DICK VAN DYKE
The Dick Van Dyke Show star gets personal about his magical chemistry with Mary Tyler Moore.
Just like Rob Petrie tripped over the ottoman in The Dick Van Dyke Show ’s opening credits, the sitcom’s stars fell head over heels for each other. “We used to break up laughing,” Dick recalled to Mary Tyler Moore when the iconic sitcom couple reunited for an interview in 2003. “We had a terrible time on set the first year, looking at each other and starting to laugh, and a psychologist told me that’s a sign of an attraction.” Agreed Mary, covering her mouth with embarrassment, “It’s sexual tension, and that’s how you release it.”
This romantic spark sizzled through the screen when Dick and Mary played Rob and Laura, the 1960s’ sexiest TV couple. “Everything about him I loved and connected to,” Mary said. And Dick, 91, tells Closer, “It was just serendipity — we caught on so fast. We got to where we could read each other’s minds.” But the timing was never right for a reallife romance; Dick and Mary weren’t ever single at the same time, and the ideal marriage they portrayed on TV was sadly destined to remain fictional. “They both really cared for each other,” the sitcom’s creator and co-star Carl Reiner tells Closer. “And we found out years later if they weren’t married [to other people], they would’ve made a couple.”
When Dick and Mary first met, he had his doubts about her. He was a 35-year-old song-and-dance star coming off a Broadway triumph in Bye Bye Birdie; she was a 24-year-old ingenue who had shown only her legs as Richard Diamond, Private Detective’s secretary. “I thought she was just beautiful, but a little young,” Dick explains. “I said, ‘Well, she’s cute, but can she do comedy?’ ”
Could she ever! “We bounced off each other immediately,” Dick says. “It wasn’t two episodes before her timing
ROB & LAURA PETRIE’S ROMANTIC CHEMISTRY WAS REAL, AS THE DICK VAN DYKE
SHOW’S CO-STARS REVEAL
Dick and first wife Margie (in London in 1964) were married in 1948 on the radio show Bride and Groom. “I found a new best friend in Arlene,” Dick says of his second wife (in 2014). “We talk about everything.”
came. She got it like that. What a pleasure!”
There was one problem: CBS’ censors wouldn’t let Rob and Laura share a bed. A decade later, “Bob Newhart got to sleep with Suzanne Pleshette, but we always had twin beds!” Dick laments.
Still, it didn’t throw a damper on their explosive chemistry. As Bill Persky, one of the show’s writers, tells Closer, “Their sexual attraction would’ve been obvious if they’d slept in bunk beds.”
Maybe that’s because they weren’t acting. “Carl made a joke early on,” says Vince Waldron, author of The Official Dick Van Dyke Show Book. “He said, ‘Hey, if you want to find chemistry, why don’t you two have a weekend fling?’ But it really wasn’t necessary because it was all there.”
Michelle Triola (in 1993) was Dick’s agent’s secretary when they met; they were together for
over 30 years.
But Dick wasn’t alone in his crush on Mary. All the men on the set “were smitten with her,” Rose Marie, who played Rob’s single gal pal, Sally Rogers, tells Closer. “Mary was beautiful, she had a gorgeous figure and was wonderful.”
Mary only had eyes for her TV hubby. “Mary always radiated whenever she talked about him — I could see she wished he was there instead of me,” Ed Asner, her co-star on The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the ’70s, told Closer at the Ojai Film Festival. “He was smooth, and she loved it. She was in seventh heaven whenever she was around him.”
Dick and Mary made such a convincing couple that many fans assumed they were married to each other. In 1969, three years after The Dick Van Dyke Show ended its run, the duo reunited for a variety special called Dick Van Dyke and the Other Woman. As Persky, who co-wrote the show, explains, “If they checked into a hotel with their real husband or wife, there were raised eyebrows.”
Their pairing was so indelible, when Mary launched her sitcom in 1970, the writers decided to make Mary Richards single instead of divorced because they feared viewers would assume she’d dumped Dick. Their on-screen chemistry “was amazing — one of the best in TV history,” Larry Matthews, who played son Little Ritchie, tells Closer. “Offscreen, they got along great, too. We truly were a family.”
