If getting paid to entertain people is your idea of the good life, then Dick Van Dyke is a lucky man. His very first job—at the age of sixteen—was to present his own radio show, and though he is now in his mid-eighties it is not clear that his career is over yet. Even when he joined the Air Force during World War II, he served his country by putting on musical revues under the indulgent command of a fading Broadway actress.

There was nothing to make this vocational path predictable. His father was a traveling salesman for Sunshine Cookie Company. Van Dyke poignantly records in My Lucky Life, a show biz memoir with a walk-on part for God, that when he saw Death of a Salesman it so captured his father's life that it sent him into a month-long depression. Dick Van Dyke (it is not a stage name!) grew up in the midwestern solidity of Danville, Illinois. He could stride out from his house "in any direction and hit a relative before I got tired." (Perhaps if you could make it there you could make it anywhere. His classmates included Donald O'Connor and Bobby Short—and Gene Hackman was the pesky kid brother of a friend.) Small-town radio led to local television in Atlanta and New Orleans. In 1955, he was put under contract by CBS, mostly to appear on other people's shows. In 1960 came Bye Bye Birdie, his Broadway breakthrough.

By that time, Carl Reiner was looking for someone to star in a television show that he was developing about a writer and his co-workers and home life. Johnny Carson was a possibility, but Reiner decided on the "likeable comedian who has India-rubber joints" (according to The New York Times's review of Bye Bye Birdie). This turned out to be brilliant casting, and it was a sensible choice even for what was known at the time. Bolder was the decision to title it The Dick Van Dyke Show despite the fact that its star was an unknown. Still, that formulation was ubiquitous in those days. Most people will best recall The Andy Griffith Show, but the now largely forgotten ones were legion. Indeed, The Dick Van Dyke Show was almost cancelled after its first season because it was being beaten in the ratings by The Perry Como Show. Van Dyke had already done The Fran and Dick Show back in Atlanta, and after The Dick Van Dyke Show would come—believe it or not—The New Dick Van Dyke Show, Van Dyke & Company, and The Van Dyke Show.

Van Dyke is convincing and generous in his analysis of what made The Dick Van Dyke Show TV gold. He never tires of praising Reiner's writing. Reiner insisted that the humor should grow organically out of the relationships. He was careful to avoid playing off of passing cultural moments, but rather focused on perennial human situations. The other actors were fabulous. What could be better than having Mary Tyler Moore exclaiming, "Oh, Rob!" while prancing about in Capri pants? Van Dyke is so wonderfully secure in his craft that he does not even bother to mention that his own genius for physical comedy might have helped out a bit as well. When decades later the show became a re-run hit, the Los Angeles Times approached him for his theory on its appeal for new generations. I find his analysis lucid: "The show was funny."

Let's get the bad news out there. After passing the half-century mark, Van Dyke left Margie, the wife of his youth and the mother of his four children, for Michelle Triola, a woman best known for a lawsuit against her former lover, the actor Lee Marvin, which introduced the word "palimony" into the American vocabulary. (Yes, we have just bravely marched into the 1970s.) He was also a smoker with a drink problem. Still, his relationship with his wife was a faithful one for all the decades up to this "adult-onset confusion." And he then stayed devotedly with Triola until her death at the age of 76. He eventually beat both booze and "cancer sticks," and he seems to have been a good father.

Van Dyke's clean-cut, caring reputation is exemplified by his being named in 2010 an official Year of the Tiger Ambassador of the World Wildlife Fund. He made a decision early in his career that he wanted to be involved only in projects that were suitable for the whole family to watch. This was truly a principled stand; he was warned that it could be detrimental to his career. It is one of the things that he boasts about repeatedly in this autobiography—and rightly so. Van Dyke has actively supported Democratic candidates. Nevertheless, without irony or concerns about politicized overtones a chapter is entitled "Family Values." In the conclusion he affirms again by way of summation, "I am proud that I kept it clean, that I stood for something, and upheld values."

