Somewhere in Heaven: The Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve (3 page)

Each night during the summer, festival-goers packed the inn’s dimly lit, ground-floor cabaret—often in hopes of seeing one of the stars perform. Over the years Chris had gamely obliged, sum- moning enough courage to take the stage and belt out numbers by Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and the Gershwins. “A lot of us have no business singing,” he allowed, “but the crowd seems to get a kick out of it.”

Tonight, however, Chris was content to sit back and listen to the Cabaret Corps, the tight little group of four professional singers who took up the slack each evening. Reeve’s friends nudged one another as he kept staring at the slender young singer with the enormous eyes and blinding smile. Chris was oblivious to everything in the room—the clinking glasses, the hum of table conversation punctuated by clattering sounds from the kitchen, and the occasional spike of laughter—everything but Dana.

POW! BIFF! “That was it,” Chris later said. “Right then I went down hook, line, and sinker. She just knocked me out. A lot of people saw that happen.” The inn’s co-owner, Denise Richer, was one of them. “We kept looking at the stage, and then at him, and then back at her,” Richer said, “and we thought, ‘Something’s happening here.’ It was so obvious.” According to fellow
Rover
cast member Charles Tuthill, who was standing against the back wall with Chris, “he was totally hit between the eyes. She took his breath away.”

When her number was over, Chris shook his head in wonder. “My God,” he told his buddies, “who’s
that
? She is incredible!” As intently as Chris had been staring at Dana, she had been doing her best to ignore his presence in the audience. It had been eight years since he shot to stardom as the Man of Steel, and with three sequels under his yellow belt, Reeve and the iconic comic book hero he portrayed on screen now seemed virtually insep- arable. If anything, at thirty-five Reeve now seemed more phys- ically striking than ever. Standing a full head taller than virtually everyone else in the room and decked out in his customary prep- pie uniform of pale blue polo shirt, khakis, and Docksiders with- out socks, Chris was impossible to miss. “I just pretended Superman wasn’t there,” she recalled wryly. “Not as easy as it

sounds.”

She had her reasons. That summer Reeve’s breakup with Gae Exton, his girlfriend of ten years and the mother of his two chil- dren, was grist for the rumor mill. While shooting
Superman IV
in London a few months earlier, he had been romantically linked with leading lady Mariel Hemingway. Now Williamstown was abuzz with gossip that Chris was on the prowl.

Afterward, Chris went backstage to congratulate the woman who had, it would turn out, won his heart with a single song. “Hi, I’m Chris Reeve,” he said with all the awkward charm of Clark Kent.

“Yes,” she replied, stifling the urge to blurt out, “You must be kidding.” Still suspicious of his motives—her friends had warned her he was in the audience and on the make only moments be- fore she stepped onstage—she politely introduced herself in return, and then listened as he heaped praise on her performance.

“I’ve always liked that song,” said Chris, who sheepishly ad- mitted to being a fan of Broadway musicals in general and
Funny Girl
in particular. “It’s a great song,” he told her. “You know,” he went on, struggling to make small talk, “Streisand loved that song, but they cut it from the movie.”

“I know.” She nodded, trying not to appear surprised that one of the biggest action stars of the decade not only liked show tunes but was a Barbra Streisand fan. Maybe he wasn’t going to make a move on her, she thought. Maybe her friends were completely wrong about Reeve and his intentions.

They were right, as it turned out. Chris and a few of his fel- low actors from the cast of
The Rover
were headed to The Zoo, an after-hours
Animal House
–style hangout tucked away in a dor- mitory on the Williams College campus. The name of the es- tablishment said it all.

“Would you like a ride?” he asked. “My truck is parked right outside.”

“Oh, no,” Dana replied without missing a beat as several of her friends showed up to congratulate her. “That’s OK. I’ve got my own car.”

“Oh,” Chris mumbled as she disappeared in the crowd. This was not the kind of response Superman was accustomed to.

Dana, meantime, was being scolded by pals who had witnessed Chris’s timid overtures. “You are
crazy,
” one chided her. “Why don’t you go with him?”

“But I
have
a car,” she insisted. “I can get there on my own.” “Give us your keys right now!” one demanded. “We’ll drive your damn car. Christopher Reeve wants to give you a ride.