SECRET STRUGGLES
Dick’s real-life family wasn’t so harmonious, yet he refused to stray during his sitcom’s run, rendering the prospect of acting on his attraction to Mary impossible. In 1948, at 23, he’d married Margie Willett, a local girl he’d known growing up in Danville, Ill., and together they had four children. But as his star rose, he was waging a private battle with alcoholism. “Dick was such a great actor that when he drank, we never knew it,” Carl says. “I only knew he drank when he told me he was on the wagon. I said, ‘On the wagon from what?’ ”
In 1972, Dick checked into rehab to deal with his drinking problem. Soon afterward, Margie entered the same facility for treatment of an addiction to prescription medication. With his marriage under strain, Dick began confiding in his agent’s secretary, Michelle Triola. “She was easy to talk to — she understood me,” Dick says.
They began an affair. “I was writhing in guilt,” Dick says. “By 1976, I had to do something. I needed to be honest.” He came clean to Margie, and the couple lived separate lives until finally divorcing in 1984. Even then, Dick couldn’t convince Michelle — who had been involved in a notorious palimony suit with her ex-boyfriend, Lee Marvin — to marry him. “I couldn’t talk her into it,” says Dick,
who stayed with Michelle for more than 30 years. “She was a great lady, very strong and a loyal friend.”
Dick and Margie remained close, and in 2008 she died of pancreatic cancer. “Even though we were long divorced, with her death, I lost a part of myself,” Dick said. A year later, Michelle passed away from cancer as well. “She got lung cancer, and it metastasized so fast,” Dick says. “I’ve lost so many friends to cancer.”
Bereft, Dick felt like he’d never fall in love again. “Carl and Mel Brooks and I all said, ‘That’s it,’” he shares of his fellow widowers. Then Dick met Arlene Silver, a makeup artist 46 years his junior. “I thought there would be an outcry about a gold digger marrying an old man, but no one took that attitude,” Dick says. “She’s given me a third life, and I’m tickled to death with it.” Gushed Arlene to Closer at the AMD Britannia Awards, “He’s the most perfect human being. I’ve never met anyone so sweet and genuine. He’s just like a happy pill.”
MOORE, THE MARRIER
While Mary was blissful on set with Dick, she was unhappily married offcamera. At the age of 18 in 1955, she’d wed Richard Meeker and a year later gave birth to her only child, Richie. By the time of The Dick Van Dyke Show’s 1961 debut, “As bursting with excitement over my work as I was, I was equally without emotion at home,” she said. The couple divorced that year.
Almost immediately, Mary met Grant Tinker, an ad exec, and the two wed in 1962. Together they formed MTM Enterprises, which produced Mary’s self-titled sitcom. Yet as with Dick and Margie, substance abuse drove Mary and Grant apart. After The Mary Tyler Moore Show ended in 1977, a “great silence had fallen on us,” she said. “We always made these feeble attempts at self-counseling during the so-called ‘happy hour,’ the only time we had courage enough to broach the subject.”
Mary and Grant split in the early ’80s, and she tragically lost Richie in a gun accident. Just before going into rehab for her drinking, she met and married Dr. Robert Levine, who was 18 years younger and helped Mary in her longtime bout with diabetes. “He was completely devoted to her,” friend Dr. Sandra Puczynski told Closer at the JDRF’s 45th Annual Promise Ball. “We should all have someone so committed to us.”
The disease took Mary’s sight and mobility and eventually her life when she died at 80 in January. Five years earlier, Dick and Mary had reunited for the last time when she received the SAG Life Achievement Award. “I got to present it to her,” Dick says. “It was very sweet, and I loved doing it.”
After Mary’s passing, Dick said, “She was the best. We always said we changed each other’s lives for the better.” Whenever Dick and Mary were together, to paraphrase her sitcom’s theme song, love was all around. — Reported by Amanda Champagne-Meadows, Ilyssa Panitz & Scott Steepleton
“We clicked as real people. I loved him. I loved his kindness and his humor and his dance.” — Mary