My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [66]
Our menagerie also included four quarter horses, a Great Dane, and a pinto horse named Frijoles who thought he was a dog. He visited our back door throughout the day, hoping to get invited inside. He let the kids play on him as if he were a puppy, and ran next to me like a circus horse when I rode my dirt bike. He spent all his time looking for opportunities to play with us.
One summer night we had a family cookout way down in the pasture. As we prepared dinner over the fire, Frijoles sniffed at our steaks as they cooked in the skillet and burned the hell out of his nose. Poor guy. He wanted to be part of the family so badly.
While riding my dirt bike one day, I made a discovery that let me go back to work without going back to Hollywood. I was speeding down a dirt road that led off the ranch and into town where I picked up the mail, but sticking to the path I detoured across a dry arroyo and came upon the nearly completed Carefree Southwestern Studios, a complex of four soundstages for movies and TV. Workmen were putting the finishing touches on it.
“Why hadn’t I heard about this place?” I asked myself. I only lived about eight miles from the site.
But now that I knew about it, I saw things differently. I called both my agent and manager, Sol and Byron, and said that I could accept the longstanding offer from CBS to do a series. They were shocked and asked the reason for my sudden change of mind. I told them about the studio.
“Are you nuts?” Sol asked. “Why do you want to do a series in the desert?”
“So I can ride my minibike to work,” I said.
“That’s crazy.”
Crazy like a fox.
In the spring of 1970, I shot an NBC special with Bill Cosby there and things went so smoothly that CBS agreed to let me do a new weekly sitcom from there, too. Carl signed on as executive producer and came up with the premise for the show we called The New Dick Van Dyke Show. I played Dick Preston, a local TV talk-show host living in Phoenix with his wife and family. That it sounded similar to the original series wasn’t an accident.
But Carl made it clear that he was not interested in writing another series. That job went to Saul Turtletaub and Bernie Orenstein, two top comedy scribes who’d just ended five years on Marlo Thomas’s hit series That Girl. The hardest part of the whole process of putting the show together was pitching the idea to actors—not the idea of the show, but the idea of moving to the desert.
We lucked out when Hope Lange accepted the part as my wife, Jenny. I liked Hope on her previous series, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, on which she’d worked with my old friend Charles Nelson Reilly and also, not insignificantly, won two Emmys. She was also a real dame, with a career that included the movies Bus Stop and Peyton Place. She’d also had a long-term relationship with Glenn Ford.
As my agent said, there was a lot to like about Hope, and I agreed, especially when she joined us in the desert.
The supporting cast was rounded out by teenager Angela Powell as our daughter (another child was written to be away at college), Fannie Flagg as my sister, David Doyle as the station boss, and Nancy Dussault and Marty Brill as our neighbors. We set up shop on Stage 1 and rehearsed until a rhythm and chemistry emerged—not something that was guaranteed when you put a bunch of strangers together. But this group had talent on- and off-camera. Nancy was a well-known singer, Fannie was starting to write fiction (she would publish the bestselling novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café in 1987), and Marty was an amateur astronomer and former concert pianist, which captured my interest as a devoted self-taught noodler