Somewhere in Heaven: The Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve (9 page)

Chris pleaded with her to reconsider, but she held firm. Dana did, however, reluctantly agree to go ahead with their original plans to sail to Galiano Island—one of the most breathtaking spots in the Pacific Northwest—so long as things between them re- mained strictly platonic.

No sooner did she step onto the pier at Galiano Island than Dana realized her resolve to end their relationship would be put to the test. There were moonlight strolls along the beach, a bike ride through the island’s lush Pacific Coast forest, candlelit din- ners, and drinks by the fireside. If Dana and Chris thought there was any way they could restrain themselves from making love, it was answered their first night on the island: They could not.

In what Chris would later describe as “the most agonizingly bittersweet time,” they both confronted the fact that, in Dana’s words, “we couldn’t live without each other. But there were go- ing to have to be some changes made.” At long last, Chris agreed to Dana’s oft-repeated plea that he seek help from a therapist in dealing with his fear of commitment.

After months of therapy, thirty-nine-year-old Chris would fi- nally admit that, beyond the legacy of his parents’ dismal marital track record, he had his own ulterior motives for avoiding mat- rimony. “I was in a cycle of trying to maintain a relationship,” he conceded, “but secretly looking for the ultimate babe.”

Conversely, Chris also knew that he “risked everything” if he failed to deal with his own deeply rooted anxieties. “It came down to one thing,” he later explained. “Was I going to be a damn fool and let this incredible woman walk out of my life?”

There would soon be an added incentive for Chris to finally, in Dana’s words, “get a grip” on what was holding him back in the relationship. A few weeks after returning from their idyllic days on Galiano Island, Dana began feeling exhausted. “It was unusual for Dana,” Chris recalled. “She’s one of the few people in the world I have a hard time keeping up with—and that’s say- ing something.”

Stumped as to the cause of this nagging fatigue, Dana asked her older sister, Deborah, who was studying medicine at Boston University, if she had any theories. Deborah, who was pregnant, recognized the symptoms immediately. Dana, however, had al- ready rejected the possibility that she could be pregnant; she and Chris had always been scrupulous when it came to birth control. “Nope,” Dana concluded. “That couldn’t be it. Maybe the flu?” Deborah’s diagnosis was right on the mark. A sonogram taken in December showed that Dana was already four months preg- nant with a baby boy. Since the sonogram was taken at a doc- tor’s office in New York’s Murray Hill neighborhood, she and

Chris referred to their future son as “Murray.”

Dana, unprepared for this sudden turn of events, went ahead with plans to go to L.A. for a series of TV and film auditions. Concealing her swelling belly beneath roomy jackets and billowy blouses, she spent a week going from tryout to tryout before fi- nally coming home.

“It was my way of sort of saying I wasn’t going to let this baby

get in my way,” Dana recalled. “Then I thought,
Yes, I am going to let this baby get in my way!
”

A few days before Christmas 1991, with the lights of midtown Manhattan twinkling in the distance, Dana and Chris sat down to a romantic candlelit dinner. They had scarcely begun when their eyes locked and they both said simultaneously, “Let’s get married!”

“Saying that,” he later recalled, “was the sexiest thing.” Indeed, no sooner had the words left their lips than they both put down their forks and headed straight for the bedroom. “I have never been happier, never,” he said years later. “It was a moment whose time had come.... It was,” Chris added, “extremely erotic.”

In her more plainspoken way, Dana agreed. “Yep,” she con- ceded, “it was a real turn-on.”

So much so that Chris found himself waltzing around the Williamstown house and the apartment singing, “We’re getting married!” Dana was more subdued, although she was more than willing to joke about what was appropriate attire for a visibly pregnant bride. “I want it to be as flattering as possible,” she told one reporter. “I guess I’ll show off legs and make a bonus of the cleavage.”

Chris had his own ideas: “Make sure the dress has a window in it,” he insisted.

“Yes,” she continued, “for the ring-bearer inside.”

Photographer Robin Bowman, who had been assigned to shoot the happy couple for
People,
recalled they were “obviously very much in love and thrilled about the baby.” But even in the middle of Manhattan, Chris was eager to do something daring for the camera. He suggested Bowman shoot him repairing a

cracked pane in the atrium window, which required climbing outside on a narrow balcony.

