Fox details his 'lucky' life

By Ann Oldenburg
USA Today

Michael J. Fox cannot stop moving. He's not jittery. Not shaky. He just keeps swaying, back and forth, as he sits on the couch in his Fifth Avenue, New York offices.

Michael J. Fox said writing about his illness has helped him accept life changes.

If he takes "just a tiny bit too much" of the Sinemet he's on, his body reacts in this way. It's unsettling.

Yet nothing about the actor prompts pity. His story isn't about that; it's about his dramatic life change. And it's about how he came to grips with his fate — drinking too much to forget it, taking baths for hours in a darkened room because he was so depressed, hiding his symptoms and his pills from co-stars, and eventually seeking psychotherapy.

He explains it all in his new book, "Lucky Man: A Memoir" (Hyperion, $22.95). A first printing of 650,000 copies arrived in bookstores last week.

"We didn't plan initially to print that many," says Bob Miller, president of Hyperion, "but as we talked about the book with bookstores, the interest has been so high. I think it's because he's so well liked and well respected."

As wisecracking as ever at 40, Fox first struck a chord with audiences playing conservative, tie-wearing teen Alex P. Keaton, contending with hippie, liberal parents on the '80s sitcom "Family Ties."

Emmys, Golden Globes, Screen Actors Guild statuettes and People's Choice awards line the shelves of his sitting room, testament to a successful and varied acting career. A giant-screen TV, where he can watch pilots of shows he might want his production company to tackle, takes up almost an entire wall. Photos of his wife, actress Tracy Pollan, 41, and their four children, Sam, 12, twins Aquinnah and Schuyler, who are 7, and baby Esme, born last November, are tucked on the shelves. His life surrounds him.

He just can't sit still.

Will that glass of diet soda make it to his lips without spilling?

It does. He knows his illness well, having wrestled with it since his diagnosis in 1991.

He wants to discuss writing the book, but his condition at the moment, even for polite guests, is unavoidable, the proverbial elephant in the room.

"If the question is, am I ever comfortable? In the sense you would think? No," he says. "Never. But am I comfortable to me? A lot of times."

'I'm moving all the time'

He isn't in pain, except when his muscles cramp. "I get fatigued. I eat like a horse, but I burn a lot of calories; I'm moving all the time."

It's just the way life is now for Michael J. Fox. With this new reality has come a new perspective on family, friends, Hollywood and the meaning of life.

It started with a twitch in his pinkie nearly 12 years ago.

"Tap. Tap. Tap. Like a moisture-free Chinese water torture, I could feel a gentle drumming at the back of my skull. If it was trying to get my attention, it had succeeded. I withdrew my left hand from behind my head and held it in front of my face, steadily, with fingers splayed like the bespectacled X-ray glasses geek in the old comic book ad."

He opens "Lucky Man" by reliving the moment the disease appeared in his life. He spent a year asking questions, until finally told: young-onset Parkinson's disease. The doctor said Fox probably would be able to act for "another 10 good years." And that's almost exactly how it would turn out.

When the symptoms first appeared, he thought maybe he was just hung over. He was in Gainesville, Fla., with Woody Harrelson working on the movie "Doc Hollywood." They had been in a bar the night before. Being rowdy guys, they often would drink, then find an excuse to start elaborate mock brawls. No harm was intended, Fox says, but sometimes he'd take a punch. He thought maybe Harrelson had decked him. Or maybe he'd had too many Molsons.

He went to see doctors at the University of Florida, who examined him and decided he had probably suffered a minor injury to his ulna (funny bone).

Boozing and its aftereffects had taken a toll on him before. Take, for example, the set of Brian De Palma's "Casualties of War" in 1988 in Phuket, Thailand. It was hot, and there was a lot of waiting-around time. He and co-star Sean Penn would become restless, drink the local beer, then drive out to a snake farm and goad each other into drinking shots of a popular Thai cure-all: "equal parts Thai whiskey and cobra blood."

Just another night on location.

About a week after that Vietnam trip, he married Pollan, whom he had met on the set of "Family Ties."

