My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [53]
“He would’ve attacked you,” he explained.
I never got used to that part of working with the chimp. To me, he was a doll. I forgot that he was an animal being cajoled, if not forced, into performing acts that did not come naturally to him. Later I heard he was doing a Tarzan movie in Mexico and bit an actor in the face. I was told the actor picked him up and pinched him, and in turn Dinky nipped his face. That was the end of his film career.
He was ten years old, so he was pretty close to retirement, anyway. After I heard he’d been placed in the Los Angeles Zoo, I went there to see him, knowing he had been raised in a house his whole life—he had never been in a cage. When I got there, he was sitting in the middle of a large circular pen. It was outdoors, but it was still a cage—and I saw the effect it had on him.
I called out his name. He looked up and recognized me immediately. He ran over as close as he could. I could tell from the expression on his face that he was asking me to get him out of there. It looked like he was saying, I’m in here with a bunch of monkeys. Take me home.
The whole visit upset me. I knew he thought that I had come to take him out, which I would have if it had been possible.
I had to walk away. I couldn’t look back.
There was a similar feeling of sadness when it came time to acknowledge the end of The Dick Van Dyke Show.
In late summer of 1965, all of us began the fifth season knowing it was our last. The public may not have realized it yet, but we knew.
Carl felt strongly that he would get stale after five years of writing and rewriting thirty-nine episodes a season, and so would the show. He thought all of us would lose the spring in our step. I think he also recognized that all of us, through our collaboration and hard work, had produced a TV classic, and he feared that if repetition and fatigue set in, it could tarnish the show’s magical reputation. He also may have been ready to do something else.
The same may have been true of Mary. She may have been ready to move beyond Laura Petrie. I don’t know. But I doubt it.
Was the show getting stale?
No.
Repetitive?
No.
Was I ready to leave?
No.
I loved the show and the people. It wasn’t work. I played myself. Between the series and a movie every summer, I had a great setup. As a performer, nothing topped the excitement and energy of working in front of a live audience. If it wasn’t the stage, a weekly show like ours was as close of an approximation as one could get. We stopped only if there was a mistake or a scene change. Otherwise the studio audience let us know if we were funny or not.
If there was discussion about continuing the show without Carl, I didn’t hear it. Ownership issues aside, I couldn’t imagine anyone considering The Dick Van Dyke Show without Carl Reiner. Although it was a collaborative effort, everything about the show stemmed from his endlessly and enviably fascinating, funny, and fertile brain and trickled down to the rest of us. We all knew it, and as each of us said in our own ways, we appreciated every aspect of having been party to this chapter of television genius.
The final season began airing in September. Two months later, CBS put out a press release informing the rest of the world what we already knew—that this would be the show’s swan song, its final season. I got steamed when the New York Times attributed the decision to me. It wasn’t true. Not wanting the disappointment of millions of viewers pinned on me, I did a series of interviews with other reporters wherein I tried to explain I wasn’t behind the decision while still holding the party line, namely that we wanted “to quit while we were still on top.”
It was like yelling into the wind, though. The writers still stared back with perplexed looks, as I’m sure our fans did, too, asking yet again, “So why are you all stopping a hit show?”
I was not as hard-pressed to answer the other question people asked—what next? In February 1966,