My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [63]
But the feelings were always there. Countless times I spoke about the good fortune I had in continuing to work with Carl, Aaron, and others from the show. However, I missed the daily interaction and laughs I got from Morey and Rosie, and I especially missed my partnership with Mary, which made working together again such a treat for me.
Like me, she had done a handful of films, but thanks to the considerable success of our show and its continuation in reruns, Mary was still primarily thought of as my on-screen wife, a perception that short-changed her considerable talents. Our special, titled Dick Van Dyke and the Other Woman, set out to change that. Produced and written by Bill Persky and Sam Denoff, along with Arnold Kane, the show was an hour of dance and comedy that was meant to play easily and show off Mary.
I told Bill and Sam to let her do whatever she wanted, and I tossed in a few suggestions of my own, too. Hey, I would have been nuts not to take advantage of singing and dancing with Mary.
“It’s my chance to fool around with her,” I joked.
In one scene, Mary and I played a couple on a wedding cake, and in another she did a tour-de-force dance through the history of the modern woman, from the flapper era to the start of women’s lib. We also took a moment to acknowledge the show that made us household names, when I strolled into the Alan Brady Show office—all of the set had been in storage at CBS. I played it with a wink and a smile, as if I were taking the viewers at home back to a familiar time and place, which of course I was.
“I wish I had a nickel for every hour I spent here,” I said, and then, after a brief pause, added, “Oh, I guess I do.”
Mary got her own series the following year. The Mary Tyler Moore Show debuted on CBS in 1970 and became another TV classic. All of us who knew and loved Mary expected as much from her. While she was the perfect actress for those changing times, I was, like so many people back then, just trying to keep up with them. One night my wife and I drove to Eagle Rock, just outside of downtown Los Angeles, to have dinner with our oldest son, who was studying at Occidental College. Our second oldest, Barry, was about to graduate from high school, and the girls, Stacy and Carrie Beth, were sixteen and ten.
Chris, a junior, was living off-campus in a house with his girlfriend. He had the place decorated like a hippie den, with batik-like fabrics on the ceiling and Moroccan rugs on the floor. The lights were low and there were candles lit. It was all very nice as we sat down and visited. Then my wife caught my attention and raised her eyebrow ever so slightly, a movement that was the equivalent of a dog whistle, imperceptible unless you have been trained to respond to it, but after twenty-plus years of marriage I knew exactly what it meant.
I had already taken note. In the middle of Chris’s coffee table was something that looked at first glance like a vase—except it did not hold flowers. When Chris and his girlfriend went in the kitchen to prepare dinner, I turned to Margie and whispered, “It’s a bong.”
“A bong?” she asked.
“For smoking marijuana,” I said, quickly pantomiming someone taking a hit off a joint before Chris returned and saw me.
Margie’s eyes were full of concern and questions. Was Chris smoking pot? How did her straight-arrow husband know about this? I assured her that I’d never tried pot, and I was just as curious as she was. Over dinner, though, the four of us talked about everything except the one subject we wanted to talk about most. I don’t know how Margie and I managed to ignore the two-foot-high water pipe on the coffee table behind us, but we did.
Then we got in the car and it was like the dam burst.
“Oh my God, he’s smoking pot,” Margie exclaimed. “What’s going on?”
“I think he’s smoking pot,” I said.
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