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Summary
Summary
A heartfelt memoir from one of Hollywood's greatest icons
Dick Van Dyke, indisputably one of the greats of the golden age of television, is admired and beloved by audiences the world over for his beaming smile, his physical dexterity, his impeccable comic timing, his ridiculous stunts, and his unforgettable screen roles.
His trailblazing television program, The Dick Van Dyke Show (produced by Carl Reiner, who has written the foreword to this memoir), was one of the most popular sitcoms of the 1960s and introduced another major television star, Mary Tyler Moore. But Dick Van Dyke was also an enormously engaging movie star whose films, including Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang , have been discovered by a new generation of fans and are as beloved today as they were when they first appeared.
A colorful, loving, richly detailed look at the decades of a multilayered life, My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business, will enthrall every generation of reader, from baby-boomers who recall when Rob Petrie became a household name, to all those still enchanted by Bert's "Chim Chim Cher-ee." This is a lively, heartwarming memoir of a performer who still thinks of himself as a "simple song-and-dance man," but who is, in every sense of the word, a classic entertainer.
Author Notes
Dick Van Dyke was born Richard Wayne Van Dyke on December 13, 1925 in West Plains, Missouri. He is best known for portraying Rob Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke show from 1961-1966. This show received four Emmy Awards as Outstanding Comedy Series and Van Dyke won Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series. Van Dyke also starred on the Broadway stage in Bye Bye Birdie and The Music Man. He won the Best Actor Tony in 1961 for Bye Bye Birdie. He also starred in two classic children's movies, Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Van Dyke is the older brother of Jerry Van Dyke and the grandfather of actor Shane Van Dyke. He is an American actor, comedian, producer, and writer. His memoir, My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business, was was written in 2011. In 2014 this memoir was on the New York Times bestseller list.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this intimate, honest memoir by TV's favorite Mr. Nice Guy, good husband, and loving father, we discover that though his persona was not an act, Van Dyke battled alcohol addiction and left a long-term marriage while struggling to maintain his image as a man of principle and values. Growing up in the Midwest, healthy and happy, Van Dyke founds his niche early with radio, then as a nightclub comedian in L.A. With no acting or dance or music training, he landed a role in Broadway's Bye Bye, Birdie and later on in the film (he provides some fun stories about Ann-Margret, Paul Lynde, and Maureen Stapleton). It was Carl Reiner who made him a household name with The Dick Van Dyke Show-which was based on reality, with many scenarios from the actors' actual lives. Along the road to success with such films as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Mary Poppins, Van Dyke discusses his social drinking as a problem, and treatment, which he ultimately revealed at a D.C. press conference with other high-profile recovering alcoholics. He reminds us there are happy clowns and sad clowns: "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." (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Popular entertainer Van Dyke takes us through his eventful life. In his late teens, he was deejaying a radio show in his hometown, Danville, Illinois. Ten years later, he was signed to a seven-year contract with CBS, which had him, among other assignments, emceeing test episodes of a new game show, The Price Is Right. Then, in fairly rapid succession came Bye Bye Birdie, the stage musical for which Van Dyke won a Tony Award; The Dick Van Dyke Show, for which he won Emmys in three succeeding years; and Mary Poppins, the Disney film that made him a star around the world. He is frank about his post-Dick Van Dyke Show years, during which he struggled to find a new direction for his career and came to terms with his alcoholism. He says he set out to write the kind of book I think people want from me, and he's done just that. It's a celebrity memoir that reminds us of why we like the man so much and why we'll always stay tuned for another rerun of the The Dick Van Dyke Show.