Still Me (12 page)

Our grandfather Richard Reeve.

One day he invited my brother and me to hunt coyotes with him. We were to meet him by the fireplace in the main house—we were staying out in the guest lodge—at 5:30 in the morning. Typical teenagers, we overslept. I was mortified because I'd made a mistake. Whenever I made a mistake I'd go to pieces with embarrassment.

I woke Ben up, and we appeared in the main lodge forty minutes late to find our grandfather staring into the fireplace with his back to us. In we came, apologizing profusely. And he said, “Well, all right, we'll go out there, but it's too late.” We went off in his Jeep, riding in silence to one of the more remote parts of the ranch. We waited, looked around for a while. No signs of anything except a beautiful sunrise. Our grandfather was taciturn, his face set in stone. Suddenly he announced that he had business with his foreman. Before we knew it he'd disappeared. He'd driven off in the Jeep, leaving us out there on a dirt road, both with loaded guns.

The mood was grim. Ben and I were pissed at each other because we'd both screwed up. I remember being very frightened. Walking back, I made sure Ben stayed in front—it was not impossible that one of us might take a shot. Further proof that Tophy and Beejy were not very different from Franklin and Dickie.

I didn't see my grandfather again until the summer of 1976, when I flew out in my first airplane, a little Cherokee 140 I had bought secondhand. After that I didn't see him until the summer of 1985, when he knew he was dying of cancer and made a trip east. He went around and touched base with everybody in the family. Franklin probably hadn't seen his father in thirty-five years, but now there was a reconciliation. They spent time together in Vermont. Franklin told me what a great old man Richard was, how much he respected him. It was a complete turnaround.

I was renting a house on Martha's Vineyard with Gae and the children. My grandfather chartered a boat out of Newport and came over to visit. I had my Swan 40,
Chandelle
, and we sailed in tandem from Menemsha over to the Sakonnet River, just east of Newport. We anchored for the night and had dinner, talking and catching up on missing years. I was astonished to learn that this formidable outdoorsman, veteran of Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal, had driven twenty miles down from his ranch into Tucson to see
Superman
and loved it. He couldn't have been nicer—he thoroughly charmed Gae, who thought he was wonderful. The next morning we sailed back, and that was the last time I ever saw him. He died the next year.

My last visit with my grandfather.

In 1988 my relationship with Franklin broke down completely. I had recently returned from Chile and was working with the novelist and playwright Ariel Dorfman on a screenplay based on my experience there, trying to save the lives of seventy-seven actors who had been threatened with execution by the Pinochet regime. I showed Franklin the outline for the film and asked for suggestions, but he strenuously objected to being “used” in this way and stormed out of the house. Two days later I received a letter saying he didn't want to see me anymore or have anything to do with me.

I was stunned. I had thought that sharing my ideas for the film would be received as an invitation for us to become collaborators. I certainly didn't think I was taking advantage of his talent as a writer for my personal gain. I remember wondering if we were going to play out the same scenario as Franklin and his father. After we hadn't seen each other for almost four years, I asked myself: Are we going to have a reconciliation scene when he's an old man? Or when he's in the hospital, completely defenseless, and needs visitors? What are we going to say to each other then? Of course, I didn't anticipate my accident and the irony of that speculation.

I kept trying to put an end to it, kept trying to break the cycle. Once during the years we didn't speak, I was on a train that had stopped on the bridge over the Connecticut River. I looked out the window and remembered how we used to circle around in his little sailboat, the
Sanderling
, waiting for the bridge to open. I wrote him a note recalling those fond memories, but he wrote back accusing me of cheap sentimentality.

Much to my surprise, he came to my wedding in 1992, but there were at least sixty people there, and we never found a moment to talk. In August 1994 he watched me compete on my horse Denver at a combined training event up in Vermont. We shared a tailgate picnic, and he seemed to enjoy watching our two-year-old Will run around. But nothing really substantial came of our relationship until my accident. Since then I have felt a new reaching out on both sides. My father has gone out of his way to visit me and has been constantly in touch. Every time I have a minor medical setback, he is terribly concerned. We have had long, satisfying talks in hospital rooms. Out of this disaster has come a new beginning.

But in my boyhood and teenage years, Princeton and Tris Johnson and McCarter Theater were my home base, the place where I felt most secure. I had great admiration for Tris, which I felt I had to conceal. There was even a time when I wanted to change my name to Christopher Johnson, to commit to the Johnsons as my real family. It would be Tris, Barbara, me, Jeff, Kevin, and Ben, all fitting in as best we could. I admired Tris's ability to give without expecting much back. He wanted to see all his children find their own way without imposing his values on them.

I thrived on Tris's generosity. He put me through Princeton Day School and Cornell and the Drama Division at Juilliard. He had been the lighting designer for the drama club when he was a student at Yale, so we had that in common: he liked the theater. In tenth grade I was Hal in William Inge's
Picnic
. It was a big success. After my performances we would always come home, make chocolate milkshakes in the blender, and sit around and talk about the play.

