Somewhere in Heaven: The Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve (2 page)

—Michael J. Fox

—Edward Herrmann, actor and friend

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Saturday, October 9, 2004

Backstage at Southcoast Repertory Theater Costa Mesa, California

S

he was one of the bravest women Mimi Lieber had ever known. But when Lieber poked her head into the cramped dressing room to ask if Dana Reeve would be joining her and the rest of the cast of Broadway-bound
Brooklyn Boy
that night for a post-show drink, the solitary figure she saw was plainly terrified. Dana had been on the road performing in
Brooklyn Boy
for two months—visiting home most weekends—and was set to fly back to New York once and for all the next day. She had spoken to Chris on the phone only a few hours before about how excited

she was to finally be returning to her family. Now, in an instant, that excitement had turned to dread.

“Something’s wrong at home,” Dana explained, using one trembling hand to steady the other as she clasped the phone to her ear. While Dana had been onstage, one of her husband’s physicians had left an urgent message on her cell phone. Dana had received many emergency calls like this in the nine years since Chris’s accident, as he faced one medical crisis after another. But this time the doctor’s tone was unmistakably ominous.

It had all happened with such alarming speed. Although Chris could not feel it, the bedsore on his lower back was of growing concern—this on top of the systemic infection he had been fighting for nearly three months. A powerful combination of what Reeve liked to call “industrial-strength” antibiotics had worked against these infections in the past, but he had built up a resistance to them over the years. Now the nurses who took care of Chris around the clock begged him to stay in bed so the drugs could take effect.

The patient had other ideas. With Dana twenty-six hundred miles away, Chris felt it was more important than ever that he at- tend their twelve-year-old son Will’s peewee league hockey game that afternoon. Moreover, it was a key matchup: Will’s team, the Westchester Express, was set to go head-to-head with their archri- vals, the Mass Conn Braves from Springfield, Massachusetts.

Nonetheless, the nurses continued to plead with Chris. “Please stay home this one time . . . This doesn’t look good.”

“No, I’m going,” Chris shot back.

“But you go to all of Will’s games. You can miss one. He’ll understand.”

“No, no, no,” Chris replied. “I want to watch Will play! So let’s go!”

It took more than three hours for the aides to dress Reeve, load his wheelchair onto his specially outfitted van—“Every time we leave the house, it’s a production,” Dana liked to joke—and drive the twenty miles to the Brewster Ice Arena. But once the Westchester Express took to the ice at 3:20
P
.
M
., Chris was at rink level behind the glass, cheering Will and his team on.

“
Will, Will, Will,
” Chris chanted as his son scored two of the Express’s eleven goals to defeat the Braves. Will’s winning moves earned him the game puck for the day.

By 6
P
.
M
., father and son were back at home on Great Hills Farm Road in suburban Bedford, New York. While Will showered and then chatted with friends online, Chris placed a call to then–Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. The Reeves had campaigned for Kerry, a strong supporter of stem cell research that might lead to a cure for spinal cord injuries, and Chris wanted to thank the Massachusetts senator for mentioning him by name during the most recent presidential debate. “Chris was very excited about the future,” Kerry re- called. “It was a long conversation about all the things we wanted to accomplish. I knew he hadn’t been feeling well, but he gave no indication that he was in distress. He was . . . exuberant.” Both ardent Yankee fans, Will and his dad dined on turkey tetrazzini while glued to the Yankees–Minnesota Twins game on television. They both cheered when the Yankees won. It had

been a great day, Will later said, “for father-son bonding.”

At around 10:30
P
.
M
., Chris was in bed and Will dropped in to say good night. He switched the set to CNN so his father

could watch the latest campaign coverage, and then said good night the way he always did: Will kissed his father on the fore- head, then, as he was leaving, took Chris’s big toe between his thumb and forefinger and wiggled it. It was the last time he saw his father conscious.

Will was already fast asleep when, shortly before midnight, his father suffered a massive heart attack. Chris was resuscitated and rushed by ambulance to Northern Westchester Hospital in nearby Mt. Kisco. Now Dana was being told over the phone that her husband was alive, but comatose.

“Do I need to get a plane right now?” Dana asked the doctor, her steady voice masking a rising panic.

“Yes, I think you do,” he replied.

“Could he die?” Dana inquired point-blank. “Yes.”

She hesitated for a moment before asking one more question— the one that, in her mind, said more about the gravity of the sit- uation than any other. It was a question that, even during the worst of the many crises that had gone before, none of Chris’s doctors had ever said yes to.

“Do I . . . ,” Dana asked. “Do I need to call the kids?” “Yes.”

Dana took a deep breath. She hung up the phone and imme- diately called the one person she knew who had the resources and the pull to get her a private jet on a moment’s notice—Marsha Williams, wife of Chris’s close pal Robin Williams.

