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

the notion of a Superman curse. “Once this movie is out, I’ll play neurotics or weaklings. But right now Superman is not a bad role for me.”
    Chris actually had his doubts, and sought advice from friends. “It’s so big and it’s so scary,” he told Jack O’Brien. “I’m afraid of what it might do to me.”
    “You have a great mind,” O’Brien told him. “You won’t lose your way, Chris. You won’t lose yourself—I promise you.”
    Chris attacked the job the way he did everything else in life— with a single-minded ferocity. By way of transforming his athletic but slender physique, he spent at least four hours a day lifting weights for ten weeks, packing thirty-three pounds of muscle onto his six-foot-four-inch frame. He also proved himself more than ca- pable of playing Superman’s alter ego, the stoop-shouldered, be- spectacled, lovably shy Clark Kent. By the time he went before the cameras in London, it looked as if Chris had stepped right out of
    the pages of the comic book. “If there’s a God in heaven,” said Su- perman director Richard Donner, “he sent me Christopher Reeve.” Chris, who had earned his pilot’s license in his spare time and was flying his single-engine A36 Bonanza whenever and wherever he could, was also insisting on doing his own stunts in the movie. Dangling from wires for hours on end, he worked for hours per- fecting his takeoffs and landings as the Man of Steel. Marlon Brando, who played Superman’s father, Jor-El, tried to talk Reeve out of taking any unnecessary chances. “Why risk your neck?”
    Brando asked. “It’s only a movie.”
    Released in December of 1978, Superman was an instant smash. The film would go on to gross more than $300 million worldwide—five times its production budget—in the process making it one of the biggest moneymakers of all time and Chris the proverbial overnight star. He admitted to being “a little over- whelmed” by how strongly the public identified him with the quintessentially American icon he was portraying.
    “You would not believe,” Chris told one writer, “what women would expect from somebody who played Superman.” There would be hundreds of overtures and propositions, but Chris was no longer available. Months earlier, Chris was on the commis- sary lunch line during the shooting of Superman when he backed up and accidentally stepped on the foot of modeling agent Gae Exton. While it was hardly love at first sight for the leggy, blond Exton, Chris was instantly smitten.
    Fresh from a bitter breakup with her millionaire husband, David Iverson, Exton kept Chris at arm’s length until the third date. Even then, all they did was kiss. “She was shocked,” he re- called, “that I wasn’t going to muscle past the door into her bed.” Things moved rather quickly from then on. After months
    during which the tabloids linked the hunky Reeve with every- body from his Superman costar Valerie Perrine to Farrah Fawcett, Chris appeared with Exton at the film’s royal premiere in London. Not all of Reeve’s fans were beautiful, high-profile women.
    Chris would occasionally slip into his red cape, black boots, and blue tights and make surprise visits to children’s hospitals and pe- diatric wards. Through the Make-A-Wish Foundation, he also fulfilled the dying wishes of several terminally ill children to meet Superman. “It’s very hard for me to be silly about Superman,” Reeve said, “because I have seen children dying of brain tumors who as their last request wanted to talk to me, and have gone to their graves with a kind of peace . . . I’ve seen that Superman really matters.”
    Financially, Superman mattered less to Chris than it did to sev- eral supporting players. While Brando took home $3.7 million for a few days’ work and Gene Hackman collected $2 million playing Superman’s nemesis Lex Luthor, Chris was paid a mere
    $250,000 for both the original and the sequel.
    Nevertheless, the film vaulted Reeve from