Somewhere in Heaven: The Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve (5 page)

the pages of the comic book. “If there’s a God in heaven,” said
Su- perman
director Richard Donner, “he sent me Christopher Reeve.” Chris, who had earned his pilot’s license in his spare time and was flying his single-engine A36 Bonanza whenever and wherever he could, was also insisting on doing his own stunts in the movie. Dangling from wires for hours on end, he worked for hours per- fecting his takeoffs and landings as the Man of Steel. Marlon Brando, who played Superman’s father, Jor-El, tried to talk Reeve out of taking any unnecessary chances. “Why risk your neck?”

Brando asked. “It’s only a movie.”

Released in December of 1978,
Superman
was an instant smash. The film would go on to gross more than $300 million worldwide—five times its production budget—in the process making it one of the biggest moneymakers of all time and Chris the proverbial overnight star. He admitted to being “a little over- whelmed” by how strongly the public identified him with the quintessentially American icon he was portraying.

“You would not believe,” Chris told one writer, “what women would expect from somebody who played Superman.” There would be hundreds of overtures and propositions, but Chris was no longer available. Months earlier, Chris was on the commis- sary lunch line during the shooting of
Superman
when he backed up and accidentally stepped on the foot of modeling agent Gae Exton. While it was hardly love at first sight for the leggy, blond Exton, Chris was instantly smitten.

Fresh from a bitter breakup with her millionaire husband, David Iverson, Exton kept Chris at arm’s length until the third date. Even then, all they did was kiss. “She was shocked,” he re- called, “that I wasn’t going to muscle past the door into her bed.” Things moved rather quickly from then on. After months

during which the tabloids linked the hunky Reeve with every- body from his
Superman
costar Valerie Perrine to Farrah Fawcett, Chris appeared with Exton at the film’s royal premiere in London. Not all of Reeve’s fans were beautiful, high-profile women.

Chris would occasionally slip into his red cape, black boots, and blue tights and make surprise visits to children’s hospitals and pe- diatric wards. Through the Make-A-Wish Foundation, he also fulfilled the dying wishes of several terminally ill children to meet Superman. “It’s very hard for me to be silly about Superman,” Reeve said, “because I have seen children dying of brain tumors who as their last request wanted to talk to me, and have gone to their graves with a kind of peace . . . I’ve seen that Superman really matters.”

Financially, Superman mattered less to Chris than it did to sev- eral supporting players. While Brando took home $3.7 million for a few days’ work and Gene Hackman collected $2 million playing Superman’s nemesis Lex Luthor, Chris was paid a mere

$250,000 for both the original
and
the sequel.

Nevertheless, the film vaulted Reeve from the ranks of jour- neyman soap stars to Hollywood’s A List of leading men. Soon multimillion-dollar offers were pouring in. In quick succession, Chris turned down the racy
American Gigolo
(the movie would help turn Richard Gere into a star), the even racier
Body Heat
(a career-maker for William Hurt), and the part of Fletcher Chris- tian in a big budget remake of
Mutiny on the Bounty
(the part went to up-and-comer Mel Gibson).

Vowing to “escape the cape,” Chris chose a low-budget time- travel romance as his next project. The movie would be released to lackluster reviews and fail at the box office. But over the years,

Somewhere in Time
would, like such initial box office flops as
The Wizard of Oz
and
It’s a Wonderful Life,
go on to develop a huge following. (The film would also have immense international ap- peal.
Somewhere in Time
was an immediate hit when it was released in Asia in 1984; the movie wound up playing before packed houses at Hong Kong’s Palace Theater for eighteen months straight. By 2008,
Somewhere in Time
would rank as the sixth highest-grossing film of all time in China. Back in the U.S., the film would air countless times on television to strong ratings, spawning the International Network of
Somewhere in Time
En- thusiasts (INSITE), several Internet Web sites, and a cottage industry of books, posters, photographs, CDs, DVDs, and movie- related memorabilia.)

