begin to fade into the distance as he said something about getting me a new office.

  “Boy, I don’t feel well,” I said, and then, all of a sudden, boom! My head hit the table. I passed out.

  I never did get a new office, and after a year on the anchor desk, CBS took me off The Morning Show. I spent 1956 as host of the network’s Saturday-morning Cartoon Theater, a series done on film where I interacted with Heckle and Jeckle and other popular characters. I was also a panelist on To Tell the Truth, which didn’t go that well. Every night, the show’s producers, Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, came in and shook hands with the three panelists—actually, not all three. They avoided me.

  For some reason, they never acknowledged my presence. They didn’t like me. I said to myself, “My career here is going to be rather short.” I was not altogether wrong. Yet when they were working out the idea for a new game show called The Price Is Right, they had me emceeing it. We brought in people off the street and tried to figure out the show. I went home numerous nights and said to Margie, “This is the dumbest idea. People are just trying to guess how much things cost. That’s a show? It’s never going to go.”

  Despite my opinion, they got it off the ground, giving the hosting job to Bill Cullen, and it became a TV staple. More than fifty years later, it’s still going.

  I then tried my hand at a few pilots that didn’t work and bided my time as the network tried to figure out what to do with me.

  They didn’t try too hard. There was one executive, Oscar Katz, the vice president of programming, who was not a fan. He didn’t think I had enough talent. In a meeting with other executives trying to find a place for me, he once said, “The kid just doesn’t have it.” I knew what he meant. At times, as I knocked around the network, I kind of agreed with him.

  7

  LAUGH LINES

  It was the spring of 1958, and Garry Moore asked me to sub for him when he went on a month-long sailing vacation. That should have been a sign that I was on my way up at CBS. I had made numerous appearances on his show in the past, including one of my favorites, a skit with Chuck McCann featuring the two of us as Laurel and Hardy (me as Stan Laurel and Chuck as Oliver Hardy). But just as I began to find my comfort zone, two things happened that seemed to foreshadow my future at the network.

  First, a zookeeper came on with an anteater, which relieved itself on the stage. It would have been funny if not for a noxious odor that quite simply stunk up the entire studio.

  Then, on another show, I was chatting with Garry’s sidekick, Durward Kirby, who pointed at someone in the audience. As I turned to look, his fingernail sliced into my nose. I bled like a pig. Durward finished the show for me while I went offstage and got bandaged.

  While my bleeding stopped, it was too late to save me at CBS. After a three-year run, they let me go. They said they didn’t know what to do with me, and frankly, I didn’t know what to do with me, either.

  I drove home and told Margie that I had lost my job. My voice cracked several times as I relayed the details. She put on a good face, but I saw the concern in her eyes. I’m sure she saw the same in mine. I reminded her that we had been in worse spots, but it was really more for my benefit. With a wife and three children, and a house at the end of a cul-de-sac, I shouldered the responsibility of keeping everyone fed, warm, and feeling secure, and I w
as scared to death.

  Around that same time, my agent set me up with a reporter who promised to do a little puff piece that would keep my name in circulation. The reporter asked me to describe my career goals.

  “I want to eat,” I said.

  He laughed.

  I wasn’t joking.

  I liked the life we had made for ourselves. Our neighborhood was full of families similar to us. The couples were young, upwardly mobile, with kids the same ages as ours. Everyone knew one another. Every Saturday night someone had a party. We had dinner, with a lot of drinking before and after, and played charades, which got pretty competitive. Once I got so wrapped up in the game that I broke out in hives.

  Until this time, I didn’t drink. Margie and I always kept a bottle of Early Times whiskey in the cupboard for company, but it went untouched for years. I began to enjoy a cocktail only as our social life picked up. I found a martini or two, and eventually three or four, got me past my shyness and helped me have a good time. And in those days, everybody drank and smoked and thought nothing of it. You were given odd looks if you didn’t.

