Lucky Man

by Michael J. Fox

  Like the white people in the SNL skit, celebrities are the recipients of a hell of a lot of free stuff. At a time when I could finally afford to buy whatever shoes I wanted, I'd be invited down to the Nike showroom in Santa Monica, handed a huge canvas duffel bag, and invited to help myself to all the swoosh-emblazoned swag I could stuff inside. Nike's motives were obvious: even one published photograph of a celebrity wearing those free shoes had the value of an advertisement without the expense of an endorsement fee. Once, on the Tonight show, Jay Leno asked me how I liked living in the States. “It's great. Except for the beer. American beer's a little watery,” I confided. “So I drink Moosehead Ale, imported from Canada.” A week later, sitting at my kitchen table, I heard the grinding of a large vehicle laboring up my driveway. Drawing aside the curtain, I peered out the window to see a green beer delivery truck with the giant Moosehead logo painted on the side. “There's lots more where this came from,” the delivery guy said, handing me a business card. “Just give us a call when you run out.”

  I had stumbled upon one of the lesser-known truisms of American society: those who got, get. No wonder I could afford a black granite steam room—I was paying for little else. There were free meals, first-class travel, luxury hotel rooms. From my time in London's pubs to the day when I finally quit drinking altogether, I don't recall many bar tabs being slapped down on the mahogany in front of me, Moosehead or no Moosehead.

  Even better than those who got, get is the real prize in this particular box of Cracker Jack: the wink. You can't buy the wink—the unspoken acknowledgment from almost everyone you encounter (shopkeepers, bouncers, maître d's, airline ticket clerks, and even the uncivil civil servants in the Department of Motor Vehicles) that you've been deemed worthy of a new set of privileges; that for you the usual norms don't apply. You are no longer just plain folks.

  What was astounding was how many just plain folks were willing to play along in a game whose rules were tilted so absurdly in my favor. And if I wanted to bend those rules further, or break them, or ignore them altogether, the world seemed happy to oblige. Any direction I chose to move in became the path of least resistance. Maybe this is the true root of the expression, “life in the fast lane.”

  The cool thing was, I could still be a nice guy. I didn't have to sacrifice my Canadian politeness by demanding anyone get out of my way. Though I do have to confess to feeling a secret indignation, after a while, when people didn't jump. A guy can get used to this treatment.

  . . .

  I loved my automobiles, but once I'd selected which one to drive to work in the morning, freeing it from the rest of the fleet was a chore. I felt like an overpaid valet parking attendant. The solution to the problem (some problem!) was this: I still went home to Canada regularly—almost every holiday, long weekend, or hiatus—so the next time I'd just drive up there in the 300ZX and leave it behind for use during future visits.

  I'd be retracing the twelve-hundred-mile route that I'd taken seven years earlier with my father, only now my big brother Steve would co-pilot. Steve arrived on a Friday afternoon flight in late August of 1986 only to turn around and hit the road again after that night's Family Ties taping. Our plan was to drive nonstop, L.A. to Vancouver in less than twenty-four hours.

  Driving the first shift, I set a fast pace heading out of the city. In a literal manifestation of my figurative life-in-the-fast-lane attitude, I quickly grew frustrated whenever slower cars wouldn't let me pass. One slowpoke was particularly stubborn. No matter how often I flashed my high beams or how close I edged my turbo-charged sports car to his rear bumper, Mr. Where's-the-Funeral? refused to get out of my way.

  “What the hell is this guy doing in the fast lane anyway?”

  Steve, whose wit and timing had been my model for Alex Keaton, leaned over, glanced at my speedometer, and then at the car in front of us.

  “Oh,” he answered, “about 90.”

  In preparation for the drive to Canada, I'd had a radar detector mounted beneath the dashboard of the 300ZX. I can't vouch for its effectiveness—it never beeped once on the entire trip. But the very fact that I used such a device meant I recognized the rules of the road, even if I was trying to circumvent them. Experience would later teach me that maybe I didn't need to bother.

