Dick Van Dyke was reportedly under the weather Saturday and couldn’t host his recurring Vandy Camp fan event with his wife at the couple’s namesake theater at Malibu High School.
Introducing herself as “not the Van Dyke you were expecting,” Arlene Silver explained, via People, that “when you’re 99½ years old, you have good days and bad days … and unfortunately, today is not a good day for him.”
Van Dyke and makeup artist Silver, who married in 2012 when he was 86 and she was 40, usually helm the celebrations together, along with their musical group the Vantastix.
Silver told the audience that she had to wear her “big girl pants and hold the reins without Dick here as the safety net.”
Fans were disappointed but undaunted as the show — described by Silver as a “whimsical, vintage circus” — did go on.
“All of the people at the event were so kind and amazing. Many had flown in from around the world and country. I did fly in from the Bay Area,” one fan, Christy Vaca, wrote on Saturday night on Facebook. “It turned into everyone sending amazing messages to Dick Van [Dyke] who was watching at home. He means so much to us all.
“It was really Heartbreaking.”
Last time we checked in with the “Mary Poppins” star, he was being rescued by neighbors during the Franklin fire, which started in Malibu in early December 2024 and burned for nine days.
“I’m out there laying on the ground trying to undo this fire hose, and the fire’s coming over the hill,” Van Dyke said a few days after the fire started. “What I did was exhaust myself. I forgot how old I am, and I realized I was crawling to get out.”
Neighbors managed to get the beloved entertainer, wife Silver and a number of their pets into a vehicle and out of danger, he said. Cat Bobo was missing, but he turned up when they returned home the next day. Thousands of people had to evacuate.
The neighbors “carried me out,” he said, “and came back and put out a little fire in the guesthouse and saved me.” Van Dyke’s home was spared. Twenty structures were destroyed and 28 were damaged in the fire, according to Cal Fire.
The Van Dykes did not evacuate a month later during the tremendously destructive Palisades fire, Silver said on social media in January.
“Keeping Dick warm and entertained has been the two things that have been my top priority, so, you know, we don’t have power […] or regular electricity, so we don’t have Wi-Fi,” she said, via Page Six. At the time of her Instagram live, they were cooking and charging their devices courtesy of her small camper-trailer.
“I don’t know of any other person of, you know, senior citizen age that would put up with this,” she added, calling her husband a “trouper.”
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