Somewhere in Heaven: The Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve (26 page)

world,” he said, “and she was going to be just fine.”

By the end of February, Dana’s condition had deteriorated rapidly—despite the fact that the cancer, according to Charles Morosini, was actually “in recession. But her lungs filled with fluid and she just went down. It took everybody by surprise.”

On March 4, Dana summoned Peter Kiernan to the hospital. Without stating the obvious about her worsening condition, she told Kiernan she wanted him to take over as chairman of the foundation. “I told her,” he said, “ ‘Civil rights leaders always have enemies, but the great thing was that you got to be a civil rights leader and everybody loves you!’ ”

At this point, family and friends rushed to the hospital to be by her side. But Dana wanted to hear funny stories. Even though her throat was seared from the radiation treatments and she could barely talk, she laughed through her pain when somebody brought up Groundhog Day. “I just thought,” Adrienne recalled, “through this whole thing, she can barely swallow, and yet she kept her sense of humor. She was just a fighter.”

Shortly after 10
P
.
M
. on March 6, with her loved ones gath- ered around her, Dana slipped away. She was forty-four. “She was in high spirits to the end,” said her father, Charles Morosini. “It was a very quiet passing, which gives you some comfort . . .”

Dana’s entire family was at her bedside—with one glaring ex- ception. “Will was not there,” Charles Morosini said. “He didn’t have the stomach for it.”

Robin and Marsha Williams had visited Dana in the hospital, and had known that the end was near. Yet when word of Dana’s death reached them, they both broke down. For once, Robin could only muster a few eloquent words. “The brightest light has gone out,” he said. “We will forever celebrate her loving spirit.” Barbara Walters echoed the bewilderment felt by many of Dana’s closest friends. “I was under the impression she was get- ting better,” Walters said. “Then she was gone. I was devastated.” Indeed, as shocking as Christopher Reeve’s death was, no one

was prepared for this unexpected second blow. “Jack Kennedy once said life is unfair,” observed their friend, playwright A. R. Gurney. “But this seems
brutally
unfair.” Once again, world lead- ers, movie stars, and medical researchers alike joined in what amounted to a worldwide outpouring of dismay and grief. “Chris was America’s superhero,” John Kerry said, “and Dana be- came our hero, too.” Another old friend, Larry King, said Chris and Dana “left us much too soon, but not before giving us two unforgettable profiles in courage.”

Even as she was losing her valiant battle against cancer, Dana’s thoughts were of Will and his future without a mom or dad. As unlikely a possibility as it seemed, she and Chris had both agreed some time ago that, if they were not in the picture, it would be better to have Will brought up by neighbors in familiar sur- roundings, rather than moved to live with relatives.

As his health began to fade in 2003, Chris revised his will to read, “If Dana shall fail for any reason to qualify as such Guardian hereunder . . . then I appoint my friends Robert Fraiman, Jr., and Nancy Fraiman.”

Now that the unthinkable had happened, Will would move in with the family of a schoolmate—though not the Fraimans. “We were mentioned in Christopher’s will initially,” Nancy Fraiman ex- plained, “but Dana wanted to place Will with a family where there were boys.” One of the boys was Will’s oldest friend. There was also a seventeen-year-old girl in Will’s new family. This would en- able Will to continue excelling at the school he had always at- tended, to play on the same teams alongside the same boys he grew up with, to flourish in the environment he had always known.

It was an arrangement that had the full approval of the Reeve and Morosini families, who would continue to play a large part in Will’s life. “Same neighborhood, same friends,” Charles Mo- rosini said. “Everybody was happy with that.”

“There’s an embrace of family around Will,” Peter Kiernan added. “The first circle is Matthew and Alexandra.” (In fact, dur- ing Dana’s last weeks, Alex had put her studies at Harvard Law School on hold to move into the Bedford house to care for Will.) Will would not be wanting for love—from his friends, from his family, and the countless people whose lives his parents touched. Cycling legend and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong, who had befriended Dana and Will after Chris passed away, comforted Will two days after his mother’s death. For a boy who had lost his father, his grandmother, and his mother in the span of sev- enteen months, Will was “showing the same courage his parents had,” Armstrong said. In the coming weeks, Will and Armstrong would grow close. “I love hanging with him,” Armstrong said. “I never thought I’d say that about a thirteen-year-old, but he’s not your run-of-the-mill thirteen-year-old. He’s a smart, well ad-

justed, mature, humble kid.”

