My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business

by Dick Van Dyke

  Indeed, I had a full plate of TV specials and movies. I had invested in a Phoenix-based radio station. I also volunteered with Big Brothers, served on the board of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, worked with the California Educational Center, donated time to the Society for the Prevention of Blindness, and of course cared for my wife, four children, various dogs, and our ornery cat. But really, until The Dick Van Dyke Show finished, I preferred to concentrate on, no, I preferred to savor, each and every last episode.

  Like the others before it, the final season continued to take inspiration from our personal lives. Carl’s earliest literary efforts were the source of “A Farewell to Writing,” which has Rob struggling to begin the novel he always wanted to write. In “Fifty-Two, Forty-Five or Work,” Rob recalls a time when he was out of work with a new home and a pregnant wife, and that storyline was ripped straight out of my family album.

  Likewise, “The Man from My Uncle,” about government agents using the Petries’ home to stake out a neighbor, may have sounded far-fetched, but the script from Jerry Belson and Garry Marshall was rooted in another actual event that happened to me. After the Watts Riots in August 1965, I gave some of my time to Operation Bootstrap, a group that endeavored to help people in Watts develop skills and businesses of their own without government aid.

  They began on a shoestring budget in a former auto-parts store and eventually gave rise to the Shindana Toy Factory, a business that designed toys for African-Americans. I made several trips with members from my church to the empty store where Bootstrap was headquartered, engaged in some heated debates, and got to know this one guy named Lenny.

  In his thirties, Lenny was a member of the Black Panthers, extremely political, but also extremely thoughtful and sensitive. I learned that he was a painter. He showed me his canvases, which I admired. I also found out that he was married and had a daughter. On those levels at least we related to each other easily, more than one might think given our different worlds.

  Interested in bridging those different worlds, I invited Lenny and his family to my house for dinner with my family. My kids were fascinated by Lenny. He was fairly articulate but tough as nails, which was reflected in the stories he told during dinner. Those stories pinned the kids to the table. I mean, nobody moved while Lenny spoke—that is, until the phone rang.

  I answered and a detective from the LAPD identified himself and told me not to worry, they had things under control.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “We heard there was going to be an armed robbery in your house tonight,” he said.

  “What?!” I exclaimed.

  “We have your house surrounded,” he said.

  “Holy Jesus!” I said, looking across the room at Lenny and cringing at what he was going to think.

  After I hung up, I told everyone what was going on. Lenny erupted in anger, got up, and walked toward the phone.

  “I’m going to make a call,” he said. “In two minutes I’ll have forty guys here with guns.”

  “What?” I said.

  “We’ll take care of them,” he added.

  “Dick!” said Margie, who had gotten up from the table and was now standing next to me. “Do something.”

  First, I calmed the situation inside my house, and then I walked outside and dealt with the police. There were cops everywhere. I had no idea where the LAPD got their information, whether a neighbor saw Lenny and his family enter our house and called the local precinct or whether it was a mistake, which seemed unlikely. But I was pissed—and embarrassed.

  While the memorable evening did eventually morph into a good TV episode, I wish it had turned out differently.

  As for the series finale, an episode titled “The Gunslinger,” it was a Western spoof in which Rob goes to the dentist and gets put under, descends into a dream, and everyone is transported back into the Wild West. We cooked that up so that everyone could be in the last one: I was the sheriff, Mary was the song-and-dance girl in the saloon, Carl was the bad guy (Big Bad Brady), and all the writers (Sam, Bill, Jerry, and Garry) were cowboys. Even my children were in it.

  We added to the fun with a cast and crew party afterward. As hard as we tried to celebrate five special years of accomplishment, camaraderie, creativity, friendship, and laughs, it was also a night of good-byes, which made it a bittersweet occasion. I got in the car at the end of the night, turned to Margie thinking I had something to say about the party, and nothing came out of my mouth. I was overwhelmed.

