My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [11]
A while after our Zephyr Room debut, Phil and I were booked into Slapsy Maxie’s, one of Hollywood’s hottest clubs, as the opening act for the Delta Rhythm Boys. We signed for two shows a night. It was our biggest gig to date. On opening night, I looked out and saw Lucille Ball in the audience. She was not laughing. Nor was anyone else. We died. We weren’t sophisticated enough for a club drawing from Hollywood’s upper tier, and nobody applauded when we finished. Oh, it was painful.
Afterward two guys knocked on our dressing-room door, gave us thirty bucks, and told us to get out. We never even made the late show. Adding insult to injury, I went outside and found my car had been towed. I eventually found it in a muddy field, buried up to the hubcaps, and spent the rest of the night trying to get it out. It was one of those moments when you ask, “Jeez, am I in the wrong business?”
Word of that debacle spread through the nightclub world and we lost a number of bookings. During that fallow period, Phil bought a TV, one of the seven-inch sets that were on the market. We watched Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theater, The Ed Sullivan Show, Candid Camera, Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour, and the news. Our dry spell was broken when a local station booked our act. One of the few TV stations in L.A. at the time, it broadcast from the top of Mount Wilson, about ninety minutes northeast of L.A.
Phil and I drove there in my ’35 Ford. We got about halfway up the mountain, one of the tallest peaks in Southern California, when the car died. It didn’t just wheeze and cough. It literally passed out. We took our junk out and hiked the rest of the way up.
Less than a year later, Margie and I found a duplex in Malibu. We moved in and for about eight months loved living at the beach. We found out she was pregnant with twins while Phil and I were working at the Georgian Hotel in Santa Monica, which was much closer to where I lived than Hollywood, and I carved out an easy routine with the shorter drive.
A problem arose when my share of the Merry Mutes’s take failed to cover all of Margie’s and my expenses. I fell behind on the rent, and though I always felt like something would happen that would allow me to catch up, our bills piled up until I had what was easily the worst day of my life.
It started one day with Margie experiencing severe cramps. When she began to bleed, I drove her to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. I am sure our old Ford had never been pressed to go as fast as I implored it on that gray afternoon. I had gone to church and Sunday school every week through childhood, right up until I joined the Air Force, and there in the car I said every prayer I had ever learned.
Half of those prayers were for Margie, and the other half were for our car. “Please, God, get her through this.” It didn’t matter if God understood which was which; I covered all bases.
Shortly after we got to the hospital, Margie miscarried, and it was a very bleak time for us. You figure things happen for a reason, and that was one of those times. I left her resting at the hospital and returned home to find all of our belongings stacked up in front of our place, on the shoulder of the highway. Our landlord had thrown us out.
He was apologetic, more so than might be expected from someone who was owed three months’ rent. But he was also being practical. As he explained, he needed the money.
Well, I didn’t have it. I turned around and, with cars speeding past, began piling our belongings in the back of our Ford.
I went back to St. John’s and spent the night with Margie. In the morning, I used most of the last eighty-five dollars I had to my name to pay the hospital bill. With the meager amount left over, we got a room with a hot plate in a shack of a hotel on Sawtelle Boulevard. Margie was lactating, bandaged, sore, and tired. I bought cheap hamburger meat and cooked