What if two of television’s most famous entertainers, born seven weeks apart 100 years ago, had switched places?
Would announcer/sidekick Ed McMahon have opened each Tonight Show with, “Heeere’s Dickie”? Would Johnny Carson have mastered the art of tripping over an ottoman?
Dick Van Dyke turns 100 this Saturday, December 13, with an all-star PBS American Masters salute scheduled for the night before and the documentary Dick Van Dyke: A 100th Celebration playing in theaters. The Emmy, Tony and Golden Globe winner is of course beloved for playing Bert the chimney sweep in the 1964 Disney film Mary Poppins, as well as for starring opposite Mary Tyler Moore in the landmark ‘60s sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show.
Less well known is what Van Dyke did before his series premiered in 1961. How did he get a series named after him? As co-star Rose Marie put it when she was offered the part of co-writer Sally, “What’s a Dick Van Dyke?”
‘I Was So Bad, I Cannot Tell You’
For starters, Van Dyke and Carson had similar backgrounds. Both came from the midwest, dabbled in magic, and served in the military in the waning days of World War II. Both began their broadcast careers in radio and struggled to find their true calling on television.
For years a rumor has persisted that Carson almost landed the part of Rob Petrie on the aforementioned CBS sitcom, and that Van Dyke was among those considered to follow Jack Paar as host of NBC’s Tonight Show. It makes for a great story, but is there any truth to the “sliding doors” tale?
Well, sort of.
Here are the facts: in 1959, Van Dyke did a two-week stint subbing for vacationing Paar as guest host of The Tonight Show. (As Paar would often say, “I kid you not.”) Van Dyke confirmed this when I spoke with him at a Television Critics Association gathering in Los Angeles in 2004—back when he was a mere lad of 78.
That late-night audition, according to Van Dyke, did not go well.
“I bored myself to death,” he insisted. “I was so bad, I cannot tell you.”
Back then, Tonight ran a full 105 minutes, live, each weeknight, from 11:15 p.m. to 1 in the morning.
Van Dyke blanked when asked to name even one guest from those two weeks. “I mean, I got sleepy, I got bored and I wasn’t funny…,” he explained. “I was awful. I was the worst.”
‘We’ll Get a Better Actor Than You to Play You’
As for Carson, who died in 2005 at age 79, he really did land on sitcom creator Carl Reiner’s Rob Petrie list for what would become The Dick Van Dyke Show. That is, once producer Sheldon Leonard rejected Reiner’s first choice for the role— Reiner himself.
The series about a TV comedy writer was based on Reiner’s own experience as a writer-performer on Sid Caesar’s classic variety hour Your Show of Shows, and later, Caesar’s Hour. Reiner shot a pilot, titled Head of the Family, casting himself opposite Bonnie Britton as wife Laura. Leonard, who had two successful sitcoms already on CBS—The Danny Thomas Show and The Andy Griffith Show—took one look and told Reiner, “We’ll get a better actor than you to play you.” (Reiner related this story during another TCA critics gathering, in 2008.)
Leonard asked Reiner if he had anybody else in mind. The Emmy-winning writer-producer, who died in 2020 at 98, was certain of one thing: he didn’t want to hire a brash comedian to play Petrie.
“I want to get a guy who really is a writer but is funny, so he can talk funny but doesn’t have a need to perform. Johnny Carson is such a guy,” he told Leonard. “He is a performer but you don’t feel he has to get in there and own the place. He’ll turn it over to somebody else.”
At the time, Reiner was familiar with Carson as the ad-libbing host of the ABC daytime series Who Do You Trust? (1957-62).
Leonard, however, had a different actor in mind.
“The guy you’re talking about is Dick Van Dyke,” he told Reiner. Leonard had just seen him sing and dance on Broadway in Bye Bye Birdie, a role that won Van Dyke a Tony.
Taking that cue, “I went to New York, saw him, and that was it,” said Reiner.
Bottom line, Carson was never offered the sitcom role, but got a kick out of the story when Reiner clued him in later. The two met for poker for many years, where they were joined by the likes of playwright and fellow Your Show of Shows alumni Neil Simon and later Chevy Chase.
For his part, Van Dyke was glad he was the one who got to trip over the ottoman.
“If they had switched it, I would have died on The Tonight Show,” he noted. “Thank God things went the way they did.”
When Van Dyke Met Cronkite….
Incidentally, Van Dyke was also glad he flopped at another high-profile TV gig: morning show news anchor. That was a job he performed through much of 1958 opposite legendary CBS newsman Walter Cronkite.
Van Dyke was 29 at the time, putting in “three hours a day on the air every morning,” he recalled.
Cronkite, who passed away in 2009 at 92, got in touch with his old deskmate a year before that 2004 interview.
“He dug out a picture of the two of us on the set,” Van Dyke recalled, “and wrote, ‘How did you ever make it without me?’”
