I had a real job once. In the summer of 1976, when I was fifteen. My mom made an attempt to simultaneously ease my father's concerns and gently steer me toward a more responsible approach to my future. There was a summer opening for a low-level office clerk, gofer really, at the cold storage facility where she worked. I spent the summer in her office making coffee, doing odd bits of paperwork, and filing. Down on the docks, fresh fish was being unloaded from trawlers whose captains would fill out storage orders, which I would then run back upstairs and deliver to the main office.
I earned $600 for two months’ work, an achievement my parents lavishly congratulated me on. Their delight quickly evaporated when I spent the $600 to replace my electric guitar, the Japanese copy, with the real thing: a 1967 wood-grained Fender Telecaster that I purchased from an old jazz musician through a classified ad.
My parents may have found my band's music (and economics) baffling, but there was an upside to my involvement with Halex, as they saw it, and that was Andy Hill. An honor student, star athlete, and respectful son of a prominent orthopedic surgeon, Andy was exactly the kind of kid you wanted your son to hang out with. Hell, he was exactly the kind of kid you wanted your son to be.
Not only was I in Andy's band, but I had been accepted into his social circle, an overachieving clique comprised of South Burnaby's best and brightest. Most of them were the sons and daughters of doctors, lawyers, and other professionals, and they lived in the pricey Buckingham section of town. To ride my bike from my apartment complex by the shopping mall, past the old elementary school, and then cross the tree-lined boulevard that marked the boundary of this enclave was to enter another universe. I hung out with my new friends in their homes, which seemed palatial, swam in their backyard swimming pools, and practiced my music in their basement recreation rooms. At Andy's house there was a room dedicated exclusively to Halex; its walls were soundproofed with four inches of cork.
In time, though, I came to resent the sense of freedom and opportunity these kids had inherited from their parents. By my sixteenth birthday I had already begun to drift away from Andy's crowd and eventually the band.
There were other kids at school with whom I had more in common, socioeconomically anyway, and I began to spend more and more of my time with them, both in school and out. This was an edgier group. Basically good kids (I still count many of them as friends) but more overtly rebellious—longer hair, louder music, and more dismissive of conformity. Where I might have spent a Friday night with Andy staying up late to learn all the songs from Who's Next, a night at my friend Bill's house would involve ritualistically smoking an entire pack of cigarettes and working our way through a case of beer.
Times had changed. I was no longer just moving away from accepted patterns of behavior as I followed my muse; now, perhaps emboldened by my newly acquired taste for beer, I was rejecting them outright. I picked up another habit in addition to smoking and drinking. Having somehow obtained my driver's license, I became a serial fender-bender, inflicting varying degrees of damage to my parents’ vehicles at every opportunity. I was exhibiting all the classic symptoms of a downward adolescent spiral—teenage wasteland—so what intervened to stop it?
PULLIN' OUT OF HERE TO WIN
Throughout my life, I've made a habit of somehow salvaging victory at the very threshold of ignominious failure. Now, as would happen many times in the future, just when the earth seemed to be sliding out from beneath me like loose scree on a mountainside, I somehow stumbled onto a foothold that would lead me to higher ground.
Why, for example, would my dad continue to let me drive his cars if I kept bringing them home with dents in the quarter panels and broken taillights? Well, for starters, I'd apologize profusely. And then I'd arrange for the damage to be repaired and pay for it promptly and in full. Because I was working again. Not at the cold storage plant, but in a new job—the one I'd continue to have off and on for the next quarter century.
One day in the summer of 1977, our acting troupe was packing up props and painted backdrops in preparation for a performance we'd be giving that afternoon for one of the local grade schools. Ross Jones was on the phone in his office, a converted broom closet at the back of the drama class. He called me over and thrust a newspaper clipping into my hands. It was a casting call for a new television show at the CBC—Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “They're looking for a bright twelve-year-old kid,” he said. “And I was thinking, ‘Hell, you'd be the brightest twelve-year-old kid they're ever going to meet.’” Ross had always said my height and youthful looks would someday turn out to be a blessing. “I talked to them and they can see you later this week.”
I was dumbstruck but intrigued and, odd as this might sound, immediately confident. Ross was right. I could nail this. “Oh, and Mike,” he said as he sent me off, “you don't have to worry about my ten percent.” I smiled. I had no fucking idea what he was talking about.
A massive open audition, “a cattle call,” in showbiz parlance, the search for the kid co-star of the new CBC situation comedy Leo & Me offered a one in a thousand shot at the job. I wanted to do it even if it did mean playing a twelve-year-old. Ross was right: here was payback for all the years of short jokes. As the day of the tryout neared, my confidence grew. My mom gave me a ride to the CBC studios in downtown Vancouver. When we walked in the door, a receptionist handed me a script. Scanning the room, packed with young hopefuls and their doting mothers, I searched for a couple of chairs where we could sit down and I could study my lines. I read the words on the pages, quickly understood where the jokes were intended to be, and silently ran through them in my mind.
