PART THREE
You know what Dick’s problem is? He always wanted to be smarter than he is.
—Jerry Van Dyke
21
Shortly after getting out of the hospital, I moved back to L.A., leaving Margie and the girls at the ranch. I commuted back on weekends, but putting that much distance between us was a prescription for future trouble.
Were there other options? I did not think so.
CBS had picked up The New Dick Van Dyke Show for a third season, but the network insisted on making major changes, starting by moving production to L.A. They also gave us a new time slot, on Monday night at nine-thirty, and a creative overhaul that had my character, Dick Preston, moving to Hollywood to work on a daytime soap opera after his talk show was canceled. Some critics wondered why the network didn’t cancel the show in real life.
Others were even harsher. When Carl and I faced the press at the end of summer to talk about the revised premise and addition of new castmates Chita Rivera, Richard Dawson, Barbara Rush, and Dick Van Patten, I found myself defending the fact that my hair had turned white (“I have no control over that,” I said, “and I’m not going to dye it”) and trying to diplomatically answer a reporter’s rather nasty inquiry as to why Mary’s show was a hit and mine wasn’t.
“I got old,” I said. “Mary didn’t.”
People laughed, as did I, although you could hear a sour note if you listened closely. Although comforted by the fact that Carl was more involved with the scripts, I had a hard time going back to an empty apartment after work. I had never lived by myself. I had gone from my mother to Margie. I was lonely, confused, and filled with questions about my life—or rather the meaning of it—that came as a result of my struggle to stay sober.
I hadn’t liked the person I became when I drank, but I wasn’t especially keen on the refurbished version, either. I felt a pretty big vacancy inside. And one night in April, after going eight months without a drink, I lost my willpower. I fell off the wagon, as they say. On my way home from the studio, I stopped at the liquor store, bought a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and poured myself a drink as soon as I got home. I did not even pause to take my jacket off.
I had three more drinks before I got sick to my stomach. I poured the rest of the bottle down the sink.
Mad and disappointed with myself, I called home and made a tear-filled confession to Margie. Then I did what any other alcoholic must do if he or she is determined not to succumb to this insidious disease: I acknowledged my slip as evidence that I was powerless over my addiction and started my sobriety again from day one.
Midway through the second season we had an uncharacteristically rocky moment when CBS rejected an episode Carl wrote (“Lt. Preston of the 4th Calvary”) because it contained a scene in which Dick and Jenny’s daughter Annie peeks in their bedroom and sees them having sex. The audience did not see anything other than Annie looking in the door, and in the next scene, after noticing Annie acting peculiarly, we wonder if in fact she saw us making love.
We have a talk with her, and in what I thought was a beautifully written moment, I explain sex to Annie as an intimate physical expression of love. My character goes on and on, as he was wont to do, and he is still talking when Annie gets up and starts to leave the room. Since he’s not finished, Dick asks if she has any questions.
“No,” she says. “But you sure looked silly.”
I thought that was the perfect response. The scene was smart, really sensitive, and funny—a classic example of Carl Reiner’s trademark touch. Today no one would question the propriety of such a scene. But back then the network thought it was too risqué and the show was shelved except in Canada, where it played without complaint.
Incensed, Carl vowed to never again work with CBS (though he appeared in several specials in the early 1980s).
I delivered a shocker of my own to the network when at the end of the third season I met with CBS executives and said that, despite a bump in ratings, I did not want to do a fourth. I was finished. Out of the previous three seasons, I explained, I counted only about seven episodes that I thought achieved the standard that I envisioned.
“I want my fellow actors to be able to work again,” I said in a joking tone. “If we keep going, I might ruin their careers.”
Once the series wrapped production, Margie and I fled to Coronado, a secluded jewel of an island just outside of San Diego, for a long, much-needed vacation. I decompressed and she soaked up the scenery. We took long walks along the Pacific, stared at the waves, went sailing, and talked endlessly as if we were getting to know each other all over again.
Indeed, we were trying to do exactly that. If either of us realized deep down that we might have started to grow apart, we did not acknowledge it. We were high-school sweethearts who had pledged togetherness for the rest of our lives. We had four children. And so much history together, so many stories.
And yet.
Deep down.
The knowledge that people change.
Margie wanted me to retire.
I wasn’t ready to stop work. Even though I held the record for talking about retiring and then changing course, what was I going to do?
“Enjoy life,” Margie said.
“I do,” I said.
“Take up hobbies, like me,” she said.
“I already have one,” I said. “It’s my job.”
A couple of weeks on the beach, however, put us in a more like-minded, sympathetic frame of mind and we decided to move there. In AA they call that a geographic cure—instead of facing your problems, you simply change locations. As Margie looked for homes, I started work on a movie.
