Before that first meeting with Joyce, what little I knew about psychology, psychiatry, therapy, and/or analysis I had read in books and magazines or seen (or acted out) on television; and then there were all those Woody Allen movies. I'd laughed at the New Yorker cartoons—a man lies on an analyst's couch, fingers knitted across his middle above a caption that reads: I had a dream I was getting results. Freud, I'd heard, called analysis “the talking cure.” Joyce's approach followed Carl Jung; but whatever school it was that I had stumbled into, I'd soon be doing a lot of talking, having a lot of dreams, and getting results.
How did it work? The author E. B. White said about humor that examining it too closely “is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested, and the frog dies of it.” I think the same is true for analysis. A lot has to do, after all, with the therapist, or more specifically, the fit between analyst and analysand. With Joyce and me, the connection was almost immediate. After having lain bare so many details of my misery in our first encounter, I was relieved in subsequent sessions to spot no red flags warning me that my trust had been misplaced. I sensed no judgment or criticism, and no dogma. Joyce, I'd learn later, has a background in the theater, so when I'd talk about career issues, no translation was necessary. Still, this wasn't friendship—she made it clear I couldn't charm, smart-ass, or bullshit my way out of confronting my demons, or what Jung would call “my shadow.”
I have to give myself some credit, though. Once I embarked upon this process, I made a commitment to it, seeing Joyce three times a week. This wasn't quite as time-consuming as it sounds, however. Those three hours freed me up to live the rest of my life, react to whatever I might encounter without feeling its weight exaggerated by the emotional burden I was carrying. Joyce's office became a place to, as she puts it, “hold the energy,” a sanctuary where, once having unlocked the doors to my unconscious, and exposed the fear and uncertainty within, I could safely leave all of it there until I could return to explore more thoroughly. I didn't have to hide in the bathtub anymore, worried that I was going to say the wrong thing. I could say the “wrong” thing all I wanted to, fifty minutes a session, three days a week. Rediscovering the shower—a cleansing rinse instead of a long wallowing soak—was not only a time-saver, but an indication of a new outlook.
The smoke was beginning to clear. I could see that my life wasn't completely in flames, but was beset by a series of small fires that, with Joyce's help, I set about extinguishing. Old patterns crumbled, sometimes forcibly. A couple of weeks in, my assistant called to reschedule an appointment. Joyce asked that I call her myself. When I did, she told me, in so many words, to erase her number from my assistant's Rolodex. If I had something to say to her, I'd have to speak for myself. Similarly, when she handed me her first bill and I gave her my accountant's address, she refused it, saying, “No, this is between us. I bill you, you pay me.” Joyce subtly but firmly established the rules of the partnership in ways that confronted the trouble spots in my dealings with the world outside of her office. Basic Adult Responsibility 101, I was beginning to understand. This is the way most people live. No bubbles.
Parkinson's was not a fire that Joyce and I could put out, but we could work on my denial. The first step was for me, at long last, to claim my Parkinson's diagnosis—to own it instead of continuing to let it own me. Acceptance didn't come without flashes of anger and sieges of pain, psychic as well as physical. Joyce reminds me that when my left arm would tremor violently during sessions, I would punch it with my clenched fist—sometimes pummeling it until I raised bruises. Within weeks of beginning my work with Joyce, I went, at her prompting, to see a new internist, Dr. Bernard Kruger in Manhattan. He referred me to Dr. Allan Ropper, a top neurologist in Boston. I scheduled an appointment (myself!), and the first week of February 1994 took a shuttle flight up to meet him in his office.
The sort of doctor whose bearing automatically conveys both authority and reassurance, Allan Ropper is one of the co-authors of Principles of Neurology, a doorstop of a book that is the neurologist's bible. During one of our visits many years later, Allan was trying to explain to me why I was responding to a certain medication in a particular way. He opened that giant textbook, flipped through its pages, and muttered without a trace of self-consciousness, “I can't remember what I wrote about that.”
Dr. Ropper conducted his examination, then we sat down in his office to talk. He wrote out some new prescriptions. He had some ideas about different medications and how to titrate them in order to maximize their benefits and smooth out the transitions.
