Lucky Man (21 page)

There is never a good time to find out that you're incurably ill, but from a career perspective, I felt especially vulnerable. After
Family Ties
, my future in the business would be built upon film work, and that foundation was already showing signs of cracking. While
Doc Hollywood
had been a modest hit for Warner Brothers, the Universal action comedy that preceded it,
The Hard Way
, had been a dismal failure. In ideal circumstances, I could address this stutter in my career in one of two ways: The first scenario would be to draw a measure of confidence from past successes, without trying to duplicate them, and proceed to reinvent myself—take interesting chances, choose lower-profile projects with greater artistic, if not commercial, ambitions. Or I could simply try to repeat myself, and pray lightning would strike twice. This meant chasing my tail, playing it safe by doing formulaic romantic comedies that had a shot at doing blockbuster business.

Creatively, the first option was obviously preferable, but could I afford the time it would take?
Ten years
, the man had said—
ten years to do whatever work I was
ever
going to do
—ten years to build on whatever financial security I had provided for my wife, son, and future children. How arsty-fartsy could I afford to be? So when Universal came to me post–
Doc Hollywood
(and, unbeknownst to them, post-diagnosis) with an offer of an eight-figure deal for three pictures over five years, my instinct was to leap. Tracy, however, was adamantly opposed.

“You'll be trapped,” she warned.

I argued that that wasn't true, since the contract allowed me to work on outside projects. She countered, rightly, that most of the writers, producers, and directors I'd want to collaborate with had exclusive deals at other studios. They couldn't come to Universal, and they wouldn't wait for me to be available for their films. And we both knew what Universal had in mind—keep remaking
The Secret of My Success
over and over until it paid off again.

“You don't understand.” The words sounded strange to me, even before they left my lips. Had I ever said
that
to Tracy before? “I only have a limited window of opportunity here. This deal is giving me a chance to crawl through it and come out with something on the other side. I'm taking it.”

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

Los Angeles/New York City—Spring/Summer 1992

In the days leading up to preproduction on
For Love or Money
, the first film of my Universal contract (more or less a remake of
Secret of My Success
), I busied myself with other projects, some personal, some professional. Tracy, Sam, and I flew to California (we still, at that point, kept a home there) so I could direct an episode of
Brooklyn Bridge
for my old friend and
Family Ties
mentor, Gary Goldberg. It had been a year since I'd directed the episode of
Tales from the Crypt
, and I jumped at Gary's offer; directing had gone from an interesting sideline to a future career option. In addition to this work, and in an attempt to distract myself from my health problems and lose some weight, I threw myself into a maniacal fitness regimen.

It wasn't enough that my drill-sergeant trainer pounded on our door every morning at four
A.M.
to lead me on a run around the UCLA campus and up and down the bleacher stairs of Drake Stadium, before dragging my ass back to my garage for a grueling half hour of weight repetitions—it was his diet that was killing me. Restricting myself to portions small enough to emaciate a hamster was one thing, but limiting my alcohol intake to one day of drinking a week—well,
that
was torture.

Without really understanding what the hell I was doing, I realize now I'd entered, all too predictably, into the third stage of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's paradigm for coping with loss—after denial and anger comes bargaining. Though I couldn't yet comprehend the ultimate outcome of Parkinson's takeover of my body and, with it, my life, my instincts told me to start negotiating now, fiercely, for preemptive control in whatever areas that was still possible. If P.D. was going to rob me of the ability to work in front of the camera as an actor, I'd establish a role for myself behind it as a director. To offset the eventual financial losses, I'd accept the assured payday from Universal at the price of my creative freedom.

As for the fitness training, I theorized that this self-imposed ordeal would strengthen my position on two fronts. I convinced myself that my conditioning, endurance, and increased physical toughness would somehow serve as a bulwark against neurological erosion. It would also, I calculated, fool other people. Even as I was growing sicker, those who didn't know my true condition might interpret my improved outward appearance as evidence that I was healthier than ever.

