20
Margie and I were vacationing in London when The New Dick Van Dyke Show debuted on September 18, 1971. I heard the reaction was positive. A few days after we returned, though, I was in the grocery store when a sweet-looking woman walked up to me and hit me with her purse.
“Excuse me!” I said, stepping back before she could do it again.
“How dare you leave that sweet Laura,” she said.
It wasn’t exactly the kind of hit I hoped for, but it told me that people watched. In fact, despite lukewarm reviews, including the New York Times, which said, “on the originality meter, it rated two, maybe two-and-a-half, coughs,” we were a Top 20 show. Of course, it helped to be in a Saturday-night lineup that included America’s number-one show, All in the Family, as well as The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Sandy Duncan’s new series, Funny Face.
Carl wrote and directed the opening episode, but from then on it was always a struggle behind the scenes to fill the scripts with the requisite funny. Although it was never mentioned, all of us knew that in addition to battling for ratings, we were competing against the extraordinarily high expectations my previous show set. People like the woman in the grocery store saw more than just a new sitcom. We tried our best to deliver.
Hope was not used to working in front of an audience, and so on taping nights when the studio was packed with people who had driven in from Phoenix to see the show, she calmed her nerves with a little belt. That one drink made her happy enough to do the show.
Sometimes it made her even happier. We were doing a scene in an episode midway through that first season where I came home from work and found her already in bed. I changed clothes and walked around to get into my side of the bed. When I pulled back the covers, she was stark naked. The audience hooted and laughed, as did Hope, who thought she could make me crack. But I never went out of character even though I thought her prank was hilarious.
During the second season, Hope was involved with Frank Sinatra. One week he came out to visit her. He flew in on his Lear jet and set up camp in the little house that she rented. Hope invited a bunch of us over for dinner one night and Frank cooked. We went there after taping the show. Margie had come to the studio to drive there with me, and she was all excited about meeting Frank.
It was funny, because it wasn’t like she’d never met big stars before. We had attended every major awards show. I’d made movies with some pretty famous people. But as I’ve said before, my wife did not like Hollywood, its stars, or its emphasis on status. To put it another way, she was not a fan of the tinsel in the town. Hence, we were living in the middle of the desert.
On the way to Hope’s, I said something to that effect. Margie gave me a look as if I had started to speak a strange language.
“But this is Frank Sinatra,” she said.
We walked in and were immediately hit by the thick, garlicky aroma of a rich Italian meal. I knew it was going to be a good one. Hope led us into the kitchen, where we were introduced to the man responsible for the delicious smell filling the house. Frank was at the stove, with his shirtsleeves rolled up, and wearing an apron. He had made the entire meal from scratch. Friendly and loose, he fixed drinks and served us dinner.
It was an evening of food, booze, stories, and laughs—everything except the one thing Margie wanted from Frank, to hear the famous Sinatra voice. Throughout the whole night, she tried to get him to sing, and he wouldn’t. Several times she heard him humming to himself in the kitchen. She then elbowed me, as if to say, See, he’s almost singing. Do something that will get him to sing.
With Frank, it clearly did not work that way. He did what he wanted to do, and that night he wanted to cook pasta, tomato sauce, and garlic bread, and afterward watch us bite into his own chocolate cake. He did not want to sing.
I understood.
There was also something that I did not want to do. Few people would have guessed what it was. But I had a problem with alcohol. I knew that the time had come to deal with it.
It was August 22, 1972, and I was alone in the kitchen, staring out the window at the expanse of desert. I wish I could have admired the arid beauty more, but I could barely see past my throbbing headache. I took a few aspirin. As I set my water glass down on the counter, I noticed my hands shaking. This was nothing new. I’d had the morning shakes countless times before. And that was just the most visible symptom of a condition that I had, until now, done a first-rate job of ignoring and denying—a drinking problem.
I do not know how much I drank. Some nights it was three drinks. Some nights it was double that and maybe even more. But how much I drank, whether it was one or a dozen, didn’t matter. The point was that I drank, and I had to face up to the fact that it was affecting more than just me. The rest of my family was suffering for it, too.
Just the night before, I had lost my temper with Margie for no reason, and now, as I sat in the kitchen sober and sore, I knew it was not the first time that had happened. Nor was Margie the only victim of such outbursts. I’d snapped at the kids numerous times, too. It was always at night and always after I had gotten in my cups.
I told myself that wasn’t me. But in truth, it was me. Maybe it wasn’t at one time, but I had become that person and I realized that if I wanted to be the man I thought I was, I needed to get help. That’s exactly what I did. I got out the Yellow Pages and called St. Luke’s Hospital, which advertised a treatment. A woman answered. I said that I had a drinking problem and wondered if they could help me.
“Yes,” she said.
“Do I need an appointment?” I asked. “How do I do this?”
“Come in,” she said.
“Now?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Now.”
Margie and the children expressed concern and offered support as I packed a bag. Then I made the twenty-minute drive to the Phoenix hospital and began the process of trying to figure out how I ended up with a problem.
Alcoholic was not a term that came to mind when I thought about myself. For years, Margie and I did not drink. As I mentioned earlier, we kept a bottle of Early Times in the pantry for company, but neither of us ever unscrewed the top for ourselves. It was only after we moved to Brookville, Long Island, that I began to drink, and then it was only at parties.
