Somewhere in Heaven: The Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve (4 page)

Little did they know. “Dana was a class act, but she was no prude,” said a former member of Williamstown’s Cabaret Corps. “When it was called for, she could swear with the best of them.” For the first time, cracks were beginning to show in Dana’s fa- cade of unbridled optimism. “It just wasn’t happening,” she al- lowed. “Of course, I was terribly frustrated. I just wanted the

chance to show people what I was capable of as a performer.” So when Nikos Psacharopoulos invited her to be part of the

Williamstown Festival’s 1987 summer season (at a staggering salary of $25 per week), Dana pounced at the chance. She would be completely focused on her work to the exclusion of all else—

including men. The last thing she needed, Dana Morosini tried to convince herself, was the distraction of a summer romance. “I’m not in the market for some guy on the make,” she confided to one of the other actresses at Williamstown. “I don’t care
how
cute he is.”

Like Dana, Chris was standing at a crossroads. His one long-term relationship had already crashed noisily to earth, and now his ca- reer seemed to be in a free fall.

Not that Reeve’s life was ever as charmed as it seemed from the outside. A descendant of France’s noble D’Olier clan, Chris’s great-grandfather Franklin D’Olier became the president of the Prudential Insurance Company during the 1940s and would re- main at the helm of Prudential for more than a quarter century. His grandson Franklin D’Olier Reeve decided to break away from the constraints of wealth and privilege—although not be- fore allowing his family to pay his way through Princeton.

It was while pursuing a graduate degree in Russian Studies at Columbia—and flirting with socialism on the side—that Franklin Reeve met Vassar student Barbara Pitney Lamb at a family gath- ering. As it happened, Barbara Lamb’s uncle had married Franklin’s mother, Anne, after Anne divorced Franklin’s father, Richard Reeve. It was just one small corner in the tangled web of divorces, remarriages, stepparents, half siblings, and stepsiblings that char- acterized the Family Reeve—and led to Chris’s abiding distrust of marriage as an institution.

Barbara and Franklin (“F.D.”) were married in 1951, and ten months later—on September 25, 1952—Christopher D’Olier

Reeve was born at Lenox Hill Hospital on New York’s Upper East Side. A year later, Chris’s brother Benjamin arrived. Despite the trappings of wealth—the D’Olier millions meant that all the Reeves would have entrée into the most elite prep schools, uni- versities, and private clubs—“Tophy” and “Beejy” felt anything but secure growing up.

As tall, movie star–handsome F.D. climbed the ladder of aca- demia to prominence as a translator, poet, and essayist, college- educated Barbara languished at home in the classic 1950s role of stay-at-home mom. The marriage soon unraveled, and by the time Chris was three his parents were divorced.

The boys, who went to live with their mother in Princeton, New Jersey, were never quite sure where they stood with their mercurial dad. After he married Columbia graduate student He- len Schmidinger in 1956, F.D. became less and less involved in his sons’ lives, focusing instead on the three children he had with his new wife: Chris’s half sister Alison (“Alya”) and half broth- ers Brock and Mark.

The tension between Franklin and his first two boys became even more pronounced after Barbara married wealthy invest- ment banker Tristram Johnson in 1959. The bluff, unrepentantly nonintellectual “Tris” brought his four children from a previous marriage—Johnny, Tommy, Beth, and Kate—into the mix, and by 1963 Chris had two new half brothers, Jeff and Kevin. Fun- loving and, unlike Franklin, decidedly down to earth, Tris John- son was a generous and loving stepfather to Chris and Ben—so much so that Chris actively considered changing his surname to Johnson.

According to Chris, that bond may have made F.D. even more

resentful. Soon the boys were spending almost no time at all with their father. When he did return from the occasional weekend with Chris and Ben, Franklin deposited them a block away and ordered them to walk the rest of the way home. “I have no interest,” he would snarl, “in seeing
that woman
or her new husband ever again.”

No matter. Eventually, these second marriages would also end in divorce. “It did not exactly inspire confidence,” Chris would later say, “in the ability of men and women to have any sort of lasting relationship at all.”

Meanwhile, Chris and his brother were shuttled among Reeve and Johnson family homes in Princeton (where Mom landed a job as a reporter for the weekly
Town Topics
), Connecticut, Martha’s Vineyard, and on the Jersey shore. Ironically, the boy who would grow up to play Superman was a sickly child. Like his mother, Chris was asthmatic and suffered from a wide range of allergies—including one to horses. He also suffered from Osgood-Schlatter disease, a painful medical condition which caused fluid to build up in the joints, and from alopecia; at pe- riodic intervals and without any warning, his hair simply fell out by the handful. Nobody knew why.