There was, as there had been for Chris, a small private funeral for Dana followed several weeks later by a star-studded memorial service—this time at Broadway’s New Amsterdam Theater. The same people sat in the audience, this time sharing a look that fell somewhere between bewilderment and weary resignation. “It was beautiful,” said Paula Zahn, one of more than nine hundred invited guests. “It was also raw. It was inspiring. It was heartbreaking.”

“People were very much in a state of disbelief,” added another guest, Brooke Ellison. “How could this happen to one family?” For many the most touching moment came when sisters

Deborah and Adrienne sang a tune they often sang together with Dana as children—this time with a third voice, taking Dana’s part, heard just offstage. “That brought the house down,” Zahn said. “It was very, very sad and moving.”

Once again Will, who arrived arm in arm with Matthew and Alexandra, stood up to pay tribute to a loved one—the mother who had taught him how to live and love in the face of soul- trying adversity. When he finished, the room erupted with ap- plause. “Fortunately,” observed family friend and neighbor John Bedford Lloyd, Chris and Dana “gave Will exactly what he will need—the gift of bravery and grace.”

With Matthew, Alexandra, and Will carrying on the important work of their foundation, Chris and Dana left a truly unique legacy of caring, courage, and hope. None of it could have hap- pened if Chris and Dana had not been true soul mates, the stars of one of the greatest true-life love stories of all time. In recog- nition of their equal partnership in life, one year after Dana’s death the Christopher Reeve Foundation was renamed the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation.

Chris never doubted why their marriage—and their devotion to each other—endured. “Our love is built on a rock,” he said, “like a lighthouse.”

Toward the end, Dana found her mind drifting back to the be- ginning, when she was a hopeful young cabaret singer and he was Superman. “Suddenly I find myself missing the young Chris, missing the courting days, his whole being,” Dana said wistfully. “I think he would like that.”

ACKNO WL EDGMENTS

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“He’s got real potential,” Kate Hepburn told me in 1976 when we spoke about the young man making his Broadway debut op- posite her in Enid Bagnold’s
A Matter of Gravity
. “Of course he’ll have a lot more once I’ve kicked some sense into him!” It was classic Kate: She reserved such good-natured lambasting only for those she truly liked. And she truly liked Christopher Reeve.

But Hepburn, whose own love affair with Spencer Tracy be- came the stuff of legend, was in awe of Dana. She was more than just a loyal wife standing by her man; Dana displayed the kind of quintessentially American spirit that Kate admired above all else. “She never complains—you never hear either of them com- plain,” Hepburn told me. “It’s heartbreaking what’s happened, but now we know they are just two damn extraordinary people, plain and simple.”

Over the past thirty years, I have had the privilege of writing

about many famous couples. My books about Hepburn and Tracy, Jack and Jackie Kennedy, Bill and Hillary Clinton, George and Laura Bush, and Princess Diana examined the complex forces that attract people to one another and then hold them to- gether in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. No story was more poignant, yet ultimately more uplifting, than that of Christopher and Dana Reeve.

A tremendous amount of research is essential for any com- prehensive biography, and this was particularly true for this dual biography of Christopher and Dana Reeve. In essence, work on this book began when Kate Hepburn first introduced me to Chris Reeve over thirty years ago—although no one could have foreseen the strange twists in the road that would lead him from playing a superhero to actually being one.

Many people spoke to me about how their lives had been changed forever merely for having known Chris and Dana, but none more movingly than Brooke Ellison. Brooke, who knows something about courage and grace, had befriended the Reeves when Chris directed
The Brooke Ellison Story
for television not long before his death. “I’m honored to be a part of your book,” Brooke told me, echoing the sentiments of literally every one of the hun- dreds of people who I spoke to for
Somewhere in Heaven
. “The love Chris and Dana had for each other—and the love they gave to Will—was so powerful . . . They were an amazing couple, and it’s important for people to know that.”

Once again, I have had the distinct privilege of working with Hyperion’s supremely gifted editor in chief Will Schwalbe—a dear friend who is respected, admired, and genuinely liked throughout an industry where personalities can often be, to put

it kindly, problematic. He is the proverbial Class Act. I also owe a debt of thanks to his consummately professional and eternally patient colleague, Brendan Duffy.

My thanks, as well, to all the folks at Hyperion—particularly Bob Miller, Ellen Archer, Will Balliett, Beth Gebhard, Phil Rose, Fritz Metsch, David Lott, Navorn Johnson, Muriel Tebid, and Chisomo Kalinga. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Camille McDuffie of Goldberg-McDuffie Communications, and to Brad Foltz for another superb cover design.

