11
That fall was a wonderful time in our lives, with a new show and the kids starting new schools, making new friends, trying to comprehend that they were still able to play in the swimming pool in October, and then, miraculously, saying hello to their new baby sister. It was four in the morning when Margie shook me awake and said, “It’s time.”
Only a moment passed before I realized she wasn’t referring to the clock on the nightstand. No, she meant that after nearly nine months of watching her tummy grow, it was time to go to the hospital and meet the newest addition to our family. She was ready to have the baby.
The birth was like clockwork. Within thirty minutes, we were at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, and though it was the same place where we’d had an unpleasant experience a decade earlier, this time the only tears we shared were from the joy of welcoming our second daughter, Carrie Beth. She arrived with a smile on her face and wisps of blond hair on top of her pinkish head. Later, I handed out cigars to everyone on the set.
As Morey shook my hand, he exclaimed, “Wow, four kids with just one wife?”
That day, the L.A. Times’ TV critic Cecil Smith was following me around for a story. We were working on the sixteenth episode of the season, “The Curious Thing About Women,” which had Rob getting annoyed at Laura for opening his mail. During a break, I took a phone call from my agent and learned that I’d been asked to host the CBS Christmas showing of The Wizard of Oz. They wanted me to include my children, Chris, eleven, Barry, ten, and Stacy, six. I told my agent about our newest addition and he said, “She’s included, too.”
It gave Cecil a great anecdote for his story. After hanging up, I turned to everyone and said, “How about that? Three hours old and she’s already in demand.” In all seriousness, though, I thought she was too young to appear on TV. Morey immediately claimed injustice.
“Who’s her agent?” Rosie asked.
“Never mind her agent,” Morey said. “Who’s her lawyer?”
Even when I tried to be serious, I failed. I used to say that I was getting paid to play. I often went into the set on Saturdays to work out little bits. I couldn’t turn my brain off, that’s how much fun I was having on the show. Take the episode “Where Did I Come From.” One of my favorites, it opens with six-year-old Ritchie looking through his baby album while Laura and Rob sit on the sofa. After commenting on a photo, he asks where he came from.
Mary and I, as Laura and Rob, exchange one of those frightened looks that is familiar to parents caught off guard.
“Wha-wha-what did you say, Ritchie?” Rob stammers.
He repeats the question and Rob says there’s not enough time to explain such a complicated thing. Then he turns to Laura and asks when she will have time to explain it to Ritchie. Unwilling to let her husband off the hook, she says there is still a half hour before bedtime, which sends Rob scrambling for Dr. Spock’s child-rearing book. Something akin to that moment had actually happened to me at home, where Dr. Spock was our top and only authority. Our copy of his book was dog-eared in a hundred places.
“Rich, where do you think you came from?” Rob asks.
“Same place that Grandpa Helper came from,” he says. “New Jersey.”
Realizing Ritchie is not ready for Dr. Spock, and in fact isn’t ready for the kind of specifics he feared, Rob says, “You didn’t come from New Jersey. You come from New York. Don’t you remember that?”
That line helps send the rest of the show into a wonderful series of flashbacks and reminiscences about the twenty-four hours leading up to Ritchie’s birth. It was all about being a nervous husband, something I had recently gone through with Carrie Beth’s birth, by the way, and something that came naturally to me. The show developed during rehearsals, where we all took a simple idea and kept adding to it until it was jam-packed with the most delicious comedy bits.
After this whirlwind, it concludes with Ritchie asking his mom if she liked that story. She nods yes.
“Better than Black Beauty?” he asks.
“Yes, better than Black Beauty,” she agrees.
In November, about a month after Carrie Beth was born, we had our own hell’s a poppin’—or rather, hell’s a burnin’—adventure: the Bel Air fire.
One day Margie looked up from the front yard and all of a sudden she called me to come see, to hurry and confirm the mind-boggling sight of flames shooting up across the horizon. If devils wore top hats, we were seeing the tips of them dancing up and down behind the not-too-distant mountains.
Within no time, the flames began to march over the hill and we had to evacuate. Police cars drove up the street, ordering residents to leave. We packed up quickly and I took the whole family to the studio. At night, we checked into a motel and stayed there for a couple of days.
The fire burned some houses along our street but skipped ours. During the next rain, though, the hillside above us slid down into our pool. I needed to have the entire hillside replanted and reinforced.