  Early one afternoon, I was barreling down Ventura Boulevard in my Ferrari; I was late for an appointment at one of the studios in the Valley, a casting session. I wasn't auditioning—I hadn't had to audition for anything in years. Now the roles had been reversed; actors were coming in to read with and for me in hopes of a part in my next film, since I had casting approval. Still, I had fresh memories of what it was like to be in their position, and what an ordeal it was to be kept waiting. So I wanted to get there as fast as possible, and by applying $100,000 worth of Italian automotive engineering to the task, that was damn fast.

  It had been a weird morning. After flying in from a New York press junket, I was still a little jet-lagged when, in the limo on my way home from LAX, I got a frantic call from my assistant. Burnaby, my until-now perfectly friendly and harmless pit bull, had chosen that morning to munch on the neck of a neighbor dog and was, as we spoke, mid-munch. In a surreally one-sided phone conversation, I was shouting the word “Release!” over and over into the mobile phone while on the other end my assistant was holding the receiver up to my dog's ear. When I arrived home, Burnaby was back safely inside the house and the neighbor dog, while sporting a little unwanted ventilation in its larynx, appeared likely to survive. Its owners were rattled, but not especially angry. Their Siberian husky had, after all, wandered into my yard, a trespass which, I guess, had triggered Burnaby's territorial attack instinct.

  As friendly as my neighbors were, I'd been a public figure long enough to recognize them as potential complainants in a dog-bites-dog lawsuit. So, as I climbed into the Ferrari and roared down the driveway for the meeting at the studio, I punched the number of my attorney into the car phone to give him a heads-up. Ironically, we were still talking when, going in excess of 80 mph down a stretch of Ventura Boulevard, I saw the flashing blue and red lights of an LAPD patrol car strobing in my rearview mirror.

  “Shit. You're not going to believe this,” I said to my lawyer. “Hang on . . . I may need you in a second.” I pulled over and in my side mirror, marked the cop's progress as he made his approach—left hand on the butt of his revolver, and right hand tracing the smooth line of the black Ferrari. Maybe he needed to convince himself that it had actually stopped; even parked, the car looked like it was doing fifty. His opening remark made it clear that I was screwed.

  “Do you even have a driver's license?”

  I sit low in a car seat anyway, and in a Ferrari, built to ride close to the road, I must have looked, from his perspective, like a high school kid on a joyride. It wasn't until he'd studied the photo ID I'd handed over with trembling fingers—panic, not Parkinson's—that we actually made direct eye contact. His stone face now dissolved into a smile.

  “Miiike,” he said, peeling off his sunglasses. “You gotta take it easy, buddy. This is a big heavy car, and we sure don't want to see you getting hurt.”

  “I'm sorry,” I stammered, even though his cheerful admonition hardly demanded an apology.

  “Okay now,” he said, reaching in to return my license and shake my hand. “You have a nice day, and take it easy. My wife and I wanna be able to keep on watching Family Ties. We love that show.”

  I've been issued plenty of traffic citations—all deserved—but there had been just as many instances like this one, though maybe none quite so egregious. I felt a tremendous wash of relief followed by the exhilarating rush of knowing that I'd gotten away with something I shouldn't have. Then it started to freak me out a little. I mean, I was happy to take the free pass and go. It's not like I called the cop back and insisted that I had a ticket coming to me and, goddammit, he'd better write me up. But, on a commercial boulevard, with stop lights at regular intervals, in lunch hour traffic on a week
day, traveling at over 80, I was brazenly flouting the rules that every other citizen of Los Angeles was bound to comply with. Add to this my state of mind at the moment—jet-lagged, harried, preoccupied by that morning's chaotic events—and I deserved not only a ticket, but to be barred from the public roadways altogether. But as soon as that cop recognized the perp in the Ferrari as that funny kid from the box in his living room, the menace became “Miiike.” I couldn't help but wonder, as I slowly pulled out into the flow of traffic, “How fucked up was that?”

  YES-MAN

  I don't know about your kids, but the first word each of mine mastered was “no.” The same was true for me as a kid, and probably for you as well. From the corrective (“No, you can't have cake for dinner”) to the protective (“No! Johnny, never pee in the wall socket”), “no” is how we establish and begin to comprehend boundaries. But this doesn't mean “no” is only about limits. By giving a child the means with which to define his or her own unique identity and sense of self, pronouncing the word no marks the first step on the road to autonomy.

