In his book My Anecdotal Life, Carl Reiner called me “the finest all-around performer to ever grace a situation comedy,” so it’s only appropriate that I take a moment to return the compliment by saying that in the history of television, Carl is the finest all-around writer to ever create a situation comedy. He’s also one of the finest human beings to do so.
But that represents only a fraction of my admiration for this very funny, intelligent, and kind man.
Long before I met him, Carl was already among my heroes. I worshipped the Bronx-born comedy genius as a mainstay on Your Show of Shows, the classic variety series starring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. Airing on NBC from 1950 to 1954, it also featured Howard Morris and Nanette Fabray. Carl, though a regular performer, also considered himself one of the writers, an illustrious bunch that included Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, his brother Danny, and head writer Mel Tolkin.
Each season was thirty-nine weeks, and the show was broadcast live for ninety minutes. It was understandable why Sid would get a little crazy whenever people asked him how many retakes they did. The answer was: none. There weren’t any second takes. They had one chance every week, and they had to get that sucker as perfect as possible the first time.
The show was a milestone in TV comedy, and in the summer of 1959, it inspired Carl, who won two Emmy Awards for Best Supporting Actor during that period, to write a sitcom based on his experiences as a writer there.
At the time, Carl was living with his wife, Estelle, and their three children in New Rochelle, New York. He went off to Fire Island and wrote his first sitcom script. He called it Head of the Family. Being a visionary and a prolific storyteller, he didn’t stop with that one script, either. He wrote thirteen episodes—one-third of an entire season!
Then he shot a pilot starring himself as TV writer Rob Petrie and Barbara Britton as his wife, Laura. He cast Sylvia Miles and Morty Gunty as his writing partners on the fictional Alan Sturdy Show, and he put actor Jack Wakefeld in the role of Alan Sturdy. CBS liked the pilot, but not enough. However, they did respond to Carl, who was advised to try again.
As he regrouped, Carl was introduced to Sheldon Leonard, a brilliant TV producer with a Midas touch. His credits already included two classics, The Danny Thomas Show and The Andy Griffith Show. After viewing the original pilot, Sheldon, like everyone else, became an instant and devoted fan of Carl’s writing. He also made a suggestion, not an easy one, either, considering the stature of the person to whom he was making it.
He told Carl the show needed to be recast.
And Carl—did I also mention he was one of the wisest men to ever create a situation comedy?—understood.
He also agreed to let Sheldon direct the pilot, which, in retrospect, was like Babe Ruth welcoming Lou Gehrig into the lineup. Or something like that. The two of them were superstars, and Carl knew Sheldon’s sensibility and experience were only going to help this project that was so personal to him.
I say God bless both of them—and thank you—because in thinking about who should play Rob Petrie, Sheldon recalled seeing me in Girls Against the Boys, and he came to the theater to see me in Birdie. A short time later, he returned with Carl, with both of them looking at me as their lead actor.
I had no idea they were in the audience and neither man came backstage afterward. But later I heard that Carl had been very entertained and impressed, and he left the theater thinking that I was the right guy.
Over the years, I have heard and read about other actors they considered, including Johnny Carson. I have also heard and read various accounts of why they liked me. 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. Let that be a lesson for future generations.
Through my agent, I received eight scripts from Carl—the first eight scripts of this new series that didn’t have a title or any actors. No longer called Head of the Family, Carl had rewritten each episode, not that it would have mattered to me. I hadn’t read the originals. I’m sure they were as brilliant as those sent to me. The eight I read were magnificent. They were fresh and funny. They resonated with real-life energy and insights that I recognized from my own life and the lives of people I knew. Carl was dialed in, as they say.
I read one after another eager to see what was next. Midway through, I turned to Margie and said, “My God, this guy is good.”
It’s one of the great understatements in TV history.
He was Carl Reiner.
So no one accuses me of venturing into hyperbole, let me say there were no one-liners in these scripts, no corny or cheap jokes for the sake of comedy. The humor grew out of the people and their relationships to one another and their jobs. It was organic, natural, real, and timeless. I keep going back to the same point, but anyone who has been in a hit TV series will mention the same thing as the essential ingredient. It was the writing. It was fantastic.
“I want to do this,” I told my agent. “What’s next?”
Next, I met with Carl. He offered me the job and asked me to fly to Los Angeles to make the pilot. Part of me was ready to go right away, but I had some reservations about leaving a hit play and uprooting my family from a place where we’d grown very comfortable. In my meeting with Carl I found myself working out this conflict perhaps subconsciously by telling him about an idea I had for a series that I was calling Man on a Scooter.
