My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [26]
I guess my lack of perfection turned out to be a winning hand. Let that be a lesson for future generations.
Through my agent, I received eight scripts from Carl—the first eight scripts of this new series that didn’t have a title or any actors. No longer called Head of the Family, Carl had rewritten each episode, not that it would have mattered to me. I hadn’t read the originals. I’m sure they were as brilliant as those sent to me. The eight I read were magnificent. They were fresh and funny. They resonated with real-life energy and insights that I recognized from my own life and the lives of people I knew. Carl was dialed in, as they say.
I read one after another eager to see what was next. Midway through, I turned to Margie and said, “My God, this guy is good.”
It’s one of the great understatements in TV history.
He was Carl Reiner.
So no one accuses me of venturing into hyperbole, let me say there were no one-liners in these scripts, no corny or cheap jokes for the sake of comedy. The humor grew out of the people and their relationships to one another and their jobs. It was organic, natural, real, and timeless. I keep going back to the same point, but anyone who has been in a hit TV series will mention the same thing as the essential ingredient. It was the writing. It was fantastic.
“I want to do this,” I told my agent. “What’s next?”
Next, I met with Carl. He offered me the job and asked me to fly to Los Angeles to make the pilot. Part of me was ready to go right away, but I had some reservations about leaving a hit play and uprooting my family from a place where we’d grown very comfortable. In my meeting with Carl I found myself working out this conflict perhaps subconsciously by telling him about an idea I had for a series that I was calling Man on a Scooter.
Inspired by the great physical comedy of Jacques Tati’s 1953 movie Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, I envisioned myself playing an associate professor from a small Ohio college who takes a sabbatical and travels through Europe with his typewriter on the back of a Vespa, having one adventure after another.
I had already pitched it to a network and a few producers without any interest, and Carl reacted like everyone else, only kinder. He said that while he, too, admired Tati, he thought my idea was a movie, not a TV series.
“It’s one idea,” he said, and a TV series, he explained, had to have an infinite number of story ideas, like real life—and like his scripts about Rob and Laura Petrie, their son, Ritchie, Rob’s coworkers Sally Rogers and Buddy Sorrell, their boss, Mel Cooley, and their neighbors Jerry and Millie Helper.
After getting a week off from Birdie, I flew to Los Angeles and met with Sheldon Leonard and Carl in Carl’s second-floor office at Desilu Studios. I had signed on for $1,500 an episode, and I was very excited. I felt like I was a little twig on the Sid Caesar family tree; I was honored and thrilled to have any sort of attachment to that comedy lineage. Once we began to work, I was not only honored and thrilled, but I was also impressed.
Sheldon and Carl had already cast Rose Marie as Sally Rogers, and she had told Carl about Morey Amsterdam, who was also hired, to play the role of Buddy Sorrell. Both were comedy veterans. As for Mary, it’s well-known that Sheldon and Carl considered dozens of actresses before settling on Mary Tyler Moore, a young actress whose previous work, outside of commercials and dancing, was playing a receptionist on the series Richard Diamond, Private Detective, though her great legs were all that anyone ever saw of her.
But plenty of other people in town had seen her, including Danny Thomas, one of our executive producers and one of Hollywood’s biggest, smartest stars on his own. She had auditioned to play his daughter on Make Room for Daddy, better known as The Danny Thomas Show, but as Carl later quipped, “She missed it by a nose.” Indeed, as Danny added, “No