A few days ago here, I connected you to a clip of Dick Van Dyke performing "Put on a Happy Face" from the original Broadway production of Bye Bye Birdie. It was from an episode of The Ed Sullivan Show and my longtime e-mail buddy Jim Hill noticed something in it that I didn't. Here's Jim…
Thanks for sharing that Bye Bye Birdie clip from The Ed Sullivan Show. I know that it's likely that a significant chunk of this number was restaged so that it would then play better for the cameras. But even so, it was fun to see what much of Gower Champion's version of "Put on a Happy Face" might have looked like if you'd managed to see this show on Broadway back in the early 1960s.
Also…I didn't think that this would ever be possible, but my admiration of Dick Van Dyke actually went up after watching this clip. And it was all because of what Dick did at the end of this number.
By that I mean: Van Dyke is on live television on one of the top rated shows of that era. And Ed waves Dick over to talk in front of the curtain after "Put on a Happy Face" is done. Most actors would have made that time in the spotlight/that moment in the sun all about themselves. Not Van Dyke. He insists that the two young female dancers from the Bye Bye Birdie ensemble who performed with him join him in front of the camera with the show's host. Dick even mentions both of those girls' names. Which must have meant a lot to them as well as their families and friends watching at home.
Dick Van Dyke didn't need to do that. But he actually went out of his way to do so. Which — I think, anyway — says a lot about who this performer is as a person.
I'm occasionally asked at conventions and elsewhere about that old maxim about how you really don't want to meet your heroes because you'll be disappointed. I've been fortunate to meet quite a few of mine and I would say I've been disappointed maybe 30% of the time…and half of those were because of unreasonable expectations on my part. But several of them — including Jack Kirby, Daws Butler and Dick Van Dyke — didn't let me down in the slightest. If anything, my admiration for them went up once I got to know them relatively up-close and personal.
Maybe I'm easily fooled but I'd like to think they really were that nice and I did see that they had that little special aura of magic around them. Dick Van Dyke is 97…living proof that the good do not always die young.