Superhero

by Chris Nickson

  “Chris is totally believable in the role. There’s no way to connect him with the actor who plays Superman.”

  And that, Chris hoped, was true, but not for the same reasons the producers hoped. Superman was proving to be his bread and butter, the ongoing paycheck that allowed him to do everything else.

  As filming progressed, Chris realized more and more that he should never have taken the part. What had seemed like a good idea at the time was proving to be an unmitigated disaster. Awful as it might be, and it would have to await release in 1982 to see just how bad that was, it did serve one purpose for Chris.

  “It was a necessary failure because it brought me back to my senses and brought me back to me.”

  By now Chris had to be questioning some of the choices he’d made. He didn’t read his reviews anymore, but he knew full well that Somewhere in Time had been widely panned, and he could already guess that Monsignor would receive an even worse reception. He didn’t seem to be picking movies that played to his strengths for his starring roles, but away from them. As Superman he’d been a perfect fit, but beyond that, as a star, he seemed to be foundering.

  Deathtrap was something different altogether. He had a leading role, but one which had him playing strongly off another equally powerful character, rather than the reliance being on him alone. Could it be that his best work outside Superman came when he was part of an ensemble, rather than having to carry the production himself? That, after all, was what he was used to in the theater, and it was a feeling he enjoyed. And that prompted another question—was Chris really movie star material? He was a good actor, that much was beyond doubt, and he undeniably had the looks, but was he really a star?

  Had his Superman role been a fluke, one of those pieces of perfect casting he’d never be able to duplicate? Certainly, to most people he wasn’t able to get beyond it. To them Superman was Christopher Reeve and Christopher Reeve was Superman. His other starring roles were Superman in another part, a change of costume, however wildly different they might be.

  What he needed was to rethink everything, his whole approach to movies, and the type of parts he was seeking, if he was going to be genuinely happy working in the cinema.

  That was what he needed. What he got was slightly different. It was a return to prison, in a way—an offer he simply couldn’t refuse—to play Superman again.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Two million dollars and top billing to take a role he was already associated with was an impossible offer to walk away from. It offered a good measure of security, both financial and emotional. It was, essentially, a return to the basics that had made him.

  The problem, of course, was that Chris hadn’t yet managed to establish himself properly as a film actor, and the more he continued to return to Superman, the more it was going to keep dogging him throughout his career; the stronger the association, the more difficult it would be to break, no matter how good his other work might be.

  The Salkinds, producing yet again, didn’t seem to realize quite what a property they had in Chris, either. He’d carried the first two films, and his face and physique had reestablished Superman in the American psyche as someone of the modern age, but essentially they continued to try and treat him as a nobody, the young man they’d thrust into the limelight. Two million dollars was a handsome paycheck, but it still paled when compared to the amount they were paying Richard Pryor to be the villain—$4 million.

  “He’s been around longer than I have, and he deserves [it],” Chris said with remarkable grace. However, that grace no longer extended to the Salkinds, and, like Margot Kidder (who would find herself with barely a line in Superman III), he called them “untrustworthy, devious, and unfortunate people,” harsh words from a man who was generally remarkably temperate with his tongue in public.

  There would be no return for Gene Hackman, nor for Ned Beatty or Valerie Perrine—their parts had been little more than cameos in the second film, anyway. Instead the producers offered up Robert Vaughan (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.), jazz singer Annie Ross, and Pamela Stephenson, while Annette O’Toole was brought in as Superman’s new love interest, Lana Lang.

  But as preproduction was taking place, Chris had other things on his mind—the opening of Deathtrap. Even if he didn’t bother to read his notices anymore, he must have known in his gut that this was a deliciously good movie, and he’d done some outstanding work in it.

  He even took his father to a private screening, something he’d never done before. Franklin Reeve wasn’t exactly a maven of popular culture, but Chris believed he’d enjoy this, with its sly twists and turns and humor.

  Chris, as playwright Clifford Anderson, had a perfect working partner in Michael Caine. Even taking place mostly on a small set—a house in East Hampton, New York—it managed the intimacy of a stage play without its claustrophobia, a tribute to Sidney Lumet’s light direction. Its crosses, double crosses, and triple crosses kept heightening the tension, running the gamut from camp to serious to hilarious, all the way to the O. Henry jolt at the end. With subtle little flourishes to his body language and speech, Chris emphasized Cliff’s effeminate side without ever falling into a mincing stereotype.

  For the first time on film, Chris had the chance to really stretch himself, and show the breadth of his talent, and why he’d become such a strong stage actor. And whether he read their words or not, the critics had plenty of praise for his work in the film.

  “These two actors tread a fine line between being captivatingly theatrical and simply being a pair of hambones,” Gene Siskel wrote in the Chicago Tribune. “If I had to choose one performance over another, I would choose Reeve’s, simply because he is so good at getting intensely angry without seeming silly.”

  And the Washington Post suggested that “he ingratiates himself in a fresh way by impersonating a charming menace, extending his range to the amoral, treacherous aspects of human nature.”