This is how my mom remembers it: “There were all these little kids in there and mothers were fussing with their hair, but you wouldn't let me touch yours. The kids were all practicing their lines with their mothers, so I asked, ‘Do you want to go through the lines with me?’ ‘Nope. I'm okay. I'm okay.’ You just took it all so in stride.”
Leo & Me, explained the director, would be a half-hour comedy about a thirty-something gambler who lives on a run-down yacht won in a poker game. Leo's playboy lifestyle is cramped when he unexpectedly inherits guardianship of a twelve-year-old nephew, Jamie—the “me” of the show's title. I hadn't given any thought about how to tell the director, producers, and other network types present at the audition, that I was, in fact, sixteen and not twelve. Was this going to be a problem? It became a moot point during the small talk after my reading, which they liked. I let slip how pissed off I was after flunking my driver's test for the second time. “It's discrimination,” I fumed. “The minute you lay a phonebook on the driver's seat, they just check the fail box.” They kept asking me follow-up questions, and the more humiliating details I disclosed, the more flat-out hilarious they found the entire story. Who cares how old the kid is, they must have thought, he's a riot.
“When you got the callback, and then the part, well, it was just surreal,” Mom marvels. “I couldn't believe it.” She couldn't, but I could.
In addition to the lead in the series, which would begin filming later that summer, I was also offered the lead role in a separate project, a TV film that would begin production shortly after I got out of school. It was that easy. After making $600 for the entire summer the year before, I would now be getting a check for $600 every week. That summer, between the eight episodes of Leo & Me and the TV movie, I pulled in almost six grand.
I mention the money because when people ask how it was that, given my many interests, it was acting that I ultimately decided to pursue, I'll laugh and give the glib but essentially honest reply: “It was the first thing I got paid any real money for.” In 1977, for a sixteen-year-old, working-class Canadian kid, an army brat, $6,000 was a shitload of cash. But that's really only part of the answer.
I enjoyed the experience, the creative process, and as much as anything else, the working environment on the set. For the first time I was accepted as an equal among adults—people with far more experience than I h
ad, who recognized in me abilities that I had not known I possessed and helped me to nurture them. This applied not only to my fellow actors, or the producers and directors, but to the seemingly endless numbers of people—gaffers, sound engineers, camera crew, hair and makeup people, and all the others—that it takes to make a TV show.
When the cameras weren't rolling it seemed as if we were always laughing, and the tone of the humor was often darker, more complicated and irreverent than anything I'd known. These artists and artisans occupied a world apart from the sober and serious sort of workplace most adults I knew had resigned themselves to. These were the people my father had warned me about. I was home.
In the fall of 1977, I entered high school (which in Canada begins in the eleventh grade) with a new confidence—not in my ability to meet a new level of academic challenge, but in the conviction that school was, more than ever, irrelevant to me. Throughout the eleventh grade, I continued to pick up acting jobs, commercials, radio work, and guest spots on other CBC television series. It became more and more difficult to reconcile my burgeoning acting career with what to my mind were the increasingly pointless demands of school. Somehow I muddled through, though by the end of the final semester, I was still technically a few credits short of completing the eleventh grade. If I wanted my high school diploma and hoped to graduate with the rest of the class of 1979, I'd have to repeat those courses in the fall. If eleventh grade was tough, twelfth was going to be killer.
But before that, taking what was left of the summer after Leo & Me wrapped, I decided to spend some of my fresh TV money on a trip to California, my first. I'd made a new friend during the previous school year, a senior named Chris Coady. As bright as Andy Hill but with more of an outlaw edge, Coady had an irreverence and a twisted sense of humor that made him my ideal running buddy. The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls tour would be passing through California in August, and we made plans to go catch the band at Anaheim Stadium. Chris didn't have a lot of cash, so I paid for most of the trip—the plane tickets, the motel room near Disneyland—and we had a blast. Living it up in the Hotel California, we lounged by the pool, drank watery American beer, and chatted up girls who, like us, had come from various parts of the world to see the Stones. By the day of the concert, we'd run through most of our money and handed over what was left to ticket scalpers. By our last two days there we were completely broke, our only sustenance being the hot chocolate we'd get at a nearby Denny's with the free coupons we scrounged from the motel lobby. I had no idea, of course, that by the following summer I'd actually be living in California. Those few days of pseudo-poverty were a foreshadowing of the two or three years of very real economic hardship I would soon have to endure.
During much of that fall I was, at least ostensibly, going to school by day and performing at night in a long-running hit play at the Vancouver Arts Club, the most prestigious Equity theater company in town. This meant working until well after midnight every night. I would climb out of bed in the morning exhausted, go through the I'm-off-to-class motions, climb into my new pickup truck, and drive to the nearest park. I'd pull under the cool shade of a maple tree, fish a foam pad out of the cab, lay it down in the bed of the truck, and go back to sleep.
My first subject in the morning was drama, and having left the ever-supportive Ross Jones behind in junior high, I found myself in the strange position of receiving solid reviews for my professional acting at the same time I was flunking high school drama for too many absences. Naturally I pointed this irony out to my drama teacher, arguing that I should get credit for the work experience. She wouldn't budge.
