My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [80]
For me, that meant returning to the stage, the place where I found the most satisfaction: I agreed to star in Lawrence Roman’s play Tragedies/A Comedy, a play that resonated with me for many reasons. It was, as I told a New York Times reporter writing about the upcoming theater season, “about a man’s midlife emotional crisis. The character I play is confused. He realizes there’s not much time left and panics. He and his wife separate, and he runs into an old girlfriend and tries to recapture what he had with her in his salad days.”
I was intrigued with the effect the play would have on me, mining that territory night after night. But I did not get the chance to see. The financing fell through following a production delay and I snapped up the lead in a revival of The Music Man, the beloved story of softhearted con man Harold Hill, which Robert Preston made into one of Broadway’s hottest tickets in 1957.
I had always loved the play and they offered a decent weekly salary plus a sizable cut of the box office. Broadway veteran Michael Kidd, whose credits included Guys and Dolls and Finian’s Rainbow, directed and choreographed, and we had a show-stopper in Christian Slater, then a twelve-year-old boy, who sang “Gary, Indiana” with an enthusiasm that made people take note. I could tell he was going to be something.
We opened with a nine-week run in Reno, Nevada, and I went up early to acclimate myself to the altitude. I was not too worried about losing my breath mid-song, but hey, I was going on tour and I was a grandfather—now three times over, thanks to Barry and his wife; Stacy, twenty-five, married, and performing a nightclub act with her husband in Phoenix, was about to add a fourth to the next generation of Van Dykes.
Other family considerations were on my mind, too. While I was doing the play, Margie booked herself on an around-the-world cruise, an adventure lasting several months. Like me, she wanted to get away and think about her life, and with Carrie Beth now eighteen and in junior college, she could finally do so without worry. The long break worked for both of us. In February 1980, as the play debuted in Los Angeles, Margie was arriving in China. I mentioned her adventure to reporters who asked about my marriage, but gave the impression that ours was the same, stable union as always.
In many ways it was.
Meanwhile, Michelle, who the year before had won a $104,000 judgment against Lee Marvin but lost her $3.6 million community-property argument, kept me company as often as her job permitted. She had been in Reno for the play’s opening, kept a regular but low profile at the Pantages Theater, where we played in Hollywood, and visited me when we took the play to San Francisco. With her encouragement, I looked up my first leading lady, Fran Adams, whom I’d worked with in TV back in Atlanta. Now she was Fran Kearton, a successful Bay Area artist.
As we reminisced about our silly Fran and Dick Show, Fran reminded me of the time we’d booked Helen Hayes. Both Fran and I had been extremely nervous about the fabled first lady of Broadway visiting our humble local show. We rehearsed tirelessly and spruced up our studio with flowers.
Then Helen arrived, admittedly and apologetically jittery. She explained that it was because she had never seen herself on TV. Thinking I would put her at ease, I said, “Don’t worry. You don’t look half as bad as you think.”
I think it took me a couple weeks before I could pull my foot all the way out of my mouth.