My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [64]
THE NEW DICK VAN DYKE
Speaking of smoking, I smoked too much. While I also consumed too much alcohol, I had yet to recognize it as a problem. But cigarettes were different.
In 1964, the U.S. Surgeon General came out with a report that linked smoking cigarettes to cancer, and it was as if that report spoke directly to me. I had smoked a pack or two every day since my late teens. I knew that I needed to quit smoking cigarettes. But knowing you have a problem and actually doing something about it are two different things, and it took me six years from the time the Surgeon General released his report to finally making a concerted effort to quit.
I tried on my own, and then I tried every device and program that came on the market. It may as well have been a full-time occupation. First, I went to SmokEnder, and when that failed I signed up for an even more intense program called Schick. There, they put me in a phone booth–sized room, sat me in a chair situated by a big tub of sand full of cigarette butts (yes, as if I was in a giant ashtray), and instructed me to smoke.
“You want me to smoke?” I asked.
“Yes,” the counselor said. “A whole pack.”
“A pack of cigarettes?” I said.
“Yes.” She nodded. “And do it as fast as possible.”
The idea was to have the smoker overdose on nicotine, get seriously ill, and create an association in the brain that cigarettes were bad. It was severe, extreme, and sudden behavior modification.
I became ill just thinking about it, but I did it. A dutiful scout, I smoked an entire pack as quickly as I could and immediately got violently, grossly sick to my stomach. I was dizzy, nauseous, and an ugly shade of green as I staggered outside the room and into the hall, where I was met by my counselor and another of the Schick attendants, both of whom were clearly inured to the sight of people holding on to the wall so they did not keel over.
“Man, what an ordeal that was,” I said.
Then, without thinking, I reached into my pocket and took out a cigarette.
The attendant turned ghostly white.
“Here’s your money back, Mr. Van Dyke,” he said.
I was not the only person I knew who was trying but failing to quit. I heard all sorts of stories. It struck me that millions of people across the country were also struggling with the same filthy habit, and I thought the story of someone going to great lengths to give it up might make a good movie. I wrote up an idea and gave it to Norman Lear.
As I knew from working with him on Divorce American Style, Norman had his finger on the pulse of the culture—and the sense of humor to find what’s funny in the pathetic helplessness of all those who knew they were killing themselves every time they lit up. I also knew that he was a smoker who had tried umpteen times to break the habit.
After reading my treatment, Norman called me up and said he couldn’t write a story about one guy. He didn’t see it carrying an entire movie. But it had given him another idea, one that he thought would work better. Instead of one guy trying to quit, what if it was an entire town?
Norman explained that he had read Margaret and Neil Rau’s novel I’m Giving Them Up for Good, a cynical satire about a disingenuous cigarette company’s brilliant PR ploy of offering $25 million to a town that can quit smoking for an entire month, knowing full well that no town can possibly quit, since cigarettes are addictive. That, along with my idea and Norman’s own futile efforts, made the subject ripe for satire.
“That’s brilliant,” I said.
Before long we had decamped to Iowa to make the movie Cold Turkey, one of Norman’s best and I think most overlooked comedies. It falls into that category of biting social comedies that range from Catch-22 to Thank You for Smoking. In the movie, I played the Rev. Clayton Brooks, who leads the town of Eagle Rock, Iowa, in their effort to meet the tobacco company’s challenge. A first-rate team of comics and funny actors rounded out the cast, including Bob Newhart as the cigarette company’s opportunistic PR man, Tom Poston as the town drunk, Jean Stapleton as the mayor