My agent, Ellen Levine, is another of those class acts that I’ve been fortunate enough to have in my life. No one is more pas- sionate about books than Ellen, and no writer could ask for a more formidable advocate or a truer friend. In addition, my thanks to Ellen’s talented colleagues at Trident Media Group, especially Claire Roberts, Alanna Ramirez, Adam Friedstein, Victoria Horn, and Melissa Flashman.

Chris and Dana Reeve put a high premium on family, and so do I. I was lucky to have two terrific parents—Edward and Jeanette Andersen—and lucky to be able to thank them in twenty-eight books. Our own daughters, Kate and Kelly, never cease to amaze us. They and their mother, Valerie, the source of their radiance and wit, make any complaints about life that I may have seem utterly trivial. Unlike Chris and Dana, Valerie and I have had the luxury of more than thirty-six years together—a testament to the fact that we, like the Reeves, were careful never to abandon our sense of humor.

Additional thanks to Peter Kiernan, Brooke Ellison, Dr. Steven Kirshblum, Dr. John Jane, Edward Herrmann, Senator Tom Harkin, Richard Matheson, Senator John Kerry, Ariel Dorfman,

A. R. Gurney, Dan Strone, Jack O’Brien, Dr. Patricia Morton, Erica Druin, Rebecca Lewis, Dr. Mo Nadkarni, William Baldwin, the late Katharine Hepburn, Charles Tuthill, Michael Frankfurt, Robin Bronk, Donald Margulies, Lendon Gray, Jennifer Van Dyke, Dr. Marcalee Sipski Alexander, the late John Houseman, Denise Richer, Dr. Oswald Stewart, the late Charlton Heston, Michael Feinstein, Richard Caplan, the late Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Jerry Pam, Ira Levin, Bill Diehl, Johnny Mandel, Jay Presson Allen, Annette Witheridge, Robbie Kass, Alicia Mohr, Diane Rosen, Enid Bagnold, Elene M., Robin Bowman, the late Sam Spiegel, Suzanne Morelle, David McGough, Shana Alexander, Don Cash Jr., Amy Beller, Tommy Cole, Lonny Chapman, Paula Dranov, the late Ellis Raab, Tom Freeman, Rosalind Halvorsen, James Watson, Amy Beller, Eugenia Szady, Ray Whelan Jr., Barrie Schenck, Kendra Day, Harry Benson, John Marion, Rosemary McClure, Lawrence R. Mulligan, Parker Ladd, Liz Richardson, Yvette Reyes, Dudley Freeman, Cranston Jones, Jennifer Prather, Lee Wohlfert, Gary Gunderson, James Bacon, Alfred Eisenstaedt, John Bryson, Elizabeth Loth, Tiffney Sanford, Julie Cammer, Mary Beth Whelan, Army Archerd, Liz Miller, the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, the Kessler Institute for Rehabil- itation, the Reeve-Irvine Research Center, the Juilliard School, Wesleyan University, Culpeper Regional Hospital, Northern Westchester Hospital, the University of Virginia Medical Cen- ter, South Coast Repertory, the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Cornell University, Middlebury College, the Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation, the New York Public Library, the staff of Motion Picture Study at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Williams College, the New York Library of the

Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, the Creative Coalition, INSITE (the International Network of S
omewhere in Time
En- thusiasts), Talentworks, the Litchfield Business Center, Caped- Wonder.com, the Silas Bronson Library, the Gunn Memorial Library & Museum, the Brookfield Library, Reuters, the Associ- ated Press, the
New York Times
, Associated Press/ Wide World, Sipa Press, Corbis, BEImages, Getty Images, and Globe Photos.

SO UR CE NO T ES

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The following chapter notes are designed to give a general view of the sources drawn upon in preparing
Somewhere in Heaven
, but they are by no means intended to be all-inclusive. The author has respected the wishes of those interview subjects who have asked to remain anonymous and accord- ingly not listed here or elsewhere in the text. As a major international star following the release of his first Superman film in 1978, Chris was exten- sively covered by the Associated Press, Reuters, United Press International, and other major news agencies around the world. However, that paled in comparison to the tsunami of news stories triggered by his tragic accident in 1995. During the ensuing decade, Chris and Dana appeared in thousands of publications ranging from the
New York Times
,
USA Today
,
The Times
of London, the
Los Angeles Times
, the
Wall Street Journal
, and the
Washington Post
to
Time
,
Newsweek
,
People
,
Paris Match
,
Ladies’ Home Journal
,
TV Guide
,
Esquire
,
Entertainment Weekly
, the
New Yorker
,
Parade
,
Good Housekeeping
,
Us
,
Readers Digest
, and
Vanity Fair
. Only a small representative sample of this coverage is offered here.