For some, drinking alcohol only one day a week would be no hardship at all—they probably wouldn't think about it one way or another. I had trouble maintaining this discipline. Once, downing a few cold ones with Pete Benedek, my agent, while watching the Redskins humiliate the Bills in the Super Bowl, I expounded on my experience with the rigors of temperance and heard myself utter this priceless bit of drunkard's logic:

“I'm glad I don't have a drinking problem,” I confided, “because I don't think I'd ever be able to quit.”

Succeeding at my drinking career had taken some doing, even perseverance. I was never really cut out for drinking—I just wasn't that good at it. I was too small, got hammered too quickly. There was always a good reason to hoist a few, though. In the late seventies it was youthful rebellion—booze was an antidote to the self-consciousness that consumed me as an eccentric teenager in search of an identity. Then, in the eighties, as the range of my experience and the scale of my accomplishments exceeded my wildest imaginings, alcohol (all that free Moosehead) became an essential ingredient in what was ostensibly a decade-long victory party.

I say “ostensibly” because the deeper purpose of all that celebrating may well have been to obliterate feelings of unworthiness and fear. But make no mistake, on the surface—and what were the eighties about if not surface?—the presiding mood was hedonistic abandon. This was a two-fisted,
yee haw!
scramble on top of a big oak bar with a magnum of Cristal champagne, leading a hundred or so of my closest pals in a chorus of “We Are the Champions”-type social drinking. And other than occasionally waking up with an army of fire ants colonizing the inside of my skull, there never seemed to be any major repercussions. Everybody knew who I was, how hard I worked—that's Mike, just blowing off steam. “I was drunk at the time” became my ever-ready, all-purpose excuse for any indiscretion.

As the eighties gave way to the nineties, my marriage to Tracy—a glass-of-chardonnay-with-dinner type whom I don't think I've ever seen inebriated—led to a voluntary change in my drinking habits. I was ready to embrace a quieter life. My days as a backstage regular at rock concerts, a New York nightclub VIP lounge habitué, were over. I was happy to trade beer blasts with the boys for time alone with my bride, and soon after, our baby. Though my new lifestyle was decidedly less social, drinking still had its place. Rarely, if ever, intoxicated around Tracy, I'd just have a glass of wine or two at dinner—as if I actually subscribed to her belief that there was a purpose to drinking other than getting blotto. I'd still tie one on occasionally, usually when I was traveling, and might even go on prolonged benders if I was out of town working on a movie. Overall, though, the party was over, and I was okay with that, as long as they didn't shut down the bar completely.

With my diagnosis in 1991 came another shift in my relationship with alcohol. The quantity of my drinking was still down from eighties levels, but the quality of that drinking had changed ominously. I always knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, that my drinking was about filling a void, masking a need to be something more than I was. Now, without the pretense of celebration and camaraderie to veil the abuse, I craved alcohol as a direct response to the need I felt to escape my situation. Joyless and secretive, I drank to disassociate; drinking now was about isolation and self-medication.

.   .   .

We returned to New York from Los Angeles early in the spring of 1992. Tracy was in rehearsal for a new Neil Simon play,
Jake's Women
. There'd be an out-of-town run in North Carolina for a few weeks before it opened on Broadway, roughly around the same time I was to begin shooting
For Love or Money
in the beginning of May.

As soon as we began shooting, I was miserable. In the midst of all this inner turmoil and psychological negotiation, it probably was no coincidence that I agreed to play this particular character—a wily and hyperactive concierge at one of New York's luxury hotels. A concierge, or at least the one represented in our movie, is a wheeler-dealer, a calculating operator who will do whatever is necessary to please his hotel guest clients and thereby extract as big a tip as possible. He aspires to own his own hotel someday, but becomes so frantic and so fearful of failure, that he can think of nothing better to do with his life except to keep moving—just keep on dancing as fast as he can and hope folks keep throwing nickels. For me, this was like method acting in reverse.

