Somewhere in Heaven: The Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve (11 page)

—Chris

—Dana

—Dr. John Jane, Chris’s surgeon

—Chris

—Dana

4

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March 17, 1995 Bedford, New York

A

n unseasonably late snowstorm had swept through the Northeast the week before, leaving behind a glistening blanket of white around the Reeves’ contemporary Westchester County farmhouse. While outside all was pristine tranquility, in- side Chris and Will were cheering Dana on as she blew out the thirty-four candles on her birthday cake and then began tearing

through a mountain of presents.

When she got to Chris’s gift, Dana paused a moment. “What’s this?” she asked, looking at the illustration on the box. “A bird- house?”

Chris acted just a little wounded at the suggestion that he would

ever give her anything so mundane. “No, it’s a
butterfly
house,” he answered in a mock-scolding tone. Then he pointed to the packet of wildflower seeds that was also in the box. “You see, you plant these seeds around the butterfly house, and when they bloom, they’ll attract all the butterflies.”

The butterfly house was fairly typical of the kinds of gifts Chris and Dana exchanged—modest but ingenious items that were often a reflection of their abiding love of nature and the en- vironment. Dana was delighted. Chris installed the butterfly house on a post in the yard, and a few weeks later, Dana planted the wildflower seeds in the hard, acidic soil at its base. She didn’t have the heart to tell her husband what she really thought—that the seeds “didn’t have a chance in hell” of ever sprouting.

Still, each day when she returned from auditions in New York, Dana knelt down to check how the garden was doing. And each day, she saw not even the slightest hint of life.

That first week in April, the Reeves set sail on their annual shakedown cruise aboard the
Sea Angel
. As they edged up the coast toward Cape Cod, a blizzard caught them by surprise. “Chris was in heaven,” Dana later recalled, although the increasingly choppy seas were having their usual effect on her. Their visibility reduced to zero by the blinding white storm, Chris steered the
Sea Angel
while Dana kept frantically brushing the snow off the instruments so he could read them. As it happened, her sense of direction was as bad as his was acute. Eventually, Chris and Dana agreed on what they called “The Dana Rule”: Whichever way instinctively seemed right to her, Dana conceded, “just go in the opposite direction.” Since they still regarded June 30—the day they met—as the most important date in their relationship, Dana and Chris really

hadn’t done much to mark their first two wedding anniversaries. For their third, on April 11, they both agreed it was time to pull out the stops. Leaving Will at home in Bedford with the nanny, Mr. and Mrs. Reeve checked into a $1,200-a-night suite at one of their favorite hotels—The Mark on East 77th Street—and then went out to dinner followed by a Broadway show.

Over dinner that night, they agreed the time was right to have a second child. They planned to conceive a little sibling for Will that June in Ireland, when Chris would be on location filming
Kidnapped
. “Just talking about it,” Chris later said, “got us, well, worked up.”

Their third anniversary would, in fact, turn out to be a pas- sionate replay of the night Chris and Dana decided to get married and celebrated by heading for bed. This time, they returned to their suite at The Mark and made love until dawn. Dana would later use the same word to describe this night that she’d used to describe that other passionate all-night affair: “Magical.”

In early May, Chris flew to Ireland and picked out a cottage on the outskirts of Dublin where the Reeves would live—and, if all went according to plan, add to the family—while he made
Kidnapped
. More obsessed than ever with riding, Chris also hired one of Ireland’s most respected trainers to work with him.

That spring as he and Dana juggled several responsibilities, Chris somehow found time to lobby for the NEA in Washington and to pose for a safety poster. The poster, intended for distribution by the United States Combined Training Association, showed Chris jumping Denver over a fence. The caption: “In films I’ve played an invincible hero. But in real life, I wouldn’t think of riding with- out a helmet.”

Chris now pinned all his hopes as a competitive rider on Buck. Six days a week he got up before dawn and drove to the nearby stables where Buck was boarded. The hours of training and prac- tice paid off. On May 14, 1995, Dana and Will were among the spectators as Dad and Buck turned in a thrilling performance at the spring horse trials in Southampton, Massachusetts. Feeling more secure on Buck than he had on any other horse (“It’s the perfect partnership,” he told his longtime coach), Chris signed up for a Memorial Day weekend competition in Vermont.

But then another offer came along. Several other riders who trained with Chris’s first coach, Bill McGuinness, were going to Culpeper, Virginia, instead that holiday weekend. They were competing as a group—something that always appealed to the gregarious Chris—and Reeve was asked if he’d like to tag along. Happy to have the company, Chris pulled out of the Vermont competition and managed to sign up for Culpeper with only minutes to spare before the deadline.

Dana was not amused. She and Chris had been apart the last few Memorial Day weekends, and what she wanted was time alone with her husband. Now Chris would drive down with the others on Friday and check into the local Holiday Inn. Dana and Will would join him at the hotel later in the day. “Next Memo- rial Day,” she said, “
I
get to choose what we do.”

Chris knew Culpeper well. He had been there before—not to compete, but to scout for Thoroughbreds he might add to his sta- ble. Nestled at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains, between the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers, Culpeper was at the epi- center of Virginia horse country. This time, Chris was scheduled to compete at the spring horse trials of the Commonwealth

Dressage and Combined Training Association, held at the two- hundred-acre Commonwealth Park equestrian facility.

