Dick Van Dyke Read online

  He couldn’t have been friendlier as he closed the door and explained that Phil and I were doing an excellent job, but he especially liked me. He said that he was impressed with my singing, dancing, and all-around ability to entertain. He and his partner, he added, had noticed the way the audience related to me and they had a proposition for me.

  “As you can tell, we think you have special talent,” he said. “Basically, we’d like to take you over.”

  “You want to take over Phil’s and my act?” I asked.

  “No, just you,” he said. “We’re looking at you as a single.”

  “Well, thank you for the compliment,” I said, “but I still don’t understand the, um, proposal.”

  He explained that he and his partner ran the club with a group of “silent investors,” men who, he said, preferred to stay in the background but who trusted their judgment of talent. He said they liked the way the audiences reacted to me and wanted to invest in my act.

  “But I don’t have an act,” I said.

  “We’ll help you build it,” he said, adding that they would get behind me in every way, from writing to PR to salary.

  “Really?” I said.

  “We’ll pay you fifteen thousand a week,” he said.

  At the time, Phil and I were splitting less than 5 percent of that, or about seven hundred dollars a week. My eyes glazed over.

  “It’s a good starting salary,” he continued. “We’ll have the act written. You’ll buy your wardrobe. And we’ll take care of all your bookings.”

  Deep down I knew I was not going to leave my partner in the lurch, but the sum of money being offered was so fantastic that it was impossible to simply dismiss it. In truth, I was blown away. I did not know how to respond. Nor did I seem able to. My mouth seemed temporarily out of order. Finally I stammered a thank-you and explained that I would talk about it with my wife and agent and get back to him as soon as possible.

  “You’re never going to believe what happened,” I told Margie.

  Like me, she was speechless.

  “How much money are they going to pay you?” she asked.

  I returned to Earth after speaking to Phil’s and my Atlanta-based agent, Monk Arnold. He had me repeat the details, then woke me up from this dream of having arrived on easy street.

  “Dick, they’re the Mob,” he said.

  “You think?” I asked.

  “Dick, if they get a hold of you like this, they’ve got you for the rest of your life.”

  I shut my eyes and took a deep breath, feeling a wave of disappointment pass through me.

  “Don’t fool with them,” Monk advised.

  “It did sound too good,” I said.

  “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is,” he said.

  I had Monk Arnold call the guy back and tell him that I had too many commitments and would not feel right changing course. But I implored him to convey how flattered I was at the same time. I wanted to stay on good terms with those guys. I did not want them mad at me.

  5

  LIVE ON THE AIR

  In 1949, Phil and I got a job in Atlanta at the Henry Grady Hotel, an excellent establishment with a large ballroom. We performed two shows a day, one in the afternoon for kids and another at night for a more mature crowd. Children’s favorites and slapstick were de rigueur for the early show, and then we spiced up the nighttime routine with Spike Jones, Bing Crosby, and popular songs on the radio, as well as more mature jokes.

  With Phil as the straight man, more or less, and me in the role of rubber-limbed comedian, tirelessly mugging, miming, dancing, and inventing antics on the spot, we filled the room every show. We also did local events, radio, and even store openings. All the exposure made us quite popular around town. In turn, Phil and I fell in love with the city.

  At the time, Atlanta still felt like a small city. With only about 250,000 people living there, it was quaint, comfortable, and affordable. Charmed by the surroundings and buoyed by our success, both of us decided to put stakes in the ground. We took advantage of the GI Bill and bought homes. Mine was a tiny three-bedroom with prefabricated sides that seemed to go up in days. Even as the workmen slapped it together, Margie and I beamed with the pride of new and naive homeowners.

  The backyard was up against the woods, and though we had only a couple flower beds, shrubs, and several baby trees, it looked to me, with my vivid imagination, like the grounds of an estate. Wanting the front to look good, too, I carted in umpteen wheelbarrows of sod and had it looking like a magazine ad—until a hard rain washed all that greenery and hard work away.

