My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [65]
It was just as funny off-screen. Norman started the picture smoking a pipe, as did I. Both of us were using the picture as a motivation to quit. He was, in fact, having a better time of it than I was. He had about two weeks—that is, until it came time to shoot a scene featuring a room full of people, all locals cast as extras, who were chain-smoking fiendishly. There was one woman who wasn’t a smoker and it was obvious. So Norman showed her how to do it.
“No, you take it like this,” he said, putting the lit cigarette in his mouth, “and then you inhale like this.”
Well, as soon as he took that first drag, I saw his eyes glaze over. Before the day was finished, he had smoked an entire pack.
I wasn’t much better. One day I decided to drive to Danville, but I underestimated the distance and forgot to check the gas in a car I borrowed, and I ran out of fuel in the middle of nowhere. A neighborly farmer came to my rescue. On the way to the gas station, he offered me a cigarette. I said no thanks and explained that I had quit.
“I’ve quit fifteen times myself,” he said while lighting up. “It’s impossible.”
“You’re right,” I said.
I was soon smoking again, too. But I tried to keep it to a minimum. As a way of distracting myself, I rented a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and rode it to the set every day. I found the fifteen-mile drive to be an invigorating way to wake up. On one of my rare days off, I rode into the northern part of the state. While exploring the countryside, I came upon a ceremonial gathering of members from the Sac and Fox Nation in a remote part of the woods.
Although this didn’t appear to be an event for non–Native Americans, I stopped and watched from the edge—that is, until the chief spotted me. He turned out to be a fan of The Dick Van Dyke Show. He invited me in, and I ended up eating dinner and dancing with them late into the night. Before I left, they made me an honorary member of the tribe, dubbing me White Bear. Later, many of them attended the premiere of Cold Turkey in Des Moines.
A few months later, Margie and I were exploring the perimeters of our Arizona ranch when we spotted a pile of what seemed like oddly shaped stones. They turned out to be pieces of Native American pottery, stone jewelry, and arrowheads. Some researchers from the University of Flagstaff recognized the relics as belonging to the Hohokam, a tribe that disappeared from the area in the 1400s. Hohokam, we were told, was Pima for “the vanished ones.” But our discoveries showed they were not entirely gone.
I loved thinking about these people who had inhabited our land hundreds of years earlier. Just the fact that it had been inhabited. If you looked in any direction, the land appeared barren, empty, yet it obviously wasn’t. There were shadows from another time. I had always been fascinated with the bigger picture, and here was a connection to it.
We decided to move to the ranch full-time. After the Encino home sold, Stacy and Carrie Beth started new schools in Scottsdale. For Margie and me, it was probably the beginning of the end of our marriage, though we had no inkling of it then. Cognizant of Margie’s dislike of Hollywood, I convinced myself that I could live anywhere and still work, and looking back, I did enjoy the quiet and solitude on the ranch more than I had imagined.
People never believed me when I described myself as lazy, but I could spend hours sitting on the rocks under the large desert sky, following birds as they rode the thermals up and down like an invisible roller coaster, and thinking about life. The broken pottery littering the ground confirmed for me that material success, although great, was not the be-all and end-all. There was more.
I didn’t know the answers, but I could feel that the things that gave life meaning came from a place within and from the nurturing of values like tolerance, charity, and community.
I nurtured more than values, though, when