The tears of the clown...

Growing up, Michael J. Fox was sort of like my big brother, being a couple of years older than me. If I was a character on FAMILY TIES, I would have been a classmate of Mallory’s. Such was the impact of that show (squeezed in between Cosby and Cheers) that I suspect everyone in my generation felt like part of the family. He was such a nice guy that everyone cheered for him. I think we all hoped for success like his, but speaking for my generation, there is one thought that I know we all share, that at fortysomething---we’re not THAT old yet. And certainly not old enough to have Parkinson’s Disease (PD),

In case you didn’t know, this is a disease normally affecting patients in their 60’s. And Michael J. Fox has got it. This disease has been so powerful that it has taken over not only his life, but also his reputation, such that almost everyone knows him today because of his PD advocacy and not his stellar acting career.

What I remember of Michael J. Fox was that he was Canadian. I thought he was from Toronto, but he was actually from Chilliwack (a tiny town near Vancouver). He became famous playing the lead character, Alex Keaton, in Family Ties during the 1980’s. While on the show, he made the three phenomenally successful BACK TO THE FUTURE movies, rocketing him to fame. After the TV show folded, he did a couple of moderately successful romantic comedies---THE SECRET OF MY SUCCESS, DOC HOLLYWOOD---in the early 90’s, before starring in a string of bombs---THE HARD WAY, BRIGHT LIGHTS BIG CITY, LIFE WITH MIKEY---that seriously dimmed his star. He made it back into the limelight with a supporting role in the fantastic AMERICAN PRESIDENT (with Michael Douglas and Annette Benning), from which he landed another TV role in the mid-90’s with SPIN CITY. Sometime near the end of 1998, he declared that he had PD, and shocked the world into recognizing this illness. After the turn of the millennium, he became too shaky to work in front of a camera, so he continued to work by using his distinctive voice for animated films like STUART LITTLE.

This is the rough chronology of this biography, too.

Still, until reading this book, little did I realize that Michael was like a clown, happy on the outside but sad on the inside. By the time he made his early onset PD public in 1998, he had been struggling with the disease for 7 years. This was through a period where his career almost crashed, where he was resurrected into a TV show, and had 3 kids. Also during this time, the father he looked up to died, he struggled with a drinking problem, he denied his PD because he could still control it through medication, and his marriage almost fell apart because he was in so much denial.

Fox holds nothing back in this book. From his feelings about the disease, his wife Tracy Polland (the love of his life), his GED, his fans (we’re in here, and you’re out there, and frankly, we like it that way), and show business. He wrote the book without a ghost writer, and the honesty and candor is very moving.

He directs the book, not exactly chronologically, through his early career, his successes, his failures, his denial, his therapies (alcohol, psychological, and medical), and his treatments (including a funny brain surgery scene). He uses flashbacks to both start new sections (such as, by his own admission, a predilection to make life changing decisions whilst on a beach) like where he decides to quit Spin City, then he carries on with his life story with feelings, the disease, its effect on him, his fears, his tricks to hide the disease, and the way people around him react and the way he wants them to react. Then there is another flashback, or another flashback during the flashback. This technique works really well because it tends to put the same subject on the same page, instead of in a strict chronology where a reader has to keep flipping back and forth. Throughout the book, his comedic timing is spot on, and the occasionally gallows humor is so funny that I laughed out loud.

In telling his story, two things are immediately apparent. Fox did not earn his success just by his good looks. Here is a first rate creative talent. The flashback/cut in technique has been tried in other contemporary biographies, but few have managed to do it Fox’s charm and humor. At the first Spin City live show after his PD announcement, he went into the audience and someone asked how he was feeling. “Better than I look,” he responded. Then waiting just a moment, he continued. “And I don’t know about you, but I think I look pretty darn cute!”

But more profoundly, and here the book really touched me, he shared how PD forced him to let go of his own life. Like many comedians, his control of the audience and their laughter was a drug. And he tried to use the same technique of controlling reactions when he found out about PD. His own insecurities made him afraid of their reactions. He was afraid that Tracy would leave him, that his son would be afraid for him, that his producers would fire him, that his audience would no longer laugh at him. His goal in life was to be free, and the more he tried to control others, the less free he became. What he found out was that the more he let go, and the less control he tried to apply to others, the more they responded to him, and the more they showed the better sides of their natures to him. And the more he let go, the freer he became. I was touched when he admitted that he could not deal with the illness by himself and started to seek Psychological help---and he describes, without any puffing, how that help balanced him out. His LUCKY GUY tag comes from this opening up, which Fox believes would not have been possible if it was not forced upon him by PD.

He even talks about the lawsuit in the mid 90’s, when at the nadir of his career, some gold diggers tried to sue him because they found defects in a house that they bought from him. He described the agony of sitting through the trial (which he ultimately won) while trying to hide his disease from everyone.

PD, or the Shaking Palsy, is the same disease that also afflicts Mohammed Ali and Janet Reno. The book talks a lot about PD, including its definition, diagnosis, prognosis, and ongoing research. Not really knowing anyone with the disease, I still learned a lot. Now, whenever my left hand trembles (one of the first symptoms), I wonder if I, too, am so afflicted. I was inspired by his maturity in dealing with the illness---like when he settled an argument between Barbara Walters and Tracy during the TV interview where he went public with PD. I also shed a tear (hey, I’m a modern guy) when he first told Tracy and she held him crying repeating “Through sickness and health…” over and over again.

But the book also satisfies my inner gossip. It is generously studded with juicy factoids. Did you know, for example, that when Fox negotiated for his Alex Keaton role that he was such a starving actor that he couldn’t afford to have Pioneer Chicken because he needed the money for the bus fare. Or that Tracy Pollard only appeared in 7 episodes of Family Ties? Or that during a showing of Back to the Future, he sat next to Princess Diana, and couldn’t enjoy the movie because he needed to pee so badly? Or that, as a child, he owned a white mouse---which he later did the voice for in Stuart Little. Or, more seriously, the difference between Dopamine and L-Dopamine. The book is filled with these anecdotes to make it easier to get through the heavy demons and illness stuff.

I am reviewing the audiobook, read by Michael himself. This is a smashing performance, and since he is talking about his own life, we can definitely hear the love in his voice when he talks about Tracy and his son Sam. There is a catch when he describes a scene where he gets Sam to help him stop his fingers from shaking. But the PD is there. There is a definite shaky undertone to his voice at many points during the performance. One of the symptoms of the illness is that it eventually takes speech away, too. So I just hope that this doesn’t happen too soon with Fox.

In the end, I hope he is right, and that PD will be cured by the end of this decade (he tells the Executive Director of his research foundation that she should consider herself fired if she finds herself organizing a tenth anniversary dinner). If, as he believes, comedy is just tragedy plus time. Then I wish a happy ending (a comedy) upon him. I wish there was some way that I could give him more time. Because such an enlightened guy, such a lucky guy, deserves a sequel. A sequel where, in his own words, he gets to dance at his children’s wedding.