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When my daughter Stacy was fourteen, she discovered that she had a beautiful singing voice. We discovered it at the same time.
It was early morning, and my wife and I heard a crystal-clear melodic contralto note sweep through the house, going from room to room and brightening everything along its path. After looking at each other, Margie and I followed the sound into Stacy’s bathroom and found her staring at herself in disbelief as she sang that wonderful note.
Singing lessons followed, and in April 1975 I spirited Stacy away from her lazy boyfriend in San Francisco and put her in my latest ABC special, The Confessions of Dick Van Dyke. She sang “South Rampart Street” with guest star Michele Lee and me, and then the two of us traded lyrics on “Mockingbird.” After that, her voice was no longer a secret and she got involved with musical theater in Scottsdale. But not everything was out in the open.
I followed that special with a pilot for ABC called MacLeish and the Rented Kid, a story inspired, I assumed, by the movie A Thousand Clowns, as the updated plot felt similar. I played a political cartoonist content with living on my own until I agreed to care for the eleven-year-old son of a war correspondent friend who was sent overseas. I liked the way it came out, but the network had problems with it though they wanted to go forward.
After the frustrations of my last series, though, I was gun-shy about getting into anything that was not perfect and I nixed the series, walking away from my overall deal with the network. While going through that process, I found myself talking about the ups and downs of the business to my agent’s secretary, Michelle Triola. I liked her. She was easy to talk to, she understood me, she was interested, and she knew the business.
All the things Margie didn’t like, Michelle did, and gradually it got to where I was inventing excuses to call Sol so that I could speak with Michelle. I looked forward to our conversations. Michelle was an opinionated, feisty, smart woman. She wore her dark hair up and large glasses that gave her cute, girlish face a hip sophistication. She was part of the business and liked talking about every aspect of it, especially the people. She seemed to know or have met everyone.
For good reason, too. Michelle had been around. She had studied theater at UCLA before working as a singer and dancer. She was married briefly to actor Skip Ward, best known for his part in The Night of the Iguana. Her father took her to Rome to get that marriage annulled. While in Rome, Michelle stumbled upon a jazz festival, introduced herself to the headliner, the great pianist Oscar Peterson, and ended up singing a set with him and his trio, something she talked about for the rest of her life. I would have talked about it, too, had I sung with him.
It was so typical of Michelle. She collected stories the same way she collected friends. She had tons of both. And once touched by her sense of humor and enormous heart, few let go, including her ex, Skip Ward. Later, at the end of his life, he was down on his luck and we supported him. But when I took an interest in Michelle, she was a demi-celebrity on the front pages and in the gossip columns for the drama she was going through in the courts.
At the time, Michelle was suing actor Lee Marvin, with whom she had a six-year relationship between 1964 and 1970. They had met on the movie Ship of Fools and begun living together shortly after. She gave up her singing and acting career to be with him, and in turn he promised to support her for the rest of her life. It was as if they were married.
But then he dumped her, leaving Michelle with nothing, and she sued for the same rights a wife would have under California law. Hers was a groundbreaking case that received attention nationwide from all sorts of special-interest groups and individuals. Her attorney, Marvin Mitchelson, who coined the term palimony, vowed to take her case to the Supreme Court if necessary, which seemed likely that summer after it was rejected first by California’s Superior Court and then by the Second District Court of Appeals.
I provided a friendly ear. When I was in town, I would call the office and end up chatting with her. On occasion, we talked at night or arranged to meet for dinner. Then, when I needed support, I found myself turning to her.
It was that summer, around the time the courts were deciding against Michelle, when Jerry called one day and said our father had turned gravely ill and I needed to get on a plane. This was a day I knew was going to come but wanted desperately to avoid.
My parents had been living with Jerry in Las Vegas for about ten years, ever since my father, at sixty, lost his job at a packing and moving company to a younger man. He was unable to find another one. For the past few months, he had been battling emphysema, the result most likely of forty-plus years of smoking cigarettes. When I arrived at the hospital in Las Vegas, I found both my father and mother sitting in the lobby, crying.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, alarmed.
