100 Rules for Living to 100

At ninety-nine years old, Dick Van Dyke reflects on his life, career, and relationships in a book structured as personal stories, each paired with a loosely defined "rule" for living. The rules are not prescriptive guides but reflections drawn from memory, offered for readers to interpret and adapt. Some recur across chapters, some remain open questions, and some are simply comic anecdotes.

Van Dyke opens by contrasting the grumpy, bitter old men he played throughout his career, most notably the ancient banker Mr. Dawes Sr. in Mary Poppins, with the person he actually is at ninety-nine. He shares their physical deterioration but insists he is nothing like them internally. Three things have kept his life joyful: his romance with his wife Arlene Silver, doing what he loves, and laughing.

He traces his creative passion to a grade school play in Danville, Illinois, where he built cardboard tombstone sets and performed comedy for classmates. That foundational experience, he argues, unconsciously guided him whenever he drifted toward sports, the Air Force, advertising, or retirement. He urges readers to recover their own earliest memory of passionate engagement and use it as a compass.

Van Dyke recounts his Danville childhood with warmth, particularly his relationship with his younger brother Jerry. Dick served as Jerry's protector while bearing the household's heavy labor. As adults, Jerry followed Dick into entertainment, and their 2011 costarring turn in Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys became a cherished reconnection. Jerry died in 2018.

Formative encounters with fear shaped his resilience. At 11 or 12, he endured a screening of the 1931 Frankenstein, then weeks of nightmares, before teaching himself to separate fantasy from reality. His progression from magic hobbyist to comedian culminated in a humiliating Egg Bag Trick failure at a high school assembly. Rather than retreating, he took a grand bow, discovering that a carefully constructed persona cracking apart was funnier than the persona itself. He identifies this as the origin of Rob Petrie's iconic ottoman stumble, the signature gag of his future television character on The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Van Dyke describes finding successive groups of creative kindred spirits: the "Burfords" in high school, the cast of The Dick Van Dyke Show, and The Vantastix, his a cappella group of 25 years. He concludes that a shared language of music, comedy, or dance matters more than permanence.

His Air Force enlistment at 17 during World War II revealed what he was not: a person built for rigid order. Punishment marching, however, came naturally, revealing an innate gift for rhythmic movement. After flunking pilot training, he was reassigned to Special Services to build sets and perform in variety shows.

His early career struggles fill several chapters. In 1948, his Danville friend Phil Erickson recruited him for the Merry Mutes, a lip-synching comedy act that scrambled for bookings over half a decade. Their dream shot on Ed Sullivan's Toast of the Town was destroyed when Margaret Truman, the president's daughter, received an encore that consumed their slot, teaching Van Dyke that there is no such thing as a sure thing. He honed his comic persona in New Orleans television, endured a disastrous stint hosting CBS's The Morning Show, and carried hard-won lessons into his Broadway breakthrough with Bye Bye Birdie, where costar Chita Rivera's generous partnership transformed him from an untrained unknown into a leading man.

Several chapters detail The Dick Van Dyke Show's creative dynamics. Carl Reiner, the show's creator and lead writer, waged ongoing battles with network censorship: fighting unsuccessfully for the married lead characters, Rob and Laura Petrie, to share a bed; successfully backing costar Mary Tyler Moore's capri pants; and defending a "baby switch" episode whose punchline challenged racial paranoia. On The New Dick Van Dyke Show, CBS refused to air an episode citing Van Dyke's "wholesome" image, prompting Reiner to quit and Van Dyke to follow.

Van Dyke credits the Sherman Brothers' songwriting and choreographers Dee Dee Wood and Marc Breaux for the enduring magic of Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang despite uninspiring directors. He addresses his infamous Cockney accent, coached for one hour by an Irishman, and reveals he turned down the James Bond role after Sean Connery's departure out of accent anxiety.

His account of alcoholism and recovery forms the book's emotional centerpiece. He traces his drinking from suburban cocktails through nightly bourbon, escalating during isolation at the family's Arizona ranch. A hungover morning in 1972, studying his shaking hands, he recognized a destructive pattern and checked into treatment. He relapsed briefly, then received the script for the 1973 TV movie The Morning After. Realizing it would be hypocritical to destigmatize alcoholism onscreen while hiding his own, he went public, generating thousands of supportive letters.

The book's second half weaves together later career, aging, and his relationship with Arlene. He recounts his eight-season run on Diagnosis: Murder (1993-2001), casting his son Barry and folding personal hobbies into his character. He tells the origin story of The Vantastix, born from a chance Starbucks encounter with rocket scientist Mike Mendyke. He describes his deteriorating body with comic precision: shrinking four inches, losing the ability to read to macular degeneration, and gradually surrendering driving.

Van Dyke recounts surviving the December 2024 Franklin Fire and January 2025 Palisades Fire, during which he, Arlene, and their assistant Jimmy hunkered down for 11 days without power, sustaining spirits through singing and laughter. He connects the experience to childhood memories and reflects on the communal generosity that emerges from disaster.

The story of meeting Arlene at the 2007 Screen Actors Guild Awards forms the book's romantic core. Van Dyke, then 81, approached a stranger in the green room, compelled by an unexplainable force. After losing both his ex-wife Margie and his partner Michelle within two years, his grief gave way to courtship. Arlene resolved her anxiety over their age difference at Burning Man, a desert arts festival, realizing their happiness outweighed every concern.

Van Dyke confronts mortality through devastating losses: his 13-year-old granddaughter Jessica, who died in 1987 of Reye's syndrome, a rare condition triggered by aspirin given during a childhood illness; and his daughter Stacy, who died in 2017. Jessica's posthumous poem "Nightmares" now describes Van Dyke's own experience of the fragile blur between being here and being gone. The deaths of actor Gene Hackman, a Danville native, and Hackman's wife Betsy prompt him to confront the precarity of old age. He holds tentative faith that his spirit will persist but insists the afterlife is not worth fixating on when obligations to love others remain. He also reckons with honest memory, correcting a fudged detail from his previous memoir about his father and admitting his biggest parental regret is distance from his children due to work travel.

The book closes with a tribute to Arlene as the most important factor in Van Dyke's longevity. She manages his career, serves as his external memory through leading questions that help him recover fading recollections, counters his self-deprecation with evidence, and sustains his spirit through music and daily care. He frames "Find Your Arlene" as the book's most important rule and urges every reader to aspire to be that person for someone else: "When darkness creeps in, turn on the magic."