For about a week, all any of us talked about at work was the fire. It prompted everyone on the cast to talk about various disasters they had been in throughout their lives, which let Morey tell about a thousand new jokes on marriage. I talked about some of my days in the service, my various car problems, and of course the numerous tornado warnings I had experienced growing up in the Midwest, which also led me to share some stories about my younger brother, Jerry.
“The hardest I’ve ever laughed,” I told people, “was one time when Jerry and I had jobs as surveyors.”
“A summer job?” someone asked.
“No, it was winter,” I explained. “I was seventeen, and Jerry was twelve. We were out in a field. There was snow up to our knees. And it was freezing cold—below freezing, actually. We were trying to take measurements and he said something funny and we started to laugh. Except our faces were frozen stiff. We couldn’t laugh. We could see it beneath the surface, but we couldn’t get it out. If you look at someone who’s trying to laugh but can’t, it’s even funnier. As we stared at each other, we laughed even harder. We were dying.”
My brother, who had been funny his whole life, had gotten into show business, too. He and my parents had driven out to California (and camped the whole way) when I was doing the Merry Mutes act. They saw Phil and me perform at the Georgian Hotel in Santa Monica. Impressed that I was making a living—such as it was—lip-syncing to records, Jerry went home, got himself a partner, and started doing our act, pantomiming to songs.
When he went into the Air Force, Jerry got into Tops in Blue, a comedy-variety show that traveled from base to base. He swiped material from Dick Shawn’s act, including a piece called “Massa Richard,” which he performed better than Dick. He also incorporated jokes from other comics. In those days, no one could check.
Gradually, he included his own material. When I first saw him, I thought, My God, he’s got the timing! If you don’t have that talent, you can’t do stand-up. But my brother had it, and he began working some of the Playboy clubs, which put him on the map. Dan Rowan and Dick Martin took him on the road with them. Later he opened for Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme.
He had just turned thirty the summer I began doing The Dick Van Dyke Show, and Carl heard me tell stories about Jerry’s antics, from punching the high-school dean to his skill playing the four-string banjo.
One day after the Bel Air fire, a bunch of us were telling stories around the table and I mentioned that my brother had been a longtime sleepwalker. It had lasted until he was in his late teens.
“He’d just get up out of bed and leave,” I said, getting up from the table myself and acting out the way Jerry used to walk through the house as he slept. “We had to go get him one night. Some people called from across town. He had walked there in his pajamas.”
Rosie, Morey, and the others were incredulous.
“One night I caught him going out the door with our dad’s golf clubs,” I said. “He had the bag over his shoulder. I asked where he was going and he said, ‘To play golf.’ ”
“Did he know what he was doing?” Carl asked.
“Yes, that was the strange thing,” I said. “Growing up, we slept in the same bedroom, and I’d say, ‘Jerry.’ He’d say, ‘I know. I’m asleep. Just give me a few minutes.’ Then he continued walking around the house. He almost got thrown out of the Air Force because he still walked in his sleep.”
Carl, who was always listening to, adapting, and incorporating our real-life stories into the show, caught Jerry’s act in Las Vegas, thought he was as funny as I had said, and wrote a two-part episode based on the stories I’d told about Jerry being a sleepwalker and nearly getting thrown out of the service because of it. Once again, Carl amazed me with his finely tuned ear and creativity.
Jerry was excited about being on a network show. It was a break for him, and he hoped it might lead to something else, something bigger, as did I. He did gain more recognition, and we had a good time working together, the first time we’d done so on camera.
By the time the two-parter aired at the end of March 1962, though, it seemed as if there might not be another chance. Worse, it appeared that I would have to go looking for another job myself. CBS canceled the show. Sheldon delivered the news on the set. It was a ratings issue, he explained. Despite good reviews and a whole season of thirty-nine episodes to prove ourselves, we lost the ratings war each week to our more popular time-slot competition, The Perry Como Show. In short, we didn’t find an audience.
“Or they didn’t find us,” someone said, voicing a frequent complaint that we didn’t receive enough promotion from the network.
As the Six-Foot Tower of Jell-O, I didn’t see the point in complaining. The facts were the facts, and the network had made its decision. I felt sick. The whole lot of us was practically suicidal. We knew we had something good and we didn’t want it to end prematurely. I glanced around the set. It felt like a foreclosure, like we were being wrongly booted from our home. It seemed like such a tragic error in judgment.
The show aside, I was personally devastated. We had just moved across country, bought a house, and had a fourth child. I had recently signed on to do the movie version of Bye Bye Birdie. My salary would hold us for about a year. But then what?