My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [60]
Soon after I heard him swear in front of the children one too many times, and I finally had words with him. Above all else, it showed that he had no feel for the family-oriented material. As for the material in general, let’s just say that enough scenes were done on the fly or redone at the last minute that I lost faith that the version that finally showed up in theaters would match anyone’s expectations, and I think I was right.
As far as I was concerned, in the end, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang suffered from everything I feared at the outset, lack of story and substance. I know the film is beloved by many, but for me it lacked the magic of Mary Poppins, which its producer had hoped to emulate. What saved Chitty, at least in my opinion, were the brilliant Sherman brothers, whose title song earned them another Oscar nomination, and Marc and Dee Dee’s choreography, though I have to note the New York Times was much kinder in its review, echoing the feelings of many in calling it a “fast, dense, friendly children’s musical.”
If that’s the case, as I thought at the time, I’ll gladly take it.
18
SOME KIND OF NUT
I returned home from Europe to a different—and difficult—time. It was early 1968, an election year and a period of unrest, confusion, conflict, upheaval, and ultimately great sadness. I never thought being in show business made me immune from the things that affected everyone else, and I wasn’t, starting with the news that Charlie Brown, the charismatic youth minister at my church, had taken a new position in the Pacific Northwest.
His departure changed the dynamic inside the church and caused me to slowly drift away from there and from organized religion in general. The clincher occurred during a meeting of church elders. We were puzzling over what to do about the racial problems that kept much of the city divided. One of the elders suggested inviting the congregation from a black church from the inner city to our church and, ideally, they would invite us to theirs. I thought it was a great idea, right on target. It sounded like something that would have come from Charlie, who preached the best possible way, by example. The things he did the other six days of the week were far more inspirational than anything he said on the seventh day in church, which was also pretty good.
“Black families, white families, people in general—we look at each other like strangers,” I said. “But I think we have much more in common than any of us realize. We sit in our churches on Sundays, we read from the same book, we pray to the same God, we want the same thing, which is to feel loved, not hated. What if we got to know each other through an exchange program?”
The idea did not go over well. One of the elders emphatically stated that he did not want any black people in the church. Appalled, I stood up, shared my disgust, grabbed my jacket, and walked out. I never went back there or to any other church. My relationship with God was solid, but the hypocrisy among the so-called faithful finished me for good.
My faith was tested again in April when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Like many Americans, I took the tragedy personally. I knew and admired the man and his mission. A few years earlier, I’d had the honor of meeting Dr. King at a rally in Los Angeles, where I was also among the speakers.
It was a large event at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum. Rod Serling, the genius behind The Twilight Zone and an early civil rights advocate, got me involved and also wrote my speech, which articulated my feelings about being a God-loving human being in the latter half of the twentieth century and moving beyond backward and bigoted thinking.
Moments