--Pitt, David Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN the snowy cathode days before cable TV, let alone niche channels like Nick at Nite or TV Land, misshapen UHF antennas and God-forsaken rabbit ears pulled in, if you were lucky, three networks and a handful of independent stations. The latter broadcast an era-and-mind-scrambling mixture of reruns - a daily delirium wherein "The Honeymooners" might rub shoulders with "The Avengers," "The Rifleman" was just a shot away from "That Girl," and a mad parade of castaways, cowboys, talking horses, detectives, bewitching witches, doctors, avuncular Martians, fugitives and flying nuns followed "Route 66" straight into "The Twilight Zone." Dick Van Dyke and Barbara Eden became household names in the 1960s and fixtures in syndication long afterward, ubiquitous personalities who embedded themselves in our psyches whether we invited them there or not. "The Dick Van Dyke Show" was the model situation comedy for John F. Kennedy's New Frontier: from 1961 to 1966, Van Dyke's Rob Petrie neatly juggled suburban home life and urban-showbiz work (as head writer for a comedy-variety show patterned after Sid Caesar's "Your Show of Shows") with a klutzy verve that was complemented by a vivacious young Mary Tyler Moore as his wife, Laura. A down-to-earth knockout in capri pants, she was a more modern wife than TV had shown before - just a glimmer of inchoate changes starting to bubble under complacent suburban surfaces. (On the other hand, her "Oh, Rob" exclamation should have been painted by Lichtenstein.) Eden's role as the gamine genie in "I Dream of Jeannie" was hardly more than a wisp of pink smoke, a blond ponytail and a Frederick's of Baghdad harem outfit, yet there's no more potent symbol of the almost hallucinatory wholesomeness pervading television as it made the transition to "living color." Give a handsome astronaut his own personal genie-in-a-bottle and the show, like some cornball-surrealist automaton, practically writes itself: Jeannie was a ditzy assemblage of chaste sexiness, wide-eyed subservience ("Yes, Master") and Pandora-like appetite for spreading pandemonium the way an overeager baby sitter might slather slices of Wonder bread with mayonnaise. Eden and Van Dyke have written slightly contrasting memoirs of the ups and downs of being TV pioneers, but both emphasize their sense of themselves as ordinary people who seized their big breaks through diligence and a totally sympathetic feeling for their roles. The thing you take away from Van Dyke's "My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business" - the title says everything - and Eden's "Jeannie Out of the Bottle" is that they were their own target audiences, fully at ease within the limits of their respective shows. They were a couple of perfect squares amid the trapezoids of Hollywood, achieving stardom through hard work, modesty and good fortune - being the right person at the right place and time. The most charming bit in Eden's book (written with Wendy Leigh) comes when she reckons the lasting impact of her show: "There are still Jeannie machines in casinos all over America. There are Jeannie board games. There's even a Jeannie porn film!" Only a true innocent would be surprised by that, but she has a point: awards and laudatory reviews might be all well and good, but you know you've hit the true collective-unconscious jackpot when they make slot machines and porno knockoffs in your honor. Eden's Good Girl Makes Good story is otherwise not terribly eventful or momentous. She boasts of turning down $1 million to pose for Playboy, and of dodging J.F.K., Elvis and Warren Beatty. The biggest controversy of her career was whether NBC would allow her to expose her bellybutton. By her account, the fluffy innocuousness of the show drove her ambitious co-star, Larry Hagman, to a combination of drink, drugs and therapy, but Eden endured even his most boorish antics with typical show-must-go-on equanimity. Her story is of an unreflective perseverance that doesn't make for exciting reading. But it does explain how a lot of people get through the little disappointments and enduring losses of their workaday lives - a stillborn child, a grown son who overdoses - and maybe even how they use "Jeannie"-esque escapism as a means of coping. Van Dyke's book is sprightlier and a little more interesting. It's the portrait of a conscientious, levelheaded religious liberal - the old-fashioned kind who read Buber and Tillich for inspiration, supported Martin Luther King and Eugene McCarthy, and quit his church when it refused to desegregate - who thrusts himself into the entertainment racket. The narrative of Van Dyke's personal evolution actually feels as if it could be a continuation of Rob Petrie's story: one in which the blissfully self-contained world of "The Dick Van Dyke Show" gradually admits the realities of life, passing through alcoholism, midlife crisis, divorce and all the rest, as if underneath his affable shenanigans Rob harbored a kernel of Don Draper in him all along. The Rob-and-Laura fantasy had such an aspirational quality that it may have contained a secret knowledge - or dread - that in time they could have outgrown each other. Thus, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" was only the next logical step in that process. (CBS wouldn't allow Moore to play a divorced woman, but that was the implicit premise anyway.) Van Dyke got a new show around the same time, and a new prefab television family with it, but the show ran a few routine seasons without ever capturing anyone's imagination. The old chemistry wasn't there, and the new openness of Moore's show wasn't there either. He took aim at feature films but, apart from the great early success in "Bye Bye Birdie" and "Mary Poppins," never made much of a mark. Van Dyke's arms-akimbo gift for physical comedy couldn't find a proper outlet in movies, which is a shame. With the right collaborator, he might have been an American Jacques Tati. Unfortunately, "The Comic," his 1969 valentine to the silent cinema, was overbearing and strained; it didn't trust the audience to sit still for gentleness and subtlety. As a performer, he always had the tools but seldom a context: he spent 10 years roller-skating through "Diagnosis Murder," a perfectly serviceable exercise in staving off retirement but nothing more. The ultimate lesson of "My Lucky Life" is that he was just too well adjusted to tap his own potential; earnest good nature will take you exactly as far as Van Dyke got in his career and no further, and he has more than made his peace with that. As much as television has changed in 50 years, you can trace "30 Rock" directly back through "Mary Tyler Moore" to "The Dick Van Dyke Show": beneath its oh-so-nuanced emotional firewall and the sophisticated embrace-rejection tango with cynicism, there's at least as much insulation from the harsher facts of show business and personal misery as when Van Dyke was trading writers'-room oneliners with Rose Marie and Morey Amsterdam. (Never mind the Van Dyke-Moore lineage: Kenneth the page comes to us straight out of "Gomer Pyle": "Gol-ly!") "I Dream of Jeannie" is certainly far more anachronistic, yet its infantilism is somehow invincible, imperturbable, timeless. The joke of the Jeannies and Gilligans is on all of us who even as smart-aleck kids thought they were destined for the dustbin of television. Au contraire: Jeannie long ago transcended the mundane laws of time and space and taste, like Dalí or Bettie Page or Paul Lynde sitting catbird-like in the center square of eternity. Howard Hampton is the author of "Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses."
Kirkus Review
A song and dance man of the first order looks back.Van Dyke breezily recounts his adventures as a straight-down-the-middle "square" and family man navigating the vicissitudes of show business in this slight memoir, which highlights the strengths and pitfalls of the performer's signature amiability. The author is unfailingly pleasant company on the page, and his low-stakes anecdotes and fond remembrances go down easily. But his unwillingness or inability to confront the uglier aspects of life (and particularly life in Hollywood) ultimately makes for a rather bland repast. It's not as if Van Dyke lacked material; his well-publicized battle with alcoholism and the dissolution of his longtime marriage would seem ripe for serious introspection, but this is not the author's style. He addresses the issues forthrightly but with a scrupulous lack of salaciousness or soul-searching or anything approaching a strong emotional response. Van Dyke is clearly happiest relating amusing anecdotes about his Midwestern boyhood, struggling early days in show business and his successes in such classic examples of all-American family entertainment asBye Bye Birdie,Mary Poppins and the deathlessDick Van Dyke Show, still a high-water mark in the history of TV comedy. Van Dyke heaps love and praise on collaborators like Carl Reiner and Mary Tyler Moore, who surely deserve it, but the unremitting niceness becomes numbing, to the extent that a couple of bawdy incidents involving actress Maureen Stapleton stand out as Caligula-like descents into depravity by comparison. The author's earnest, boyish persona anchored his astounding gifts as a physical performerhis rubber-limbed pratfalls, fleet dancing and instinctive genius with bits of comedy "business" are justly reveredbut absent this physical dimension, Van Dyke here is earnestly, boyishly...dull.Perfectly pleasant, mildly diverting and forgettablekind of like an episode ofDiagnosis: Murder.