Somewhere in Heaven: The Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve (7 page)

U.S. citizens for Chile’s embattled artistic community. When he finished with the promise to return to the United States and tell

his countrymen what “brave and beautiful people you are,” the crowd erupted in cheers. “Superman! Superman!” they chanted. The next day, several South American newspapers carried sto- ries pitting Chris against one of the region’s most feared strong- men. “SUPERMAN VS. PINOCHET” screamed one headline, while another read “SUPERMAN TO THE RESCUE!” Sev- eral underground newspapers ran editorial cartoons showing Chris in full Superman garb, taking on a bloated, bemedaled,

jackbooted Pinochet.

In the end, the dreaded November 30 deadline passed without any of the threatened executions taking place. Less than five months later, Pinochet would bow to pressure and resign the pres- idency. Dorfman, among others, would give Reeve some of the credit for starting the ball rolling. “To many, Christopher Reeve and Superman are inseparable,” he said. “To think that Superman is on your side, even on a subconscious level, is a powerful thing. Chris gave the people of Chile hope at a time when they desper- ately needed it, and for that we shall always be grateful to him.” Chris insisted this was “not Superman to the rescue . . . If you know me as Superman, fine. But we have to remember that Su-

perman is light entertainment. This was real life.”

Dana “could not have been prouder of Chris” when he re- turned to Williamstown. “Chris is just a profoundly passionate, committed guy,” she said. “He’s the complete opposite of super- ficial, but some people don’t take him seriously because he is just so damned good-looking. If they only knew, he’s even better on the
inside
.”

That Christmas of 1987, Exton dropped both Matthew and Alexandra off with Chris to spend the holidays in Williamstown.

Again, Chris worried about how Alexandra, who like Matthew sounded very British despite their dual citizenship, was going to react to seeing Daddy in bed with someone other than Mummy. Reeve’s fears proved unfounded. In addition to his posh accent and blond hair, “Al” shared her brother’s mischievous streak. Every morning at dawn, they tiptoed in, then gleefully leapt on the bed. For the next half hour, “it was nothing but tickles and gig- gles,” Reeve said. “Dana seemed to enjoy it as much as they did.” Once they were back in New York, both Chris and Dana once again had to scramble for work. That January of 1988, Chris flew to Los Angeles to star on stage as the womanizing John Buchanan in Tennessee Williams’s southern Gothic psychodrama
Summer

and Smoke
.

After a few weeks, Dana called up one of Chris’s pals with her plan to pay him a surprise visit. “I thought it would be fun to fly out there,” she said. “Think of the expression on his face when I just show up.”

All too familiar with Chris’s tendency to stray, the friend was less than enthusiastic about Dana’s plan. “Umm, gee . . . ,” he said, screwing up his face and shaking his head, “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Don’t surprise him. Surprises aren’t good.”

“Why not?” It took a few seconds for Dana to get the not- so-subtle message. “Oh. Well,” she said with a shrug, “if I’m go- ing to go out there and find him with someone else, it might as well be now.”

When she called the theater and checked with the manager’s of- fice, she was told that Chris was throwing a party for the entire cast and crew at a popular Thai restaurant called Tommy Tang’s. Dana drove up alone in a cab and found her way to the private room

where Chris’s
Summer and Smoke
party was being held. Chris was easy to spot in any room—he towered over nearly everyone—and when she saw him, drink in hand, completely engrossed in con- versation with someone she couldn’t see at the far end of the room, her heart sank for an instant. She took a deep breath and made her way through the crowd toward Chris. She found him engaged in a heartfelt conversation with a burly electrician.

“Dana!” Chris yelled, wrapping her up in his arms and lifting her off the floor.

“So, I expected to find you with a gorgeous blonde,” she half- joked.

“Hey,” Chris shot back, motioning to the surfer-blond elec- trician, “do you want to hurt Jim’s feelings?”

They had been together for a solid six months, and neither was certain that their relationship could withstand a lengthy separa- tion. Now that they had their answer, the relief in their voices and on their faces was unmistakable.

“I missed you,” Chris said as he plucked two glasses of cham- pagne off a passing silver tray.

“I missed you too,” Dana answered, holding her glass up to toast the moment.

They stood in the same spot and talked for more than an hour, and as on the night they first met, everything and everyone else just seemed to vanish.

—Chris

—Dana

3

-

I

t had been an idyllic few months in L.A. during the limited run of
Summer and Smoke,
with Dana and Chris sharing his rented stucco-walled bungalow off Laurel Canyon Boulevard, on winding Tiana Road. Chris had assayed the role of the boozing John Buchanan twice before, but now he worried that maybe his portrayal had grown stale. He asked Dana to stay and help him

find new ways to approach the part.

Once again putting her own career on hold, Dana sat in the audience night after night, taking notes and later offering sug- gestions. “She made me see things in the part of Johnny I’d never seen before,” he said. “It’s one of the stage performances I’m proudest of, and I give a lot of the credit to Dana.”

That spring, Chris headed for Yugoslavia to shoot the two-part NBC miniseries
The Great Escape II.
In the sequel to the classic 1963 film starring Steve McQueen and James Garner, Chris was

cast as Major John Dodge, a German POW who actually fought in both world wars, swam the English Channel, and climbed the Matterhorn. As always, Chris thoroughly researched the part, and discovered that he and the adventurous Major Dodge bore an un- canny resemblance to each other.

