Book review: My Lucky Life by Dick Van Dyke

The thirty-third book I read in 2015 was Dick Van Dyke's memoir, My Lucky Life: In and Out of Show Business.  I have been a huge fan of The Dick Van Dyke Show since we got free cable, and thus access to Nick at Nite, in college, and once I convinced Tommy to give the old, black-and-white show a chance, he quickly concurred.  We binge-watched through all 5 seasons when Faith was a toddler, and she loved the episodes when Rose Marie sang.  So when Tommy saw this volume on the clearance shelves at the used-book store, picking it up for $2 was a no-brainer.

Sadly, Dick Van Dyke is no Rob Petrie, though he believes he is.  This memoir is self-justification, writ large.  Things he's proud of, like refusing to do family-unfriendly material, redound greatly to his credit; things like his alcoholism and his extramarital affair ... well, those are just unfortunate natural occurrences, like earthquakes and hurricanes, that could happen to anyone at any time.  He praises himself for helping other men with drinking problems by acting in The Morning After, a TV movie about an alcoholic.  By his own admission, however, the advocacy group, the National Association of Alcoholism, asked that the ending show the main character recovering, to give hope to those who recognized their own trajectories in the story; Van Dyke insisted that his character fail despite repeated attempts to beat his addiction, backing up his rationalization that alcoholism is a random disease that he couldn't do anything about and certainly can't be blamed for contracting.  Some guys, like he, are "lucky" enough to beat alcoholism, and some, like his character in the Movie of the Week, aren't.

This same pattern of rationalization and self-justification repeats throughout his life.  He feels guilty about having an affair only until he explains to his wife that falling in love with another woman was just something that "happened" to him; after that, it becomes her problem that she can't accept the truth, and he placidly moves in with his girlfriend while still married to her. When he argues with other leaders in his church over the civil rights movement, he walks away from organized religion forever without looking back, judging it to be worthless: this, despite the fact that he has just lovingly described two men who worked within the organized church whom he greatly admired.  If Dick Van Dyke doesn't get his way, well, he's taking his ball and going home.

Like most celebrities, I suspect Van Dyke has been surrounded by groupies and sycophants for so long that he has no idea how he comes across to "ordinary" readers.  Toward the end of the book, he describes getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and recalling that he spent the evening of his 14th wedding anniversary working late with Mary Tyler Moore on a song for The Dick Van Dyke Show.  He never called home to let his wife know where he was or that he was going to be late or to apologize or to acknowledge the occasion in any way.  When he finally arrived home that evening, he found her dressed up in an evening gown with a candlelit dinner on the table, ruined.  There was no mention of the incident when he was actually recounting that period of his life, nor does he seem to feel particularly bad about it in retrospect.  It was just one of those things that "happened," and, as Morey Amsterdam points out, all the neglect of his family worked out in the end because he got his star.