“My mother said I was a good boy—and now, at almost eighty-five years old…I guess I stayed that way,” Dick Van Dyke writes in his 2011 autobiography, My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business: A Memoir.

The legendary comedian was the star of the transformative Dick Van Dyke Show, along with the long-running Diagnosis Murder and classic films like Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. His book delves into them—but much like the autobiographies of fellow legends Sophia Loren and Fred Astaire, it also keeps a lot close to the vest. Yet the people-pleasing star tells what he chooses with such good nature and gratitude that the reader hardly minds.

“I have endeavored to write the kind of book I think people want from me. It’s also the kind of book that I want from me,” Van Dyke writes by way of explanation. “But a word of warning about this book: If you are looking for dirt, stop reading now.”

This attitude is unsurprising for a man so universally beloved. “Nobody has a rotten thing to say about him,” Merv Griffin once said, “and they have rotten things to say about everyone.” A loving father of four, Democratic booster, and civil rights advocate, Van Dyke also volunteered for years every holiday at Los Angeles’s Midnight Mission, dancing, singing, and hugging unhoused folks on Skid Row.

But this wholesome boy had a dark side, fighting a lengthy battle with alcoholism. He recounts those low points with grace and light honesty. “Hope is life’s essential nutrient, and love is what gives life meaning,” Van Dyke writes. “I think you need somebody to love and take care of, and someone who loves you back. In that sense, I think the New Testament got it right. So did the Beatles. Without love, nothing has any meaning.”

The Good Boy

Scandalously conceived out of wedlock, Richard Wayne Van Dyke was born on December 13, 1925, and grew up in Danville, Illinois. Van Dyke describes his mother as funny, talkative, and absent-minded. His gregarious father, Loren “Cookie” Van Dyke, was a former minor league baseball player and jazz musician turned traveling salesman who drank too much and was often emotionally absent.

“At a party, everyone left talking about what a great guy he was,” Van Dyke writes. “But a heart-to-heart talk with us boys was not in his repertoire.”

Van Dyke was raised amid a solidly upstanding and industrious extended family—“no horse thieves or embezzlers.” His need to be a “good boy” started early, and he was often left to babysit his brother, Jerry, when his parents went out. “I would pull a crate into the middle of the house and sit on it with an ax in my lap,” Van Dyke writes, “ever vigilant and ready to protect my baby brother—and myself!”

For a time, Van Dyke wanted to be a minister, but he was also obsessed with silent comedians like Stan Laurel and Buster Keaton. (He later befriended both and delivered their eulogies.) Always the charmer, he was “big man” at school: a talented athlete, class president, star of the theater department, and an announcer for the local radio station, where he hosted a nighttime show called The Yawn Patrol.

From a young age, one gets the sense Van Dyke had developed a persona that not only pleased others, but also protected his innermost self. “I cultivated an arsenal of tricks,” he writes, “whether it was a funny face, a pratfall, a joke, or all of the above.”

Put on a Happy Face

In 1942, Van Dyke signed up for the Air Force, and is refreshingly truthful recalling his relief that he was put in the special services. Instead of fighting, he was tasked with performing in variety shows, and even put up a DJ booth in the mess hall where he played records and read the news. “That was,” he writes, “about as military as I wanted to get.”

Some of the most fascinating and enjoyable parts of My Lucky Life are Van Dyke’s memories of his next 20 years as a drifting journeyman disc jockey, vaudeville performer, news reader, and local variety show host in the wild and wooly early days of radio and television. “The only certainty was that something would go wrong, if not today, then tomorrow,” he recalls. “It required nerves of steel and a sense of humor to match.”

Broke, Van Dyke and his high school sweetheart Margie got a free wedding and honeymoon when they married in 1948 on the live radio show Bride and Groom. After stints in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and New Orleans, his first big break came in 1955, when he signed a contract with CBS. The Van Dykes moved to New York, and Van Dyke became a presenter on the CBS Morning Show, hosted by the venerable Walter Cronkite.

On-air disasters were frequent, like the time Van Dyke was interviewing a dog sled racer live. “I began clowning around and jokingly said, ‘Mush.’ It just came out of me. His dogs didn’t understand it was a joke and they took off. They ran through the kitchen set, the weather set, and two other sets, knocking all of them down, before they stopped.”

CBS let him go after three years, and Van Dyke was again drifting, appearing on talk and game shows. He was saved by becoming a regular on Pantomime Quiz, a charades-like TV show where he was paired with his pal Carol Burnett. “Thanks to a slew of imperceptible hand signals we came up with to tip each other off…we were unbeatable,” he writes. “It was a good thing, too. I needed the two hundred dollars we were paid each time we won to buy groceries.”

Paid to Play

The early 1960s changed everything, leading into Van Dyke’s golden era. In 1960, he was a smash in the Broadway hit Bye Bye Birdie, for which he won a Tony. In 1961, writer and creator Carl Reiner cast him in a new sitcom based on Reiner’s life as a comedy writer commuting from New Rochelle to New York City. Van Dyke was clearly as shocked as anyone that he got the role.

“I have…heard and read various accounts of why they liked me,” he writes. “My favorites? I wasn’t too good-looking, I walked a little funny, and I was basically kind of average and ordinary. I guess my lack of perfection turned out to be a winning hand.”

He was even more surprised when Reiner suggested naming it The Dick Van Dyke Show. So was his wisecracking costar Rose Marie. “Rosie, appearing more perplexed than anyone, shook her head and said, ‘What’s a Dick Van Dyke?’ I agreed. It sounded like a mistake. ‘Nobody’s ever heard of me,’ I said. ‘Who’s going to tune in?’”

