Dick Van Dyke

by My Lucky Life In;Out of Show Business

  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.

  Cubby Broccoli wanted an extravaganza, as was his way, and he spent more than double what it cost to make Mary Poppins to ensure he got one. Spanning ten months, production was headquartered at London’s Pinewood Studios, but also touched down in Bavaria and the South of France. For some reason, my hair curled as soon as I arrived in London and few of the English crew even recognized me. In fact, as the film’s opening racetrack scene was shot, the assistant director walked through a crowd of extras, handing out flags they were supposed to wave as the cars passed, and he gave one to me, too.

  “But I’m in the movie,” I said.

  “Not yet, mate,” he replied. “But you will be if you wave that pennant when the camera is pointed at you.”

  I limped through my actual opening scene, having injured myself while shooting the dance routine for the song “Toot Sweets,” an over-the-top production that took three weeks and involved an army of dancers, singers, musicians, and one hundred dogs. It was my stupidity. While trying to keep up with all the twenty-year-old dancers, I did not warm up properly and paid the price.

  It turned out I had a torn calf muscle, but the doctor gave me a more serious diagnosis, arthritis. According to him, my arthritis was so pervasive that he predicted I would be in a wheelchair within five to seven years.

  I did not let that bleak prognosis get in my way, but I did have to put any dancing on hold until my leg healed. The most demanding number we shot also turned out to be one of my favorites, the song “Me Ol’ Bamboo.” Marc and Dee Dee ended this exuberant dance by making us leap over our sticks and roll directly into a somersault. It looked great. But it took twenty-three takes for everyone to execute the moves correctly and at the same time.

  As I did the final one, I felt my cuff catch on my heel. I thought, Uh-oh, and pushed through with all my might. I did not care if I ripped my pants and pulled them halfway down my legs. I could not have done a twenty-fourth take.

  We began working in and outside of London, and we spent quite a while there, enough time that Margie and I attended a royal screening of the new James Bond film, You Only Live Twice. I stood in a receiving line with Sean Connery and others, waiting nervously to meet the Queen of England, all the while reminding myself of the etiquette briefing we’d received, the most important rule of which was to not speak until the queen spoke to us.

  Not that it mattered. At the moment she stepped toward me, her eyes making contact with mine and a smile forming on her lips, Jerry Lewis, standing behind ropes to the side of me, called out, “Hey, Dick!” I turned and said, “What?” as the queen stood in front of me, waiting to be acknowledged. I was mortified and have never gotten even with Jerry for causing that ill-timed distraction. Nevertheless, the queen greeted me warmly and said, “We very much enjoy your television show.”

  Soon after that June gala we relocated to the South of France due to a lack of sunshine in England. We’d sat around all day for weeks at a time, waiting for the sun to break through the clouds so we could shoot a scene, but the clouds refused to give way. Finally they said this was going to have to do. If you pay careful attention to the movie, you will see us driving through what is supposed to be the English countryside, except there are vineyards all over the place.

  The car itself, aka Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, was hard to drive. It had a four-cylinder engine that coughed and sputtered in real life, and the turning radius of a battleship, but we still had a lot of fun in it.

  Off-camera, I enjoyed myself even more. In France, where we took over a resort in St. Tropez, Margie and the kids and I went on long hikes through the countryside. When we switched locations to Rothenberg, Germany, I took guitar lessons and spent every Sunday afternoon in the town square listening to musicians play Bach, which sounded beautiful in the outdoors. They played with a fervor that still puts me back in that square every time I hear one of the Brandenburg concertos.

  Midway through production, I became acquainted with John A. T. Robinson, best known as the Bishop of Woolwich. I had written him a fan letter, explaining that I was an American actor who admired his book Honest to God, and I would love to meet him if he had time while I was in Europe. He contacted me right away and we had such a good time talking that we decided to cohost a thirty-minute radio program once a week.