  I learned that you may move on from a show like ours, but you never move away from it. At the end of May 1966, we staged a mini reunion when the show walked away with four Emmys. The New York Times called it “a hail and farewell gesture” by our peers since we were going off the air. Indeed, almost everyone on the show had been nominated. We were genuinely touched.

  I arrived at the awards show thinking Don Adams was a shoe-in for his new series Get Smart, and so I was genuinely caught off-guard when my name was called for the third straight year. In my thank-you speech, I joked that I wouldn’t be there next year, so the category was going to have a fresh face. I added a heartfelt thank-you, which I hoped conveyed my gratitude not just for the individual honor but also for the honor of being there.

  And it was quite a club. That night, Bill Cosby, one of Emmy’s cohosts, also won an Emmy for his work opposite Robert Culp on I Spy. The first black actor to costar in a weekly prime-time TV series, he thanked NBC for “having the guts” to go with him. It wasn’t just NBC, though. It was also Sheldon Leonard, I Spy’s executive producer, who had put Bill in that role and who had, at another point in time, fought to keep The Dick Van Dyke Show on the air.

  When you’re watching award shows you sometimes wonder what the men and women in their tuxedos and gowns are thinking about while all the nominees are being called and winners announced. On that occasion, I was thinking about the connections many of us shared as we strove to entertain and inform people, and occasionally make points about the quality and condition of our lives, and I felt pretty darn lucky to be among them.

  I was also thinking that I was on to the next phase of my life and career, some of which was planned, but most of which was a mystery, the way it always is, and I was looking forward to seeing what would happen.

  PART TWO

  I’ve made peace with insecurity … because there is no security of any kind.

  —Me

  17

  NEVER A DULL MOMENT

  Destiny is an interesting idea to ponder. Somehow, when Carl was looking to cast the lead role in his new television series, I was in the exact right place at the exact right time and answered the call. However, such was not the case one day in 1966, a day that, had I answered in another way, could’ve made me far wealthier than I ever imagined.

  I was in the driver’s seat of a Volkswagen Bug parked in front of a McDonald’s, biding my time on the set of the movie Divorce American Style while the crew completed a routine recalibration of equipment and director Bud Yorkin conferred with my costar Debbie Reynolds. A man sidled up to my little car, introduced himself, and asked if I lived in Phoenix.

  “I don’t exactly live there,” I said. “But I own a ranch outside of town. We’re there a lot on weekends.”

  He then explained that he was with McDonald’s and they were selling franchises in and around Phoenix for twenty-five thousand dollars for each restaurant. McDonald’s wasn’t exactly unknown. At the time, there were about five hundred places fronted by golden arches across the country, boasting sales of one hundred million hamburgers. But I thought twenty-five grand for a burger joint was steep. So I passed.

  Fortunately, I had better judgment with Hollywood than hamburgers. Case in point: Divorce American Style. It was a sprawling, topical comedy written by Norman Lear, with his partner, Bud Yorkin, helming the production. Debbie and I played a husband and wife whose marriage was on the rocks after they’d carved out a successful life for themselves in the subu
rbs. In other words, they had achieved the American Dream, but at a cost—their relationship.

  The script, which also included parts filled by Jason Robards, Jean Simmons, Van Johnson, and Shelley Berman, was a hefty three hundred pages, more than double the standard length. The studio had told Norman the film couldn’t possibly be that long. His response was along the lines of: “It’s my story, and by God I’m going to make it the way I see it.”

  Norman’s wife, Frances, was a smart, opinionated woman who, I’m going to guess, gave him good source material on the ever-shifting state of marriage. But then everyone seemed to be going through something. Debbie was in the middle of her second marriage, and she was, in addition to being a strong woman herself, and a teller of colorful stories about Hollywood, also a handful who regularly informed me that I didn’t know anything about making movies.

  In a way, she may have been right. One day I did something terribly stupid. I was shooting a scene with actor Joe Flynn, best known as the captain on McHale’s Navy, and I was supposed to get drunk following a frustrating situation with my wife. After a handful of takes, I said, “What the hell, get me a real martini,” and three hours, numerous takes, and a couple of martinis later, I was smashed.

