Lucky Man

by Michael J. Fox

  “Listen, Michael, you've got a great look and you're very funny and charming. Toni had wonderful things to say about you, so you're obviously talented. It's just that I don't understand why she didn't mention . . . that is, I wasn't prepared . . . well, I wasn't aware that you had a disability.” And with that her eyes went back down to my feet.

  “I don't. At least I don't think I do.”

  “Then why are you wearing orthopedic shoes?”

  Now we were both staring at my feet. Those weren't orthopedic shoes. They weren't shoes at all, in fact, they were boots—jet black, glam rock, platform boots with four-inch heels and two-inch soles—the very height of 1970s cool, in my considered opinion. Embarrassed, I managed to laugh it off while assuring her that my only handicap was being a few inches too short—and, I realized in a sickening flash, several years behind the California fashion curve. Anyway, the cloud quickly evaporated and the rest of the meeting went well.

  After rejoining Dad in the office waiting room, we went downstairs to a coffee shop and slipped into a booth. “Well, she wants to sign me too,” I reported. “By the way, can you lend me another fifty bucks? I gotta get a new pair of shoes.”

  On the fourth day in Los Angeles, we packed to go home; not because anything had gone wrong—quite the contrary, everything had gone preposterously right. Every agent I met had offered to take me on. Most had sent me out on auditions in order to gauge reaction, polling the casting directors for feedback. Every audition earned a callback, and three of the callbacks produced solid offers. This Hollywood thing was beginning to look easy.

  Deciding which role to take was straightforward. Only one movie was scheduled to start production in June, after my eighteenth birthday—a Disney feature called Midnight Madness. The less said about the script, the better, but Midnight Madness was my first real job in America, and I was thrilled to have it.

  Now, all that was left to do was hire an agent. Dad and I had lunch with the Gersh Agency's Bob Gersh, the agent who'd sent me out on the Disney job. Bob was naturally solicitous of my father's approval, and he asked Dad if he had any questions. My father just smiled, put his big hand on my shoulder, and said, “I prefer to let him do all the talking.” You have no idea just how exotic those words sounded coming from my dad.

  “Did you know,” I asked Dad as we left the restaurant in Beverly Hills, “that his father, Phil Gersh, was Bogart's agent?” Dad just shook his head. Too much. We drove back to the Holiday Inn, checked out, and loaded our bags into the trunk. One last stop, delivering a pot of flowers to Toni Howard, and we were on the I-5 again, heading north.

  Queen Elizabeth Park, New Westminster, B.C.—June 9, 1979

  It was my eighteenth birthday, and I celebrated it back in Vancouver. I had a plane ticket to leave the next morning for Los Angeles and begin work on the Disney picture. Plenty of congratulations and backslaps all around. Mom, Dad, and my sibs were there, of course, as were most of my extended family—everyone from the videotape, in fact, with the sad exception of Nana. Chris Coady was present, and so, too, was Diane, the girl I'd been seeing for the previous six months.

  The colors in the park that afternoon were jaw dropping. A cobalt sky presided over early summer gardens of pastel pinks and purples. Elsewhere, a dozen different shades of green—from the pale streaks of lichen on streamside boulders to the deep jade of the Douglas firs. In the distance a white-capped mountain range crowned the treetops. This is why the license plates say Beautiful British Columbia, and I realized just how much I would miss it. But all this natural beauty exists only in response to rain, I reminded myself, and the occasional day of technicolor spectacle was bought and paid for with weeks and weeks of dull, damp gray. I wasn't going to miss the gray.

  If they could have overheard my thoughts that afternoon, my friends and family probably would no doubt have found them silly and self-dramatizing. It was only one movie, after all—one job, six weeks. It's not like I was moving to California, they'd say. I'd be back. I knew otherwise, and so, in their hearts, did my mom and dad, especially Dad. He had made a point of telling me on the way back to Canada how well I'd handled myself and how proud he was. “You've got the world by the tail,” he announced while driving north on I-5. “Just hold on.” I realized that for me, the trip we made together to Los Angeles had been a rite of passage, a coming-of-age ceremony, like those in cultures the world over. But unlike many such rites, which often involve abandonment or even scarification—some physical evidence of a test or ordeal endured—mine was not a wounding ritual. Dad had found a way to get past his misgivings and make my rite a ceremony of healing.