My father could not answer.
“We just saw the doctor,” my mother replied between deep breaths. “He said, ‘Look, you’re an old man. You’ve got emphysema. You’re going to die.’ ”
“He’s going to die?”
She nodded.
I looked over at my father. He was shaking from nerves. Tears were streaming down the sides of his face. Bad news is one thing, but to break it to a person that bluntly and that insensitively was unconscionable.
I flew into a rage and ran around the hospital screaming for the doctor who had examined my father. I was going to beat the shit out of him. I had never been this upset in my entire life. I covered as much of that hospital as I could and never found the doctor. He was either hiding or he had left.
We decided to move my father to a hospital in Phoenix where they specialized in treating emphysema. He was cognizant of everything that was happening, and although he was dying, he was still himself, a charmer and a jokester. As he was carried on a stretcher onboard the chartered plane taking us to Phoenix, he turned to the pilot and flight attendant and in a suave British accent said, “Hello, I’m David Niven.”
On the night he died, I was with my mother in a motel near the hospital. Apparently my father’s heart began to race and he asked the nurse if she could get it down. She said, “We’re working on it, Mr. Van Dyke.” He passed away a few hours later. We took his body back to Danville for burial. We started out flying on a commercial airline, but on a layover in Dallas I thought, What the heck am I doing? I was distraught and so was my family. So I chartered a plane to take us the rest of the way.
We deplaned at the tiny airport in Danville and stood on the tarmac, tired and unsure what to do next. Jerry put his arm around my shoulder.
“Let’s take a cab to the hotel,” he said. “It’s my treat since you got the jet.”
We cracked up and knew my father would have laughed the loudest if he had heard.
There was more shuffling to be done. Soon after, my father-in-law died and we moved my mother and my mother-in-law into a lovely apartment near our place on Coronado. As housemates, they were the female version of the odd couple. They were either laughing hysterically or fighting. We were constantly mediating one issue or another. Between such real-life details, my nascent feelings for Michelle, and my marriage, I felt I needed to spend a while on the beach figuring out my life.
But suddenly I found myself listening to Bob Einstein and his writing-producing partner, Allan Blye, both veteran writer-producers of the Smothers Brothers and Sonny and Cher variety shows, pitch me an idea for a variety show. Despite asking myself why the hell I wanted to do a TV series when I could spend all day doing nothing, I heard myself, for reasons I did not want to analyze, say, “Let’s try it.”
The one-hour special, called Van Dyke & Company, aired in October 1975 and featured guest stars Carl Reiner, Gabe Kaplan, Ike and Tina Turner, plus a surprise appearance from Mary Tyler Moore. My young executive producers and their crew of hip writers, including Steve Martin, guided me more in the direction of Saturday Night Live than Your Show of Shows, and it paid off. Kay Gardella of the New York Daily News praised the special as “skillfully crafted” and “fresh and offbeat.” Even an admitted non-fan of mine, the New York Times’ John O’Connor, called it “pleasantly agreeable.”
Buoyed by the positive reaction, NBC execs decided to put Van Dyke & Company on the fall schedule as a weekly series. The network seemed confident we could find an audience in the heart of the family hour; I was hopeful, but not as sure since we were opposite three popular shows—The Waltons; Welcome Back, Kotter; and Barney Miller. My manager called that a “suicide” time slot. Then at the last minute we were moved. I wanted to believe this was good news.
“No, it’s worse than suicide,” Byron said.
“Worse?” I asked. “What could be worse than suicide?”
“Thursdays at ten P.M.,” he said. “Nobody is watching a show like yours at that hour.”
