Dick Van Dyke

by My Lucky Life In;Out of Show Business

  “Hello, Dickie,” he said.

  I could not have been happier as I shook the hand of my idol. He’d had a slight stroke, but I never saw any noticeable effects as he led me inside.

  My visit was everything I could have hoped for. I tried to take it all in without being rude. His Academy Award was displayed on top of his TV set. He had a small typewriter on a modest desk that was covered with fan mail, which he answered personally, though he acknowledged being months behind. I asked if he still wrote sketches or ideas, and he answered, with his famous nod, “Yes, Dickie, I do, when they come to me.”

  As a lifelong fan, I couldn’t resist asking him questions, and he generously let me ask whatever I wanted. I asked him about my favorite movie of his, Way Out West. As he recalled some of his scenes with Oliver Hardy—whom he still referred to as Babe—playing prospectors trying to find gold, he sounded as if they had made the film a few years earlier, not in 1937.

  Stan also confirmed that he did not like scenes in which he had to cry, even though they turned into his signature. To get Ollie to do his slow burn, Stan took advantage of his partner’s love of golf. Knowing that Oliver always wanted to finish the day in time to play at least nine holes, he saved for last the scenes where Ollie lost his temper and did his slow burn. As soon as he noticed his partner getting anxious about missing his tee time, he shot them.

  “I hated to cry, though,” Stan told me. “I didn’t think it was funny, either.”

  Of course, Stan thought Oliver was the funniest guy in the world. That, he said, was the secret to their partnership. Ollie made him laugh. I nodded. He didn’t need to say any more. I understood perfectly.

  It was, I explained, why I had become a fan, and in some part why I had wanted to get into show business. Stan made me laugh, and I had wanted to have the same effect on other people.

  Before I left, I invited Stan to come see us shoot The Dick Van Dyke Show. We were getting ready to shoot “The Sam Pomerantz Scandals,” an episode that featured the cast putting on a variety show to benefit a friend, and it included a sketch with me and actor Henry Calvin as Laurel and Hardy. I explained that everyone on the show would be honored if he were able to attend. But he politely declined, saying he wasn’t up to it.

  I didn’t push. I knew that he never went out in public.

  After the “Pomerantz” episode aired in early March 1963, I called Stan up and asked for his opinion. Knowing that he was going to watch, I had gone to great lengths to be as meticulous as humanly possible to get every detail right, and I thought I did a pretty good job, too. Stan agreed. But then he spent the next forty minutes reviewing my performance and giving me notes. He said that he had always used paper clips as cuff links. He also said that he always took the heels off his shoes, which was what gave him his trademark stance and walk. He went on and on, talking about the smallest of small details. It was the best lesson in comedy I had ever heard. I wish I had taken notes.

  “You did a good job,” he said. “It was the best impersonation I have seen.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “There is one more thing,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “The hat was a little off,” he said.

  “I knew it,” I said. “Yours and Ollie’s had flat brims. Mine curled slightly. I tried to find one like yours. I even tried ironing the brim on my derby.”

  He laughed.

  “Young man, why didn’t you just ask me?” he said. “You could have used mine.”

  “Oh my God,” I said.

  “Well, God bless,” he said, and then he hung up.

  On February 23, 1965, Stan died after suffering a heart attack. Reporters came to my house for comments. As I stood in the front yard giving interviews, a sprinkler burst, causing me to jump and dance around while getting soaked. I was sure it was Stan’s doing, one last funny bit. He left his derby to me, though it was never found among his belongings.

  Still, I was immensely touched. To me, it was like the passing of the baton, both an honor and a responsibility.

  His funeral at Forest Lawn brought out Hollywood comedy legends Buster Keaton, Hal Roach Jr., Patsy Kelly, and Alan Mowbray, among others, but at the request of Stan’s wife, I delivered the eulogy, which I began by stating what to me was the obvious: “Laurel and Hardy are together again—and the halls of heaven must be ringing with divine laughter.”

