PART FOUR
Everybody wants to laugh—you know that. They need to laugh.… People need to laugh.
—Carl Reiner
26
For years, Michelle was a holdout smoker. Long after I gave up cigarettes, long after almost everyone we knew gave up the cancer sticks, she continued to puff away. Her big concession to all the health warnings was to give up her preferred brand of unfiltered smokes, though she continued to purchase stronger brands while turning a deaf ear to my harangues to take better care of herself. Once, I even caught her smoking in the shower.
But then she got a message she couldn’t ignore.
While out shopping one day, she was carrying an armload of clothes when suddenly she felt a sharp pain in her chest and lost her breath. Scared, she dropped everything and drove to the CBS studio where I was working on a new sitcom for the network’s 1988 fall lineup. I took one look at her and somehow knew she was having, or had just had, a heart attack.
I laid her down in my dressing room and made sure she was comfortable while Grant Tinker, who, though no longer Mary’s husband, still ran their MTM production company, called an ambulance. Michelle chewed both of us out. She didn’t want the attention, and she made it abundantly clear that she didn’t want to go to the hospital. The paramedics, in turn, made it abundantly clear that she didn’t have a choice in the matter.
A few hours later, she was in surgery, undergoing a bypass procedure. It all went well, she recovered, and after a few days Michelle was allowed to go home. And guess what? She never smoked again.
“Just like that?” I asked her.
“I have no idea why, but the craving is gone,” she said.
“Just like that?” I asked again.
“Just like that,” she said.
Later, as she put more thought into it, Michelle attributed the change to a Jamaican nurse who came into her hospital room and said soothing, perhaps magical things to her as she fluttered in and out of the netherworld between consciousness and painkillers.
“I think that nurse did some island magic,” she said.
One thing Michelle did not lose was her sense of humor.
Not long afterward, but long enough that Michelle seemed fully recovered from her surgery, I brought her a cup of coffee in bed. It was morning, and as I set the cup on her nightstand I noticed she was puzzling over the TV remote control in her hand as if she’d never seen it before. She looked up at me.
“What does this do?” she asked.
“I beg your pardon?” I said.
“What does this do?” she asked again.
I thought, Oh Jesus, something odd is going on—and it was. All of a sudden she lost the ability to speak coherently. It appeared she couldn’t focus properly. I could see her struggling to capture her thoughts. Quickly, I picked up the front page of the newspaper and asked if she knew what the headline said. She looked at it for a moment, then back up at me and shook her head no.
I threw her into the car and rushed her to St. John’s. Within twenty minutes, a doctor was examining her. He took her vitals, checked her heart, then did a neurological workup that included simple questions, such as asking her to name the president of the United States.
It was as if she could see it was Ronald Reagan, but couldn’t translate the picture into words.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But he’s an asshole.”
According to the doctor Michelle had suffered a transient ischemic attack—a kind of warning stroke whose symptoms would pass within twenty-four hours. And thank God the symptoms did pass and she became herself again, otherwise I might have spent much of my dotage playing nurse.
Once she was given the all-clear sign, though, I returned to work on The Van Dyke Show, a new series I agreed to do only in order to enjoy the pleasure of working with my son Barry, who was cast as my on-screen son. Interestingly, that fall, Mary Tyler Moore also had a new series, Annie McGuire, and the two of us were scheduled back-to-back in the same hour on CBS.
The network very cleverly announced we were “together” for the first time since the old days. We weren’t really together, of course, but it made for a nice, albeit contrived, reunion story. At the annual press tour, where we both promoted our shows, we traded fun, light banter in front of reporters. When someone asked if we’d remained friendly, Mary said she had “true affection and respect for me,” but cracked, “[Dick] never really liked me.”
Even I laughed at that one.
