Somewhere in Heaven: The Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve (6 page)

hammered the final nail in Chris’s professional coffin—“the end of my nine-year career as an above-the-line movie star.”

By late 1986, Chris’s decade-long relationship with Gae Ex- ton was over. They agreed that she and the children would con- tinue to live in the London house Chris had purchased for them, while Chris returned to live in New York. As for the children, “If the love is not in question, they can survive separation,” he later said. “When we get together, we fall right into place.”

For now, he and Gae were keeping the split out of the press. But later, Chris would insist “there was never an incident, never an act of cruelty or a betrayal between Gae and me. It was just a growing awareness that we were the wrong people for each other.”

Reeve and Exton would, for the sake of the kids as much as anything else, remain friends. That did not, however, keep Chris from sinking into a deep depression. “I knew I would always be a part of their lives,” he said, “but by separating, we were just acting out what I’d seen in my family over and over again. It was painful.”

From the depths of his depression over the breakup, Reeve mulled his options. For the time being, he would retreat once more to the place where he felt safest: peaceful, bucolic, nurtur- ing Williamstown. It was there that, in early 1987, he threw him- self into renovating a cedar-sided contemporary house he bought just outside of town on Treadwell Hollow Road, for $260,000. Situated on thirty-six hilltop acres with sweeping views of the Berkshires, the house boasted five bedrooms and seven bath- rooms as well as a garage/barn big enough to accommodate Chris’s glider. He placed a king-sized bed smack in the middle

of the octagonal master bedroom, so that when he woke up there would be a dazzling vista in every direction.

By the summer of 1987, Chris was getting tired of waking up alone in that giant bed with the wraparound view. But before he could do anything about that, his half brothers Kevin and Jeff showed up to keep him company. They were joined at the end of July by Matthew and Alexandra, on vacation from school in London. As he attacked his role in the Williamstown production of
The Rover
with his customary laserlike intensity (“No one took his craft more seriously than Chris—
no one,
” said fellow cast member Edward Herrmann), Chris seemed genuinely content. “I’m at a place right now,” he told one of his fellow actors, “where I’m feeling optimistic about things. Maybe I just don’t need to be in a serious relationship to be happy.”

Enter Dana. After that first meeting at the 1896 House cabaret show and the hour-long conversation at The Zoo that followed, Chris could not get her out of his mind. For the next ten days, he courted Dana in a manner that could have been straight out of the script for
Somewhere in Time
.

There was yet another random encounter—this time on a Williamstown street—during which the two were once again lost in conversation. The next day while biking near his home, Chris suddenly decided to stop and pick wildflowers for Dana along the side of the road. He gathered them up in a bunch, rushed back to the theater where Dana was rehearsing one of her cabaret numbers, and then just as suddenly got cold feet. In- stead, he asked a coed to go inside and deliver the flowers to

Dana for him. The young woman was obviously delighted to act as a go-between.

Dana had just finished her number when the girl walked in from the wings and handed them to her. “Christopher Reeve asked me to give these to you,” she said.

Dana’s eyes widened with surprise and her hand went to her mouth. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said, then without miss- ing a beat asked when and where he gave them to her.

“About two minutes ago,” the coed answered.

Dana rushed outside to thank him, but Chris was gone. Em- barrassed by his impulsive gesture—and, incredibly, fearing re- jection—Chris had pedaled off “feeling stupid. It was all so corny, and for whatever reason, it occurred to me that maybe she would think I was a jerk.”

If anything, Dana was both flattered and beguiled by this movie star who seemed so unsure of himself. Yet she was also more than a little suspicious. “It seemed a little fishy,” she said, “that he could be quite so charming and obviously very shy. I kind of wondered what he was up to.”

Her suspicions seemed confirmed when, after one cabaret per- formance, he asked if she’d like to drive over to Margaret Lind- ley Pond for a moonlight dip. “Oh, God,” she thought, “here comes the old let’s-get-naked-and-go-for-a-swim routine.”

Before she could answer, Chris added, “I’ll drive over to your place and you can pick up your bathing suit.”

For Dana, who was both relieved and delighted, it was a defin- ing moment in their relationship. “I thought,” she later recalled, “that that was so sweet.” As promised, Chris drove Dana back to the dorm where she was staying to pick up her swimsuit—which

she put on under her clothes—and the two headed out to the pond. That night, they swam and engaged in a little chaste horse- play, splashing each other mercilessly. Then, in another scene straight out of old Hollywood, Chris pulled Dana toward him in the water, and they shared their first kiss.

