My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [17]
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