  The show might have been better if we’d been of differing opinions, but I agreed with his thesis that God was not an all-powerful “cosmic superman” looking down from the penthouse as much as He was Love. The bishop put it more eloquently in his book when he wrote, “Assertions about God are in the last analysis assertions about Love.”

  As far as I was concerned, that cut to the very heart of faith, belief, and the way to live. If knowing, finding, and giving love were the paths to knowing God, I thought people could get there without much additional doctrine. Maybe an occasional push back in line or a gentle slap on the wrist. Otherwise it was pretty clear and simple.

  That did not, by any means, conclude that life itself would be simple—and it wasn’t. As we shuttled between London and the South of France, Margie suffered through a series of health problems that finally got the best of her when a local doctor surmised she might have cervical cancer. I didn’t need to hear anything else. After months of being there with me, she took the kids back home and underwent a series of medical tests.

  When I told Cubby that I needed to go home and be with my wife while she had more exams, he understood and wished me well. He said that he’d do the same if he were in my position. Before I left, he even put his arm around me and said, “Don’t worry. We’ll shoot around you.”

  I was gone only a few days. Margie’s tests came back negative and I jetted back to Europe only to have my agent inform me that Cubby had docked me eighty thousand dollars for missing work. Furious, I didn’t want to talk to him after that, which wasn’t good since I was already unimpressed with the director, Ken Hughes. Quite simply, I thought he was wrong for the picture. One day I heard him grouse that he had to rewrite Roald Dahl’s script. Who rewrote Roald Dahl?

  Soon after I heard him swear in front of the children one too many times, and I finally had words with him. Above all else, it showed that he had no feel for the family-oriented material. As for the material in general, let’s just say that enough scenes were done on the fly or redone at the last minute that I lost faith that the version that finally showed up in theaters would match anyone’s expectations, and I think I was right.

  As far as I was concerned, in the end, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang suffered from everything I feared at the outset, lack of story and substance. I know the film is beloved by many, but for me it lacked the magic of Mary Poppins, which its producer had hoped to emulate. What saved Chitty, at least in my opinion, were the brilliant Sherman brothers, whose title song earned them another Oscar nomination, and Marc and Dee Dee’s choreography, though I have to note the New York Times was much kinder in its review, echoing the feelings of many in calling it a “fast, dense, friendly children’s musical.”

  If that’s the case, as I thought at the time, I’ll gladly take it.

  18

  SOME KIND OF NUT

  I returned home from Europe to a different—and difficult—time. It was early 1968, an election year and a period of unrest, confusion, conflict, upheaval, and ultimately great sadness. I never thought being in show business made me immune from the things that affected everyone else, and I wasn’t, starting with the news that Charlie Brown, the charismatic youth minister at my church, had taken a new position in the Pacific Northwest.

  His departure changed the dynamic inside the church and caused me to slowly drift away from there and from organized religion in general. The clincher occurred during a meeting of church elders. We were puzzling over
what to do about the racial problems that kept much of the city divided. One of the elders suggested inviting the congregation from a black church from the inner city to our church and, ideally, they would invite us to theirs. I thought it was a great idea, right on target. It sounded like something that would have come from Charlie, who preached the best possible way, by example. The things he did the other six days of the week were far more inspirational than anything he said on the seventh day in church, which was also pretty good.

  “Black families, white families, people in general—we look at each other like strangers,” I said. “But I think we have much more in common than any of us realize. We sit in our churches on Sundays, we read from the same book, we pray to the same God, we want the same thing, which is to feel loved, not hated. What if we got to know each other through an exchange program?”

  The idea did not go over well. One of the elders emphatically stated that he did not want any black people in the church. Appalled, I stood up, shared my disgust, grabbed my jacket, and walked out. I never went back there or to any other church. My relationship with God was solid, but the hypocrisy among the so-called faithful finished me for good.