I did not expect to jump back into work, but the ABC movie The Morning After turned out to be one of the best and most powerful pieces of acting in my career, as well as one of the most personal. Based on Jack Weiner’s novel, the script told the story of an oil company public-relations man’s battle with alcoholism, something he first refuses to admit, believing he is merely a “social drinker,” but then struggles with after seeking help.
It was unflinchingly raw and honest, and for that reason, I think, it was powerful, disturbing, and provocative.
I knew that I had to do it.
At the time, only a few people guessed I had a problem with booze. So it was ironic when producer David Wolper sent me the script. When I asked why me, I was told that besides having a deal with the network, I fit the type they wanted for the lead: an average, middle-aged, middle-class family man.
Before production began, I told director Richard Heffron about my battle with alcoholism. His eyes nearly bugged out of his head. But I could not have asked for better treatment or direction. We worked beautifully together. He would lay out a scene, then say, “Dick, you know more about this than I do, so just do it the way you see it, the way you feel it.” My costars Lynn Carlin and Linda Lavin were also supportive.
We shot that winter in and around L.A., including at the veterans hospital in Brentwood. There, working amid former servicemen who were dealing with addictions of various types, I was moved by the importance of the story we were trying to tell and decided to go public with my own story, giving Marilyn Beck the exclusive. Her eyes bugged out, too.
Fans were accepting when the news hit. I received thousands of letters. People understood that those who clowned around and made them laugh often had a dark, private side.
The movie aired on February 13, 1974, and both ratings and reaction were strong. AP TV critic Jay Sharbutt’s review sounded like a summary of my personal tale. “It’s not just a tale about the downfall of a corporate lush,” he wrote. “Rather, it’s a chilling, sip-by-sip study, stirred with a heavy swizzle stick for dramatic emphasis, of how easily any ‘social drinker’ can slide into alcoholism without realizing he or she can’t handle any kind of drinking.”
The “strong and welcome antidote to the usual run of TV movies about happy people with happy problems” earned me an Emmy nomination. Although I lost to Hal Holbrook for his work in another extremely powerful TV movie, The Pueblo Affair, I savored the impact of my work. Only the National Association of Alcoholism took exception. They had wanted the ending changed so the guy made it. I argued that the movie would not have had the same impact if it ended happily ever after.
As I knew all too well, the disease did not work that way. Unbeknownst to anyone, on two occasions during production—this was after I had come forward in the press about my alcoholism—I went back to the hotel where I was staying and drank. Both slips were after shooting scenes that, at the end of the day, left me feeling depressed and empty.
After each one, I got sick and swore, Never again, though that promise was easier said than kept.
Margie and I bought a beachfront home on Coronado Island with a spectacular view of the ocean. I also purchased a thirty-three-foot Ranger sloop, which occupied so much of my time that I referred to it as my mistress. From the moment I hoisted my first sail the boat became my escape. I loved being on the water, feeling the sun, the wind, and the salt, and most of all the freedom. It released everything in me that I couldn’t otherwise express.
I sailed every day, sometimes up the coast, sometimes straight out into the ocean. I studied navigation, the weather, and ocean currents. I was always on the lookout for something, something I couldn’t find.
For a while, I talked of journeying to Fiji—not to live. The commute was too far. “But I’d like to try the lifestyle,” I said jokingly.
The entire family was trying out lifestyles. One day when Margie and I were on Coronado, our eldest son called. After graduating from law school, Chris had moved to Salem, Oregon, gotten married, and most recently made us grandparents with the birth of his daughter, Jessica. Now he wanted to plant roots. He had his heart set on a one-hundred-year-old home and asked if I’d loan him the money for a down payment.
“Sure,” I said. “No problem.”
That same afternoon we got a call from our other son, Barry, a great-looking young man who had married a beautiful girl he met when both of them were ushering at a theater. He had also found a house and wanted to borrow money to put down.
Again I said sure, no problem. But then I turned to Margie and said, “We aren’t answering the phone the rest of the day.”
A short time later Stacy moved to San Francisco with her trumpet-player boyfriend, who used to sit in our living room watching Kung Fu and muttering, “Heavy duty.” Margie and I constantly rolled our eyes. What did that mean? We did our best to savor the relatively simple concerns of our baby, Carrie Beth, whose big worries, at fourteen, were homework and the prom. I marveled at the equanimity of our fourth-born. By the time she arrived, our attitude as parents was more cavalier than with the first or second, and I think it made Carrie Beth a calmer person. She was an angel of a girl, an old soul with a preternatural ability to read people that made me think she should become a psychologist.
I could have used one. As my children were finding themselves, I was going through the same thing, a sort of adult-onset confusion that had me asking many of the same questions: What was I going to do with my life? What was going to make me happy? Why wasn’t I happy?
Like it or not, life is a never-ending confrontation with bouts of uncertainty and chapters of self-discovery. As I was about to learn, it is a series of fine messes that we enter, some wittingly, and others not.