My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business

by Dick Van Dyke

  Mad and disappointed with myself, I called home and made a tear-filled confession to Margie. Then I did what any other alcoholic must do if he or she is determined not to succumb to this insidious disease: I acknowledged my slip as evidence that I was powerless over my addiction and started my sobriety again from day one.

  Midway through the second season we had an uncharacteristically rocky moment when CBS rejected an episode Carl wrote (“Lt. Preston of the 4th Calvary”) because it contained a scene in which Dick and Jenny’s daughter Annie peeks in their bedroom and sees them having sex. The audience did not see anything other than Annie looking in the door, and in the next scene, after noticing Annie acting peculiarly, we wonder if in fact she saw us making love.

  We have a talk with her, and in what I thought was a beautifully written moment, I explain sex to Annie as an intimate physical expression of love. My character goes on and on, as he was wont to do, and he is still talking when Annie gets up and starts to leave the room. Since he’s not finished, Dick asks if she has any questions.

  “No,” she says. “But you sure looked silly.”

  I thought that was the perfect response. The scene was smart, really sensitive, and funny—a classic example of Carl Reiner’s trademark touch. Today no one would question the propriety of such a scene. But back then the network thought it was too risqué and the show was shelved except in Canada, where it played without complaint.

  Incensed, Carl vowed to never again work with CBS (though he appeared in several specials in the early 1980s).

  I delivered a shocker of my own to the network when at the end of the third season I met with CBS executives and said that, despite a bump in ratings, I did not want to do a fourth. I was finished. Out of the previous three seasons, I explained, I counted only about seven episodes that I thought achieved the standard that I envisioned.

  “I want my fellow actors to be able to work again,” I said in a joking tone. “If we keep going, I might ruin their careers.”

  Once the series wrapped production, Margie and I fled to Coronado, a secluded jewel of an island just outside of San Diego, for a long, much-needed vacation. I decompressed and she soaked up the scenery. We took long walks along the Pacific, stared at the waves, went sailing, and talked endlessly as if we were getting to know each other all over again.

  Indeed, we were trying to do exactly that. If either of us realized deep down that we might have started to grow apart, we did not acknowledge it. We were high-school sweethearts who had pledged togetherness for the rest of our lives. We had four children. And so much history together, so many stories.

  And yet.

  Deep down.

  The knowledge that people change.

  Margie wanted me to retire.

  I wasn’t ready to stop work. Even though I held the record for talking about retiring and then changing course, what was I going to do?

  “Enjoy life,” Margie said.

  “I do,” I said.

  “Take up hobbies, like me,” she said.

  “I already have one,” I said. “It’s my job.”

  A couple of weeks on the beach, however, put us in a more like-minded, sympathetic frame of mind and we decided to move there. In AA they call that a geographic cure—instead of facing your problems, you simply change locations. As Margie looked for homes, I started work on a movie.

  I did not expect to jump back into work, but the ABC movie The Morning After turned out to be one of the best and most powerful pieces of acting in my career, as well as one of the most personal. Based on Jack Weiner’s novel, the script told the story of an oil company public-relations man’s battle with alcoholism, something he first refuses to admit, believing he is merely a “social drinker,” but then struggles with after seeking help.

  It was unflinchingly raw and honest, and for that reason, I think, it was powerful, disturbing, and provocative.

  I knew that I had to do it.

  At the time, only a few people guessed I had a problem with booze. So it was ironic when producer David Wolper sent me the script. When I asked why me, I was told that besides having a deal with the network, I fit the type they wanted for the lead: an average, middle-aged, middle-class family man.

  Before production began, I told director Richard Heffron about my battle with alcoholism. His eyes nearly bugged out of his head. But I could not have asked for better treatment or direction. We worked beautifully together. He would lay out a scene, then say, “Dick, you know more about this than I do, so just do it the way you see it, the way you feel it.” My costars Lynn Carlin and Linda Lavin were also supportive.