By November it became clear that I was flunking just about every class I had. The whole high school thing had become a farce. I talked to my parents and told them I truly did want to graduate, but not at the price of throwing away the promising career I had embarked on. Mom urged me to hang in there, and made me promise that if she and Dad could work out a compromise with the school—credit for work experience combined with tutoring and makeup courses outside of the regular classroom—I would stick with it and do my very best. Surprisingly, my dad sympathized with my frustrations even more than Mom. I was making a living. Indeed, he'd be the first to admit that I was making more in a year than he was. So my parents agreed to fight for me and vowed that if no compromise could be worked out, they would support my decision to leave school and work full-time.
The school administration refused to bend, and to my relief and surprise, my parents held up their end of the bargain. They supported my decision to drop out, despite the fact it had always been their dream to see one of their children go to college.
Why did they let me do it? Well, some of the credit has to go to Nana. “We had no reason to doubt that these opportunities, the plays and the job at the CBC, were what Nana said was gonna happen,” my mother says now. “Because Nana was so strong in her beliefs, if we hadn't followed through and supported your decision, I would have felt like we were letting her down, as well as you. So Dad and I said, ‘Go for it.’”
With Mom and Dad's blessing I gave notice that I would not be returning for classes in the spring. I made the rounds at school, collecting my things and saying good-bye to friends and those teachers with whom I was still on speaking terms. Their doubt about the wisdom of my decision was nearly unanimous. I remember one exchange in particular, with a social studies teacher. “You're making a big mistake, Fox,” he warned. “You're not going to be cute forever.” I thought about this for a beat, and as I turned to make my escape from his classroom—from school and, soon enough, from my life in Canada—I shot him a smile and replied in a measured tone, “Maybe just long enough, sir. Maybe just long enough.”
Chapter Three
Hollywood High
U.S. Interstate 5—April 1979
Here's an unlikely concept for a buddy movie, a sort of late 1970s, cross-generational Farley-Spade road picture: my dad and I driving through the night to California, on our way to Hollywood for my shot at the big time. My sidekick lay stretched out in the rearview mirror, Dad's 250 pounds contorted into the backseat of our 1977 Dodge Aspen. He was catching a little shut-eye while I drove the night shift, following the treacherous twists of Interstate 5 through Oregon's Cascade mountain range. We'd meet the sun as it brimmed over the more hospitable hills of northern California. Now that he was asleep, I could tune out his twenty-four-hour-all-news radio station and tune in the only static-free music I could find—new Doobie Brothers. “What a fool believes, he sees,” crooned Mike McDonald, “no wise man has the power to reason away.”
I remember thinking that night just how far Dad and I had come over the past few weeks. The fact that he was accompanying me to Hollywood, after years of regarding my ambitions from beneath a skeptical brow, was a turn of events I never would have anticipated. Of course his decision to let me bail on school was a gesture that cut both ways: sure, it was a show of support, but it was also, I knew, a challenge—this was put-up-or-shut-up time. Still, he'd given my clichéd dream of escape—dropping out of school to chase fame and fortune in America—an interesting twist: if I was going to be a runaway, I was going to be a runaway with a chauffeur.
Deciding to make my move that April was the hard part. It meant passing on work I had already lined up for the spring and summer in Vancouver: a German television production of Huckleberry Finn. But Toni Howard, an L.A.-based casting director I'd met on an earlier job, had convinced me that the time to strike was now. She believed I held an advantage: American producers would be eager to hire an experienced actor who looked young enough to play a kid, since labor laws made it costly to use actors under eighteen. Spring was also the casting season for TV pilots. It didn't take much to convince me, so supremely confident was I that a Hollywood career was my destiny. But since I wouldn't turn eighteen till June, I'd need my parents to sign off on my plan—and that seemed inconceivable.
Mom: “Are you sure this is what you want to do?”
Me: “Absolutely.”
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Dad: “You realize what you'd be turning down, right? You're that confident?”
Me: “Absolutely.”
And then Dad shocked me.
“Well if you're going to be a lumberjack, you might as well go to the goddamn forest.”
Dad agreed not only to drive me down to L.A., but to underwrite the adventure, putting the whole trip on his Visa card.
“A down payment on my pension plan,” he joked.
I couldn't have been more earnest in my reply: “It's a deal.”
We were off to the goddamn forest.
Los Angeles—April 1979
As soon as we checked into our room at the Westwood Holiday Inn on Wilshire Boulevard, I hit the phone, confirming sit-downs with agents who said, yes, Toni had been in touch and they were expecting my call. Dad advised me that he'd just drive to the appointments and debrief me after each one—his way of signaling to me that this was my show, not his.
My composure was tested during one particularly memorable interview. The agent in the chair across from me seemed distinctly underwhelmed at the prospect of representing me. An awkwardness hung over the office like a methane cloud. For some reason, she couldn't look me in the eye—her gaze kept drifting down to my feet. Finally, she summoned up the nerve to say what was on her mind, in the process interrupting some of my wittiest patter.
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