16
In the spring of 1965, I made Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N., a silly Disney movie about a Navy pilot who ends up on a deserted island with a native girl and a space program–trained chimp for companionship. The picture was pure family fun—and a good time for me personally for a reason I never expected: I fell into a deep friendship with the chimp.
We shot a good portion of the movie in Kauai and made a family vacation out of it. Walt and his wife, Lillian, came over, too. We stayed at a hotel whose accommodations looked like grass-covered huts. Walt and Lilly had the room above ours, and I heard him hacking and coughing all night. Yet after dinner, as we told stories in the bar, he smoked like a chimney, and drank pretty well, too, as did I in those days.
My partner and manager, Byron Paul, was directing the movie, and before shooting on the first day, my costar Nancy Kwan, a beautiful actress originally trained as a classical ballerina, took him aside and asked, “Mr. Van Dyke is not going to bother me, is he?” Evidently she had been in another project where someone had spent the entire production chasing after her.
“No, Mr. Van Dyke is safe,” Byron told her.
She needn’t have worried, as Mr. Van Dyke was occupied with his other costar. A jungle set was built near the beach, and on the first morning of work, as I walked onto the set holding a Styrofoam cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other, I was greeted by Dinky, the 130-pound chimp who was the real star of the movie. Seated in his personal director’s chair, which was near mine, he crooked his index finger and motioned me toward him.
“Hello, how are you?” I said.
Apparently he felt the same way I did. After a slight roll of his eyes, he reached for my coffee and cigarette, then drank the coffee and smoked the cigarette. I looked at his trainer.
“He shouldn’t smoke,” I said.
“Neither should you,” the trainer said.
From then on, I brought Dinky a cup of coffee every morning and lit a cigarette for him. I might as well have asked him how he slept, as we started our days so similarly. It was as if we could actually talk to each other. Soon Dinky and I started to have lunch together. He ate with a fork and used a napkin. For a chimp, his manners were impeccable. So was his sense of humor.
One day I saw him resting cross-legged on a log. I noticed he had taken off the chain that was normally around his ankle and put it around the leg of his trainer, Stewart. I swear he caught my eye and gave me a look that said, Don’t tell. All of a sudden he took off and ran up a tree, then beat his chest and laughed.
I don’t know any other way to describe it, but Dinky was chuckling at his own joke.
I was charmed. He started to have a thing for me, too. He would pick at my hair the way chimps do with one another. I would get down on the ground to make it easier for him. When he finished, I went through his.
He developed an obsession with my watch. I almost expected him to know how to tell time—that’s how bright this chimp was.
In the movie, he played golf and he was incredible. We also played poker. One day he was sick. I think he had a temperature of 103. In the scene, we were playing cards. He was supposed to be able to see my cards in the shaving mirror behind me. Amazingly, he looked up and smiled on cue. But the second that Byron said Cut, he would groan and lay down, ill.
I turned to the trainer and Byron. I wanted the trainer to help him and Byron to praise him. This chimp was a pro.
The downside was that when he misbehaved, his trainer took him away and hit him. I hated that. In one scene, I came sliding down a coconut tree as planned, but I startled Dinky, who was seated at the base of the tree. I saw all of his hair suddenly stand on end. So did Stewart. He balled up a chain he kept with him and threw it at the chimp. He saw the look on my face. It was one of surprise and anger.
“He would’ve attacked you,” he explained.
I never got used to that part of working with the chimp. To me, he was a doll. I forgot that he was an animal being cajoled, if not forced, into performing acts that did not come naturally to him. Later I heard he was doing a Tarzan movie in Mexico and bit an actor in the face. I was told the actor picked him up and pinched him, and in turn Dinky nipped his face. That was the end of his film career.
He was ten years old, so he was pretty close to retirement, anyway. After I heard he’d been placed in the Los Angeles Zoo, I went there to see him, knowing he had been raised in a house his whole life—he had never been in a cage. When I got there, he was sitting in the middle of a large circular pen. It was outdoors, but it was still a cage—and I saw the effect it had on him.