  Still, as People noted, “Reeve does the desired damage to his Superman image by kissing Caine full on the mouth,” hardly the point of it all, but one of many twists. Even with that little shock, they couldn’t quite recommend the movie.

  Finally, it seemed, Chris was living up to the potential that had been bubbling under the celluloid surface for four years now. If one movie seemed to offer him the chance to establish an identity away from Superman and show a strong actor’s personality of his own, this was it.

  The only problem was that not many people saw it. However good its notices, the public in the early 1980s wanted big entertainment, big names in big roles with big budgets, and preferably big special effects. Deathtrap had the names, but that was all. It was, by design, a small film, but a little gem hidden among the blockbusters. In its quest to be overawed, America missed a treat, although the film did manage to end up in the black.

  Chris claimed to be happy just doing the best work he could.

  “I really thought I’d act in regional theaters for the rest of my life,” he said. “I never expected stardom. So I’m not complaining.”

  However, he wasn’t able to capitalize on this new base once Monsignor was released. From a zenith he moved straight to a nadir.

  It was an artistic and commercial disaster. Even a naked Genevieve Bujold could barely make it limp past its opening weekend.

  In Newsweek, Jack Kroll wrote that “only his best friend or his best accountant can explain why the talented Reeve signed on for this ecclesiastical geek of a movie, which wins the ‘Inchon’ award as the most gangrenous Turkey of the Month.”

  And that was one of the kinder reviews. It really was so badly done that what should have been drama came across like bad comedy, causing the Los Angeles Times to muse that “as guided by [director] Frank Perry, Reeve is not only at sea in any of these emotions, his performance is somehow familiar … . When his postulant-lover, Genevieve Bujold, presses him to reveal his troubling secret, [you expect] what he will blurt out is not, ‘I’m a priest,’ but ‘I can fly!’”

  In
the movie business, one bomb, even two, is far from a career-ending proposition. Perry was coming off a big hit (Mommie Dearest), but this was so bad that it would be three years after Monsignor before another of his films made it to the screen.

  Not surprisingly, there was a big Catholic backlash against Monsignor, not only in America, but all over the world. The Church was an institution not to be treated badly, even by the mighty Hollywood. Chris was lucky to escape the wrath, but by then he’d already suffered enough at the pens of the critics.

  What perhaps made it worse was the fact that every word was justified. Everyone involved would have been done a great favor if all the prints had been burned before the public had a chance to see them.

  In his three roles away from Superman, Chris had proved himself to be extremely erratic, going from bad to excellent to just plain awful. Part of the blame (or credit) had to go to the directors, but a lot had to be assumed by Chris himself. When it came to the crunch, so far he hadn’t been able to draw consistently good performances out of himself. He was a star by virtue of Superman. To be able to break away from that and achieve renown as a movie actor, he would need to pull several stunning roles in a row out of his hat.

  At the same time, no one was about to dismiss him out of hand. In his own quiet way, he’d built up a lot of goodwill, both within the industry and with the public. His acting choices so far hadn’t always been the best, but at least he’d approached them honestly and earnestly, always eager to give it all, and people appreciated that. In interviews he came across as thoughtful, articulate, and dignified beyond his years, far from overawed by his own stature. He was the type of star that America, and indeed the world, loved to love, another James Stewart or even Henry Fonda. The tabloids seemed to enjoy dredging up rumor and gossip about his private life, but the fact was that he remained a committed family man, a strong partner and father. He saw one of his responsibilities as keeping Gae and Matthew as far away from the spotlight as he could, and shielded them.

  Gae wasn’t, and never would be, a typical “movie wife,” content to hang on her husband’s arm. They were seen together, at parties, premieres, discos, but she’d continued to build her business, and become quite successful in her own right. When Chris received his $2 million paycheck for Superman III, he invested some of it in her modeling agency, Legends, feeling that he’d end up making money.

  She was every bit as international as Chris, shuttling with Matthew and his nanny between her offices in New York and London, and still maintaining homes in both cities.

  Matthew saw his father less than most sons; filmmaking was hardly a typical nine-to-five job. But then again, Chris wasn’t a typical dad. How many fathers could take a three-year-old flying in their own plane, or gliding, skiing, or sailing? And in the time he wasn’t working, Chris was able to share these things with his son, to give him constant attention and have the kind of relationship and closeness he’d never had with his own father.

  The pain of his parents’ divorce had never left Chris, and he certainly didn’t want his own kid to have to go through something similar. There was a lot he could offer Matthew, not just financially, but also emotionally, a stability, a bonding, that he desperately wanted to be able to give.

  “The key to being a good father is never to think you own your child—you don’t. Why, Matthew’s a real person. He’s just short!”

  Once again, though, in 1982, he had to be away from home for an extended period, as the filming for Superman III began. This time around, Chris wanted to give more depth to Clark Kent. He’d already achieved the lightness; now it was time to have a little more heft and avoid the possibility of caricature.

  “I tried to give Clark Kent a new dimension,” he told Guy Delcourt, “to show his gentility, his need to do good, his friendliness, instead of continuing to portray him as a comic personality or as a slapstick character.”

