27
On a mild afternoon in February 1993, I stood facing a crowd on Hollywood Boulevard, feeling a mix of nostalgia and celebration. I was receiving a star on the city’s Walk of Fame, the best part of which was sharing the moment with Michelle, who was at my side, as well as my former Dick Van Dyke Show costars Rose Marie and Morey Amsterdam, and the man responsible for the whole thing, Carl Reiner, who, when I turned to him and said thank you, quipped, “When I saw all of you here, I thought, Hey, we can do a show.”
Given the chance, we might have. At any rate, we laughed and reminded ourselves of numerous good times from the old series. We reminisced about the production numbers we used to weave into some of the shows. Funny how all of us recalled those scenes as our fondest, especially Carl, who reminded us that they meant less writing and shorter scripts. But Morey was a musician, Rosie was a singer, and of course Mary was a dancer, who back in the day continued to do her barre exercises at lunchtime. And all of us were hams.
As we stood on Hollywood Boulevard, I almost felt transported back in time as I remembered rehearsing a dance number with Mary that was set in a prison. Our legs were tied together, and as we practiced, I yanked her too hard and she fell. “Sorry, Mary,” I muttered up into the sky now, hoping that wherever she was, she was able to hear me.
Oh, and then I remembered going to a recording studio with Mary after work one night to lay down vocals for a song, but the music had been prerecorded in the wrong tempo, way too fast, and we spent hours trying to get it right. It happened to be my fourteenth wedding anniversary that night and I never called home, sent flowers, or did anything. When I finally walked through the front door, my wife was waiting at the dining-room table for me, wearing a gorgeous evening gown, her candlelit dinner on the table, ruined.
Carl, Morey, and Rosie all felt my pain as I recounted that story thirty-some years later.
“I never knew that,” Carl said.
“Boy, I was in deep trouble,” I said.
“And so was your marriage,” Morey said. “But things worked out. You still got your star.”
My star was placed next to that of my idol, Stan Laurel, but when Hollywood’s honorary mayor, Johnny Grant, finally unveiled it, there was an unexpected silence, followed by a clap of laughter. My name was misspelled. It read Dick Vandyck. Embarrassed, Johnny quickly handed me a Sharpie and I drew a line where there should have been a space and told him not to worry. It had happened before. When I opened in Bye Bye Birdie, the name on my dressing-room door was Dyck Van Dyke. I survived—and looking back, I learned not to sweat the little stuff.
Indeed, I rather enjoyed the reminder that even those immortalized are mortal, though there were those who were saying that I was looking more like TV’s iron man. I was almost sixty-eight years old and had a show on CBS’s fall schedule. Granted, it was Friday night at eight P.M., normally considered TV’s dead zone, but I was content in trying to transform the graveyard into an old-age home, and who knows, maybe bring in some younger viewers, too.
It worked. Although the Washington Post described Diagnosis Murder as “prime-time television as it was twenty years ago,” they were not criticizing me for that. On the contrary, they pointed out that there was an audience for NYPD Blue and one for my brand of entertainment, and added, “Buddy Ebsen didn’t need to walk around bare-butted to make Barnaby Jones worth watching.” I was pleased to find that viewers felt the same way. As a result, CBS ordered more shows beyond the initial eight.
For cost purposes, we’d shot the first round in Denver at a facility that had once been home base for the show Ironside. I stayed in Raymond Burr’s former hotel penthouse, which had unobstructed views of the Mile High City. I could watch the sun rise and set from different sides of the glassed-in perch. I felt like I was suspended in the clouds, and I probably carried some of that lightness into the way I played this funny doctor who danced and roller-skated when he wasn’t solving crimes.
It could not have been easier. But then, I feel as if every role is always a version of me.
The earliest version of me was put back on display on Nick at Nite, the bloc of nighttime programming the cable network devoted to classic shows. Some thirty years after its debut, The Dick Van Dyke Show was a hit again. I don’t mean this egotistically, but I was not surprised. However, others were. A reporter from the Los Angeles Times asked me why I thought the show was popular with a whole new generation, albeit a very different type of viewer from those who originally saw it.
The question made me laugh. Wasn’t it obvious?
The show was funny.
It was the same reason kids still giggled through Laurel and Hardy movies. Some humor is timeless. Clever people like Carl Reiner come along and figure out new ways to find the funny in human behavior, and then all of a sudden you have another hit.
With two shows on the air, I supposed sticking to family entertainment all these years had paid off. I was hot.
And then I got too hot. At the start of November, as I was promoting both shows and an NBC Christmas special I’d narrated, Malibu was engulfed by wildfires. Michelle and I watched nervously as the flames danced slowly but steadily down the brush-covered hills. This happened every five or ten years; it was almost like payback for living amid such beauty close to the ocean.