  So much so that Norman drove me home. All the way there he asked, “Why did you do that? Are you crazy?”

  I wasn’t the only casualty on the movie. One day we shot a scene with Pat Collins, who was known as “The Hip Hypnotist.” She was supposed to hypnotize Debbie, who then climbed onstage and performed a sexy dance. It was pretend, of course, except that cinematographer Conrad Hall, who later won an Oscar for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and several of the grips actually fell under Pat’s spell. Filming stopped while she brought them out of their trances.

  At lunch that day, Van Johnson asked Pat to help him quit smoking. They did one session and he never smoked again. I ran into him years later, though, and he was about fifty pounds heavier. He was still off cigarettes, he explained with a smile. But he had a new vice—Häagen-Dazs ice cream.

  From Divorce American Style, I went directly into the movie Fitzwilly, a light comedy costarring Get Smart’s Barbara Feldon. Despite Oscar-winner Delbert Mann’s direction, the movie flopped and, as film buffs can attest, will likely be remembered only as composer John Williams’s first collaboration with Marilyn and Alan Bergman.

  Next, I tried to make a movie out of the book Fear on Trial, John Henry Faulk’s nightmarish account of being blacklisted. For whatever reason, I was unable to get it off the ground. Even with Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin attached as producers, the subject matter may have been too controversial for the networks. In 1975, it was finally adapted as a TV movie with George C. Scott and William Devane in the starring roles.

  Then it was back to television for me, with my first special for CBS, which aired in April 1967. The network billed it as a homecoming, though it bore little resemblance to The Dick Van Dyke Show. Nor did it resemble a traditional variety show. I wanted to do something different and daring, instead of a theme and a bunch of guest stars, and the most different and daring idea I came up with was to challenge myself to do it all—or most of it, anyway.

  Some may have thought it indulgent.

  To me, it was fun.

  Loads of it. I opened the hour-long show with a zany, silent-film era–style montage of my trying to get to the studio after my car breaks down. I kayak, roller-skate, skateboard, and ride in a golf cart, finally arriving onstage clinging to my car bumper.

  I had only two guests. One was my old Merry Mutes partner, Phil Erickson, who leapt at the chance to take a week off from running his comedy club in Atlanta and reprise our old act on network television. In one bit, we pantomimed to the Bing Crosby–Mary Martin hit “Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie” (including the earthquake that punctuated our act nearly twenty years earlier), and in another titled “A Piece of Lint, or How Wars Begin,” we played two friends who get into a skirmish after one of them picks a piece of lint off the other.

  Whether the audience enjoyed it (and I think they did), we had a blast. Backstage we joked that it was nice knowing our timing was still intact after a fifteen-plus-year break, in case we needed a fallback.

  My other guest star was Ann Morgan Guilbert, who’d played Millie on The Dick Van Dyke Show. In one of my all-time favorite skits, I played “The Great Ludwig,” the world’s oldest magician, and Ann was my dedicated assistant and wife. The skit was supposed to go eight minutes, but funny business kept happening—as she levitated, for instance, I ad-libbed, “Why are there flies around you?” which made her crack up, and then I lost it. The tails of my tux were set on fire, which was planned, though I pretended not to notice, which inspired more shtick—and, well, it ran for nearly fifteen minutes.

  Ann and I left the stage with tears in our eyes from laughing so hard, the tails of my tux still smoking! We thought it was hysterical, brilliant, serendipitous comedy magic. Then the director came up to us and said, “We’re going to have to redo it.”

  My jaw dropped.

  “What?” I said. “What’s the problem?”

  “We saw the boom [microphone] in the shot for a few seconds,” he said.

  “We can’t re-create that stuff,” I said. “It just happened. We’ll have to use it as is, mistakes and all.”