  I taught Sunday school at the Dutch Reformed Presbyterian Church, and when I saw friends with whom I had partied the night before, I would roll my eyes and ask if they had recovered from the good times. I made it look sort of funny. It would not be as funny later on when I realized that I had a drinking problem. But that was still a long way off, and it was an even longer time before I understood it.

  The drinking never interfered with the work, which picked up again when I landed a guest spot on The Phil Silvers Show as Sgt. Bilko’s cousin. Then I was doing weekly pantomimes on The Pat Boone Show when I ran into Gil Cates, a young producer who went on to have an excellent career directing movies and producing TV, including more than a dozen Academy Awards telecasts.

  Gil liked me. He was launching a daytime game show called Mother’s Day, and he hired me to emcee. We shot at the famous Latin Quarter nightclub on Broadway and Forty-seventh Street. I stuck it out for an entire season because I needed the money, but unfortunately for both Gil and me, overseeing diaper-changing races and floor-mopping contests was not my thing.

  I went on to host another game show called Laugh Line. On it, a group of actors struck a pose while a panel of funny people, including Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Shelley Berman, Orson Bean, and Dorothy Loudon, attempted to come up with a humorous description for it. With a panel full of comedy Hall of Famers, you’d think that show would still be on the air. But it didn’t matter how funny those people were, and they were funny. The show didn’t work.

  And pretty soon, neither did I.

  But the whole time I hosted those game shows, I hedged my bets against unemployment by auditioning for plays. As soon as I finished the show, I raced into the theater district. I was trying to expand my options as a performer. That’s how I found out I could sing and dance. Sure, I had sung in high school and danced in some school plays, but I never considered doing it professionally. I was at one of those auditions and someone asked if I could sing and dance.

  “Sure,” I said.

  Hey, fear of being hungry and homeless will do that to you.

  I would have said yes to almost anything short of tightrope walking and then at least tried it.

  As it happened, I could sing and dance some. I found that if I went with the music and just did what I felt, I could do pretty well.

  Well enough, anyway.

  I landed a little variety show with Peter Gennaro, the gifted dancer and choreographer (he’d collaborated with Jerome Robbins on the original Broadway production of West Side Story), and Ruth Price, who was eighteen and a knockout. The show closed after a very brief run, but Aaron Ruben, a writer-producer from The Phil Silvers Show, noticed my work and took a shine to me. He became a friend and supporter.

  Aaron and I began palling around together, working out at the Y and talking over coffee. Eleven years older than I was, he had written for George Burns, Milton Berle, Phil Silvers, and Sid Caesar, and would go on to co-create The Andy Griffith Show and Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. Some people have the magic touch, and he was one of them. He promised to look out for possible jobs for me, and when he started doing the company sketches for Girls Against the Boys, a comedy revue, he got me in as part of the chorus, as well as in short pieces between scene changes.

  The show starred Bert Lahr, Nancy Walker, and Shelley Berman. Aaron warned that “these people were hysterical,” and he was right. Bert could just look at the audience and get laughs, and Nancy knew when to do those kind of takes, too. I had one sketch with Nancy set in a deli in which I played a married man meeting up with a girl, and Nancy was the deli owner who attempts to distract me from the girl with her chopped liver.

  It was funny, but after eating chopped liver eight times a week, I got nauseous just thinking about eating it.

  Aaron also helped me write a pantomime of a guy who came home very drunk, but the second his wife appeared, he was as sober as a judge. Every time she turned her head, though, he was drunk again. The pacing kept speeding up, and so did the antics. I got a lot of laughs—and a good review.

  In early November 1959, after workshopping the show in Philadelphia, we moved to Broadway. Despite some relatively good notices and a Hirschfeld cartoon in the New York Times, Girls Against the Boys was too light to compete with the drama-heavy season that included Mary Martin in The Sound of Music, Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker, and John Gielgud in Much Ado About Nothing, and the show closed after a mere two weeks.