  My faith was tested again in April when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Like many Americans, I took the tragedy personally. I knew and admired the man and his mission. A few years earlier, I’d had the honor of meeting Dr. King at a rally in Los Angeles, where I was also among the speakers.

  It was a large event at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum. Rod Serling, the genius behind The Twilight Zone and an early civil rights advocate, got me involved and also wrote my speech, which articulated my feelings about being a God-loving human being in the latter half of the twentieth century and moving beyond backward and bigoted thinking.

  Moments before we filed through the locker room tunnel and went onto the stage in the middle of the field, a security official informed us that there’d been a threat on Dr. King’s life. He said that we had the option of backing out, and everyone would understand if we did. No one fell out of line.

  We marched out and gave the most impassioned speeches of our lives, at least I did, though I have to admit that when Dr. King sat next to me, I did lean slightly to the other side.

  At the time Dr. King was assassinated, I was involved in the organization Concerned Democrats and was campaigning on behalf of Senator Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 bid to become president of the United States. Being on the campaign trail with McCarthy brought back memories of when I was a teen and my grandfather took me to the train station to see Wendell Wilkie speak in his run against Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. My grandfather was against the New Deal and referred to Roosevelt as a “One Worlder.”

  It’s likely he would have been against McCarthy, too. But I was attracted to his stance against the Vietnam War. He was the first candidate to publicly question the war and call it a mistake while defending his patriotism. He was also a poet and unusually sensitive and personable for a politician. At a fund-raiser in Minneapolis, I became separated from him and his group as we snaked through a crowd. Suddenly, he stopped, turned, and asked, “Where’s Dick?”

  I caught up and asked how he knew that I’d fallen behind.

  “I had a sense,” he said.

  That pretty much describes what I really liked about him. He had a sense of what was going on in the country and what ought to be done to ensure a brighter tomorrow for future generations. He won the New Hampshire primary, which caused President Johnson to take himself out of contention. Sensing an opening, though, Robert Kennedy entered the race. With rolled-up shirtsleeves and youthful vigor, he ran against McCarthy.

  In June 1968, I was with the McCarthy camp at the Hilton hotel in downtown Los Angeles, waiting for the results of the California primary. Bobby Kennedy was about a mile away at the Ambassador Hotel. I was briefly distracted from the night’s main event when actress Myrna Loy showed up in the same dress that my wife had on. Myrna was quite charming about it and both women ended up having a good-natured chuckle.

  Then I found myself in a corner talking to someone about my fears that McCarthy was too smart and too intellectual and not a tough enough politician to get elected. I said he reminded me of Adlai Stevenson, who had lost in two elections to Eisenhower. Sure enough, Bobby Kennedy topped McCarthy in the state’s Democratic presidential primary. The mood in our ballroom, which had been poised for celebration, was downcast and disappointed as we followed Kennedy’s victory speech from down the road on TV.

  Moments later, we were frozen in time as news reached us that Kennedy had been shot. I remember shock, despair, and tears.

  “Not again,” I said to Margie as we held each other and waited for news on Kennedy’s condition.

  He died the next day—and with him and Martin Luther King Jr., the country lost much more than two great leaders, and although many of us knew that, we did not know how to fill that void.

  In August, I followed McCarthy to Chicago for the Democratic convention. The sight of Mayor Daley’s police lining the street and appearing to taunt demonstrators made me feel as if we had already lost the war three months before the battle for the presidency. Afterward, I retreated to our Arizona ranch, where Margie and I spent weekends and summers with the children.

  We had 180 acres in the middle of the desert, and it was the perfect place to decompress. We had been lured there a few years earlier to the area outside of Phoenix by our friends Marc and Dee Dee, who had a place nearby. Margie fell in love with the desert. I had expected to find a small A-frame on a couple of acres. Instead, we ended up with a ranch whose property sprawled farther than I could see. It was a special place with unique charms. I could do nothing for hours and found endless fascination staring up at the billions of stars that filled the clear nighttime sky.