  Stuff kept on happening, too. I played a flamenco dancer who crashes through a piano, a musician reinterpreting Bach as jazz on the harpsichord, and reworking Fiddler on the Roof’s signature number as “If I Were a Rich Man.” All in all, it was “a splendid showcase,” said the New York Times, and the Pittsburgh Gazette patted me on the back by writing “It should have been longer.”

  If only reaction to Divorce American Style had been as complimentary. It wasn’t the critics who blasted the movie, though. It was my fans. They felt I had betrayed them by taking on a role in which my character got drunk in one scene and dallied with a prostitute in another. The headline in the Los Angeles Times captured the shock: NEW VAN DYKE FILM CHANGES HIS IMAGE.

  I refused to see that as a problem since I wasn’t doing anything that crossed the line of decency I had set for myself.

  “Let’s face it,” I told Roger Ebert. “Debbie Reynolds isn’t Tammy anymore, and neither am I.”

  But the question nagging at me wasn’t “Who am I” as much as it was “Who did I want to be?”

  Like a lot of people when they reach their forties, I was trying to figure out the answer. Although my oldest child was headed to college and I still had three others at home, I was mulling a change of some sort. I didn’t know exactly what, but I envisioned myself retiring and, if not getting out of show business, then slowing down. In fact, in an interview with Redbook magazine, I mentioned that I might retire in six years and work with youth groups.

  Why?

  I was restless and felt the need for something more. As I explained, I was “looking for meaning and for value, personal value.”

  How could I feel that way when I had a wonderful wife, terrific children, a thriving career, a shelf full of awards, and strangers approaching me every day just to say they were fans?

  I suppose those are the nuanced inklings that precede midlife crises and keep psychiatrists in business. In order to deal with them before they turn into full-blown problems, though, you have to be attuned not just to the initial feelings, but also to the need to address them, and I wasn’t.

  For me it was business as usual. I went to work on the movie Never a Dull Moment, a comedy about an actor who gets into trouble after he’s mistaken for a gangster. My pal Jerry Paris directed, and we laughed every day on the set. The picture also allowed me to work with the great character actor Slim Pickens, who showed me how to throw a punch, and screen icon Edward G. Robinson, who grinned at every person who wanted to shake his hand.

  It turned out he was stone deaf.

  One day I asked if he’d ever tried a hearing aid. Grinning, he pulled out a tiny sack and let me look inside. It con
tained five hearing aids.

  “None of them work,” he said.

  “Why don’t you get them fixed?” I asked.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Can’t hear you.”

  From there I went straight into Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a movie that I repeatedly turned down. Based on Ian Fleming’s only children’s novel, it’s the story of an eccentric inventor whose magical automobile is coveted by foreigners with nefarious intentions. The movie’s producer, Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, known for his tight-fisted control of the James Bond movie franchise, desperately wanted to re-team Julie Andrews and me.

  I can’t speak for Julie’s reasons, but both of us turned him down. I thought the script had too many holes and unanswered questions. However, each time I said no, Cubby came back with more money. I’m talking serious money—more than seven figures, which in those days was mind-boggling, plus a percentage of the back end, which I never counted on.

  I still wanted to say no, but my manager reminded me that not too many years earlier I was scrambling to win two hundred dollars on Pantomime Quiz. Although I was in a different position now, I understood—and just in case I didn’t, he let me know if I turned down this much money I was basically declaring myself officially crazy.

  After one more round, I finally agreed.

  In the interim, Cubby hired the remarkable Sherman brothers to write the score, as well as my favorite choreographers, Marc Breaux and Dee Dee Wood. While both additions pleased me greatly, I made one last stipulation. I didn’t want to reprise my English accent, which I’d struggled famously with in Mary Poppins. Not a problem. My character was suddenly an eccentric American inventor.

  In lieu of Julie, the role of Truly Scrumptious went to another Yank, Sally Ann Howes, who truly was. From a show business family, she arrived with a long list of stellar credits, starting at age twelve when she worked with Vivien Leigh in the film Anna Karenina.