6
Jane Froman was a popular singer from the 1930s, a former star with the Ziegfeld Follies, and so highly regarded that legendary Broadway producer Billy Rose reportedly once quipped that the ten best female singers in the world were “Jane Froman and nine others.” In 1943 she survived a plane crash in Europe while on a USO tour but suffered injuries that led to a rash of physical problems as well as an addiction to painkillers and alcohol.
In 1952, the same year Susan Hayward played her in the movie With a Song in My Heart, Jane began hosting a nightly fifteen-minute show on CBS called USA Canteen. By the time I arrived in New York City for my audition, her show was called simply The Jane Froman Show. On the night I got into town, Byron met me at my hotel and took me to the theater where she did her show.
I was backstage with Byron when Jane finished her show, and I heard the director ask the audience to stay in their seats “because we have a young man who’s going to come out and entertain you.” At that moment, I asked myself why I was doing this. I wasn’t ambitious. My life in New Orleans was perfectly fine. And yet …
“This can be your big break,” Byron said.
“I know,” I said. “But I’m scared to death.”
“You’re going to be fine,” he said. “Just be yourself.”
After a quick pass through makeup and a couple deep breaths to shake out my nervousness, I went onstage—my first time in front of multiple cameras, real lights, and an experienced director—where I sang a song and performed a monologue I had written. It seemed to go over well with the audience, but the only opinion that mattered belonged to the network executives watching from the booth, and I didn’t see them afterward.
Later, over dinner, Byron analyzed my performance and expressed his belief that I had impressed the CBS brass. I was not as confident, though I didn’t think I was terrible. I simply had no way of knowing, and that made me nervous.
The next morning, Byron took me into the vice president’s office. He told me to relax, it was going to be a good meeting. He was right. The VP offered me a seven-year contract, with a starting salary of twenty thousand dollars a year—twice as much as I had made in my life.
I couldn’t speak. I stared at the CBS executive, then at Byron, and kept going back and forth. Finally, Byron reached over to shake hands with the VP.
“Speaking on behalf of Dick, he accepts,” he said. “As you can see, he is thrilled.”
I nodded.
I was thrilled. Beyond thrilled. I was downright stunned. This was one of those proverbial big breaks, the kind you hear about, except it was happening to me, Dick Van Dyke, from Danville, Illinois.
While I went back home and gave my two weeks’ notice, Byron rented us a house in Massapequa, a suburb on the South Shore of Long Island, and within the month, Margie and I and our three children had moved in. To celebrate our new good fortune, I took Margie on a Fifth Avenue shopping spree and we bought each other gifts as if we had just come into money. By our standards, we had.
Work-wise, I was assigned to the CBS Morning Show, airing Monday through Friday from seven to eight. Walter Cronkite hosted the show when it launched in 1954 as a two-hour broadcast. After Dave Garroway and NBC’s Today show trounced it in the ratings, it was cut to sixty minutes, with the second hour going to Captain Kangaroo. Other hosts were brought in, including Jack Paar and Johnny Carson, then a lanky Midwestern comedian who was beginning his climb up TV’s ranks.
The network also used humorist John Henry Faulk, whom I replaced after he was wrongly labeled a communist by a McCarthy-backed group and blacklisted from the business.
I wasn’t aware of the reasons for Faulk’s departure until later when he chronicled his ordeal in the wonderful book Fear on Trial. I walked into my new job as the Morning Show’s announcer wonderfully, blissfully ignorant—and quite late.
My first day was July 18, 1955. I woke up at four A.M. because I had to be at the studio at six for rehearsal and I had an hour’s drive into the city. I got in our Chevy, started it up, heard a loud snap, crackle, pop, and was suddenly engulfed by smoke.
I leapt from the car and waited for the smoke to clear. I tried the ignition again. The car was dead, and I would be, too, if I didn’t get going.
I took a cab to the train station and caught the train into Manhattan. It was my first time on the Long Island Rail Road, but I did not worry, as I still had plenty of time to get to work. It seemed like I might even save time, since I could get off at Grand Central Station, where, in fact, the studio was located, way up high in the upper floors above the terminal.
But in keeping with the way the day began, I missed my stop and ended up at Penn Station, on Seventh Avenue and Thirty-first Street. I was not even close. I checked my watch. It was time to panic. The cushion I had wanted before going on the air was virtually gone, and so was my sense of calm.
I hopped in a taxi and implored the driver to hurry to Grand Central. That may work in the movies, but in real life, as anyone who has driven in Manhattan knows, it’s nearly impossible to hurry through crosstown traffic, and for some reason it becomes exponentially slower when time is a factor.
When I finally hurried into the studio, the show had already been on for twenty minutes. Merv Griffin, a young singer and a regular on the show until the format was changed a few months later, was filling in and proving that he was a much better emcee than I was ever going to be.
