Dick Van Dyke Celebrates 100 Years: A Look Again at His Profession Beginnings

Dick Van Dyke as Rob Petrie in The Dick Van Dyke Present, 1963.

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Getty/Silver Display Assortment

Comic and actor Dick Van Dyke danced throughout rooftops greater than 60 years in the past in Mary Poppins. And he danced barefoot throughout his yard final yr in “All My Love,” a Coldplay video that went viral on his 99th birthday.

As he begins his second century on Saturday, it appears the precise second to recollect the way in which he first got here into our lives: in a six-year blaze of multimedia glory that started on Broadway on the Martin Beck Theater on April 14, 1960.

He was second-billed after Chita Rivera in Bye Bye Birdie, pitching woo to her, and pitching songs to Conrad Birdie, a fictional rock star within the Elvis Presley mode. Additionally, as can be his behavior all through his profession, doing his stage finest to immediate a smile within the present’s largest hit tune, “Placed on a Glad Face.”

Birdie acquired combined opinions, however this lanky, 34-year-old Midwesterner was successful from the phrase go. He gained a Tony Award as finest featured actor in a musical and charmed audiences. And, when he took every week off to audition for a TV sitcom that Carl Reiner was cooking up, he additionally charmed its producers. A lot so, that though he was a near-complete unknown, when nobody may give you a great title for the present, they simply named it after him: The Dick Van Dyke Present.

Reiner had initially forged himself as TV author Rob Petrie, as a result of he’d based mostly the character on his personal expertise in comic Sid Caesar’s writing room. However with Van Dyke paired with 24-year-old newcomer Mary Tyler Moore as Laura Petrie, the present wasn’t only a office comedy — there was warmth on the house entrance.

From the primary episode, Laura and Rob Petrie had been horny collectively, particularly in comparison with the characters within the Andy Griffith and Danny Thomas sitcoms that had been their essential competitors.

Rob and Laura had been additionally mid-century fashionable — the kind of modern suburbanites you could possibly think about dwelling down the road — although with a head of the home who, when denied his favourite pillow at bedtime, may do 5 minutes of broken-neck pantomime.

The Dick Van Dyke Present began gradual within the rankings, however by the second season it was firmly within the prime-time high 20. And it stayed there, at the same time as Van Dyke began doing different tasks. He shot the film model of Bye Bye Birdie throughout the TV present’s first summer time break. And shortly, the Disney people had been nosing round, searching for a chimney sweep to pair with a nanny performed by Julie Andrews.

When Van Dyke instructed an interviewer that he wished there was extra high quality youngsters’s leisure on the market, Walt Disney took discover, and referred to as to supply him the a part of Bert the chimney sweep in Mary Poppins.

Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews dancing in Mary Poppins, June 1963.

Don Brinn/AP

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Don Brinn/AP

Shot throughout the summer time of 1963, the movie would take virtually 11 months of modifying and animation earlier than it was prepared for theaters, however that October, only a month after it completed taking pictures, the forged of The Dick Van Dyke Present winked at it when Morey Amsterdam’s Buddy pitched a sketch as, “How about if Alan comes out dressed as a cockney chimney sweep however he is getting so fats he cannot get down the chimneys?” That joke performed to close silence, however would’ve gotten a a lot greater snicker a yr later, as soon as the viewers had met Bert the chimney sweep in Mary Poppins.

As Van Dyke remembers it, Pamela Travers, who wrote the youngsters’s books that impressed the movie, thought he was all flawed for the half — and she or he did not like Julie Andrews both. It is true that Van Dyke had possibly the worst cockney accent ever.

However the movie did so effectively that Disney was capable of purchase land in Florida for a deliberate theme park in Orlando. And its buzz stored The Dick Van Dyke Present close to the highest of the rankings proper by the tip of its fifth season — 158 episodes — when Reiner determined to cease whereas they had been nonetheless on high. It was a bittersweet ending, as Van Dyke remembered on NPR’s Wait Wait … Do not Inform Me!

“All of us concerned,” he instructed host Peter Sagal, “say The Dick Van Dyke Present was the perfect 5 years of our lives. We had been like otters at play.”

Dick Van Dyke on the forty third Annual Kennedy Middle Honors press convention in Could 2021.

Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP through Getty Pictures

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Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP through Getty Pictures

He went on to star in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, TV’s Prognosis: Homicide, and dozens of different tasks proper up by an Emmy-winning visitor spot on the cleaning soap opera Days of Our Lives, simply a few years in the past on the age of 97.

It has been a full life — almost all of it spent getting folks to placed on a cheerful face — together with on the conclusion of his go to to Wait Wait … Do not Inform Me!, when he delighted the viewers by singing the lyrics Morey Amsterdam wrote to The Dick Van Dyke Present theme music:

So that you assume that you just’ve acquired bother /

Effectively bother’s a bubble /

So inform ol’ Mr. Hassle to get misplaced. /

Why not maintain your head up excessive and /

Cease cryin’, begin tryin’ /

And don’t overlook to maintain your fingers crossed. /

Once you discover the enjoyment of dwelling /

Is loving and giving /

And also you see that when the profitable cube are tossed /

A smile is only a frown that’s turned the other way up /

So smile and that frown’ll defrost /

And don’t overlook to maintain your fingers crossed.

Ivy Buck produced this digital story.