My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [9]
I returned to the radio station full-time. I just didn’t have the head for business. Without Wayne, I knew that I would starve. I enjoyed being on the radio, not selling.
But I had a sense that television was coming on strong, that it was going to be the next big thing, and I thought I could do well as an announcer. It wasn’t that different from what I was already doing. I heard about an opening at WBBM in Chicago and arranged for an audition. I took a train there the night before and stayed in a cheap hotel. My wakeup call never came and I slept through my appointment.
Upset, I went to the station, anyway. I knew I wasn’t going to get anywhere without at least trying. Dave Garroway worked at WBBM, and I wondered if I’d catch a glimpse of him. As it turned out, I did. At the station, I wandered into the announcers’ lounge and there he was, the great man in his horn-rimmed glasses. He turned to me and said, “Kid, this is private.” I knew that he meant Get lost. I didn’t even have a chance to say hello.
I later auditioned at an ABC station in Indianapolis. They turned me away, too, saying my voice didn’t sound folksy enough. Getting into TV was not as easy as I thought.
It was about then, the summer of 1947, that I crossed paths with Phil Erickson. Though our families were friendly, Phil was four years older than I was, old enough that I didn’t know him in high school. But I knew of him. He had been active in dramatics and then developed an act called the Three Make-Believes. They lip-synced to songs and turned into a novelty that did quite well across the country.
But they’d recently broken up following a booking in Chicago. One of his partners decided to go to law school and the other guy made plans, too. So Phil returned to Danville and came into the theater one afternoon looking for a new partner. I was rehearsing The Philadelphia Story. He introduced himself and asked, “Do you want to do an act with me? I have a booking in California.”
I wanted out of there so badly that I didn’t bother asking about specifics. I just said, “What time will you pick me up?”
4
THE MERRY MUTES
The funny thing was that Phil never auditioned me. He never asked, “Can you lip-sync to a record? Can you perform?”
He just pulled up in front of my house one day in a beat-up Chevy, I hopped in, and we drove west. Phil was married, with two babies, and had left his family in Danville. He fell asleep a few times on the drive and I quickly had to grab the wheel to keep us in our lane. Even today I can still hear myself yelling, in an alarmed voice, “Phil! Phil! Wake up!”
We stayed in a couple of cheap motels along the way, and when we got to California, we pooled together what little money we had to rent a little tract home in Venice. It was a dull-colored cracker box without any landscaping—no trees, no shrubs, and brown patches of weeds where there once might have been a green lawn.
I didn’t care. Phil had taken a risk by asking me to partner up, and even though for me it was more of a lark and an adventure, I felt a responsibility to him and an obligation to our partnership as the Merry Mutes. The prospect of getting up in front of a paying audience also filled me with a mix of fear and excitement that would prove to be a lifelong addiction.
Would they like us?
Could I make them laugh and have a good time?
We would see.
We were booked into the Zephyr Room at the Chapman Park Hotel, an old, odd place that was all tiny cottages spread across a block near the Brown Derby restaurant and across the street from L.A.’s landmark hotel, the Ambassador, which was home to the famous Coconut Grove. The Zephyr was quite a bit smaller, to say the least.
On opening night, Phil and I arrived early and checked out the stage. We were well-rehearsed by this point, yet we still went over our act again before anyone was there. I was beyond nervous. My skin was pale and my knees knocked like shutters in a windstorm. After I threw up my dinner, I am sure Phil wondered what