All Hollywood stars grow old and die except perhaps one – Dick Van Dyke – who turns 100 today. The real world Peter Pan who used to trip over the ottoman on The Dick Van Dyke Show is still standing. The man who impersonated a wind-up toy in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang hasn’t wound down just yet. He has outlived mentors, co-stars, romantic partners and several studios. He’s even outlived the jokes about his performance in Mary Poppins. These days his mangled cockney accent is regarded with more fondness than contempt. It’s seen as one of the great charms of the 1964 classic, along with the carousel chase or the cartoon dancing penguins.
Charm is the magic ingredient of every popular entertainer and few have possessed it in such abundance as Van Dyke, the impoverished son of a travelling cookie salesman who dropped out of high school and educated himself at the movies. “His job in this life is to make a happier world,” his Broadway co-star Chita Rivera once said – and this may explain his stubborn refusal to quit, not while times are tough and he feels that audiences still need cheering up.
Naturally his workrate has now slowed, but in the past few years he has competed on the TV show The Masked Singer, starred in a Coldplay video and enthusiastically stumped for Bernie Sanders. Van Dyke simply couldn’t understand why America’s older citizens were resistant to Sanders’ democratic socialist domestic policies. He said, “I want to urge my generation to get out and vote for him, please.”
As he nudges into triple figures, he has become a piece of living history: a walking, talking chronicle of US showbusiness itself. Van Dyke began his career performing for the troops in the second world war and proceeded to rub shoulders with the likes of Phil Silvers and Walt Disney. He had one foot in music-hall slapstick and the other in screwball comedy, and possibly splayed fingers in his midwestern hometown of Danville, Illinois.
In bridging these worlds, he perfected an outward-facing public image that was one part Stan Laurel to two parts Jimmy Stewart: a pratfalling clown who was decent and honest and smarter than he first appeared. And while he was already nearing 40 when The Dick Van Dyke Show and Mary Poppins made him an international star, the actor remained irrepressibly boyish. In 1968’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, he played Caractacus Potts, the madcap inventor who dreams up a flying car, while Lionel Jeffries – six months younger – played Potts’s addled and eccentric dad.
Van Dyke, by and large, has steered clear of dark films. He famously turned down the lead role in The Omen and insists that he mostly played a version of himself. “Wholesome,” he says. “An all-round good boy.” That’s true so far as it goes, although it’s probably only half the story, because Van Dyke’s interpretation conveniently sidesteps a 25-year struggle with alcoholism that spanned his professional heyday. Possibly it also glosses over the air of dancing mischief – even wildness – that animates his most feted, family-friendly performances.
Or to put it more bluntly, Van Dyke may have been mainstream but he never once felt conservative, nor even cosy, exactly. He brought too much energy to the room. It was as though he’d just blown in from outside and wasn’t entirely housetrained. The Dick Van Dyke Show – an otherwise standard 60s family sitcom – is notable for the crackling sexual chemistry and sparring mutual respect which Van Dyke cooked up with his co-star, Mary Tyler Moore.
Caractacus Potts, for his part, is the ultimate rackety dad: loving and exciting and liable to forget every birthday and dentist appointment. And then there is Bert, the sweep from Mary Poppins who trips across London’s rooftops like an urbanised Puck of Pook’s Hill. The evidence suggests that Bert isn’t cockney at all. He’s a spooky nature spirit, antic and mercurial, who is gamely attempting to pass himself off as a local.
Van Dyke is 100 and therefore no longer looks like Peter Pan. He looks, if anything, the platonic ideal of old age, with laughter lines and a thick white beard, the weathered embodiment of a life well lived. In his later years, he has grown used to people asking him for health advice, to the point where he even sat down and listed it all in a book (100 Rules for Living to 100).
The man is too self-aware to present himself as a paragon of good living. Instead he credits his longevity to a sprinkle of everyday magic – a combination of good genes, solid friendships and a positive mental outlook. “My life has been a magnificent indulgence,” he says. “I’ve been able to do what I love and share it with the world.”
It’s an arrangement that has sustained him for a full century on the planet. It’s fuelled a career so rewarding and fun that it barely felt like work at all. Van Dyke started out as showbusiness’s gawky gatecrasher, a controlled explosion of elastic limbs and rubber-faced double-takes, before maturing by degrees into Hollywood’s twinkling Father Time. He is ancient but evergreen, feted and cherished. And he’s altogether as lucky as lucky can be.
