Lucky Man (25 page)

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I think it was when that huge, sad silence was finally breached late that spring that I realized the work I'd been doing with Joyce, and the progress I'd made in beginning to accept my diagnosis, had brought a sea change to my life. It's impossible to attribute this reawakening to a specific breakthrough or insight—I didn't suddenly burst out of a cocoon of fear. Neither was it a linear progression, an easily followed map of self-rediscovery. As Joyce might say, it all came down to showing up for my life—and doing the work.

This is how Tracy remembers those first few months of 1994, the gradual change in my outlook: “Your hopefulness came back, your sense of humor. Everything wasn't so thick with tension. You weren't so angry all the time. It was like this wall just started to crumble, and you weren't trying to build it back up again.”

Late one spring afternoon, as we sat on the grass watching Sam lead a younger cousin on a chase through the butterfly bushes in their grandmother's Connecticut garden, Tracy smiled at me and said, “Sam's going to love being a big brother.”

“CHOOSE A JOB YOU LOVE . . .”

Manhattan—March–April 1994

Before Parkinson's, when so much of my identity was tied up in my acting career, the question that burned inside me was,
How long can I keep living like this?
Then came P.D., with its slightly more pressing question:
How long will I be able to keep on living any life at all?
My sense of what really mattered had been turned upside down, and I came out of this period of self-reflection with a completely new perspective on my life and work.

In March of 1994,
Greedy
, the Kirk Douglas–led ensemble comedy I'd made the previous summer, opened and sank without a trace, just as the advance polling had suggested it would. I'd had box office failures before, but there was something different about this one. It wasn't just that Pete Benedek didn't call early Saturday morning, somberly intoning, “I'm sorry, man.” Even if Pete had still been my agent, I doubt I would have been standing by for his consoling phone call. After everything I'd been through, the ups and downs of show-biz just didn't seem that important anymore.

Bryan Lourd and Kevin Huvane, my new agents at CAA, faced a couple of stiff challenges. The first, and most obvious, was finding a way to restore my status in the movie business—especially now, in the wake of another box office bomb. But these guys knew that
Greedy
was going to tank before they signed me, and resuscitating a once-promising career was exactly the kind of high-wire act they'd made their reputations on. The greater challenge was this: How do you find a job for someone who doesn't want to work?

Well, it wasn't quite as clear-cut as that. As the Confucian epigram advises, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” I wanted to find a job, it would just have to be a job that I
loved
. The urgency I'd felt about my career in recent years had less to do with the work itself than with the desire to distract myself from the more difficult trials of my day-to-day life. I was back in my life now, living in real time, and savoring the days with Tracy and Sam in a way I never had before. I was wary of letting all that slip away again. The lyric in the old James Taylor song Tracy had played for me in the Paramount parking lot never rang truer: “Try to remember that working's no crime, just don't let them take and waste your time.”

“Forget about chasing hits, forget about making more money,” Tracy had told me so many times. “Unless you really think we need to live like Donald Trump for the rest of our lives. Do only what you have a passion for—you've earned that right.” She didn't say what we both knew: that I'd already tried it my way, and it didn't work. What Tracy was saying had always made sense; now I was finally hearing it. But
did
I still have a passion for work? Did I still love acting?

Believe it or not, even after
Greedy
I was still getting offers, albeit not necessarily top-shelf material: a high-concept action comedy based on a popular children's toy; a couple of scripts inspired, if that's the word, by classic TV comedies of the 1950s and 1960s; and other similar factory-to-you Hollywood products. These were the kind of scripts I had no problem picking through and quickly passing on. To their credit, the boys at CAA weren't crazy about this stuff either.

“You'll see,” they promised. “Better things will come along.”

“Yeah, well, I want to take it easy for a while anyway—be with my family,” I told them. “Just let me know if Woody Allen calls.”