  In 1950, Margie gave birth to our son Chris, and thirteen months later we had a second baby boy, Barry. Like Phil, now that I had a family, I lost my taste for the road. I got a job as an announcer at the local CBS radio station, WAGA. Pretty soon they gave me my own slot as an early-morning disk jockey, and a little later, when there was an opening at night for a fifteen-minute record act, Phil and I took it.

  You couldn’t be in Atlanta for any appreciable amount of time without hearing me, which worked in my favor when the local television station owned by the Atlanta Constitution, WCON, needed a full-time announcer. They turned to me. I got the job reading all the news, announcements, and commercials—anything that needed announcing over the course of an eight-hour day.

  I proved myself adept and inexpensive, and eventually the station’s management gave me an hour-long show of my own. I was thrilled.

  But let me tell you, no matter how excited and eager I was to do well—and I was—it didn’t take long before those sixty minutes felt like six hundred minutes. It ate up material. I mean it devoured material. Few things are as terrifying as standing in front of a camera by yourself and realizing you have used most of your best material and still have to fill fifty-four minutes.

  On my first night, I felt like the clock had stopped. It didn’t seem like the hour would ever end. I read the newspaper, told jokes, and interviewed people—whatever I could think of. It was like an episode of The Twilight Zone. A young performer’s dream comes true when he’s given his own hour-long television show, except when that hour never ends and the performer goes bananas.

  Fortunately, I figured out the pacing and quickly got to where I was so comfortable in front of the camera that I forgot I was on the air. I never gave it a thought—until the red light on the camera went off and I began to think about the next day’s material.

  I never worked as hard. At night, I sat in front of the TV with Margie and the boys, with a portable typewriter on my lap, and read through the newspaper, through joke books, and listened to the TV, all the while writing furiously.

  Was it quality material?

  I had no idea. But I got very good at producing a lot of it.

  I pantomimed records, told jokes, and interviewed people on the street about popular topics. I also came up with a running bit where I put some soft clay on a slant board and told a story while I sculpted. I kept the bit going throughout the hour. At the end of one show, I put the finishing touches on a guy and then punched him under the chin. His face scrunched up and I quipped, “Well, there’s a funny-looking old fart.”

  This was the early 1950s, when there were only a few stations on the dial, and oh my God, the phone calls poured into the station. I was almost fired.

  Eventually the station moved into a more proper studio and I partnered with a quick-witted woman named Fran Adams (later Fran Kearton) on The Fran and Dick Show, also known as The Music Shop. We wrote and produced skits, clowned around, satirized popular TV shows, and pantomimed hit songs. Like all such shows done live, it was a little bit of everything we could think of.

  In her 1993 memoir, Fran recalled a play on the show Dragnet, with Detective Friday and his partner, Thursday, investigating the murder of Goldilocks, of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” fame. She was found on the street “wearing a derby and slacks,” intoned Friday. “At least she died like a man,” said Thursday. Ugh. As I said, it
was everything we could think of.

  One day, as I was lip-syncing Andy Griffith’s 1953 comedy hit “What It Was, Was Football,” a monologue about a hillbilly preacher watching his first football game and trying to figure out what was happening on “the pretty little green cow pasture,” I looked up and saw Andy himself, watching me.

  It turned out he was in town promoting his record, but no one told me he was stopping by the studio. I was too far into the bit to stop. I thought, Oh, God, I’m in trouble. He’s not going to appreciate my interpretation. (Given the quality of the Dragnet satire, you can only imagine.)

  But Andy was quite amused.

  And I was quite relieved.

  At some point, I left Fran and repartnered with Phil on a show for WSP, the local NBC affiliate. The show was more elaborate than anything either of us had done up to that point. We had a little band, a girl singer, and a kid who helped us write. In other words, it was a real show.

