My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [77]
Was I surprised?
No, you can see the writing on the wall when your show is shuffled around in the schedule.
But vindication was just around the corner. Van Dyke & Company received three Emmy nominations and then Bob, Allan, and I left the September 1977 gala holding statues we had won for Outstanding Comedy-Variety or Music Series. I couldn’t believe we had beaten The Carol Burnett Show. Allan couldn’t believe we had beaten Saturday Night Live and The Muppets. Bob shook his head as if the two of us were missing the point and then quipped, “I can’t believe we won and we’re out of a job.”
I feared I might have been out of more than just a job, though, as my risk taking was not confined to the show. I am talking about Michelle. Over the four months we worked on the show, I was drawn into a relationship with her. I was five days in L.A., two on Coronado. Our phone conversations turned into lunches and those evolved into low-key dinners in dark restaurants where we could avoid attention. If anyone had asked, I was ready to explain that Michelle was my agent’s secretary and we had met up to sign papers.
But no one asked. Fortunately, no one saw us in the corner of Dan Tana’s or any of our other nighttime haunts. Michelle and I would talk throughout the day. She loved show business and wanted to hear about what had happened on the set, the bits that worked and those that did not work, who the guests were, and all that stuff. She had ideas and opinions and understood my ambitions and frustrations.
It was the opposite of Margie, who liked Coronado but loved the isolation of the desert even more. Margie took up painting and weaving and she became quite good at them. I worked harder going back and forth between my two worlds than I did on the show. I lost seven pounds in the first two months. I told people it was the work. In truth, it was the stress of dividing my time between two extremely strong, attractive women.
Margie kept trying to pull me away, out of Hollywood. She wanted us to go somewhere. We had already gone to the desert, then to the beach, but that was not enough. Forget about show business, she said. As far as she was concerned, I had already done Broadway, television, and movies. What more was there to prove? What more was there to do?
But suddenly I was involved with a woman who loved what I did for a living and not only knew all the people in the business, but understood that performing was in my blood, somehow part of my DNA, and that all my talk of retirement was bunk. I wasn’t going to stop. I couldn’t.
In December, Michelle talked me through the sting of Van Dyke & Company’s cancellation and I helped her celebrate when California’s Supreme Court ruled in her favor, saying that an agreement to share assets between a nonmarried couple living together was binding. With the holidays upon us, I woke up to what was happening to me, or in reality what had happened. I was involved with a woman other than my wife. It was unbelievable. I was writhing in guilt. I had to do something.
23
DIVORCE AMERICAN STYLE
In the spring of 1976 I stood alongside fifty prominent figures from politics, entertainment, sports, and the clergy in front of the Washington, D.C., press corps and acknowledged that I was a recovering alcoholic. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, former baseball pitcher Don Newcombe, Representative Wilbur Mills, and TV host Garry Moore were among those at the event also helping to eliminate the stigma and shame that often prevented people from owning up to the disease.
With all those individuals shedding their anonymity and sharing personal stories, it was a powerful, well-managed spectacle, and afterward I had dinner with one of the event organizers and his wife. We ate in their hotel suite, and to my astonishment, they had a pre-dinner cocktail,