  He also offered his opinion as to why there was no love story in the new film. It was, he explained, something he respected, because Superman had fallen in love “once and for all in Superman II.” Superman had slept with Lois and then erased her memory of the affair. “He does this because he feels that he can handle the pain of their separation more easily than she can.”

  But it was also a fact that there was absolutely no chemistry between Chris and Annette O’Toole’s Lana Lang. What romance occurred would be described by O’Toole as “bittersweet, not hot and heavy,” which was almost a metaphor for the entire film.

  Somewhere along the line, the film’s basic idea of going deeper into Superman, and revealing more about him, had been lost in the rewrites. Even five weeks spent filming in Alberta—substituting for the American Midwest on film—didn’t seem to illuminate much of anything.

  The Salkinds had a budget, and they planned on using it, all $35 million of it. The theory, which would become prevalent in Hollywood, was that if you spent and spent to overwhelm an audience, they’d be happy. And so locations and effects were piled heavily upon each other, as if they could substitute for a plot.

  The first two films in the series had managed to enhance the Superman legend. But, more than anything else, their popularity had been due to Chris’s courtly performance as the Man of Steel. The action scenes were state-of-the-art for their time, but it was the image of Chris in cape and boots that remained in the public’s memory, seeing everything with a gentle, compassionate (super)humanity. There was drama and comedy in good proportions, enough to offer gentle nudges and winks to the audience, without ever becoming a parody of itself.

  During the filming it became apparent that restraint wasn’t going to be one of the watchwords on this production. Richard Pryor had been recruited not to play a part, it seemed, but to be Richard Pryor, one of the hottest comedy talents of the period, in a Superman movie. It was as if the Salkinds (with director Richard Lester equally guilty) had sold out the franchise for a quick profit. The quality control that made the first two movies such a delight had vanished entirely. They’d forgotten that the law of diminishing returns didn’t necessarily have to set in so quickly—the James Bond films have remained a viable, entertaining series for many years—as long as a certain amount of care was exercised.

  For Chris, becoming more and more horrified as the shoot dragged on, it was a case of give it his best, get it over with, and get out, back to Gae and Matthew in New York, to try and erase the experience from his mind—only there was no superkiss that could do that.

  He came away with even less love for the Salkinds than he’d had going into the filming. Their motive, he said, was no more than “greed,” and he continued, “There are some things about commercial filmmaking that are in really bad taste. For a film to be commercial, it must earn money, and that results in strategic planning in certain degrees—the goal to earn even more money. When it comes down to a showdown between quality and integrity and commercial expedience, guess who wins?”

  The answer was going to be self-evident. He’d come away from the whole experience with a very bad taste in his mouth. And even if it had made him a relatively rich man, he wasn’t planning on returning.

  “Look, I’ve flown, become evil, loved, stopped and turned the world backward. I’ve faced my peers, rescued cats from trees. What is there left for Superman to do that hasn’t already been done?”

  It was a valid question, but it was also one the comic-book writers had been forced to ask themselves for years before coming up with creative solutions. The scriptwriters of Superman III had seemed to settle for the lowest common denominator, a fact that wasn’t lost on fans.

  Also, Chris believed it was time to leave Superman behind, once and for all. The character had given him so much, there could be no doubt of that—in each of his homes, in his plane or glider, he saw the results—but its time had passed. Before it became too late, he was determined to establish himself as a film actor, rather than a star.

  “I decided back in 1981, when I read the script for Superman III. I said, �
��I’ll do it,’ because I’d said I’d do it, but it wasn’t up to the mark. Something was missing. They left out the warmth and the humor.”

  What he needed and craved were roles with the depth and complexity of his part in Deathtrap. Nothing flashy, but something to challenge him, to give him a chance to properly parade his art.

  “I wanted to be an actor, not run around with a machine gun,” was the way he characterized it to Entertainment Weekly.

  His agent came up with two possibilities. The first was a remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, titled simply The Bounty, which would have put him up against Anthony Hopkins, still several years away from his Oscar, but a fine actor nonetheless. Chris would have had the lead in a big-budget production.

  “It was tempting,” he admitted. “It had a fine Robert Bolt screenplay, Anthony Hopkins, and eighteen weeks in Tahiti but … it wasn’t for me. I need to get excited and I just couldn’t feel it.”

  The other was far more modest, one of the leads in a Merchant-Ivory production of Henry James’s The Bostonians.

  The choice for a movie star should have been obvious. The Bounty was offering $1 million for his services. Merchant-Ivory couldn’t manage more than a fraction of that. But Chris was determined to try and live by his words that “I just hope it’s a decent piece of work.” In spite of the difference in money, he chose The Bostonians.

  The decision wasn’t popular with his agent, to the extent that they quickly ended up parting ways. Nor was it well received by Merchant-Ivory’s investors, who didn’t believe Chris had what it took to act in a period drama. James Ivory and Ismail Merchant, whose reputations for quality films preceded them, fought hard to keep him, and finally succeeded. They knew whom they wanted, and had ample faith in his ability, even when he was going to be paired with Britain’s leading actress, Vanessa Redgrave. They felt him capable of holding his own.