As it happened, Walt Disney read that Van Dyke had made this commitment and decided he wanted him for Mary Poppins (1964). It was a great relief to read that Van Dyke agrees with me that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is not a very good movie. There were numerous other films, many of them forgotten or forgettable, but as a septuagenarian Van Dyke was starring in another hit TV show, Diagnosis: Murder. Its eighth and final season concluded in 2001, making it a longer running series than The Dick Van Dyke Show.

As a child, Van Dyke attended Immanuel Presbyterian Church regularly. He also went to vacation Bible school, and at the age of eleven read the entire Bible. As a sophomore in high school he carried his Bible around with him and told people he wanted to be a minister. His plans changed after he joined drama club. Van Dyke does not exactly reason that when he does a pratfall he feels God's pleasure, but he does write that he had found his "true calling."

Although throughout the book he only refers to his oldest son as "Chris," they had actually christened him "Christian." While appearing on Broadway, Van Dyke was not only worshipping faithfully in a Dutch Reformed church but even teaching Sunday school. (Have you ever noticed how lucky Calvinists are?) When they moved to California, they joined Brentwood Presbyterian Church and Van Dyke became an elder. He also seems to have done some preaching ("I spoke to the congregation on occasion") and witnessing ("I shared my opinions when the appropriate opportunity arose").

Van Dyke speaks movingly about the quality of the Christian faith of Brentwood's youth minister, who was also a Young Life worker. Van Dyke leaned on him spiritually, even turning to him for guidance when President Kennedy was assassinated. Van Dyke also volunteered for service activities sponsored by Brentwood Presbyterian, including community development in Watts after the riots. His revered youth pastor took a call elsewhere, and this weakened Van Dyke's commitment. In his telling of it, at any rate, when a fellow elder expressed his dislike of the idea of African Americans coming to their church, Van Dyke decided that organized Christianity was overrun by hypocrites and it was best to give up on ensemble work and become a one-man show. His relationship with God, however, was still "solid."

Moreover, he continued to read serious theological literature. One expects a show biz memoir to be marked by name-dropping—"Of all the presidents I have met (Johnson, Nixon, Clinton), Obama has been my favorite "—but it was surprising to come upon Buber, Tillich, Bonhoeffer, and Tournier. These are not selling points for his publisher—none of these named favorite theologians makes it into the index, and the copyeditor was sufficiently unengaged that Tillich is misspelled.

Van Dyke also evokes John A. T. Robinson's Honest to God (1963). Robinson proceeded from the assumption that Bultmann's dictum that one cannot both use electricity and believe in miracles was a profound insight rather than a self-flattering non sequitur. Following Tillich, Robinson also revealed breathlessly that God is not actually "up there" but rather "the ground of our being" (theologians having hitherto lacked spatial reasoning). Van Dyke was so enthralled he wrote the Anglican bishop a fan letter. While he was filming Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in England, Van Dyke and Robinson co-hosted a radio show in which they explored faith in the light of contemporary thought.

Van Dyke quotes approvingly from the bishop's bestseller—"Assertions about God are in the last analysis assertions about Love"—and throughout My Lucky Life he commends all-you-need-is-love as his own rubber-jointed theology. When this theme comes to the fore again in the conclusion, Van Dyke offers a barrage of sources where it can be found, from the New Testament to Walt Disney. One cannot help but feel wistful when one traces the road from Danville to the lives of his grandchildren today if he has really convinced himself that the church services and Bible reading of his own spiritual formation can be adequately replaced by the box-set of Love Bug movies.

Earlier in the book, Van Dyke explains that he had come to the conviction that to live by the credo of love was all that the Lord his God required of him: "I decided if I could manage that I wouldn't have any serious problems were there to actually be a Judgment Day." It's the Master. Step in time.

Timothy Larsen, McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, is the author most recently of A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians, published in March by Oxford University Press.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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