My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [90]
“You’re not twelve anymore,” I exclaimed.
“Neither are you,” he laughed.
Beaming, Michelle watched us reconnect. She never explained how she had found him. The best part? Charlie had saved an old magic trick of mine all these years, the endless-scarf trick, and he gave it to me at the party. And I kept pulling and pulling … until both of us laughed the way we had fifty years earlier.
The party was sensational. We had a piano player. My daughter sang. Actually, all of us sang. I blew out the candles on my cake and wanted to know how everyone else had gotten so old when I was still a kid—or at least acted like one. I chalked it up to good genes and a sense of humor.
Even my mother, at ninety-one, though having begun a marked decline that eventually led to her death in 1993, still had a good outlook. I had visited her over Mother’s Day at Jerry’s farm in Arkansas, where he had moved after remarrying and she had soon followed. We were on the porch, talking with one of my cousins, and my mother turned to me and asked, “Who are these people?” Her voice was so sweet and curious.
“That’s your son Jerry,” I said.
“Well, he looked like a nice man,” she said. “I’m glad to meet him.”
She once called me in a panic. I heard the alarm in her voice and started to look for my cell phone, thinking I should call my brother while keeping her on the line. Then I heard the problem.
“You know your dad has left me,” she said.
“Mom, …” I said.
“No, listen to me,” she continued. “I fixed him breakfast and then he left. I thought he had gone to take a nap, but he’s not in the bedroom.” She paused. “Dick, I think he’s run off with another woman.”
Finally, it was my turn to speak.
“Mom, Dad has been dead for fifteen years,” I said.
“Really?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Oh, thank God!” she said.
Having run nearly every television network on the planet—or at least seeming to have—Fred Silverman knew the TV business and also the business of TV. He was a throwback to the days when I started out and there were just a few guys in the executive suites who made all the decisions according to taste and gut instinct, as opposed to what the business had become now, with shows passing through a sieve of executives, committees, and focus groups before getting on the air.
I did not want to be seen as difficult, but I was spoiled by working with the best writers in the business, Carl Reiner, Aaron Ruben, Garry Marshall, Jerry Belson, Sam Denoff, and men of that ilk. As I told People magazine, it seemed to me that networks now pandered to an audience afflicted with “attention deficit disorders”—that is, if shows even made it through all the committees and testing—and so you needed someone with Fred’s know-how to get a show on the air.
Like Warren Beatty, Fred also had a talent for hearing what he wanted to hear. Even when I refused his offer to star in a spin-off of his show Jake and the Fat Man, he kept right on talking as if I was going to change my mind, which eventually I did.
“I don’t want to do an hour show,” I said. “I think at my age—you know I recently turned sixty-five—it’s going to be too much.”
“Just do the pilot,” he said.
“But that could turn into a commitment I don’t want to make,” I said.
“It could turn into an excellent series if we do our jobs,” he said.
In 1991, I went on Jake and the Fat Man and introduced the character Dr. Mark Sloan, a free-spirited, iconoclastic physician who solves crimes in his spare time at night with his police detective son. Instead of picking up the pilot, CBS ordered three made-for-TV movies they called Diagnosis Murder. I made them contingent on casting my real-life son Barry as my TV son. The whole thing rode on that; otherwise I would not have agreed.
But they readily wrote him in and we went to work in Vancouver, planning to do the movies one after another. Cynthia Gibb and Stephen Caffrey were cast in the other key roles, and guest spots