Missouri Bicentennial: Dick Van Dyke

Richard Wayne “Dick” Van Dyke was born on December 13, 1925, in West Plains, Missouri. The family move to Danville, Illinois, where Dick attended school and started acting in high school theatre productions. His father Loren was a traveling salesman for the Sunshine Biscuit Company. His mother Victoria was a stenographer.

Money was tight during the Depression when Dick was growing up. Movies were cheap entertainment, and he loved them. He was a fan of Laurel and Hardy. He practice the slapstick routines devised by Stan Laurel. As an adult, Van Dyke sought out the retired Laurel, and delivered his eulogy in 1965. He did the same for another of his heroes, Buster Keaton.

Van Dyke dropped out of high school in 1944 to enlist during World War II. The Army initially rejected him for being underweight. He served in the U.S. Army Air Forces as a radio announcer and performer. After his discharge in 1946, he returned to Danville to start and advertising company. The company only lasted a year, and its failure prompted him to try a return to show business.

Van Dyke and Phil Erickson performed as the Merry Mutes, a pantomime act, from 1945 to 1953. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s he appeared on a variety of radio and television programs, often as a host, mostly in Atlanta and New Orleans. One of his gigs during the 1950s was hosting the The Morning Show on CBS with Walter Cronkite delivering the news.

One of those shows was Bride and Groom, on which he married his first wife Margie in 1948. The radio program paid for the ceremony and honeymoon. The couple had four children: Christian, Barry, Stacy and Carrie Beth. They divorced in 1984.

Broadway called, and Van Dyke made his premiere in the 1959 musical The Girls Against the Boys. He got a part in Bye Bye Birdie, running from 1960 to 1961, and reprised the role in the 1963 film adaption. He won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical for Birdie. He returned to Broadway in 1980 to star in a revival of The Music Man.

Success on Broadway led back to television, this time starring in The Dick Van Dyke Show. Van Dyke played television writer Rob Petrie. Costars included Carl Reiner, who created the show with the idea he would play the lead, and Mary Tyler Moore, taking on her first leading role in television as Rob’s wife Laura. Over the show’s run from 1961 to 1966, it won 15 Emmy awards. Van Dyke won three Emmys for his performance. The show has been popular in syndication. Episodes of 2021 Disney+ miniseries WandaVision emulated the show; producers hired Van Dyke to consult.

My fellow science fiction fans might note that The Dick Van Dyke Show was referenced, not subtly, in an episode of The X-Files. Mulder and Scully went undercover as a married couple using the names Rob and Laura Petrie, which Mulder insisted on pronouncing Petri like the dish. It was not Van Dyke’s first connection to creepy realms. He voiced a version of himself in “Scooby-Doo Meet Dick Van Dyke,” a 1973 episode of The New Scooby-Doo Movies.

The successful sitcom opened doors for Van Dyke in Hollywood. He played two roles in Disney’s 1964 musical Mary Poppins, and won a Grammy award for his performance on the film’s soundtrack. Though Walt Disney wanted Van Dyke to pay chimney sweep Bert, he resisted the actor’s bid to play bank boss Mr. Dawes. Disney made Van Dyke audition for the Dawes role, and then said he wanted a $4,000 contribution for the California Institute of the Arts, which the actor provided. In the 1960s he also appeared in What a Way to Go!, Divorce American Style, The Comic and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a musical based on Ian Fleming’s children’s book.

Van Dyke continued to appear on television throughout the 1970s. He played a talk show host in The New Dick Van Dyke Show. He won an Emmy for his portrayal of an alcoholic in the television film The Morning After. He hosted a comedy-variety show, Van Dyke and Company, which won an Emmy for its single 1976 season. He appeared regularly on The Carol Burnett Show the following year.

This was a rough period for the actor. He not only played an alcoholic on TV, he was one. He received diagnosis of emphysema, which had killed his father. At the urging of Margie, he had semi-retired in Arizona, but he deeply missed performing, and the strains in their marriage led to divorce. He quit drinking and smoking and tried to get back to work. An attempted return to television in the late 1980s flopped, though he got a part in the 1990 film Dick Tracy.

He found renewed success in a television show that lasted through most of the 1990s. Diagnosis Murder ran from 1993 to 2001. Van Dyke played a physician who solved murders on the side. His son Barry co-starred as a police detective. (Dick’s brother Jerry is an actor, too.)

Van Dyke returned to film after the long-running Diagnosis Murder. He appeared in the 2006 films Curious George and Night at the Museum and its 2014 sequel Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb. In 2018’s Mary Poppins Returns he played a descended of a character he portrayed in the first film.

Throughout much of this period, Van Dyke was in a relationship with Michelle Triola. Though they did not marry, their affair lasted nearly 30 years to her death from lung cancer in 2009. He married make-up artist Arlene Silver in 2012—he was 86 and she was 40 years old.

Van Dyke published Faith, Hope and Hilarity: A Child's Eye View of Religion in 1970, based on his experience as a Sunday School teacher in the Presbyterian Church. He published an autobiography, My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business, in 2011.

The Television Academy Hall of Fame inducted Van Dyke into its rolls in 1995. The Screen Actors Guild recognize him with its Life Achievement Award in 2013, the year after Mary Tyler Moore received it. He received the Kennedy Center Honor in 2021.

Dick Van Dyke is one of a handful of living people featured in this series recognizing the Missouri statehood bicentennial. Others are Sheryl Crowe,?Margaret Kelly,?Tina Turner and Kevin Kline.

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