Making ‘Dick Van Dyke Show,’ ‘Mary Poppins’

As Dick Van Dyke turns 100 and celebrates six Emmys over more than seven decades in the TV trenches, it’s hard to imagine there was a time before he was a national treasure. The fledgling funny man was no overnight success — before his first big break, Van Dyke shlepped his growing family across the country several times while touring comedy clubs and working in local TV.

After gigs in Hollywood and Atlanta, Van Dyke landed in New Orleans to emcee an early comedy program. Television was becoming big business in the mid-1950s, and CBS was searching far and wide for new comic talent to fill its growing schedule on both coasts. But network reps reported to Variety that “searching parties have turned up little of long range promise.” Except in the Big Easy — where the network discovered “a comic named Dick Van Dyke” who will “get the full grooming treatment,” reported a 1955 column in Daily Variety.

Van Dyke left New Orleans and ended up with a seven-year CBS contract, becoming the joke-cracking host of “The Morning Show” with Walter Cronkite as his co-anchor. The talented comic was also a song and dance man, who then moved seamlessly from the news desk to Broadway, where he won a Tony for his role in “Bye Bye Birdie,” then reprised it on film. “Van Dyke displays a showbiz knowhow far more extensive than his television outings communicate,” Variety wrote in its 1962 review.

That assessment might have undersold Van Dyke’s starring role in “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” which became an all-time top sitcom over its five seasons on CBS. After the 1960 pilot, starring creator Carl Reiner as Rob Petrie, didn’t quite land, producer Sheldon Leonard wanted to try a different comic actor, and Van Dyke won the title role over Johnny Carson.

“The Dick Van Dyke Show” took a while to fully find its footing. CBS canceled the sitcom after one season when it had trouble competing with “The Perry Como Show,” but summer re-runs brought in new fans, and the network changed its mind and ordered a second season.

“A funny thing happened that second season when Mary and I went back to work,” Van Dyke recounts in “My Lucky Life In and Out of Showbiz,” his first memoir. “We couldn’t stop giggling when we were around each other.” Van Dyke consulted a psychiatrist friend who broke the news to him that Rob had a crush on Laura Petrie. “Who didn’t adore Mary?” he wrote, “If we had been different people, maybe something would have happened.”

Despite the show nabbing Emmy noms for writing and directing in season one, Van Dyke and co-star Mary Tyler Moore weren’t nominated until the second season. Each finally won acting trophies for the third.

Those 1964 Emmys unfolded under strange circumstances. CBS (and ABC) had threatened to boycott the proceedings, as the networks were unhappy with certain Emmys rules and practices. But the Eye network’s “Dick Van Dyke Show” show swept anyway with five awards, and Van Dyke tearfully accepted his first trophy, saying “I’m crying, I don’t believe this.”

During the 1960s, the Emmys lumped together comedy and drama performances, so Van Dyke competed against the likes of serious actors like George C. Scott in “East Side/West Side” and David Janssen in “The Fugitive.”

After the ceremony, Van Dyke told Daily Variety columnist Army Archerd that he felt “out of place” competing with dramatic actors, and that for his next film, he’d like to be offered a “heavy” role.

But that didn’t happen.

Instead, Van Dyke decided he preferred family movies and was cast in dual parts alongside Julie Andrews in Walt Disney’s massive hit “Mary Poppins.” Making the children’s book adaptation, packed with memorable Sherman Brothers tunes, seems like a no-brainer now, but at the time it was considered a gamble. Variety reported in a 1963 article headlined “‘Mary Poppins’ Disney Coin Risk” that it was Disney’s biggest-budget production to date at $6 million, and that the studio was keeping a tight lid on publicity until the time was right.

The risk paid off: It became the year’s most profitable film and Van Dyke’s rendition of “Chim Chim Cher-ee” won the Oscar for best song. “Mary Poppins” remains a beloved classic 60 years later, but Van Dyke’s Cockney chimney sweep dialogue went down in history as one of the worst movie accents ever. It may have even cost him the role of James Bond, which Van Dyke reportedly turned down because he was too embarrassed to play an Englishman again (for “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” from Bond producer Cubby Broccoli, he sounded like the American he was).

He finally got the chance to play a “heavy” part as an alcoholic businessman in the Emmy-nominated 1974 TV movie “The Morning After.” After it aired, Van Dyke revealed that he had recently become sober after 25 years of struggling with alcohol.

Van Dyke’s career continued to prosper for many more decades, notably with eight seasons of 1990s detective show “Diagnosis: Murder,” an appearance in “Mary Poppins Returns” at the age of 93 and a new record as the oldest competitor on “The Masked Singer” at 97.

But that wasn’t his final act. In 2024, Coldplay released a music video directed by Spike Jonze, “All My Love,” that was a combination Van Dyke family reunion, career retrospective and duet with Chris Martin. And the personal appearances have continued to this day, featuring his always-sunny outlook.

“Hope is life’s essential nutrient, and love is what gives life meaning. As corny as it sounds, I think my decision to stick with entertainment the whole family could see was made with that in mind,” Van Dyke wrote in his memoir. “I’m proud that I kept it clean, that I stood for something, and upheld values.”

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Here’s a vintage Variety advertisement from the June 29, 1965, edition of Daily Variety highlighting Dick Van Dyke signing to star in the comedy film released in 1967 as “Fitzwilly.”