Still, Dana wanted to take things slow. “I thought I would look at this as ‘What I Did Last Summer,’ ” she said. “I didn’t expect to really fall in love.” Chris was equally wary. “I really wanted to make sure I was not getting into a relationship on the rebound,” he admitted. “It was a case of what happens to you when you’re not looking. Happiness sneaks up.”

Caution aside, the romance quickly blossomed. There were dinners in town, picnics, and long drives along the narrow two- lane roads that snaked through the Massachusetts countryside. One of the things that most appealed to Dana was the fact that this major movie star tooled around in a black pickup with roll- down windows and an AM radio. “This guy is
cool,
” Dana thought. Later, she recalled how they would “do all these things that were so down-to-earth. Which is what I’m like and what I like about people. I realized he wasn’t just this movie star. I found that he was very much like me.”

Soon they were parking in the middle of fields and, in Chris’s words, “making out like teenagers.” It was during one of these sessions, when the truck was parked on a treeless hilltop with only a few cows in view, that they consummated the affair.

Such privacy was not always attainable. On occasion, Chris would take Dana back to her dorm after the cabaret show and park outside—right next to a giant green refuse container heaped with festival garbage. While they necked in the distinctive black

pickup, other actors would pass by and casually remark that Chris and Dana were inside steaming up the windows. “They were right on the verge,” joked a theater apprentice who worked with Chris, “of becoming a tourist attraction.”

“We knew something was going on between Chris and Dana,” said Jennifer Van Dyke, who was performing alongside Chris in
The Rover
. “But there were lots of summer romances go- ing on at the time. Compared to some other people, they were pretty discreet about it.”

Chris’s friend Edward Herrmann at first saw Dana as “another one of the beautiful, talented young fillies who came up to Wil- liamstown every summer. She was leggy and gorgeous and we were all jealous as hell. But I thought it was just another pleas- ant Williamstown summer fling.” Soon he and the rest of the Williamstown Festival community came to the realization that “they had really fallen for each other. This was the real deal.”

Before they could read about it in the gossip columns, Dana decided to share the news of her celebrity romance with a few of her closest friends. One of the first people she called was her longtime pal Michael Manganiello.

“I’ve met somebody,” she said, hesitating. “What?” Manganiello said.

“Well, he’s kind of famous.”

“So who is it?” Manganiello asked.

“Well, I’m kind of dating Christopher Reeve.”

Manganiello paused for a moment. “You’re dating Superman?” he asked.

Kidding aside, Chris and Dana had legitimate reasons for try- ing to keep their romance under wraps. To begin with, Chris and

Gae had not yet gone public with their split. Even more impor- tant, Matthew and Alexandra were staying with Chris at the Williamstown house, and he did not want to confuse or upset his young children by showing up with a woman other than their mother.

It would be nearly two months before Chris brought Dana home for dinner with the kids. If he had any worries about how they would react to this new woman in Dad’s life, they quickly vanished. Dana’s natural, easygoing manner, her boundless energy, and her window-rattling laugh made her an instant hit with Matthew and Alexandra. Soon Dana was joining them for spirited miniature golf tournaments, marathon bike rides, and some good- natured roughhousing on the front lawn.

The one thing Dana did not do was stay over. Chris was still not sure what the kids would think if they saw Dad sharing a bed with Dana. Gae showed up in late August to bring three-year-old Alexandra back to London, leaving Matthew, seven, to spend a little more time with his father.

At this stage, Dana was still reluctant to risk alienating Chris’s children. By the time her parents came to see her perform at Williamstown, she was still not staying overnight at the Reeve house. Over dinner at a local restaurant, Chris told the Morosinis that he “enjoyed dating” their daughter. “I mean, she’s so much fun, so wonderful. We have a great time together . . .”

Without missing a beat, Chris then launched into a description of the house he was still renovating. “The master bedroom is huge and has an octagonal shape with windows facing in every direc- tion,” Chris told them, scarcely trying to conceal his enthusiasm. “There’s a spiral staircase leading up to it, and this big king-size

California bed right in the middle of the room that is
so
com- fortable.”

