My success to that point had been so unexpected—I was nowhere near being able to process it—that I regarded the whole thing as a matter of luck. Would the luck hold? That seemed too much even to ask for.
In Chilliwack, when I was four years old, my mother took a job for a time and would leave me in the care of a baby-sitter, one of the other mothers in the neighborhood. It was all well and good for me to wander off whenever I wanted, but I didn't appreciate it much when the adults in my life did the same thing. This is when my four-year-old mind discovered the power of reverse psychology. From about four o'clock on, I'd stand in the baby-sitter's front yard, tears streaming down my face, chanting the same mantra over and over again: “My mom's not coming back—my mom's not coming back.” But of course she always did—a miracle that I credited to being prepared if she didn't.
Maybe that's what I was doing in the days before the release of Back to the Future. My luck was about to run out, I told myself, the other shoe was set to fall. And when it did, I wanted to be adequately prepared. I said good-bye to Pete and hung up the phone. I shuffled over to the minibar, cracked open a bottle of beer. If this was the beginning of the end, I had to admit, it'd been a hell of a ride.
The ride, it turned out, was only beginning.
Chapter Four
Lost in the Fun House
An American Newsstand—Circa 1986
GQ: “The Rise and Rise of Michael J. Fox”
US: “Michael J. Fox—Back to My Future”
People: “The Secret of His Success”
Rolling Stone: “The Hot Issue—Michael J. Fox”
Playgirl: “On the Prowl with Michael J. Fox”
Bop: “Who's Cuter? Kirk Cameron or Michael J.—You Decide!”
There's a newsstand in my old Studio City neighborhood, on the southwest corner of Van Nuys and Ventura boulevards. Every now and then during the post–Back to the Future eighties, I'd stop by and—baseball cap tugged down low on my brow, sunglasses snug to the bridge of my nose—discreetly scan the racks. No, I wasn't checking out Hustler or Juggs or any of the other girlie magazines, but surveying the versions of myself on display—People, US, GQ, TV Guide, MAD, Cracked, AdWeek, Variety, McCall's, Family Circle, The National Enquirer, The Star, The Globe, Seventeen, 16, Tiger Beat, Bop, and on and on.
Everywhere I looked, I saw my image reflected back at me. But that was the thing—none of them was a true representation of my real self, whoever that was; it was more like a hall of mirrors. These weren't reflections so much as they were different facets of my public persona, skewed by the various publishers and editors to best promote their point of view—not mine—and, most important, attract whatever demographic group they catered to. So on the cover of People I was the boy next door, GQ a well-groomed yuppie, Playgirl a sex symbol. . . . Some I recognized, others might have been aliens inhabiting my body—in fact, that might have been a headline on one of the tabloids.
That hall of mirrors on Van Nuys is a perfect metaphor for what my life had become as I found myself in the labyrinthine fun house of America mega-celebrity—a place where, I discovered, it is easy to get lost.
Here are the facts, a recap of my story thus far. In 1979, feeling constricted by the conformity in which I was raised and with dreams of becoming an actor, I left Canada for Los Angeles. Over the next three years, I enjoyed a modest, anonymous success, but by the spring of the third year was struggling. Winning the role of Alex on Family Ties in 1982 sparked a turnaround. Surrounded by talented producers, actors, and writers, I played a character who happened to strike a chord with viewers. I gained a certain notoriety—of the second-guest-on-Johnny-Carson, two-page-profile-in-TV-Guide (after the crossword puzzle) variety. Then, for the first time in my career, I started to receive film offers, adding that work to my TV commitments. In the summer of 1985, with Family Ties the second most-watched program in prime time, Back to the Future shot to number one at the box office, with Teen Wolf inexplicably holding number two. And so it was that in a brief six-year period I had become famous.
Here's the fiction: that was my plan all along.
Well, wait a minute, wasn't it? Didn't I set out for Hollywood at the age of eighteen to seek my fame and fortune, and three years later, after shooting the Family Ties pilot, report to Coady that I was “finally about to go large”? Wasn't my goal, all along—wasn't the whole idea—to one day become rich and famous?
