My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [57]
Whether the audience enjoyed it (and I think they did), we had a blast. Backstage we joked that it was nice knowing our timing was still intact after a fifteen-plus-year break, in case we needed a fallback.
My other guest star was Ann Morgan Guilbert, who’d played Millie on The Dick Van Dyke Show. In one of my all-time favorite skits, I played “The Great Ludwig,” the world’s oldest magician, and Ann was my dedicated assistant and wife. The skit was supposed to go eight minutes, but funny business kept happening—as she levitated, for instance, I ad-libbed, “Why are there flies around you?” which made her crack up, and then I lost it. The tails of my tux were set on fire, which was planned, though I pretended not to notice, which inspired more shtick—and, well, it ran for nearly fifteen minutes.
Ann and I left the stage with tears in our eyes from laughing so hard, the tails of my tux still smoking! We thought it was hysterical, brilliant, serendipitous comedy magic. Then the director came up to us and said, “We’re going to have to redo it.”
My jaw dropped.
“What?” I said. “What’s the problem?”
“We saw the boom [microphone] in the shot for a few seconds,” he said.
“We can’t re-create that stuff,” I said. “It just happened. We’ll have to use it as is, mistakes and all.”
Stuff kept on happening, too. I played a flamenco dancer who crashes through a piano, a musician reinterpreting Bach as jazz on the harpsichord, and reworking Fiddler on the Roof’s signature number as “If I Were a Rich Man.” All in all, it was “a splendid showcase,” said the New York Times, and the Pittsburgh Gazette patted me on the back by writing “It should have been longer.”
If only reaction to Divorce American Style had been as complimentary. It wasn’t the critics who blasted the movie, though. It was my fans. They felt I had betrayed them by taking on a role in which my character got drunk in one scene and dallied with a prostitute in another. The headline in the Los Angeles Times captured the shock: NEW VAN DYKE FILM CHANGES HIS IMAGE.
I refused to see that as a problem since I wasn’t doing anything that crossed the line of decency I had set for myself.
“Let’s face it,” I told Roger Ebert. “Debbie Reynolds isn’t Tammy anymore, and neither am I.”
But the question nagging at me wasn’t “Who am I” as much as it was “Who did I want to be?”
Like a lot of people when they reach their forties, I was trying to figure out the answer. Although my oldest child was headed to college and I still had three others at home, I was mulling a change of some sort. I didn’t know exactly what, but I envisioned myself retiring and, if not getting out of show business, then slowing down. In fact, in an interview with Redbook magazine, I mentioned that I might retire in six years and work with youth groups.
Why?
I was restless and felt the need for something more. As I explained, I was “looking for meaning and for value, personal value.”
How could I feel that way when I had a wonderful wife, terrific children, a thriving career, a shelf full of awards, and strangers approaching me every day just to say they were fans?
I suppose those are the nuanced inklings that precede midlife crises and keep psychiatrists in business. In order to deal with them before they turn into full-blown problems, though, you have to be attuned not just to the initial feelings, but also to the need to address them, and I wasn’t.
For me it was business as usual. I went to work on the movie Never a Dull Moment, a comedy about an actor who gets into trouble after he’s mistaken for a gangster. My pal Jerry Paris directed, and we laughed every day on the set. The picture also allowed me to work with the great character actor Slim Pickens, who showed me how