Michael Tucker is used to people stopping him on the street. But it’s not always to ask the 57-year-old L.A. Law star for an autograph; instead it’s often to ask questions about coping when your loved one has breast cancer. “There’s a lot of, ‘What can I do for her? How can I be there?’ The answer is simple: ‘Be there completely. Be open and be honest about what you’re feeling and don’t pretend. You’re allowed to feel frightened and angry, too.’”

These lessons were learned the hard way: Tucker’s wife, actress Jill Eikenberry, 55, was diagnosed with the disease in the spring of 1986, shortly after the pair shot the pilot for L.A. Law. After years of struggling in New York City, making ends meet with sporadic stage and screen work and voiceovers, their friend, Steven Bochco, created the roles of attorneys Anne Kelsey and Stuart Markowitz for them. “It was an incredible gift, an incredibly exciting time for us,” says Tucker. “It had always been one career was up, the other career was down. Now we were both starring on a hot TV series together. We couldn’t have been happier.”

The pair began making plans to move with their two children (Max, then 4, and Alison, then 16) to L.A. to accommodate the first season’s shooting schedule. They even snuck away for a romantic vacation in St. Maarten. It was there that Tucker felt a small lump in his wife’s right breast. “I didn’t say anything and it was the first of many denials,” he admits. “I didn’t want to bring it up. I didn’t want to think about it. We were on this fabulous second honeymoon, and I knew she had a mammogram scheduled when we got back, so I thought, ‘Why ruin things now?’”

When they returned to New York, the mammogram showed a tumor that turned out to be malignant. “That’s when the bottom dropped out for me. Here we were, perched on this huge and wonderful change in our life – and we were slapped in the face with mortality,” Tucker says. They called Bochco to tell him they couldn’t continue on the show. “He calmed me down and said, ‘Let’s just see what happens – we can do this.’ We had good friends who had good faith.”

Eikenberry’s doctor suggested a mastectomy and the couple at first agreed. “Our reaction was, ‘Get this thing off! Get it out of her.’ Jill just wanted to live and we were both terrified she was going to die.” But then Eikenberry began to worry what losing a breast would mean to her career – and her femininity. Her friend, Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon, introduced her to her mom, a woman who had survived with her breast intact. She convinced Eikenberry to get a second opinion, and this time, the recommendation was a lumpectomy – and a much more positive prognosis. “That was the day that there was suddenly a light at the end of the tunnel,” says Tucker. “From that point on, our attitudes changed. We were going to get through this.”

And they did. Following a lumpectomy, the removal of 11 lymph nodes, and six weeks of radiation treatments, Eikenberry is cancer-free. Today, Tucker says, Eikenberry is “in the best health of her life. She takes really good care of herself.” Most couples would prefer to put the agonizing experience behind them, but instead, Tucker and Eikenberry “hit the road talking about it. We travel around the world, about 15 times a year, telling people what we went through and how, as a couple, you can help each other.”

Fighting the Need to Be a Hero

In Tucker’s case, he felt helpless and hopeless. “Men are taught that you have to be the hero. But I couldn’t do anything to make Jill’s cancer go away. I couldn’t fix the
problem, and that was frustrating and very frightening. I felt like a failure. Then in comes this doctor who can and it puts you even lower on the totem pole. You feel worthless – ’just shut up and go stand over there in the corner.’”

During the ordeal, Tucker had a tough time connecting with his emotions. “The man has to be the strong and silent one – which is terror, by the way,” he admits. “I was numb a lot, I was repressing the fear of losing the most important person in my life. Even our four-year-old could talk about it and I couldn’t. The day Jill came home from the hospital our son asked, ‘Are you going to die?’ It was a question I had been afraid to voice myself.”

To make matters worse, a publicist recommended that Eikenberry not discuss her disease in the press. “That was very hard for Jill; She didn’t want to be known as ‘The Woman With Breast Cancer,’ but she felt like she was living a lie,” Tucker says. So they carried on for nearly two years without revealing it, rising to fame as TV’s favorite amorous odd-couple (remember Markowitz’s Venus Butterfly maneuver in bed?). But when a friend, filmmaker Linda Otto, also diagnosed with breast cancer, asked Eikenberry to host a documentary about 100 survivors, not only did the actress decide to come out of the closet, but she phoned – then NBC head – Brandon Tartikoff and asked that the documentary air during primetime. He agreed, and suddenly everyone was aware of the battle she and Tucker faced. “Talking about it felt great – and right,” says Tucker. “Cancer used to be a dirty word, but things have changed so much with education and awareness.”

Tucker now tries to make other husbands and partners understand that what they feel – or don’t feel – is perfectly okay. “I didn’t know what I was feeling for a very long time.

I was there for her; I did what I was supposed to do, going to doctor appointments and treatments with her. But in my mind, I went away. So many men think they have no right to be in pain; after all, their wives have the cancer, not them. What right does a guy have to have a problem with it? You have every right, because cancer impacts not just the woman, but the people who love her. I wish I had someone back then telling me how opening up makes all the difference in the world.” What worked for him and Eikenberry can work for others going through this as well. “It boils down to intimacy,” he says.

“She needs to tell you what she needs and you need to do it for her – something as simple as ‘rub my feet.’ That’s sharing; that’s communicating. That’s the doorway to intimacy right there.” And your sex life doesn’t have to suffer either: “When you have one partner going through something physically debilitating, of course the sex may be different than it was before. But sex begins and ends with making her happy – making her feel attended to and loved. That can be better than the best sex in the world.”
“Breast cancer changed our life in a positive way,” Tucker continues. “It made us rethink what matters most. Jill turned to me at one point and said, ‘This ain’t it, honey. This rich and famous gig isn’t it, there’s more.’ So we left L.A., moved to Northern California, and today what we do most is focus on each other. Because we figure that when we’re good, everything else just takes care of itself.”

Sheryl Berk is senior entertainment editor of Biography magazine. She lives in New York City, NY with her husband and new baby daughter Caroline.