I returned home from Europe to a different—and difficult—time. It was early 1968, an election year and a period of unrest, confusion, conflict, upheaval, and ultimately great sadness. I never thought being in show business made me immune from the things that affected everyone else, and I wasn’t, starting with the news that Charlie Brown, the charismatic youth minister at my church, had taken a new position in the Pacific Northwest.
His departure changed the dynamic inside the church and caused me to slowly drift away from there and from organized religion in general. The clincher occurred during a meeting of church elders. We were puzzling over what to do about the racial problems that kept much of the city divided. One of the elders suggested inviting the congregation from a black church from the inner city to our church and, ideally, they would invite us to theirs. I thought it was a great idea, right on target. It sounded like something that would have come from Charlie, who preached the best possible way, by example. The things he did the other six days of the week were far more inspirational than anything he said on the seventh day in church, which was also pretty good.
“Black families, white families, people in general—we look at each other like strangers,” I said. “But I think we have much more in common than any of us realize. We sit in our churches on Sundays, we read from the same book, we pray to the same God, we want the same thing, which is to feel loved, not hated. What if we got to know each other through an exchange program?”
The idea did not go over well. 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.
My faith was tested again in April when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Like many Americans, I took the tragedy personally. I knew and admired the man and his mission. A few years earlier, I’d had the honor of meeting Dr. King at a rally in Los Angeles, where I was also among the speakers.
It was a large event at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum. Rod Serling, the genius behind The Twilight Zone and an early civil rights advocate, got me involved and also wrote my speech, which articulated my feelings about being a God-loving human being in the latter half of the twentieth century and moving beyond backward and bigoted thinking.
Moments before we filed through the locker room tunnel and went onto the stage in the middle of the field, a security official informed us that there’d been a threat on Dr. King’s life. He said that we had the option of backing out, and everyone would understand if we did. No one fell out of line.
We marched out and gave the most impassioned speeches of our lives, at least I did, though I have to admit that when Dr. King sat next to me, I did lean slightly to the other side.
At the time Dr. King was assassinated, I was involved in the organization Concerned Democrats and was campaigning on behalf of Senator Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 bid to become president of the United States. Being on the campaign trail with McCarthy brought back memories of when I was a teen and my grandfather took me to the train station to see Wendell Wilkie speak in his run against Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. My grandfather was against the New Deal and referred to Roosevelt as a “One Worlder.”
It’s likely he would have been against McCarthy, too. But I was attracted to his stance against the Vietnam War. He was the first candidate to publicly question the war and call it a mistake while defending his patriotism. He was also a poet and unusually sensitive and personable for a politician. At a fund-raiser in Minneapolis, I became separated from him and his group as we snaked through a crowd. Suddenly, he stopped, turned, and asked, “Where’s Dick?”
I caught up and asked how he knew that I’d fallen behind.
“I had a sense,” he said.
That pretty much describes what I really liked about him. He had a sense of what was going on in the country and what ought to be done to ensure a brighter tomorrow for future generations. He won the New Hampshire primary, which caused President Johnson to take himself out of contention. Sensing an opening, though, Robert Kennedy entered the race. With rolled-up shirtsleeves and youthful vigor, he ran against McCarthy.
In June 1968, I was with the McCarthy camp at the Hilton hotel in downtown Los Angeles, waiting for the results of the California primary. Bobby Kennedy was about a mile away at the Ambassador Hotel. I was briefly distracted from the night’s main event when actress Myrna Loy showed up in the same dress that my wife had on. Myrna was quite charming about it and both women ended up having a good-natured chuckle.
Then I found myself in a corner talking to someone about my fears that McCarthy was too smart and too intellectual and not a tough enough politician to get elected. I said he reminded me of Adlai Stevenson, who had lost in two elections to Eisenhower. Sure enough, Bobby Kennedy topped McCarthy in the state’s Democratic presidential primary. The mood in our ballroom, which had been poised for celebration, was downcast and disappointed as we followed Kennedy’s victory speech from down the road on TV.