  Stan did not want his funeral to be a solemn occasion and in fact had written a warning to all of us: “If anyone at my funeral has a long face, I’ll never speak to you again.” Buster Keaton reportedly told people that Stan was the funniest of all the great film comics, funnier than Chaplin, funnier than even himself. I could not have agreed more.

  “In the wee hours of one of his last mornings on Earth,” I said in my eulogy, “a nurse came into Stan’s room to give him emergency aid. Stan looked up and said, ‘You know what? I’d lot rather be skiing.’ The nurse said, ‘Do you ski, Mr. Laurel?’ He said, ‘No! But I’d lot rather be skiing than doing this.’

  “Stan once remarked that Chaplin and Lloyd made all the big pictures and he and Babe made all the little cheap ones. ‘But they tell me our little cheap ones have been seen by more people through the years than all the big ones. They must have seen how much love we put into them.’

  “And that’s what put Stan Laurel head and shoulders above all the rest of them—as an artist, and as a man. He put into his work that one special ingredient. He was a master comedian and he was a master artist—but he put in that one ingredient that can only come from the human being, and that was love. Love for his work, love for life, love for his audience—and how he loved that public. They were never squares or jerks to Stan Laurel.

  “Some of his contemporaries didn’t criticize Stan favorably back in the thirties. Some of his contemporaries took great delight in showing their tools, and their skills, their methods on the screen; they were applauded because the audience could see their art.

  “Stan was never really applauded for his art because he took too much care to hide it, to conceal the hours of hard creative work that went into his movies. He didn’t want you to see that—he just wanted you to laugh, and you did!

  “You could never get him to pontificate about comedy. He was asked thousands of times, all through his life, to analyze comedy. ‘What’s funny?’ he was always asked, and he always said: ‘How do I know? Can you analyze it? Can anybody? All I know is just how to make people laugh.’

  “That’s all he knew!”

  I ended with the recitation of a poem of unknown authorship that I had come across years earlier, “The Clown’s Prayer.”

  God bless all clowns.

  Who star in the world with laughter,

  Who ring the rafters with flying jest,

  Who make the world spin merry on its way.

  God bless all the clowns.

  So poor the world would be,

  Lacking their piquant touch, hilarity.

  The belly laughs, the ringing lovely.

  God bless all the clowns.

  Give them a long, good life,

  Make bright their way—they’re a race apart.

  Alchemists most, who turn their hearts’ pain,

  Into a dazzling jest to lift the heart.

  God bless all clowns.

  I met Buster Keaton the same way I did Stan. I found out that someone I knew had his phone number and one afternoon I called him up. His wife, Eleanor, answered and put Buster on. After a short talk, he invited me to lunch. He lived in Woodland Hills, about ten minutes from my Encino house. He had a beautiful piece of property, maybe a quarter of an acre.

  While Stan was very much an English gentleman, he was still gregarious and friendly. Buster was the opposite. He was extremely shy. After meeting him, in fact, I was surprised I had been invited out. His wife greeted me at the door and chatted with me in the kitchen. After a while, I saw Buster through the kitchen window. He was walking around outside. His wife smiled the p
atient smile of a woman who knew him well.

  “He’ll come to you,” she said. “Give him time.”

  Sure enough, he finally entered the kitchen. He had on his flat hat and was playing a ukulele, singing, “Oh Mr. Moon, Carolina moon, won’t you shine on me.” He was more comfortable in character, as the showman, or talking about his work. I asked if he remembered the bit where he put one foot on the table and then the other and we saw him suspended in midair before he fell. Not only did he remember, at age sixty-eight, he did it for me, then and there.

  Way out in the back he had a little picnic table where we had lunch. A miniature railroad ran through the yard. Buster made hot dogs for us and ran them out to the table on the train. He got a kick out of that. On another one of my visits, we were in the kitchen when his dog, a giant St. Bernard named Elmer, sauntered through the back door, looked up at Buster, then at me, and let out a loud and clear meow.

