My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [22]
I didn’t know what the hell to say, and what I eventually said sounded completely wrong.
“But I … I can’t really dance.”
“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “I saw what you can do. That’s what we’ll build on. I’ll teach you to dance.”
Those lessons paid off handsomely. With a book by Michael Stewart and music and lyrics from Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, respectively, Birdie was a takeoff on the mania that swept through the youth of America when Elvis Presley was drafted into the Army in 1958. After I saw a run-through of the number “Telephone Hour,” I called my wife and told her that this show was going to go and probably do very well. It felt like everything worked.
From day one, the show had a special feel, at least among those of us on the inside, a remarkable cast featuring Dick Gautier as Conrad Birdie, Susan Watson as Kim MacAfee, Paul Lynde as her father, Kay Medford as my mother, Chita Rivera as my assistant, Rosie Alvarez, and me in the role of agent and songwriter Albert Peterson. Michael J. Pollard played the kid, Hugo, and Charles Nelson Reilly was Mr. Henkel, in addition to my understudy.
We rehearsed at the Phyllis Anderson Theater on Fourteenth Street, near the great old German restaurant Luchow’s, in the heart of what had once been the Yiddish theater district. Chita and I met on the first day of rehearsals and instantly hit it off. Both of us were clowns and made each other laugh. Gower sent us home one day after we couldn’t stop ourselves from laughing. He was a quiet man and under a lot of stress from directing and choreographing the show, and he just snapped.
“Just go home!” he said.
We left the theater like naughty schoolchildren, laughing even though we knew nothing was funny. I thought we were going to get fired.
I lucked out being able to dance with Chita. She was a natural, a whiz-bang genuine crowd-pleaser. I didn’t have to do much of anything except move with her, and as a result, I ended up looking like Fred Astaire. Her husband, Tony Mordente, later spotlighted in West Side Story, was understudying the role of Birdie and assisting Gower, and he grew jealous of how chummy Chita and I became.
He was jealous of any guy who got near Chita or gave her a look. He blew up if a cabdriver said something to her. All of a sudden he got the idea Chita and I were stepping out on him, and one day he confronted me. For a moment I thought he might kill me.
“Are you crazy?” I said. “I don’t do that.”
Luckily he believed me and we all stayed good friends.
One night, just before we left town to workshop the show in Philadelphia, I exited the theater and started down the snow-covered sidewalk on Fourteenth Street when a tall, skinny guy came up to me and said, “Excuse me, do you have a dresser yet?”
I looked up—and up—and immediately recognized one of the tallest people I knew: Frank Adamo. A fairly recent acquaintance, he had recently lost his job as a junior ad executive at the J. Walter Thompson agency, and he was looking for something else, something different.
“I don’t know,” I said. “What’s a dresser?”
I really didn’t know.
When I had done Girls Against the Boys the previous year I didn’t know that theater people did their own makeup. On the first night, I asked someone to point me toward the makeup room. They laughed and explained that I had to do it myself. That night, I borrowed makeup from some people and went out looking like Emmett Kelly the clown.
Frank smiled.
“Sure,” he said. “A dresser is the person who takes care of your wardrobe, makes sure it’s clean and hung up and ready for you every night. I’ll also do all the other things you will need done.”
“Oh, I see,” I said.
“I also need a job,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Well, you got one,” I said. “We’re opening at the Shubert Theater in Philadelphia.”
“Yes, I know,” he said.
“Then I’ll see you there.”
We shook hands, and the next time I saw Frank was in Philadelphia where he had my clothes hung up in my dressing room, as promised. Somehow he intuitively