He explained the reasons for many of the symptoms I'd long contended with, gave terms to tics and behaviors that I hadn't even realized were part of the disease. For example, my tendency to bring the thumb and all four fingers of my left hand together in a point, like I was creating a shadow puppet of an ostrich's head, was a phenomenon called “tenting.” The fact that I was experiencing symptoms only on my left side was also typical, he said. The initial stage of Parkinson's disease is almost always asymmetric, or unilateral; it's not at all unusual for a patient's symptoms to remain limited to one side of the body for many years (though inevitably, the symptoms will spread to the other side). Dr. James Parkinson himself had noted this phenomenon when he first described the disease in 1817.
All of this information helped chip away at my uncertainty and sense of isolation. What I was experiencing was real, that much I knew; but the doctor served as a conduit to a broader body of knowledge about P.D. This helped me to see the disease itself as a fact apart from my own experience with it. I was not an anomaly. All this was happening to others, too. And while I gained no particular satisfaction from that, it did help me understand that it wasn't personal.
To my surprise, Dr. Ropper was also complimentary. He looked past all I didn't know about Parkinson's, the gaps in knowledge that, given how long I'd been diagnosed with the disease, were inexcusable, and instead offered praise for my ability to notice and describe my symptoms. “Being an actor makes you inherently very observant about your behavior. The manner in which you felt and expressed the experience is very different from most patients. It puts you at an advantage in managing it.”
Oddly, I found comfort in my conversation with Dr. Ropper. It had been so long since I had talked to a neurologist, or for that matter anyone with more than a layman's understanding of Parkinson's disease. For one thing, he forthrightly addressed that prognosis I'd received when first diagnosed—that I had “ten good years” left to work, a deadline that, I was acutely aware, meant that by now, I was down to seven. How about a little extra time added on? Let's be honest, the last three haven't been all that “good.” Dr. Ropper dismissed the whole notion of a timetable, except to say that all indications suggested mine was likely to be a slow progression given that other cardinal features, like rigidity, were still minor relative to the tremors on my left side. “I don't think anyone knows how much time they have. The rate in younger individuals is known to be slower and more unpredictable. The only thing you can predict is that, like aging, it's going to go on.”
Pre-Joyce, pre-Ropper, my unarticulated belief was that by thinking about Parkinson's, I was hastening its arrival. It was as if I could choose between staying in the past where P.D. didn't exist, or a future where I would be overwhelmed by it. Life had become a set of unbroachable predicaments, events, and outcomes that I was racing from or toward, or, worse, that I feared were racing toward me. This defensive, compartmentalized attitude toward life with Parkinson's also infected my career, and my most important personal relationships. I'm thinking especially of Tracy and Sam.
If I can't fix it, I don't even want to talk about it. As a personal doctrine, this one is seriously flawed, but carried into a marriage, it is pure poison. Sadly, I thought I was doing Tracy a favor—after all, there was no way she could do anything about my illness, so why burden her by talking about it? But with a problem so huge, not discussing it meant not discussing much of anything. Even small talk wa
s risky, because who knew what bigger issues that could lead to? Bad enough I had allowed P.D. to own me, but by my silence—cutting my wife and family off from the experience—I had made them slaves to it as well. And however dire my circumstance, that obviously didn't preclude Tracy from having travails of her own. God forbid Tracy came to me with unrelated questions about challenges she was facing in her own life. Unless the answer was immediately obvious to me, I felt as though she was bringing up the problem for no other purpose but to confront me with my ineffectiveness.
If I can't fix it, I don't even want to think about it. I knew, of course, that that wouldn't stop Tracy from thinking about my illness. Without ever directly enquiring about them, Tracy's thoughts on this subject, whatever they were, became my obsession. Session after session spent working through these issues in Joyce's office helped me to see that I was setting a trap for Tracy by never addressing the subject head-on, and my self-isolating behavior did nothing to invite disclosure. Questions like, “Does my being sick make you afraid? Are you disappointed that I'm different now from when you married me? Are you worried about the future? Would you love me if you knew that I'm afraid, I'm disappointed, I'm worried about the future?” all went unasked. But that didn't stop me from filling in the blanks myself. Tracy's answers, as I imagined them, devastated me. It was unfair for me to assume the worst—she hadn't left me; how could I look past that?—but in my war with P.D., the first casualty had been trust. No one was to blame for my disease, not even myself, yet it still left me with a sense of betrayal—and in time, I came to project that onto everyone else, even the person closest to me. I was beginning to understand how unfair this was. But, if it was wrong to simply invent a point of view for Tracy without giving her the opportunity to accept or disavow it (or maybe even offer a point of view of her own) in one area, her silence itself did speak volumes: she never talked anymore about having another child together. Enough not said.
. . .
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 S
eventy-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.
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