  Still very much a kid in my mid-twenties, I was no longer hearing the word no very often, if at all, and frankly, I was too blissed out to care—at first. All yeses, all the time, worked just fine for me. “Well, Mr. Fox, we are totally booked for the evening, but, yes, we can seat your party of ten. Right this way.” “Why yes, a twelve-hundred-square-foot lavatory tacked onto your bedroom would be a wooonderfulll idea.” “Yes, here's my phone number. Call me anytime.”

  As a young child, I dreamed and spoke incessantly of a world of limitless possibility. And now, it turned out that such a world did exist, and this was it—I'd arrived in the magical realm of “yes” that they'd told me existed only in fairy tales. Yet there are times when any sane person, no matter how spectacular their box office or Nielsen ratings, expects to hear “no”—as in “No, you can't drive twice the legal speed limit on a city street.”

  These were the moments when I first started to sense the implications of a life with no clear boundaries. Wall-lessness didn't just mean freedom, I slowly began to realize; it also meant vulnerability. It took me a while, but eventually I started to ask and then answer two terrifying questions: Do I deserve all this? And if I don't (and who did?), what happens when everybody finds out? So I developed a threefold strategy for protecting myself against whatever nasty, humiliating, ride-stopping no was lying in wait at the end of this long string of yeses.

  First, in order to assuage any creeping guilt I felt about never hearing anyone say no to me, I all but banished the word from my own vocabulary. Whatever anybody asked of me or wanted from me, I figured the safest thing to do was to say yes. Be a nice guy, go along, get along. Of course, if you hear only yes and say only yes, you're apt to find yourself stranded in the middle of nowhere, with no fixed boundary between yourself and the outside world, unarmed.

  The people I said yes to most often, and most happily, were fans. After all, their response to my work (a sort of huge collective yes) had made my success possible. Some had known me for years from Family Ties; others only recently through Back to the Future. It was always easy to tell one from the other. Ties fans would be animated but friendly and relaxed; in fact, my first instinct would often be to infer from their backslapping familiarity that I must know them from school (however brief my time there). By contrast, movie fans would react as if they had just spotted Sasquatch during a picnic in the woods. Given my visibility on both the big and small screen, there were those, of course, who had feet in both camps—the ones who weren't sure whether to tap me on the shoulder or tear my shirt off.

  I didn't mind. Look, how often do plumbers have strangers approach them on the street to compliment them on their latest pipe refitting? With a “thank you,” a smile, a willingness to take a photograph or sign an autograph—a simple “yes”—I've been able to literally make someone's day, and I've always regarded that as a privilege. Sure, sometimes the encounter is inconvenient or awkward. The cameras, for example, never seem to work right the first time. Hastily pulled from pocketbooks and fumbled nervously from one giggling friend to another as each in the group takes their turn beside me, inevitably the camera's flash won't go off or the film runs out. Just a quick tip: those little cardboard throwaways need to be rewound after every exposure.

  Signing autographs can sometimes be just as comic—long moments spent laughing with people as they scramble to find a pen, pencil, crayon, or eyeliner—whatever works. And then what exactly is it that they want to have signed? A business card, a matchbook, a child's wallet portrait from Sears, the bill of a baseball cap, an exposed body part, or, in the case of the well-prepared, an autograph book. Some actors, even the most gracious of them, like my friend Alan Alda, refuse to sign autographs at all—in the belief that the ritual creates a barrier that separates them from the experience of meeting people. I remember ending up in hysterics one night in a Chinese restaurant in New York as Alan tried to explain to an uncomprehending Cantonese kitchen crew, using pantomime and pidgin English, why it would be better to just shake hands. I was mercilessly teasing him as I scribbled away, obliging each and every one of them.

  “I respect your principles, Alan, but your dumplings are getting cold. Just sign already!”

  I can see his point, though; after all, what is an autograph, really? A signed contract wherein some guy from TV verifies the existence of Phil from Ohio? Just another example of magical thinking, I guess. But, for me anyway, signing autographs is a painless way simply to say yes, and thank you.