  Did this mean that on my eighteenth birthday, I had actually come of age? The events of the next fifteen years or so would lead one to a very different conclusion. But on that June ninth in the park, with friends, family, and other well-wishers gathered around, I felt as if I had reached a new level of maturity. There was no question in my mind that I was now indeed a man—as I leaned over and blew out the candles on a birthday cake decorated with an image of Mickey Mouse.

  OPENING CREDITS

  The Slums of Beverly Hills—1979–1981

  An inventory of my worldly possessions circa 1980: one duffel bag full of clothing (i.e., dirty laundry), one hot plate, some mismatched kitchenware, toiletries, blanket, bed sheets, and a wind-up alarm clock. Oh, and then there was the furniture: one mattress and one folding canvas director's chair.

  My studio apartment was seventeen by twelve feet with a microscopic bathroom—toilet, shower, no tub, and the domicile's one and only sink. The sink basin was too tiny to do dishes in, so I'd have to take them with me into the shower. More than once I washed my hair with Palmolive and my dishes with Head and Shoulders. A closet doubled as the kitchen.

  Technically, my address was that of a small pink stucco apartment building on Shirley Place in Beverly Hills, although I rarely saw the building's peaceful, tree-lined street side—I came and went via the back alley. There was a tiny separate garage structure where tenants would park their cars. My unit was one of the three built into the space above it. My front window gazed across a six-foot-wide pathway at the pink backside of the mother building. Peering through the narrow transom window in the bathroom required standing on top of the toilet seat. With nothing out there but Dumpsters, parked cars, and oil-stained asphalt, the vista did not reward the effort. But for $225 a month with a six-month lease, this was paradise.

  My alley marked the boundary between Beverly Hills and Century City, a tight cluster of soaring glass-and-steel office buildings constructed on land that was once the old Twentieth Century Fox back lot. Shirley Place was named for Shirley Temple, Fox's biggest star at the time the maps were redrawn. Sometimes referred to as “the slums of Beverly Hills,” the ring of multi-unit dwellings that circle the more affluent residential areas are actually attractive and luxurious—by my standards, anyway. People can live in bigger apartments for less money elsewhere in the city, but they covet the 90210 zip code that Aaron Spelling's Beverly Hills High soap opera was going to make world famous. The school itself, which backed up against the end of my alley, reeks of privilege and exclusivity. Just to walk past it can be an intimidating experience, as I discovered the day I bought my folding canvas director's chair.

  I'd picked up the chair—my first big purchase—for thirty bucks at Thrifty Drugs. Trekking back toward the apartment, my home, the chair slung over my shoulder, I must have looked like a complete rube, a total dink. Just as I was about to make the turn down my alley, a teenager from the high school drove by in a Porsche convertible. Slowing to a crawl, he considered me for a second and then, over the rumble of his turbo-charged engine, shouted, “Go back to the Valley!” I had no idea what he was talking about. The Valley? He meant the San Fernando, but for all I knew he was talking about the Fraser River Valley—Camp Chilliwack.

  Life as a fish out of water in Beverly Hills didn't really faze me, though. I'd always been an outsider in one way or another, and L
.A.—hell, America—seemed like outsider headquarters. As the number of days I spent there added up, so did the number of eccentrics, risk takers, and freethinkers I encountered. Equally captivating was the breathtaking racial and ethnic diversity. As I saw it, California was everything that Canada, with its polite provincialism and reverence for order, could never be. So, far from being alienated, I actually felt at home. The logic of this mecca of nonconformity was this: not fitting in meant that I truly belonged.