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Fans who like Van Dyke's affable, self-deprecating characters will enjoy this first memoir, because his prose is as easygoing and comical as he appears on-screen. At the outset, Van Dyke warns readers that he is not going to dish the dirt, and he doesn't, but he will still engage celebrity watchers with inside stories of The Dick Van Dyke Show, Mary Poppins, and other parts of his career. From the Midwest, he describes his parents and childhood as pretty unspectacular. He began in local radio, but a pairing with a friend to form a novelty act was his entry into show business. He moved from variety show to variety show and finally landed the lead in Bye Bye Birdie. He includes lots of anecdotes about Carl Reiner (his idol), Julie Andrews (a lady, first and foremost), Mary Tyler Moore (he had a crush on her), and Cloris Leachman (even more of a character offscreen), among others. VERDICT Celebrity watchers will not be disappointed by this matter-of-fact but heartwarming, long-awaited memoir by a beloved entertainer. [See Prepub Alert, 11/15/10.]-Rosellen Brewer, Sno-Isle Libs., Marysville, WA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 STEP IN TIME It was nighttime, February 1943, and I was standing next to my mother, thinking about the war in Europe. I had a very good relationship with my mother, so there's no need for any psychoanalysis about why I was thinking of the war. The fact was, we had finished dinner and she was washing the dishes and I was drying them, as was our routine. My father, a traveling salesman, was on the road, and my younger brother, Jerry, had run off to play. We lived in Danville, Illinois, which was about as far away from the war as you could get. Danville was a small town in the heartland of America, and it felt very much like the heartland. It was quiet and neighborly, a place where there was a rich side of town and a poor side, but not a bad side. The streets were brick. The homes were built in the early 1900s. Everybody had a backyard; most were small but none had fences. People left their doors open and their lights on, even when they went out. Occasionally someone down on their luck would knock on the back door and my mother would give him something to eat. Sometimes she would give him an odd job to do, too. I had things on my mind that night. You could tell from the way I looked out the kitchen window as I did my part of the dishes. I stood six feet one inch and weighed 130 pounds, if that. I was a tall drink of water, as my grandmother said. "I'm going to be eighteen in March," I said. "That means I'll be up for the draft. I really don't want to go-and I really don't want to be in the infantry. So I'm thinking that I ought to join now and try to get in the Air Force." My mother let the dish she was washing slide back into the soapy water and dried her hands. She turned to me, a serious look on her face. "I have something to tell you," she said. "Yeah?" "You're already eighteen," she said. My jaw dropped. I was shocked. "But how-" "You were born a little premature," she explained. "You didn't have any fingernails. And there were a few other complications." "Complications?" I said. "Don't worry, you're fine now," she said, smiling. "But we just put your birth date forward to what would have been full term." I wanted to know more than she was willing to reveal, so I turned to another source, my Grandmother Van Dyke. My grandparents on both sides lived nearby, but Grandmother Van Dyke was the most straightforward of the bunch. I stopped by her house one day after school and asked what she remembered about the complications that resulted from my premature birth. She looked like she wanted to say "bullshit." She asked who had sold me a bill of goods. "My mother," I replied. "You weren't premature," she said. "I wasn't?" "You were conceived out of wedlock," she said, and then she went on to explain that my mother had gotten pregnant before she and my father married. Though it was never stated, I was probably the reason they got married. Eventually my mother confirmed the story, adding that after finding out, she and my father went to Missouri, where I was born. Then, following a certain amount of time, they returned to Danville. It may not sound like such a big deal today, but back in 1925 it was the stuff of scandal. And eighteen years later, as I uncovered the facts, it was still pretty shocking to discover that I was a "love child." I am still surprised the secret was kept from me for such a long time when others knew the truth. Danville was a town of thirty thousand people, and it felt as if most of them were relatives. I had a giant extended family. My great-grandparents on both sides were still alive, and I had first, second, and third cousins nearby. I could walk out of my house in any direction and hit a relative before I got tired. There were good, industrious, upstanding, and attractive people in our family. There were no horse thieves or embezzlers. I was once given a family tree that showed the Van Dyke side was pretty unspectacular. My great-great-grandfather John Van Dyke went out west via the Donner Pass during the gold rush. After failing to find gold, he