Moments later, we were frozen in time as news reached us that Kennedy had been shot. I remember shock, despair, and tears.
“Not again,” I said to Margie as we held each other and waited for news on Kennedy’s condition.
He died the next day—and with him and Martin Luther King Jr., the country lost much more than two great leaders, and although many of us knew that, we did not know how to fill that void.
In August, I followed McCarthy to Chicago for the Democratic convention. The sight of Mayor Daley’s police lining the street and appearing to taunt demonstrators made me feel as if we had already lost the war three months before the battle for the presidency. Afterward, I retreated to our Arizona ranch, where Margie and I spent weekends and summers with the children.
We had 180 acres in the middle of the desert, and it was the perfect place to decompress. We had been lured there a few years earlier to the area outside of Phoenix by our friends Marc and Dee Dee, who had a place nearby. Margie fell in love with the desert. I had expected to find a small A-frame on a couple of acres. Instead, we ended up with a ranch whose property sprawled farther than I could see. It was a special place with unique charms. I could do nothing for hours and found endless fascination staring up at the billions of stars that filled the clear nighttime sky.
For me, work was the best antidote to the problems I saw plaguing the world. I was so lucky that I loved what I did and was able to make a good living at it. In addition, it provided me with a sense of giving back something of value. If you could entertain people and take them away from their problems for a while, you were doing pretty well, I thought.
With two movies and a TV special in the works, I was doing just fine. The first film was Some Kind of a Nut, a comedy written and directed by Garson Kanin, whose erudite sense of humor had defined his screenplays for Born Yesterday, Pat and Mike, and Adam’s Rib. In Some Kind of a Nut, he cast me as a banker who grows a beard after getting stung by a bee and developing a rash, but he sees his career and personal life suffer drastic consequences when, in a stab at independence, he opts to keep his facial hair.
I enjoyed working again with Angie Dickinson, who was a doll, as were Rosemary Forsyth and Zohra Lampert, but the partnership with Garson, who was lovely and came to the set each day dressed to the nines, didn’t work out as I had hoped. It was nothing he did or didn’t do; the material, envisioned as a social satire, just never panned out. It “sounds like something out of Kanin’s trunk,” said the New York Times. I knew it, too. Even as we shot a scene with Rosemary where we rolled around in Central Park, I said to myself, “This is terrible … it stinks … but it’s Garson Kanin … how can this be?”
Ah, well. I had higher hopes for my next picture, The Comic, an homage to old-time silent-movie comics and idols of mine like Stan Laurel and Buster Keaton. A labor of comedy love from my old cohorts Carl Reiner and Aaron Ruben, and directed by Carl, this picture costarred Mickey Rooney and Michele Lee and told the story of silent-film star Billy Bright (loosely based on Keaton, but really a composite of several of those guys) as he looked back from the grave on his life and career.
Like any clown, he had as many private torments as laughs—maybe even more—but making the movie was like a playdate with friends who appreciated this special era of comedy and all its subtleties as much as I did. In his book My Anecdotal Life, Carl wrote, “I believe, if Mephistopheles popped in on Dick and offered him a chance to sell his soul for the chance to work in those old black-and-white comedies, he would think long and hard before refusing.”
He was right. But this was my chance to go back in time, and I took full advantage of it. Carl and Aaron Ruben and I were like kids let loose in a video arcade. It was playtime. We rewrote every day. Why wouldn’t you with those two in the room? Also, we couldn’t help ourselves. During production, we got together every day, looked at the script, told one another stories, laughed, and pretty soon someone said, “Why don’t we do this instead?”
For me, the best part was re-creating Billy Bright’s shtick. We shot it on sixteen-millimeter black and white, speeded it up so it would look authentically old, and then dragged the footage across my backyard to mess it up. Of course, we shot much more footage than we ever needed just because it was fun. Carl and I also talked about doing something with the extra material. We didn’t know what that might be, but something.