  Along with a new country, new city, new job, new apartment, and new chair, I'd also picked up a new identity. The Screen Actors Guild prohibits any two members from working under the same stage name, and they already had a “Michael Fox” on the books. My middle name is Andrew, but “Andrew Fox” or “Andy Fox” didn't cut it for me. “Michael A. Fox” was even worse, the word fox having recently come into use as a synonym for attractive. (Presumptuous?) It also sounded uncomfortably Canadian—Michael Eh? Fox—but maybe I was just being oversensitive. And then I remembered one of my favorite character actors, Michael J. Pollard, the guileless accomplice in Bonnie and Clyde. I stuck in the J, which I sometimes tell people stands for either Jenuine or Jenius, and resubmitted my forms.

  So it said Michael J. Fox on the call sheet I picked up at wrap each night that summer, or more accurately, each morning. True to its title, Midnight Madness turned out to be an endless series of all-nighters: six weeks of almost exclusively night shoots. The mix of late nights and young actors gave the set a loose frat party ambience. At least we had a few laughs—several more, we correctly sensed, than the audience ever would. Personally, I was just happy to be there. So what if I was working all night on a lousy project?—it left my days free to audition for better ones.

  Determined to stay in L.A., I hit the pavement looking for future employment. By autumn I'd landed my third post-Madness project. My only disappointment was not landing a feature film. I came close on a couple of movies, most notably Ordinary People, earning a callback to see the director. But Robert Redford seemed less than impressed by my reading; he spent the audition flossing his teeth. My next big screen role would not be until 1981, the then-futuristically titled Class of 1984, a teen exploitation flick that would make Midnight Madness look like Casablanca.

  Instead, I appeared in episodes of Family, Lou Grant, and in September had begun work as a regular on Palmerstown U.S.A., a CBS midseason pickup with an order for eight one-hour episodes. Walton-esque in tone, the drama chronicled a friendship between two families, one white, one black, in rural 1930s Tennessee. Reluctant at first, I committed to the show largely on the strength of its creator/producer team of Alex Haley and Norman Lear. As a bonus, the Southern twang I had to affect as the rednecked but well-meaning son of the town grocer helped to flatten out the conspicuously rounded vowels of my Canadian accent.

  With even more episodic TV work (Trapper John, M.D.; Here's Boomer); the odd industrial film and commercial (McDonald's, Tilex Foaming Tub and Tile Cleaner); as well as that previously mentioned cinema classic, Class of 1984, my first two-and-a-half years in Los Angeles had amounted to a reasonably successful run. Nothing spectacular, no redwoods were felled, but I had been able to find my way to a sufficient supply of nuts and berries.

  So why then, as 1981 wound down and 1982 loomed through the trees, was I perilously near starvation?

  Naïveté would be a generous explanation for the financial predicament I found myself in—abject stupidity, perhaps more honest. There's a cautionary lesson here. When I first arrived, the proverbial babe-in-the-woods, there were plenty of savvy forest denizens happy to offer guidance in exchange for a share of my earnings. I don't regard them as bad guys, but I don't think they woke up each morning wondering, “What can I do for Michael today?” The only true villain was a ravenous monster of my own creation, one I had unwittingly brought with me from Canada and kept locked in a kitchen cabinet.

  NO ABSOLUTION

  Those first days in L.A. were heady, but I was still only eighteen and a long way from home. I was always grateful whenever friends and family visited me in California. Coady came down for a week, and among other things, we hiked into the scrubby hills of the Cahuenga Pass in search of the Hollywood sign, where we shot a photo series of each of us dangling and lounging on its nine gigantic letters. My girlfriend Diane made a separate trip, and before leaving made plans to return, a pattern that would repeat itself until we were, for all intents and purposes, living together. All of my visitors expressed the same concern: while I'd taken great care of my career, I didn't seem to be taking very good care of myself.

  It's true that I'd developed some unhealthy attitudes regarding food and shelter. Tired of wrangling with the hot plate and scrubbing pots and pans with a soap-on-a-rope, I enlisted Ronald McDonald as my exclusive nutritionist. For any sustenance not offered on the golden arches menu, I improvised—beer and cigarettes, I reasoned, must fit someplace within the four major food groups.