Later that day, the sheriffs evacuated our neighborhood. There was no time to pack up the house, not even to gather more than a few photo albums. Michelle and I shut the door on all of our furniture and clothing, as well as a lifetime of possessions, artwork, and awards. We had no idea whether any of this stuff would be there when we returned—whenever that would be—or if it would even survive the rest of the afternoon.
Standing on the porch, I looked at her and shrugged. What were we going to do?
“We’re leaving with each other,” I said. “That’s what’s most important.”
A short time later, I was updating my publicist, Bob Palmer, when he put me on hold to talk to another client, Anthony Hopkins. A moment later, Bob came back on the phone and said that Anthony, who also lived in Malibu, had called from London to get the latest news on the fire. Hearing that Michelle and I were suddenly homeless, he offered us an apartment that he kept in Westwood. Fortunately, we only had to spend one night there before we were able to return to our house, which survived the close call, as had all of the other homes in the neighborhood.
We were lucky. The flames had burned right into some of the backyards. It was a lesson for all of us on how much you can control in life, or rather, how little control you sometimes have. As I’d found time and again throughout my life—and would continue to find—you do what you can, say your prayers, and hope for the best.
Defying predictions, we were renewed for a second season, and production for Diagnosis moved to L.A., where we shot at an old mental hospital off Coldwater Canyon Boulevard in the Valley. The place was not haunted, but holes in the walls, urine stains on the floor, and other damage made the torment of its former occupants feel very close by. A moderate earthquake hit one day and shook pieces of the ceiling loose. As they crashed to the floor, it prompted jokes about the show’s shaky status with the network.
I turned seventy in the midst of the show’s third season. I joked that it was as hard to get out of the business as it was to get in it. That season, Charlie Schlatter joined the cast in place of Scott Baio. He added a personality that was like a missing ingredient. I had spotted him when we were auditioning actors to replace Scott. Fred Silverman had said, “I wish we could get a Michael J. Fox type,” and I said, “I’ve got just the guy. You couldn’t get any closer to Michael J. Fox than Charlie Schlatter.”
He fit in with Barry and me. The three of us would get all of our laughter out during rehearsal and then play the scenes as straight as possible. It was the same with Victoria. Off-camera, the three of us had a running joke. We used to wonder who was running the hospital while the three of us were out chasing a criminal or looking for clues. Luckily, I suppose, nobody ever asked.
I think the primary reason Diagnosis Murder succeeded was the relationship people saw on-screen between Barry and me. That was real. So was the bond I had with Charlie and Victoria. It was not your typical detective show. It felt more like Rob Petrie playing a detective. It may have looked that way, too, when we tossed in the roller-skating, singing and dancing, and wrapped it in a little cat-and-mouse mystery.
We lucked into something special, something you can’t act, and when that happens, people will sense the fun you’re having and tune in. They want to experience it, too.
We chugged along, the little TV show that could. When I looked up, we were in our sixth year. Then our seventh. In terms of longevity, the series surpassed The Dick Van Dyke Show. Astonished writers and TV insiders asked how that happened. Peoplemagazine called it “remarkable” that at nearly seventy-three years old I had a show. Was it remarkable?
Not to me. I just kept showing up and having fun.
I added to the fun by inviting many friends and contemporaries on as guest stars, including Mike Connors, Andy Griffith, Dick Martin, Sally Kellerman, Robert Vaughn, Tim Conway, and even Jack Klugman when he was recovering from throat cancer. I took pride in the easygoing, comfortable atmosphere. In fact, the only argument I ever had during the entire run came when the line producer tried to save money by cutting back on the sandwiches we put out for the crew in mid-morning.
I heard grumbling right away. One thing you do not want on a TV series is an unhappy crew. I went straight to the producer and told him that if he was not going to pay for the sandwiches, I would out of my own pocket. Embarrassed, he had the food back the next day and smiles returned to my crew.
The only other problem I had came when the network brought on two young executive producers who tried to make the show hipper. All of a sudden a show opened with a guy in bed with a naked girl. And gun battles were written into the script. I told them that they were on the wrong show if they wanted to write cutting-edge stuff, and then I took my case to CBS president Leslie Moonves. Michelle had known Les many years earlier when he was a struggling actor, and that was probably why this powerful and astute man in TV who would have fit in nicely at the network back in its Tiffany heyday gave me ample time to air my complaint.
Indeed, Les listened as I told him that we did not need the sex and violence. I said that the people who tune in to the show did not expect it from me. Nor did they want it. Nor did I. In fact, I feared we would actually lose our audience if we kept it up.
Les heard me, and once that was straightened out, we chugged along for several more seasons. We finally wound down in 2001. By then we had spent ten years on the air.
