15
Paris was supposed to be partly a vacation—and it was, sort of. I went there to make the movie The Art of Love, a comedy about a down-and-out artist who fakes his death to increase the value of his work. With Angie Dickinson, Elke Sommer, and James Garner costarring, and Norman Jewison directing, it looked like a good time. I arranged for Margie to join me on location, since we had never gone on a proper vacation other than our honeymoon to Mount Hood. I envisioned us visiting the city’s museums, restaurants, and sites.
However, as with all of life, whether you’re making a movie or running to the market, there are the plans you make and there is the way life actually unfolds. In this case, shortly after we checked in to the palatial Raphael Hotel off the Champs-Elysées, I had to shoot a scene where my character fled from the authorities after getting word that he was to be guillotined. We did numerous takes. For days, I ran behind a camera truck. For someone who smoked heavily and enjoyed cocktails and wine at night, I was not in terrible shape. But this was different. I may as well have been training for a marathon.
Upon returning to the hotel after work, I encountered Margie waiting to go out with me. We had museums to see, cafés to visit, and stores to peruse. But I would look down at the ground to avert her expectant gaze and shake my head pathetically. I couldn’t walk. I could barely stand. So she trudged off alone while I slipped into a hot bath and soaked my achy muscles.
After that scene was behind us, our time improved. Carl also came over to act in a small part, rewrote major portions of the script, and added erudite amusement to the day. The only serious blemish on our otherwise well-deserved vacation occurred when a tabloid printed a story that I was having an affair with Angie Dickinson. They followed that with a story that Jim Garner and I had gotten into a fight over her.
Both stories were complete fabrications, containing not one single morsel of truth beyond the fact that we all were making a movie together. This was the first time I had been snared in the ugly trap of celebrity gossip and it offended me in countless ways.
After the movie, I tried to sue the publisher. I went to New York and gave a deposition, though a judge threw out my suit, explaining that libel laws were applied differently to public figures. The decision didn’t make sense to me. Just because I was a celebrity didn’t mean a patently false and damaging story hurt my family or me any less. It was clearly unjust.
Although I bristled over that for a long time, it turned into one of those moments that forced me to gather my wits, adjust my perspective, and basically mature. It was a life lesson—a wake-up to the fact that, as I wrote at the beginning of this book, you can’t spread peanut butter over jelly. The whole thing made me relish the good fortune I had of returning to The Dick Van Dyke Show. It was like pulling into a safe harbor after weathering a storm. I was home.
What went unspoken was that this was the show’s fourth season and from the outset Carl had said we were going to do only five. I didn’t even want to think about the end. None of us did.
As an ensemble, from crew to actors to Carl and the writers, we were just hitting our stride. Episodes like “My Mother Can Beat Up My Father,” which showed Laura trying to best Rob in the art of self-defense, gently but pointedly tapped in to the currents of social change. So did “A Show of Hands,” in which Laura and Rob accidentally dye their hands black before attending a formal dinner. Other episodes that addressed everyday family issues, like Ritchie dealing with a girl who had a crush on him, continued to showcase Carl’s genius for mining laughs from suburban living rooms and kitchens.
My brother returned for another two-parter, and I was deeply amused when Jerry Belson and Garry Marshall wrote “Young Man with a Shoehorn,” an episode in which Rob becomes part owner of a shoe store and struggles as a salesman, based on a story I told one day about my own failure selling shoes in my uncle’s store. I was paid three dollars a day plus commission if I sold a hundred dollars’ worth, which I never did. The work was maddening. I would put twenty pairs of shoes on a woman, all of which fit perfectly, and she would walk out shaking her head that none of them was right. God, I hated that job.
One of the most memorable episodes we did that season and also one of the funniest was called “Never Bathe on Saturday.” In it, Rob and Laura go away for a romantic weekend—a second honeymoon, as those types of getaways were called. After being shown into their luxurious suite, Rob grabs his wife by the waist with a hungry look in his eye.
“Darling,” she says, “what about the bellboy?”
“You first,” he says.
The risqué line got big laughs—and so did the rest of the show, depicting their weekend taking an abrupt downhill turn after Laura’s big toe gets caught in the bathtub faucet. Behind the scenes was a little less funny. Mary had decided to quit smoking earlier in the week and she hadn’t had a cigarette for several days. She was white as a sheet, shaking and nervous—like anyone going through nicotine withdrawal.
As an actress who was pretending to be stuck in the bathtub behind a locked door, she did not get much camera time. Normally it wouldn’t have bothered her, but she was on edge, a rarity for Mary. At one point she even had kind of a tiff. I was so startled that I said, “Mary, will you please go outside and smoke a cigarette.”
She scrunched up her face, looking frustrated but adorable and funny, and all of us laughed.
A side from the opportunity to work, the most enjoyable upside to the celebrity I received from starring on a top-rated TV series was entrée to some of my idols—the greats who had inspired me. I took full advantage of this and developed a good friendship with Stan Laurel, though my first introduction to him happened purely by chance.
We were shooting the second season of the TV series, and I was at home one day, looking up a name in the telephone book, when I came across the name Stan Laurel.
“Stan Laurel?” I said to myself. “It couldn’t be.”
But I called the number. A man answered promptly.
“Hello,” I said. “This is Dick Van Dyke. Is this Mr. Laurel?”
“Yes, it is,” he said.
It turned out that Stan knew the show and knew who I was. He invited me to the Santa Monica apartment he shared with his fifth wife, Ida Kataeva Raphael, a Russian woman who kept a careful eye on him. As I walked down the hallway and approached his door, it suddenly opened and there he was.
“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 patient 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.