None of this, however, kept Chris from being the classic first- born overachiever. He excelled in the classroom and—despite the grab bag of ailments that afflicted him—quickly proved himself to be a gifted athlete. A self-described loner, Chris preferred soli- tary pursuits like running, swimming, tennis, and fencing to team sports—a reflection of his own reluctance to depend on anyone else. (Chris would earn his varsity prep school letter in hockey, playing the more solitary position of goalie.)

Chris was also a gifted musician who practiced piano ninety minutes a day and, seemingly effortlessly, mastered elaborate pieces by Mozart, Ravel, and Debussy. Barbara Johnson would reward her son by giving him a Steinway Grand for his sixteenth birthday.

Chris also came to the realization at an early age that he could act. From the age of thirteen on, he would dash from school to the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, searching for any roles that called for an adolescent. Two years after joining the McCarter, he would be accepted by the Williamstown Theatre Festival, where he would return every subsequent summer—even after he struck gold in Hollywood. (By the time he met Dana, Chris had even built a beautiful hilltop home in Williamstown.)

In fact, the theater became his family. “I knew I was loved as a child,” Chris said, “but I grew up feeling that I could not count on other people to always be there for me.” In stark contrast to the stable and supportive family life Dana had enjoyed, Chris de- scribed his family as “all just bits and pieces. You don’t want to risk getting involved with people for fear that things are going to fall apart. That’s why I found relief in playing characters,” con- tinued Chris, who had an Actors’ Equity Card at sixteen. “You knew where you were in fiction. You knew where you stood.” Even at age nineteen, Chris so impressed stage veterans that they eagerly cast him in a variety of parts. “In walked this gawky, earnest, slightly goofy Adonis,” recalled Tony Award–winning di- rector Jack O’Brien, “and yet what instantly struck you was his

mind
. He was so obviously, incredibly, bright.”

By the time Chris graduated from Cornell University with a degree in English and Music Theory in 1974, he had apprenticed in summer stock, off-Broadway, and in regional theater. At the

Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he played in everything from Turgenev’s
A Month in the Country
to
Death of a Salesman
. He also played Macheath in the Manhattan Theater Club production of
The Threepenny Opera,
and acted opposite Oscar-winner Celeste Holm in
The Irregular Verb to Love
before being cast to play Eleanor Parker’s much-younger lover in the comedy
Forty Carats
. (During that run, Chris experienced one of his many brushes with death when a fifty-pound spotlight crashed down onto the stage in the middle of a performance.)

From Cornell, Chris, with Jack O’Brien’s help, enrolled at Juil- liard to study under John Houseman, the curmudgeonly theater legend who won an Academy Award playing a crusty law profes- sor in
The Paper Chase
but was best known for his Smith Barney TV commercials (“They make money the old-fashioned way. They
earn
it.”). “Mr. Reeve, it’s very important that you become a serious actor,” Houseman intoned. “Unless, of course, they of- fer you a shitload of money to do something else.”

That year at Juilliard, Chris studied with the likes of Kevin Kline, Mandy Patinkin, and William Hurt. But the friendship he began with his frenetic young roommate (“He was like a balloon that had been inflated and immediately released.”) would last a lifetime. “We clicked right away because we were exact opposites,” Chris later explained of his relationship with Robin Williams. In- deed, the stalwart uberpreppie seemed the perfect foil for Williams’s crazed antics. “I never tried to top him—of course I couldn’t. I never tried to do bits with him. I was just my old bor- ing self.”

To the fans of
Love of Life,
Chris was anything but boring. Heed- ing John Houseman’s advice to go for the money, he dropped out

of Juilliard to play bigamist tennis bum Ben Harper in the long- running CBS soap opera. Over the course of two years, Chris be- came one of the genre’s most loved/hated cads—and brought himself the kind of fame that made him irresistible to, in his words, “a certain kind of scoundrel-loving woman.” However artless his passes may have seemed, at twenty-three Chris took advantage of Manhattan’s pre-AIDS singles scene. However, waking up in the morning next to someone he didn’t know soon became, Chris said, “embarrassing and vaguely disappointing.”