But I was too old to care about ratings. After reassuring Bob and Allan and the rest of the staff that I was not afraid to try anything, we premiered the new season with guests Flip Wilson, Chevy Chase, Dinah Shore, and Andy Kaufman, one of our staff writers, who played the loser in a Fonzie look-alike skit that was typical Andy. We kept up the zaniness with Carol Burnett, John Denver, Sid Caesar, Tina Turner, and our own staff, including Andy, Pat Proft, Marilyn Sokol, and Bob, who debuted his “Super Dave” character in a bit where he gets sick on a Disneyland roller coaster.
We amused ourselves more than anyone. In the middle of a production number, for instance, Andy wandered onstage, looking like he had just beamed down to the planet from an alien culture. The confused audience laughed nervously as I tried to figure out why he had interrupted my song. Andy just shrugged. I pretended to be upset by the interruption and walked offstage, leaving Andy to stare blankly at the audience. Of course, it was planned—or at least to the degree you could plan anything with Andy.
My young, smart staff of silly, subversive, upstart writers continued to break all the rules of prime-time variety shows. One skit turned TV itself inside out by examining how an imaginary sitcom titled Honey, I’m Home would be written for three different time slots, and I acted out each variation. At eight P.M., I walked through the front door and my wife said dinner was nearly ready. At nine P.M., I came home and found her kissing another man. At ten P.M., I came home to another man who was fixing us dinner.
My favorite piece was a sketch we did each week about a family of morons, the Bright Family, and the dumber we made them, the funnier it was. I rarely got through those without busting up. Unfortunately, the jokes were lost on other people and ratings failed to materialize. A move in November to an earlier time slot did not improve the numbers, and the following month NBC canceled the show.
Was I surprised?
No, you can see the writing on the wall when your show is shuffled around in the schedule.
But vindication was just around the corner. Van Dyke & Company received three Emmy nominations and then Bob, Allan, and I left the September 1977 gala holding statues we had won for Outstanding Comedy-Variety or Music Series. I couldn’t believe we had beaten The Carol Burnett Show. Allan couldn’t believe we had beaten Saturday Night Live and The Muppets. Bob shook his head as if the two of us were missing the point and then quipped, “I can’t believe we won and we’re out of a job.”
I feared I might have been out of more than just a job, though, as my risk taking was not confined to the show. I am talking about Michelle. Over the four months we worked on the show, I was drawn into a relationship with her. I was five days in L.A., two on Coronado. Our phone conversations turned into lunches and those evolved into low-key dinners in dark restaurants where we could avoid attention. If anyone had asked, I was ready to explain that Michelle was my agent’s secretary and we had met up to sign papers.
But no one asked. Fortunately, no one saw us in the corner of Dan Tana’s or any of our other nighttime haunts. Michelle and I would talk throughout the day. She loved show business and wanted to hear about what had happened on the set, the bits that worked and those that did not work, who the guests were, and all that stuff. She had ideas and opinions and understood my ambitions and frustrations.
It was the opposite of Margie, who liked Coronado but loved the isolation of the desert even more. Margie took up painting and weaving and she became quite good at them. I worked harder going back and forth between my two worlds than I did on the show. I lost seven pounds in the first two months. I told people it was the work. In truth, it was the stress of dividing my time between two extremely strong, attractive women.
Margie kept trying to pull me away, out of Hollywood. She wanted us to go somewhere. We had already gone to the desert, then to the beach, but that was not enough. Forget about show business, she said. As far as she was concerned, I had already done Broadway, television, and movies. What more was there to prove? What more was there to do?
But suddenly I was involved with a woman who loved what I did for a living and not only knew all the people in the business, but understood that performing was in my blood, somehow part of my DNA, and that all my talk of retirement was bunk. I wasn’t going to stop. I couldn’t.
In December, Michelle talked me through the sting of Van Dyke & Company’s cancellation and I helped her celebrate when California’s Supreme Court ruled in her favor, saying that an agreement to share assets between a nonmarried couple living together was binding. With the holidays upon us, I woke up to what was happening to me, or in reality what had happened. I was involved with a woman other than my wife. It was unbelievable. I was writhing in guilt. I had to do something.