Keep Moving (9 page)

I think he’s pretty close there, as close as anybody has ever gotten to what happens, which makes the way you live even more important. It is the only time you have to recall and assess and account for those experiences, the connections you had with other people, the work you did, the words you said, and the friends and family you leave behind. So it’s worth making sure those scrapbooks are filled. Make sure you have fun. Make sure you smile and laugh. Make sure you live.

Here’s a final note about Michelle: she spent her last morning alive on the telephone, talking with her friends. At noon she went into a coma—and that was it. The last thing she ever said to me was, “You made me a better person.”

Then it was just me and our dog, Rocky, and all of Michelle’s things in the house, which suddenly felt very large and empty. It was October 2009, the day before Halloween, in fact. I remember going outside to put the finishing touches on my annual Halloween decorations, for which I was renowned in our neighborhood; I had
contemplated taking the year off, but Michelle had insisted I go on with the show. I could hear her voice as I worked. The weather was still warm, and the yard was still green and the gardens in bloom. It was beautiful. It was all Michelle’s doing.

But I couldn’t help thinking that I was supposed to go first.

A Tribute to Old Friends
A Tribute to Old Friends
^*
*

I would like to say a few words in tribute to a cricket who lives in my garden. Unlike the hundreds we had when we first moved here, he was the only one who showed up this year. He sings his little heart out, trying to make it sound like a summer night. It’s sad. My heart goes out to him, as it does to the Mariposa butterfly who flits madly around the flowers, trying to pretend it’s the annual invasion of former years. There is one dragonfly who has thrown in the towel, I think. He makes a couple of passes over the pool in the morning, but then we don’t see him anymore. We have three flies in the kitchen who do a pretty good job of pestering my wife.

I found a nice environmental CD of rain on the roof. We were using it to get to sleep at night, but the neighbors complained we were running our sprinklers too late.

We had a bee early in June. But he fell in the pool and drowned. Wouldn’t it be funny if next spring we weren’t here either?

Sit or Get Off the Pot Roast
Sit or Get Off the Pot Roast

As near as I can figure, the history of the pot roast is as plain and basic as the ingredients themselves. It seems to have originated on farms in the 1800s where the cooking was done in large pots dangling over a hearth. A big slab of meat and an assortment of vegetables were tossed in, and everything cooked slowly in natural juice, water, wine, or some kind of stock. Recipes began to appear in cookbooks at the end of the 1800s.

By the early 1900s pot roast was standard fare in homes across America. The 1904 edition of
The Modern Cook Book and Household Recipes
included a recipe for “Braised Beef Pot Roast”; a similar recipe appeared in the 1937 version of
My New Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book.
And when André Simon described the roasting of a two-and-a-half-pound rump of beef in his 1952 book,
A Concise Encyclopedia of Gastronomy,
the pot roast was referred to as “an old Yankee recipe.”

I mention this only because, while doing my research, I did not find instructions anywhere that a pot roast should be delivered weekly to someone who has lost their spouse. But as soon as word got out that Michelle was gone, my family and friends showed their concern by dropping off food. One day I came home and found a large pan of meatloaf on the front porch. Another time it was a baking dish of lasagna. Then someone brought a pot roast. Some dishes were delivered with reheating instructions; others came with a loving note, “Call if you need anything else.” Pretty soon what I needed was more freezer space to store the food.

I like pot roast, meatloaf, and lasagna as much as anyone, maybe even more. As my wife, Arlene, has learned, my taste in food was shaped during my midwestern youth. My favorite meal, for instance, is fried chicken, corn on the cob, and mashed potatoes, followed closely by meatloaf, pot roast, and lasagna. I have never tired of any of these dishes.

But the casseroles friends dropped off and the messages they left, “Dick, it’s me—and I want to come by with some food,” took on a momentum that I couldn’t keep up with. I could only eat so much, and my appetite had disappeared.