  We embraced the challenge of producing what was essentially a variety show every day. We poured every ounce of creative energy into writing sketches and rehearsing songs. I even painted scenery on the weekends. I was so passionate that I was nearly possessed. It was also fun, and the show was quite popular—or so we thought. We figured we would do it a long time.

  Phil had also opened a comedy club called The Wit’s End. It was located near the Biltmore Hotel and Georgia Tech University. The club’s motto was to the point: “Bring money.” And people did. It was an instant hit with the college kids and would, by the 1970s, send improv groups all over the country. In its early days, though, it complemented our TV show.

  After about a year, the TV station’s general manager came to me and said they wanted me to do the show alone.

  “What about Phil?” I asked.

  The station manager shook his head.

  I raised my eyebrows. I didn’t know what that meant.

  “We want you to do it,” he said. “We don’t need Phil.”

  I felt a pit in my stomach. I had been in this situation before. Now, granted, it wasn’t the Mob making me an offer. It was the station manager. But he was persuasive. He said they were going to cut back and fire Phil, anyway. They didn’t want to pay two people for a job they thought one person could do adequately enough.

  I needed a job, but I couldn’t leave Phil hanging like that. I didn’t know what to do until I remembered that some months earlier a New Orleans TV station had contacted me about a job. I ignored them at the time, but I found out the position was still available, and though it paid the same as I currently made, two hundred dollars a week, I took it. It still meant breaking up with Phil, but I thought it was better than continuing to do our show without him.

  I didn’t tell him about my conversation with the station manager, and he was hurt when I left. He thought I was deserting him. Later, we talked it out and patched things up, and moved on with our lives and careers.

  It was 1954 when we arrived in the Big Easy, and on my first day in town, before I had even visited the station, I met the general manager at a motel. He took me into a conference room, where I improvised for about a half hour in front of a half dozen potential sponsors. They were local businessmen and regional reps for larger companies. They wanted to see what I had to offer.

  Talk about pressure. And poor conditions for a performance. But I knew my livelihood was on the line. If I didn’t get sponsors, they would find someone else and I would have to look for work.

  Luckily, I nabbed a couple of them, including a biggie, Louisiane Coffee. My new boss gave me a congratulatory slap on the back and then I went back to my motel, downed two beers, and passed out.

  Once past that stressful day, New Orleans felt charmed. Margie and I had a cute little house and pretty soon we added our third child and first daughter, Stacy. The station was located in the French Quarter, and I was able to walk to work in the morning as the restaurateurs and barkeeps cleaned up from the previous night and cafés brewed fresh coffee. It was nice.

  For the show, I had a combo of musicians, did some man-on-the-street interviews, and brought kids into the studio, which was almost always comedy gold. I incorporated them into skits and songs. I had learned a lot over the years and was very comfortable in front of the camera. Within about six months, I owned the New Orleans market. I was beating Arthur Godfrey’s national broadcast, which, in those days, was something.

  My ratings got the attention of the network in New York, specifically my old Air Force buddy Byron Paul. We had kept in touch over the years as Byron rose up the ranks at CBS, from a cameraman to a director. He told the executives about me and suggested they bring me to New York for an audition.

  There was some skepticism, of course, but Byron said if they didn’t hire me, he would personally pay all of the expenses. I heard that and said, “Really? That’s very generous—and brave—of you.” But he felt confident it was not going to cost him a cent.

  6

  A SEVEN-YEAR CONTRACT

  Jane Froman was a popular singer from the 1930s, a former star with the Ziegfeld Follies, and so highly regarded that legendary Broadway producer Billy Rose reportedly once quipped that the ten best female singers in the world were “Jane Froman and nine others.” In 1943 she survived a plane crash in Europe while on a USO tour but suffered injuries that led to a rash of physical problems as well as an addiction to painkillers and alcohol.

