My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [59]
We began working in and outside of London, and we spent quite a while there, enough time that Margie and I attended a royal screening of the new James Bond film, You Only Live Twice. I stood in a receiving line with Sean Connery and others, waiting nervously to meet the Queen of England, all the while reminding myself of the etiquette briefing we’d received, the most important rule of which was to not speak until the queen spoke to us.
Not that it mattered. At the moment she stepped toward me, her eyes making contact with mine and a smile forming on her lips, Jerry Lewis, standing behind ropes to the side of me, called out, “Hey, Dick!” I turned and said, “What?” as the queen stood in front of me, waiting to be acknowledged. I was mortified and have never gotten even with Jerry for causing that ill-timed distraction. Nevertheless, the queen greeted me warmly and said, “We very much enjoy your television show.”
Soon after that June gala we relocated to the South of France due to a lack of sunshine in England. We’d sat around all day for weeks at a time, waiting for the sun to break through the clouds so we could shoot a scene, but the clouds refused to give way. Finally they said this was going to have to do. If you pay careful attention to the movie, you will see us driving through what is supposed to be the English countryside, except there are vineyards all over the place.
The car itself, aka Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, was hard to drive. It had a four-cylinder engine that coughed and sputtered in real life, and the turning radius of a battleship, but we still had a lot of fun in it.
Off-camera, I enjoyed myself even more. In France, where we took over a resort in St. Tropez, Margie and the kids and I went on long hikes through the countryside. When we switched locations to Rothenberg, Germany, I took guitar lessons and spent every Sunday afternoon in the town square listening to musicians play Bach, which sounded beautiful in the outdoors. They played with a fervor that still puts me back in that square every time I hear one of the Brandenburg concertos.
Midway through production, I became acquainted with John A. T. Robinson, best known as the Bishop of Woolwich. I had written him a fan letter, explaining that I was an American actor who admired his book Honest to God, and I would love to meet him if he had time while I was in Europe. He contacted me right away and we had such a good time talking that we decided to cohost a thirty-minute radio program once a week.
The show might have been better if we’d been of differing opinions, but I agreed with his thesis that God was not an all-powerful “cosmic superman” looking down from the penthouse as much as He was Love. The bishop put it more eloquently in his book when he wrote, “Assertions about God are in the last analysis assertions about Love.”
As far as I was concerned, that cut to the very heart of faith, belief, and the way to live. If knowing, finding, and giving love were the paths to knowing God, I thought people could get there without much additional doctrine. Maybe an occasional push back in line or a gentle slap on the wrist. Otherwise it was pretty clear and simple.
That did not, by any means, conclude that life itself would be simple—and it wasn’t. As we shuttled between London and the South of France, Margie suffered through a series of health problems that finally got the best of her when a local doctor surmised she might have cervical cancer. I didn’t need to hear anything else. After months of being there with me, she took the kids back home and underwent a series of medical tests.
When I told Cubby that I needed to go home and be with my wife while she had more exams, he understood and wished me well. He said that he’d do the same if he were in my position. Before I left, he even put his arm around me and said, “Don’t worry. We’ll shoot around you.”
I was gone only a few days. Margie’s tests came back negative and I jetted