Now go for it!”

“But why would I leave my perfectly good car in the parking lot,” Dana persisted stubbornly, “and then be stuck at the party?” Her friends rolled their eyes, but by then it was too late; Chris had already spun out of the parking lot behind the wheel of his battered black pickup, hoping to meet up with Dana at The Zoo. When he got there, he ignored his friends and did not even bother to stop at the bar. Instead he stood where he could get a clear view of the front door, hands thrust in his pockets, waiting for the

beautiful girl in the black off-the-shoulder dress to walk in.

Dana arrived a few minutes later, and scanned the crowd for Chris. Their eyes locked, and within moments they were stand- ing together in the center of the crammed room. He had strolled up to her with a studied nonchalance that she found disarmingly clumsy. “Could I get you a drink?” he asked, and she said sure. But he never did. “We didn’t get a drink, we didn’t sit down, we didn’t move,” he later said. For the next hour, everything and everyone around them melted away as they stood talking—just talking.

Don’t rush this,
Chris told himself.
It’s too important
... “Well,” he blurted as he looked at his watch. “It’s getting late

. . . It was very nice to meet you.” She, in turn, shook his hand, and a half hour later both were back home in their own beds.

They would eventually call June 30, 1987, simply “our day.” But on this, the day they met, they were each privately asking the same thing: “Do I really want to do this?”

At that point in their lives, Chris and Dana both had reasons for walking—running—in opposite directions. At twenty-six, Dana

was making her Williamstown debut doing supporting parts on- stage, then, once the curtain fell, rushing to the 1896 House to belt out numbers as one of the Cabaret Corps. The Williamstown Festival, which for years had attracted major stars like Chris yearn- ing to reconnect with their roots in live theater, had also long been regarded as a showcase for up-and-coming talent. Dana Charles Morosini needed the work, and she needed to land that all- important break.

Not that she had ever faced any real hardships in her early life— far from it. Dana was born on March 17, 1961, in suburban Tea- neck, New Jersey. Her father, Charles (who provided Dana with her gender-bending middle name), was a respected cardiologist, while mom, Helen, worked for a New York publishing house.

When Dana was a child, the Morosinis moved to Greenburgh, New York, a decidedly more upscale commuter enclave in coun- try club–speckled Westchester County. All three Morosini daugh- ters were excellent students, eager to please their demanding dad. “These were very capable young ladies,” said one family friend. “They could do anything a boy could—and that included chop- ping firewood.” (Eldest sister Deborah would wind up following in Daddy’s footsteps by becoming a noted physician and medical researcher, while baby of the family Adrienne became a success- ful real estate agent.)

In this family of headstrong achievers, Dana took on the clas- sic role of the middle child. Whenever the inevitable family squab- bles took place, it was Dana who calmed the waters. “She was the nurturer, the peacekeeper,” Adrienne said.

“She was outgoing and lots of fun and good at everything she did,” said a childhood friend. “But she was also very conscious,

even at a young age, of not hurting people’s feelings. If it looked like another kid was being ganged up on or excluded for some reason, she always came to their rescue.”

Dana also had a vivid imagination. She not only walked down the street holding the hand of her imaginary friend, but also could picture her imaginary friend’s imaginary hat. “I had a very rich fantasy life,” she later recalled. “I liked to pretend, to invent characters and situations, like practically everybody who winds up becoming an actor.”

Like multitudes of other American girls, Dana also became fas- cinated with horses, and before she was seven she was riding com- petitively at equestrian centers in New Jersey and Westchester County. “Like everything else she did,” her mother once said, “Dana threw her whole heart and soul into doing it right. She had great style and control, and she loved it. Dana really became a superb horsewoman.”

Indeed, Dana was, said one family friend, “very spirited, and whatever she tried—tennis, skiing, track—she did fairly well.” A sport at which Dana did not excel just happened to be one of her father’s favorite pastimes. Charles Morosini had repeatedly tried to teach all three of his daughters how to sail on Long Island Sound, but, he said, “none of them quite got the hang of it.”

