Somewhere in Heaven: The Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve (19 page)

Chris drank it all in before beginning. “What you probably don’t know,” he said with a wry smile, “is that I left New York last September and I just arrived here this morning.” He went on, “And I’m glad I did, because I wouldn’t have missed this kind of welcome for the world.”

Then he launched into his message for the evening: that movies can, do, and should make a difference. “When I was a kid, my friends and I went to the movies just for fun,” he said. “But then we saw Stanley Kubrick’s
Dr. Strangelove,
which started us thinking about the madness of nuclear destruction. Stanley Kramer’s
The Defiant Ones
taught us about race relations. It was then we began to realize films could deal with social issues.” Hol- lywood, he went on, “needs to do more. Let’s continue to take risks. Let’s tackle the issues. In many ways, our film community can do it better than anyone else.”

The curtain came down to more thunderous applause, and

Dana rushed to Chris’s side and kissed him on the lips. “You were wonderful,” she said, wiping a tear away with her hand.

Chris looked up at her and smiled broadly. “It was amazing, wasn’t it?”

In a private room afterward, Dana beamed while such figures as Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and Quincy Jones toasted her husband. The Reeves then moved on to the Governor’s Ball, where his old pals Robin Williams and Susan Sarandon—who happened to have picked up a Best Actress Os- car that night for
Dead Man Walking
—were among those who stopped by his table to celebrate Chris’s return. Mel Gibson, who won two Academy Awards that night for
Braveheart,
echoed the sentiments of many. “The attitude he’s got—he’ll walk,” Gibson said. “I have no doubts about it.”

For the time being, Chris was willing to settle for once again being among his peers in the film industry. “Chris loved show- ing people,” observed his agent Scott Henderson that night, “that he’s back.”

But what about Dana? That night at the hotel, after his nurse and two aides had spent the two-and-a-half hours it took each night to get him into bed, Chris told Dana it was time she started thinking about her own future as an actress. “You’ve done so much for me and the kids,” he said. “But work means as much to you as it does to me.”

Dana had already been offered a job—playing the part of Julia in the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival’s production of
Two Gen- tlemen of Verona
. “It’s important for you both to get back to doing what you do,” the festival’s director, Bonnie Monte, had told her. The theater in New Jersey was close enough so that Dana

could commute there from home each day, and Chris felt com- fortable alone in the house with the nurses and aides who now cared for him. Will’s nanny was first-rate, and when Will wasn’t climbing all over his dad, Chris loved to watch him cavort in the front yard.

Still, Dana worried about leaving her husband for so many hours each day. What if something went wrong and she wasn’t there? Think of how scared Will would be without his mother there to reassure him.

Chris listened patiently to Dana’s concerns, and when she was finished the only sound in the room was the whoosh of his ven- tilator. “Come here,” he said with a tilt of his head, and Dana walked over so that they could look squarely into each other’s eyes.

“Do it,” he said firmly. “Do it.”

—Margot Kidder, friend and
Superman
costar

—Dana

—Chris

—Peter Kiernan, close friend and chairman

of the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation

—Brooke Ellison, friend

—Dana

6

-

A Sunday Morning Williamstown

C

hris gazes across the sun-filled living room at Dana, who sits cross-legged on the couch reading the Arts and Leisure section of the
New York Times.
He suddenly finds her little man- nerisms—the way she scans the ads before lighting on an article that interests her, how she rests her coffee mug on her right knee and laughs out loud when something she reads really amuses

her—arousing.

Dana looks up and realizes that this whole time he has been sitting there, sphinxlike, just staring at her. “So,” she says in mock defiance, “what are you lookin’ at?”

Chris does not even blink. “I’m lookin’ at—
you!
” he replies.

Then, as Dana’s eyes widen in shock, he bounds out of his chair and over the coffee table to get to her. Dana screams with laugh- ter. She has barely had time to uncross her legs before he grabs her by the shoulders, lifts her up, and kisses her passionately. While he reaches around to unhook her bra, she undoes his belt . . .

Frozen. Chris awakened this morning in Bedford at the usual time—around six-thirty—feeling frozen, or as he put it, “more like stone than flesh.” Notwithstanding the whoosh of his ven- tilator, Chris could hear Dana breathing softly as she slept in the bed next to his. She would sleep for another hour—time during which Chris tried to come to terms with the reality of what he called his “situation.”

