My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [20]
I taught Sunday school at the Dutch Reformed Presbyterian Church, and when I saw friends with whom I had partied the night before, I would roll my eyes and ask if they had recovered from the good times. I made it look sort of funny. It would not be as funny later on when I realized that I had a drinking problem. But that was still a long way off, and it was an even longer time before I understood it.
The drinking never interfered with the work, which picked up again when I landed a guest spot on The Phil Silvers Show as Sgt. Bilko’s cousin. Then I was doing weekly pantomimes on The Pat Boone Show when I ran into Gil Cates, a young producer who went on to have an excellent career directing movies and producing TV, including more than a dozen Academy Awards telecasts.
Gil liked me. He was launching a daytime game show called Mother’s Day, and he hired me to emcee. We shot at the famous Latin Quarter nightclub on Broadway and Forty-seventh Street. I stuck it out for an entire season because I needed the money, but unfortunately for both Gil and me, overseeing diaper-changing races and floor-mopping contests was not my thing.
I went on to host another game show called Laugh Line. On it, a group of actors struck a pose while a panel of funny people, including Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Shelley Berman, Orson Bean, and Dorothy Loudon, attempted to come up with a humorous description for it. With a panel full of comedy Hall of Famers, you’d think that show would still be on the air. But it didn’t matter how funny those people were, and they were funny. The show didn’t work.
And pretty soon, neither did I.
But the whole time I hosted those game shows, I hedged my bets against unemployment by auditioning for plays. As soon as I finished the show, I raced into the theater district. I was trying to expand my options as a performer. That’s how I found out I could sing and dance. Sure, I had sung in high school and danced in some school plays, but I never considered doing it professionally. I was at one of those auditions and someone asked if I could sing and dance.
“Sure,” I said.
Hey, fear of being hungry and homeless will do that to you.
I would have said yes to almost anything short of tightrope walking and then at least tried it.
As it happened, I could sing and dance some. I found that if I went with the music and just did what I felt, I could do pretty well.
Well enough, anyway.
I landed a little variety show with Peter Gennaro, the gifted dancer and choreographer (he’d collaborated with Jerome Robbins on the original Broadway production of West Side Story), and Ruth Price, who was eighteen and a knockout. The show closed after a very brief run, but Aaron Ruben, a writer-producer from The Phil Silvers Show, noticed my work and took a shine to me. He became a friend and supporter.
Aaron and I began palling around together, working out at the Y and talking over coffee. Eleven years older than I was, he had written for George Burns, Milton Berle, Phil Silvers, and Sid Caesar, and would go on to co-create The Andy Griffith Show and Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. Some people have the magic touch, and he was one of them. He promised to look out for possible jobs for me, and when he started doing the company sketches for Girls Against the Boys, a comedy revue, he got me in as part of the chorus, as well as in short pieces between scene changes.
The show starred Bert Lahr, Nancy Walker, and Shelley Berman. Aaron warned that “these people were hysterical,” and he was right. Bert could just look at the audience and get laughs, and Nancy knew when to do those kind of takes, too. I had one sketch with Nancy set in a deli in which I played a married man meeting up with a girl, and Nancy was the deli owner who attempts to distract