  We shot that winter in and around L.A., including at the veterans hospital in Brentwood. There, working amid former servicemen who were dealing with addictions of various types, I was moved by the importance of the story we were trying to tell and decided to go public with my own story, giving Marilyn Beck the exclusive. Her eyes bugged out, too.

  Fans were accepting when the news hit. I received thousands of letters. People understood that those who clowned around and made them laugh often had a dark, private side.

  The movie aired on February 13, 1974, and both ratings and reaction were strong. AP TV critic Jay Sharbutt’s review sounded like a summary of my personal tale. “It’s not just a tale about the downfall of a corporate lush,” he wrote. “Rather, it’s a chilling, sip-by-sip study, stirred with a heavy swizzle stick for dramatic emphasis, of how easily any ‘social drinker’ can slide into alcoholism without realizing he or she can’t handle any kind of drinking.”

  The “strong and welcome antidote to the usual run of TV movies about happy people with happy problems” earned me an Emmy nomination. Although I lost to Hal Holbrook for his work in another extremely powerful TV movie, The Pueblo Affair, I savored the impact of my work. Only the National Association of Alcoholism took exception. They had wanted the ending changed so the guy made it. I argued that the movie would not have had the same impact if it ended happily ever after.

  As I knew all too well, the disease did not work that way. Unbeknownst to anyone, on two occasions during production—this was after I had come forward in the press about my alcoholism—I went back to the hotel where I was staying and drank. Both slips were after shooting scenes that, at the end of the day, left me feeling depressed and empty.

  After each one, I got sick and swore, Never again, though that promise was easier said than kept.

  Margie and I bought a beachfront home on Coronado Island with a spectacular view of the ocean. I also purchased a thirty-three-foot Ranger sloop, which occupied so much of my time that I referred to it as my mistress. From the moment I hoisted my first sail the boat became my escape. I loved being on the water, feeling the sun, the wind, and the salt, and most of all the freedom. It released everything in me that I couldn’t otherwise express.

  I sailed every day, sometimes up the coast, sometimes straight out into the ocean. I studied navigation, the weather, and ocean currents. I was always on the lookout for something, something I couldn’t find.

  For a while, I talked of journeying to Fiji—not to live. The commute was too far. “But I’d like to try the lifestyle,” I said jokingly.

  The entire family was trying out lifestyles. One day when Margie and I were on Coronado, our eldest son called. After graduating from law school, Chris had moved to Salem, Oregon, gotten married, and most recently made us grandparents with the birth of his daughter, Jessica. Now he wanted to plant roots. He had his heart set on a one-hundred-year-old home and asked if I’d loan him the money for a down payment.

  “Sure,” I said. “No problem.”

  That same afternoon we got a call from our other son, Barry, a great-looking young man who had married a beautiful girl he met when both of them were ushering at a theater. He had also found a house and wanted to borrow money to put down.

  Again I said sure, no problem. But then I turned to Margie and said, “We aren’t answering the phone the rest of the day.”

&n
bsp; A short time later Stacy moved to San Francisco with her trumpet-player boyfriend, who used to sit in our living room watching Kung Fu and muttering, “Heavy duty.” Margie and I constantly rolled our eyes. What did that mean? We did our best to savor the relatively simple concerns of our baby, Carrie Beth, whose big worries, at fourteen, were homework and the prom. I marveled at the equanimity of our fourth-born. By the time she arrived, our attitude as parents was more cavalier than with the first or second, and I think it made Carrie Beth a calmer person. She was an angel of a girl, an old soul with a preternatural ability to read people that made me think she should become a psychologist.

  I could have used one. As my children were finding themselves, I was going through the same thing, a sort of adult-onset confusion that had me asking many of the same questions: What was I going to do with my life? What was going to make me happy? Why wasn’t I happy?

  Like it or not, life is a never-ending confrontation with bouts of uncertainty and chapters of self-discovery. As I was about to learn, it is a series of fine messes that we enter, some wittingly, and others not.