Immersed in her subject, Bowman forgot where she was— until she looked down and saw the pavement several stories be- low. “I froze,” she recalled.

“You look like you’re in trouble,” Chris said when he realized that the photographer was in an awkward position and unable to climb down.

“So there I was,” Bowman said later, “being rescued by Su- perman.” As for Dana: “She was warm and friendly. He was ob- viously used to being in control—he told me from the beginning what he would and wouldn’t do, and where and how he wanted to be photographed. Dana went along, but he also treated her with great respect. It was obvious they had a real partnership.”

For the time being, Dana had her hands full balancing morn- ing sickness and a lead part in the off-Broadway production of Donald Margulies’s play
Sight Unseen.
Chris, in turn, was busy promoting his latest film, Peter Bogdanovich’s screen version of the hit Broadway comedy
Noises Off.
He was paid $100,000— less than he had been paid for any film since
Superman.
Despite some glowing reviews (“No farce lover should miss it,” raved
Newsweek
) and a cast that included Carol Burnett and Michael Caine, the movie bombed.

No matter. On April 11, a drizzly Saturday, the bride and groom, Matthew and Alexandra, and about forty-five other guests gathered at Field Farm in South Williamstown for the wedding of Christopher Reeve and Dana Morosini. Wearing a scoop-neck satin maternity top, a single strand of pearls, and baby’s breath in

her upswept hair, Dana clutched a bouquet of lilies of the valley as she walked down the aisle.

The newlyweds both realized that it had taken some consid- erable effort to get to this point. “All of the garbage in our rela- tionship,” Dana said in her characteristically direct manner, “was worked out before we got married.”

Before a minister who moonlighted as a white-water rafting guide, the couple exchanged vows they had written and simple gold bands. Although no one could have known what the fu- ture held, those in attendance were emotionally undone by what was said.

“We made it very clear,” Dana later said, “that we wanted to be married for better or worse. The choice was made then . . . You make these vows like, I will be with you whether things are always as terrific as they are at this moment or if they are the worst you can possibly imagine. I will stand by you. If you lose all your hair. If you lose every employment opportunity. We are now one. We go through this life as one.”

When they were finished, everyone—including the bride and groom—was sobbing. At one point the official wedding video began shaking because the cameraman, Chris’s brother Ben, was crying.

As they left the church, they were pelted with rice. “God, I love being married, I love it,” Chris kept repeating. “This is a good deal!” According to Dana, Chris made this declaration every day for their first year as husband and wife. “Why,” he would say as Dana shook her head in wonder, “didn’t we do this before?”

There was no honeymoon. With a baby on the horizon, she went back onstage to finish her run in
Sight Unseen
and he went

back on the road to promote
Noises Off.
That May, Chris and Dana attended the premiere of the new Merchant Ivory film,
Howards End,
at Lincoln Center. Chris told his old friend from
The Bostonians,
James Ivory, that he would take any part in the team’s next film. Ivory phoned the next day and asked Chris if he would be interested in a small but important part in their next film,
The Remains of the Day.

Chris told Ivory he did not need to see the script first. His an- swer was an emphatic “Yes.”

Two months after the wedding, on June 7, 1992, Dana gave birth at North Adams Regional Hospital near Williamstown. Little Murray was now William Elliot Reeve, named after Chris’s great- great-grandfather and the community where Chris and Dana met, fell in love, and planted roots: Williamstown.

After just two years in their East Twenty-second Street apart- ment, Dana and Chris pulled up stakes and moved yet again—this time to a century-old farmhouse on seven acres they purchased for $980,000. The property was situated just fifty miles northeast of Manhattan, in the Westchester County town of Bedford, not far from Dana’s parents. While Bedford had more than its share of secluded estates (Martha Stewart’s cozy $16 million “farm- house” among them), the town retained a certain rustic charm. Ostensibly, they were making the move because they did not want to raise their child in the middle of a noisy, congested city. But Chris had his own reasons for wanting to relocate: The move would give him more time to practice his riding skills. Even Dana had to admit that, next to his family and acting, riding had become

the most important thing in Chris’s life. “He rides every day, is completely involved,” she said. “He practices, watches videos. He is absolutely obsessed.”

