My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [85]
“What?” I asked.
“I don’t want to lose you, Mr. Van Dyke,” he said. “You must stop the smoking.”
“I will,” I said.
And I did. After walking out of the hospital, I bought the patch and started chewing nicotine gum, and I have not smoked a cigarette since. That doctor’s prescience probably saved my life.
25
STRONG MEDICINE
Booze was the next thing to go.
It wasn’t like I had a checklist, though. Despite all the effort I’d devoted to giving up alcohol in the past, despite programs I tried and the promises I’d made to myself, sobriety just happened as I was living my life.
In the fall of 1985, I made Strong Medicine, a TV miniseries based on Arthur Hailey’s novel about the pharmaceutical industry. We shot in London with a cast that included Dallas’s Patrick Duffy and Pamela Sue Martin, and also Sam Neill, Ben Cross, Annette O’Toole, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who, at eighty-five, provided a debonair air of fun by coming to the set every day dressed to the nines and hitting on all the actresses.
I hadn’t worked there since I made Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but the city and the countryside charmed me all over again. Michelle and I settled in a hotel around the corner from Hyde Park. She redid our room, made friends with the hotel staff, and eventually convinced them to redesign their restaurant’s menus. Basically, she took over the hotel and we were treated like royalty.
During downtime on the set, I indulged my interest in poetry, as well as reciting poetry out loud, and poor Michelle had to sit and listen to me recite verse in an English accent, which, I have to say, had improved since I first tried it out in Mary Poppins. As long as I was around people who spoke with an English accent, mine was more than passable. For a while, I entertained the idea of moving there, to a little place in the hills of Broadway, also known as the “Jewel of the Cotswolds,” and if not for the tax structure there we might’ve actually moved.
I don’t know whether it was because I was so relaxed in England and comfortable within my life or whether something in my body chemistry changed, but all of a sudden I lost both my taste and tolerance for alcohol. It first happened in England and continued after we returned to L.A. Instead of giving me a lift, a cocktail or glass of wine made me sick to my stomach.
Michelle still enjoyed a cocktail or two, and if we went to a party she’d get silly with the rest of them, but I began to pass. We were making dinner at home one night and after taking a sip of wine I put the glass down and said, “Boy, that’s making me ill.” From then on, I lost my desire to drink. Finally, I just stopped trying altogether and then I lost the taste altogether.
After a certain point, I never hid the fact that I had a drinking problem. I may not have been open about the long struggle I endured in giving it up completely, but once it happened I never wanted a drink again. Over the years, people would ask how I stopped and I would shrug, as mystified and curious as anyone. It was as if my body did what my mind couldn’t: It said, “Enough!”
Sometimes I wonder if I no longer needed it, if the intricate complications within me somehow, finally, straightened themselves out.
At sixty-one, I was happy and content in my life—and with myself. There were no more internal fires to put out. The conflicts I had battled for years had been resolved. Good decisions had prevailed, and time had proven the strongest medicine. Margie had moved to a lovely house on the Oregon coast. The kids were all doing well, and so were the grandchildren.
Now a decade into our relationship, Michelle and I bought a Spanish-style hacienda in Malibu. We wanted to get married, something we never got around to doing even though it was always on our to-do list. We were either too busy sailing, relaxing at home, or visiting with friends, and time flew by. As friends such as Richard Deacon and Jerry Paris passed away, I counted my blessings. I wanted another series. I read numerous scripts