 |
 |
WHEN YOU SIGNED ON FOR SPIN CITY IN 1992, DID YOU TELL THE NETWORK BRASS ABOUT YOUR HEALTH PROBLEMS? Keeping it a secret from other people wasn't a problem, once I got past keeping it a secret from myself. [Laughs] Then it just became my business. The spirit was, who among us leads off a conversation by saying, 'Hey, I've got a boil on my ass?' It was my business, nobody else's - except those who might have a financial stake in my health. Having been straightforward about that, I had no problem. AT THE BEGINNING, DID YOU KNOW HOW THE DISEASE WOULD PROGRESS SYMPTOMATICALLY? I learned that on my own, but it was very difficult to relate to. It's like a kid getting caught smoking in the bathroom. They would take you to the principal's office and put in front of you a big black lung in a jar, which instantly made you want to have a smoke to keep the puke down. You can't relate to that. WAS THE NEXT STAGE ANGER? I don't remember getting specifically angry. I didn't get mad at people, or even at the disease. I got mad at my arm. [He starts whacking his left arm.] Its belligerence bothered me, so I whacked it a lot. [Sighs] What it finally all comes down to is acceptance: Acceptance is it. [Chuckles] Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Carl Jung, and Bill Smith turn out to be exactly right about the stages you go through when you get news like this. [Laughs] It pisses me off; I hate it when things get that predictable. BUT AREN'T DENIAL AND SECRECY PART OF THE PROCESS? Denial and hiding are two different things. Accepting didn't mean I had to tell everyone else; it meant looking at myself, taking responsibility for me, my disease, my family, really addressing it. WERE YOU EVER SCARED? I never looked at my Parkinson's honestly enough to be scared. When I finally got to the place where I could, I was beyond fear. YOU HAD CRUISED INTO ZEN MODE. Exactly. What's that truism? 'Courage is not the absence of fear, it's being afraid and doing it anyway'? But before that happened, at the end of '93, I found myself just being in the bathtub a lot, trying to keep my head below water. TO SEE HOW LONG YOU COULD HOLD OUT? Yeah, lying in the bathtub in a fetal position with the lights out. WHEN DID YOU, METAPHORICALLY, GET OUT OF THE WATER AND TAKE A HARD LOOK AT WHERE YOU WERE? At the beginning of '94, I started to make all kinds of changes - I started over again in my career, and we decided to have more kids. And had twins! [LAUGHS] TALK ABOUT A SIGN FROM ABOVE. That's what I'm saying. It wasn't as if there was one moment where I said, 'Oh, I've been looking at everything wrong.' It was a slow realization that I was on a new path - and seeing the rewards of that. Then it became a magnet. THE TRUTH USUALLY IS. Well, I found a new honesty with myself - and others - because honesty is expedient. The truth is easier. With this disease you can't afford to wake up in the morning and go, 'Oh, shit, what did I say?' I don't have that energy. Since there are things that I cannot control, all I can do is the next right thing. For instance, I quit drinking about a year and a half after the diagnosis. WHAT EFFECT DID ALCOHOL HAVE ON PARKINSON'S? It helped me not think about it. [Laughs] That was the idea. But again, I fell into quitting. One day I woke up and said, 'I don't want to drink anymore.' And when you stop drinking, you remember all those times when you weren't there because you'd had a few drinks, that you are now thinking, progressing, moving forward - doing that next right thing. You realize, 'I'm on a path here.' Somewhere in there, I thought, 'I don't give a shit about making another hit movie' - though I did for so long. I stopped thinking, 'I'm going to do a movie that will turn into the next Back to the Future.' Why don't I just do 10 days on a Woody Allen movie and have a good time' And my career turned in a way I never thought it would. I'm in New Zealand on location, watching a tape of Friends, thinking, 'God, TV is funny. I love doing TV. Why aren't I?' And out of that came Spin City. HAS PARKINSON'S CHANGED YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH TRACY? All I can say is that I've been diagnosed with this almost 10 years and have been living with her for 12. THIS ILLNESS MUST HAVE BEEN SOMETHING OF A CO-PROJECT, COMING AS IT DID SO EARLY IN YOUR MARRIAGE. The project is making it not a project, just focusing on our lives with a million considerations and contingencies every day. Tracy has to make adjustments I don't even notice. But I know they're there. Much more than anything big and dramatic, that is why I'm so in love with her and grateful to her. She doesn't say, 'Michael has this thing so we have to - honey, are you okay?' It's not like that. OBVIOUSLY, IT'S MADE YOU VERY CLOSE. Oh, absolutely. There are times when I just can't function. We might be traveling and there's that moment when we have to get the bags organized, change our seats, and I literally cannot do it. I can't have a conversation, can't negotiate at that moment. In five minutes, perhaps I can. What I'm always working with is to stay calm. So Tracy steps in and does it without saying, 'Okay, now I'm going to do it.' I was having a particularly bad day like that recently and I said to her: 'Two out of three.' And she said, 'What are you talking about?' And I said, 'Better or worse, richer than poorer.' [Laughs] BUT YOU HAVE A GREAT LIFE. And my disease is not the only thing in our lives. Before people knew about this, they would ask, 'What do your kids think about being famous?' And I'd say, 'If you came to our home, you're not going to see posters or