At six-foot-four and 215 pounds, Chris was by all accounts sim- ply too big to make it to the front ranks of U.S. equestrians. Yet, ever the competitor, he was hell-bent on going as far as he could in the sport. Arriving in the early afternoon of Friday, May 26, Chris headed straight for Commonwealth Park to rehearse the dressage course with Buck. When he was finished, Chris walked the cross-country course on which he and Buck would also be competing—twice—before settling in with Will and Dana back at the Holiday Inn.

Whenever they were on the road as a family, Mom and Dad always made sure that Will slept in his own room. After an early room service dinner, they turned in for the night, but there would be no opportunity for intimacy, since the door to Will’s adjacent room was propped open so they could hear him if he woke up in the middle of the night.

Chris and Buck showed up on time the next morning to com- pete in the dressage phase of the competition. Proudly showing his own colors—the silver and blue of his prep school alma mater, Princeton Day—Chris donned helmet and padded safety vest, then put Buck through his paces.

Dressage was not Buck’s best event—he excelled at cross- country—but he did well nonetheless. When it was over, Chris had placed fourth out of twenty-seven. He returned to the Hol- iday Inn, where Dana had decided to spend the day with Will; she planned to be among the spectators when he competed in the final event—show jumping—on Sunday. “You know, I think I might actually win this thing,” Chris told his wife. “All it takes

is for somebody else to make a few mistakes. And the way Buck’s been riding, I think we really have a shot.”

Dana, no stranger to the equestrian world, was proud that her husband, who had taken up the sport seriously just a decade earlier, had come so far in a relatively short period of time. “Most people start out riding as kids and never get to the point where Chris is,” she said. “He is the most focused person I’ve ever known. When Chris feels passionately about something, he makes anything seem possible.”

Chris roughhoused with Will for a while, and then drove back to the equestrian grounds at one-thirty. For the next hour, he carefully studied the cross-country course a third time. Chris was concerned about a couple of jumps—one into and out of wa- ter, the other over a bench—but they were toward the end of the course. At least he and Buck would be able to build up a rhythm during the first half dozen jumps, none of which seemed the slightest bit difficult.

A fellow rider and friend of Chris’s, John Williams, dropped by to wish him luck before he headed for the warm-up area. It was the last thing Chris would remember for the next four days. At their precisely scheduled start time of 3:01
P
.
M
., Chris and Buck—Entry No. 103—were off. The first two jumps went smoothly. “The rhythm was fine and Chris was fine, and they were going at a good pace,” observed Lisa Reid, a veteran trainer who was among the spectators that day. As they approached the third fence, a three-foot-two-inch-high split rail set in a zigzag pattern—in terms of difficulty, merely a three on a scale of one to ten—Reid was impressed with how seamlessly horse and rider meshed. They were, she said, “coming into the fence beautifully.”

Buck started to jump, but then, without warning, abruptly— and disastrously—changed his mind. “The horse put his front feet over the fence, but his hind feet never left the ground,” Reid said. “Chris is such a big man. He was going forward, his head over the top of the horse’s head. He had committed his upper body to the jump. But the horse—whether it chickened out or felt Chris’s weight over its head, I don’t know. But the horse decided, ‘I can’t do this.’ And it backed off the jump.”

As he had done two years earlier in Calgary, Chris pitched for- ward and started to slide down the horse’s neck. Only this time, Chris’s hands were tangled in the reins, and as he soared for- ward—Buck was putting his head down to avoid Chris’s weight—he pulled the bridle, bit and all, off Buck’s head.

Unable to break his fall with hands that were tangled up in the horse’s tack, Chris hurtled straight ahead, striking his head on the top rail, just under the rim of his helmet. Then he plowed fore- head-first into the ground on the other side of the fence, flip- ping over and snapping his neck in the process. As Chris lay there, motionless, the judge announced over the loudspeaker, “Super- man is down!”

Buck backed away, then bolted for the stables. Chris, mean- while, turned ashen. Although there was no way of assessing the damage at the time, Chris’s first and second vertebrae were shat- tered. It was roughly equivalent to the spinal injury suffered when someone is hanged.

Seconds after Chris hit the ground, one of the spectators heard him say, “I can’t breathe.” But by the time Helmut Boehme, one of the organizers of the event, arrived one minute later, Chris was unconscious and his lips were turning blue. “He was not moving,

he was not breathing,” Boehme said. It seemed, he added, as if “the life had gone out of him.”

It was three minutes before paramedics arrived on the scene. One dropped to his knees immediately and began giving Chris mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Within a minute, he was breathing—though barely. Regaining consciousness, he was soon in an agitated state. Turning his head back and forth, Chris demanded to be let alone as emergency medical workers— aided by a woman anesthesiologist who happened to be among the spectators that day—squeezed air into him using a handheld device called an ambu bag.

Stabilizing his neck with a collar, the paramedics carefully lifted Chris onto a stretcher and carried him to a waiting ambulance. Then, rather than cause further damage by jostling the patient, the ambulance drove off the field at a snail’s pace.