Charles Morosini studied Chris’s face for a moment, and cocked his head quizzically. Before he could ask Chris if he was seriously talking to him about his and Dana’s sleeping habits, Dana hastily changed the subject.

In fact, Chris was still concerned about Matthew walking in and finding his dad beneath the sheets with Dana. So he waited until they went sailing off the coast of Maine with Uncle Kevin aboard Chris’s forty-foot yacht,
Chandelle
. The first morning at sea, Matthew, who slept in the main cabin, walked to the bow to find Chris and Dana sharing the same bed. Dana, unfazed, pulled back the covers and invited Matthew to snuggle. As soon he set- tled in, Dana ambushed him with tickles. In retaliation, Matthew clobbered her with a pillow, and soon there was chaos in the for- ward part of the cabin. “We laughed
so
hard,” Dana told a friend, “but I told them we had to stop before somebody fell overboard.” It was the breakthrough Chris had been hoping for. Matthew’s easy acceptance of Dana opened the way for an even more re- laxed and open relationship. Now, when Dana sang during the cabaret show at Williamstown, Chris joined her onstage for a duet or two. Perched on stools and clutching microphones, Dana and Chris were, said one regular audience member, “obviously besotted with each other.” Their repertoire nearly always in- cluded two standards: the Gershwins’ “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” and Cole Porter’s “It’s De-Lovely,” the tune they

would come to think of as “our song.”

Now that Chris publicly acknowledged his break from Gae Exton, the press was quick to paint Dana as the scheming Other

Woman. Apparently relying on reports that Dana had spent a con- siderable amount of time with Matthew and Alexandra, one tabloid story stated that she had been hired to care for them. “SUPERMAN,” the headline blared, “DUMPS HIS KIDS’ MOM FOR BABYSITTER.”

That fall, they continued their affair in New York. While Chris was ensconced in his duplex co-op on West Seventy-eighth Street near the American Museum of Natural History, Dana shared a modest apartment with her sister. It was not long before Dana was spending nearly all her time at Chris’s apartment.

They quickly discovered that there were some differences in their approach to housekeeping. “My side of the bed is neat,” ob- served Chris, whose passion for order would soon get on Dana’s nerves. “Hers looks like a yard sale. Sometimes it gets to me and I say, ‘Clutter alert.’ ”

He may have been a household name, but Chris, like Dana, was now forced to audition for every role. With one exception. Asked to join a TV ad campaign for Maidenform Bra that included the likes of Pierce Brosnan, Omar Sharif, and Michael York, Super- man agreed—and gratefully pocketed the $300,000 fee.

Chris and Dana hied away to Williamstown once more, de- termined to enjoy a quiet Thanksgiving holiday at their idyllic New England retreat. The last thing they had on their minds was political turmoil in South America. But when exiled Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman phoned him in Williamstown and requested his help, Chris was eager to hear what he had to say.

Ever since General Augusto Pinochet seized power in Chile in 1973, anyone who dared speak out against his regime feared imprisonment, torture, or worse; by the fall of 1987, thousands

of Chileans had been executed, assassinated—or simply disap- peared. Now Pinochet had ordered seventy-seven actors in the capital city of Santiago to leave the country by November 30 or face execution.

The seventy-seven condemned actors were standing their ground, and now an international group of actors was being as- sembled by Amnesty International to stand beside them as the deadline approached. Dorfman asked Chris if he was willing to be the group’s sole U.S. member. Chris sat on the governing council of Actors’ Equity, but more important, as Superman he was recognized the world over as a symbol of truth, justice, and democracy.

The mission was not without its risks. Pinochet’s henchmen had shown no compunction about assassinating foes of the regime. Chris asked Dana what she thought.

“You really don’t have any choice, Chris,” she said without hesitating. “Do it.”

During his week-long visit to Santiago, Chris was scheduled to speak at a rally in support of the actors threatened with execution. More than seven thousand people packed Santiago’s Santa Laura Stadium, but when police turned fire hoses on the crowd, the rally moved to an abandoned parking garage in another part of the city. Pinochet’s forces encircled the building, tear-gassing the overflow crowd and awaiting orders to open fire. Those orders never came. Instead, inside the garage there were poetry readings and tele- grams from abroad proclaiming solidarity with the actors. The high point came when Chris stood up to declare support among