For all the personal and professional risk his decision entailed, when it came right down to it, Michael J. Fox found the idea of unloading the weighty secret of his battle with Parkinson's disease strangely comforting. "The fact is, I'm seven years down the line with this thing, putting one foot in front of the other, and I haven't mentioned it [to the press]," he told PEOPLE in November in his first public inter-. view about his illness. "It might be easier if I did." What the 37-year-old actor, who artfully quelled a National Enquirer Story and closed a lucrative syndication deal for his popular ABC series Spin City before he made his revelation, didn't expect was the extent of the resultant outpouring of affection and support. Hundreds of well-wishers called and wrote Fox's office, a testament to the sheer likability of the former Family Ties and Back to the Future star. "I think Michael showed great courage," says the Reverend Billy Graham, a fellow Parkinson's sufferer, while activists like Parkinson's Action Network president Joan Samuelson cheered because Fox's name recognition would likely boost research funding. "He's so very young and alive and vital, everything people assume Parkinson's victims aren't," she points out. Fox's disclosure, wrote Dallas Morning News columnist Ed Bark, "is cause to pause, reflect and then root hard for him."
"I was really moved that people cared and expressed that emotion," Fox later told Barbara Walters in a 20/20 interview. But he was also struck by the melodrama of some media accounts. After seeing a retrospective of his career on one show, he told Walters, "None of us will ever get to read our obit. In a way, I kind of got to. And it was strange." Hitting such tragic notes, the actor says, is inappropriate because his life and work go on, and all is well. "He hasn't missed a beat," says Bill Lawrence, coexecutive producer of Spin City. "It's not like people here are going, 'Wow, it looks like he's really hurting.' " In fact, Fox remains active in body and spirit, romping with his three children, riding horses and believing fully that a cure for his condition will exist by the time he's 50. "He's just the ultimate optimist," Fox's wife, actress Tracy Pollan, told 20/20. Which is the best thing for a risk taker to be.