trophies - that's not who we are.' And that's not a concession - 'Hey, we're just normal folks.' I don't have the energy to create a pretense. The same goes about this illness, which is just a new factor in our marriage. HAS IT BEEN HARD TO GIVE UP THAT ILLUSION OF CONTROL? First, you have to realize there's this level of control that just doesn't exist - whether you're sick or not. I spent a lot of time trying to control my Parkinson's - but giving up control has been a great lesson. I cannot, for instance, multitask - to do more than one thing is very difficult for me. Tracy and I were on a plane once, and everyone was aboard when they announced we couldn't take off, which was clearly bullshit. They knew we weren't going before we got on, and they don't disembark you. The passengers got what the game was, that we would be there for three hours. Tracy said, 'Let's say something.' And I said, 'I'm giving this one a pass.' For me this was in the category of 'I can't do this anymore because it takes too much energy.' I said to her, 'If you want, do something, go ahead.' And she did, got everybody off the plane. She was very convincing. YOU HAVE TO RATION YOUR ENERGY, CHOOSE YOUR SHOTS. WHAT MEDICATION DO YOU TAKE, HOW OFTEN, AND HOW MUCH? Sinemet is my main drug, but I'm having a lot of luck with a dopamine agonist that cajoles your brain into producing its own dopamine. I take my meds four to five times a day, each dose lasting about 90 minutes. It's called 'on and off' - 'on' being when your medication is working, 'off' when it's not. Figuring out how to titrate my drugs so they kick in at the right time became a science, especially when nobody knew I had Parkinson's, planning the thing so it would kick in within a second of going on, say [Laughs], Regis and Kathie Lee. Waiting, then [big sigh], 'Thank you, God, here it comes.' Every day you're two different people eight times a day. The thing is to try to keep a through line. WHAT DOES HAVING PARKINSON'S FEEL LIKE? It's like having your brain hijacked. Like you are constantly floating, can't sit down, can't land for a second. It's like your brain is talking to your body on a cell phone in a tunnel. I'm always in the canyon. At this point, I'm so objective, I can look at it almost like a bug and say: 'What makes this bug fly?' Look at its legs, antenna, really break it down. DO YOU SOMETIMES OPT FOR REALITY OVER A THRILL RIDE? Yeah. Like right now. [Though sitting, Fox appears restless, his body in constant movement.] This is not from the disease, it's from drugs. On a day like this, when I'm working, you build up. I am far more dyskinetic in these situations than I ever am in my life. Anxiety exacerbates everything, so you medicate for smoothness. IN NOVEMBER 1998 YOU ANNOUNCED THAT YOU HAD PARKINSON'S, REPORTEDLY TO BEAT THE TABLOIDS TO THE PUNCH. WHAT WAS THE TOUGHEST PART OF THAT DECISION? One concerned my work. All timing is, is me saying: 'I trust they'll wait for me' - and them trusting it will be worth it if they do. It takes years to get that. I was worried that if the audience knew about my disease, they would be looking for it, which would ruin our pact. When I finally decided that that would be okay, it was the first time I gave myself any credit at all for what I did. I said, 'It speaks for itself. It doesn't matter if I get caught now, because I've told them.' [Sighs] WITHOUT THE TABLOID THREAT, WOULD YOU HAVE TOLD THE WORLD YOU HAD PARKINSON'S? I still believe that as long as I wanted, it was my business. As a student of the situation, I found it interesting because if I didn't talk, the tabloids would. One day I was going to work, taking my son at school, and this woman was in front of my building screaming, 'Parkinson's disease' at us. By the time I made the announcement, I had done so much work that it didn't matter what anyone thought. DID YOU HAVE ANY INKLING THAT THE PUBLIC RESPONSE TO YOUR ANNOUNCEMENT WOULD BE SO HUGE? I did not operate on the premise that anybody would give a shit. The idea that I am going to have a press conference and talk about my - What am I - Marlon Brando's colon? It doesn't make sense. There's a level of that that I can never get next to. Finally, it came down to knowing that my life - and the lives of others - would be more expedient if I got the facts out there. WHAT'S REMARKABLE IS YOUR LACK OF VANITY. HOW DO YOU GET PAST THE FACT THAT THOUGH YOU'RE NOT ALWAYS IN PHYSICAL CONTROL, YOU KNOW PEOPLE ARE LOOKING AT YOU? We keep a little office in our neighborhood, which has squares of smoked glass on the walls of the lobby. I went there one day when I was having a really off period. It was hard to even open the door. But I was in a very good mood and keeping cool, even though I was as nonfunctioning as I get. Walking in, I saw myself getting bigger and bigger in these mirrors. Then I saw this hunkered-over, trembling guy with this impassive expression on his face, because I was getting hypomimia. I saw my reflection in the mirror and I just kind of winked at myself. As I passed the guy, I said, 'Hey, how's it going?' By the time I got in the elevator, I was smiling inside. That was the acid test, when I knew, when I saw this guy reacting to me and just went, 'How ya doing?' My condition is what it is what it is what it is. And then what next? By Nancy Collins Copyright 2000 Hachette Filipacchi http://www.georgemag.com/xp6/George/Features/1000/Interview.xml janet paterson 53 now / 44 dx cd / 43 onset cd / 41 dx pd / 37 onset pd TEL: 613 256 8340 URL: http://www.geocities.com/janet313/ EMAIL: [log in to unmask] SMAIL: PO Box 171 Almonte Ontario K0A 1A0 Canada