December 13, 1925– Dick Van Dyke:
“As you get older, you care less & less what other people think.”
I hold the half-hour television sitcom in high esteem as an art form.
My Top 10 Of All Time:
I Love Lucy (1951-57)
The Bob Newhart Show (1972-78)
The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77)
Will & Grace (1998-2006)
Roseanne (1988-1997)
The Golden Girls (1985-92)
Frasier (1993-2004)
Newhart (1982-90)
Friends (1994-2004)
The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-66)
Van Dyke writes in his memoir, My Lucky Life In & Out Of Show Business (2011) that his life was nothing other than one long string of lucky breaks.
Born in small town Missouri to a housewife & a travelling salesman, Van Dyke was a shy kid who used humor as his way of dealing with the tough spots in life.
During WW2, Van Dyke enlisted in the US Army Air Corps where he found work as a radio announcer. After the war, he formed a double pantomime act with a buddy, The Merry Mutes. They mimed to Bing Crosby & Doris Day records.
Van Dyke took the act to Hollywood where he persuaded the producers of a program titled Bride & Groom to let him marry his high school sweetheart on-air, saving the cost of the wedding & honeymoon.
He found work in radio & television in Atlanta & New Orleans before signing a 7 year contract with CBS in the early 1950s, but he was let go after just 3 years.
Van Dyke landed a small role in the short-lived Broadway musical revue Girls Against The Boys (1959). His big break came when, against all odds, he was cast in the new Broadway musical Bye Bye Birdie (1960) with Chita Rivera, Paul Lynde & Charles Nelson Reilly. The show was a big box-office hit, & Van Dyke received a Tony Award. He would reprise his role in the film version in 1963.
Van Dyke took 2 weeks off from the run of Bye Bye Birdie to shoot the pilot for a new sitcom. Originally titled Head Of The Family, with different actors playing the roles. In the original version, Carl Reiner, who created the show based on his own experiences as a TV writer, played the lead. The first pilot was a dud, & Reiner revamped the show with Van Dyke playing the central character. It was television alchemy.
Earlier, I Love Lucy & Make Room For Daddy were TV series set in the milieu of show business, but my love for The Dick Van Dyke Show has always been fueled by its more realistic, but hilarious look at the inner backstage workings of the making of a television series, the fictitious The Alan Brady Show. Reiner had formerly been a writer & performer on Sid Caesar‘s crazy Your Show Of Shows.(1950-54) & he drew from his own life on that show for the new The Dick Van Dyke Show. It centered on the lives of head TV writer Rob Petrie & his pretty wife, Laura, played by Mary Tyler Moore. Rose Marie & Morey Amsterdam played Petrie’s co-workers on the program. Rob, Buddy, & Sally write comedy material for Alan Brady, played to perfection by Reiner, & the premise provides a built-in way for them to be making constant jokes. In the early 1960s, I was so impressed with the premise, that I dreamed of being a joke writer. I still do.
Though The Dick Van Dyke Show was not an immediate hit, it eventually developed quite a following. Van Dyke showed such sweet, good natured humor & likeability in his performance. He won 3 Emmy Awards for his work on the series. Decades later, I still watch the show in syndication, although I have every episode memorized. Van Dyke:
“When we did The Dick Van Dyke Show, it was like an improv group. Carl Reiner, the writer & producer, had a rule: ‘I don’t care how crazy it gets as long as it could happen in real life & you react accordingly.’ The minute you try to be funny, you’re not.”
With the success from The Dick Van Dyke Show, Van Dyke was able to move to feature films. He worked in many genres & proved a smart dramatic actor & a reliable, if unexpected, villain in films like The Runner Stumbles (1979) as an alcoholic priest, as a crook in Warren Beatty‘s Dick Tracy (1990) & an evil night watchman in Night In The Museum (2006) & its sequels. But he will always be most noted for his work in musical films Mary Poppins (1965), with Julie Andrews, & Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang (1968).
Van Dyke’s problem with his film work was that The Dick Van Dyke Show had set the bar so high for television comedy & Rob Petrie was such a familiar & beloved character, that matching that standard in his movies was a tough task, & audiences had trouble accepting him as anybody else.
But, I admire his breezy, charming performances in the 1960s era comedies: What A Way To Go! (1964) with Shirley MacLaine, The Art Of Love (1965) with James Garner, & Some Kind Of A Nut (1969). But, nothing matched the TV stuff.
Van Dyke has been forthright about his personal problems:
“I was an alcoholic for about 25 years. In the 1950s & 1960s, everybody had their martini, everybody smoked incessantly. The funny thing is that all through my 20s & early 30s, I didn’t drink at all. Then we moved to a neighborhood full of young families with the same age kids & everyone drank heavily, there were big parties every night. I would go to work with terrible hangovers which if you’re dancing is really hard.”
He had a couple of stays in rehab:
“I had suicidal feelings, it was just terrible. But then suddenly, like a blessing, the drink started not to taste good. I would feel a little dizzy & a little nauseous & I wasn’t getting the click. Today I wouldn’t want a drink for anything. But I do occasionally think of taking a nice drag on a cigarette.”
In his recently released book Keep Moving: Tips & Truths About Aging, Van Dyke writes:
“My whole generation has disappeared on me. My contemporaries, not in talent but in age, were Paul Newman, Jack Lemmon, Rock Hudson. All gone.”
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