Somewhere in Heaven: The Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve (10 page)

Dana, Chris allowed, was “the heart and soul” of their blended family. “She is such a naturally positive person,” he said, “that kids are just drawn to her. I know I’m prejudiced, but it’s impossible not to like her. And, from a kid’s perspective especially, she’s
fun.
Dana’s a joy to be around.”

Still, their Canadian idyll was not without its moments. Chris, who was thrilled to do all his own riding and stunts in
Black Fox,

also insisted on competing in equestrian events in and around Calgary. By this time, having worked with such top teachers as Mike Huber, Yves Sauvignon, Brian Sabo, and Mark Weiss- becker, Chris felt confident enough to compete in combined training events—three-phase competitions that included dressage, stadium jumping, and cross-country jumping. It helped that his allergy to horses—which had required Chris to take frequent stiff doses of the decongestant Dimetapp—seemed to have vanished. Kristen Hyduchak, who had tried to teach him the basics years before, still worried about the way Chris carried himself on horseback. “I saw him in photos and videos,” she said, and was surprised to see that he was still shifting his weight too far for-

ward. “That’s a recipe for disaster.”

Why, then, was Chris competing at such a high level? “When someone comes into your barn with a lot of money,” Hyduchak explained, “you tell him, ‘What would you like to do?’—whether or not he’s well suited for it. You let him do it anyway, because you don’t want to lose the prestige and the money.” In Chris’s case, she told herself at the time, “This is an accident waiting to happen.”

Hyduchack was proved right during one of the competitions Chris entered in Calgary that summer of 1993. Chris was about to jump his horse over a ditch when it stopped abruptly, sending Chris hurtling straight ahead—“like a field goal through the horse’s ears,” he laughingly recalled. Toppling forward, Chris ac- tually did a somersault over the horse’s head, landing on his knees. A gasp of horror went up from the crowd. “People watching went

‘Ooh!,’ ” he remembered, but Chris quickly scrambled to his feet, “none the worse for wear.”

Not all the dangers Chris confronted involved riding. That same year, Chris did not take Dana and the kids along when he journeyed to Kenya to scout locations for a film he was inter- ested in making,
The Hunt.
In the process, he contracted a se- rious case of malaria. Once Chris managed to reassure a concerned Dana that he would make a complete recovery, she briefly adopted a new nickname for her husband. Dana began calling him “Indiana Jones.”

A few months later, Chris was taking his small plane for a spin above the English countryside when a sudden storm forced him to crash-land in a clearing not far from the Gloucestershire vil- lage of Watlington. Amazingly, Chris walked away without a scratch. Dusting himself off, he made his way to the nearest house and knocked on the door. When Chris asked the woman who answered if he could use her phone to call for help, she let him inside.

“Pardon me,” she said, studying his face carefully, “but you seem so familiar . . . Have we met?”

“Oh,” Chris answered as he dialed the phone. “I’m Superman.” News of yet another brush with death was something Dana had learned to take in stride. She was married to a man who en- joyed living on the edge, and she wasn’t about to ask him to stop now. “Chris isn’t reckless, but he loves life, and danger is a part of life,” she once explained, adding that Chris’s exploits were “part of what makes him who he is, and part of the reason I love

him. He’s an exciting guy.”

No less important to Dana was Chris’s commitment to the

causes they both believed in. Coming on the heels of sweeping Republican victories in the 1994 congressional elections, the Na- tional Endowment for the Arts was more vulnerable than ever. As the newly elected co-president (with Blair Brown) of the Cre- ative Coalition, Chris spearheaded the group’s efforts to oppose cuts in NEA funding. According to those who knew them, Dana never complained that Chris’s various causes were taking him away from the family. On the contrary, said one longtime fam- ily friend, “Dana knew Chris loved what he was doing. She wasn’t going to get in the way of that. She believed in him to- tally, totally.”

Reeve family fun resumed in the summer of 1994 when everyone joined Dad in Point Reyes, a seaside village just north of San Francisco, for the filming of
Village of the Damned.
In this remake of the 1960 horror classic starring George Sanders, Chris played a doctor who discovers he is the only person who can de- stroy the cute-but-murderous alien children who have invaded his small town.

While his own brood played with some of the child actors on the set, Chris found it difficult to see them as evil once the cam- eras started rolling. “They were so sweet and adorable,” he sighed. “They wanted to play Frisbee and sing songs, and I had to look upon them as an alien force.”

For the past fifteen years that was precisely the way Hollywood had viewed Reeve. Now, in the wake of those character parts in films like
The Remains of the Day
and
Speechless,
Superman had be- gun to loosen his grip on Chris’s career. Gary Arnold of the
Wash- ington Times
compared Chris to another forty-something whose career had recently taken off after sputtering for years. “It’s only

a matter of time before Reeve is ‘officially’ rediscovered and cel- ebrated,” Arnold wrote, “like John Travolta in
Pulp Fiction.
”

There was still the occasional career disappointment—in 1994 Chris auditioned for the lead in
Jefferson in Paris
but lost it to Nick Nolte. But he could always count on Dana, who balanced her own auditions with raising their two-year-old son, to keep everything in perspective. “It’s been tough on her,” he acknowledged to one of their closest friends. “She is so talented, but she’s hasn’t had that big break yet. Mine came so early for me, I think maybe it’s a bless- ing when it comes a little later. When Dana gets that breakthrough part, she’ll be huge.”