I called out his name. He looked up and recognized me immediately. He ran over as close as he could. I could tell from the expression on his face that he was asking me to get him out of there. It looked like he was saying, I’m in here with a bunch of monkeys. Take me home.
The whole visit upset me. I knew he thought that I had come to take him out, which I would have if it had been possible.
I had to walk away. I couldn’t look back.
There was a similar feeling of sadness when it came time to acknowledge the end of The Dick Van Dyke Show.
In late summer of 1965, all of us began the fifth season knowing it was our last. The public may not have realized it yet, but we knew.
Carl felt strongly that he would get stale after five years of writing and rewriting thirty-nine episodes a season, and so would the show. He thought all of us would lose the spring in our step. I think he also recognized that all of us, through our collaboration and hard work, had produced a TV classic, and he feared that if repetition and fatigue set in, it could tarnish the show’s magical reputation. He also may have been ready to do something else.
The same may have been true of Mary. She may have been ready to move beyond Laura Petrie. I don’t know. But I doubt it.
Was the show getting stale?
No.
Repetitive?
No.
Was I ready to leave?
No.
I loved the show and the people. It wasn’t work. I played myself. Between the series and a movie every summer, I had a great setup. As a performer, nothing topped the excitement and energy of working in front of a live audience. If it wasn’t the stage, a weekly show like ours was as close of an approximation as one could get. We stopped only if there was a mistake or a scene change. Otherwise the studio audience let us know if we were funny or not.
If there was discussion about continuing the show without Carl, I didn’t hear it. Ownership issues aside, I couldn’t imagine anyone considering The Dick Van Dyke Show without Carl Reiner. Although it was a collaborative effort, everything about the show stemmed from his endlessly and enviably fascinating, funny, and fertile brain and trickled down to the rest of us. We all knew it, and as each of us said in our own ways, we appreciated every aspect of having been party to this chapter of television genius.
The final season began airing in September. Two months later, CBS put out a press release informing the rest of the world what we already knew—that this would be the show’s swan song, its final season. I got steamed when the New York Times attributed the decision to me. It wasn’t true. Not wanting the disappointment of millions of viewers pinned on me, I did a series of interviews with other reporters wherein I tried to explain I wasn’t behind the decision while still holding the party line, namely that we wanted “to quit while we were still on top.”
It was like yelling into the wind, though. The writers still stared back with perplexed looks, as I’m sure our fans did, too, asking yet again, “So why are you all stopping a hit show?”
I was not as hard-pressed to answer the other question people asked—what next? In February 1966, I was being interviewed by a reporter who asked that question—“What are you going to do next?”—with such concern that I had to tell her not to worry, I was going to be fine.
Indeed, I had a full plate of TV specials and movies. I had invested in a Phoenix-based radio station. I also volunteered with Big Brothers, served on the board of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, worked with the California Educational Center, donated time to the Society for the Prevention of Blindness, and of course cared for my wife, four children, various dogs, and our ornery cat. But really, until The Dick Van Dyke Show finished, I preferred to concentrate on, no, I preferred to savor, each and every last episode.
Like the others before it, the final season continued to take inspiration from our personal lives. Carl’s earliest literary efforts were the source of “A Farewell to Writing,” which has Rob struggling to begin the novel he always wanted to write. In “Fifty-Two, Forty-Five or Work,” Rob recalls a time when he was out of work with a new home and a pregnant wife, and that storyline was ripped straight out of my family album.
Likewise, “The Man from My Uncle,” about government agents using the Petries’ home to stake out a neighbor, may have sounded far-fetched, but the script from Jerry Belson and Garry Marshall was rooted in another actual event that happened to me. After the Watts Riots in August 1965, I gave some of my time to Operation Bootstrap, a group that endeavored to help people in Watts develop skills and businesses of their own without government aid.
They began on a shoestring budget in a former auto-parts store and eventually gave rise to the Shindana Toy Factory, a business that designed toys for African-Americans. I made several trips with members from my church to the empty store where Bootstrap was headquartered, engaged in some heated debates, and got to know this one guy named Lenny.
