Dick Van Dyke: ‘I Love to Laugh’

MERRIER THAN EVER AS HE NEARS THE CENTURY MARK, THE LEGEND SHARES STORIES FROM HIS ICONIC CAREER—AND SECRETS FOR A LONG, HAPPY LIFE

- LIZ MCNEIL

“I feel really good for 100,” declares Dick Van Dyke. “Sometimes I have more energy than others—but I never wake up in a bad mood.” As he nears his centennial birthday on Dec. 13 (“I hope I make it,” he jokes), the legendary entertainer admits to being a bit hard of hearing and a tad wobbly, using a wooden cane as he walks barefoot through his memorabilia-filled Malibu home. But the twinkly humor and lanky charm that have endeared him to generations are ever present: Between telling jokes, tinkering at the piano and singing old favorites like “Puttin’ On the Ritz” and “Big Spender,” he quips, “I feel like I’m about 13.”

As a kid growing up during the Great Depression in Danville, Ill., he developed a knack for pratfalls playing cops and robbers with his brother Jerry, a skill that came in handy for the rubber-limbed star of The Dick Van Dyke Show in the early ’60s.

That’s when Walt Disney—the man, not the company—offered him the role of a lifetime as Bert the chimney sweep in the 1964 classic Mary Poppins, opposite an incandescent Julie Andrews. A turn in 1968’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang cemented his status as a national treasure. “How rare it is that a person gets to do what they love,” he reflects, sitting next to his wife of 13 years, Arlene Silver, 54. “I looked forward to getting up every morning, because it’s what I would have done for nothing.” In a new book, 100 Rules for Living to 100, he shares his eternal optimism, why he doesn’t fear death (“when you expire, you expire”) and how he hopes to be remembered: “For as long as children are proudly belting out their new word, ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,’ or singing and skipping along to ‘Chim Chim Cher-ee,’ the most important part of me will always be alive.”