Then I realized that the pot roasts were more than considerate goodwill gestures, more than mere precooked meals I could pull out of the refrigerator when I got hungry, more than a favorite recipe intended to
help out until I got back into a routine. They were coded messages!

It was as clear as the mozzarella on top of the lasagnas. All these meals were dropped off by women who were also single, many of them widowed themselves; they were letting me know they were out there—and available. It was as if a secret message had been sent to every widowed female of a certain age from Malibu to Beverly Hills:
Girls, we have a live one. He’s eighty-three, he’s got all his marbles, and he can still dance. Perfect for the charity circuit. Get your pot roasts ready.

At the gathering that followed Michelle’s service I had jokingly asked all the rich widows to move to one side, a light moment that drew laughter from everyone. But I wasn’t ready for a new relationship. Not then. Not a month later. Not several months later. Writing in the
New York Times
about his own terminal diagnosis, Dr. Oliver Sacks, one of my favorite authors, noted, at age eighty-one, that the deaths of friends and loved ones leave wounds that don’t heal. “There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever,” he wrote. “When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled.”

That’s the way I felt after losing Michelle. There had not been anyone like her, ever. Certainly not in my life. She had been such a dominant presence. Even as her health declined, she ran things from her bed. The phone rang. I heard her voice. I heard her booming laugh. She wanted dinner—then nothing. Her absence left a giant-sized hole everywhere I turned. Someone asked how I dealt
with the grief. I didn’t. I didn’t eat well. I forgot to pay bills. I declined invitations to go out. I fell off the track and didn’t know how to get back to living my life.

I wasn’t alone. Rocky, our wire hair fox terrier, was equally bereft. He searched endlessly for Michelle, and then after a while, he parked himself in front of me with the same look of sadness, loss, and confusion that was on my face. I tossed his toy across the living room, watched him bring it back, and then tossed it again until he grew bored. He might not have understood what had happened to Michelle, but he knew she was gone. I tried to put things in perspective for him.

“At least you don’t have a credit card that’s been canceled,” I said.

That really happened. My card was canceled, and it wasn’t for lack of money to pay the bill; it was because I wasn’t organized enough to
find
the bill. That was indicative of the way things unraveled. I had to get it together. I wanted to, believe me. I had told myself repeatedly that I did not want to be one of those people who lose a spouse and stop living. I had seen that in others, both men and women, and I never understood why they let their lives change so dramatically. They quit going to shows, they stopped cooking meals for themselves, they slept late, they moved slower, and they turned into virtual shut-ins. Even when they went out, they were closed off. I did not want that to happen to me. I had promised myself it wouldn’t. I had promised Michelle it wouldn’t. We had promised each other.

But it was easier said than done. I had never been single. As I said, I had a steady girlfriend in high school who dumped me after I got back from the Air Force. Then I got married to Margie. Then I was with Michelle. Then it was just Rocky and me in the house. I found myself apologizing to him. I promised to change.

I said yes when Gregory Peck’s wonderful wife, Veronique, invited me to lunch at a restaurant in Beverly Hills and introduced me to a woman she thought I might like. We had a nice time, but she wasn’t my cup of tea. The same thing happened with several other friends who tried to set me up.

Then word got out that I was dating, and my popularity skyrocketed. One woman waited for me every morning in my local coffee shop. She was like a well-intentioned stalker with a nice wardrobe. My phone rang constantly.

I went on quite a few dates, actually—only first dates, mind you—but demand for a widower like me, as I discovered, was such that I might still be going on dates if it were not for my wife, Arlene. At the time she was my makeup artist and friend. We had met a few years before at the SAG awards and worked together enough that I felt comfortable going to her for advice. I had to ask someone—I was a novice. I hadn’t dated—really dated—since before World War II.

So I would e-mail her a picture of the woman I was meeting and ask her opinion: “What do you think?” Or, “Have you heard of this restaurant?”

