Lucky Man (10 page)

Instead, I appeared in episodes of
Family
,
Lou Grant
, and in September had begun work as a regular on
Palmerstown U.S.A.
, a CBS midseason pickup with an order for eight one-hour episodes.
Walton
-esque in tone, the drama chronicled a friendship between two families, one white, one black, in rural 1930s Tennessee. Reluctant at first, I committed to the show largely on the strength of its creator/producer team of Alex Haley and Norman Lear. As a bonus, the Southern twang I had to affect as the rednecked but well-meaning son of the town grocer helped to flatten out the conspicuously rounded vowels of my Canadian accent.

With even more episodic TV work (
Trapper John
,
M.D.
;
Here's Boomer
); the odd industrial film and commercial (McDonald's, Tilex Foaming Tub and Tile Cleaner); as well as that previously mentioned cinema classic,
Class of 1984
, my first two-and-a-half years in Los Angeles had amounted to a reasonably successful run. Nothing spectacular, no redwoods were felled, but I had been able to find my way to a sufficient supply of nuts and berries.

So why then, as 1981 wound down and 1982 loomed through the trees, was I perilously near starvation?

Naïveté would be a generous explanation for the financial predicament I found myself in—abject stupidity, perhaps more honest. There's a cautionary lesson here. When I first arrived, the proverbial babe-in-the-woods, there were plenty of savvy forest denizens happy to offer guidance in exchange for a share of my earnings. I don't regard them as bad guys, but I don't think they woke up each morning wondering, “What can I do for Michael today?” The only true villain was a ravenous monster of my own creation, one I had unwittingly brought with me from Canada and kept locked in a kitchen cabinet.

NO ABSOLUTION

Those first days in L.A. were heady, but I was still only eighteen and a long way from home. I was always grateful whenever friends and family visited me in California. Coady came down for a week, and among other things, we hiked into the scrubby hills of the Cahuenga Pass in search of the Hollywood sign, where we shot a photo series of each of us dangling and lounging on its nine gigantic letters. My girlfriend Diane made a separate trip, and before leaving made plans to return, a pattern that would repeat itself until we were, for all intents and purposes, living together. All of my visitors expressed the same concern: while I'd taken great care of my career, I didn't seem to be taking very good care of myself.

It's true that I'd developed some unhealthy attitudes regarding food and shelter. Tired of wrangling with the hot plate and scrubbing pots and pans with a soap-on-a-rope, I enlisted Ronald McDonald as my exclusive nutritionist. For any sustenance not offered on the golden arches menu, I improvised—beer and cigarettes, I reasoned, must fit someplace within the four major food groups.

My casual approach to housekeeping made the one-room walk-up increasingly claustrophobic. A space that small simply couldn't withstand the accumulation of domestic debris that litters a bachelor's existence—Big Mac boxes, magazines, long-obsolete script pages, dirty laundry, dirty dishes, even dirty
dirt.
At one point, I adopted a cat for company. It turned out to be a tom who soon left for better prospects, but not before he'd permeated the apartment with an aroma well matched to its décor.

Bob Gersh picked me up for lunch one day. After getting a look at (and whiff of) my apartment, he realized that his newest client, while a decent earner, was no star in the self-maintenance department. It was time, he calculated, to call in reinforcements.

He introduced me to a husband and wife management team, who I'll refer to as B & S. Managers, they explained, do whatever agents cannot. Available at any hour, they'd devise the perfect career strategy, help me establish and meet goals, and so much more. With their vast network of contacts, they'd get me on a fast track to success. Bottom line: they'd be my new best friends in Hollywood.

For his part, Bob earned the standard ten percent of my paycheck off the top, and for holding my hand, my new managers took another twenty percent. (Who says you can't put a price on friendship?) Whenever I needed help they couldn't provide, B & S directed me toward the appropriate Hollywood professional: a photographer, publicist, or lawyer. In my teenaged, fresh-from-Canada cluelessness, this pattern of delegating any and everything that needed doing in my life produced what I thought of as an ever-widening circle of “allies.” Only much later did I realize that “feeding frenzy” was probably a more apt description.