Invoking Woody Allen's name was a shorthand way of conveying a message to my agents. I no longer felt driven by the need for commercial success. What I craved now was a new kind of creative experience with a director, actor, or writer who didn't give a damn about anything other than telling an interesting story in a compelling way. Allen, being all three rolled into one, was the first name that popped into my head. (Or maybe, after spending so much time in analysis, I just wanted to work with someone who could relate.) Still, whatever Woody Allen's next project was, I didn't imagine that “Michael J. Fox” would be the first, second, third, or even forty-seventh name that would pop into
his
head. So maybe I was just buying more time to consider my future.

And then Woody Allen called. Okay, Woody himself didn't call, and it would probably be more accurate to say that Bryan and Kevin called him; or at least, his producers. My agents had heard ABC had a deal with Allen to produce, direct, and star in
Don't Drink the Water.
There was a part in the script for me, and they went after it.

Allen was adapting his classic stage comedy for television, with himself as the obnoxious patriarch of the Hollander family, American tourists mistaken for spies while visiting a fictional Iron Curtain country during the 1960s. They take refuge, and wreak havoc, in the American embassy, which is temporarily being run by the Ambassador's incompetent son, Axel McGee. This was the part Allen offered me. Shooting would begin in New York the first week in April.

The job meant going back to TV for the first time since
Family Ties
. The money was lousy—SAG scale—and they couldn't even promise me a dressing room. Here was a job I could love.

And love it I did. Filming so close to home (at Seventy-ninth and Fifth Avenue, right across the park from our apartment) allowed me to zip back to our place for lunch with Tracy and Sam almost every day. Breezing into our lobby one afternoon while still in my vintage 1960s wardrobe (Bobby Kennedy–style suit—narrow lapels, straight-leg trousers, white tab-collared shirt, and skinny tie), the doorman stopped me. “Looking sharp, Mike.”

I touched the lapel. “Oh, the suit?” I said. “Yeah, not bad, huh? I don't think it's even been worn since 1963.”

“No kidding?” he replied. “Still fits you good.”

Don't Drink the Water
, like most of the feature films Woody Allen directed around that time, was shot in a loose cinema verité style. Long uninterrupted takes with no cutaways forced cinematographer Carlo DiPalma to swim through and around the actors, swish-panning his handheld camera in rhythm with the scene. While some audiences find this herky-jerky “you are there and this is all happening now” style a little unsettling, to participate in it as an actor was a dizzying thrill. No scene ever played out the same way twice. The pace, intensity, and even the dialogue varied wildly from take to take. That was fine with Woody Allen-the-writer, who was anything but protective of his screenplay. “Just throw the script away,” he'd tell us. “Say whatever comes to you in the moment.” Far less accomplished writers often insist that actors treat their work as gospel, and here was Woody Allen telling me to “throw the script away.”
I appreciate the trust, Woody, but your words are just fine with me.

Woody Allen-the-actor, however, gave you no choice but to wander from the text. Underestimated as an actor, I think, because of the ease with which he can meld the idiosyncratic elements of his persona into a fluid performance, Allen is a gifted and hilarious improviser. Since it was impossible to know what he was going to do next, it was futile to try to plan my own performance in advance. There were no close-ups, no pickups. Each actor had to go all out every time or feel the cold breeze of Carlo's camera swish-panning elsewhere. Even when it seemed obvious that things were falling apart, we'd keep going, because in this kind of improvisational free-for-all, the comedy often comes out of the chaos.

There was something else apart from the performing that I'll never forget. Remember that at this time, spring of 1994, Woody Allen's private life was in turmoil and on very public display. To watch him act and direct, you'd never think that just that morning you'd seen his face and his tribulations splashed across the front pages of New York's tabloids. I was amazed at how completely he was able to throw himself into his work. At a time when my own struggles were never far from my mind (and thankfully, still out of public view), I drew inspiration from his focus.

