Somewhere in Heaven: The Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve (8 page)

No one who knew the thrill-seeking Chris was surprised when he agreed to do the stuntman special. It quickly became clear that, in making the special, he was eager to take some chances of his own. At one point during the shooting, Chris stood on the tar- mac as a small plane zoomed out of the sky and headed straight for him.

“It was Chris’s idea to end the special that way,” the plane’s pilot, Jim Petri, recalled. “I could hardly believe what he was

asking.” When it came time to shoot the scene, Petri went on, “I headed right for him at about eighty miles an hour. He dropped to his knees just before one wing passed over him and I breathed a sigh of relief.”

Incredibly, Chris drew himself up and asked to shoot the stunt again. The screams of crew members on the ground, terrified as they watched the plane pass just inches over Chris’s head, were clearly audible on the tape. He felt they were too distracting.

As always, Dana was impressed by Chris’s bravado. But she was also concerned that he would someday push the envelope too far. “The show was a tribute to Hollywood stuntmen,” she cracked, “not a tribute to dead actors trying to do their own stunts.”

As horrifying as Chris’s stunt special was, it was not nearly as shocking as the news he and Dana received from his business manager in 1989. Britain’s Inland Revenue Service was claim- ing that, since all four of his
Superman
films were shot largely in England, he owed $l million in back taxes to the UK.

To pay off this whopping tax debt—not to mention support a lifestyle that included a New York apartment, a country house, a seven-passenger Cheyenne II turboprop he referred to as “Mike,” a glider, and a yacht—Chris took on even more televi- sion work. In the span of a few months, he hosted an environ- mental documentary titled
Our Common Future, Night of 100 Stars III
, the
16th Annual People’s Choice Awards, The Earthday Party
, and the highly rated
Valvoline National Driving Test,
which also featured the diverse likes of Betty White, Paul Newman, and Walter Cronkite.

There would still be challenging roles onstage—in Joseph Papp’s production of
The Winter’s Tale
at New York’s Public The-

ater, in a national tour of A. R. Gurney’s
Love Letters
playing op- posite Julie Hagerty, and of course in numerous productions at Williamstown. But increasingly, it was the acting he did on the small screen—particularly in made-for-TV movies—that paid the bills.

Starting with
The Rose and the Jackal
on Ted Turner’s TNT net- work—a Civil War–era drama in which a bearded Reeve portrayed Secret Service founder Allan Pinkerton—Chris starred in a Life- time network thriller called
Death Dreams
and the CBS movie of the week
Bump in the Night,
followed by Disney’s
Road to Avonlea,
PBS’s
The Road from Runnymeade,
HBO’s
Tales from the Crypt,
and the USA Network’s
Mortal Sins
—all in the span of twenty months. Despite his prolific output on television, Chris was no longer being asked to spend months at a time on a movie set. That meant he had more time to devote to the causes he felt passion- ately about. A committed environmentalist, he narrated a docu- mentary on the
Exxon Valdez
oil spill, spearheaded a campaign to block a coal-fired electric plant in upstate New York, urged legislators in Albany to enact a law that allowed private citizens to sue polluters, and went to Washington to urge passage of the

federal Clean Air Act.

One of Chris’s pet crusades ended up pitting him against real estate mogul Donald Trump. Chris had joined others in protest- ing The Donald’s plans to build a huge development bearing his name on Manhattan’s West Side. But when the two men met face-to-face at Trump’s offices on Fifth Avenue, they quickly dis- covered they could work together to make Trump City more palatable to West Siders. “It was,” Trump later said, “the start of a beautiful friendship.”

The list of Chris’s humanitarian works—causes in which Dana became no less involved—ranged from Save the Children and ChildHope to the National Jewish Hospital for Asthma Re- search, the American Heart and Lung Association, Amnesty In- ternational, and MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving). A turning point came when Reeve, outraged by attempts to cut back funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, teamed up with actors Ron Silver, Blair Brown, Stephen Collins, and Bed- ford neighbor Susan Sarandon to form a group called the Cre- ative Coalition. In addition to coming to the defense of the embattled National Endowment for the Arts, the Creative Coali- tion took on such issues as homelessness, campaign finance re- form, health care, and the environment. “Chris was incredibly persuasive,” said actor William Baldwin, who later served as the Coalition’s president. “We were all passionate and well informed on the issues, but nobody was more effective than Chris at win- ning people over. He was so calm, so measured, and so self- assured—he was a down-to-earth guy, but he also always brought a certain dignity to the proceedings.”

