Somewhere in Heaven: The Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve Read Online Free PDF Page A

“embarrassing and vaguely disappointing.”
    At the height of his soap opera fame, Chris got his shot at Broadway playing Katharine Hepburn’s grandson in Enid Bag- nold’s A Matter of Gravity . As she always did when she met some- one for the first time, Kate went out of her way to say something provocative, confrontational, or downright rude. When Chris brought greetings from his grandmother Beatrice Lamb, a for- mer classmate of Hepburn’s at Bryn Mawr, Kate replied, “Oh, Bea. I never could stand her.” Then she sized Chris up head to toe, glared at his feet, and ordered him to shine his shoes.
    During the endless rehearsals and out-of-town tryouts that fol- lowed, Chris refused to be cowed by the domineering Hepburn. She, in turn, developed an almost grandmotherly affection for him. At one point Chris, who was still flying back from tryouts in Philadelphia, Washington, New Haven, Boston, and Toronto to tape Love of Life in New York, collapsed onstage from exhaustion and malnutrition. Hepburn turned to the audience and joked, “This boy’s a goddamn fool. He doesn’t eat enough red meat!”
    A Matter of Gravity received a lukewarm reception from crit- ics, but the chance to see Hepburn onstage was enough to fill the theater for two and a half months. Chris even seized the oppor-
    tunity to do a little family fence-mending on opening night. “I said, ‘What the hell,’ and got my parents and stepparents tickets all together in the same row,” he remembered. By the time the curtain fell, the squabbling ex-spouses and their new mates had all “buried the hatchet.”
    Hepburn, for one, was impressed. “I come from a big family and I know from experience how impossibly pigheaded and stubborn one’s relatives can be,” she said. “It took guts to do what he did.” From then on, Hepburn would be one of Christopher Reeve’s biggest boosters—to the point of calling up studios to lobby on his behalf. “Chris is so honest, so genuine,” she told one journal- ist at the time. “I wonder if maybe he’s a little too good-looking. They really like to put ugly people in pictures these days. My God, just look at the creatures up there on the screen! But they’re go- ing to have to start putting attractive people back in the movies eventually . . . and once he finds the right part—a big, fat, juicy leading man part, I mean—Chris is going to be a big, big star.”
    Unfortunately, Chris made his film debut the following year playing a member of a nuclear submarine crew in Gray Lady Down, starring Charlton Heston. The movie sank at the box office. “I ab- solutely wrote myself off,” said Chris, who spent the next five months “sponging off friends, sleeping on couches, turning into a vegetable, and then one day I said this isn’t right.”
    Chris soon found himself back in New York, scrambling for anything he could get. He had just been turned down for a Wool- ite commercial when the call came that would change his life forever.
    When Chris told his father that he had been chosen out of a field that at one time or another had included Steve McQueen,
    Robert Redford, James Caan, Bruce Jenner, and Sylvester Stal- lone to star in a big budget screen version of Superman, F.D. was ecstatic—until it dawned on him that Chris was not talking about the lead in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman . When Chris mentioned that the producers had not yet cast the role of Lois Lane, F.D. looked visibly deflated. “Oh,” he said archly, “ that Superman.”
    Growing up among such bookish Ivy Leaguers, Chris was only vaguely aware of Superman and never watched the highly suc- cessful 1950s TV serial starring George Reeves. As an aficionado of Hollywood lore, however, Chris was aware that Reeves, whose surname so closely resembled his own, grew despondent over be- ing typecast as Superman and shot himself to death in 1959.
    “I haven’t been acting this long to be typecast as Superman,” said Chris, shrugging off