A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future: Twists and Turns and Lessons Learned (4 page)

PART III

Pay Attention Kid, You Might Learn Something

FOR ALL THE HELP I’VE HAD ALONG THE WAY, I AM
still prone to the delusion that I figured it all out myself. I used to tell people that I was an autodidact, then smile smugly when I could tell, by the look on their face, that I was so autodidactic that I had taught myself a word they didn’t even know.
What a schmuck.
I do understand that the greatest influences in my life have been and remain those folks who keep me connected to the world around me and concerned with the people in it.

John Wooden, venerated coach of the UCLA men’s basketball team during its dynasty years, recently celebrated his ninety-ninth birthday. To mark the occasion, ESPN interviewed Bill Walton, the gangly, garrulous center on two of Wooden’s ten championship teams. Not really an interview, it was more of a
soliloquy,
with Walton launching into stanza after stanza of breathless praise for a man who had obviously influenced him in a profound and formative way. The stories and remembrances were peppered with Woodenisms that Walton and his fellow Bruins probably heard every day on the court during their college careers. “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?” As well as: “It isn’t what you do, but how you do it.” And my personal favorite: “Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.”

But it was obvious that the coach’s relationship with these young men transcended basketball. More than a coach, to Bill Walton at least, John Wooden had become a mentor. And it must have been a complicated relationship; in Walton’s voice, it was easy to hear not only his obvious affection and regard for his maestro, but also an ache as well, an enigmatic sense of remorse and regret, vestiges of a situation, or situations, when the bond had been threatened. After all, the formative years of their relationship coincided with the escalation in Vietnam, and Walton’s youthful rebellion must have been an uneasy mix, at times, with Wooden’s old-school conservatism. Perhaps it would have been easier for Wooden to remain purely the coach: to motivate, organize, maybe even inspire, but not risk seeing his players as any more than the means to another winning season.

Bill Walton’s tribute brought to mind the gratitude I feel toward a number of people in my own life who have taken the time to express a belief in me, teach me, encourage me, inspire me, or just steer my ass out of oncoming traffic. And there have been a few whose shepherding of me toward my better interests surely qualifies them as mentors.

Ross Jones, my junior high drama teacher, awakened in me an understanding that a creative life could, indeed, be a productive life, and that it was perfectly acceptable to consider a career in acting. He was that rare authority figure who didn’t mind stirring things up a bit. When I think of Ross, I think of two words that he would say again and again. A sly grin would appear on his thin, bearded face, framed by a mop of hair radically long for a teacher, even in the seventies. He’d splay his hands out in front of him like a close-up magician revealing his palms and ask, rhetorically, “Why not?”—a textbook piece of mentoring. Mr. Jones awakened in me a penchant for questioning and an acceptance of possibility as infinite.

Teachers and coaches, with exceptions like Ross and Coach Wooden, are distinct from mentors in that they have broader agendas, to adhere to the lesson plan or focus on the interests of the team, not the individual. They may develop a special interest in you, but they don’t choose you, nor you them. In the same way, I don’t include parents in my own definition of mentors, although parents are undoubtedly the principal influence in most of our lives. They brought us into the world and they may do everything in their power to get us through it safely, but in a way, that’s their job.

On the subject of family, I do credit my mother’s mother, Nana, for the space I was given as a child to be a dreamer and to color outside the lines. I was so irrepressibly quirky and impossibly tiny for the first ten years or so of my life, most of the adults around me were dubious that I could ever become a fully functioning adult member of society: “What’s he going to do when he grows up—if he grows up?”

“Don’t worry about him,” Nana would assure them. “Michael will do more in his life than you can ever imagine.” Her pronouncement carried the considerable weight of her reputation in the family as a proven psychic (among other premonitions, during the Second World War, after two of her sons were missing in action and presumed dead, she foretold the exact circumstances of their safe return, the details of which came to her in a dream). Believe it or not, the accuracy of her past predictions secured a great deal of wiggle room for me. Nana died when I was ten, but she had already bequeathed to me the benefit of the doubt when it came to opinions about my prospects. Nana’s unflagging belief in her grandson had a profound effect on the path I chose and the willingness of others to grant me safe passage.

