Somewhere in Heaven: The Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve (22 page)

“I want to set him free,” Chris said of Will. “I want him to be a kid so when he goes out of the house every morning he’s not worried about the old man.”

In lieu of expanding their family, both Dana and Chris flexed their creative muscles. In the fall of 1998, he tackled his first acting role since the accident—as the wheelchair-bound peeping Tom in ABC’s prime-time remake of the Alfred Hitch- cock classic
Rear Window.
Unlike the James Stewart character in the original, a man recovering from a broken leg who happens to witness a murder while peering into neighboring apartments with binoculars, Chris wanted to be a “vent-dependent quadri- plegic living in an apartment with the latest assistive techniques.” His character, a former architect “with an outsize ego,” would come to see the accident that paralyzed him as “a lesson in hu- mility. He starts out as a master of the universe,” Chris said as someone speaking from experience, “and he goes through a pro- found transformation.”

Chris, who would also coproduce the movie, rejected the first script as “too melodramatic and medically inaccurate.” Instead, he incorporated harrowing elements from his own life—like a scene in which the hero suffers a ventilator pop-off and has to summon help by clicking his tongue.

Still, he “worried that only acting with my voice and my face, I might not be able to communicate effectively enough to tell the story. But,” he said, “I was surprised to find that if I really con- centrated, and just let the thoughts happen, that they would read on my face.” His peers apparently agreed; Chris edged out fel- low nominees James Garner, Charles S. Dutton, Ben Kingsley, Ray Liotta, and Stanley Tucci to win a Screen Actors Guild Award as Best Actor in a Miniseries or Television Movie.

While Chris worked on
Rear Window,
Dana realized a lifelong dream. In October 1998, she made her Broadway debut, as a Long Island housewife married to a comedian in Rob Bartlett’s play
More to Love: A Big Fat Comedy.

“She was an incredibly gifted comedienne,” said Bartlett, who played her husband in
More to Love.
“She auditioned for the show by singing ‘Do You Know the Way to San Jose?’ while she did this little drama like she was driving a car. It was sweet and quirky and funny, and we knew right away she was the one. There was something almost Lucy-esque about her. I remember wonder- ing why no one had put her on Broadway before.”

The show’s director, Jack O’Brien, agreed. “Dana had what

G. B. Shaw called that ‘spark of divine fire.’ She was definitely a player. But if she gave up a lot of opportunities to care for Chris, she was never anxious or self-pitying. She did what she did be- cause she
wanted
to. She was deeply in love with Chris.”

The reality of actually making it to Broadway finally hit Dana when she watched as her name was spelled out on the marquee of the Eugene O’Neill Theater. “It’s thrilling to walk in the stage door,” she conceded, “because then you know you belong.”

Chris was on hand opening night, dressed in a dark gray suit. He had urged Dana to take the role and even helped her rehearse her lines—proud, he said, “because it’s time she got the attention she deserves . . . I’ve overshadowed her a little.” But after just four performances,
More to Love
closed. After the final performance, Dana and some of the actors from the show went to Joe Allen’s, the legendary Broadway hangout that boasts a “Wall of Shame” covered with the posters of shows that ran ten performances or less. On the way, Dana ripped a
More to Love
poster off the side of a flower stand so they could take it to the restaurant and au-

tograph it personally before it went up on the Wall of Shame. “She said she was proud of the show and all our work,” Bartlett recalled. “As if you hadn’t fallen in love with her already . . .”

Like virtually everyone who encountered her, Bartlett, who worked up to eighteen hours a day with Dana for months, said Dana was “an inspiration. She changed me, just by the example she set.” He recalled that a favorite line of Dana’s was “Don’t ex- pect life to be easy,” and, Bartlett noted, “she knew that better than anyone. But she kept going. I never knew anyone with a stronger sense of who she was.”

As she had so many times before, Dana handled this latest set- back with grace and humor. “Gee,” she told Chris when she got home to Bedford, “I was in a longer-running show when I was a snowflake in the third-grade Christmas pageant.”

No matter. Two weeks after
More to Love
folded, Chris was again sitting proudly in the audience as Dana accepted Procter & Gamble’s Shining Example Award for her “grace, courage, and ac- tivism”—along with a $25,000 check for the Christopher Reeve Foundation.