Shortly after filming began, Dana joined Chris on location. It was their first trip abroad together, and as they explored the an- cient villages and wild terrain along the border between Slovenia and Croatia, the American lovers found themselves, in Dana’s words, “swept away by the beauty and romance of it all. It was very exciting.”

Much of the excitement apparently stemmed from the manner in which they were touring the Yugoslav countryside. While they had done a little riding the previous summer in Williamstown, this trip abroad marked the first time that Chris and Dana set out to spend entire days on horseback. Several times a week, they would ride up to Mokrice, a turreted, six-hundred-year-old castle- turned-hotel, for an afternoon tryst before returning to the set.

From the outset, it was clear that Dana was far the superior horsewoman. As with everything he did in life, Chris took an all- out approach to the sport, often taking off without warning across an open field or, in one or two instances, jumping a low hedge or a narrow brook. Dana could easily keep up, but as a trained equestrienne she erred on the side of caution. “Whoa, Chris,” she called out to him as he raced ahead, “what’s the rush? We don’t have to kill ourselves.”

It was a concern that had been shared by at least one of Chris’s teachers. Kristen Hyduchak was first approached by Chris in 1989 when he began training at the Westchester County stable

where she worked. Over the next two years, she observed him frequently—often several times a week—and was not happy with what she saw.

Almost from the beginning, Chris was trying to jump—this de- spite the fact that, according to Hyduchak, he was “still having trouble with the basics—walk, trot, canter. He used to scream my name to help him all the time,” she continued. “‘Kristen,’ he would yell, ‘I can’t get my horse to trot.’ I’d help him get it right. The next day, he’d have the same problem.”

Yet what bothered Hyduchak most from the start was the way Chris sat in the saddle. He had a tendency, she noted, to shift his weight forward as he rode. “There is always a risk that way,” she said, “of going over the horse’s head.”

Yet Dana was impressed with how Chris, who had far more experience at the helm of a yacht than he did astride a stallion, carried himself in the saddle. For a large man who sometimes looked, she said, “as if his feet were going to drag on the ground,” Chris exuded “complete confidence and control up there.”

Moreover, his lifelong allergy to horses required Chris to down sizable quantities of antihistamines—and even then his eyes pe- riodically puffed up and watered. “I was miserable some of the time,” he conceded, “but I tried not to let Dana see that.”

Chris’s performance as a horseman was indeed calculated in part to impress the woman he loved. “She is a wonderful rider— a real pro,” he allowed. “I mean, she’s been doing this since she was six! I wanted her to know that I wasn’t a total tenderfoot when it came to horses—that I could keep up.”

Conversely, Dana pushed aside her natural inclination toward seasickness and embraced Chris’s love of sailing. Over the years,

they would cruise up and down the Eastern Seaboard, explor- ing the coastline from Nova Scotia down to the Chesapeake. More than once, she came up from belowdecks looking, Chris said, “a little green around the gills.” But she never whined, and over time proved that nothing—not even a raging storm or the imminent threat of being dashed against a rock in rough seas— could rattle her.

On one excursion north to Nova Scotia, the
Chandelle
en- countered a fog bank and began to drift dangerously close to the rocky shore. While Chris and his half brother Kevin sweated out the arrival of the Canadian Coast Guard, Dana seemed unper- turbed. After a Coast Guard cutter showed up in the nick of time to tow the
Chandelle
and its passengers to safety, Dana thanked the cutter’s crew by whipping up some breakfast and serving it to them on deck.

These shared passions only served to draw Chris and Dana closer together. “One of the things that’s so great about Dana,” he gushed to one writer when they returned to the United States, “is we sail together, we dive together, we ride together. She plays a good game of tennis. She’s a great dancer. She laughs all the time. She thinks life is to be enjoyed. So I’ve got a great partner.”

Now when they returned to Williamstown for the summer, they both felt they were returning to their house. “Gae really had had nothing to do with the Williamstown house,” Chris explained, “but Dana’s influence was everywhere. We felt like a real couple.” While his personal life was coming together, Chris found he was persona non grata as far as major Hollywood producers were con- cerned. He stormed out of an audition for
Pretty Woman
when it

became clear that the director Garry Marshall was not seriously considering him for the lead role (it went to Richard Gere). When it came time to bring Tom Wolfe’s blockbuster novel
The Bonfire of the Vanities
to the screen, Chris met with the producers and made an impassioned plea as to why he was perfect for the part.

“I know this guy. I
am
this guy,” he said of the book’s Ivy League–educated Park Avenue protagonist. “There is no part of him that I don’t understand, and there is no part of him that I can’t play.”

The producers agreed. “You would be absolutely perfect,” one said. “I think you’d be great casting for the role, and there’s no way we’re giving you this part.”

No one had to explain why. “What was not being said,” Chris later explained, “and I mean the ‘filling in the blanks’ said, was ‘I’m not going with somebody who hasn’t had a hit in two years.’ ”

Chris began taking jobs he wouldn’t even have considered just a few years earlier. He was forced to stand idly by as
Saturday Night Live
’s Dana Carvey hosted
Superman’s Fiftieth Anniversary: A Celebration of the Man of Steel
on CBS, but Chris jumped at the chance to host another prime-time TV special:
The World’s Great- est Stunts: A Tribute to Hollywood Stuntmen.