I took one other thing away from the experience, unexpectedly and quite by chance. On the set one afternoon, a few of us in the cast were distracting ourselves between setups by playing a game of hypotheticals. We'd come to the question, “If you could live in any era other than the present, what would it be?” Everyone tossed in their ideas and then Woody, who had been hovering distractedly at the fringe of the conversation, decided to weigh in.

“I wouldn't want to live in any time prior to the invention of penicillin,” he said.

Everybody fell out laughing—it was such a perfect, in-character response. With everything that Woody Allen was going through that spring, there was still nothing more terrifying to him than the prospect of incurable disease. And then suddenly it hit me.
Hey,
I
have an incurable disease—and I'm laughing anyway. I must be doing okay.

Los Angeles—October 1994

Dog-eared from repeated readings during the flight from New York and stained with brown circles from my soda can, my copy of
The
American President
screenplay was firmly tucked under my arm as I entered Rob Reiner's office. Maybe, finding it hard to believe that such a terrific script had actually come my way, I wanted to protect it, guard against the possibility that it might still be taken away.

“It's not an offer yet,” Kevin had told me before I left. “Rob just wants you to look at it and fly out to L.A. for a meeting.”
Yeah, well, I looked at it and I liked what I saw. So make me an offer Rob, but I should warn you, I won't do it for a penny less than “Free.”

I didn't say that, of course, but neither did I make any secret of the fact that I thought the screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, known then for
A Few Good Men
and today for television's
West Wing
, was among the best I'd ever read. It mattered little to me that the role he was considering me for wasn't a lead; Michael Douglas, as the President, and Annette Bening, as his lobbyist girlfriend, were well worth supporting.

Rob Reiner and I talked about movies and our kids, but the conversation grew most animated when the topic turned to politics. Newt Gingrich and his “Contract with America” were dominating the national headlines, and the Democrats were only weeks away from losing control of the House. The director's face, so familiar from
All in the Family
that I felt as though I knew him far better than I did, ran the gamut of emotions as he passionately voiced political opinions very near to my own. His reasons for wanting to direct this film were obvious. A clever romantic comedy, it was also a timely commentary on how cynicism can sometimes be passed off as patriotism in Washington politics. So I was thrilled when he asked me right there in his office to play the part of Lewis, a fictionalized version of a well-known aide to Bill Clinton.

But I wasn't home free yet. Weeks later, just after a cast read-through in a boardroom at Rob Reiner's Castle Rock Productions, something happened that terrified me. For the first time I was convinced that Parkinson's disease was about to cost me a job.

There was a lot of happy hubbub as the actors and production staff rose from the conference table after the read-through. The morning had gone well and the mood was relaxed, though I felt a mild urgency to say my good-byes, leave the building, and get into my car. Caught up in the reading, I had forgotten to take my Sinemet; tremors were about to kick in and I wanted to be safely alone and out of sight when they did. Before I could make my escape, however, the production manager asked for the cast's attention.

“We want to get your insurance company physicals out of the way today,” we were informed. “Please wait in the lobby and the doctor will see you one at a time.”

I was stunned.
Nobody warned me.
But why would they have? Preproduction physical exams are routine nonevents, perfunctory once-overs by doctors working for studio insurance carriers. Usually consisting of nothing more than saying
aaaah
and checking blood pressure, exams are just a way for film companies to avoid hiring someone who might croak midpicture and bog down production.

My left hand began to slap uncontrollably against my thigh. I hid it in my pants pocket, dry swallowed half a Sinemet, and quickly revised my exit strategy. Now I stalled, slowing to a crawl; maybe if I was last in line the synthetic dopamine would reach my brain before I reached the doc.

I had made great strides in dealing with my illness, but I still wasn't sure how anyone else would. Better to keep it to myself. Sinemet consistently worked for me and I knew how to control my symptoms well enough that they were still years away from interfering with any production schedule. Would P.D. scare them out of hiring me? Knowing what I know now about the better side of most people, probably not, but at the time, I wasn't prepared to find out. One day I'd share my diagnosis with future employers, but it wasn't going to be today.