Halfway through the first season of
Palmerstown
, my lease was up. Diane was by now my roommate, and needing more space, we found a slightly larger but equally funky one-bedroom apartment in nearby Brentwood. The new rent was almost double, $425, but in addition to a bathtub, this place boasted an actual kitchen sink.

Above the kitchen sink there was a cupboard—just the right size for a monster. This was about the time that the mathematical “absolutes” I protested to my mother about during junior high school came back to bite me on the ass. You see, I had no patience for numbers, and therefore no facility for keeping track of my debts and expenditures.

I was earning SAG minimum rates, which, I came to learn, barely covered the basics—apartment, clothing, car rental, food—plus business expenses (all those percentages). Then there was Uncle Sam. I had overlooked a subtlety in my check stubs during that first year in L.A.: my employers hadn't been deducting any state or federal taxes from my payments, and it never occurred to me, or my high-priced hand-holders, that I should be putting any money away for that purpose.

Around this time I developed a habit of collecting all my bills, unpaid tax notices, and threatening missives from creditors into a loose, disorganized bundle and jamming them into that cupboard above the kitchen sink: a growing paper monster. Not wanting to think about it any more than I had to, never mind actually look at it, I'd open the cupboard only long enough to feed the beast more red ink, then quickly slam the door shut. Out of sight, out of mind, like a Fibber McGee closet full of daunting, implacable absolutes.

When I received my first tax bill from the IRS, I made a panicky call to B & S, and they recommended an accountant. This guy laid out an orderly method for applying all my present and future earnings toward achieving solvency, including paying off back taxes, for which services he would deduct from all present and future earnings five percent off the top. This brought my total up-front fees to a staggering thirty-five percent. “You also have to stop letting employers rent cars for you and deduct the charges from your paycheck,” my new accountant advised. “Their rates are inflated.” So, he generously leased me his Porsche.

My CPA's blueprint for financial recovery never made it off the drawing board. Unable to work during a prolonged SAG strike in 1980, I was nearly broke going into the second and last season of
Palmerstown
. After the series was canceled, there were a few jobs, but they barely earned me enough to live on—and nowhere near enough to begin seriously paying down my debts. While most out-of-work actors can supplement their income by boxing groceries or waiting tables, my alien status made this impossible. The only way I could work legally in the U.S. was as an actor. I was in a bind.

Buying into the time-honored Hollywood maxim that image is everything, I took some comfort in driving the Porsche—at least I didn't
look
unemployed.

Eventually the accountant deemed me more trouble than I was worth. I fell behind on his bills, too—not only for the lease of the car, but also for his bookkeeping services. He dumped me and repossessed the Porsche. Now he was just another name on my lengthening list of creditors.

“WHY DIDN'T ANYBODY TELL ME?”

A word about rejection. Auditions, most struggling actors will tell you, suck. You get a few pages of a script and read it over and over in hopes of picking up some clue to the character, some insight that will give you an edge in translating written words into a living, breathing, engaging, and profound approximation of human behavior. If you can do this better than any of the other actors in competition for the role, you get to eat; if you can't, you don't. At least, you delude yourself into thinking it's that simple. It's not.

You also have to be careful that you're not too skinny, fat, tall, short, blond, redheaded, dark, light, loud, quiet, young, or old, and that there isn't something about you that reminds the director of his or her girlfriend, boyfriend, father, mother, priest, therapist, or despised stepchild. You want to be familiar enough with the material to look up from the page every now and then, but for God's sake don't memorize it; you'll appear arrogant, like you already have the job. Above all else, no matter how badly you need work, no matter how hungry you are, how exhausted you've become from playing duck-the-landlord, never, ever show desperation. For me, that first rule of auditioning was getting harder and harder to pull off.

Back when I was the new kid in town, I didn't have to carry the burden of expectation with me into an interview. That is, the producer/director/casting director had no idea what to expect of me, no preconceived notion of who I was. So, I could do a halfway decent job with the material, dazzle them with a little small talk on either side of the reading, and be considered a
fresh
casting choice—new and different.