  There were other requests, some more sobering. Foundations like Starlight and Make-A-Wish, established with the purpose of fulfilling the desires of catastrophically ill children, called regularly, to arrange for me to spend time with these kids and their families. When I was on the road, I'd routinely schedule visits to that particular city's pediatric hospital. I've met children with leukemia and other cancers, kids with cystic fibrosis who fight for every breath, juvenile diabetics on dialysis battling the odds that a donor kidney will be found and transplanted before time runs out. Without exception, they faced their circumstances with a grace and dignity that any adult in the same situation would be hard-pressed to match. Many times their biggest concern wasn't for themselves, but for their parents and siblings. These are kids who know all about no, and who understand the unfairness of limitation. At the time, their lessons in courage and acceptance were humbling. But only more recently, as I've struggled with the no of P.D., have their lessons really sunk in. I am grateful to each of my young teachers. If every time I said yes to one of these young people was a gift, then the true recipient was me.

  Those are the times when I would have said yes, regardless. But there's a longer list of things I agreed to do, purely to keep the success machine well-oiled and running smoothly. Yes to interviews and personal appearances, yes to studio requests, yes to network requests, and when there were conflicts, “Yes, don't worry, I'll make it happen.” The royal premiere in London, for example, took place on a Sunday night before the start of a rehearsal week. That meant that I had to leave Heathrow on the Concorde the following morning at 8:00 A.M., GMT, arrive in New York at 10:00 A.M., EST, get on another plane and be on the Family Ties set immediately following the lunch break at 2:00 P.M., PST. Sometimes political, always exhausting, my policy of routinely responding in the affirmative was crucial to my three-part strategy of self-preservation.

  Which brings me to the second part of my survival strategy: work. I felt a special obligation in the case of Family Ties to be amenable and diplomatic. Gary had drawn a lot of flack from his industry peers for letting me do Back to the Future; and once the film was a hit, they chided him for his foolishness. “That's it,” they'd say, “you're never getting the kid back. He's going to be so gone he won't even show up in reruns.” But whenever people would ask me if I was going to stay with the show, my answer was yes—absolutely. This was my home, these were my friends, Gary gave me my big break, and besides, I lov
ed playing Alex Keaton.

  Without compromising my commitment to Family Ties, I filled much of my time away with extra projects. Sometimes moonlighting, as in the case of Back to the Future, sometimes making two films during a single hiatus, hedging my bets by doing one drama and one comedy, such as Light of Day and The Secret of My Success. It's not just that I remembered the grief of unemployment, but keeping my nose to the grindstone, I figured, was one way to lessen the risk of having my head exposed.

  Those times when I wasn't pressing the flesh, promoting one project or another, politicking or otherwise busy, I was applying the third component of my three-part strategy for survival in Hollywood: partying my ass off. This was, after all, a time to celebrate—so much was going right, why shouldn't I be happy? My cup had runneth over, and I was trying to drink up as much of the overflow as humanly possible. I remember this period of my life—to the extent I can remember this part of my life—as one blowout after another; the booze was free and I was usually the guest of honor. For some people, excessive alcohol consumption is a means of escape, but at this point in my life, anyway, that was the last thing I wanted. Already inhabiting what was essentially a fantasy world, there was nowhere else I wanted to escape to. Alcohol being a preservative, I figured, what better way to preserve the happy illusion? And so, a lot of the time I was pickled.

  I didn't drink when I was working or had other commitments. But conscientiousness wasn't the only motive for my discipline. When I was on the set, or performing some other function related to my career, the environment itself sustained the fantasy and the work was stimulant enough.

  The key was staying busy—constructively or not. My credo during this period—work hard, drink hard, say (and hear) only yes—was really a way of making sure that no matter what the situation, I was always occupied and had as little time for reflection as possible. Perhaps because my success was so sudden and outsized, I had the feeling that I was getting away with something. Sometimes I felt like I did as a teenager, when I wanted to get the car keys without waking my father from his nap on the living room couch. I'd try to grab the keys from the coffee table, inches away from his sleeping form, without disturbing him and incurring his wrath. My strategy was basic: keep moving, get in and out as quickly as possible.