Some of those videos were, in fact, taken by Dana. Determined to share in every aspect of Chris’s life, she went to nearly all of his competitions, frequently videotaping his performance so he could learn from his mistakes.

This grand obsession aside, Chris never hesitated to leave his horses behind when a location shoot beckoned. Now, whenever he signed on to do a feature film or TV film, Chris’s contract stipulated that he would be provided quarters large enough to ac- commodate himself, Dana, Will, Matthew, Alexandra, and the nanny. Will was a colicky one-month-old when the entire tribe picked up and headed for Vancouver to film Jack London’s clas- sic
The Sea Wolf.

That fall, Dana and Will tagged along when Chris journeyed to England to film
The Remains of the Day.
In the film, which re- volves around the stifled relationship between a butler (Anthony Hopkins) and a housekeeper (Emma Thompson), Reeve played a young American congressman trying to convince his aristo- cratic British hosts to wake up to the threat posed by the Nazis. There was plenty of time between takes for the tight little fam- ily unit to tour the picturesque villages, medieval castles, and stately homes for which England’s West Country was famous. In a year that produced
Schindler’s List
and
The Piano, The Remains of the Day
would go on to earn eight Academy Award nomina- tions. Just as important, it would be a smash at the box office— the kind of success that could help even one of the supporting players begin his ascent back to the top of the Hollywood heap.

The Reeves returned home at the end of October 1992, in time to see Bill Clinton and Al Gore capture the White House. For Chris, who had campaigned hard for the ticket, the victory meant easy access to the powers that be in Washington. On en- vironmental issues in particular, Chris would make use of this newfound access, phoning the White House directly and getting answers to his questions from deputy cabinet members.

Dana was, by all accounts, every bit as passionate about the is- sues as her husband was. “Whenever I’m a little reluctant to pick up the phone and call,” he said, “Dana is right there urging me to do it.” Mrs. Reeve made no apologies for giving Superman a nudge now and then. “Chris is a very polite guy, and sometimes he doesn’t want to appear pushy. That’s where I come in. What’s the point of having influence,” she asked, “if you don’t
use
it?” In the wake of
The Remains of the Day,
Chris also had a little more clout in Hollywood. After attending the inaugural festivi- ties in Washington, he packed up the family and headed for New Mexico to begin filming the comedy
Speechless
with Michael Keaton and Geena Davis. In the film, based loosely on the ro- mance of flamboyant Clinton spin doctor James Carville and his equally outspoken Republican counterpart Mary Matalin, Chris

played an outlandishly narcissistic TV news correspondent.

As they did every year, Chris and Dana launched the
Sea Angel
the first weekend in April, and headed up the coast to Martha’s Vineyard with Will in tow. That summer, the Reeves were on the road again—this time to Calgary, Alberta, where Chris played the part of a former plantation owner turned Indian-fighting Texas pioneer in the three-part CBS western miniseries
Black Fox.
This time, thirteen-year-old Matthew and Alexandra, nine, were cast

in nonspeaking parts—he as a sheriff ’s deputy and she as a farmer’s daughter.

The movie, not surprisingly, called for Chris to do a lot of rid- ing—not to mention all of his own stuntwork. “Chris is such a total pro,” said
Black Fox
producer Les Kimber. “When he says he can do something, no matter how impossible it seems, he always delivers. Chris puts his heart and soul into everything he does.” This summer spent in the Canadian Rockies would hold cher- ished memories for Chris and Dana. As they swam, rode, played tennis, and hiked (with one-year-old Will strapped on Dad’s back) along steep mountain trails together, the Reeves behaved like any other American family on vacation. Matthew and Al were, in Chris’s words, “completely smitten” with their little brother—and

vice versa.

When Will began taking his first tentative steps, his brother and sister were on hand to cheer him on. Like any doting sib- lings, they even competed for their little brother’s attention. It never mattered that they spent most of the year separated by an ocean, Chris said. “They picked up right where they left off. They never took each other for granted the way other brothers and sisters might,” he observed. “Their time together was that much more precious.”