American Masters: "Starring Dick Van Dyke" (Thirteen/WNET, 1515 Productions Limited, American Masters Pictures, PBS, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Monday, December 15 PBS broadcast an American Masters documentary called “Starring Dick Van Dyke” in celebration of his 100th birthday just two days before that. It was a fascinating look at a performer whose image is pretty much frozen in time from the early 1960’s as the star of The Dick Van Dyke Show from 1961 to 1966, though he’s had a quite extensive career since – including a second long-running TV series called Diagnosis: Murder which actually lasted eight seasons, three more than The Dick Van Dyke Show. Dick Van Dyke was born December 13, 1925 in West Plains, Missouri and he was one of those kids who seemed destined for show business as his life’s work from the time he was old enough for anyone to notice him. In 1944 Dick Van Dyke tried to enlist in the United States Army Air Corps (which in 1955 was spun off into a separate service and has since been known as the United States Air Force). Rejected for combat duty for being underweight, he was finally admitted to the service as a radio announcer and assigned to Special Services to give shows for troops in the U.S. before they were sent overseas. He was discharged in 1946 and the following year he and fellow comedian Phil Erickson teamed up for an act called “The Merry Mutes,” in which they mimed to records. They settled first in Hollywood and, in the early 1950’s, moved to Atlanta, Georgia where they made their TV debut. Van Dyke broke up his professional association with Erickson when CBS offered to put him under contract. The problem was that CBS really didn’t know what to do with him. They cast him as a sidekick to game-show host Dennis James, as a sidekick to singer Pat Boone on his variety program, and briefly as an early morning news anchor with Walter Cronkite, of all people, as his assistant. Unhappy with the way his career was going and already married to Marjorie Ann Terrell and with several children to raise, Van Dyke looked for steadier work and tried to make it as a stage actor on Broadway.

After playing in a plotless revue called The Girls Against the Boys, Van Dyke achieved stage stardom in the 1960 musical Bye Bye Birdie, a spoof of Elvis Presley’s induction into the U.S. Army. He played Albert Peterson, manager of newly drafted rock star Conrad Birdie, with Chita Rivera cast as his secretary and assistant. During rehearsals director Gower Champion took one of the songs, “Put On a Happy Face,” away from Rivera and gave it to Van Dyke, and largely on the basis of his plaintive performance of it Van Dyke became a stage star. Meanwhile, over at CBS writer-producer-director Carl Reiner had developed an idea for a half-hour TV situation comedy called Head of the Family in which he would play the head comedy writer of a TV variety show who lived in a New York suburb with his wife and son. Reiner paid for a pilot episode out of his own pocket, and CBS liked the overall premise but didn’t like Reiner’s performance in the lead. Instead they looked for another person to star and settled on Van Dyke, and though the documentary (written and directed by John Scheinfeld) didn’t go into the reasons why the network didn’t buy the show with Reiner as the star, I suspect it was because they assumed Reiner was too Jewish and the show would only work with someone more “Anglo” in the lead. Producers Carl Reiner and Sheldon Leonard assembled a top-notch supporting cast: Mary Tyler Moore as Rob Petrie’s (Van Dyke) long-suffering wife Laura; Larry Mathews as their pre-pubescent son Ritchie; Morey Amsterdam and Rose Marie as Rob’s colleagues in the writers’ room of variety-show host Alan Brady (played by Carl Reiner himself in a marvelous inversion of their actual roles; it was really Reiner who was running the writers’ room for the show); Richard Deacon as Mel, Brady’s manager and the writers’ main point of contact with their ultimate boss; and Jerry Paris as Rob’s next-door neighbor and best friend.

