My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [47]
When President Kennedy’s former press secretary Pierre Salinger ran for the U.S. Senate from California, I joined his campaign efforts. He had been flying to Japan when JFK was slain and then worked briefly with Lyndon Johnson. After leaving the White House though, he returned to his native California and defeated Alan Cranston in the primaries. He ran against former actor George Murphy, a Republican.
The cornerstone of Salinger’s platform, which I very much agreed with, was his opposition to Proposition 14, a ballot effort intended to overturn the California Fair Housing Act, legislation that had been passed the previous year. It prevented property owners from discriminating for reasons of race, religion, sex, physical limitations, or marital status.
My sense of the way people should be treated was thoroughly offended by those who supported overturning the proposition. I loathed bias of any kind. How could people support such measures? How could Americans openly support the right to discriminate for reasons of race, religion, and so on? Salinger was asking the same questions and fighting the good fight. I didn’t know him until I pledged my support, and I grew to like him very much.
At one point, Dan Blocker from Bonanza, several actresses, and I were on a whistle-stop tour from L.A. to San Diego, and at a speech in Orange County, we were met by a pro–Prop 14 crowd that pelted us with tomatoes and eggs and held up signs displaying vile slogans of hate.
In San Diego we attended a dinner with some of Pierre’s wealthiest backers. I happened to be sitting next to Pierre when one of the bigwigs told him that he had to drop his opposition to Prop 14 and stop talking about fair housing if he wanted a shot at winning. If he didn’t, the backer said, he and several others were going to drop their support.
Pierre didn’t flinch.
“I can’t do that,” he said. “I’m running on that platform. It’s fair, it’s right, and I believe in it.”
Hearing that, I admired him even more as a politician and as a man. Not enough voters shared my opinion, though, and he lost the election and went on to a successful career in journalism.
At work, Carl was excellent at pushing the boundaries in subtle ways, like acknowledging that Rob and Laura were intimate, as husbands and wives are, or allowing others to venture into new and dicey territory. For instance, the third season had opened with the Persky and Denoff–written episode “That’s My Boy?” In it, Rob recounts how he had believed that, after Ritchie was born, he and Laura had brought the wrong baby home from the hospital. He insisted on meeting the other family, and in the end they turned out to be black.
It was a brilliant, socially relevant twist to an extremely funny episode. Initially, though, the network rejected the episode, explaining that a family sitcom was not the place to address the issue of race. However, Sheldon persuaded the network’s executives to change their mind, and we all were proud of that episode’s message.
Work was a great place to search for, and occasionally find, answers to some of life’s big questions. Failing that, it was just a great place to be. As I told a group of people one day in a question-and-answer session for Redbook magazine, “Material success isn’t too important [to me]. I suppose it would be if you were a businessman or a broker making investments and the money you accumulated was the symbol of your success.”
But that wasn’t me. I was fairly simple and basic. “I like acting,” I said. “I like my work. I just love it and try to get better if I can.”
15
SEEING STARS
Paris was supposed to be partly a vacation—and it was, sort of. I went there to make the movie The Art of Love, a comedy about a down-and-out artist who fakes his death to increase the value of his work. With Angie Dickinson,