My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [73]
I knew that I had to do it.
At the time, only a few people guessed I had a problem with booze. So it was ironic when producer David Wolper sent me the script. When I asked why me, I was told that besides having a deal with the network, I fit the type they wanted for the lead: an average, middle-aged, middle-class family man.
Before production began, I told director Richard Heffron about my battle with alcoholism. His eyes nearly bugged out of his head. But I could not have asked for better treatment or direction. We worked beautifully together. He would lay out a scene, then say, “Dick, you know more about this than I do, so just do it the way you see it, the way you feel it.” My costars Lynn Carlin and Linda Lavin were also supportive.
We shot that winter in and around L.A., including at the veterans hospital in Brentwood. There, working amid former servicemen who were dealing with addictions of various types, I was moved by the importance of the story we were trying to tell and decided to go public with my own story, giving Marilyn Beck the exclusive. Her eyes bugged out, too.
Fans were accepting when the news hit. I received thousands of letters. People understood that those who clowned around and made them laugh often had a dark, private side.
The movie aired on February 13, 1974, and both ratings and reaction were strong. AP TV critic Jay Sharbutt’s review sounded like a summary of my personal tale. “It’s not just a tale about the downfall of a corporate lush,” he wrote. “Rather, it’s a chilling, sip-by-sip study, stirred with a heavy swizzle stick for dramatic emphasis, of how easily any ‘social drinker’ can slide into alcoholism without realizing he or she can’t handle any kind of drinking.”
The “strong and welcome antidote to the usual run of TV movies about happy people with happy problems” earned me an Emmy nomination. Although I lost to Hal Holbrook for his work in another extremely powerful TV movie, The Pueblo Affair, I savored the impact of my work. Only the National Association of Alcoholism took exception. They had wanted the ending changed so the guy made it. I argued that the movie would not have had the same impact if it ended happily ever after.
As I knew all too well, the disease did not work that way. Unbeknownst to anyone, on two occasions during production—this was after I had come forward in the press about my alcoholism—I went back to the hotel where I was staying and drank. Both slips were after shooting scenes that, at the end of the day, left me feeling depressed and empty.
After each one, I got sick and swore, Never again, though that promise was easier said than kept.
Margie and I bought a beachfront home on Coronado Island with a spectacular view of the ocean. I also purchased a thirty-three-foot Ranger sloop, which occupied so much of my time that I referred to it as my mistress. From the moment I hoisted my first sail the boat became my escape. I loved being on the water, feeling the sun, the wind, and the salt, and most of all the freedom. It released everything in me that I couldn’t otherwise express.
I sailed every day, sometimes up the coast, sometimes straight out into the ocean. I studied navigation, the weather, and ocean currents. I was always on the lookout for something, something I couldn’t find.
For a while, I talked of journeying to Fiji—not to live. The commute was too far. “But I’d like to try the lifestyle,” I said jokingly.
The entire family was trying out lifestyles. One day when Margie and I were on Coronado, our eldest son called. After graduating from law school, Chris had moved to Salem, Oregon, gotten married, and most recently made us grandparents with the birth of his daughter, Jessica. Now he wanted to plant roots. He had his heart set on a one-hundred-year-old home and asked if I’d loan him the money for a down payment.
“Sure,” I said. “No problem.”
That same afternoon we got a call from our other son, Barry, a great-looking young man who had married a beautiful girl he met when both of them were ushering at a theater. He had also