My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [79]
But Harvey proved irreplaceable. Despite the fanfare in the press as the new season began in September, I was uncomfortable in the skits and unable to find a rhythm among a cast that had been together for a decade. It must have been the same for actors who came on to The Dick Van Dyke Show. Even though we were welcoming, we had our own ways of communicating that resulted from having been together every day for years.
Carol and the others did everything they could to help me, but the writers were still producing sketches with Harvey in mind and I could not on my own figure out where I fit in. At the end of September, I told the AP’s Jerry Buck that my timing was getting better. Tim also offered encouraging words. Privately, though, he came to my dressing room and commiserated.
Finally, at the end of November, I called off the experiment. My final show was December 3, 1977. I blamed it on the difficult commute between Arizona and L.A., saying I spent too many hours in the airport or on the road and too few with my family. Carol’s executive-producer husband, Joe Hamilton, released a statement saying they hated to lose me. In the end, it was sad but a nice try and quite simply not my cup of tea.
In late spring 1978, Stanley Kramer, the Oscar-winning director responsible for such classic films as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Inherit the Wind, and Judgment at Nuremberg, took me to lunch at the Brown Derby, a landmark Hollywood watering hole, and put a copy of the script for his next movie, which he was directing and producing, on the table. Based on the dramatic 1976 Broadway play, The Runner Stumbles was a strong, complicated look at a priest in a small mining town who falls in love with a young nun. Stanley had already cast Kathleen Quinlan as the nun, and he wanted me as the priest.
I had read the script several times prior to lunch and related more than Stanley knew to the mysterious forces that weighed on the priest. But I wanted to pass.
“It’s out of my reach,” I said. “This is heavy drama and I fear that I’ll embarrass all of us.”
Stanley ordered dessert and kept on me about the role. That summer, after he agreed to take full responsibility if the film bombed, I let him talk me into a deal and started work on the picture. Along with Kathleen, Maureen Stapleton, and Beau Bridges, we shot in Roslyn, Washington, a rural little town that oozed charm and was full of warm locals who took lots of photos, asked for autographs, and went slack-jawed this one memorable day when they overheard me greet Maureen, who was poised on the steps of her dressing-room trailer with a little bottle in her hand.
“Where the hell are you off to?” she asked.
“Getting a cup of coffee,” I said. “Do you want anything?”
“I want you to come in here and fool around with me,” she said.
I turned white, as did those standing nearby.
“Consider it a mercy mission,” she said.
“Can I get you anything else?” I said, laughing nervously while continuing to walk briskly away.
There were few other highlights. Stanley was a marvelous producer, but he did not do much as a director beyond telling me that he didn’t want to see “a vestige of Dick Van Dyke, not a word, not a body movement.” Then why cast me? He made me so self-conscious that I couldn’t get into a single scene. I was lost. At night I brooded and read the Bible and Carl Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul, looking for thoughts and information that might help me reach more of an understanding of the role.
The superb actors around me also tried to help, and Kathleen, a serious actress who knew her business, felt so sorry for me. She knew I was trying and gave me everything she could. But I could not get a hold of the part. Today I could do it. Back then I was not ready.
In my early fifties, I was