Not surprisingly, Chris soon drew the attention of Demo- cratic Party officials. “It was hard to imagine a more attractive and articulate candidate than Christopher Reeve,” said Al Gore, who urged Chris to run for office. “I mean, come on, he’s Superman!” On the sudden death in 1991 of Massachusetts Republican Sil- vio Conte, who represented the Williamstown area in Congress, several Democratic party leaders urged Chris to run for the seat. “What?” he replied, “and lose my influence in Washington?” Reeve was dead serious. As a movie star recognized by millions as the personification of truth, justice, and the American way,

Chris commanded far more attention than any one congressman or senator.

For all of his accomplishments, the fact remained that Chris was relying more heavily than ever on Dana—and not merely for emotional support. Every year, Matthew and Alexandra were sent to live with their father. But in truth, it was Dana who dropped everything to care for them—a burden she gladly undertook. “They were so darling and fantastic,” she recalled, “that when it was time for them to visit, I’d literally drop everything. I wouldn’t take auditions. I wouldn’t do jobs. Family, even before it was my official family, was always my priority.”

Gae Exton, too, had always kept family as her first priority. But Gae also had her own life, her own career apart from Chris; she could stand on her own financially and emotionally. The things that, aside from her beauty, initially appealed to Chris most about Gae—this abiding sense of independence, her British reserve, and the fact that she was not particularly interested in show business or the celebrities it spawned—were what actually may have stood in the way of a permanent commitment.

In Dana, Chris had found someone who understood his world completely because she was a part of it. She was also open and warm and funny—and clearly willing to make sacrifices if that’s what it took to make the man she loved happy.

Indeed, it was Dana’s desire to partake fully in Chris’s life that set her apart from anyone he had ever known. She shared his love of acting without ever wanting to compete with him (Chris’s previous affairs with actresses were “doomed by our egos,” he once cracked). She cherished his children. She took up his favorite causes, standing beside him at meetings and rallies, working dili-

gently behind the scenes to help him polish his speeches. She fell in love with the place he now called home, Williamstown, and, like Chris, could hardly wait to return there every summer and on the holidays.

Then there was the outdoor life that made Chris the man he was—the skiing, the tennis, the biking, the flying, the riding, and, perhaps most important, the sailing. Dana had become so enam- ored of the sport, in fact, that when Chris decided he wanted to sell the
Chandelle
in late 1989 and build a bigger, faster boat of his own, she urged him to do it.

Her reasons were perhaps not altogether unselfish. “Chris had a lot of memories tied up with that boat that didn’t include Dana,” said a friend. “Like any woman, she wanted to start fresh and have them make memories of their own as a couple. I’m sure Chris was aware of that, and he was happy to please her.”

They contracted to have the Cambria 46 custom-built in Portsmouth, Rhode Island—an expensive venture that Chris off- set in part by selling one of his planes for $300,000. For weeks before the keel was laid, Dana and Chris pored over the design to determine every aspect of the boat, from the shape of the hull and the location of the galley to the brass fixtures on deck. They quickly agreed on a name:
Sea Angel.

On the day their new yacht was christened, Dana handed Chris an album chronicling the birth of
Sea Angel.
It was a gesture that nearly brought him to tears, and left him more convinced than ever that Dana was the one. “I was feeling more and more,” he later said, “that we were meant to be together.”

Dana agreed. The boat wasn’t the only thing she thought to replace in their lives. Dana had never really felt completely com-

fortable in the Upper West Side duplex. This was where Chris, Gae, and their children had lived for years as a family; the cherry trees they planted on their roof garden were a constant reminder to Dana of the life Chris had led before they met. “The apart- ment is beautiful, and I love the neighborhood,” Dana confided to a friend. “But I still sort of feel like a guest there.”