As for our series, both of us could’ve used a little more laughter. Mary’s show fared better than mine, which was, to put it kindly, a total disaster. The audience didn’t buy the premise, which featured me as a retired song-and-dance man who helps his son try to make a go of a fledgling theater in small-town Pennsylvania. Nor did I really buy the premise. And frankly, I don’t think the show’s writers bought it, either.
Coming off that experience, it was easy for me to say no to Warren Beatty. I said it quite clearly, in fact.
“No.”
But Warren has a hearing problem. Like many successful visionaries he hears only what he wants to hear. So when I told him that I had read the part he had in mind for me in his script for Dick Tracy, which he had sent over, and did not think I could do anything with it, he said, “Oh Jesus, you’re leaving me up in the air.”
Mind you, I had never committed. I had yet to even talk to him since he’d messengered the script to the house.
“But—”
“You can’t do this to me,” he said.
Later I realized that he had already cast the part in his head. It was a fait accompli. He had already cast his girlfriend at the time, Madonna, and pals such as Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman. I was on his list, too, and what I eventually realized was that whether or not I liked it or even agreed, I was going to be in the movie.
Indeed, the most remarkable thing was that though I had no intention of saying yes, I ended up in the movie anyway, playing the district attorney, D.A. Fletcher.
I spent only three days working on the film, and it was still a strange experience. I had one scene where we were shooting in a small hotel room and I had to fall between a little nightstand and an iron cot. We did six takes and on the last one I hit my shoulder on the iron and it tore my clavicle loose. I took my coat off and the bone was sticking straight up. A doctor was called in and taped me up so I could continue work.
I could have complained about the lack of a stunt coordinator, but I chose not to. The next scene was in the courtroom opposite my nemesis, Big Boy Caprice, who was played by Al Pacino. For the two days we worked together, he never spoke to me. At best, I got a nasty look. After a while, I got it. Al was a Method actor and always in his role. He was not supposed to like me, so he kept his distance. But the moment Warren said, Cut, he stuck out his hand and said, “Dick, how are you? How have you been?”
The whole experience baffled me. I never understood what I was doing there until finally, before leaving the set, I asked Warren why he wanted me.
“We needed somebody above reproach,” he said. “We needed someone who was a good guy because of the twist at the end when he turns bad. I wanted someone nobody would ever suspect.”
“And I’m the guy,” I said.
“You’re the guy.” He nodded. “You’re the goody two-shoes.”
Hey, I guess it worked. The movie won three Academy Awards, Al Pacino received a Best Supporting Actor nomination, and the picture itself was a box-office smash. Michelle, who had known Warren for years, had the proper take. She advised me not to think too much about it, adding, “He and Madonna were fun to look at—and the movie was pretty good, too.”
Perspective was one thing you hoped to acquire with age, and I suppose I was getting my share.
For my sixty-fifth birthday, Michelle threw me a party at home. She put a big tent up in the backyard and took care of the guest list without letting me in on who was coming. On the big day, I walked in and saw a mob of people, seemingly everybody I ever knew or had met, from all my leading ladies to Charlie Dye, the kid who had lived next door to me when I was twelve and did magic tricks with me. He had flown in from Indianapolis.
“You’re not twelve anymore,” I exclaimed.
“Neither are you,” he laughed.
Beaming, Michelle watched us reconnect. She never explained how she had found him. The best part? Charlie had saved an old magic trick of mine all these years, the endless-scarf trick, and he gave it to me at the party. And I kept pulling and pulling … until both of us laughed the way we had fifty years earlier.
The party was sensational. We had a piano player. My daughter sang. Actually, all of us sang. I blew out the candles on my cake and wanted to know how everyone else had gotten so old when I was still a kid—or at least acted like one. I chalked it up to good genes and a sense of humor.
Even my mother, at ninety-one, though having begun a marked decline that eventually led to her death in 1993, still had a good outlook. I had visited her over Mother’s Day at Jerry’s farm in Arkansas, where he had moved after remarrying and she had soon followed. We were on the porch, talking with one of my cousins, and my mother turned to me and asked, “Who are these people?” Her voice was so sweet and curious.
