Carl Reiner Had to Tell ‘Dick Van Dyke Show’ Cast About JFK Assassination
“I remember it vividly, honestly, like it was yesterday,” Larry Mathews, the 69-year-old actor who played Ritchie Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show, told Remind. He was rehearsing an episode where Ritchie invites dozens of kids from his school to his 8th birthday party when producer Carl Reiner interrupted the cast with an important announcement.“Carl came in and said, ‘Everybody stop. Just stop everything,’” Mathews remembered. “And we were all like, ‘What?’ And he goes, ‘The president’s just been assassinated.’ The silence was deafening.”The cast gathered around a working prop radio in the Petrie living room set and heard the news together. “We basically listened to Walter Cronkite‘s newscast on the assassination. And then Carl told everybody to go home,” Mathews said. Don't Miss “We’re done. We’re going to shut down,” ordered Reiner. “We’ll pick it up next week. Everybody needs to go.” Dick Van Dyke remembered the day as well in his memoir, My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business. “I had returned to the set from lunch in the commissary with a few people from the show and immediately noticed a change in the atmosphere,” he said. “I will never forget it. The usual lightness in the air had disappeared, and the mood was somber and heavy. We all knew immediately that something had happened, something bad and dire. I looked around, trying to figure it out, and then someone asked if we had heard.”Van Dyke recalls everyone sharing an expression of “disbelief, horror, and tragedy.” In his memory, they were all watching the news instead of listening to a radio. “We couldn’t do anything but stare at the television and mutter, ‘Oh my God.’” Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore were often compared to JFK and his wife Jackie, so much so that the resemblance was noted in an episode of the Dick Van Dyke Show where a character painted Rob, Laura and Ritchie on the back of a turtle. “I pick it up and look at it and say, ‘Oh, we look like the Kennedy family,’” remembered Moore after the assassination. “That had to be redubbed.” While most everyone in the cast went home after Reiner broke the news, Van Dyke did something different — he headed to a recording studio that had been booked for the night. A band had also been hired for the session to record Van Dyke’s first album, Songs I Like. “Although it was the last thing I wanted to do that evening, and I’m sure the musicians shared that sentiment, we went through with the recording session anyway,” Van Dyke wrote. “And the resulting album, at least to me, sounded that way.”
Comments (0)