At Greenburgh’s Edgemont High, Dana was soon starring in nearly every school play and musical while at the same time main- taining a straight-A average. “Everybody was very impressed with Dana’s singing,” recalled one classmate, “but whenever you com- plimented her, she just laughed it off. She wasn’t stuck up at all, and she wasn’t afraid to make fun of herself. Students, teachers, parents—everybody loved her.” One of the teachers at Edgemont,

Richard Glass, described Dana as being “a born leader, pure and simple.” Accordingly, she was elected senior class president and, when she graduated in 1979, was voted “most admired” by her classmates.

Determined to pursue an acting career, Dana went to New York that summer following graduation to study with Nikos Psacharopoulos, the flamboyantly eccentric director and acting coach. A decade earlier, Psacharopoulos, who was also artistic di- rector at Williamstown, had taken a teenage Christopher Reeve under his wing.

Dana also studied for a semester at the HB (for Herbert Berghof) Studio in Manhattan, where she was taught by Uta Hagen. The legendary stage actress was “brilliant, stern, and un- relenting,” remembered Dana, who quickly learned that it was “a long, long way from being able to sing loud enough so that the parents in high school can hear you to acquiring the tools of acting.”

Over the next four years, she would major in English Litera- ture at Vermont’s Middlebury College. But Dana would never abandon her dreams of a life on the stage. She took large roles in several college productions, including the part of the villain- ous Nurse Ratched in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. “Talk about casting against type,” said fellow student Peter Kiernan, who later became one of the Reeves’ closest friends and confi- dants. Coincidentally, Kiernan had grown up playing hockey with Chris. “Nurse Ratched is such a cold, awful character. Dana had to be a great actress to pull that off. She was such a warm, sweet, funny person—a beautiful human being, inside and out. “Besides,” Kiernan added, “can you imagine Dana stepping out

onstage in a skintight nurse’s uniform? I could barely breathe.” At the time, Kiernan said, he was “totally smitten with her. She was a knockout. I tried three or four times, but she would have noth- ing to do with me.” (Twenty years later, he would bring up the incident while introducing Dana to a group of movers and shak- ers at New York’s Algonquin Hotel. “She turned beet red,” Kier- nan said. “She’d completely forgotten that I was the annoying guy who kept hitting on her back in college. Not that I was the only one, of course. She was gorgeous. Every guy felt the way I did.”) Determined to become an actress, Dana spent her junior year abroad studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in Lon- don. After she graduated cum laude from Middlebury, Dana headed off to Los Angeles to earn a master’s of Fine Arts degree from the West Coast’s answer to Juilliard, the prestigious Califor-

nia Institute of the Arts.

Through it all, Dana apparently never had a committed, long- term relationship. “A lot of guys were after her, of course,” said one of Dana’s college friends, “and she certainly dated a few of them. But Dana was too focused on her career to really get involved with anybody who didn’t knock her off her feet.”

In 1986, Dana returned to New York to start auditioning. She waited tables like every other aspiring actor, but there were also small parts off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway, as well as work in children’s theater, regional theater, and the occasional singing gig. For a lifelong nonsmoker, the nights spent belting out show tunes and standards in hotel lobbies and dingy bars packed with chain-smokers took their toll. By the time her last set was over, Dana’s eyes would be burning, her throat would feel dry and sore, and she would often be fighting off waves of nausea. She could

hardly wait to get home to wash the smoky smell out of her clothes and her hair. “As bad as it is for me,” Dana said, “imag- ine how awful it is for the people who have to wait on tables or tend bar for eight hours at a stretch. I feel so sorry for them.”

She would never, by contrast, feel sorry for herself. “Dana was unbelievably positive and upbeat,” Ed Herrmann said. “It sounds corny, but she was that proverbial person who lights up a room.” Added a fellow struggling actor, “Dana never made a science of whining like the rest of us. But she was no Pollyanna, either. She felt the sting of rejection and disappointment as much as the rest of us did.”

At audition after audition, she kept being passed over in favor of more seasoned actresses. “She comes across as the girl next door,” Psacharopoulos observed, “at a time in the theater when they aren’t always looking for the girl next door.” When one scene called for her to cut loose with profanity, the casting di- rector rejected her on the grounds that “nobody’s going to be- lieve words like that coming out of her mouth.”