At the height of his soap opera fame, Chris got his shot at Broadway playing Katharine Hepburn’s grandson in Enid Bag- nold’s
A Matter of Gravity
. As she always did when she met some- one for the first time, Kate went out of her way to say something provocative, confrontational, or downright rude. When Chris brought greetings from his grandmother Beatrice Lamb, a for- mer classmate of Hepburn’s at Bryn Mawr, Kate replied, “Oh, Bea. I never could stand her.” Then she sized Chris up head to toe, glared at his feet, and ordered him to shine his shoes.

During the endless rehearsals and out-of-town tryouts that fol- lowed, Chris refused to be cowed by the domineering Hepburn. She, in turn, developed an almost grandmotherly affection for him. At one point Chris, who was still flying back from tryouts in Philadelphia, Washington, New Haven, Boston, and Toronto to tape
Love of Life
in New York, collapsed onstage from exhaustion and malnutrition. Hepburn turned to the audience and joked, “This boy’s a goddamn fool. He doesn’t eat enough red meat!”

A Matter of Gravity
received a lukewarm reception from crit- ics, but the chance to see Hepburn onstage was enough to fill the theater for two and a half months. Chris even seized the oppor-

tunity to do a little family fence-mending on opening night. “I said, ‘What the hell,’ and got my parents and stepparents tickets all together in the same row,” he remembered. By the time the curtain fell, the squabbling ex-spouses and their new mates had all “buried the hatchet.”

Hepburn, for one, was impressed. “I come from a big family and I know from experience how impossibly pigheaded and stubborn one’s relatives can be,” she said. “It took guts to do what he did.” From then on, Hepburn would be one of Christopher Reeve’s biggest boosters—to the point of calling up studios to lobby on his behalf. “Chris is so honest, so genuine,” she told one journal- ist at the time. “I wonder if maybe he’s a little
too
good-looking. They really like to put ugly people in pictures these days. My God, just look at the creatures up there on the screen! But they’re go- ing to have to start putting attractive people back in the movies eventually . . . and once he finds the right part—a big, fat, juicy leading man part, I mean—Chris is going to be a big, big star.”

Unfortunately, Chris made his film debut the following year playing a member of a nuclear submarine crew in
Gray Lady Down,
starring Charlton Heston. The movie sank at the box office. “I ab- solutely wrote myself off,” said Chris, who spent the next five months “sponging off friends, sleeping on couches, turning into a vegetable, and then one day I said this isn’t right.”

Chris soon found himself back in New York, scrambling for anything he could get. He had just been turned down for a Wool- ite commercial when the call came that would change his life forever.

When Chris told his father that he had been chosen out of a field that at one time or another had included Steve McQueen,

Robert Redford, James Caan, Bruce Jenner, and Sylvester Stal- lone to star in a big budget screen version of
Superman,
F.D. was ecstatic—until it dawned on him that Chris was not talking about the lead in George Bernard Shaw’s
Man and Superman
. When Chris mentioned that the producers had not yet cast the role of Lois Lane, F.D. looked visibly deflated. “Oh,” he said archly, “
that
Superman.”

Growing up among such bookish Ivy Leaguers, Chris was only vaguely aware of Superman and never watched the highly suc- cessful 1950s TV serial starring George Reeves. As an aficionado of Hollywood lore, however, Chris was aware that Reeves, whose surname so closely resembled his own, grew despondent over be- ing typecast as Superman and shot himself to death in 1959.

“I haven’t been acting this long to be typecast as Superman,” said Chris, shrugging off the notion of a Superman curse. “Once this movie is out, I’ll play neurotics or weaklings. But right now Superman is not a bad role for me.”

Chris actually had his doubts, and sought advice from friends. “It’s so big and it’s so scary,” he told Jack O’Brien. “I’m afraid of what it might do to me.”

“You have a great mind,” O’Brien told him. “You won’t lose your way, Chris. You won’t lose yourself—I promise you.”

Chris attacked the job the way he did everything else in life— with a single-minded ferocity. By way of transforming his athletic but slender physique, he spent at least four hours a day lifting weights for ten weeks, packing thirty-three pounds of muscle onto his six-foot-four-inch frame. He also proved himself more than ca- pable of playing Superman’s alter ego, the stoop-shouldered, be- spectacled, lovably shy Clark Kent. By the time he went before the cameras in London, it looked as if Chris had stepped right out of