But by now I'd been on the scene for three years. I was a known quantity in every casting office in town, and I was all out of small talk. I began to long for the benign indifference of Robert Redford flossing his molars. That was like a standing ovation compared to some of the experiences I'd been having lately. Some were so humiliating they were almost comical, like the ad executive who screamed at me during a commercial audition. It seems I had not folded the stick of Wrigley's into my mouth as diagrammed on the instruction sheet posted in the waiting room, but instead had the audacity to jam it in sideways in a single indelicate motion. And I called myself an actor.
Next!

The rejection can be so matter-of-fact, so impersonal, that there's a danger you'll get numbed by it. I still felt the pain, but it had less to do with what these strangers thought of me than what I was perilously close to thinking about myself. For so long, my actions had been instinctive, in confident defiance of the world around me. Without that faith in myself, I'd truly be lost. But until then, there was still a chance. Of course, more than anything, what I needed now, badly, was someone in a position to help me, who also shared in that faith.

Luckily, I was about to find that person, although—as he would recount to me many times later—it wasn't exactly faith-at-first-sight.

Paramount Studios, Hollywood—1982

“You gotta stop hocking me about this kid,” writer/producer Gary David Goldberg pleaded with Judith Wiener, the casting director of his new sitcom pilot. “He's just not our guy.” Gary was convinced that in the month since Matthew Broderick, his first choice for the teenage-son role, declined, not one of the hundreds of young actors to audition was an acceptable alternative. Judith insisted Gary was making a big mistake by refusing to take another look at the very first actor she'd brought in to read. “Gary, you're forgetting how good he was. What's the harm of bringing him in for a callback?”

Goldberg bristled at having his instincts called into question. And why shouldn't he? They had served him well. A Brooklyn kid, high school all-city basketball star turned Berkeley dropout, Gary and his future wife, Diana, spent the late 1960s and early 1970s as counterculture nomads. With their black lab Ubu, they wandered the world, for a time living in a cave in Greece before a newborn daughter forced them to settle down and try adulthood. In his San Diego apartment watching a
Bob Newhart
rerun one day while Diana job hunted, Gary had a gut feeling he could write a
Newhart
script. So he did. He sent it off to the producers and in no time, the bearded former Berkeley radical was a rising star among MTM's stable of comedy writers.

Now, just a few short years since relying on food stamps to feed his family, Gary Goldberg was producing his own TV show. Grant Tinker, his old MTM boss and now the head of NBC, had a hunch that Gary and Diana's experience as ex-hippies raising a family made a great premise for a series. The young writer poured his heart into the pilot script, and he wasn't going to screw it up with bad casting. Judith was really driving him nuts though, so he agreed to see her candidate one more time, but not without a final protest. “It's a waste of time, Judith. There's no way I'm going to change my mind on this. I'm a grown man. I know what I want and I know what I don't want. And I'm telling you, I don't want Michael Fox playing Alex Keaton.”

The Slums of Brentwood—1982

If my first journey into the “forest” back in the spring of 1979 was like a Grimm brothers' fairy tale, by the spring of 1982, when I auditioned for Gary Goldberg, the scenario was just plain grim—no happily-ever-after in sight.

Now and then, I'd receive a residual check for an old commercial or TV episode—usually small amounts that passed first through the hands of my agent and managers, taxes paid up front, so the figure I actually netted would be pitifully small. Diane, while still nominally my girlfriend, had returned to Vancouver, this time staying there to find a full-time job. She liked California, but why live the life of the starving artist if she didn't have to? Whether or not I was an artist at all was debatable, as I had no opportunity to develop my craft and no offers to do so. The starving part fit, though. My diet had been reduced to cans and boxes with declarative, generic labels—like
TUNA
or
MACARONI
.

What few possessions I owned, like my furniture, I began to liquidate. Over a period of months, I sold off my sectional sofa section by section. The buyer was another young actor living in my building. Adding insult to indigence was the incremental nature of the transaction, emphasizing, as it did, the inverse trajectories of our respective careers.