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Again I said sure, no problem. But then I turned to Margie and said, “We aren’t answering the phone the rest of the day.”

A short time later Stacy moved to San Francisco with her trumpet-player boyfriend, who used to sit in our living room watching Kung Fu and muttering, “Heavy duty.” Margie and I constantly rolled our eyes. What did that mean? We did our best to savor the relatively simple concerns of our baby, Carrie Beth, whose big worries, at fourteen, were homework and the prom. I marveled at the equanimity of our fourth-born. By the time she arrived, our attitude as parents was more cavalier than with the first or second, and I think it made Carrie Beth a calmer person. She was an angel of a girl, an old soul with a preternatural ability to read people that made me think she should become a psychologist.

I could have used one. As my children were finding themselves, I was going through the same thing, a sort of adult-onset confusion that had me asking many of the same questions: What was I going to do with my life? What was going to make me happy? Why wasn’t I happy?

Like it or not, life is a never-ending confrontation with bouts of uncertainty and chapters of self-discovery. As I was about to learn, it is a series of fine messes that we enter, some wittingly, and others not.

22

ANOTHER FINE MESS

When my daughter Stacy was fourteen, she discovered that she had a beautiful singing voice. We discovered it at the same time.

It was early morning, and my wife and I heard a crystal-clear melodic contralto note sweep through the house, going from room to room and brightening everything along its path. After looking at each other, Margie and I followed the sound into Stacy’s bathroom and found her staring at herself in disbelief as she sang that wonderful note.

Singing lessons followed, and in April 1975 I spirited Stacy away from her lazy boyfriend in San Francisco and put her in my latest ABC special, The Confessions of Dick Van Dyke. She sang “South Rampart Street” with guest star Michele Lee and me, and then the two of us traded lyrics on “Mockingbird.” After that, her voice was no longer a secret and she got involved with musical theater in Scottsdale. But not everything was out in the open.

I followed that special with a pilot for ABC called MacLeish and the Rented Kid, a story inspired, I assumed, by the movie A Thousand Clowns, as the updated plot felt similar. I played a political cartoonist content with living on my own until I agreed to care for the eleven-year-old son of a war correspondent friend who was sent overseas. I liked the way it came out, but the network had problems with it though they wanted to go forward.

After the frustrations of my last series, though, I was gun-shy about getting into anything that was not perfect and I nixed the series, walking away from my overall deal with the network. While going through that process, I found myself talking about the ups and downs of the business to my agent’s secretary, Michelle Triola. I liked her. She was easy to talk to, she understood me, she was interested, and she knew the business.

All the things Margie didn’t like, Michelle did, and gradually it got to where I was inventing excuses to call Sol so that I could speak with Michelle. I looked forward to our conversations. Michelle was an opinionated, feisty, smart woman. She wore her dark hair up and large glasses that gave her cute, girlish face a hip sophistication. She was part of the business and liked talking about every aspect of it, especially the people. She seemed to know or have met everyone.

For good reason, too. Michelle had been around. She had studied theater at UCLA before working as a singer and dancer. She was married briefly to actor Skip Ward, best known for his part in The Night of the Iguana. Her father took her to Rome to get that marriage annulled. While in Rome, Michelle stumbled upon a jazz festival, introduced herself to the headliner, the great pianist Oscar Peterson, and ended up singing a set with him and