My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [78]
I considered going public about their hypocrisy but thought better of it, and put the unpleasant incident out of my mind. One night, months later, though, actually toward the end of the year, the memory returned with all the subtlety of a car wreck as I sat across from Michelle at dinner, sipping my second martini of the night, and I thought, Oh my God, I am just like them—a hypocrite.
I don’t know why I was surprised that I was drinking again. The booze spirited me away from the guilt and unpleasantness I felt for betraying the vows I had taken to be faithful to my wife. I had never cheated on her before. In fact, I had never come close to it. It was just like when I first realized I had a drinking problem. I would be in the shower, driving my car, or sitting in front of the TV and suddenly say to myself, “This can’t be happening to me.”
The few people I let in on the secret all said the same thing: I was fifty years old and was undergoing a stereotypical midlife crisis. Indeed, I had to consider that a strong possibility. How could I not when I woke up every morning and asked myself, “Am I going in the right direction?”
For fifty years, I never worried about which direction I was headed. I went any way the wind blew. Now, all of a sudden, I had no idea. However, I knew that Michelle and I, despite being opposite personalities—she was a strong-willed force of nature while I was content to stand in the back and smile—got along as if we were meant to be together. As a result, I asked myself how something that felt so right could also feel so wrong.
After much soul-searching and many nerve-racking months, I wanted to get on with my life, and there was only one way to do it. I needed to be honest with Margie. We were on Coronado one day and I told her. I said that there was another woman whom I liked a lot. Margie was terribly shocked, as I had expected, and both of us were confused. We had known each other so long that we could not conceive of a divorce.
After many emotional but productive talks, Margie and I agreed to do what we had basically been doing for years; live our separate lives, or more accurately, live our lives separately. She returned to the desert and I went to my rental in Hollywood. I made sure Margie knew she would never want for anything materially or financially. My one regret was leaving her alone. For myself, I was confident that I was making the right decision.
My oldest son, Chris, now a deputy district attorney in Salem, had recently gone through his own divorce, and the other children were wiser and more understanding and accepting than I had expected. In April they helped me celebrate the opening of Same Time Next Year at the Huntington Hartford Theater in Pasadena. Stacy, twenty-two, noted that she had not seen me onstage since Bye Bye Birdie, prompting Carrie Beth, sixteen, to remind all of us that she was not even born then.
I was starring with my pal Carol Burnett. We set new box-office records, some of which were due to the anticipation generated by the announcement that I was joining her long-running variety show. Carol and I had a special chemistry dating back to when we teamed up on the game show Pantomime Quiz. Now, nearly thirty years later, we still spurred each other into new realms of silly. In Same Time Next Year, instead of taking a bow at the end, she jumped into bed as an old lady and I scrambled after her as an old man with a bottle of Geritol. Then the curtain came down. Even though the playwright, Bernard Slade, disapproved of the way we hammed it up, the audience screamed. On closing night, we took it a step further. After I got into bed, Tim Conway shuffled across the stage dressed as a butler and holding a tray with a bottle of champagne. People laughed for an hour.
Carol’s and my partnership had been rekindled when she came on Van Dyke & Company. We had pantomimed a fight at the end of a skit that ended up with the two of us rolling on the ground in slow motion as we traded