My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [83]
When all was finally done, I had one question: Where were the comedies?
Drama was fine, but my first love was making people laugh.
I had long talks with Michelle about the changing state of comedy. Comedy was a world where the ground shifted every couple of years. New people arrived and the veterans moved to the side, but they did not disappear. Funny was funny. It would always be in demand. People seemed to need to laugh as much as they needed anything else. Did it matter, she asked, if I never found another sitcom?
Her question was not an invitation to quit looking for the right project as much as it was a stake she hammered into the ground to mark a point in time, that being the end of my midlife crisis. I did not have to try to compete with anything I had done in the past, she said. Critics would always make comparisons to The Dick Van Dyke Show, but that was their job, not mine.
My job was to continue to be me and answer only to the voice inside me that knew whether something felt right.
I gladly said yes to a hodgepodge of TV movies, starting with Drop-Out Father, a satire that let me make light of a man going through a midlife crisis. Costarring with Mariette Hartley, I played an advertising executive who looks at his Greenwich, Connecticut, life and sees nothing worthwhile, nothing of substance and meaning. He reacts by locking himself in his bedroom for eleven days and reading War and Peace from start to finish.
After that accomplishment, he rejoins his family with a determination to drop out and start fresh. He quits his job and destroys his family’s credit cards. Today the movie’s references to the book Passages and to group therapy give it the feel of a time capsule. But it was a fun romp that made a few good points about something a lot of us were going through, and it was NBC’s highest-rated movie of the season.
A few months later, I partnered with Sid Caesar on the movie Found Money, directed by Bill Persky. Sid and I played a couple of guys at a bank who have lost their jobs to computers, but my character, a computer expert, figures out a way to turn the tables by using a computer to withdraw money from the bank’s dormant accounts and give it to deserving people. I hoped this latter-day Robin Hood tale might get turned into a series. It didn’t.
My favorite role, though, was off-screen: watching my kids. Actually, I no longer had children. I had four grown-ups. By the time Found Money aired toward the end of 1983, Chris was finishing up his term as DA, planning a new career with Nike, and getting remarried. Barry was acting in numerous pilots, Stacy had gotten divorced, and Carrie Beth got married.
In 1984 my divorce was also finalized under amicable terms and afterward Michelle and I left for a two-week sailing adventure in the British Virgin Islands. We got a forty-foot boat, threw a bunch of groceries on it, and took off all by ourselves. It would always remain our favorite vacation together ever. We put down anchor in uninhabited coves, Michelle cooked dinner, and we watched the sun set while the waves and the tropical air lulled us to sleep.
One day we found an island called Jost Van Dyke. We stayed there overnight and learned that a Dutch pirate had named the island after himself. A local rowed out to our boat and tried selling us seashell jewelry he had made. I told him that my name was Van Dyke. He was not impressed.
“Everybody on the island is named Van Dyke,” he said.
The solitude was a strange and wonderful experience. We were getting used to it when we pulled into a little island one night at sunset. I saw one other boat out a ways from where we dropped anchor. As we ate dinner, I said, “Man, this is getting away.” But a short while later, the silence was broken by the gentle sound of the guy from the other boat rowing toward us in his dinghy.