In his thirties, Lenny was a member of the Black Panthers, extremely political, but also extremely thoughtful and sensitive. I learned that he was a painter. He showed me his canvases, which I admired. I also found out that he was married and had a daughter. On those levels at least we related to each other easily, more than one might think given our different worlds.
Interested in bridging those different worlds, I invited Lenny and his family to my house for dinner with my family. My kids were fascinated by Lenny. He was fairly articulate but tough as nails, which was reflected in the stories he told during dinner. Those stories pinned the kids to the table. I mean, nobody moved while Lenny spoke—that is, until the phone rang.
I answered and a detective from the LAPD identified himself and told me not to worry, they had things under control.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“We heard there was going to be an armed robbery in your house tonight,” he said.
“What?!” I exclaimed.
“We have your house surrounded,” he said.
“Holy Jesus!” I said, looking across the room at Lenny and cringing at what he was going to think.
After I hung up, I told everyone what was going on. Lenny erupted in anger, got up, and walked toward the phone.
“I’m going to make a call,” he said. “In two minutes I’ll have forty guys here with guns.”
“What?” I said.
“We’ll take care of them,” he added.
“Dick!” said Margie, who had gotten up from the table and was now standing next to me. “Do something.”
First, I calmed the situation inside my house, and then I walked outside and dealt with the police. There were cops everywhere. I had no idea where the LAPD got their information, whether a neighbor saw Lenny and his family enter our house and called the local precinct or whether it was a mistake, which seemed unlikely. But I was pissed—and embarrassed.
While the memorable evening did eventually morph into a good TV episode, I wish it had turned out differently.
As for the series finale, an episode titled “The Gunslinger,” it was a Western spoof in which Rob goes to the dentist and gets put under, descends into a dream, and everyone is transported back into the Wild West. We cooked that up so that everyone could be in the last one: I was the sheriff, Mary was the song-and-dance girl in the saloon, Carl was the bad guy (Big Bad Brady), and all the writers (Sam, Bill, Jerry, and Garry) were cowboys. Even my children were in it.
We added to the fun with a cast and crew party afterward. As hard as we tried to celebrate five special years of accomplishment, camaraderie, creativity, friendship, and laughs, it was also a night of good-byes, which made it a bittersweet occasion. I got in the car at the end of the night, turned to Margie thinking I had something to say about the party, and nothing came out of my mouth. I was overwhelmed.
I learned that you may move on from a show like ours, but you never move away from it. At the end of May 1966, we staged a mini reunion when the show walked away with four Emmys. The New York Times called it “a hail and farewell gesture” by our peers since we were going off the air. Indeed, almost everyone on the show had been nominated. We were genuinely touched.
I arrived at the awards show thinking Don Adams was a shoe-in for his new series Get Smart, and so I was genuinely caught off-guard when my name was called for the third straight year. In my thank-you speech, I joked that I wouldn’t be there next year, so the category was going to have a fresh face. I added a heartfelt thank-you, which I hoped conveyed my gratitude not just for the individual honor but also for the honor of being there.
And it was quite a club. That night, Bill Cosby, one of Emmy’s cohosts, also won an Emmy for his work opposite Robert Culp on I Spy. The first black actor to costar in a weekly prime-time TV series, he thanked NBC for “having the guts” to go with him. It wasn’t just NBC, though. It was also Sheldon Leonard, I Spy’s executive producer, who had put Bill in that role and who had, at another point in time, fought to keep The Dick Van Dyke Show on the air.
When you’re watching award shows you sometimes wonder what the men and women in their tuxedos and gowns are thinking about while all the nominees are being called and winners announced. On that occasion, I was thinking about the connections many of us shared as we strove to entertain and inform people, and occasionally make points about the quality and condition of our lives, and I felt pretty darn lucky to be among them.
I was also thinking that I was on to the next phase of my life and career, some of which was planned, but most of which was a mystery, the way it always is, and I was looking forward to seeing what would happen.