Inspired by the great physical comedy of Jacques Tati’s 1953 movie Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, I envisioned myself playing an associate professor from a small Ohio college who takes a sabbatical and travels through Europe with his typewriter on the back of a Vespa, having one adventure after another.
I had already pitched it to a network and a few producers without any interest, and Carl reacted like everyone else, only kinder. He said that while he, too, admired Tati, he thought my idea was a movie, not a TV series.
“It’s one idea,” he said, and a TV series, he explained, had to have an infinite number of story ideas, like real life—and like his scripts about Rob and Laura Petrie, their son, Ritchie, Rob’s coworkers Sally Rogers and Buddy Sorrell, their boss, Mel Cooley, and their neighbors Jerry and Millie Helper.
After getting a week off from Birdie, I flew to Los Angeles and met with Sheldon Leonard and Carl in Carl’s second-floor office at Desilu Studios. I had signed on for $1,500 an episode, and I was very excited. I felt like I was a little twig on the Sid Caesar family tree; I was honored and thrilled to have any sort of attachment to that comedy lineage. Once we began to work, I was not only honored and thrilled, but I was also impressed.
Sheldon and Carl had already cast Rose Marie as Sally Rogers, and she had told Carl about Morey Amsterdam, who was also hired, to play the role of Buddy Sorrell. Both were comedy veterans. As for Mary, it’s well-known that Sheldon and Carl considered dozens of actresses before settling on Mary Tyler Moore, a young actress whose previous work, outside of commercials and dancing, was playing a receptionist on the series Richard Diamond, Private Detective, though her great legs were all that anyone ever saw of her.
But plenty of other people in town had seen her, including Danny Thomas, one of our executive producers and one of Hollywood’s biggest, smartest stars on his own. She had auditioned to play his daughter on Make Room for Daddy, better known as The Danny Thomas Show, but as Carl later quipped, “She missed it by a nose.” Indeed, as Danny added, “No daughter of mine could ever have a nose that small.”
But he suggested “the girl with three names” to Carl, and she got the role. Her nose was perfect, as was she. Everyone loved Mary.
What wasn’t to love? I adored her from the moment we were introduced. I think both of us had each other at hello. But I still had a couple of problems. For one, I thought she was too young to play my wife. She was twelve years younger than I was, though as time went by, no one ever noticed or mentioned that fact. Even I forgot about it. Then, during our initial read-throughs of the first episode, titled “The Sick Boy and the Sitter,” I was concerned that Mary wasn’t much of a comedienne.
It is hard to imagine. But she was stiff and proper, polite. She didn’t seem to have much of a funny bone. I saw a little Katharine Hepburn in her, but not much Lucille Ball.
Of course, I was wrong. And therein is yet another reason Carl was known as a genius and I was referred to as “the actor playing Rob Petrie.” Within a few days of reading and working together—really in no time at all—Mary got it. With Carl, Rosie, and Morey in the room, she had the best teachers. These people knew comedy like nobody else. They had funny in their bones, down into the marrow. On top of that, they had impeccable timing. Mine was pretty good, too. And Mary was the A-plus student. She absorbed everything—the chemistry, the rhythm—and emerged a comedienne herself.
I had never seen a transformation like hers, and I still haven’t. She went from black to white. The first time I stood across from her in rehearsal and heard her say, “Oh, Rob!” I thought, That’s it, we’re home.
All of a sudden, she was perfect.
Little Cahuenga Studios, or Little Desilu, became our home away from home. We spent much of that first week as a cast preparing for the pilot by sitting around a table, reading the script, and throwing out suggestions as Carl listened and wrote. He was brought up on Your Show of Shows, where they sat around the table and threw out lines. We did the same. Everybody got to suggest dialogue and work out their parts, and Carl wrote and, more accurately, rewrote the scripts as he fine-tuned each role to our personalities, strengths, speech patterns, and inflections.
Imagine humming a tune to Mozart. With perfect pitch, something I still marvel at, he captured every one of us. It made it so we didn’t have to act. All we had to do was read our parts. We were playing ourselves.
We had to hold Morey down. He was an encyclopedia with a million jokes in his head. They popped out of him at a rapid-fire pace, and they were hiliarious, except most didn’t fit the story. He wasn’t always wrong, though. Sometimes he threw in a great one, and Carl kept it.