It's not that simple. “Richandfamous” was as much a cliché fantasy to me as it would be to a truck driver from Peoria. So, sure, inasmuch as “richandfamous” implied freedom, it held an appeal. But if the cliché is broken down into synonyms like, for instance, millions and adoration, then, no, I don't believe that either of those words, together or apart, were prime motivators.
Rich, relative to my background, meant buying my own food and clothing and being able to pay the rent. Fame, to me then, meant something as basic as not having to constantly explain myself, earning a reputation and, along with that, room in which to pursue my interests. I didn't want anyone to kiss my ass, I just wanted to get to a place where they couldn't kick it.
Simply put, my highest ambition was to be an actor. I was focused on getting work, not gaining wealth. The law of averages suggests that a career as a performer is not a likely means to that end. And, as for fame—were that the only objective, there might have been an easier route, though none so direct as exist today. Now I'd just have to go camping with a group of equally machiavellian narcissists in Bora Bora or the Australian Outback, eat a few rats, a handful of blowfly larvae, and, bam, every talk show and magazine in the country would come calling.
What I really desired—and for a long time even this seemed too much to wish for—was for acting to be a means to a means. I wanted whatever part I was playing to lead to another, and so on. And, hey, if something happened, well, that would be too good to be true.
Something happened.
I'm about to take you on a brief tour—highlights and lowlights—of the Being-Famous-in-America Fun House, a shape-shifting world where only one thing is perfectly clear: there is no way to prepare for the journey.
No maps or guidebooks are available, and few who have experienced the maze leave behind helpful advice or even the most cryptic clues regarding pitfalls or shortcuts. I was pretty much on my own. I had to rely upon whatever moral and ethical compass my family provided me (here, I was lucky), or trust my impulses (in this department I was not so lucky).
Also, contrary to popular opinion, before you enter the fun house, you aren't handed a waiver to sign titled FAUSTIAN BARGAIN: You want to be an actor? Fine, but by choosing such an undignified and, worse yet, selfish (admit it, bub, you just wanna be richandfamous) vocation, you hereby waive any right to complain about, contest, or place conditions upon whatever might happen to you. Just put your autograph right here on the dotted line . . . I'm not complaining, but I sure as hell don't remember signing anything.
It should come as no surprise that fame—showbiz fame anyway—is so disorienting. After all, the theater, where it all begins, is founded on a conspiracy of mutual deception. The performer pretends to be someone he is not, and the audience willingly suspends its disbelief. It's a confidence game in which both parties risk the humiliation of being played for a sucker. The actor makes himself vulnerable to the embarrassment of failure by trusting that the audience will grant him the time and attention to craft his lie. In return, the audience depends upon the actor's gift to keep them from feeling like fools for believing. Artfully transacted, this is one con where the potential exists for everybody to win. The payoff is an hour or so of collective—and harmless—magical thinking.
The symbiotic relationship between the entertainer and the entertained goes something like this: The audience witnesses its darkest fears and deepest fantasies being played out in a safe environment—experiential enrichment without emotional risk. The performance holds out a mirror in which we can observe the most secret parts of ourselves without
the risk of anyone else recognizing our reflection. The actor is rewarded with applause and his cut of the price of admission—fame and fortune at its most basic.
Once you get beyond the physical and temporal boundaries of the playhouse, however, the deal gets more confusing. With TV and film, for example, the sense of scale is thrown so completely out of whack that the whole idea and value of the mirror is lost. Take the film actor—blown up to fill a twenty-foot-high film screen, he assumes the dimensions of a god. Some in the audience, viewing him from the darkened, churchlike environment of the cineplex, might even begin to regard him as such—hence, matinee idol. In contrast, the television actor is miniaturized, omnipresent as a new member of the viewer's family. But there's a godlike power in this illusion as well, turning on its ubiquity, and the sheer number of lives that the performer can touch in the intimate space of their living rooms.
