My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [34]
Mary and I, as Laura and Rob, exchange one of those frightened looks that is familiar to parents caught off guard.
“Wha-wha-what did you say, Ritchie?” Rob stammers.
He repeats the question and Rob says there’s not enough time to explain such a complicated thing. Then he turns to Laura and asks when she will have time to explain it to Ritchie. Unwilling to let her husband off the hook, she says there is still a half hour before bedtime, which sends Rob scrambling for Dr. Spock’s child-rearing book. Something akin to that moment had actually happened to me at home, where Dr. Spock was our top and only authority. Our copy of his book was dog-eared in a hundred places.
“Rich, where do you think you came from?” Rob asks.
“Same place that Grandpa Helper came from,” he says. “New Jersey.”
Realizing Ritchie is not ready for Dr. Spock, and in fact isn’t ready for the kind of specifics he feared, Rob says, “You didn’t come from New Jersey. You come from New York. Don’t you remember that?”
That line helps send the rest of the show into a wonderful series of flashbacks and reminiscences about the twenty-four hours leading up to Ritchie’s birth. It was all about being a nervous husband, something I had recently gone through with Carrie Beth’s birth, by the way, and something that came naturally to me. The show developed during rehearsals, where we all took a simple idea and kept adding to it until it was jam-packed with the most delicious comedy bits.
After this whirlwind, it concludes with Ritchie asking his mom if she liked that story. She nods yes.
“Better than Black Beauty?” he asks.
“Yes, better than Black Beauty,” she agrees.
In November, about a month after Carrie Beth was born, we had our own hell’s a poppin’—or rather, hell’s a burnin’—adventure: the Bel Air fire.
One day Margie looked up from the front yard and all of a sudden she called me to come see, to hurry and confirm the mind-boggling sight of flames shooting up across the horizon. If devils wore top hats, we were seeing the tips of them dancing up and down behind the not-too-distant mountains.
Within no time, the flames began to march over the hill and we had to evacuate. Police cars drove up the street, ordering residents to leave. We packed up quickly and I took the whole family to the studio. At night, we checked into a motel and stayed there for a couple of days.
The fire burned some houses along our street but skipped ours. During the next rain, though, the hillside above us slid down into our pool. I needed to have the entire hillside replanted and reinforced.
For about a week, all any of us talked about at work was the fire. It prompted everyone on the cast to talk about various disasters they had been in throughout their lives, which let Morey tell about a thousand new jokes on marriage. I talked about some of my days in the service, my various car problems, and of course the numerous tornado warnings I had experienced growing up in the Midwest, which also led me to share some stories about my younger brother, Jerry.
“The hardest I’ve ever laughed,” I told people, “was one time when Jerry and I had jobs as surveyors.”
“A summer job?” someone asked.
“No, it was winter,” I explained. “I was seventeen, and Jerry was twelve. We were out in a field. There was snow up to our knees. And it was freezing cold—below freezing, actually. We were trying to take measurements and he said something funny and we started to laugh. Except our faces were frozen stiff. We couldn’t laugh. We could see it beneath the surface, but we couldn’t get it out. If you look at someone who’s trying to laugh but can’t, it’s even funnier. As we stared at each other, we laughed even harder. We were dying.”
My brother, who had been funny his whole life, had gotten into show business, too. He and my parents had driven out to California (and camped the whole way) when I was doing the Merry Mutes act. They saw Phil and me perform at the Georgian Hotel in Santa Monica. Impressed that I was making a living—such as it was—lip-syncing to records, Jerry