My bosses understood, though, and they hustled me on the air and let me keep my job. Live TV was like that. Every day you marched into the heart of the unknown, like one of those crazy people who purposely drive into the eye of a tornado. The only certainty was that something would go wrong, if not today, then tomorrow. It required nerves of steel and a sense of humor to match.
The mistakes were not funny when they happened, but afterward they had a way of seeming hilarious. The great Dixieland trumpet player Bill Davison showed up one morning so stoned that I had to prop him in the corner. I had to look back after we went off the air to make sure he wasn’t still there. Guests came in all the time still drunk or stoned from the night before. I came to realize that that glassy-eyed look meant I was not only going to ask the questions but also have to figure out a way to come up with the answers.
My most memorable disaster occurred when I interviewed a dogsled racer. I was going to question him about traversing Canada’s Laurentian Mountains. He had his team of dogs set up on the stage. They were gorgeous animals. Just before we went live, he warned, “Whatever you do, don’t say ‘mush’ to the dogs.”
“Okay,” I told myself, and made a mental note. But of course during our interview, as I asked him about driving his team of dogs, I began clowning around and jokingly said, “Mush.” It just came out of me. His dogs didn’t understand it was a joke and they took off. They ran through the kitchen set, the weather set, and two other sets, knocking all of them down, before they stopped.
I never thought I was good at reading the news or interviewing the more serious-minded people who came into the studio. It wasn’t my cup of tea. I got by only because my newsmen were two of the best who ever worked in television, Walter Cronkite and Charles Collingwood.
However, six months into the show, the network removed Walter. I guess they thought he was busy enough with the Evening News and his own show, You Are There, but apparently that was not communicated to Walter. He called me as soon as he heard, looking for an explanation.
“What did I do?” he asked. “What didn’t you like?”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“What did I do that got me fired?”
Walter was ten years older than I was, far more experienced, and basically in a whole other universe at the network. But I realized he had no idea what was going on. I set him straight.
“Walter, I can’t fire anybody,” I said. “I’m lucky to have this job myself.”
My way out of the news and into a more comfortable role was to start doing a five-minute segment where I sat in front of a large easel, told famous children’s stories and fairy tales, and illustrated them with cartoons. A composer named Hank Silvern wrote me a theme song called “Mice on Rollerskates.” And viewers seemed to like the segment. But I went into work one morning and found all my belongings in the hall.
In short time, I learned that the network had brought in a new producer, Charlie Andrews, a nice guy who actually turned out to be quite helpful. But they had given him my office without telling me. I was assured that it wasn’t a message; it was a mistake. I was also told not to read anything into the fact that they didn’t have a place to put me.
Yet how could I not get upset? It was six in the morning and I was standing in the hall, without an office—and with a show to do.
I got on my high horse and complained to the network’s vice president of television, Harry Amerly. It wasn’t fair, I told him. In those days, CBS was known as the Tiffany network, and it was. Network headquarters was located at Fifty-second Street and Madison Avenue, the heart of Manhattan, and the executives were gentlemen. They dressed to the nines and conducted themselves accordingly. There wasn’t any skulduggery. The network was run beautifully. And Harry reflected that sensibility. He responded to my ire by saying, “Let’s go out to lunch.”
He took me to Louie & Armand’s, an upscale speakeasy on Fifty-second Street. I didn’t drink at the time. Harry nevertheless ordered me a couple of martinis, one right after the other, which I sipped until I felt a chill in my extremities and heard Harry’s voice begin to fade into the distance as he said something about getting me a new office.
“Boy, I don’t feel well,” I said, and then, all of a sudden, boom! My head hit the table. I passed out.
I never did get a new office, and after a year on the anchor desk, CBS took me off The Morning Show. I spent 1956 as host of the network’s Saturday-morning Cartoon Theater, a series done on film where I interacted with Heckle and Jeckle and other popular characters. I was also a panelist on To Tell the Truth, which didn’t go that well. Every night, the show’s producers, Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, came in and shook hands with the three panelists—actually, not all three. They avoided me.
For some reason, they never acknowledged my presence. They didn’t like me. I said to myself, “My career here is going to be rather short.” I was not altogether wrong. Yet when they were working out the idea for a new game show called The Price Is Right, they had me emceeing it. We brought in people off the street and tried to figure out the show. I went home numerous nights and said to Margie, “This is the dumbest idea. People are just trying to guess how much things cost. That’s a show? It’s never going to go.”
Despite my opinion, they got it off the ground, giving the hosting job to Bill Cullen, and it became a TV staple. More than fifty years later, it’s still going.
I then tried my hand at a few pilots that didn’t work and bided my time as the network tried to figure out what to do with me.
They didn’t try too hard. There was one executive, Oscar Katz, the vice president of programming, who was not a fan. He didn’t think I had enough talent. In a meeting with other executives trying to find a place for me, he once said, “The kid just doesn’t have it.” I knew what he meant. At times, as I knocked around the network, I kind of agreed with him.