  “How the heck did you get him to do that?” I asked.

  Buster opened the dog’s mouth and pulled out a newborn kitten. It was soaking wet from the dog’s slobber.

  “It’s in his mouth like a wad of chewing tobacco,” I said.

  Buster laughed.

  “He found the kitty and has been taking care of it,” he said. “He carries it around like that.”

  I also learned Buster was something of a pool shark. He had a specially built table and custom-made pool cues. We played a couple games and he massacred me. Given that the cues had his name on them, who would have expected any other result? In fact, he ended up leaving those cues to me after his death in 1966.

  I gave the eulogy at his funeral as well. All the same people from Stan’s funeral the previous year were present again, everyone except Buster.

  My connection to the older stars extended to Harold Lloyd, who wanted me to play him in a movie, and a number of actors from Hollywood’s Golden Age whom I met on visits to the Motion Picture Home, where characters like Babe London treated me to stories about Charlie Chaplin, W. C. Fields, and Harry Langdon. I also met one of the Keystone Kops, a man in his eighties whose hobby was making costume jewelry. One of his customers turned out to be a wealthy widow. He ended up marrying her and living out his life in luxury.

  Talk about happy endings.

  16

  UPSETS AND GOOD-BYES

  In the spring of 1965, I made Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N., a silly Disney movie about a Navy pilot who ends up on a deserted island with a native girl and a space program–trained chimp for companionship. The picture was pure family fun—and a good time for me personally for a reason I never expected: I fell into a deep friendship with the chimp.

  We shot a good portion of the movie in Kauai and made a family vacation out of it. Walt and his wife, Lillian, came over, too. We stayed at a hotel whose accommodations looked like grass-covered huts. Walt and Lilly had the room above ours, and I heard him hacking and coughing all night. Yet after dinner, as we told stories in the bar, he smoked like a chimney, and drank pretty well, too, as did I in those days.

  My partner and manager, Byron Paul, was directing the movie, and before shooting on the first day, my costar Nancy Kwan, a beautiful actress originally trained as a classical ballerina, took him aside and asked, “Mr. Van Dyke is not going to bother me, is he?” Evidently she had been in another project where someone had spent the entire production chasing after her.

  “No, Mr. Van Dyke is safe,” Byron told her.

  She needn’t have worried, as Mr. Van Dyke was occupied with his other costar. A jungle set was built near the beach, and on the first morning of work, as I walked onto the set holding a Styrofoam cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other, I was greeted by Dinky, the 130-pound chimp who was the real star of the movie. Seated in his personal director’s chair, which was near mine, he crooked his index finger and motioned me toward him.

  “Hello, how are you?” I said.

  Apparently he felt the same way I did. After a slight roll of his eyes, he reached for my coffee and cigarette, then drank the coffee and smoked the cigarette. I looked at his trainer.

  “He shouldn’t smoke,” I said.

  “Neither should you,” the trainer said.

  From then on, I brought Dinky a cup of coffee every morning and lit a cigarette for him. I might as well have asked him how he slept, as we started our days so similarly. It was as if we could actually talk to each other. Soon Dinky and I started to have lunch together. He ate with a fork and used a napkin. For a chimp, his manners were impeccable. So was his sense of humor.

  One day I saw him resting cross-legged on a log. I noticed he had taken off the chain that was normally around his ankle and put it around the leg of his trainer, Stewart. I swear he caught my eye and gave me a look that said, Don’t tell. All of a sudden he took off and ran up a tree, then beat his chest and laughed.

  I don’t know any other way to describe it, but Dinky was chuckling at his own joke.

  I was charmed. He started to have a thing for me, too. He would pick at my hair the way chimps do with one another. I would get down on the ground to make it easier for him. When he finished, I went through his.

  He developed an obsession with my watch. I almost expected him to know how to tell time—that’s how bright this chimp was.