  22

  ANOTHER FINE MESS

  When my daughter Stacy was fourteen, she discovered that she had a beautiful singing voice. We discovered it at the same time.

  It was early morning, and my wife and I heard a crystal-clear melodic contralto note sweep through the house, going from room to room and brightening everything along its path. After looking at each other, Margie and I followed the sound into Stacy’s bathroom and found her staring at herself in disbelief as she sang that wonderful note.

  Singing lessons followed, and in April 1975 I spirited Stacy away from her lazy boyfriend in San Francisco and put her in my latest ABC special, The Confessions of Dick Van Dyke. She sang “South Rampart Street” with guest star Michele Lee and me, and then the two of us traded lyrics on “Mockingbird.” After that, her voice was no longer a secret and she got involved with musical theater in Scottsdale. But not everything was out in the open.

  I followed that special with a pilot for ABC called MacLeish and the Rented Kid, a story inspired, I assumed, by the movie A Thousand Clowns, as the updated plot felt similar. I played a political cartoonist content with living on my own until I agreed to care for the eleven-year-old son of a war correspondent friend who was sent overseas. I liked the way it came out, but the network had problems with it though they wanted to go forward.

  After the frustrations of my last series, though, I was gun-shy about getting into anything that was not perfect and I nixed the series, walking away from my overall deal with the network. While going through that process, I found myself talking about the ups and downs of the business to my agent’s secretary, Michelle Triola. I liked her. She was easy to talk to, she understood me, she was interested, and she knew the business.

  All the things Margie didn’t like, Michelle did, and gradually it got to where I was inventing excuses to call Sol so that I could speak with Michelle. I looked forward to our conversations. Michelle was an opinionated, feisty, smart woman. She wore her dark hair up and large glasses that gave her cute, girlish face a hip sophistication. She was part of the business and liked talking about every aspect of it, especially the people. She seemed to know or have met everyone.

  For good reason, too. Michelle had been around. She had studied theater at UCLA before working as a singer and dancer. She was married briefly to actor Skip Ward, best known for his part in The Night of the Iguana. Her father took her to Rome to get that marriage annulled. While in Rome, Michelle stumbled upon a jazz festival, introduced herself to the headliner, the great pianist Oscar Peterson, and ended up singing a set with him and his trio, something she talked about for the rest of her life. I would have talked about it, too, had I sung with him.

  It was so typical of Michelle. She collected stories the same way she collected friends. She had tons of both. And once touched by her sense of humor and enormous heart, few let go, including her ex, Skip Ward. Later, at the end of his life, he was down on his luck and we supported him. But when I took an interest in Michelle, she was a demi-celebrity on the front pages and in the gossip columns for the drama she was going through in the courts.

  At the time, Michelle was suing actor Lee Marvin, with whom she had a six-year relationship between 1964 and 1970. They had met on the movie Ship of Fools and begun living together shortly after. She gave up her singing and acting career to be with him, and in turn he promised to support her for the rest of her life. It was as if they were married.

  But then he dumped her, leaving Michelle with nothing, and she sued for the same rights a wife would have under California law. Hers was a groundbreaking case that received attention nationwide from all sorts of special-interest groups and individuals. Her attorney, Marvin Mitchelson, who coined the term palimony, vowed to take her case to the Supreme Court if necessary, which seemed likely that summer after it was rejected first by California’s Superior Court and then by the Second District Court of Appeals.

  I provided a friendly ear. When I was in town, I would call the office and end up chatting with her. On occasion, we talked at night or arranged to meet for dinner. Then, when I needed support, I found myself turning to her.

  It was that summer, around the time the courts were deciding against Michelle, when Jerry called one day and said our father had turned gravely ill and I needed to get on a plane. This was a day I knew was going to come but wanted desperately to avoid.

