My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [94]
Indeed, Les listened as I told him that we did not need the sex and violence. I said that the people who tune in to the show did not expect it from me. Nor did they want it. Nor did I. In fact, I feared we would actually lose our audience if we kept it up.
Les heard me, and once that was straightened out, we chugged along for several more seasons. We finally wound down in 2001. By then we had spent ten years on the air.
But I did not go gently into the sunset. When we shot our finale, I invited a writer from the Los Angeles Times to come on the set for the purpose of giving him a piece of my mind about the poor treatment given us codgers by youth-obsessed TV and media outlets like the Times, who only seemed to care about the next big—and usually younger, sexier—thing. A few years earlier, I had accused the Times of having “it in for us old folks” and sent one of their writers a letter that said, “Growing old is not a leper colony where an unfortunate few are sent to die. It is a precious gift given only to some lucky human beings.”
At seventy-five, I thought I was ready to indulge in the gift of my dotage. I had been in the business for more than fifty years. “It’s time to go out to pasture,” I told the Associated Press. “Tastes have changed.” I often felt like an anachronism because I stood for wholesome family entertainment, the stuff I had practiced and preached for half a century. But if that went out of fashion, well, what kind of society were we?
On the morning after our wrap party, where I had harmonized with the guys one last time, I stood on our front porch shaded in bougainvillea, draped my arm around Michelle, took a deep breath of ocean air, and for something like the fifty-seventh time in my career I announced my retirement.
Michelle laughed.
“How long do you think you’ll be out in the pasture?” she asked.
I checked my watch and raised an eyebrow.
“What time is it now?”
Michelle was an excellent cook. She specialized in Italian food. The richer the sauce and the more garlic, the better. But for her, cooking was an artistic endeavor, and if she wasn’t in the mood, we ate out. We also enjoyed a rich social life with Dolly and Dick Martin (they would always pretend to bicker, but it was an act and they were a wonderful couple), Tim Conway and his wife, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, Mike Connors and his wife, and Richard Crenna, who was a prince.
For a time, we also enjoyed poker night on Sundays at Barbara Sinatra’s, though it was Michelle who played, not me. I kibitzed with Larry Gelbart, Jack Lemmon, and Veronique and Gregory Peck, who laughed at me when I said that I was the only one there who didn’t play cards.
“Yeah,” he said, “but you’re the only one here still working.”
That was true. After a few months of puttering around the house and checking the calendar to see which couple we were meeting for dinner, I told Michelle that I was going back to work. “I knew it,” she chortled, her laugh echoing through the house. I made two Diagnosis Murder movies that aired on CBS in early 2002, one of which featured my daughter Stacy in a pivotal role, and the other included my grandson Shane, a budding actor and filmmaker whose energy and creativity made being on the set feel like the playground it had been for me forty years earlier.
After continuing to screw up my retirement with a guest spot on the NBC sitcom Scrubs, I reunited with Mary Tyler Moore for the first time since the sixties in a PBS production of The Gin Game, the Pulitzer Prize–winning play that Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn had made a Broadway hit in 1977. Before Mary and I had bid good-bye to the sitcom that made both of us household names, we’d said, “God, it would be fun to do a play together.” Well, neither of us thought it would take nearly four decades.
The two-act play that brought us back together was about a couple of lonely people who meet at an old-age