Comedian and actor Dick Van Dyke danced across rooftops more than 60 years ago in Mary Poppins. And he danced barefoot across his backyard last year in "All My Love," a Coldplay video that went viral on his 99th birthday.
As he begins his second century on Saturday, it seems the right moment to remember the way he first came into our lives: in a six-year blaze of multimedia glory that began on Broadway at 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 in the Elvis Presley mode. Also, as would be his habit throughout his career, doing his level best to prompt a smile in the show's biggest hit song, "Put on a Happy Face."
Birdie got mixed reviews, but this lanky, 34-year-old Midwesterner was a hit from the word go. He won a Tony Award as best featured actor in a musical and charmed audiences. And, when he took a week off to audition for a TV sitcom that Carl Reiner was cooking up, he also charmed its producers. So much so, that although he was a near-complete unknown, when no one could come up with a good title for the show, they just named it after him: The Dick Van Dyke Show.
Reiner had originally cast himself as TV writer Rob Petrie, because he'd based the character on his own experience in comedian Sid Caesar's writing room. But with Van Dyke paired with 24-year-old newcomer Mary Tyler Moore as Laura Petrie, the show wasn't just a workplace comedy — there was heat on the home front.
From the first episode, Laura and Rob Petrie were sexy together, especially compared to the characters in the Andy Griffith and Danny Thomas sitcoms that were their main competition.
Rob and Laura were also mid-century modern — the sort of contemporary suburbanites you could imagine living down the street — though with a head of the house who, when denied his favorite pillow at bedtime, could do five minutes of broken-neck pantomime.
The Dick Van Dyke Show started slow in the ratings, but by the second season it was firmly in the prime-time top 20. And it stayed there, even as Van Dyke started doing other projects. He shot the movie version of Bye Bye Birdie during the TV show's first summer break. And soon, the Disney folks were nosing around, looking for a chimney sweep to pair with a nanny played by Julie Andrews.
When Van Dyke told an interviewer that he wished there was more quality children's entertainment out there, Walt Disney took notice, and called to offer him the part of Bert the chimney sweep in Mary Poppins.
Shot during the summer of 1963, the film would take almost 11 months of editing and animation before it was ready for theaters, but that October, just a month after it finished shooting, the cast of The Dick Van Dyke Show winked at it when Morey Amsterdam's Buddy pitched a sketch as, "How about if Alan comes out dressed as a cockney chimney sweep but he's getting so fat he can't get down the chimneys?" That joke played to near silence, but would've gotten a much bigger laugh a year later, once the audience had met Bert the chimney sweep in Mary Poppins.
As Van Dyke remembers it, Pamela Travers, who wrote the children's books that inspired the film, thought he was all wrong for the part — and she didn't like Julie Andrews either. It's true that Van Dyke had maybe the worst cockney accent ever.
But the film did so well that Disney was able to buy land in Florida for a planned theme park in Orlando. And its buzz kept The Dick Van Dyke Show near the top of the ratings right through the end of its fifth season — 158 episodes — when Reiner decided to stop while they were still on top. It was a bittersweet ending, as Van Dyke remembered on NPR's Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me!
"All of us involved," he told host Peter Sagal, "say The Dick Van Dyke Show was the best five years of our lives. We were like otters at play."
He went on to star in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, TV's Diagnosis: Murder, and dozens of other projects right up through an Emmy-winning guest spot on the soap opera Days of Our Lives, just a couple of years ago at the age of 97.
It's been a full life — nearly all of it spent getting people to put on a happy face — including at the conclusion of his visit to Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me!, when he delighted the audience by singing the lyrics Morey Amsterdam wrote to The Dick Van Dyke Show theme music:
So you think that you’ve got trouble / Well trouble’s a bubble / So tell ol’ Mr. Trouble to get lost. / Why not hold your head up high and / Stop cryin’, start tryin’ / And don’t forget to keep your fingers crossed. / When you find the joy of living / Is loving and giving / And you see that when the winning dice are tossed / A smile is just a frown that’s turned upside down / So smile and that frown’ll defrost / And don’t forget to keep your fingers crossed.
