My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [91]
For that first movie, I got Arthur Duncan, the great tap dancer from The Lawrence Welk Show, to come in and play a janitor. He secretly teaches me tap dancing in exchange for medical treatment. Nobody knows it, though. They keep hearing something going on in my office and wonder what it is. At the end of the show, we appear in the hall and do our number.
It was such a treat to dance with Arthur. I indulged myself. But while rehearsing, I did a move where I stepped on my heel and toe and all of a sudden my foot flopped. I could not step on my heel.
I called my doctor and he said get back here now if you don’t want to lose the use of your leg. It was a pinched nerve, with some minor complications. We had to postpone the other two movies while I returned to L.A. and underwent several weeks of traction. By the time we finished the recast with Victoria Rowell and Scott Baio, there was talk about a series. And before long there was an order for eight episodes.
It was like the old Camel and the Arab fable: An Arab pitches a tent in the desert at night and leaves his camel outside. Complaining that he’s cold, the camel asks if he can put his head inside. Then he asks if he can put his feet in. Before long, he’s completely inside the tent. And so it was with Diagnosis Murder and me.
27
DIAGNOSIS FUN
On a mild afternoon in February 1993, I stood facing a crowd on Hollywood Boulevard, feeling a mix of nostalgia and celebration. I was receiving a star on the city’s Walk of Fame, the best part of which was sharing the moment with Michelle, who was at my side, as well as my former Dick Van Dyke Show costars Rose Marie and Morey Amsterdam, and the man responsible for the whole thing, Carl Reiner, who, when I turned to him and said thank you, quipped, “When I saw all of you here, I thought, Hey, we can do a show.”
Given the chance, we might have. At any rate, we laughed and reminded ourselves of numerous good times from the old series. We reminisced about the production numbers we used to weave into some of the shows. Funny how all of us recalled those scenes as our fondest, especially Carl, who reminded us that they meant less writing and shorter scripts. But Morey was a musician, Rosie was a singer, and of course Mary was a dancer, who back in the day continued to do her barre exercises at lunchtime. And all of us were hams.
As we stood on Hollywood Boulevard, I almost felt transported back in time as I remembered rehearsing a dance number with Mary that was set in a prison. Our legs were tied together, and as we practiced, I yanked her too hard and she fell. “Sorry, Mary,” I muttered up into the sky now, hoping that wherever she was, she was able to hear me.
Oh, and then I remembered going to a recording studio with Mary after work one night to lay down vocals for a song, but the music had been prerecorded in the wrong tempo, way too fast, and we spent hours trying to get it right. It happened to be my fourteenth wedding anniversary that night and I never called home, sent flowers, or did anything. When I finally walked through the front door, my wife was waiting at the dining-room table for me, wearing a gorgeous evening gown, her candlelit dinner on the table, ruined.
Carl, Morey, and Rosie all felt my pain as I recounted that story thirty-some years later.
“I never knew that,” Carl said.
“Boy, I was in deep trouble,” I said.
“And so was your marriage,” Morey said. “But things worked out. You still got your star.”
My star was placed next to that of my idol, Stan Laurel, but when Hollywood’s honorary mayor, Johnny Grant, finally unveiled it, there was an unexpected silence, followed by a clap of laughter. My name was misspelled. It read Dick Vandyck. Embarrassed, Johnny quickly handed me a Sharpie