These perceptions are amplified by all of the other forms of mass media—newspapers, magazines, radio, books, and the Internet. By now, almost all of the boundaries of the original theatrical conceit have vanished, and the theater of celebrity expands to become the whole world. In this new multimedia realm, there seems to be no beginning or end to the performance, no backstage or onstage, no proscenium. Everything is now part of the show—the performer's private life included.
So much of this magical thinking is unbidden and beyond the control of the celebrity. Fame is not something you do; it's a perception that originates and resides not in the mind of the celebrity, but in the collective imagination of the public. Over time, the rewards to the performer and the expectations of the audience grow unchecked, and everybody, each for their own reasons, is happy to forget that the whole exercise is based on illusion. A simple magic trick confined to a theater or television screen has mutated into a society-wide epidemic of magical thinking.
Odd as this might sound, becoming famous is something that happened to me in the same way that Parkinson's disease is something that happened to me. I'm not saying celebrity is a disease, but it can trigger an abnormal psychological condition not unlike mania or amnesia. I became so intoxicated on the nectar of money and the ambrosia of unlimited possibility, that I fell completely under its influence, forgetting for a time that it wasn't real.
Fortunately, someone came into my life to remind me that the whole thing was hocus-pocus; that while it might be okay to get caught up in the wonder of it all, I should never forget how the trick works. Like many others in the same position, I eventually had to make a choice: either live in a world where I believed in the illusion, and accept privilege as entitlement; or reject magical thinking and do my best to keep my feet planted in the real world. I'm embarrassed to say it wasn't an easy choice, but I ultimately went with the second option. It's a good thing that I did—because if I were still living according to the fun house rules when I was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, it would, I'm sure, have destroyed me.
IT'S GOOD TO BE THE KING
Don't get me wrong—I had a really, really good time.
When I was growing up, I was crazy about girls. I can remember the specific crush I had in each year of grade school; I could even give you names. But by the time I was a teenager, I felt shy around the opposite sex. Maybe it had to do with an insecurity about my height. I'd also resigned myself to the fact that, in school anyway, girls go for the jocks, not the theater geeks. Still, while I was hardly a lothario, I did date a little, and by the time I dropped out of high school, I was going out with Diane, my first long-term relationship.
By the mid-eighties, it was a whole new ball game. You know that old sentence that starts with “girls who never used to give me the time of day . . .”? Well, I'd end it with “. . . were now inviting me home to read it off of their bedside alarm clocks.” And as for the question, “Does it bother you that maybe she just wants to sleep with you because you're a celebrity?” My answer to that one was, “Ah . . . nope.” Mel Brooks as Louis XVI in The History of the World: Part I said it best when, arms wrapped around the waists of a pair of corseted ladies-in-waiting, he gushed, “It's good to be the King.”
. . .
I may have felt like a king, but I was out of my league in the company of a real princess. I returned to England in the fall of 1985 for the royal premiere of Back to the Future. Princess Diana was in attendance. Upon arriving at the theater, Bob Zemeckis, Steven Spielberg, the cast, and other invited guests were ushered into a reception area off the lobby. The chief of royal protocol prepped us for our formal introduction to Diana. Sweating bullets in my starched, rented tuxedo, I probably had more reason to be nervous than the others in our party. I was Canadian after all, and therefore a royal subject. This was my future Queen I was about to meet. It occurred to me that Nana might be watching.
While we waited at the bar to be escorted to the receiving line, I made the critical mistake of downing a couple of beers to calm my nerves. I didn't get drunk, but that's not the only consequence of poorly timed beer intake.
The Princess was cordial, and she looked even more beautiful—sexier—than I'd expected. She was wearing a backless blue silk gown, a generous strand of pearls wrapped once around her long, elegant neck and then draped down the length of her spine. I wanted to mention that, in my humble opinion, this was a really good look for her, but the opportunity didn't present itself. The protocol guy had been exacting in his litany of dos and don'ts, and I'd followed them to a tee. To everybody's relief (maybe even Nana's), I made it through the introduction without a serious gaffe.
I'd soon get another shot.
