Home For The Holidays

Ladies’ Home Journal, December 1993

On TV, he plays a fumbling fix-it man who treats his family and his tools with a funny mix of love and bumbling enthusiasm. In real life, Tim Allen is a little better at handling both. Tim Allen still can’t quite get used to life in Los Angles. The man who plays a hapless handyman Tim Taylor on Home Improvement is in real life, pretty good with a hammer and nails. But while he’s been renovating his off-season house in suburban Beverly Hills, Michigan, for the last eleven years (it’s now “just about perfect,” he says with a grin), in L.A. he lives in a neighborhood where the very notion of tackling any kind of household repair is ridiculous.

Recently, for example, he ventured outside to change the bulb in a lamp along his driveway and immediately attracted the admiring attention of a curious neighbor.

“You don’t generally see many people round here putting their own bulbs in,” said the onlooker.

“Wow,” the incredulous Tool Man responded. “Do you mean to tell me there is, like, a light bulb service that does that for you?”

In fact, there probably is, but Allen, forty, is too much like his TV alter-ego, host of the fictional cable-TV show Tool Time, to take advantage of such silly Hollywood perks. Nevertheless, he’s perfectly happy to take advantage of other, more manly, badges of fame and fortune, the kind of trademarks that come with being the hottest male star on TV. Hence, the recent trip to Italy, during which Allen agreed to traipse around the museums and galleries of Florence only if his wife, Laura, would accompany him to the dreary industrial town of Modena for a tour of the local Ferrari factory. Needles to say, the Allen’s now own a Ferrari—along with a couple of Cadillacs, two Jeeps and a monstrous GMC Typhoon truck (the sort of vehicle best saved for hauling steel beams and cords of two-by-fours).

It’s fortunate that Allen feels so comfortable with his TV counterpart, because he’s the first to admit that his range as an actor is strictly limited. “I can only play a part if I can draw on personal experience, and that well can go dry pretty quickly.”

Viewers, certainly, would disagree, but none of his thiry0million-member audience can claim to be a bigger fan than the actor’s three-year-old daughter, Kady. Once she finally stopped worrying about how her dad got into the television—she kept looking behind the set for the answer—Kady eagerly adopted the role of her pop’s proud personal publicist. “Do you know who my dad is?” she will demand of total strangers in restaurants, supermarkets and airports. ‘He’s Tim-the-Tool-Man-Taylor!”

It’s an occupation Allen never expected to have. Growing up in a large family in Birmingham, Michigan, he was crazy about cars, and his first ambition was to work in the auto industry or drive trucks. Nevertheless, he enrolled in Western Michigan university, and it was there that he discovered a quicker—if illegal- way to make money: dealing drugs. Allen expanded his small-time business after graduating in 1976, but two years later, he was arrested in a large cocaine bust at Kalamazoo airport. Recognizing that his high-flying life was over, he cooperated with the police, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to seven years in prison—of which he served twenty-eight months. When he left prison, at the age of twenty-six, he was determined never to return. “I was going way off on the wrong track,” he says. “Being in a penitentiary realigned everything. Sometimes you have to hit bottom to know where to go.”

For Tim, the place to go was the comedy-circuit. He had always been a funny kid, and right before going to prison, he took a friend up on a dare and ventured onstage during amateur night at a local comedy club. He was hooked; when he got out of jail, he hit the road. (Laura, his college sweetheart, had stood by him through his ordeal, and the couple married in 1984.) Then one night, at a club in Akron, Ohio, he found himself ding onstage in front of a bunch of guys from the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. Suddenly he started cracking jokes about what he calls “men’s stuff”—garages and tools and hubcaps and tractors. The audience loved and howled for more. A few years later, Disney CEO Michael Eisner caught the by-then trademark act and asked Allen to create a sitcom based on his grunting gig. Home Improvement was born.

“It’s got what every good sitcom has to have,” Allen explains.” And that is a great relationship between the husband and wife. I knew the pilot was funny, but the magic that Pat has brought to it has exceeded all expectations.

“She has such great instincts. The script might call for the children to be hanging around the house playing, but if she feels it’s not right, she’ll suddenly tell them to start setting the table. One time at the end of a scene, I went to kiss her because I thought it would be the right thing to do, but she wasn’t ready for it, so I just missed. ‘Your instincts are good,’ she said to me. ‘You’ll just have to aim better next time.’”

That pretty much sums up the character of Tim Taylor, through which Allen manages to both celebrate and send up masculinity. He calls it “masculinism,” epitomized by a grunting man with power tool in hand, defending the last male strongholds—the garage, the yard and the hardware store. “Men have been backed into a corner,” he says, suddenly quite serious. “We seem like we’re in control of everything, but it’s an illusion.”

Allen doesn’t take his own male obsessions lightly either. That’s why, for example, he insists that everything on the show be authentic. So that hot rod that Tim-the-Tool-Man had been building in his garage is correct right down to the last nut and bolt. You could, in fact, take it out for a spin — assuming you can get past the Disney brass (“They won’t let me drive it,” says Allen with a sigh. “I think they’re saving it for some kind of museum!”).

This is, after all, still the same man who celebrated the initial success of his new show by rushing out and buying a $1,200 sixteen-horsepower compost shredder.

“Didn’t you get a little something for your wife?” I wonder.

“Oh sure,” he says, deadpan. “I bought her a lawn mower.”

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