  In 1952, the same year Susan Hayward played her in the movie With a Song in My Heart, Jane began hosting a nightly fifteen-minute show on CBS called USA Canteen. By the time I arrived in New York City for my audition, her show was called simply The Jane Froman Show. On the night I got into town, Byron met me at my hotel and took me to the theater where she did her show.

  I was backstage with Byron when Jane finished her show, and I heard the director ask the audience to stay in their seats “because we have a young man who’s going to come out and entertain you.” At that moment, I asked myself why I was doing this. I wasn’t ambitious. My life in New Orleans was perfectly fine. And yet …

  “This can be your big break,” Byron said.

  “I know,” I said. “But I’m scared to death.”

  “You’re going to be fine,” he said. “Just be yourself.”

  After a quick pass through makeup and a couple deep breaths to shake out my nervousness, I went onstage—my first time in front of multiple cameras, real lights, and an experienced director—where I sang a song and performed a monologue I had written. It seemed to go over well with the audience, but the only opinion that mattered belonged to the network executives watching from the booth, and I didn’t see them afterward.

  Later, over dinner, Byron analyzed my performance and expressed his belief that I had impressed the CBS brass. I was not as confident, though I didn’t think I was terrible. I simply had no way of knowing, and that made me nervous.

  The next morning, Byron took me into the vice president’s office. He told me to relax, it was going to be a good meeting. He was right. The VP offered me a seven-year contract, with a starting salary of twenty thousand dollars a year—twice as much as I had made in my life.

  I couldn’t speak. I stared at the CBS executive, then at Byron, and kept going back and forth. Finally, Byron reached over to shake hands with the VP.

  “Speaking on behalf of Dick, he accepts,” he said. “As you can see, he is thrilled.”

  I nodded.

  I was thrilled. Beyond thrilled. I was downright stunned. This was one of those proverbial big breaks, the kind you hear about, except it was happening to me, Dick Van Dyke, from Danville, Illinois.

  While I went back home and gave my two weeks’ notice, Byron rented us a house in Massapequa, a suburb on the South Shore of Long Island, and within the month, Margie and I and our three children had moved in. To celebrate our new good fortune, I took Margie on a Fifth Avenue shopping spree and we bought each other gifts as if we had just come into money. By our standards, we had.

  Work-
wise, I was assigned to the CBS Morning Show, airing Monday through Friday from seven to eight. Walter Cronkite hosted the show when it launched in 1954 as a two-hour broadcast. After Dave Garroway and NBC’s Today show trounced it in the ratings, it was cut to sixty minutes, with the second hour going to Captain Kangaroo. Other hosts were brought in, including Jack Paar and Johnny Carson, then a lanky Midwestern comedian who was beginning his climb up TV’s ranks.

  The network also used humorist John Henry Faulk, whom I replaced after he was wrongly labeled a communist by a McCarthy-backed group and blacklisted from the business.

  I wasn’t aware of the reasons for Faulk’s departure until later when he chronicled his ordeal in the wonderful book Fear on Trial. I walked into my new job as the Morning Show’s announcer wonderfully, blissfully ignorant—and quite late.

  My first day was July 18, 1955. I woke up at four A.M. because I had to be at the studio at six for rehearsal and I had an hour’s drive into the city. I got in our Chevy, started it up, heard a loud snap, crackle, pop, and was suddenly engulfed by smoke.

  I leapt from the car and waited for the smoke to clear. I tried the ignition again. The car was dead, and I would be, too, if I didn’t get going.

  I took a cab to the train station and caught the train into Manhattan. It was my first time on the Long Island Rail Road, but I did not worry, as I still had plenty of time to get to work. It seemed like I might even save time, since I could get off at Grand Central Station, where, in fact, the studio was located, way up high in the upper floors above the terminal.

  But in keeping with the way the day began, I missed my stop and ended up at Penn Station, on Seventh Avenue and Thirty-first Street. I was not even close. I checked my watch. It was time to panic. The cushion I had wanted before going on the air was virtually gone, and so was my sense of calm.