That Thanksgiving 1998, the Reeves had more to be grateful for than awards and juicy parts in plays and movies. In Septem- ber, Chris had easily blown out the single candle on his birthday cake—something he had been unable to do for the first three years following his accident.

There was more: At one point that year, Dana heard a strange, explosive sound coming from Chris’s office and ran in to check it out. “What was that?” she asked.

“I sneezed!” he replied happily. “I really sneezed!” Dana and the nurses cheered, and with good reason: Sneezing is a sudden,

violent contraction of the diaphragm, which atrophies with paralysis and disuse. Although his pre-accident sneeze “would knock down walls,” Chris not been able to sneeze since the ac- cident. The fact that he could now sneeze was a definite sign that the breathing exercises he had been doing to wean himself of the ventilator were working.

By this time, Chris was able to fully appreciate the way in which his redefined life had brought his entire family closer. Nearly all the time he had spent before with his brothers and sisters, for ex- ample, had been devoted to skiing, sailing, playing tennis, or toss- ing around a football. “Now,” he reflected, “because physical activities are limited, we spend hours talking to each other instead of being busy doing things.” Not that he ever felt excluded when the family did decide to get physical: During the Reeves’ annual Thanksgiving Day soccer game, it was Chris who made the calls as referee.

In 1999, Dana followed Chris onto the Best Seller List with
Care Packages: Letters to Christopher Reeve from Strangers and Other Friends.
Dedicated to “Will, my most precious care package,” Dana’s first book was a sampling of the letters Chris had received since his accident—thoughts and prayers from stars like Hepburn, Robert De Niro, John Travolta, Hugh Grant, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Emma Thompson, and Paul McCartney, to Bill and Hillary Clin- ton, Nancy Reagan, and even the men on San Quentin’s Death Row (“We’re not all tough guys. We love you, Chris.”). The most touching were from young Superman fans: “I’m sorry that you fell off your horse. Let’s hope it won’t happen again.”

For Dana,
Care Packages
was “a thank-you letter. A long over- due reply to all of the people who . . . prayed for us, joined hands for us . . . cried for us, cheered for us, sent positive energy our way.” The book was also, said Dana, a love letter—“a love letter to Chris from me.” (She would write the foreword for another epistolary collection,
Love Letters of a Lifetime,
two years later.)

That success was offset by yet another medical setback when, the same week
Care Packages
was released in October 1999, a der- matologist noticed a lesion on Chris’s arm. It turned out to be skin cancer. Fortunately, it was caught early enough for Chris to be treated and cured. “Dana was very, very concerned, of course,” said one of Chris’s nurses. “But she never let on for a minute.”

Dana was, in fact, becoming increasingly celebrated as a kind of hero, if not a saint. She was now routinely being called “Saint Dana,” “Superwoman,” or America’s “Caretaker-in-Chief.” Each sobriquet made her wince. “I am not a hero,” she said with a laugh, “and I am most certainly not a saint! There’s nothing su- perhuman about standing by Chris. What’s so saintly about that? Lucky me. I’m with him!”

Surprisingly, sometimes the smallest things were the biggest re- minders of what she’d lost: There was no one to help latch her bracelet, no one to warm up the car, no one to hand the baby to. “All these little things that people don’t think about,” she said. “You are really on your own and, not only that, you’re caring for someone. It’s years and years. Your entire life has really changed. Are you up for the task?”

At Dana’s insistence, she and Chris each began seeing a ther- apist. “There are some things that I don’t think you should share with your spouse,” she explained. “You get a heart doctor for your heart. A therapist is an emotion doctor for your emotions.”

Like her husband, Dana considered herself “very fortunate be- cause I have a tremendous amount of help and love and support from people I don’t even know. There are millions of people who are caring for loved ones under much, much worse circumstances and they go completely unheralded. I thought,
Really, my job here is to be the voice for the many, many spouses who are caregivers, who don’t have the advantage of the world patting them on the back every day.
I’m not a saint. I’m a voice for the silent partner.”