  My casual approach to housekeeping made the one-room walk-up increasingly claustrophobic. A space that small simply couldn't withstand the accumulation of domestic debris that litters a bachelor's existence—Big Mac boxes, magazines, long-obsolete script pages, dirty laundry, dirty dishes, even dirty dirt. At one point, I adopted a cat for company. It turned out to be a tom who soon left for better prospects, but not before he'd permeated the apartment with an aroma well matched to its décor.

  Bob Gersh picked me up for lunch one day. After getting a look at (and whiff of) my apartment, he realized that his newest client, while a decent earner, was no star in the self-maintenance department. It was time, he calculated, to call in reinforcements.

  He introduced me to a husband and wife management team, who I'll refer to as B & S. Managers, they explained, do whatever agents cannot. Available at any hour, they'd devise the perfect career strategy, help me establish and meet goals, and so much more. With their vast network of contacts, they'd get me on a fast track to success. Bottom line: they'd be my new best friends in Hollywood.

  For his part, Bob earned the standard ten percent of my paycheck off the top, and for holding my hand, my new managers took another twenty percent. (Who says you can't put a price on friendship?) Whenever I needed help they couldn't provide, B & S directed me toward the appropriate Hollywood professional: a photographer, publicist, or lawyer. In my teenaged, fresh-from-Canada cluelessness, this pattern of delegating any and everything that needed doing in my life produced what I thought of as an ever-widening circle of “allies.” Only much later did I realize that “feeding frenzy” was probably a more apt description.

  Halfway through the first season of Palmerstown, my lease was up. Diane was by now my roommate, and needing more space, we found a slightly larger but equally funky one-bedroom apartment in nearby Brentwood. The new rent was almost double, $425, but in addition to a bathtub, this place boasted an actual kitchen sink.

  Above the kitchen sink there was a cupboard—just the right size for a monster. This was about the time that the mathematical “absolutes” I protested to my mother about during junior high school came back to bite me on the ass. You see, I had no patience for numbers, and therefore no facility for keeping track of my debts and expenditures.

  I was earning SAG minimum rates, which, I came to learn, barely covered the basics—apartment, clothing, car rental, food—plus business expenses (all those percentages). Then there was Uncle Sam. I had overlooked a subtlety in my check stubs during that first year in L.A.: my employers hadn't been deducting any state or federal taxes from my payments, and it never occurred to me, or my high-priced hand-holders, that I should be putting any money away for that purpose.

  Around this time I developed a habit of collecting all my bills, unpaid tax notices, and threatening missives from creditors into a loose, disorganized bundle and jamming them into that cupboard above the kitchen sink: a growing paper monster. Not wanting to think about it any more than I had to, never mind actually look at it, I'd open the cupboard only
long enough to feed the beast more red ink, then quickly slam the door shut. Out of sight, out of mind, like a Fibber McGee closet full of daunting, implacable absolutes.

  When I received my first tax bill from the IRS, I made a panicky call to B & S, and they recommended an accountant. This guy laid out an orderly method for applying all my present and future earnings toward achieving solvency, including paying off back taxes, for which services he would deduct from all present and future earnings five percent off the top. This brought my total up-front fees to a staggering thirty-five percent. “You also have to stop letting employers rent cars for you and deduct the charges from your paycheck,” my new accountant advised. “Their rates are inflated.” So, he generously leased me his Porsche.

  My CPA's blueprint for financial recovery never made it off the drawing board. Unable to work during a prolonged SAG strike in 1980, I was nearly broke going into the second and last season of Palmerstown. After the series was canceled, there were a few jobs, but they barely earned me enough to live on—and nowhere near enough to begin seriously paying down my debts. While most out-of-work actors can supplement their income by boxing groceries or waiting tables, my alien status made this impossible. The only way I could work legally in the U.S. was as an actor. I was in a bind.

  Buying into the time-honored Hollywood maxim that image is everything, I took some comfort in driving the Porsche—at least I didn't look unemployed.

  Eventually the accountant deemed me more trouble than I was worth. I fell behind on his bills, too—not only for the lease of the car, but also for his bookkeeping services. He dumped me and repossessed the Porsche. Now he was just another name on my lengthening list of creditors.

  “WHY DIDN'T ANYBODY TELL ME?”