My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [32]
Likewise, on one of the later episodes that season, I was supposed to toss my hat onto the hat rack in my office. All week long during rehearsals, and even during the run-through on the day we filmed, I flipped my fedora toward the peg and missed. Usually I missed badly. But when we got in front of the audience Tuesday night, I tossed my hat and it went straight onto the peg, and I mean straight, as if it were on a string. I looked genuinely surprised, which I was and which was okay—it still worked in the scene—and Rosie gave me a look that said, Not bad, which also worked as a beautifully underplayed moment that got a laugh on its own. But Morey ruined it. He couldn’t hold back his astonishment.
“Holy shit!” he said to the audience. “He’s been trying to do that all week.”
Part of the fun of that first season was getting to know everyone. I was the new kid in town, so my eyes were wide open, and everyone had a full life going on outside of work. Rosie had been a performer since childhood, when she was a cute singer known as Baby Rose Marie, and she was a warmhearted New Yorker whose husband, Bobby Guy, the lead trumpet player in the NBC Orchestra, went through a mysterious illness that eventually took his life. She never lost the twinkle in her eyes, but it was hard on her.
Richard, who also played Lumpy Rutherford’s father, Fred, on Leave It to Beaver, was a gourmet cook and connoisseur of fine things. He enjoyed laughing at himself and often noted that the best acting advice he ever got came from Helen Hayes at the start of his career when she told him to give up any thoughts of becoming a leading man.
Richard and Morey were unlikely best pals, but they were, and they frequently went out for drinks after work and came up with some of the best one-liners, insults, and bad jokes. That was Morey’s specialty, coming up with those spot-on, hilarious insults.
Morey was a fascinating character with a joke for every person, situation, moment, or occasion. He claimed to know a hundred thousand jokes. But he had another side that few saw—or heard. The son of immigrants, he was a skilled musician who’d done stand-up with his brother in vaudeville and, as a teenager, worked in Al Capone’s Chicago speakeasy. He wrote a couple of well-known songs in the 1940s, including “Rum and Coca-Cola.” Few people know he also wrote lyrics to the show’s theme song.
So you think that you got trouble
Well, trouble’s a bubble
So tell old Mister Trouble to get lost.
Why not hold your head up high, and
Stop cryin’
Start tryin’
And don’t forget to keep your fingers crossed.
When you find the joy of livin’
Is lovin’
And givin’
You’ll be there when the winning dice are tossed.
A smile’s just a frown
That’s turned upside down
So smile, and that frown
Will defrost
And don’t forget to keep your fingers crossed.
I don’t think anyone outside the show ever heard those lyrics until I began performing them with my singing group around 2004. Once you hear them arranged with the theme song, they put a smile on your face.
Morey was like that, too. He was a devoted husband and father of two children, and above all else a very happy man. He used to say he was the happiest person he knew. He was probably right.
On the set, Morey was usually on the phone with his broker or reading the business section of the paper and then talking to his broker. It was as if he ran a second business. During rehearsals, someone was always paging him, “Morey, we’re ready for you. We’re waiting.”
It turned out the human joke machine was a financial genius. If not a genius, he had the magic