My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [88]
Loving each other forever,
Orchestras of heart-beats,
Visits to paradise—
Every word is a kiss.
PART FOUR
Everybody wants to laugh—you know that. They need to laugh.… People need to laugh.
—Carl Reiner
26
THE OLD MAN AND THE TV
For years, Michelle was a holdout smoker. Long after I gave up cigarettes, long after almost everyone we knew gave up the cancer sticks, she continued to puff away. Her big concession to all the health warnings was to give up her preferred brand of unfiltered smokes, though she continued to purchase stronger brands while turning a deaf ear to my harangues to take better care of herself. Once, I even caught her smoking in the shower.
But then she got a message she couldn’t ignore.
While out shopping one day, she was carrying an armload of clothes when suddenly she felt a sharp pain in her chest and lost her breath. Scared, she dropped everything and drove to the CBS studio where I was working on a new sitcom for the network’s 1988 fall lineup. I took one look at her and somehow knew she was having, or had just had, a heart attack.
I laid her down in my dressing room and made sure she was comfortable while Grant Tinker, who, though no longer Mary’s husband, still ran their MTM production company, called an ambulance. Michelle chewed both of us out. She didn’t want the attention, and she made it abundantly clear that she didn’t want to go to the hospital. The paramedics, in turn, made it abundantly clear that she didn’t have a choice in the matter.
A few hours later, she was in surgery, undergoing a bypass procedure. It all went well, she recovered, and after a few days Michelle was allowed to go home. And guess what? She never smoked again.
“Just like that?” I asked her.
“I have no idea why, but the craving is gone,” she said.
“Just like that?” I asked again.
“Just like that,” she said.
Later, as she put more thought into it, Michelle attributed the change to a Jamaican nurse who came into her hospital room and said soothing, perhaps magical things to her as she fluttered in and out of the netherworld between consciousness and painkillers.
“I think that nurse did some island magic,” she said.
One thing Michelle did not lose was her sense of humor.
Not long afterward, but long enough that Michelle seemed fully recovered from her surgery, I brought her a cup of coffee in bed. It was morning, and as I set the cup on her nightstand I noticed she was puzzling over the TV remote control in her hand as if she’d never seen it before. She looked up at me.
“What does this do?” she asked.
“I beg your pardon?” I said.
“What does this do?” she asked again.
I thought, Oh Jesus, something odd is going on—and it was. All of a sudden she lost the ability to speak coherently. It appeared she couldn’t focus properly. I could see her struggling to capture her thoughts. Quickly, I picked up the front page of the newspaper and asked if she knew what the headline said. She looked at it for a moment, then back up at me and shook her head no.
I threw her into the car and rushed her to St. John’s. Within twenty minutes, a doctor was examining her. He took her vitals, checked her heart, then did a neurological workup that included simple questions, such as asking her to name the president of the United States.
It was as if she could see it was Ronald Reagan, but couldn’t translate the picture into words.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But he’s an asshole.”
According to the doctor Michelle had suffered a transient ischemic attack—a kind of warning stroke whose symptoms would pass within twenty-four hours. And thank God the symptoms did pass and she became herself again, otherwise I might have spent much of my dotage playing nurse.
Once she was given the all-clear sign, though, I returned to work on The Van Dyke Show, a new series I agreed to do only in order to enjoy the pleasure of working with my son Barry, who was cast as my on-screen son. Interestingly, that fall, Mary Tyler Moore also had a new series, Annie McGuire, and the two of us were scheduled back-to-back in the