  For me, work was the best antidote to the problems I saw plaguing the world. I was so lucky that I loved what I did and was able to make a good living at it. In addition, it provided me with a sense of giving back something of value. If you could entertain people and take them away from their problems for a while, you were doing pretty well, I thought.

  With two movies and a TV special in the works, I was doing just fine. The first film was Some Kind of a Nut, a comedy written and directed by Garson Kanin, whose erudite sense of humor had defined his screenplays for Born Yesterday, Pat and Mike, and Adam’s Rib. In Some Kind of a Nut, he cast me as a banker who grows a beard after getting stung by a bee and developing a rash, but he sees his career and personal life suffer drastic consequences when, in a stab at independence, he opts to keep his facial hair.

  I enjoyed working again with Angie Dickinson, who was a doll, as were Rosemary Forsyth and Zohra Lampert, but the partnership with Garson, who was lovely and came to the set each day dressed to the nines, didn’t work out as I had hoped. It was nothing he did or didn’t do; the material, envisioned as a social satire, just never panned out. It “sounds like something out of Kanin’s trunk,” said the New York Times. I knew it, too. Even as we shot a scene with Rosemary where we rolled around in Central Park, I said to myself, “This is terrible … it stinks … but it’s Garson Kanin … how can this be?”

  Ah, well. I had higher hopes for my next picture, The Comic, an homage to old-time silent-movie comics and idols of mine like Stan Laurel and Buster Keaton. A labor of comedy love from my old cohorts Carl Reiner and Aaron Ruben, and directed by Carl, this picture costarred Mickey Rooney and Michele Lee and told the story of silent-film star Billy Bright (loosely based on Keaton, but really a composite of several of those guys) as he looked back from the grave on his life and career.

  Like any clown, he had as many private torments as laughs—maybe even more—but making the movie was like a playdate with friends who appreciated this special era of comedy and all its subtleties as much as I did. In his book My Anecdotal Life, Carl wrote, “I believe, if Mephistopheles popped in on Dick and offered him a chance to sell his soul for the chance to work in those old black-and-whit
e comedies, he would think long and hard before refusing.”

  He was right. But this was my chance to go back in time, and I took full advantage of it. Carl and Aaron Ruben and I were like kids let loose in a video arcade. It was playtime. We rewrote every day. Why wouldn’t you with those two in the room? Also, we couldn’t help ourselves. During production, we got together every day, looked at the script, told one another stories, laughed, and pretty soon someone said, “Why don’t we do this instead?”

  For me, the best part was re-creating Billy Bright’s shtick. We shot it on sixteen-millimeter black and white, speeded it up so it would look authentically old, and then dragged the footage across my backyard to mess it up. Of course, we shot much more footage than we ever needed just because it was fun. Carl and I also talked about doing something with the extra material. We didn’t know what that might be, but something.

  Unfortunately, all of that footage disappeared sometime before the movie opened and never resurfaced. I’ve been heartbroken since. Yet the picture itself buoyed my faith in the effort we put into it. Upon its opening in November 1969, the New York Times called the film “genuinely funny,” the local Los Angeles Times’ critic Kevin Thomas said it was “one of the most devastating films ever made about Hollywood,” which he meant in a good way.

  In April 1969, after I had completed both films but months before either of them were released, I starred in my third special for CBS, which was my most delightful special quite simply because it costarred Mary Tyler Moore, the most delightful costar of my career. When The Dick Van Dyke Show ended, we vowed to get together for lunch every three weeks. It never happened. Busy schedules, career demands, and family obligations made such a well-intentioned promise impossible to fulfill.

  But the feelings were always there. Countless times I spoke about the good fortune I had in continuing to work with Carl, Aaron, and others from the show. However, I missed the daily interaction and laughs I got from Morey and Rosie, and I especially missed my partnership with Mary, which made working together again such a treat for me.