Chris’s love interest in the film was British actress Jane Sey- mour, a onetime Bond girl (she played Solitaire opposite Roger Moore as 007 in
Live and Let Die
) who would go on to star in the hit CBS series
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman
. In
Somewhere in Time,
Chris plays a young writer who falls in love with the por- trait of a long-dead actress (Seymour) and journeys back in time to meet her. “I was surprised and delighted that Chris wanted the part,” said Richard Matheson, on whose book
Bid Time Return Somewhere in Time
was based. “He approached it perfectly, bring- ing an honesty and an innocence to his character that is tremen- dously appealing to audiences—to men as well as women.”

For Chris, the film posed more than just an acting challenge. More than any other screen project,
Somewhere in Time
wreaked havoc with his allergy to horses. The movie was shot in and around the Grand Hotel on Michigan’s picturesque Mackinac Island, where all cars were banned. Horse-drawn carriages were the only

mode of transportation allowed, which meant there were nearly seven hundred horses roaming the island at any given time. Even though he was doubling up on his allergy medication, Chris oc- casionally succumbed to an attack. While the crew waited to be- gin, the star put drops in his eyes to keep them from watering and waited for the coughing and wheezing to subside.

Stung by
Somewhere in Time
’s initially cool reception (the
New York Times
’s Vincent Canby described Reeve as looking and sounding like a “helium-filled canary” in the film), Chris re- turned to London with Exton to finish
Superman II
. It was there that Matthew Exton Reeve was born on December 20, 1979, at the Welbeck Street Clinic in Mayfair. The baby’s arrival taught Chris that “unconditional love is everything.” But it did not con- vince him that it was time to marry Matthew’s mother. Gae did not press the issue, although she drew the line at more children without matrimony. “One illegitimate child is fine,” she allowed, “but two, is, well, tacky.”

Surprisingly,
Superman II
met with both critical acclaim and success at the box office—one of the few sequels that equaled or, in the view of many, surpassed the original. Reeve would later say he felt that it was the best of the series.

Not surprisingly, Chris was now more closely identified than ever with the superhero he brought to life on screen. Still deter- mined to escape the cape, he went back to Broadway, this time playing a Vietnam veteran whose legs had been blown off by a land mine in Lanford Wilson’s searing drama
Fifth of July
. In re- searching the role at a Brooklyn Veterans Administration hospi- tal, Chris was given his first real glimpse into the challenges faced by the disabled.

Chris followed
Fifth of July
up by taking on the role of Michael Caine’s psychopathic lover in Sidney Lumet’s
Deathtrap
. But in 1982, Reeve was persuaded by director Richard Lester to don the cape once again for
Superman III
. It was while filming this latest episode in the Superman saga that Chris decided to take a hot air balloon ride with his longtime friend, photographer Ken Regan. “My contract says that while I’m making
Superman,
I can’t fly my plane,” Reeve explained, “but it doesn’t say anything about a balloon!”

As it turned out, they got off to a late start and wound up land- ing after dark—directly on a tree stump in an open field. Both men were jettisoned from the basket on impact. Regan managed to struggle to his feet and called out Chris’s name in the dark- ness. Nothing. “Oh no, I’ve killed Superman!” Regan thought to himself. Finally, he heard his friend moaning. “Oh, God,” he said, “I think I broke everything in my body.” Regan rushed up to help Chris, who was sprawled out on the grass. When he got there and knelt down, his friend burst out laughing. “I could have slugged him,” Regan later recalled. “He was absolutely fine.”

As soon as
Superman III
was completed, Chris wasted no time again trying to distance himself from the role that had made him famous. The anti-Superman crusade continued with Merchant Ivory’s
The Bostonians,
in which Chris was cast as impoverished writer Basil Ransome. Later, while playing a barnstorming air- mail pilot in
The Aviator
(for which the thrill-seeking Chris did his own aerial stunts), Chris became a father a second time with the arrival of Alexandra Exton Reeve in December of 1983. Holding to the conviction that “in most cases marriage is a sham,” Chris made it clear that he still had no intention of tying the knot

with Gae—no matter how “tacky” it was to have two illegitimate children.

As devoted as he undoubtedly was to Matthew and Alexandra, the fact remained that Chris was essentially an absent father. When he wasn’t poring over scripts, acting on the stage, or away on a film location, Chris was crisscrossing the country (or flying solo across the Atlantic) at the controls of his new twin-engine Beechcraft, skiing down some of the world’s most challenging runs, or soaring over mountaintops in his glider. Reeve was also, he would later admit, seeing other women—lots of other women. He conceded that the pressures of fatherhood and family during this period made him feel “unsettled and restless.”