As an actor, I did feel that I was repeating myself, but I didn't dare complain to Tracy. I was afraid that she would come back at me with some variation on “I told you so.” And whether or not that was fair of me, it deepened my sense of isolation. At the end of the workday I'd drink a couple of beers in my trailer, having a couple more as my teamster driver shuttled me home. At dinner, I'd ask Tracy if she wanted wine. If she said yes, I'd select a bottle, pour us each a glass, then take the bottle back into the kitchen under the pretense of returning it to the refrigerator. In my other hand, I'd be carrying my own wine glass. Once in the kitchen, I'd quickly polish off the bottle, throw it in the recycle bin by the service elevator and extract an identical bottle from the wine rack. I'd open it and swill enough to lower the level of liquid in the second bottle so it matched that of the first when I'd left the living room. Returning from the kitchen, as if I'd spent the last five minutes checking on the pot roast, I'd ask Tracy if she wanted me to freshen up her glass, do so, and then refill my own once more.

For all my sneakiness, I knew I couldn't be hiding my drinking all that well. By the end of dinner, my voice would be inappropriately loud and my words slurred. There were nights that I'd get out of bed after Tracy had fallen asleep and continue drinking. On those occasions when Tracy confronted me, I'd become angry and defensive. The distance that my behavior was opening up between me and my young family frightened me—but this was dwarfed by the greater fear of the other shoe dropping; the bill that had finally come due but which I had no way to settle.

What could I say to Tracy; how could I explain? There was no explanation for anything. Nothing made sense. “You don't understand” had evolved from a phrase I rarely, if ever, uttered to my wife into a virtual mantra. She didn't understand; nobody understood. Even
I
didn't understand what Parkinson's would do to me, how it would change my life. But when I was drunk, it was all a little easier to ignore.

If this downward spiral had continued much longer, I'm sure that there would have been an intervention of some sort. But in June of 1992, just before I finished work on
For Love or Money
, there would be one more bender, one last morning of awakening to feelings of confusion, fear, and remorse, not to mention a crippling hangover. And then, in a moment of clarity, something I can now attribute only to grace, I'd decide to put a stop to it.

That summer, Tracy spent most nights on the Broadway stage, and I'd be on the film set all day long, so we saw less of one another than usual. But as
For Love or Money
prepared to wrap before the second week of July, we'd made the typical end-of-production shift into night shoots. On Friday the 26th of June, it happened that Tracy and I were leaving for work at the same time, she to the theater and me to the set. I'd been told to expect to work until 5:00
A.M.
and advised Tracy that she probably wouldn't see me until the following morning. Our plan that day was for me to take Sam up to Connecticut, and for Tracy to join us on Sunday—Sunday and Monday being dark, or off, days for most New York theaters. But as soon as I got to work, I learned that there'd been a scheduling mistake. I wouldn't have to work through the night after all; in fact, I'd be finished by 9:30 or 10:00
P.M.
, and home before Tracy.

Under normal circumstances, in less troubled times, this prospect would have cheered me and I'd have hurried home, glad for found time together. But at home was my new reality, my P.D. And so, my first impulse was this:
I said I wouldn't be home until morning, and so now I have five or six hours that I don't have to account for—prime drinking time.

There was an urgency, an edge to that night's partying, as if somehow I knew it would be my last. Even as I stood in front of the camera—all I had to do was a two-page twilight scene on a Tribeca street corner—a few of my crew buddies were picking up a quart bottle of Tequila, a bag of limes, and commandeering a blender. We were on our third pitcher of margaritas by the time the assistant director called “wrap.”

By 10:00
P.M.
we had taken over a small restaurant/bar in the village, the name of which, along with many other details of that evening, is now a blur. It must have been a Russian place because I remember throwing back shots of chilled vodka. The transition from tequila to vodka had been cushioned by a brief interlude of beer guzzling. I don't know whether it was the custom of the joint, or something we had simply improvised and the management tolerated, but as we tossed back each shot of vodka, we hurled the tiny glasses into a fireplace where they'd explode into crystalline splinters. This bacchanal went on until well after closing time, when we circled back to my trailer in Tribeca to polish off the beer in the mini-fridge.