I was the prototypical social drinker. I had a martini to loosen up. It got me past my shyness and helped me enjoy the night. Very quickly, though, I was enjoying the night with three or four cocktails, and then I did the same at home when I arrived back from work. I never drank on the set. But by the second season of The Dick Van Dyke Show, I would start looking at my watch to see how close we were to five o’clock. Pretty soon I just knew without having to check the time.
As soon as I got home, I poured myself a glass of bourbon. And then another. And sometimes still another. In a frank admission to columnist Marilyn Beck, I said, “Somewhere along the line I progressed from being just a party drinker to the point where I’d run a race with Margie each night to see if I could get drunk before she could get dinner on the table.”
I did not get drunk—not in the way most of us think of drunk. It was more that a couple of drinks before dinner put me in a more tranquil state of mind. And a couple more after dinner kept me in that place.
But I never thought of myself as an alcoholic.
And why was that?
Well, I would ask myself simple questions.
Did I drink in the morning? No, not unless it was a Bloody Mary at Sunday brunch, and who didn’t have one then?
Did I drink at work? Never.
Did I go to bars? No.
Did I have a problem? No, not as far as I was concerned.
Others saw it differently. In 1967 a friend dropped by the house and said some people who had worked with me were whispering about my drinking. They hadn’t actually seen me drinking, he said, but they’d noticed me complaining a few too many times about being hungover.
“Maybe you want to get some help,” he said.
“I don’t have a problem,” I said. “I appreciate your concern and friendship and willingness to come to me, but I swear to you, I’m fine. I have a couple drinks at parties, one or two to unwind at night, but that’s it. If that makes me an alcoholic, well, I guess everyone else is, too.”
“But Dick, you understand why—”
I cut him off.
“I understand,” I said. “But I don’t have a problem.”
The staff at St. Luke’s did a double take when I walked through the doors and said I was there to check in for treatment. They were not expecting anyone famous. They kept looking out the windows for reporters. Eventually I was able to assure them that no one knew I was there. I explained that I had called earlier about getting help for a drinking problem, my wife had dropped me off, and now I wanted to be treated like anyone else.
And I was. I was placed in the psych ward with other alcoholics and drug addicts. We were separated from those with serious emotional problems, but we heard them in the background. The addicts and alcoholics were bad enough, though. Some were having fits and throwing up from withdrawals, others were agonizing through the DTs. I had no such side effects.
Although the hard-core addicts scared the hell out of me, I didn’t let that get in the way of the work I needed to do. I attended group meetings daily in a basement room with concrete walls and a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. One day, I suggested that I didn’t think I was an alcoholic, or a severe case, since I didn’t have any physical problems going cold turkey. A thin, pasty guy about my age said, “Buddy, there aren’t different types of alcoholics. You are one or you aren’t. And you are. And it don’t matter if you’re rich and famous like you are or a desert rat like me. The only way to beat this thing is to put a plug in the jug. Period.”
During treatment and therapy sessions, I dredged up emotions and fears I had buried long ago, like the fights my parents used to have when I was a child. I remembered hearing their screams rattling through the house. It was always after my father came home drunk following one of his lengthy road trips. Then, a little after I turned six years old, my mother gave him an ultimatum: either quit drinking or she was leaving.
She left and went to a friend’s house in Boston. Then my dad went back on the road.
All of a sudden I found myself, along with my brother, at my paternal grandparents’. I had no idea where my mother and father were. I was told only that they were gone. Nothing specific was said to me (and Jerry was too young to know). I sat in my grandmother’s lap at night and cried. Finally my mother returned, followed by my father, and everything was all right again. I was nearly grown before they told me the truth.
During treatment, I dealt with those painful memories for the first time and faced other more recent and regrettable issues, like the way I’d snapped at Margie and the kids over the past few months. I saw myself repeating some of the mistakes my father had made and vowed to stop. There was no instant cure, but self-awareness was the first step to real change.
After three weeks at St. Luke’s, I was sober for the first time in nearly fifteen years. Feeling enlightened and empowered, I understood that alcoholism is a disease, one that does not care if you have strong moral fiber or no conscience at all, and that, like it or not, I was an alcoholic. I also understood that the disease does not quit until you do. You had to wave the white flag.
I thought that by going in for treatment I was better. I certainly had more knowledge, awareness, and the tools to help me.
But, as I would learn, that wasn’t enough.
On my last day at the hospital, Margie came to pick me up. I was sitting on my bed while she spoke with the counselor in the hallway. I thought she was getting tips on what was next for me. However, after a few minutes, the counselor came in and said that Margie was taking over my room.
“What?” I asked. “She’s driving me home.”
“No,” he said. “She just checked herself in.”
It turned out Margie had a problem with Librium. She’d been taking the drug for anxiety and depression and gotten hooked. I had no idea. The situation, while serious, was ironic. We were quite a pair—a drunk and an addict. I offered the same support and encouragement she had given me, and I visited regularly over the next few weeks as she confronted her problems.
As we sobered up, the two of us began to wake up to the realities of our lives, which were more complicated than we were ready to admit.