Once I went with Tris to see Johnny at Berkshire Academy in Sheffield, Massachusetts, and he let me drive the car up the Taconic by sitting right next to him and steering. He thought it would be good practice. Of course he had no idea that I'd previously “borrowed” the car and sneaked off to the shore with it.

We used to have a little applesauce industry going at the house. We would turn on the radio to listen to the Princeton football games and climb our big apple tree next to the driveway at Campbelton Circle. We'd go way up in the tree, pick apples, and lower them down in a bucket while my mom would be making applesauce in the kitchen. I loved it. I loved the family dinners.

And then sometimes Tris wouldn't come home. The table would be set, and he wouldn't show up. He would disappear for a couple of days at a time without any explanation, without even saying that he owed us an explanation. Just that he was on business, just doing what he was doing. I had such high hopes that this little family would take hold, particularly when my half brothers, Jeff and Kevin, came along. But it didn't work; it wouldn't jell. We weren't able to come together under one roof. My mother convinced Tris that we should move to a much larger house over on Cleveland Lane, under the assumption that things would improve if we had more space. But in fact this created greater isolation in the household. Jeff and Kevin kept to themselves up on the third floor; Ben and I were separated by a long hallway as well as our natural jealousy of each other; my mother and Tris were experiencing the beginning of the end.

From my childhood I developed the belief that a few isolated moments of contentment or happiness were the best you could hope for in relationships—and they probably wouldn't last. Everything seemed to be built on shifting sand. Even in the theater, a play, a season, was a moment. Inevitably it would be over and everybody would move on. New friendships, new alliances would have to be built. I developed a tendency to stick to myself and not get too close to anybody. I didn't want to risk too much, to get too involved, because I was certain that loss and disappointment would inevitably follow.

I found relief from all this uncertainty in playing characters. I liked knowing the entire story line—beginning, middle, and end. At the same time I loved taking risks. Whether onstage or as goalie on the hockey team, I kept putting myself on the line.

Those years at Campbelton Circle—the coziness of that house, picking apples in the fall, playing soccer in the front yard, the kids on Allison Road, going to Bay Head in the summer—also lacked a solid foundation. Two things were going on at once, and they opposed each other: my dream house and the real house. By the time Jeff and Kevin were in grade school, it was all starting to fall apart. Tris was leaving my mother at loose ends. I didn't know the kind of distress she was in.

Both households were troubled. I remember asking my father why he left my stepmother, Helen, in his midfifties. He had always described the two of them as joined at the hip, “so close that we're like one person. We share everything. This is what a family is.” And I thought, of course it is—this cozy Victorian farmhouse in Higganum. Brock, Mark, and Alya were such adorable, brilliant children—the makings of a perfect family. When he did separate from Helen in the late 1970s, I asked Franklin when he first knew that the marriage wasn't working. And he said, “In Paris, in 1956.” I was stunned. More shifting sand, more illusions.

Looking back now at Princeton and Higganum, I still wonder why such wonderful, extraordinary people couldn't build relationships that lasted. I came to believe that marriage was merely a set of obligations undertaken under false pretenses. It wasn't until I met Dana and knew I was falling seriously in love with her that all that changed. But it took time, and therapy, and Dana's patience with me to overcome that disrespect, that fear of marriage.

I saw marriage as a loss rather than a gain. All my life I had heard people say that they loved each other and that they would be together forever, to have and to hold from this day forward, and so forth, and then it would turn out not to be true. Or irreconcilable differences would emerge. My father was an intellectual, my mother was not. My stepfather was a staunch Republican, a Nixon supporter, while she was a romantic about Kennedy and very liberal. Eventually they, too, had little to say to each other. I witnessed a gradual loss of respect. My father had an affair. My stepfather often would not come home. When I was old enough to understand what was happening, I concluded that in most cases marriage is a sham.

Even the family that Gae and I created years later with Matthew and Alexandra wasn't completely genuine, because I still couldn't see the point of marriage. When we met there was a period of intense romance, but I think ultimately we should have been friends rather than lovers. I know that in many ways I was holding back. In fact we
were
friends, which is why when we separated in 1987 we did it amicably and were able to work things out well between us. We have joint custody of the children and discuss every aspect of their upbringing. Over the past ten years there have been no serious disagreements, no rancor or bad feelings. It was exactly the opposite of what happened when my mother and father divorced. But after we separated I didn't think I had much of a future as far as love and family were concerned. A good marriage seemed more improbable than ever.

And then there was Dana. She rescued me when I was lying in Virginia with a broken body, but that was really the second time. The first time she rescued me was the night we met.

After my first tries at acting at McCarter, I was accepted at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts. I began as an apprentice when I was fifteen and ultimately performed there for fourteen seasons. Even at the height of my film career, I tried to keep my summers free to rejoin the Williamstown family.

There is a cabaret attached to the festival, where many of the actors perform in a local inn after the shows. Some of us, myself included, really have no business singing, but admission is cheap and the theater audiences love to hear us perform everything from '50s doo-wop to Irving Berlin and Cole Porter. It's one of the delights of the festival.