The more “restless” he felt, the more chances he took. In Au- gust of 1984, Chris, Gae, and the children were vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard when Chris spotted a woman parasailing over an inlet and decided to give it a try. Having strapped himself into a harness that was being towed by a motorboat, he gave a signal and the boat took off. Chris quickly gained altitude, and when he was about ninety feet above the water he began waving at Gae and the kids with both hands. “He should have been holding on to the harness,” an eyewitness said.

“Suddenly, the harness became loose,” the witness said, “and he began to fall, frantically waving his arms in the air.” (The harness, it turned out, was designed to carry no more than 180 pounds; Chris weighed over 200 pounds.) Reeve plunged nine stories into just four feet of water.

“He dropped like a rock,” said artist Donald Widdis, who also witnessed the accident. Widdis raced down the beach to check on him, convinced that “no one could take a fall like that and not be severely injured or dead.”

Incredibly, Chris, who had instinctively curled up in a ball as he fell, landed on his side. He lay in the water, moaning, until onlookers helped him ashore. Reeve suffered bruised ribs and was bleeding from the mouth, but within a few weeks he had fully recovered. “You’re lucky,” one of his rescuers told him, “you didn’t break your neck.”

Gae Exton would never forget that day. “I’ve never been so terrified,” she said, “as when I saw him falling.”

The following month, after being turned down for the lead in
Children of a Lesser God
(the role went to his friend William Hurt), Chris agreed to do his first made-for-television movie. He was to play Count Vronsky opposite Jacqueline Bisset in the CBS adap- tation of Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina
. With a screenplay by
The Lion in Winter
author James Goldman and a cast that also included Acad- emy Award–winner Paul Scofield, Chris looked forward to being part of what, for all intents and purposes, looked like a quality pro- duction. As for advisors who told him to wait for a vehicle of his own before making the jump to television: “I just thought: ‘What a beautiful story. I’d like to be part of it.’ ”

Before filming began in Budapest, Chris decided to get some formal instruction in horseback riding from an instructor near his brother Ben’s home in Martha’s Vineyard. Once he arrived in Hungary, it quickly became apparent that Chris, who still took antihistamines to control his allergy to horses, needed all the pro- fessional help he could get. In one of
Anna Karenina
’s key scenes, Vronsky’s horse is injured in a steeplechase and the count is forced to put him down with a single bullet. Chris had no experience jumping fences or hedges, but he did want to try to keep up with the other riders in the scene—all members of Hungary’s national equestrian team—during the opening stretch on flat ground.

As it turned out, his horse tore away from the pack and out of range of the camera truck. After several takes, Chris was hooked. When he returned to the United States in late 1984, he decided to take up riding seriously. In addition to working with trainers in Bedford, New York, he often spent days at a time riding through the Green Mountains of Vermont. His mount for the Vermont rides, a temperamental mare named Hope, made a habit of throw- ing him off whenever the mood struck her. “She was definitely a tough cookie,” he later said. “But she kept you on your toes.” Another of Chris’s many close calls occurred on the set of his next film, one that Chris hoped would finally help him emerge from the long shadow of Superman. In the gritty
Street Smart,
Chris portrayed an ambitious young reporter whose manufac- tured stories land him in a dangerous spot between the police and a homicidal pimp (played by big-screen newcomer Morgan Freeman). Driven to once again prove his versatility as an actor, Chris refused to be sidelined by something so minor as an emer- gency appendectomy. Just two days after surgery, he defied doc- tor’s orders and returned to the set—to do a fight scene. “Don’t forget,” Chris cautioned Freeman jokingly, “what happened to

Houdini.”

Street Smart
earned an Oscar nomination for Freeman, but Chris’s performance was widely panned. He had no illusions about what the reaction to his next project would be: Offered

$4 million to reprise the role, Chris donned his cape yet again, for
Superman IV
. It was a decision, he later conceded, “I lived to regret.” “
Superman IV,
” he said, “was a catastrophe from start to finish. That failure was a huge blow to my career.” His next film, a clumsy remake of
The Front Page
called
Switching Channels,