by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night, after the two episodes of I Love Lucy colorized in shrieking tones, came two episodes of The
Dick Van Dyke Show, which I remember from
my youth as brilliantly funny when it focused on the exploits of Rob Petrie
(Dick Van Dyke) and his colleagues, Buddy Sorrell (Morey Amsterdam) and Sally
Rogers (Rose Marie — she was the precocious child singer who belted out “My
Bluebird Is Singing the Blues” in the 1932 film International House and, amazingly, she’s still alive and active at 94!) as comedy writers for TV star Alan
Brady (Carl Reiner). (I love the irony that on the show Dick Van Dyke was
playing a writer for Carl Reiner, while in fact Reiner was the show’s creator
and principal writer for Van Dyke and the rest of the cast!) Unfortunately,
this show was considerably less interesting when it went home with Rob at the
end of his workday to New Rochelle, New York and spent time with Rob, his wife
Laura (Mary Tyler Moore) and their son Ritchie (Larry Mathews). I remember even
as a kid being annoyed by Mary Tyler Moore, with her constant whining and
snit-throwing, and her performance is even more infuriating now that we watch
it in the context of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and her surprise emergence as a feminist icon
instead of her role here, as the stereotypical ditz wife in a sexist’s
conception of marriage. (At least Gracie Allen and Lucille Ball made this silly
stereotype funny! Maybe the fact
that Allen and Ball were both playing it alongside their real-life husbands helped.)
Unfortunately, last night CBS
chose to air two of the “domestic” episodes instead of any of the “work” episodes
— and one was a really silly one
called “My Blonde-Haired Brunette” that was only the second show in the series
(originally aired October 10, 1961). At a time when Clairol was advertising
their hair dye with the breathless slogan, “Is it true blondes have more fun?”,
it’s obvious Carl Reiner (who in addition to being the show’s producer, creator
and runner, wrote this particular episode) thought it would be topical to do a
story in which Laura Petrie starts to suspect that her husband is losing interest
in her — especially when he picks out a strand of what he says is grey hair
from her head — and she and her best friend and neighbor Millie Helper (Ann
Morgan Guilbert), who works as a beautician and was essentially the Ethel Mertz
of this show (her husband was played by Jerry Paris, who also directed some of
the episodes) decide that the way to win back Rob’s affections and get him to
fall in love with her again is to dye her hair blonde. Unfortunately, the
effect they used to transform Mary Tyler Moore into a blonde was one of the
most blatantly fake wigs ever seen in any sort of filmed entertainment — she
looks like a high-school girl trying to make herself over as Marilyn Monroe —
and during the day Rob calls her from work and they end up in the middle of a
conversation about her hair in which he says he likes her just as the brunette
she is (was). So Millie, whose own shop is out of brown dye, has to put in an
emergency call to a druggist (veteran comedian Benny Rubin) to get the brown
dye — and there’s a great shot (that probably looks even better in color, since
these episodes, like the I Love Lucy
show CBS ran just before them, had been colorized) in which Millie is halfway
through the process, so that Laura’s hair is blonde on one side of her head and
brunette on the other. (You want to walk in the screen and tell them, “Don’t
laugh! Some day that look will be fashionable!”) This might have been screamingly funny if Mary
Tyler Moore weren’t so ridiculously whiny and the concept itself so sexist.
The
second Dick Van Dyke episode,
“October Eve,” was funnier, though it still suffered from Moore’s almost
neurotic portrayal of the stereotypical stupid wife — no one watching this show would have been able to predict
how Moore would blossom as an actress in her own show, when she got to play an
assertive woman instead of a domesticated ditz — and was from the middle of the
show’s run (season 3, episode 28, aired April 8, 1964). It centers around an
art gallery which is exhibiting a painting called “October Eve” — obviously a
parody of the famous piece of nudist kitsch, “September Morn” — which Sally Rogers (Rose Marie),
whose vivid portrayal of a salty, no-nonsense woman made Mary Tyler Moore’s
mincing and whining look even more distasteful by comparison, notices is
actually a picture of Laura Petrie … in the nude. Apparently years before,
shortly after she married Rob, he gave her an outfit of a black top and black
slacks of which she was particularly proud, and she decided to return the favor
by having herself painted in it. Unfortunately, the artist, Sergei Carpetna
(played in a madly funny turn by the show’s creator, Carl Reiner, himself), who
seems like he’s walked in from the dramatis personae of My Sister Eileen, indulged in artistic license and painted Laura
accurately above the neck, but below it went wild with his imagination.
When
Laura hired him to do the painting Carpetna was a starving artist who charged
$50 per painting; now he’s world-famous and the paintings cost $5,000 — thereby
stymieing Rob’s initial plan to buy the picture himself to make sure no one
sees it. Laura never thought Carpetna would show the painting publicly since
she’d thrown something at it; little did she know that he restored it and
thinks it’s one of his greatest works. He has three possible buyers, one an
eccentric millionaire who lives in Brazil and wants to hang it privately on the
walls of his mountaintop redoubt, while the other two want to show it publicly.
Rob learns from Laura that she actually paid Carpetna the $50 for the painting,
and therefore the Petries legally own it, though Laura threw away the receipt
(a hand-painted receipt that Carpetna boasts themselves have become collector’s
items); Rob eventually bluffs Carpetna into agreeing to let him pick which buyer he’ll sell the painting to as his
price for not legally contesting the sale, and of course he picks the guy from
Brazil. There’s a final punch line when we see the painting and it’s a
Picasso-esque jumble of limbs that almost no one, including a CBS Standards and
Programming executive (that was the Newspeak name the networks gave their
censors back then), would get in a snit about. The show is great fun when
Sergei Carpetna is on screen — the highlight is when he and Rob Petrie fire
paint-loaded water pistols at a canvas (one of the off-beat techniques 1960’s
artists like Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely sometimes used) — but once again Mary
Tyler Moore’s sexist characterization is really hard to take: it was hard to take when this show was
new and got even harder to take after she did her own show and showed how much
more she was capable of!