If not a mentor, then a role model, my brother, Steve, provided an example to be followed. Steve is a solid guy—playing by the rules and enjoying the hell out of life while doing it. In fact, his solidity probably made it easier for me to be a flake:
Well, Mike may be a washout, but at least Steve will be all right.
My big brother, mensch that he is, never used that as a club against me. Eight years his junior, I always felt (and still do) that Steve likes me. And while I make choices that he might find unconventional and shy away from, he supports me. Always a few years ahead of me in the milestone department, marriage, kids, etc., Steve laid out a primer for how to do things right. He and his wife are devoted to each other. They have a daughter and two sons, the eldest born with special needs. He greeted each challenge with grit, smarts, and compassion. He stepped up for Mom and the rest of us in a big way when our dad passed away. To this day, Steve is the only guy with whom I can spend more than thirty seconds on the telephone. In fact, sometimes our calls stretch on for hours. He’s unaware that he’s mentoring me—we’re just shooting the shit.

Outside of family, the most significant mentor figure in my life has undoubtedly been Gary David Goldberg who, in his role as creator and executive producer of
Family Ties,
rescued me from poverty, plucked me from obscurity, and, in many ways, helped to prepare me for challenges and opportunities I never saw coming. Gary was Mr. Miyagi to my Karate Kid, Crash Davis to my “Nuke” LaLoosh, Doc Brown to my Marty McFly…well, no…I guess Christopher Lloyd was Doc to my Marty, but then, Gary had a hand in that too.

Gary didn’t even want to hire me at first. For the role of Alex Keaton in
Family Ties,
Gary had Matthew Broderick in mind. When Matthew passed on the role and Gary started to audition other actors, I was the very first of hundreds to read for Alex. Judith Weiner, the casting director, loved my audition. Gary hated it. Weeks went by, and at the end of every fruitless casting session, Judith would get in Gary’s ear and suggest that he give me another shot. Finally, Gary relented and in I went again, broke, starving, and incredibly motivated. Within a matter of minutes, Gary had gone from seeing me only to humor Judith, to being my number one fan.

Having won Gary over didn’t completely secure my employment. He then had to sell me to a less than enthusiastic NBC, which had serious questions about my prospects as a TV star. “I don’t know, Gary,” said network chief Brandon Tartikoff. “I just can’t see this kid’s face on a lunchbox.” Nonplussed and impatient with the lunchbox criteria, Gary, the indomitable battler, fought for me when it would have been just as easy to appease the higher-ups and move on. The realization that Gary believed in me validated this crazy gambit I had undertaken. I wouldn’t have presumed that this bushy-bearded, bear-like comedy writer/producer would ever become my mentor, but vaguely aware of the stand he was taking on my behalf, I understood that I at least had a champion. All I ever wanted was a chance. Now someone was giving me a shot and, in the process, putting one of his own bullets at stake.

“All I know is I write him two jokes, he gets me three laughs” is how Gary put it to the network upon completion of the
Family Ties
pilot. The live taping had gone well, audience reaction had been enthusiastic, and they responded strongly to the Alex character. Like any protégé, I wanted to make my benefactor look like a genius. Well, he might already have been a genius, but at least I didn’t prove him a fool. A common showbiz term, Komedy Kollege (yes, with two “K”s) was perhaps the only post-secondary education I was qualified for. I majored in the double take. Gary had a distinct understanding of comedy, and through his skills as a producer and talents as a writer, he transformed a kid who had never done comedy before into a young actor who had the chops and poise to carry a network TV show.

I committed my fair share of screw-ups over the next few years and admittedly came close to careening off the rails more than once during the eighties, but I’m convinced that without Gary looking out for me, my relatively sudden success would have been even more perilous. Show up to work on time, learn my lines, respect the writers, strive with every performance, every scene, every line, to improve on what I had done before: these were the standards that Gary expected me to meet. It was an ethic I understood. It was basically my father’s. I locked it in, and try to honor it still.

Our backgrounds, though completely different on the surface, were, viewed more closely, made up of the same stuff. Sure, Gary was a product of forties and fifties Brooklyn, and I came of age on various military bases across Canada during the sixties and seventies. But both of us were raised by close families of modest means, and each of us proved to be the wild card in our respective familial decks.

