My mother said I was a good boy—and now, at almost eighty-five years old…I guess I stayed that way,” Dick Van Dyke writes in his 2011 autobiography, My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business: A Memoir.The legendary comedian was the star of the transformative Dick Van Dyke Show, along with the long-running Diagnosis Murder and classic films like Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. His book delves into them—but much like the autobiographies of fellow legends Sophia Loren and Fred Astaire, it also keeps a lot close to the vest. Yet the people-pleasing star tells what he chooses with such good nature and gratitude that the reader hardly minds.
This attitude is unsurprising for a man so universally beloved. “Nobody has a rotten thing to say about him,” Merv Griffin once said, “and they have rotten things to say about everyone.” A loving father of four, Democratic booster, and civil rights advocate, Van Dyke also volunteered for years every holiday at Los Angeles’s Midnight Mission, dancing, singing, and hugging unhoused folks on Skid Row.
But this wholesome boy had a dark side, fighting a lengthy battle with alcoholism. He recounts those low points with grace and light honesty. “Hope is life’s essential nutrient, and love is what gives life meaning,” Van Dyke writes. “I think you need somebody to love and take care of, and someone who loves you back. In that sense, I think the New Testament got it right. So did the Beatles. Without love, nothing has any meaning.” (...)
In 1942, Van Dyke signed up for the Air Force, and is refreshingly truthful recalling his relief that he was put in the special services. Instead of fighting, he was tasked with performing in variety shows, and even put up a DJ booth in the mess hall where he played records and read the news. “That was,” he writes, “about as military as I wanted to get.”
Some of the most fascinating and enjoyable parts of My Lucky Life are Van Dyke’s memories of his next 20 years as a drifting journeyman disc jockey, vaudeville performer, news reader, and local variety show host in the wild and wooly early days of radio and television. “The only certainty was that something would go wrong, if not today, then tomorrow,” he recalls. “It required nerves of steel and a sense of humor to match.” (...)
On-air disasters were frequent, like the time Van Dyke was interviewing a dog sled racer live. “I began clowning around and jokingly said, ‘Mush.’ It just came out of me. His dogs didn’t understand it was a joke and they took off. They ran through the kitchen set, the weather set, and two other sets, knocking all of them down, before they stopped.”
CBS let him go after three years, and Van Dyke was again drifting, appearing on talk and game shows. He was saved by becoming a regular on Pantomime Quiz, a charades-like TV show where he was paired with his pal Carol Burnett. “Thanks to a slew of imperceptible hand signals we came up with to tip each other off…we were unbeatable,” he writes. “It was a good thing, too. I needed the two hundred dollars we were paid each time we won to buy groceries.”
Paid to Play
The early 1960s changed everything, leading into Van Dyke’s golden era. In 1960, he was a smash in the Broadway hit Bye Bye Birdie, for which he won a Tony. In 1961, writer and creator Carl Reiner cast him in a new sitcom based on Reiner’s life as a comedy writer commuting from New Rochelle to New York City. Van Dyke was clearly as shocked as anyone that he got the role.
“I have…heard and read various accounts of why they liked me,” he writes. “My favorites? I wasn’t too good-looking, I walked a little funny, and I was basically kind of average and ordinary. I guess my lack of perfection turned out to be a winning hand.”
He was even more surprised when Reiner suggested naming it The Dick Van Dyke Show. So was his wisecracking costar Rose Marie. “Rosie, appearing more perplexed than anyone, shook her head and said, ‘What’s a Dick Van Dyke?’ I agreed. It sounded like a mistake. ‘Nobody’s ever heard of me,’ I said. ‘Who’s going to tune in?’”
Now a beloved, Emmy-winning superstar, Van Dyke clung to his family life and eschewed the Hollywood party scene, much like his level-headed Mary Poppins costar Julie Andrews (whom he adored). But he couldn’t resist a little flirtation with his on-set wife, Mary Tyler Moore.
“We couldn’t stop giggling when we were around each other,” Van Dyke writes. “I finally asked a psychiatrist friend of mine about it. He stated what was patently obvious. ‘Dick, you’ve got a crush on her.’ I put my head in my hands and laughed. Of course, I did. Who didn’t adore Mary? If we had been different people, maybe something would have happened. But neither of us was that type of person. Still, we were stuck on each other.”
The Six-Foot Tower of Jell-O
An amateur philosopher and elder at his Presbyterian church, Van Dyke consistently tried to live up to its ideals of brotherly love. But his faith was shaken during a contentious church meeting regarding civil rights:
One of the elders emphatically stated that he did not want any black people in the church. Appalled, I stood up, shared my disgust, grabbed my jacket, and walked out. I never went back there or to any other church. My relationship with God was solid, but the hypocrisy among the so-called faithful finished me for good.
But Van Dyke admits he was not always so brave. “My dislike of confrontation was so obvious that Rosie turned it into a joke. She dubbed me ‘the Six-Foot Tower of Jell-O,’” he writes.
This aloofness meant many felt he was an unknowable enigma. “He’s a loner,” Carl Reiner once said. “You don’t see him hurting,” Mary Tyler Moore agreed. In My Lucky Life, Van Dyke addresses this depiction, revealing the anxiety and navel-gazing underneath his unflappable exterior.
“The public saw a smiling, nimble-footed performer while my family and friends were served up a more contemplative loner, a man who many said was hard to know,” he writes. “I will say that it was not intentional…. Throughout my whole life I have pondered the big questions. I’ve thought more like a philosopher…. If I was hard to know, it was because I would disappear into this abyss of questions and debate…. What was the point? What was I supposed to do? Was I getting it right?”