They shot the pilot on January 21, 1961. Van Dyke paints his five seasons on the show as a collaborative, congenial wonderland of creativity, overseen by his hero Carl Reiner. “I often went into the set on Saturdays to work out little bits,” he writes. “I couldn’t turn my brain off, that’s how much fun I was having on the show.”

Now a beloved, Emmy-winning superstar, Van Dyke clung to his family life and eschewed the Hollywood party scene, much like his level-headed Mary Poppins costar Julie Andrews (whom he adored). But he couldn’t resist a little flirtation with his on-set wife, Mary Tyler Moore.

“We couldn’t stop giggling when we were around each other,” Van Dyke writes. “I finally asked a psychiatrist friend of mine about it. He stated what was patently obvious. ‘Dick, you’ve got a crush on her.’ I put my head in my hands and laughed. Of course, I did. Who didn’t adore Mary? If we had been different people, maybe something would have happened. But neither of us was that type of person. Still, we were stuck on each other.”

The Six-Foot Tower of Jell-O

An amateur philosopher and elder at his Presbyterian church, Van Dyke consistently tried to live up to its ideals of brotherly love. But his faith was shaken during a contentious church meeting regarding civil rights:

One of the elders emphatically stated that he did not want any black people in the church. Appalled, I stood up, shared my disgust, grabbed my jacket, and walked out. I never went back there or to any other church. My relationship with God was solid, but the hypocrisy among the so-called faithful finished me for good.

But Van Dyke admits he was not always so brave. “My dislike of confrontation was so obvious that Rosie turned it into a joke. She dubbed me ‘the Six-Foot Tower of Jell-O,’” he writes.

This aloofness meant many felt he was an unknowable enigma. “He’s a loner,” Carl Reiner once said. “You don’t see him hurting,” Mary Tyler Moore agreed. In My Lucky Life, Van Dyke addresses this depiction, revealing the anxiety and navel-gazing underneath his unflappable exterior.

“The public saw a smiling, nimble-footed performer while my family and friends were served up a more contemplative loner, a man who many said was hard to know,” he writes. “I will say that it was not intentional…. Throughout my whole life I have pondered the big questions. I’ve thought more like a philosopher…. If I was hard to know, it was because I would disappear into this abyss of questions and debate…. What was the point? What was I supposed to do? Was I getting it right?”

One gets the sense that Van Dyke’s aloofness also helped mask his drinking problem, which he says began during The Dick Van Dyke Show and accelerated in the late 1960s. “Somewhere along the line I progressed from being just a party drinker to the point where I’d run a race with Margie each night to see if I could get drunk before she could get dinner on the table,” he writes.

In 1972, disgusted with himself after yet another night at home where he snapped at his wife and children, Van Dyke checked into rehab. “I realized that if I wanted to be the man I thought I was, I needed to get help. That’s exactly what I did.”

Double Life

But the rehab didn’t stick, and Van Dyke fell off the wagon, even while starring in The Morning After, a TV movie about alcoholism. He also found himself drifting further away from his wife Margie, whom he describes as an earthy, artistic woman with no interest in Hollywood. Instead, Van Dyke was falling in love with his agent’s secretary: Michelle Triola, a feisty, opinionated Hollywood gadabout whose yearslong legal battle with ex-partner Lee Marvin was a town scandal.

“Fortunately, no one saw us in the corner of Dan Tana’s or any of our other nighttime haunts. Michelle and I would talk throughout the day,” he writes. “She loved show business and wanted to hear about what had happened on the set, the bits that worked and those that did not work, who the guests were, and all that stuff. She had ideas and opinions and understood my ambitions and frustrations.”

Wracked with guilt, the formerly faithful “good boy” tried to focus on his new show, Van Dyke and Company. “I worked harder going back and forth between my two worlds than I did on the show,” he recalls. “I lost seven pounds in the first two months. I told people it was the work. In truth, it was the stress of dividing my time between two extremely strong, attractive women.”

Van Dyke eventually came clean to Margie, and they finally amicably divorced in 1984. (Van Dyke was by her side when she died in 2008.) Now happy and open with Michelle, he finally stopped drinking for good in 1985, after being disgusted by a sip of wine. “Over the years, people would ask how I stopped and I would shrug, as mystified and curious as anyone,” he writes. “It was as if my body did what my mind couldn’t: It said, ‘Enough!’”

Dorian Van Dyke

Dick Van Dyke’s longevity has become the stuff of legend. When his brother Jerry needed a kidney, Van Dyke offered to give him one if he died. “Jerry called me every single day,” Van Dyke writes. “What a guy, right? Then, as soon as I answered the phone, he said, ‘Oh, you’re still alive.’”

After the deaths of Margie in 2008 and Michelle in 2009, one feels Van Dyke was given a new perspective on life, and became a more open person, eager to embrace the people he loves. Van Dyke (who married 40-year-old Arlene Silver in 2012) describes his love of volunteering, creating CGI animation for his kids and grandkids, and singing with his a cappella group, the Vantastix. Recalling one show, he writes:

When I noticed that women in their sixties and up comprised most of the audience, I turned to the other guys in my group, all at least half my age, and warned them that these were my groupies. Sure enough, after the show, the women rushed the stage, albeit slowly and politely. We had to make a run for it.

Van Dyke has also kept his sense of humor and timing. In 1993, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. “When Hollywood’s honorary mayor, Johnny Grant, finally unveiled it, there was an unexpected silence, followed by a clap of laughter,” Van Dyke recalls. “My name was misspelled. It read Dick Vandyck. Embarrassed, Johnny quickly handed me a Sharpie, and I drew a line where there should have been a space and told him not to worry. It had happened before.”

Now 98, Van Dyke appears to have fully embraced his lucky, lucky life. “My life has been a magnificent indulgence,” he writes. “I’ve been able to do what I love and share it. Who would want to quit?”