Following each Friday night taping at the height of
Family Ties
’ success, the cast, crew, and writers would head to an elegant but welcoming French restaurant a block or two away from Paramount Studios on Melrose in Hollywood to eat, drink, and party. Usually the last to leave, Gary and I would linger at the table, polishing off the dregs of whatever indecently expensive Cabernet we had ordered, and
kvell.
Gary would launch into the story of how he came to be sitting at that victory table, tracing his journey from playing stickball on the streets of Brooklyn, to basketball at Brandeis, to dropping out of college, to Greece, where he lived in a cave with his future bride, Diana, and their well-traveled Labrador, Ubu, to the birth of their daughter, to surviving on food stamps, to a spec script, to a career. A story he never tired of telling and I never tired of hearing, it was every bit as improbable as my own. “Mike,” he would say, clapping a meaty, fur-coated hand on my bony, freckled forearm with unintended force, “you know what we did? We jumped worlds. This wasn’t supposed to happen to us. We are the luckiest guys on the planet.” To this day, the word that comes to mind when I think of Gary is “gratitude.” None of us is entitled to anything. We get what we get, not because we want it or we deserve it or because it’s unfair if we don’t get it, but because we earn it, we respect it, and only if we share it do we keep it.

As I said earlier, Gary made a second huge bet on me, one that many of his advisors counseled him against. Just as
Family Ties
was hitting its stride, he allowed me, after an initial hesitation, to do
Back to the Future.
As I was contractually tied to the show, there was no obligation or expectation that Gary should take a risk that I might find success on the big screen and finagle my way out of the TV series. I rewarded his faith with complete loyalty, and though I found worldwide success as Marty McFly, I redoubled my commitment to Alex P. Keaton.

Tougher days lay ahead. Our mentor/mentee relationship would be tested, just as Bill Walton’s and Coach Wooden’s had (as I had inferred from watching Walton’s interview on ESPN). Seven years after Gary and I had mutually agreed to end
Family Ties
while it was still on top, we re-teamed for the ABC series
Spin City.
We were thrilled about working together again, but I felt some trepidation. Before renewing our professional relationship, I explained to Gary that we had to make some adjustments to our respective roles that reflected a number of wholesale shifts that had occurred in my life during the intervening years. I was now married with three children, had been diagnosed with PD, had quit drinking, and had moved to New York City, where I insisted the new show be filmed. Gary offered no objection to producing the show in New York rather than his home base in L.A. It was also very important to me that we be equal partners going forward.

The show, when it hit the air, was a big success, both creatively and commercially. But by the second season, tensions were mounting. It’s not that this new dynamic was so wrong; it was that the old one was so right. Gary decided to bow out. We had a kind of half-assed standoff for a few months, maybe a year, but our affection and respect for each other absorbed the strain and negated it. When the advance of my illness necessitated my early retirement, Gary returned for my last few episodes of the show, and our friendship grew stronger than ever. I’m convinced it was our gratitude that saved us.
The rocks—not the sand. Hold the beer, but pour Gary some wine.

We will always be those two guys in the restaurant, leaning back in upholstered French armchairs before the vestiges of a banquet, sipping on our wine and exclaiming, “Can you friggin’ believe this?”

A few days ago, Gary dropped by my office in New York. We walked down the block to Madison Avenue for coffee at this little neighborhood café, a place where local private school moms stop in for lattes after drop-off. No longer two Young Turks on the rise, commandeering a pricey bistro until the wee hours, we now sat at this modest table, two contented middle-aged men, each on either end of their fifties, still marveling at their ridiculously good fortune. I was pleased to see Gary looking so trim and healthy, and was particularly moved by the look of contentment that washed over his face as he described the life that he and his longtime love, Diana, were now leading at their home in rural Vermont. Explaining how the two of them, up there in the Green Mountains, had managed to dial down life’s urgencies and dial up its pleasures and richness, Gary put it beautifully and poetically: “We’ve discovered a way,” he confided with a sense of gleeful wonderment, “
to bend time
.” I imagined Tracy and me engaged in a similar conspiracy a dozen years or so from now. It was a nice feeling. I realized, in that moment, that I still have a lot to learn from Gary—that he’d always be my mentor. He may not be ninety-nine yet, but that’s my soliloquy.