My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business

by Dick Van Dyke

It was similar to Carl wanting The Dick Van Dyke Show to be timeless, or Fred Astaire movies seeming classic. If I always felt comfortable taking the whole family to one of my films, I knew others would, too, and that would serve me well over time. I could play many types of characters on camera, but all were, in some way, going to be variations of me, and I was conscious of who I was. I wasn’t a prude or a goody two-shoes, but I was, in many ways, still the boy my mother praised for being good, and though older and more complex, I was content with remaining that good boy.

Every Sunday, we attended the Brentwood Presbyterian Church. I didn’t teach Sunday school as I had in New York, but I spoke to the congregation on occasion. My brief interest in becoming a minister was far behind me, but I was intensely curious and even passionate about God. I had read and continued to read Buber, Tilich, Bonhoeffer, and Tournier, all theologians whom I thought helped explain religion in a practical, rational sense as far as everyday life as opposed to the strict doctrines of religion. I was all about living a kind, righteous, moral, forgiving, and loving life seven days a week, not just the one day when you went to church. I thought about it quite a bit, noticed the differences in others, and I shared my opinions when the appropriate opportunity arose.

It was a life lesson—a wake-up to the fact that, as I wrote at the beginning of this book, you can’t spread peanut butter over jelly.

The idea did not go over well. One of the elders emphatically stated that he did not want any black people in the church. Appalled, I stood up, shared my disgust, grabbed my jacket, and walked out. I never went back there or to any other church. My relationship with God was solid, but the hypocrisy among the so-called faithful finished me for good.

As my children were finding themselves, I was going through the same thing, a sort of adult-onset confusion that had me asking many of the same questions: What was I going to do with my life? What was going to make me happy? Why wasn’t I happy? Like it or not, life is a never-ending confrontation with bouts of uncertainty and chapters of self-discovery. As I was about to learn, it is a series of fine messes that we enter, some wittingly, and others not.

In my early fifties, I was going through a phase where few things felt right and I was trying to figure out those that did. It was not uncommon. In your twenties, you pursue your dreams. By your late thirties and early forties, you hit a certain stride. Then you hit your fifties, you get your first annoying thoughts of mortality, you begin more serious questioning of not just the meaning of your life but of what’s working, what’s not working, and what you still want, and all of a sudden you don’t know which way is up. You thought you knew but don’t. You just want to get to where life feels okay again.

Hope is life’s essential nutrient, and love is what gives life meaning. I think you need somebody to love and take care of, and someone who loves you back. In that sense, I think the New Testament got it right. So did the Beatles. Without love, nothing has any meaning.