  In the movie, he played golf and he was incredible. We also played poker. One day he was sick. I think he had a temperature of 103. In the scene, we were playing cards. He was supposed to be able to see my cards in the shaving mirror behind me. Amazingly, he looked up and smiled on cue. But the second that Byron said Cut, he would groan and lay down, ill.

  I turned to the trainer and Byron. I wanted the trainer to help him and Byron to praise him. This chimp was a pro.

  The downside was that when he misbehaved, his trainer took him away and hit him. I hated that. In one scene, I came sliding down a coconut tree as planned, but I startled Dinky, who was seated at the base of the tree. I saw all of his hair suddenly stand on end. So did Stewart. He balled up a chain he kept with him and threw it at the chimp. He saw the look on my face. It was one of surprise and anger.

  “He would’ve attacked you,” he explained.

  I never got used to that part of working with the chimp. To me, he was a doll. I forgot that he was an animal being cajoled, if not forced, into performing acts that did not come naturally to him. Later I heard he was doing a Tarzan movie in Mexico and bit an actor in the face. I was told the actor picked him up and pinched him, and in turn Dinky nipped his face. That was the end of his film career.

  He was ten years old, so he was pretty close to retirement, anyway. After I heard he’d been placed in the Los Angeles Zoo, I went there to see him, knowing he had been raised in a house his whole life—he had never been in a cage. When I got there, he was sitting in the middle of a large circular pen. It was outdoors, but it was still a cage—and I saw the effect it had on him.

  I called out his name. He looked up and recognized me immediately. He ran over as close as he could. I could tell from the expression on his face that he was asking me to get him out of there. It looked like he was saying, I’m in here with a bunch of monkeys. Take me home.

  The whole visit upset me. I knew he thought that I had come to take him out, which I would have if it had been possible.

  I had to walk away. I couldn’t look back.

  There was a similar feeling of sadness when it came time to acknowledge the end of The Dick Van Dyke Show.

  In late summer of 1965, all of us began the fifth season knowing it was our last. The public may not have realized it yet, but we knew.

  Carl felt strongly that he would get stale after five years of writing and rewriting thirty-nine episodes a season, and so would the show. He thought all of us would lose the spring in our step. I think he also recognized that all of us, through our collaboration and hard work, had produced a TV classic, and he feared that if repetition and fatigue set in, it could tarnish the show’s magical reputation. He also may ha
ve been ready to do something else.

  The same may have been true of Mary. She may have been ready to move beyond Laura Petrie. I don’t know. But I doubt it.

  Was the show getting stale?

  No.

  Repetitive?

  No.

  Was I ready to leave?

  No.

  I loved the show and the people. It wasn’t work. I played myself. Between the series and a movie every summer, I had a great setup. As a performer, nothing topped the excitement and energy of working in front of a live audience. If it wasn’t the stage, a weekly show like ours was as close of an approximation as one could get. We stopped only if there was a mistake or a scene change. Otherwise the studio audience let us know if we were funny or not.

  If there was discussion about continuing the show without Carl, I didn’t hear it. Ownership issues aside, I couldn’t imagine anyone considering The Dick Van Dyke Show without Carl Reiner. Although it was a collaborative effort, everything about the show stemmed from his endlessly and enviably fascinating, funny, and fertile brain and trickled down to the rest of us. We all knew it, and as each of us said in our own ways, we appreciated every aspect of having been party to this chapter of television genius.

  The final season began airing in September. Two months later, CBS put out a press release informing the rest of the world what we already knew—that this would be the show’s swan song, its final season. I got steamed when the New York Times attributed the decision to me. It wasn’t true. Not wanting the disappointment of millions of viewers pinned on me, I did a series of interviews with other reporters wherein I tried to explain I wasn’t behind the decision while still holding the party line, namely that we wanted “to quit while we were still on top.”

  It was like yelling into the wind, though. The writers still stared back with perplexed looks, as I’m sure our fans did, too, asking yet again, “So why are you all stopping a hit show?”