At some point I realized that I looked forward to Arlene’s responses more than I did the dates. Pretty soon I quit e-mailing her pictures of other women and suggested the two of us get together. I liked talking to her. I liked her personality. I liked her sense of humor. I liked her take on things. I liked her smiles and her eyes. I liked everything about her. Indeed, I liked the feeling—and this came as a pleasant, unsettling surprise—that I liked her and wanted to be around her.

Does that happen in your eighties?

It sure does.

There was just one problem: the difference in our ages: forty-six years. Ten years is not that big an issue once you’re in your thirties; a thirty-five-year-old man with a twenty-five-year-old woman is not a big deal. Twenty years is also an understandable choice, whether you’re in your sixties or your eighties. My brother is married to a woman in her sixties. No one questioned that gap when he was in his sixties, and now that he’s in his eighties, both of them look smart.

But forty-six years was uncharted territory. Though I was quite sure Arlene knew I was smitten with her, I was not blind to the reality: we were nearly two-and-a-half generations apart, which was like being separated by three time zones, the equator, and another language. Or was it? Or was it not that big of a difference?

I went over the pros and cons, making sure the pros outnumbered the cons, and told myself to be cautious, to take any next steps slowly. I knew that, at eighty-three, I
was going to be the major beneficiary of socializing with a beautiful woman in her thirties. At the same time, I sensed that Arlene also enjoyed my company. We had worked together. We e-mailed. We talked on the phone. She occasionally came over and made dinner, or I would pick something up, and she checked in on me. It seemed safe to assume that she was thinking about me almost as often as I was thinking about her—and how to move our friendship into a relationship.

As this happened, I began to feel like myself again. I turned the lights on again. I felt a lightness in my step. I looked forward to talking to Arlene. I had things to say. I wasn’t isolated or alone or lonely. It was the darnedest thing. After months of floundering, it was so natural, so effortless. Since then people have asked how I got through the tough parts of losing Michelle. The answer? I didn’t. What helped me through this tough period was the same thing that helps in any tough situation, the same thing that had brought me luck when I was struggling in New York with a wife and three young kids when I left the TV station where I worked and auditioned for every play on and off Broadway in order to earn extra money: I opened myself up to the world and all its possibilities, and the world responded.

In this particular instance, I opened my heart. I let life back in. I realized that if I wanted Arlene in my life, I simply had to take a risk. The choice was mine. And it was a simple choice: sit or get off the pot roast.

What Do You Talk About with Her?
What Do You Talk About with Her?

My brother is caught up in a mystery, even though I have explained the answer to him numerous times. The mystery is my three-year marriage to Arlene. Each time Jerry looks at us, he squints his eyes, shakes his head, and asks, “What do you talk about with her?”

He did it when we were eating lunch together recently. We were having a pleasant conversation about something we both had seen on television, when suddenly he looked up from his cake, shook his head in the direction of Arlene, and asked the question.

I am aware he is asking much more than that singular question, and he probably isn’t even interested in the specifics of our conversations, which are obvious to anyone who is around us for more than thirty minutes. In reality, Jerry is saying, “My God, you were already in your forties when she was born. What could you possibly
have in common? What are you doing with her? What is she doing with you?”

It’s all those questions and more, even if it comes in the form of, “What do you talk about with her?”

I could have asked my brother, “What does anyone talk about with their mate?” relationships being a mystery, and love being the ultimate in the unexplainable. As Albert Einstein mused, “Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.”

Even Friedrich Nietzsche said, “It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.” Arlene and I fell into friendship with ease, and the next steps all seemed natural.

One afternoon, several months into our new friendship-slash-relationship, Arlene came over and my dog, Rocky, and I greeted her at the door, holding a plate of fresh oatmeal cookies from the local bakery. She came inside, and we talked for a while about her day, then I told her about my day, and then I moved to the piano and we sang some songs together—she has a terrific, lively voice. Time passed, then we talked about where we wanted to have dinner, and then I proposed. Marriage.