Carl was like that with all of us. If someone offered a line and it was funny and fit the story, it stayed in. That was the ethos as we worked on the pilot, and it stayed that way for the entire run of the series.
I liked everyone instantly and the feeling was mutual. We all liked one another and everyone had a handle on the idea. Throughout the week, we knew we were headed in the right direction. The show got better, funnier, and each of us grew more comfortable in our parts. That was when I was at my most creative, when I was on the set, doing the work. With the adrenaline flowing, you never knew what might happen.
I was so nervous before taping the pilot that fever blisters broke out in my mouth. That morning we were to begin taping, I looked in the mirror and counted five of them. I thought, Poor Mary, I have to kiss her in the opening scene when I come home from work excited because my boss, Alan Brady, has invited us to a party at his penthouse home. We shot the pilot on January 21, 1961, the same day John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the thirty-fifth president of the United States, in front of three cameras and a live audience, just like present-day sitcoms do, and got laughs in all the right places, and even a few unexpected places. Toward the end, there was a big party scene at Alan’s house where everyone got to perform, and it went flawlessly, too.
Everything worked, including ideas we had discussed earlier and little impromptu bits that came to us in the moment. We came off as a married couple. It was thrilling. I could tell it was working, and so could Mary. From the start, we had a special timing and chemistry that you can’t manufacture. It’s either there or it isn’t. With us, it was there—and it only got better over time.
All of us were learning. I spoke to Carl between takes about the shadings of my character. We had been discussing Rob throughout the week and continued the conversation every chance we had. Carl had a picture in his head, and I was just getting acquainted with him. The two would quickly merge, his vision and my portrayal, and then the fun really started.
He knew that I loved physical comedy, so we made Rob a tad klutzy. If he could trip or bump into something at an inopportune or unlikely moment, he did. It was during one of the early rehearsals that I came up with the idea to stumble over the living room ottoman, which became a signature of the show’s opening. I tried it and Carl laughed—especially at my expression. It was golden.
Everything about Rob was like that. He was relatable. A comedy writer may not be familiar to everyone, but he was a husband and father, a good guy who tried hard to make sure things went right, that he did a good job, and that he not get flustered when things went awry. I was able to pour so much of myself into him before I even knew I was doing that. Like me, he hated confrontation. Carl had a deft eye for piling up intricate little problems that turned into challenges that thwarted Rob, including his job, his coworkers, his roles as a husband and a responsible provider, and his own charming, well-intentioned self. Every time he came up with a new situation that caused Laura to wince, “Oh, Rob!” I thought, Oh, good, this is going to be fun.
It was also no accident that we had numerous episodes with parties where we broke into song or dance. All of us looked for any excuse to perform, and Carl relished any and every opportunity to write in a number, since they shortened the script by ten pages or so.
As we shot the pilot, I mispronounced Rob and Laura’s last name, saying Pet-re rather than Pee-tree, as Carl had done in the original when he based the name on some actual neighbors of his in New Rochelle. Nobody corrected me, and so it stuck.
Another name stuck, too—the show’s title.
That was the problem the whole time we began working on the remake. There wasn’t a title. No one wanted to use the old name, Head of the Family. Carl came up with numerous suggestions, one more clever than the next, but none of them hit the magic note that made Carl and Sheldon go, “Aha, that’s it!”
Ideas were pitched all week and just as quickly dismissed, including Double Trouble, which Sheldon championed, as it was his idea.
But Carl shook his head. Our conductor heard it as a sour note.
“The problem is we have a show with a star that no one has heard of,” Carl said. “We need something that will make both Dick and the show a household name.”
One afternoon, with time running out before we had to deliver a title to CBS, Sheldon, an imposing, opinionated man who was always perfectly dressed, fit, and tan, as well as a man who possessed an impressive vocabulary and used it to his advantage, got into a discussion with Carl, who had his own arsenal of opinions and arguments. As they went back and forth, Carl suggested calling it The Dick Van Dyke Show. I saw his face brighten.
“Look, Make Room for Daddy, a big hit, became better known as The Danny Thomas Show,” Carl said. “We should do the same. It solves our problems.”
Sheldon, who looked as if someone had just put a pinch of bitters on his tongue, didn’t think so.
“The Dick Van Dyke Show,” he said slowly, as if placing it on a shelf and standing back to assess how it looked.
All of a sudden everyone looked. All eyes swung to me. I wanted to hide. 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?”
“I disagree,” Carl said. “I think it’s perfect.”