Unfortunately, all of that footage disappeared sometime before the movie opened and never resurfaced. I’ve been heartbroken since. Yet the picture itself buoyed my faith in the effort we put into it. Upon its opening in November 1969, the New York Times called the film “genuinely funny,” the local Los Angeles Times’ critic Kevin Thomas said it was “one of the most devastating films ever made about Hollywood,” which he meant in a good way.
In April 1969, after I had completed both films but months before either of them were released, I starred in my third special for CBS, which was my most delightful special quite simply because it costarred Mary Tyler Moore, the most delightful costar of my career. When The Dick Van Dyke Show ended, we vowed to get together for lunch every three weeks. It never happened. Busy schedules, career demands, and family obligations made such a well-intentioned promise impossible to fulfill.
But the feelings were always there. Countless times I spoke about the good fortune I had in continuing to work with Carl, Aaron, and others from the show. However, I missed the daily interaction and laughs I got from Morey and Rosie, and I especially missed my partnership with Mary, which made working together again such a treat for me.
Like me, she had done a handful of films, but thanks to the considerable success of our show and its continuation in reruns, Mary was still primarily thought of as my on-screen wife, a perception that short-changed her considerable talents. Our special, titled Dick Van Dyke and the Other Woman, set out to change that. Produced and written by Bill Persky and Sam Denoff, along with Arnold Kane, the show was an hour of dance and comedy that was meant to play easily and show off Mary.
I told Bill and Sam to let her do whatever she wanted, and I tossed in a few suggestions of my own, too. Hey, I would have been nuts not to take advantage of singing and dancing with Mary.
“It’s my chance to fool around with her,” I joked.
In one scene, Mary and I played a couple on a wedding cake, and in another she did a tour-de-force dance through the history of the modern woman, from the flapper era to the start of women’s lib. We also took a moment to acknowledge the show that made us household names, when I strolled into the Alan Brady Show office—all of the set had been in storage at CBS. I played it with a wink and a smile, as if I were taking the viewers at home back to a familiar time and place, which of course I was.
“I wish I had a nickel for every hour I spent here,” I said, and then, after a brief pause, added, “Oh, I guess I do.”
Mary got her own series the following year. The Mary Tyler Moore Show debuted on CBS in 1970 and became another TV classic. All of us who knew and loved Mary expected as much from her. While she was the perfect actress for those changing times, I was, like so many people back then, just trying to keep up with them. One night my wife and I drove to Eagle Rock, just outside of downtown Los Angeles, to have dinner with our oldest son, who was studying at Occidental College. Our second oldest, Barry, was about to graduate from high school, and the girls, Stacy and Carrie Beth, were sixteen and ten.
Chris, a junior, was living off-campus in a house with his girlfriend. He had the place decorated like a hippie den, with batik-like fabrics on the ceiling and Moroccan rugs on the floor. The lights were low and there were candles lit. It was all very nice as we sat down and visited. Then my wife caught my attention and raised her eyebrow ever so slightly, a movement that was the equivalent of a dog whistle, imperceptible unless you have been trained to respond to it, but after twenty-plus years of marriage I knew exactly what it meant.
I had already taken note. In the middle of Chris’s coffee table was something that looked at first glance like a vase—except it did not hold flowers. When Chris and his girlfriend went in the kitchen to prepare dinner, I turned to Margie and whispered, “It’s a bong.”
“A bong?” she asked.
“For smoking marijuana,” I said, quickly pantomiming someone taking a hit off a joint before Chris returned and saw me.
Margie’s eyes were full of concern and questions. Was Chris smoking pot? How did her straight-arrow husband know about this? I assured her that I’d never tried pot, and I was just as curious as she was. Over dinner, though, the four of us talked about everything except the one subject we wanted to talk about most. I don’t know how Margie and I managed to ignore the two-foot-high water pipe on the coffee table behind us, but we did.
Then we got in the car and it was like the dam burst.
“Oh my God, he’s smoking pot,” Margie exclaimed. “What’s going on?”
“I think he’s smoking pot,” I said.