Dana told Chris that it was time they picked up and moved to another Manhattan neighborhood where they could make mem- ories of their own. Besides, at twenty-nine Dana felt the Upper West Side was a little too stodgy for her taste; she wanted to re- locate to a trendier neighborhood farther downtown. Tribeca, perhaps, or maybe Chelsea.

Chris had other ideas. Despite his devotion to Dana, his feel- ings about the institution of marriage remained unchanged. And by setting up a new household, it seemed to Chris as if they were taking a major step toward the altar.

Dana “wasn’t pressing Chris about marriage at all,” one of his closest friends recalled. “But she did want them to have a com- mitted relationship, a real future as a couple. Setting up a place of their own, far from the ghosts of Chris’s past, was part of that.” In the meantime, Dana was seriously considering a move to California. In the spring of 1990, she played the Julia Roberts part in a television pilot based on the blockbuster film
Steel Magnolias.
The series was never produced, but Dana wondered if she was losing out on important opportunities by not being

in Los Angeles.

Worried that she might pull up stakes and leave, Chris finally relented in the fall of 1990 and sold his beloved Upper West Side duplex for $1 million. They settled on an eight-room penthouse

on East Twenty-second Street in New York’s up-and-coming Flatiron District. The apartment boasted brick walls, high ceil- ings, and a glassed-in atrium with dazzling midtown views.

Dana reveled in their new digs, eschewing the Gae Exton– inspired English shabby-chic look of the West Seventy-eighth Street apartment in favor of oversized white cotton sofas and chairs, jewel-toned carpets, and glass-topped tables heaped with books and flowers. Chris was a willing accomplice in Dana’s de- sire to make the Flatiron District their new neighborhood. The dined at nearby Union Square Cafe and City Crab, prowled stores like ABC Carpet and Fish’s Eddy for treasures, and on weekends stocked up on fresh produce at the outdoor Greenmarket in Union Square.

“You get the feeling of being sort of a pioneer down here, that you’re more on the cutting edge,” Dana observed, noting that the downtown New York scene provided a “nice contrast” to their permanent residence in bucolic Williamstown. “This area of the city is grittier, noisier, younger, more alive. That’s what I love about it.”

If Dana thought that by starting fresh Chris would suddenly realize they had a future together as a couple, she was sadly mis- taken. Whenever she hinted at the possibility of a long-term commitment, he became more intransigent than ever. Chris still told anyone who would listen that he had no intention of fol- lowing previous generations of Reeves down the primrose path to matrimony and, inevitably, bitter divorce.

“What about my parents?” Dana asked. “They’ve been married forever and they’re still in love.”

“Your mom and dad,” he replied with a shrug, “are the ex- ception that proves the rule.”

Exasperated, Dana made it clear that she definitely saw marriage in her future, even if he did not see it in his. “I love you, Chris,” she told him. “But I want a family, too. I want what my parents have . . .”

Even if he had wanted to change, Chris felt powerless to over- come his fear of marriage. While Dana fumed, Chris left for Van- couver in the summer of 1991 to make his first feature film in four years. In
Morning Glory,
he was cast as an ex-con who becomes involved with a recently widowed young mother (Deborah Raf- fin) in Depression-era Texas.

Before he left New York, Chris made Dana promise that she would join him in British Columbia midway through the shoot. He made plans to charter a boat and sail from Vancouver to Galiano Island, the most ruggedly beautiful of British Columbia’s Gulf Islands. There, they would stay in a suite at the island’s only oceanfront resort, the Galiano Inn.

For the next two months, Dana and Chris burned up the phone lines between Vancouver and New York. Why was he so in- tractable on the subject of marriage? What was he really afraid of? “If you really love someone,” she said point-blank, “then to me that means you commit to the relationship—or you lose that person. Is that what you want, Chris?”

“No, of course not,” he replied. But neither was he willing— or able—to overcome his profound feelings of dread when it came to the subject of marriage. He had been so scarred by the cycle of divorce, remarriage, and divorce that had characterized

his childhood that Chris could offer no solutions. They had reached a stalemate.

Conceding defeat, Dana finally called it quits. “It’s over, Chris,” she told him during one of their emotional late-night phone calls. “There is no future for us. There is just no point to going on like this if you can’t even . . . It’s . . . it’s just over.”