As I related here, I went to see a filming of The Dick Van Dyke Show when I was twelve. I cannot count the ways in which that evening changed my life, all of them for the better. I'd always wanted to be a writer. I have no memory of a time when I didn't want to be a writer. But it was at that filming that I realized I wanted to be a TV writer, not necessarily to the exclusion of other venues.
I also wanted to be — well, I'm not sure if I wanted to be Dick Van Dyke or Rob Petrie or even if it was possible to make much of a distinction. I know I didn't want to be a performer so I guess I wanted to be Rob. He only had to perform at parties and he got to sleep with Laura. I mentioned something in the above-linked article but a moment like the one I'm about to describe deserves more attention. It was the moment when Mary Tyler Moore walked onto the set and passed about six feet in front of me.
She was 28 years old and if I thought she looked great on my TV at home — which I did — I was unprepared for the sight of her live and in color. If Satan had appeared and said, "You can have one year of hugging this woman and staring at her all day but then I will have your soul and you will rot in the bowels of Hell for all eternity," he would have had a deal. On the spot, no questions asked. I wasn't even thinking of sleeping with her, not even in the Petries' twin beds. I just wanted to be around her and I admired/envied Dick/Rob because he was. (Sixteen years later, I actually met Ms. Moore and in a move worthy of Rob Petrie at his Petriest, I started things off by stepping on her left foot — the same one Rob broke in the episode about how he and Laura met.)
So I wanted to be Dick and/or Rob because that's the kind of guy who got to be around women like that…but there were other reasons. Dick/Rob was cool. He was funny. People liked being around him. He was friends with one of my other favorite performers, Stan Laurel, and did a darned good impression of the guy. He could sing. He could dance. He could deliver a joke. On the set of The Dick Van Dyke Show that evening, there was a delay for technical reasons. It was the flashback episode where Rob and Laura bought their house and Mr. Van Dyke was holding a business card that the actor playing the realtor had just handed him. Instantly, to keep the audience amused, Van Dyke began doing sleight of hand, back-palming the card to make it disappear and appear and disappear and appear.
And I sat there and thought, "Boy, he can do anything." Where I guess I leaned more towards wanting to be Dick was because Rob was a klutz — the kind of guy who'd step on the foot of a woman he'd always wanted to meet — whereas Dick was just so darned good at everything he did.
That's about how he's always been. When people make fun of his English accent in Mary Poppins, I think they do so because that's like the only thing they can nail him on. And they still usually admit that he was wonderful in that movie, along with all the rest, even the crummy ones. I haven't liked everything he's been in but I've always liked him.
Which I guess is all I really wanted to say here. There's no real point to this whole mini-essay except to say how much I've always liked Dick Van Dyke. If you've gotten that idea by now, I guess we can move on.