She rolled her eyes and laughed. It wasn’t the first time I had proposed, nor was it the last, but, as she could see from my reaction, it was the most serious I had been up till that point, and suddenly she realized my offer was less of a joke and something I wanted her to consider seriously.

I was new at this, I explained. Having been with one woman for thirty-three years and another for thirty-one years, I was not in the habit of asking women to marry me. Of course, she already knew that about me, along with the fact that I was different from all of the other guys she had dated previously.

We met at the 2006 Screen Actors Guild Awards, where I was introducing Julie Andrews, who was receiving that year’s Life Achievement Award. I was backstage, in the artists’ green room, talking with Cate Blanchett, when I noticed Arlene. She walked by and sat on a sofa. Something about her caught my eye. I excused myself from Cate and sat down beside Arlene.

“Hi, I’m Dick,” I said, beginning what turned out to be a nice, easy conversation. It was strange; something about her simply compelled me to get to know her. In retrospect, it was as if we were supposed to know each other—and there was lots of catching up to do.

“Weren’t you in
Mary Poppins
?” she asked before admitting that she had not seen the movie but had recently walked by the El Capitan Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard where it was showing to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of its release.

I said, “Yes, I was,” and told her that the movie was pretty good.

“I guess I should see it,” she laughed.

Arlene was a makeup artist and taught at a nearby makeup school. She was friendly and easy to talk to. We chatted until a production assistant came for me. I told
Arlene to save my seat. She didn’t think I’d return, she later told me, but I did, only to find the cast of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
had decamped on the sofa.

I introduced Arlene to Valerie Harper. “Are you friends?” Valerie asked.

“It seems like it,” I said. “But we just met.”

Before I went onstage I asked Arlene for a card. She found one—it was her last one—in her bag. I put it in my tuxedo pocket and promised to call. A few months later, I was getting ready to shoot the made-for-TV movie
Murder 101,
and my regular makeup artist from
Diagnosis Murder,
Stacy Halax, was working on
Desperate Housewives.
I needed someone I liked and trusted. I called and offered the job to Arlene.

She accepted but then had second thoughts after speaking with Stacy, who made the job sound not difficult but . . . delicate.

“Don’t talk to him, because everyone talks to him,” she told Arlene. “He’s too nice and never says no to anyone, and it wears him out. He also needs eye drops. He likes his hair done a certain way. Oh, and work fast. He doesn’t like to sit in the chair for more than five minutes.”

On Arlene’s first day on the set Stacy actually came and watched her airbrush my makeup on to ensure she was doing it correctly. However, once it was clear that Arlene was a pro, everyone relaxed, including her. She understood that Stacy was just being protective.

Even then, I was still easier-going than she had anticipated. I came into the makeup room singing a song and
continued singing while she applied the makeup. Arlene sensed that I wasn’t in a hurry to leave, and she was right. I was glad to see her. She had a good, positive, capable, and yet relaxed presence.

Promo shots taken in New York in the 1950s when I was struggling to find work. Even when I had very little money, I liked to dress as if I did.
Photograph from author’s private collection

My wife, Arlene, was originally my personal makeup artist. Here we are on the set of a 3-D short called
The Caretaker. Photograph by Jim Udell

American Gothic: at a friend’s 1920s-themed wedding on the
Queen Mary.
It was our first public outing together.
Photograph by Oh! Snap Studios

Newly engaged, Arlene and I enjoy an alfresco performance of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Photograph by Laura Gillespie

My family at granddaughter Kristen McNally Mullin’s wedding in July 2011. Left to right, back row: Shane Van Dyke, Wes Van Dyke, Arlene Van Dyke, me, Kristen McNally Mullin, Russell Mullin, Carrie McNally, Kevin McNally, Christine Van Dyke, Chris Van Dyke, Carey Wayne Van Dyke; front row: Taryn Van Dyke, Ryan Breen, Stacy Van Dyke, Mary Van Dyke, Barry Van Dyke.
Photograph by Curtis Dahl