Hold the Roses (2 page)

It was the last day of The Dick Van Dyke Show. We had been together five
years. We were so close. We have been through divorces, marriages, sicknesses, and deaths together, and now it was all coming to an end. Would
we stay in touch with one another? Would we be as close as we had been
for the past five years? No one knew. We kept looking at one another and
trying to keep from crying.

How we ever got through that show was a miracle. Mary would say,
"That's the last time I will get made up in that room." "This is the last time
I will walk through that door." Morey was trying to make jokes at every
turn, but he too had a lump in his throat. Everyone was so keyed up. No
one would admit that we all felt like kids losing our best friends. I kept
trying to think that it wouldn't end. We were too close for this to just stop.

We had done our run-through. We got our notes from Carl Reiner and
our director Jerry Paris. We went to dinner, just as we had done for five years.
No one ate. We were all in the dumps. We tried to kid around and act as
crazy as we always did, but we were all acting. I sat in my dressing
room... cried... and went to our makeup man, Tom Tuttle, to fix my makeup.
He smiled.... He knew. Even he had tears in his eyes. I got dressed, and Marge
Mullen, our script girl, came to me, hugged me, and said, "This is the last
time I give you notes. Let's make it a good one."

The audience came in and we went on to do the last Dick Van Dyke
Show. What wonderful memories I would have of that show. Five years...So
much had happened in those five years.

I began to think of my life before the Van Dyke Show, before all the
other TV shows and performances I had done during my lifetime, before I
grew up. My mind took me back to the first time I ever stepped on a stage
to perform.

I was three years old. My mother always said I was two years and nine months, but you know how mothers like to exaggerate, so let's go for three
years old. I won an amateur contest at the Mecca Theatre on 14th Street in
New York City. I sang "What Can I Say, Dear, After I Say I'm Sorry?"

I don't remember too much of that night, except that I sang and ran
off the stage. When I got to the wings, somebody put a bouquet of roses in
one of my arms and another bouquet in the other arm. I could hear the
audience applauding and screaming and someone yelling, "Bring the kid
back! Let her sing! We want the kid to sing!" When I heard this commotion, I threw the roses down and said, "Hold the roses-I can't take my
bow!"

It has been like that ever since. Hence the title of this book.

Ad (t f eke s k Is, go ~ les

I was born, illegitimately, on August 15 in New York City. A holy day... the
Feast of the Assumption. I was named Rose Marie: Marie because it was a
holy day, so my grandmother said I would be named either Mary or Marie.
The choice was not a difficult one for my mother, since she never did like
the name Mary. My father decided I should be named after his mother,
Rose. So, to please everybody, I was named Rose Marie. A musical entitled "Rose-Marie" had opened on Broadway the night I was born, and
my mother liked the name as two words rather than one. Little did she
know how many times in my life I would be called "Rosemary" or "Miss
Marie."

My mother's name was Stella Gluscak. My father was Frank Mazzetta.
They never married because my father already was married to a woman in
Brooklyn-he also had two children with her. I think my mother knew,
but what could she do-I had arrived. We lived in a three-story railroad
tenement at 616 East 17th Street-the first high stoop on the right, across
the street from the dumps. At least that's what we used to say when we
could afford to take a cab.

I don't remember my father ever living with us. I lived with my mother
and her mother and father, Ursula and Michael Gluscak. My grandmother
cleaned office buildings and my grandfather was a shoemaker. He made all
my shoes until he passed away when I was about five. My mother had
various jobs (telephone company, pencil factory, and so on). I remember
my grandmother saying to my mother, "Don't worry: when you're working, I'll take care of her. And when I'm working, you'll take care of her. We'll get along." My grandparents were from Krakow, Poland. My mother
was born in New York on Christmas (also a holy day).

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