My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [48]
However, as with all of life, whether you’re making a movie or running to the market, there are the plans you make and there is the way life actually unfolds. In this case, shortly after we checked in to the palatial Raphael Hotel off the Champs-Elysées, I had to shoot a scene where my character fled from the authorities after getting word that he was to be guillotined. We did numerous takes. For days, I ran behind a camera truck. For someone who smoked heavily and enjoyed cocktails and wine at night, I was not in terrible shape. But this was different. I may as well have been training for a marathon.
Upon returning to the hotel after work, I encountered Margie waiting to go out with me. We had museums to see, cafés to visit, and stores to peruse. But I would look down at the ground to avert her expectant gaze and shake my head pathetically. I couldn’t walk. I could barely stand. So she trudged off alone while I slipped into a hot bath and soaked my achy muscles.
After that scene was behind us, our time improved. Carl also came over to act in a small part, rewrote major portions of the script, and added erudite amusement to the day. The only serious blemish on our otherwise well-deserved vacation occurred when a tabloid printed a story that I was having an affair with Angie Dickinson. They followed that with a story that Jim Garner and I had gotten into a fight over her.
Both stories were complete fabrications, containing not one single morsel of truth beyond the fact that we all were making a movie together. This was the first time I had been snared in the ugly trap of celebrity gossip and it offended me in countless ways.
After the movie, I tried to sue the publisher. I went to New York and gave a deposition, though a judge threw out my suit, explaining that libel laws were applied differently to public figures. The decision didn’t make sense to me. Just because I was a celebrity didn’t mean a patently false and damaging story hurt my family or me any less. It was clearly unjust.
Although I bristled over that for a long time, it turned into one of those moments that forced me to gather my wits, adjust my perspective, and basically mature. It was a life lesson—a wake-up to the fact that, as I wrote at the beginning of this book, you can’t spread peanut butter over jelly. The whole thing made me relish the good fortune I had of returning to The Dick Van Dyke Show. It was like pulling into a safe harbor after weathering a storm. I was home.
What went unspoken was that this was the show’s fourth season and from the outset Carl had said we were going to do only five. I didn’t even want to think about the end. None of us did.
As an ensemble, from crew to actors to Carl and the writers, we were just hitting our stride. Episodes like “My Mother Can Beat Up My Father,” which showed Laura trying to best Rob in the art of self-defense, gently but pointedly tapped in to the currents of social change. So did “A Show of Hands,” in which Laura and Rob accidentally dye their hands black before attending a formal dinner. Other episodes that addressed everyday family issues, like Ritchie dealing with a girl who had a crush on him, continued to showcase Carl’s genius for mining laughs from suburban living rooms and kitchens.
My brother returned for another two-parter, and I was deeply amused when Jerry Belson and Garry Marshall wrote “Young Man with a Shoehorn,” an episode in which Rob becomes part owner of a shoe store and struggles as a salesman, based on a story I told one day about my own failure selling shoes in my uncle’s store. I was paid three dollars a day plus commission if I sold a hundred dollars’ worth, which I never did. The work was maddening. I would put twenty pairs of shoes on a woman, all of which fit perfectly, and