Next, Dana phoned Will, who was now being looked after by family friends. “I’m coming home right now,” she told Will. She tried to reassure him. “Don’t worry too much. Dad’s a tough

guy—he’s been through things like this before and bounced right back.”

As she headed for Los Angeles Airport to board the private jet arranged by Marsha Williams, Dana worked her cell phone. She called London to discover that Matthew Reeve, one of two chil- dren from Chris’s ten-year relationship with British modeling agent Gae Exton, was already on his way from England with his mother.

Meanwhile, Will’s half-sister Alexandra, an undergraduate student at Yale, had driven down from New Haven. Within an hour of her father’s arrival at the hospital, she was sitting at his bedside.

Alexandra had been warned that Chris had lapsed into a coma and was not responding to stimuli. But when she leaned in to speak to him, she noticed that his eyes “flickered. He knew I was there. He definitely heard me.”

It was precisely the hopeful sign Dana needed. As she flew across the country, she checked in with Alexandra, who reassured her that Chris was sleeping peacefully through the night. There had been emergencies like this in the past, Dana told herself— times when he’d been rushed off to the hospital, and yet he’d al- ways somehow managed to come through. “I thought,” she later confessed, “
There’s a possibility
.. .”

Hope faded in the early morning hours of October 10, how- ever, when Chris suffered a series of cardiac arrests. Each time, intensive care doctors fought frantically to pull him back from the brink—all in keeping with Dana’s wishes. “Please, please,” Dana told doctors from the plane. “Just keep him alive until I get there.” By the time Dana arrived at Westchester County Airport late

that afternoon, most of the family was already at the hospital. Gae Exton and Matthew were there from London, as were Chris’s father, Franklin Reeve, his brother Benjamin, and Dana’s parents. Chris’s mother, Barbara, an angular, athletic woman who en- joyed rowing on Boston’s Charles River well into her seventies, had received a call at 7:30
A
.
M
. that Chris was in intensive care and driven two hours from her home in Princeton, New Jersey. When Chris suffered his famous horseback riding accident nine years earlier, it was Barbara who stood over his bed at the Uni- versity of Virginia Medical Center and made the case for taking her son off life support. “All I could think of was how active he was—sailing, scuba diving, flying a plane, skiing, tennis,” she later recalled. “I didn’t feel he would want to live if he was paralyzed,

trapped in his own body.”

Although she risked angering Dana and the rest of the family back in June of 1995, Chris’s mother had persisted. “I just don’t understand,” she told the others, “why we are doing all these measures just to keep him alive.” It’s not, she said, “the kind of life he would want to live.”

At the time, Barbara’s son by her second marriage, Chris’s half- brother Jeffrey, took her aside. “Mom, Chris would want to be able to see Will grow up,” Jeff said of the then-three-year-old boy, “even out of the corner of his eye.” It was then, Barbara ad- mitted, that she finally “came around” to the idea that life as a quadriplegic was still worth living.

The ventilators and monitors were still whooshing and beep- ing as they kept Chris alive, but this time things were different and everyone in the room knew it. As her son neared the end of his life, Barbara leaned over and whispered in his ear. “You’re free,

Chris,” she said. “You fought a good fight and now you are finally

free,
Chris. You’re free of all these tubes!”

When she got to the hospital, Dana didn’t wait for the eleva- tor. Instead, she dashed up the stairs to the second floor, threw her things down, and ran into Chris’s room. “The good news,” Mimi Lieber later observed, “is that Dana made it. I think he waited for her.”

Now that she was finally on the scene and able to help her son through this terrible ordeal, Dana asked for Will to be driven to the hospital. Once he got there, Dana fought the urge to break down as she wrapped him up in her arms. “We’re going to say good-bye to Dad now,” she whispered into his ear. Then, taking his hand, Dana led Will into intensive care.

Chris had never emerged from his coma, but Will believed that somehow he knew the people who loved him were there. Will softly kissed his father on the forehead and gently wiggled Chris’s toe.

“Night, Dad,” Will said.

—Dana

—Chris

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June 30, 1987

Williamstown, Massachusetts

H

e simply could not take his eyes off her. Wearing a short black off-the-shoulder evening dress, her auburn hair tum-

bling over tanned shoulders, Dana Morosini confidently took the microphone off the stand and gazed through the blue haze of cig- arette smoke out over the heads of those sitting ringside. Then, in a sweet mezzo-soprano, she eased into Jule Styne’s lyrical bal- lad “The Music That Makes Me Dance.”

Williamstown was, in many ways, home to Christopher Reeve. It was here, at the annual theater festival held on the campus of Williams College, that Chris had come every summer since 1968 to sharpen his skills as a stage actor. As he had also done every year

since 1968, Chris—cast this season in Aphra Behn’s costume drama
The Rover
—after a hard day’s rehearsal unwound with his fellow actors at the 1896 House, a quaint white-clapboard coun- try inn nestled in the Berkshire hills.