There was another, unforeseen consequence to being lauded as a nurturer: “The one downside,” she said, “is that people perceive me as way older than I am. I used to audition for sexier roles, and then suddenly I’m only called to play the beleaguered wife.” In desperation, she called her agent. “Please tell people,” Dana said, “that I’m younger than Meg Ryan!”

In 2000, Dana turned down a part in the Broadway musical
The Full Monty
because it would have required leaving home for the six-month tryout in San Diego. “He’s an incredible human being,” she said of her decision to stay by Chris’s side. “Who wouldn’t want to be with him?”

She did take acting jobs in the New York area, however. In addition to another appearance on
Law & Order,
Dana landed a recurring role as a politician’s campaign manager in the gritty HBO prison drama
Oz.
She also joined veteran ABC news- woman Deborah Roberts as cohost of a Lifetime network talk show,
Lifetime Live.
Dana agreed to do the show because it aired live at noon, which meant that she could drive to the Astoria Stu- dios in Queens, do the show, leave at 2
P
.
M
., and be back before Will returned from school at four. “I can still be a stay-at-home wife and mom,” she said beaming, “and have a
real
job!”

This “real job” could sometimes get to her. “We all knew she

had those extra challenges in her life,” said Deborah Roberts. “She handled them happily, with aplomb.” Dana cracked only once, just as she was about to interview a woman who had lost a child. In the walk-up to the interview, producers showed a video of the woman at the funeral; her surviving child was comforting her by stroking her face. “Dana just lost it,” recalled Roberts. “She couldn’t stop crying.” The video reminded Dana of how Will had tried to comfort her in the aftermath of Chris’s accident.

Dana’s hopes for Chris’s recovery were now rather modest. “I’d love it,” she said, “if he could gain some more arm motion back so he could drive, or if he could get off his ventilator. Then we could go out to dinner without another person.”

“Every step of their journey, Dana saw around the corner first,” Peter Kiernan said. “She accepted the reality of the situa- tion. You know the stages of death—anger, denial, bargaining, acceptance? Well, Chris never got past bargaining to acceptance. He was going to fight until the end.”

The strength of their relationship, they both insisted, was not dependent on Chris’s recovery. “Dana never makes me feel guilty about creating this situation,” he said. “We’re just as much in love. Whether I have zero recovery or full recovery, our relationship will survive. That’s pretty incredible.”

That said, Chris seemed more confident than ever that he would regain the use of his legs. That dream was brought home dramat- ically in January 2000, when an estimated 150 million viewers tuned into the Super Bowl and saw a handsome, tuxedo-clad Christopher Reeve appear to rise from his chair and walk in a commercial for Nuveen Investments. Chris loved the spot, which, thanks to a little technical magic, was so convincing that it sent

thousands of paralysis victims and their family members to their phones. They wanted to know how they could cure their spinal cord injury the way Reeve had cured his.

While the ad was widely criticized as misleading, Chris and Dana both stood by it. “This,” he said, “is a motivating vision of something that can actually happen.” Nor was Chris, who still shouldered crushing medical bills, about to turn his nose up at the $1 million Nuveen had paid him for the ad.

These days, the financial pressures were such that Chris was ac- cepting offers from Madison Avenue. He was paid another $1 mil- lion to endorse an on-line supplemental health insurance firm, HealthExtras. He also directed corporate image ads for Johnson

& Johnson, including one heart-tugging spot about faith that he also appeared in. “Tell your kids,” he said, “that with faith, bad days will become good days in disguise.”

Faith was something Chris and Dana knew quite a lot about. Yet neither was religious in the conventional sense. Dana, who had been raised a practicing Catholic, drifted away from the church in her twenties. As a child in Princeton, Chris attended Presbyterian services most Sundays, but wound up experimenting with Scien- tology in 1975 before embarking on his own lengthy spiritual quest.

Chris’s first true act of faith, he was proud of saying, was not a religious one. It occurred the day he threw off his lifelong fear of commitment and married Dana. Three years later, after wak- ing up paralyzed in a Virginia hospital, Chris once again found himself grappling not only with his own mortality but with spir- itual issues. When he told his friend Bobby Kennedy, Jr., that he felt “like a phony” praying to a God he had never acknowledged

in the past, Kennedy told him to “fake it till you make it . . . Your faith will become real soon enough.”