In the meantime, she did not underestimate how important it was to spend quality time with Will. The Reeves did employ a full- time nanny and occasionally relied on relatives to look after Will when they both had appointments in New York. But for the most part, it was Dana who drove the ten miles to watch him frolic with the other toddlers enrolled in his Gymboree play group, or to don a swimsuit with the other mothers who brought their kids to Wa- ter Babies in the nearby town of Mt. Kisco.

Chris also took Will to Water Babies whenever he could. Dur- ing those classes and whenever they happened to be staying at a hotel with a pool, Dad made a point of standing in the water, arms outstretched, and coaxing his justifiably wary little boy to jump in. “Trust me, Will,” he insisted. “I won’t let anything happen to you. Come on.” Such reassurances aside, after months in the Water Babies program Will was still refusing to make the leap of faith.

For his part, Chris was grateful for the time with his wife and son—each day Dad now plopped Will on his lap at the piano and encouraged him to pound on the keyboard—as well as the acting

jobs that were still coming his way. Not long after losing
Jefferson in Paris,
Chris was offered the lead in the Hallmark Entertainment production
Kidnapped,
Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic story of a young man’s adventures with a band of eighteenth-century rene- gade Scots. The four-hour television movie, which was being pro- duced by Francis Ford Coppola for the Family Channel, was set to start shooting in Ireland the following June. Chris relished the idea that, once again, he would be called upon to do some seri- ous riding in the film.

Not long after, Chris was approached by his old friends Ismail Merchant and James Ivory with another screen project. At most, he was hoping they would hand him another juicy supporting role in a sprawling period piece similar to
The Remains of the Day.
They did offer him a role in their next feature,
The Proprietor,
but this time it was the male lead opposite French screen idol Jeanne Moreau.

Chris made use of the time between shoots perfecting his riding skills. While he was filming
Village of the Damned
back in Northern California, Chris had spent $20,000 on a new jumper—a twelve-year-old chestnut gelding named Eastern Express. Buck, as everyone called the horse, combined years of experience in all phases of competition riding with a docile nature.

Buck was certainly not the only horse that Chris had forged an intense bond with. Another favorite was his Irish Thoroughbred, Denver. At the Area 1 Championships in Vermont that September, Chris had actually ridden Denver to an impressive third-place fin- ish. Still, a couple of months later Chris withdrew in the middle of a competition when, after a few successful jumps, he sensed that

something was wrong with Denver. “Sorry,” Chris told officials as he bowed out, “but he’s keeping his head down for some reason, and I’m not going to take any chances.” In matters of this nature, Chris like to quote a piece of advice he received from his first fly- ing instructor: “The outcome of any maneuver must never be se- riously in doubt.”

For all his talents, Denver did have the unfortunate habit of pe- riodically knocking down rails as he jumped—the kind of mistake Chris could not afford if he was going to move up in the sport. Buck, in contrast, was more consistent—a dauntless competitor, particularly when it came to jumping. Once he completed
Village of the Damned,
Chris returned to Bedford with Buck in tow. Dana took an instant liking to the horse, and Chris would hold Will up so he could feed Buck carrots or the occasional sugar cube. “This horse is a winner, right, boy?” Chris said as he stroked Buck’s neck. “You and me—we’re going places.”

Chris spent the late fall and winter months of 1994 for the most part away from Dana and Will, filming his next project,
Above Suspicion,
on location in Los Angeles. In the HBO thriller, he was cast as a police officer who is shot in the line of duty and para- lyzed from the waist down. Confined to a wheelchair, the cop, who also happens to have a young son, first entertains thoughts of suicide. Later, he becomes a murder suspect when his wife (played by a pre–
Sex and the City
Kim Cattrall) and his brother, who have been carrying on a clandestine affair, turn up dead.

Years earlier, before playing the part of a double amputee on Broadway in
Fifth of July,
Chris had researched his role by visit-

ing VA hospitals. For
Above Suspicion,
he spent time at a rehabil- itation facility in the L.A. suburb of Van Nuys. There he learned how to use a “sliding board” to make the switch from hospital bed to wheelchair and then, using only his arms, to maneuver himself from his wheelchair into a car and back out again.

Much of his time at the rehab hospital in Van Nuys was spent with victims of the recent Northridge earthquake, many of whom had been crushed by falling debris. He was particularly touched by a twenty-five-year-old woman who had suffered se- vere spinal injuries after being struck on the head by a falling bookcase. A steel halo held her skull in place, and she had yet to regain any feeling or movement in her legs. She was, under- standably, emotionally as well as physically devastated, and not yet able—or willing—to accept her condition.

On the phone to Dana from the rehab center, Chris choked back tears as he told her how the young woman and several other patients at the rehab center were struggling against the odds to take even a few halting steps. “Jesus, Dana,” Chris said, “it’s so hard to even watch these poor people. Some of them are just kids—you know, one day they’re riding their bikes or shooting hoops and the next . . . You just think that this can happen to anybody at any time, you know?”

Dana sympathized. But as the self-confessed “grounded one” in the relationship, it often fell to her to keep Chris in a posi- tive frame of mind. “Remember that you’re there for a reason,” she told him. “Millions of people are going to learn about what paralyzed people go through because of your character in the movie.”

Chris took solace in Dana’s words, and kept his focus on doing

the job he was there to do. But each day when he left the rehab facility, Chris got into his rented car, turned on the ignition, and muttered the same words to himself before heading for the Sun- set Marquis Hotel. “Boy,” he sighed, shaking his head, “thank
God
that’s not me.”