A Look Back at Dick York's Life

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article around the time York's Biography was published. With some wonderful quotes by the incredible Joey York:

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Dick York refused to wallow in self-pity despite constant pain

By Steve Penhollow
The Journal Gazette

One of the most enduring pop cultural debates concerns which of the two actors who played Darrin Stephens on TV's "Bewitched" was better, Dick York or Dick Sargent. And one of the biggest pop cultural quandaries has to do with what happened to Dick York in 1969 that forced producers of the show to call on Sargent's services. With all due respect to Sargent, the answer to the first question is obvious. The answer to the second has saddened fans for decades. But a new book that amounts to an autobiography by the late York, "The Seesaw Girl and Me" (New Path Press; $25.95), gives the actor the last word on his difficult but not disconsolate life and leaves readers with the impression that York' considerable acting talents were the least of his attributes.

As York's wife, Joan, writes in the introduction: "I don't have the words to do justice to the wonderfulness that was Dick York." There was nothing Dick didn't know, there was nothing he couldn't do." Ask anybody and they'll tell you the same. He just was magnificent." The book was transcribed and shaped by Claudia Kuehl from cassette tapes York recorded shortly before his death from emphysema in 1992. But it doesn't read like a transcription, and it doesn't read like the memoir of a man who was in pain more years than he was free from it. It reads like a celebration of being alive by someone whose love of life was not conditional upon the ease of his days.

It is a funny and lyrical book, and it begins in Fort Wayne. York was born here Sept. 4, 1928, and lived in Fort Wayne for the first four years of his life. The early chapters should pique the interest of Summit City historians. In them, York recounts such activities as getting ice from the ice house, fishing in a local pond with his Grandma Snyder and going "junking," which meant filling one's wagon with all sorts of resalable stuff like tin cans and newspapers.

"His days in Fort Wayne were really idyllic for him," Kuehl said in a phone interview.

Yet, even as a boy, York was vexed by health problems and the pain that accompanied them. "It seems like poor Dick had pain all of his life even as a child," Joan York said, also via phone. "He had some stones in his salivary gland that they had to go in and dig out." You could not be asleep for it. "The nurse fainted," Joan said.

York had a special relationship with his Grandma York, who lived on Hanna Street. "Grandma York was a big large lady," Joan said, "and when she was following him down the stairs, she would say, "Be careful, Dickie, that I don't fall on you." In the book, York says his Grandma York had the uncanny ability to dispel gloom and anxiety. This came in handy when he would escape Chicago, and his indigent existence there, to visit her. "Life in Chicago was tough," Joan York said. "In Fort Wayne, he was able to relax."

York met Joan while the pair were starring on a Chicago radio show called "That Brewster Boy." It may have been love at first sight, but there was a minor (in several senses) obstruction to a happily ever after. York was 15, Joan was 12. Seven years later, they were married.

York's acting career went well from the start. He was in "Tea and Sympathy" and "Bus Stop" on Broadway and played the schoolteacher who is hounded by religious fundamentalists in the film "Inherit the Wind." It was on the set of the western "They Came to Cordura," starring Gary Cooper, that York unwittingly embarked on a more challenging chapter of his life. A railroad handcar fell on York, severely injuring his back. York rested, but he did not seek medical attention. He returned to the set as soon as he was able, little understanding the extent of the damage.

"We didn't know when it first happened that it was going to be as horrendous as it was," Joan York said. Five often pain-plagued years later, York was chosen as the star of a new TV series called "Bewitched." Joan York said she and her husband had no expectations that "Bewitched" would be a smash hit. "An actor never thinks this is going to be the big thing," Joan said. "That's really the truth. You just go and do it." On the set of "Bewitched," York worked through his chronic pain with the help of prescription medications and doses of cortisone.

This sufficed for quite a while. York managed to conceal his condition from his co-stars until the indubitable end. But Joan York said she agonized for him the entire time. "We didn't sit around and talk about it," Joan York said. "But I saw him hurt and in pain. I saw how miserable he was. I saw how much it was taking it out of him."

In 1969, York's body could take no more punishment from chemicals and the actor's sheer willpower, and he collapsed into convulsions during a scene. Joan York said she was the one who asked the show's director and producer, Bill Asher, to let Dick go. "He said to me, 'Is there anything I can do for him, Joan?' And I said, "Tell him he doesn't have to do this anymore."

The sight of Dick Sargent playing the character York created didn't distress Joan's husband in the same sense that it might distress other actors, Joan York said. "It didn't incite in him envy or self-pity. He just felt he had let the show down. It was the only thing he had never completed in his life, and he felt very bad about that," she said.

The years following York's departure from the show were marked by increasing difficulty for the couple.The frequently bedridden York could work only sporadically in Hollywood and then not at all. They were years of poverty and unemployment, and years when the couple were forced to take jobs that would shame most other struggling or ebbing actors. But Joan York said they were happy because they had each other. "You're together. You're living. What difference does it make what anyone thinks? What is, is. The rest is opinions.We had fun. We had each other. Why be greedy? So, we cleaned apartments. So, we both got big and fat. That's what happens when you're poor and eat a lot of starch."

Joan York said her husband lived by a philosophy he learned from a "Tarzan" novel he read as a kid. "Tarzan was surrounded," Joan said. "He was in a hopeless situation. He faced certain death. And someone asked him why he was smiling. And he said, 'Because I'm alive.' Dick's philosophy was, 'You might as well do something. Why sit around feeling sorry for yourself? Why sit around dying?"

Eventually, York's crumbling spine, and the emphysema he had contracted after years of smoking, immobilized him. And, true to York's word, that was precisely the point when he began to accomplish the most. York became an advocate for the homeless, freeing up surplus government supplies like army blankets and getting them sent to shelters. He did it all by phone. He did it all while living in Grand Rapids, Mich., on a $650-a-month Screen Actors Guild pension.

Joan York said giving and receiving were the same thing to Dick. "It wasn't just homeless people. It was anyone in need. Dick's idea was that helping people wasn't about being choosy. It wasn't about asking people what they were going to use it for. He just did it. Dick was the sort of guy who believed that if you have two sandwiches, and the other guy has none, you give him one of your sandwiches." Dick was bright-eyed and energetic until the end, Joan York said.

Joan York believes her husband's life is a lesson to anyone who is tempted to give in to justifiable despair or wallow in unjustifiable self-pity. "Everyone pretty much liked Dick because there was nothing to dislike. He was not filled with ego. He was not interested in cutting people down. He lifted people up. The good news is that poverty and destitution isn't the end of the world. It depends on who you're with and how you look at it. Life comes down to how you feel about what you think and what you think about how you feel."

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