But I did not go gently into the sunset. When we shot our finale, I invited a writer from the Los Angeles Times to come on the set for the purpose of giving him a piece of my mind about the poor treatment given us codgers by youth-obsessed TV and media outlets like the Times, who only seemed to care about the next big—and usually younger, sexier—thing. A few years earlier, I had accused the Times of having “it in for us old folks” and sent one of their writers a letter that said, “Growing old is not a leper colony where an unfortunate few are sent to die. It is a precious gift given only to some lucky human beings.”
At seventy-five, I thought I was ready to indulge in the gift of my dotage. I had been in the business for more than fifty years. “It’s time to go out to pasture,” I told the Associated Press. “Tastes have changed.” I often felt like an anachronism because I stood for wholesome family entertainment, the stuff I had practiced and preached for half a century. But if that went out of fashion, well, what kind of society were we?
On the morning after our wrap party, where I had harmonized with the guys one last time, I stood on our front porch shaded in bougainvillea, draped my arm around Michelle, took a deep breath of ocean air, and for something like the fifty-seventh time in my career I announced my retirement.
Michelle laughed.
“How long do you think you’ll be out in the pasture?” she asked.
I checked my watch and raised an eyebrow.
“What time is it now?”
Michelle was an excellent cook. She specialized in Italian food. The richer the sauce and the more garlic, the better. But for her, cooking was an artistic endeavor, and if she wasn’t in the mood, we ate out. We also enjoyed a rich social life with Dolly and Dick Martin (they would always pretend to bicker, but it was an act and they were a wonderful couple), Tim Conway and his wife, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, Mike Connors and his wife, and Richard Crenna, who was a prince.
For a time, we also enjoyed poker night on Sundays at Barbara Sinatra’s, though it was Michelle who played, not me. I kibitzed with Larry Gelbart, Jack Lemmon, and Veronique and Gregory Peck, who laughed at me when I said that I was the only one there who didn’t play cards.
“Yeah,” he said, “but you’re the only one here still working.”
That was true. After a few months of puttering around the house and checking the calendar to see which couple we were meeting for dinner, I told Michelle that I was going back to work. “I knew it,” she chortled, her laugh echoing through the house. I made two Diagnosis Murder movies that aired on CBS in early 2002, one of which featured my daughter Stacy in a pivotal role, and the other included my grandson Shane, a budding actor and filmmaker whose energy and creativity made being on the set feel like the playground it had been for me forty years earlier.
After continuing to screw up my retirement with a guest spot on the NBC sitcom Scrubs, I reunited with Mary Tyler Moore for the first time since the sixties in a PBS production of The Gin Game, the Pulitzer Prize–winning play that Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn had made a Broadway hit in 1977. Before Mary and I had bid good-bye to the sitcom that made both of us household names, we’d said, “God, it would be fun to do a play together.” Well, neither of us thought it would take nearly four decades.
The two-act play that brought us back together was about a couple of lonely people who meet at an old-age home and play gin rummy. Over the course of thirty-two games, their new friendship turns competitive, dark, and bitter—and in the end the two stubborn old mules miss the whole point of their second chance at companionship. Someone told me that Jessica and Hume had notes with dialogue hidden all over the stage, and I believed it.
Although Mary and I instantly recaptured our special chemistry, I could tell a couple days into the two weeks we set aside for rehearsal that we might have picked the wrong material. The director didn’t give us much to work with, and I had problems with the coarse language. It never felt right calling Mary a bitch even though we were acting. We did a lot of takes and in the end it wasn’t there, not the way I’d hoped.
Others disagreed. The play aired in May 2003 to mixed reviews, though it got a rave from actress Anne Bancroft. I bumped into her and her husband, Mel Brooks, one night at a restaurant shortly after the play aired and Anne was full of compliments and even a little envy.
“Why didn’t you ask me to do it?” she said.
My jaw dropped.
“If you’re telling the truth, I’m going to kill myself,” I said.
As much as I enjoyed working again with Mary, I also would have loved to have worked with Anne.
Afterward, instead of rushing into more jobs, I tried behaving like an actual retiree for a change. An early riser, I worked out at the local gym, brought coffee to Michelle, and then disappeared for much of the rest of the day into the guesthouse, where I had a sophisticated computer setup to indulge my passion in computer animation and CGI. Few people realized it, but I had been the computer graphics specialist on Diagnosis Murder.
In my so-called retirement, I made short films, including some in 3D. I was like a mad scientist in his lab. I put my present-day self in an old Dick Van Dyke Show episode, and I cut and pasted myself into famous movies, which I then showed to my kids and grandkids, though their amusement hardly matched mine. I felt as if I had entered my second or third … make that my fifth or sixth childhood.