resettled in Green County, Pennsylvania. The same family tree showed that Mother's side of the family, the McCords, could be traced back to Captain John Smith, who established the first English colony in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. Maybe it is true, but I never heard any talk about that when I was growing up. Nor have I fact-checked. The part beyond dispute begins when my father, Loren, or L. W. Van Dyke, met my mother, Hazel McCord. She was a stenographer, and he was a minor-league baseball player: handsome, athletic, charming, the life of the party. And his talent did not end there. During the off-season, he played saxophone and clarinet in a jazz band. Although unable to read a note of music, he could play anything he heard. He was enjoying the life of a carefree bon vivant until my mother informed him that she was in a family way. All of a sudden the good life as he knew it vanished. He accepted the responsibility, though, marrying my mom and getting a job as a salesman for the Sunshine Cookie Company. He hated the work, but he always had a shine on his shoes and a smile on his face. Years later, when I saw Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman, I was depressed for a month. It was my dad's story. He was saved by his sense of humor. Customers enjoyed his company when he dropped by. Known as Cookie, he was a good time wherever he went. Unfortunately for us, he was usually on the road all week and then spent weekends unwinding on the golf course or hunting with friends. At home, he would have a drink at night and smoke unfiltered Fatima cigarettes while talking to my mother. He was more reserved around my brother and me, but we knew he loved us. We never questioned it. He was one of those men who did not know how to say the words. A joke was easy. At a party, everyone left talking about what a great guy he was. But a heart-to-heart talk with us boys was not in his repertoire. Years later, after I was married, Jerry and my dad drove to Atlanta to visit us. I asked Jerry what he and Dad had talked about on the drive. He shrugged his shoulders. "You know Dad," he said. "Not much of anything." My mother was the opposite. She was funny like my dad, but much more talkative. If she had a deficiency, it was a tendency toward absentmindedness. She once cooked a ham and later found it in my father's shirt drawer. I am not kidding. And when I was in my thirties, she confessed that when I was little she and my father would go to the movies and leave me at home by myself in the crib. I would be a mess when they returned. "I don't know how I could've done that," she said. "Me neither," I replied. "But we were young," she said, smiling. "We didn't mean any harm. We just didn't know any better." I was five and a half years old when my brother, Jerry, was born. It was not long before my parents moved him from a little bassinet in their room to a crib in my room and made it my job to go upstairs after dinner and gently shake the crib until he went to sleep. Within a year or two, I was given the job of babysitting. It wasn't a problem during the daytime when my mom ran errands and was gone a short time, but there were longer stretches at night when my parents went out and our old house filled with strange noises and eerie creaks, and I turned into a wreck. Convinced that the place was haunted, I would pull a crate into the middle of the house and sit on it with an ax in my lap, ever vigilant and ready to protect my baby brother-and myself! At six years old, I was sent to kindergarten. There was only one kindergarten in town, and it was located in the well-to-do section. The school was quite hoity-toity. Every morning my mother dressed me up and gave me two nickels. I used one for the six-mile trolley ride to Edison Elementary, and in the afternoon I used my other nickel to get back home. For first grade, I switched to Franklin Elementary, which was on the other side of town, the side that was struggling even more than we were through the Great Depression. We didn't have much, but the families in this area did not have anything. All the boys at school wore overalls and work shoes-all of them except for me. I arrived on the first day in a Lord Fauntleroy suit, blue with a Peter Pan collar and a beret. Since I was the only one in class with any schooling, the teacher made me the class monitor and assigned me to escort kids to the bathroom and back. It was a rough job. Some of the kids were crying. Others wanted to go home. I had my hands full all morning. Between my outfit and my job as helper, I was teased for being the teacher's pet. At recess, I walked outside and a tough kid in overalls-his name was Al-punched me in the chest while another boy kneeled down behind me. Then Al pushed me backward, and I lost my balance and fell down. I ended up with a bloody