The royal party was shown into the theater, and once they were settled, the ushers came back for our group. I was led to my seat and almost went into cardiac arrest. It was right next to Diana's. I was going to spend a night at the movies with Princess Diana. Jesus, I thought, except for the fact that she's married and is the Princess of Wales, this is practically a date. Well at least I could pretend, couldn't I? As long as I didn't get carried away, fake a yawn, and leave my arm draped across her shoulder. What if it got caught in all those pearls? I was sweating all over again.
In the moments before the movie started there was a flurry of small talk, initiated by the Princess. That was part of Mr. Protocol's whole riff, along with all the honorifics you had to use when addressing her. You couldn't speak to her unless she spoke to you first; if seated, you weren't allowed to rise until she did; and never, ever, did you turn your back toward her. I didn't anticipate any problem adhering to these guidelines until the lights went out and Back to the Future's opening credits scrolled across the movie screen.
Then it hit me: a sharp and unmistakable discomfort—I had to take a leak. Urgently. Made sense—the anxiety, the goddamn beer—but what the hell was I going to do? I was a hostage to etiquette. She'd be too polite to speak during my movie, and if she did say anything, whatever it was, “Excuse me, Your Highness, I have to go wring it,” was not going to be the appropriate response. I couldn't just get up and leave unless she did. And even if I could, I'd have to back away, tripping over the other people in our row and probably falling on my ass. There was, of course, one final option—but that was unthinkable.
And so my fantasy date with a princess turned into two of the most excruciating hours of my life, a timely reminder from nature not to get too carried away by my heady circumstances. No matter how many people were eager to let me believe otherwise, I was only human. There'd soon be more reminders. I'd need them.
Though not a king, or even a prince, I was quickly gaining the means with which to live uncommonly well. By late 1986, the driveway of my Laurel Canyon home resembled a luxury car lot. I owned a Ferrari, a Range Rover, a Mercedes 560SL convertible, a Jeep Cherokee, and a Nissan 300ZX. I can't remember the intricate decision tree I had to climb in order to determine which one I'd drive to work on any given day—it probably had something to do with the weather, or which car had more gas in the tank, or upholstery that best matched whatever shirt I happened to throw on
that morning.
Then there was the house itself. I had some remodeling done during the summer of 1986 while I was away making two films back-to-back, Light of Day in Chicago and then The Secret of My Success in New York City. The bungalow already had three bedrooms, so additional sleeping quarters weren't called for. At a cost of almost a half a million dollars, I commissioned a massive addition to the main bedroom, creating a master suite with retractable skylights and a jacuzzi/steam room area complete with fireplace, two TVs, and a full wet bar. For a twenty-five-year-old lottery winner, money was no object—and neither was good taste.
I remember a Saturday Night Live bit from the early eighties in which Eddie Murphy puts on white-face and discovers a different America. His first stop, post-makeup chair, is an office building newsstand. He picks up the morning paper, waits for a black customer to finish making a purchase, and then puts his paper down on the counter, along with a quarter. The vendor is confused at first, and only after nervously checking to make sure that the black customer is gone, smiles and pushes the money back toward Murphy. “You're kidding me, right pal?” the newsy laughs. “You don't have to pay for this. Take the paper . . . it's okay. Just take it.” Later, at a savings and loan, when an African-American loan officer asks the Caucasian Murphy for his credit history, a white banker has to come to the rescue. Once they're alone, the banker apologizes with a wink and pulls out stack after stack of fresh $100 bills. “And don't worry about paying this back . . . Need more?” Whenever African-Americans aren't present, Murphy learns, white people give each other things for free. But that's not all. On his way home, the subway car he's riding discharges the last of its nonwhite passengers and then erupts into a spontaneous cocktail party, complete with champagne, hors d'oeuvres, and a jazz quartet.
So what does this satire about the African-American experience have to do with my story? Well, on a political level, not much. But like Murphy's astonished black Everyman, I was experiencing the shock and vaguely illicit thrill of an unexpected crossover into a parallel universe, one that I had no idea even existed.
Lucky Man Page 11