The Dick Van Dyke Show bombed in its first year (it was sponsored by Procter and Gamble and the writers built the commercials into the show, especially with scenes in which Laura Petrie would be shown washing the family’s dishes and rhapsodizing about the wonders of Procter and Gamble’s detergent, Joy) and Van Dyke was convinced it was because the show was on too early in the evening (8 p.m.). Van Dyke and the writers wanted to show more displays of physical affection between him and Mary Tyler Moore than had been the norm in previous sitcoms – even I Love Lucy and Burns and Allen, in which the co-stars actually were married to each other – and there’s a fascinating interview clip in the documentary in which Van Dyke and Moore jokingly complained that they’d got dirty looks from hotel desk clerks when they tried to register with their real-life spouses and the clerks assumed they were fooling around with people other than their TV spouses. Starting with the second season, the show was moved to a different day and a later time, and it took off and became a huge hit and won several Emmy Awards until Van Dyke and Reiner suddenly decided to take it off the air after five years because they thought if it continued they’d grow stale and start repeating themselves. Meanwhile, Van Dyke had appeared in the 1963 film of Bye Bye Birdie, and though he’d been reluctant to make the film at first because he thought the script departed too much from the stage version, he repeated his stage role in the film and got good notices. In 1965 Van Dyke got another film role that generated one of the biggest hits of the decade; Mary Poppins, a Walt Disney production that freely mixed live-action and animation and cast Julie Andrews in the title role, as a governess who loosens up a strait-laced bankers’ family by taking care of their two children. Van Dyke played Bert, Mary Poppins’s chimney-sweep boyfriend, and in his most spectacular sequence he leads a chorus line of fellow chimney sweeps in a dance on the London rooftops to the song “Step in Time.”

After Van Dyke left The Dick Van Dyke Show his career went into the doldrums, though he’d make some amusing movies. He’d had a hit with the 1967 film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, based on a children’s novel by James Bond creator Ian Fleming (though the filmmakers radically reshaped the material and kept little from Fleming’s book beyond the central premise of a crackpot inventor who develops a car that can fly) and made a quite good dark comedy called Fitzwilly in which he played a butler who’s really a super-crook who commits his crimes to bolster the illusion of his once-wealthy owner that she still has money. Then in 1969 Van Dyke and Carl Reiner teamed up again for a dark film called The Comic, in which he played a silent-film comedian whose career is doomed by the advent of sound films and his own egomania. The Comic bombed at the box office, much to Van Dyke’s disappointment since he’d seen it as a tribute to the great real-life silent comedians who had influenced him: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Stan Laurel. (Van Dyke had become a close friend of Stan Laurel’s in Laurel’s later years, and Laurel told his biographer, John McCabe, “If they ever make a movie of my life – and I hope they don’t – I’d like Dick to play me.”) In 1974 Van Dyke showed off his chops as a serious actor with a TV-movie about alcoholism called The Morning After, which led him to confront his own drinking problem. Van Dyke also returned to series TV in the early 1970’s with The New Dick Van Dyke Show, in which he played a local TV talk-show host with Hope Lange as his wife. Though the show was produced and developed by Carl Reiner, lightning didn’t strike twice and The New Dick Van Dyke Show was canceled after three seasons.

Van Dyke made a comeback in character roles and TV guest appearances in the 1980’s, including a few appearances on Carol Burnett’s variety show (Burnett and her producer/husband Joe Hamilton were looking for a replacement for Harvey Korman). The documentary showed a fascinating clip in which Van Dyke and Burnett pantomimed a fight scene in slow motion, and my husband Charles, who was watching the show with me, wondered just how many people younger than we are would “get” that they were spoofing the infamous slow-motion bloodbaths of Sam Peckinpah’s action movies. In the 1990’s, after a stint as a corrupt district attorney in Warren Beatty’s movie Dick Tracy, Van Dyke got another TV series in a vein quite different from his previous ones, as a crime-solving doctor in Diagnosis: Murder. Van Dyke insisted that the producers cast African-American actress Victoria Rowell as his principal co-star, and when they protested, “She’s Black,” Van Dyke put his foot down and said, “She’s good!” (The show had previously mentioned a rally in L.A. in 1964 in which Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King had spoken and Van Dyke had been one of his opening acts, delivering a pro-civil rights speech written for him by Twilight Zone and Night Gallery producer Rod Serling.) Along the way Van Dyke and his long-time wife Margie came to an amicable parting of the ways in 1984 and, after he was briefly involved with Lee Marvin’s ex, Michelle Triola (who had sued him and won a settlement even though they were never formally married, which established a precedent for so-called “palimony” suits), he married producer Arlene Silver in 2012 and Van Dyke credits her with saving his life. “Starring Dick Van Dyke” is an engaging portrait of a survivor in a frequently unforgiving business who’s kept his good humor over the years and managed to remain both a major star and a decent human being.