It wasn't until September 1991, just about a year after the Florida episode, that symptoms reappeared. Fox and Pollan were vacationing on Martha's Vineyard. He went for a jog and began to falter on his way back. Pollan saw him, noticing that the left side of his body was barely moving. They returned to New York, and he found a doctor who delivered the news.

"The air sucked from my lungs, my left arm was shaking clear up to the shoulder. My only clear memory is of wondering why the hell he was doing this to me, and what was I going to tell Tracy?"

Fox learned that maybe he'd had Parkinson's for five or even 10 years before his pinkie twitched that day in Florida. Scientists believe that by the time a patient notices the tiniest tremor, as much as 80 percent of the dopamine-producing cells in the brain are dead.

In reviewing his symptoms, Fox realized that he had already experienced many of them: diminished blinking and reduced spontaneity of facial expression, stiff postures.

One of his favorite scenes in the hit 1985 movie "Back to the Future" was a "Johnny B. Goode" sequence requiring him to move like rock 'n' roller Chuck Berry. It wasn't especially grueling. But when he had to reprise the number for 1989's "Back to the Future II," he says, he was achy for weeks afterward. At the time, he chalked it up to age.

He also began to consider how he got the disease. No definitive data exist on possible causes, but general consensus is that it's a combination of genetic and environmental factors. He had no history of it in his family. He has, however, learned that at least three people who worked with him at CBC's Vancouver Studios to tape "Leo & Me" in the mid-1970s have been diagnosed with it.

A coincidental cluster? A sick building? Research scientists are investigating, he says.

There also was the possibility that a blow to his head could have been the cause. An avid ice hockey player, he suffered several concussions, but doctors were quick to dismiss that in his case.

He began taking medication, carrying his pills in his pockets like candy, he writes. He hid the disease from everyone but his family.

He also continued drinking. That was already a habit.

After growing up in Canada, he decided to try acting and moved to Los Angeles. "I was running around going to parties and nightclubs. Everybody was doing it, too. That was life as a twentysomething in the '80s."

By 1986, he had become a star. His driveway looked like a luxury car lot, he likes to say, with a Ferrari, a Range Rover, a Mercedes 560 SL convertible, a Jeep Cherokee and a Nissan 300ZX.

Fame was, he says, "disorienting." The key was to stay busy — "work hard, drink hard." He wasn't drinking to escape (this was before Parkinson's); he was drinking to preserve his fantastic life.

His wife was one of the first to be disturbed by his alcohol use, especially after the diagnosis. He writes of a night in 1992 when he was throwing back shots of chilled vodka after filming "For Love or Money," only to stagger home before sunrise to be soon awakened by his 3-year-old son.

It was time to quit. He found a program, and hasn't had a drink since.

Still, he hadn't dealt fully with Parkinson's and continued to isolate himself. He began taking baths in a darkened room for hours at a time.

"That's so obvious when I look at it now," he says. "To turn off the lights and curl up in the bathtub in the fetal position? How badly did I want to start over again? It's so textbook." He went through times of wondering "Why me?" He went through periods of pondering if this was "payback" for such a grand and fast-lane life.

'I wasn't singled out'

Later, he realized he was going through a by-the-book process, he says — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' five stages of grief: denial/isolation, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

He eventually turned to psychotherapy, regular appointments with a Jungian analyst in Manhattan. An assessment of his life made him realize that "none of this is personal. I wasn't singled out."

He knows that the title of the book is probably a tough concept for most to grasp. "Lucky Man"? How can a guy who once had an eight-figure, three-picture movie deal call himself lucky now?

"If you were meant to carry a yoke around all day, at a certain point if you realize it's not going away, you either buckle under the weight of it or isolate (yourself) — all of those things I experimented with, or you take it on and carry on," he says. "In doing that, that's what I'm saying has been the gift: realizing how much bigger, in a sense, my life is in that I purposely made it smaller. I really look at what's important to me, to my family."

He is certain there will be breakthroughs — new medications to improve the quality of life, a cure within a decade.

"I operate on that premise," he says. "Does my going ahead on a day-to-day basis hinge on that happening? No! I go ahead on a day-to-day basis because I wake up curious."