My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [62]
For me, work was the best antidote to the problems I saw plaguing the world. I was so lucky that I loved what I did and was able to make a good living at it. In addition, it provided me with a sense of giving back something of value. If you could entertain people and take them away from their problems for a while, you were doing pretty well, I thought.
With two movies and a TV special in the works, I was doing just fine. The first film was Some Kind of a Nut, a comedy written and directed by Garson Kanin, whose erudite sense of humor had defined his screenplays for Born Yesterday, Pat and Mike, and Adam’s Rib. In Some Kind of a Nut, he cast me as a banker who grows a beard after getting stung by a bee and developing a rash, but he sees his career and personal life suffer drastic consequences when, in a stab at independence, he opts to keep his facial hair.
I enjoyed working again with Angie Dickinson, who was a doll, as were Rosemary Forsyth and Zohra Lampert, but the partnership with Garson, who was lovely and came to the set each day dressed to the nines, didn’t work out as I had hoped. It was nothing he did or didn’t do; the material, envisioned as a social satire, just never panned out. It “sounds like something out of Kanin’s trunk,” said the New York Times. I knew it, too. Even as we shot a scene with Rosemary where we rolled around in Central Park, I said to myself, “This is terrible … it stinks … but it’s Garson Kanin … how can this be?”
Ah, well. I had higher hopes for my next picture, The Comic, an homage to old-time silent-movie comics and idols of mine like Stan Laurel and Buster Keaton. A labor of comedy love from my old cohorts Carl Reiner and Aaron Ruben, and directed by Carl, this picture costarred Mickey Rooney and Michele Lee and told the story of silent-film star Billy Bright (loosely based on Keaton, but really a composite of several of those guys) as he looked back from the grave on his life and career.
Like any clown, he had as many private torments as laughs—maybe even more—but making the movie was like a playdate with friends who appreciated this special era of comedy and all its subtleties as much as I did. In his book My Anecdotal Life, Carl wrote, “I believe, if Mephistopheles popped in on Dick and offered him a chance to sell his soul for the chance to work in those old black-and-white comedies, he would think long and hard before refusing.”
He was right. But this was my chance to go back in time, and I took full advantage of it. Carl and Aaron Ruben and I were like kids let loose in a video arcade. It was playtime. We rewrote every day. Why wouldn’t you with those two in the room? Also, we couldn’t help ourselves. During production, we got together every day, looked at the script, told one another stories, laughed, and pretty soon someone said, “Why don’t we do this instead?”
For me, the best part was re-creating Billy Bright’s shtick. We shot it on sixteen-millimeter black and white, speeded it up so it would look authentically old, and then dragged the footage across my backyard to mess it up. Of course, we shot much more footage than we ever needed just because it was fun. Carl and I also talked about doing something with the extra material. We didn’t know what that might be, but something.
Unfortunately, all of that footage disappeared sometime before the movie opened and never resurfaced. I’ve been heartbroken since. Yet the picture itself buoyed my faith in the effort we put into it. Upon its opening in November 1969, the New York Times called the film “genuinely funny,” the local Los Angeles Times’ critic Kevin Thomas said it was “one of the most devastating films ever made about Hollywood,” which he meant in a good way.
In April 1969, after I had completed both films but months before either of them were released, I starred in my third special for CBS, which was my most delightful special quite simply because it costarred Mary Tyler Moore, the most delightful