My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [33]
Mary was a hard worker who was going through a divorce from a man she had married at eighteen and was now falling in love with Grant Tinker, a former advertising executive turned TV producer who was frequently on the set with her. Mary kept her personal life quiet. She was a load of fun, though. Before we shot the pilot, Carl jokingly (I think he was joking) suggested that she and I go away for the weekend and get to know each other. We didn’t. Once the show began airing, though, our chemistry was such that people actually thought we were husband and wife in real life.
When she was about seven or eight months pregnant, my wife came to the studio and watched a show being filmed. Afterward, she came backstage and said it didn’t look like I was acting at all.
“You’re exactly like you are at home,” she said.
She was right, and that was all due to Carl’s ability to render me perfectly on the page. I was pretty much the same person on and off the set—maybe to a fault. Early on, Sheldon gave me the only acting lesson I ever had when he came up to me after a taping, put his hands on my shoulders, and told me that I was doing a terrific job except for one small thing. It was my voice. He said that I spoke the same in every scene, in a monotone.
“Exaggerate a little,” he said. “Let the audience hear your reaction.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Don’t do much,” he said. “Just raise and lower your voice.”
I did. It worked. Simple.
11
CANCELED
That fall was a wonderful time in our lives, with a new show and the kids starting new schools, making new friends, trying to comprehend that they were still able to play in the swimming pool in October, and then, miraculously, saying hello to their new baby sister. It was four in the morning when Margie shook me awake and said, “It’s time.”
Only a moment passed before I realized she wasn’t referring to the clock on the nightstand. No, she meant that after nearly nine months of watching her tummy grow, it was time to go to the hospital and meet the newest addition to our family. She was ready to have the baby.
The birth was like clockwork. Within thirty minutes, we were at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, and though it was the same place where we’d had an unpleasant experience a decade earlier, this time the only tears we shared were from the joy of welcoming our second daughter, Carrie Beth. She arrived with a smile on her face and wisps of blond hair on top of her pinkish head. Later, I handed out cigars to everyone on the set.
As Morey shook my hand, he exclaimed, “Wow, four kids with just one wife?”
That day, the L.A. Times’ TV critic Cecil Smith was following me around for a story. We were working on the sixteenth episode of the season, “The Curious Thing About Women,” which had Rob getting annoyed at Laura for opening his mail. During a break, I took a phone call from my agent and learned that I’d been asked to host the CBS Christmas showing of The Wizard of Oz. They wanted me to include my children, Chris, eleven, Barry, ten, and Stacy, six. I told my agent about our newest addition and he said, “She’s included, too.”
It gave Cecil a great anecdote for his story. After hanging up, I turned to everyone and said, “How about that? Three hours old and she’s already in demand.” In all seriousness, though, I thought she was too young to appear on TV. Morey immediately claimed injustice.
“Who’s her agent?” Rosie asked.
“Never mind her agent,” Morey said. “Who’s her lawyer?”
Even when I tried to be serious, I failed. I used to say that I was getting paid to play. I often went into the set on Saturdays to work out little bits. I couldn’t turn my brain off, that’s how much fun I was having on the show. Take the episode “Where Did I Come From.” One of my favorites, it opens with six-year-old Ritchie looking through his baby album while Laura and Rob sit on the sofa. After commenting on a photo,