“That’s your son Jerry,” I said.
“Well, he looked like a nice man,” she said. “I’m glad to meet him.”
She once called me in a panic. I heard the alarm in her voice and started to look for my cell phone, thinking I should call my brother while keeping her on the line. Then I heard the problem.
“You know your dad has left me,” she said.
“Mom, …” I said.
“No, listen to me,” she continued. “I fixed him breakfast and then he left. I thought he had gone to take a nap, but he’s not in the bedroom.” She paused. “Dick, I think he’s run off with another woman.”
Finally, it was my turn to speak.
“Mom, Dad has been dead for fifteen years,” I said.
“Really?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Oh, thank God!” she said.
Having run nearly every television network on the planet—or at least seeming to have—Fred Silverman knew the TV business and also the business of TV. He was a throwback to the days when I started out and there were just a few guys in the executive suites who made all the decisions according to taste and gut instinct, as opposed to what the business had become now, with shows passing through a sieve of executives, committees, and focus groups before getting on the air.
I did not want to be seen as difficult, but I was spoiled by working with the best writers in the business, Carl Reiner, Aaron Ruben, Garry Marshall, Jerry Belson, Sam Denoff, and men of that ilk. As I told People magazine, it seemed to me that networks now pandered to an audience afflicted with “attention deficit disorders”—that is, if shows even made it through all the committees and testing—and so you needed someone with Fred’s know-how to get a show on the air.
Like Warren Beatty, Fred also had a talent for hearing what he wanted to hear. Even when I refused his offer to star in a spin-off of his show Jake and the Fat Man, he kept right on talking as if I was going to change my mind, which eventually I did.
“I don’t want to do an hour show,” I said. “I think at my age—you know I recently turned sixty-five—it’s going to be too much.”
“Just do the pilot,” he said.
“But that could turn into a commitment I don’t want to make,” I said.
“It could turn into an excellent series if we do our jobs,” he said.
In 1991, I went on Jake and the Fat Man and introduced the character Dr. Mark Sloan, a free-spirited, iconoclastic physician who solves crimes in his spare time at night with his police detective son. Instead of picking up the pilot, CBS ordered three made-for-TV movies they called Diagnosis Murder. I made them contingent on casting my real-life son Barry as my TV son. The whole thing rode on that; otherwise I would not have agreed.
But they readily wrote him in and we went to work in Vancouver, planning to do the movies one after another. Cynthia Gibb and Stephen Caffrey were cast in the other key roles, and guest spots in the first movie went to Bill Bixby, Ken Kercheval, and Mariette Hartley. You could tell I had a say in developing my character. I had to play myself one way or another. I wanted him to be very human, very vulnerable—a little absentminded, caring, and funny when appropriate. Oh, and lest anyone miss all that, he danced.
For that first movie, I got Arthur Duncan, the great tap dancer from The Lawrence Welk Show, to come in and play a janitor. He secretly teaches me tap dancing in exchange for medical treatment. Nobody knows it, though. They keep hearing something going on in my office and wonder what it is. At the end of the show, we appear in the hall and do our number.
It was such a treat to dance with Arthur. I indulged myself. But while rehearsing, I did a move where I stepped on my heel and toe and all of a sudden my foot flopped. I could not step on my heel.
I called my doctor and he said get back here now if you don’t want to lose the use of your leg. It was a pinched nerve, with some minor complications. We had to postpone the other two movies while I returned to L.A. and underwent several weeks of traction. By the time we finished the recast with Victoria Rowell and Scott Baio, there was talk about a series. And before long there was an order for eight episodes.
It was like the old Camel and the Arab fable: An Arab pitches a tent in the desert at night and leaves his camel outside. Complaining that he’s cold, the camel asks if he can put his head inside. Then he asks if he can put his feet in. Before long, he’s completely inside the tent. And so it was with Diagnosis Murder and me.