  But that was enough time for me to impress noted choreographer Danny Daniels, who introduced himself to me after the opening and said, “Boy, I’ve never seen anybody move like you do.” He and Aaron got me on The Fabulous Fifties, a TV special celebrating the decade that was just about to end. In one sketch, I played a shy wallflower-type who learns to mambo, but then goes to a nightclub where everyone is doing the cha-cha. So he returns to the dance studio, learns the cha-cha, and then finds everyone at the club doing the Frug. So he learns the Frug, and so on. It was nonstop—and on live television. I had to dance twelve minutes straight. I almost died from exhaustion.

  Aaron also put me into the lead of The Trouble with Richard, a pilot for CBS that we shot at an abandoned hotel in Lower Manhattan. I played a simpleminded bank teller who lived with his two aunts and infused the character with traits I had loved in Stan Laurel. But the network passed. As I recall, they said that “it looked cheap.”

  Disappointed, I phoned my agent at MCA, hoping he had some prospects. He put me on Mike Stokey’s Pantomime Quiz, a charades-like TV game show that had been running since the late 1940s. I was partnered with Howard Morris and series regular Carol Burnett, whom I knew from working together on The Garry Moore Show, and that turned out to be a lucky break.

  Carol and I were dynamos as teammates on Pantomime Quiz. Our personalities clicked, and so did our competitive juices. Thanks to a slew of imperceptible hand signals we came up with to tip each other off—some impromptu, some we worked out away from the show—we were unbeatable. It was a good thing, too. I needed the two hundred dollars we were paid each time we won to buy groceries.

  My prospects brightened considerably when I learned that my agent had booked an audition with Gower Champion for another Broadway show. Champion was an actor turned director who had won a Tony Award a few years earlier for Lend an Ear, the show that made Carol Channing a star, and from what my agent told me, he was getting set to stage another musical, called Bye Bye Birdie. My agent said he had a good feeling about this one.

  What he didn’t tell me—perhaps he didn’t know—was that Aaron Ruben had already been in there, on the inside, with Gower, laying the groundwork for me. He also smelled a hit and thought I was perfect for a key part as a songwriter-agent.

  8

  BYE BYE BIRDIE

  My audition took place in a dimly lit, empty theater off Broadway, somewhere in the Forties. It was an overcast winter day. I walked into the theater an
d took off my jacket; I wore a sweater and khakis. There were only a few people there, including Gower, a handsome, serious man. It looked and felt how I imagine most people picture a Broadway audition—dark, austere, tense, and scary.

  Gower and his producers sat at a table in front. I stayed in the back until I heard my name, then took my place on the stage. There was one light shining down and a piano player on the side.

  After answering a few questions, I sang “Till There Was You” from The Music Man and then “Once in Love with Amy” with a little soft-shoe that I knew. When I finished, Gower came onstage and said, “You’ve got the part.” Just like that. He gave me the job. Right on the spot.

  I didn’t know what the hell to say, and what I eventually said sounded completely wrong.

  “But I … I can’t really dance.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “I saw what you can do. That’s what we’ll build on. I’ll teach you to dance.”

  Those lessons paid off handsomely. With a book by Michael Stewart and music and lyrics from Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, respectively, Birdie was a takeoff on the mania that swept through the youth of America when Elvis Presley was drafted into the Army in 1958. After I saw a run-through of the number “Telephone Hour,” I called my wife and told her that this show was going to go and probably do very well. It felt like everything worked.

  From day one, the show had a special feel, at least among those of us on the inside, a remarkable cast featuring Dick Gautier as Conrad Birdie, Susan Watson as Kim MacAfee, Paul Lynde as her father, Kay Medford as my mother, Chita Rivera as my assistant, Rosie Alvarez, and me in the role of agent and songwriter Albert Peterson. Michael J. Pollard played the kid, Hugo, and Charles Nelson Reilly was Mr. Henkel, in addition to my understudy.