“I’m never disabled in my dreams,” he said. “I’m never in a wheelchair.
Never.
I’m always whole—sailing, riding, traveling, making films. So naturally, I’m happiest when I’m asleep. I’m saddest each morning when I wake up.”

Eventually, Chris would discover a way to push the darkest thoughts out of his mind by staring up through the skylight at the tops of the trees and concentrating on the day ahead. But for now, this hour when he was alone with his thoughts was sheer torture, devoted almost entirely to replaying the senseless accident that had robbed him and his family of so many things. “What people don’t know about is, like, in the morning,” he said, “when I need . . . I need twenty minutes to cry.”

“Chris is incredibly resilient,” Dana said at the time. “He will occasionally get down, hit rock bottom. I just listen and try to find things that can help. Close physical contact is helpful.”

Indeed, one of the things that had changed drastically was the Reeves’ sex life. Yet even before Chris left Kessler, he and Dana

had explored the ways they could still be intimate. Once it was determined that, despite his near-complete paralysis, the accident had not rendered Chris impotent, Chris and Dana were not shy about sharing the news.

“My wife gets a lot of attention,” Chris told Larry King. “She walks through the room and I’m practically leering at her.” As for the all-too-obvious physical reaction: “It’s really embarrassing. It’s an automatic reflex. So it works. You know that thing about how it has a mind of its own? That’s true!”

Chris told Katie Couric that he was “feeling like a high school senior these days.”

“Oh, really?” Couric shot back. “Feeling a little randy, are we?” While Chris’s spinal injury meant that he was incapable of actually feeling anything, these “reflex erections” meant that he could have sexual relations leading to orgasm. More important, it meant that he could father more children—something both

Reeves were now seriously considering.

“So, it would be possible?” Barbara Walters asked Dana. “Yes. In fact,” Dana replied, “it is possible.”

“In fact, it is possible?” Walters said, somewhat taken aback by the Reeves’ candor on this delicate subject.

“Yes, I’m here to tell you,” Dana stated firmly, “we can, and we are able to.” For the next few years, they would kick around the idea of adding to the family. But Chris and Dana were also wary of doing anything to rob Will, Matthew, and Alexandra of the at- tention they deserved. Moreover, Dana wondered if she could handle the added responsibility. “Quite honestly,” she said, “there have been a couple of times I’ve been maxed out and thought,
Could I really add a screaming baby to this equation? I’d lose it!
”

It was a simple fact of their new lives that would be the de- ciding factor. It was bad enough that Chris could no longer so much as give Will a hug; he at least had memories of doing so. “The idea of bringing a child into the world that he couldn’t hold or even touch,” Dana said, “was just too painful for Chris.” No longer able to have sex in what he called “the ordinary way,” Chris conceded that he missed the physical relationship he’d had with Dana “terribly. But there are marriages where the couple are making love all the time, but they’re not really as intimate as they should be. You know, it’s a ritual, somehow not that fulfilling. But, oddly enough, Dana and I are just as intimate as we ever were, and

that’s what really counts.”

It fell to Dana to create those intimate, even erotic moments. While they slept in their spacious master bedroom, a nurse in an- other part of the house monitored Chris’s breathing. This loss of privacy—the fact that they were never really alone, not even as they slept—wore heavily on Dana. “Having people in our bed- room in the morning and at night,” she said, “that’s the stuff that gets to me sometimes . . .” Several times a week, they turned off the monitors so they could have some degree of privacy, and Dana would climb into bed beside Chris and carefully place his arm around her.

They continued to make love, although Dana admitted “it’s nothing like our sex life was before.” Since Chris was paralyzed from the shoulders down, she said, “sex is kind of one-sided. What we do is physically intimate, but it is not as fulfilling in many ways for either of us. That’s one of the things we miss most of all.”

Yet Dana would frequently concede that, even more than sex, what she missed most was Chris’s touch. “Not being able to touch is very hard on Chris and me,” Dana once conceded, fighting back tears. “It’s hard to see other people do what we used to do. Even hold hands. Even, you know, I look at other couples laugh- ing . . . a husband sort of flipping his wife’s hair.”