nose and a few scratches. They also threw my beret on the roof, and for all I know, it is still there. I was a mess when I got home after school. "What in God's name happened to you?" my mother said. I was too much of a little man to rat out the other kids. I spared her the details and simply said, "Mom, I need some overalls." As for the Depression, I remember my parents having some heated arguments about unpaid bills, and which bills to pay. They went in and out of debt and periodically got a second mortgage on the furniture. I wasn't aware of any hardship and never felt the stigma of having to watch every nickel. Everybody was poor. Actually, we had it better than most. My maternal grandfather owned a grocery store that also sold kosher meat. He did well. He also owned our house, so we had free rent and food. My other grandfather worked in the shop at the East Illinois Railroad. The train yard was his life. He never took a vacation. If he had time off, he put up storm windows for one of us or fixed a broken door for someone. He was always busy. On Christmas, we came downstairs in the morning and found him waiting for us, after having lit the tree, started a fire in the fireplace, and gotten everything ready. I looked up to him and, with my father on the road more often than not, he became a role model. He was a seemingly simple, industrious man, but he did a lot of thinking about things, too, and that rubbed off on me. Thanks to my mother and her mother, there was a good measure of talk about religion in our house when I was growing up. Every summer, I went to Bible school. A bus picked me up across the street from our house early in the morning and brought me back in the afternoon. I hated it. I would rather have played and run around with friends. Nonetheless, at age eleven, I took it upon myself to read the Bible from front to back. I struggled through the various books, asked questions, and when I reached the end I had no idea what any of it meant. But it pleased my mother and grandmother, who were proud of me and boasted to friends of my accomplishment. As for my studies in school, I was a solid student. I was strong in English and Latin, but I got lost anytime the subject included math. I wish I had paid more attention to biology and science in general, subjects that came to interest me as an adult. I could have gotten better marks, but I never took a book home, never did homework. Come to think of it, neither of my parents ever looked at any of my report cards. They thought I was a good kid-and looking back, I guess I was. Chapter 2 THE YAWN PATROL Just before I started ninth grade, my father was transferred to Indiana and we spent a year in Crawfordsville. We took an apartment there. I came into my own. It was not a personality change as much as it was the realization that I had a personality. I also found out that I could run and jump pretty well, and I got on the freshman track team. Success on the track added to my self-confidence, including one particular day that still stands out as the most exciting of my life. We lived across the street from Wabash College, a beautiful little school that gave the town a youthful feel. On Saturdays they hosted collegiate track meets, which our high-school coach helped officiate. I watched all the competitions. This one particular day, Wabash was running against Purdue University and I was in the stands when my coach came up to me and said that the anchorman on the Wabash team had turned his ankle and was unable to run in the race "Do you want to run anchor?" he said. "Are you kidding?" I replied. "They need a man," he said. What an offer! I was only fifteen years old, but heck, the chance to compete against college boys was one I did not want to pass up. Even though I didn't have track shoes, which were considered essential to running a good race, since in those days the tracks were layered with cinders, I jumped to my feet. Yes, I told my coach, I was ready to fill in for the Wabash team-and as anchor no less. When I took the baton, Purdue's anchor was slightly ahead of me. I was not intimidated. We had one hundred yards ahead of us and he did not look that fast to me. I ran hard, gained ground every few steps, and passed him on the outside, with about twenty yards to go. I heard the crowd roar and held on to the lead, crossing the tape before all the other college boys. I won. A high-school freshman. Amazing. They gave me a blue ribbon, which I took home and showed my father. He didn't believe me when I said I beat a college boy from Purdue. He thought I was lying. It was, I agreed, pretty far-fetched. The kid I beat was older and could really run. But I was faster-at least that day. From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business: A Memoir by Dick Van Dyke All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