  My parents had been living with Jerry in Las Vegas for about ten years, ever since my father, at sixty, lost his job at a packing and moving company to a younger man. He was unable to find another one. For the past few months, he had been battling emphysema, the result most likely of forty-plus years of smoking cigarettes. When I arrived at the hospital in Las Vegas, I found both my father and mother sitting in the lobby, crying.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked, alarmed.

  My father could not answer.

  “We just saw the doctor,” my mother replied between deep breaths. “He said, ‘Look, you’re an old man. You’ve got emphysema. You’re going to die.’ ”

  “He’s going to die?”

  She nodded.

  I looked over at my father. He was shaking from nerves. Tears were streaming down the sides of his face. Bad news is one thing, but to break it to a person that bluntly and that insensitively was unconscionable.

  I flew into a rage and ran around the hospital screaming for the doctor who had examined my father. I was going to beat the shit out of him. I had never been this upset in my entire life. I covered as much of that hospital as I could and never found the doctor. He was either hiding or he had left.

  We decided to move my father to a hospital in Phoenix where they specialized in treating emphysema. He was cognizant of everything that was happening, and although he was dying, he was still himself, a charmer and a jokester. As he was carried on a stretcher onboard the chartered plane taking us to Phoenix, he turned to the pilot and flight attendant and in a suave British accent said, “Hello, I’m David Niven.”

  On the night he died, I was with my mother in a motel near the hospital. Apparently my father’s heart began to race and he asked the nurse if she could get it down. She said, “We’re working on it, Mr. Van Dyke.” He passed away a few hours later. We took his body back to Danville for burial. We started out flying on a commercial airline, but on a layover in Dallas I thought, What the heck am I doing? I was distraught and so was my family. So I chartered a plane to take us the rest of the way.

  We deplaned at the tiny airport in Danville and stood on the tarmac, tired and unsure what to do next. Jerry put his arm around my shoulder.

  “Let’s take a cab to the hotel,” he said. “It’s my treat since you got the jet.”

  We cracked up and knew my father would have laughed the loudest if he had heard.

  There was more shuffling to be done. Soon after, my father-in-law died and we moved my mother and my mother-in-law into a l
ovely apartment near our place on Coronado. As housemates, they were the female version of the odd couple. They were either laughing hysterically or fighting. We were constantly mediating one issue or another. Between such real-life details, my nascent feelings for Michelle, and my marriage, I felt I needed to spend a while on the beach figuring out my life.

  But suddenly I found myself listening to Bob Einstein and his writing-producing partner, Allan Blye, both veteran writer-producers of the Smothers Brothers and Sonny and Cher variety shows, pitch me an idea for a variety show. Despite asking myself why the hell I wanted to do a TV series when I could spend all day doing nothing, I heard myself, for reasons I did not want to analyze, say, “Let’s try it.”

  The one-hour special, called Van Dyke & Company, aired in October 1975 and featured guest stars Carl Reiner, Gabe Kaplan, Ike and Tina Turner, plus a surprise appearance from Mary Tyler Moore. My young executive producers and their crew of hip writers, including Steve Martin, guided me more in the direction of Saturday Night Live than Your Show of Shows, and it paid off. Kay Gardella of the New York Daily News praised the special as “skillfully crafted” and “fresh and offbeat.” Even an admitted non-fan of mine, the New York Times’ John O’Connor, called it “pleasantly agreeable.”

  Buoyed by the positive reaction, NBC execs decided to put Van Dyke & Company on the fall schedule as a weekly series. The network seemed confident we could find an audience in the heart of the family hour; I was hopeful, but not as sure since we were opposite three popular shows—The Waltons; Welcome Back, Kotter; and Barney Miller. My manager called that a “suicide” time slot. Then at the last minute we were moved. I wanted to believe this was good news.

  “No, it’s worse than suicide,” Byron said.

  “Worse?” I asked. “What could be worse than suicide?”

  “Thursdays at ten P.M.,” he said. “Nobody is watching a show like yours at that hour.”