Superhero

by Chris Nickson

  In The New Statesman, he was praised for a “charisma [and] a ruthlessness that is both repellent and fascinating.”

  The Observer noted in particular a moment in the play when Jarvis seemed to pounce “as if Henry Jarvis were so eager to get at the papers of Jeffrey Aspern that he forgets himself at the last moment and positively runs up the final steps to take the unwitting defenders by surprise.

  “It is, physically and psychologically, a marvelous moment and compels in an audience anxious to clap whatever they can, a chilled and electrifying silence. The barbarians are no longer at the gates. Mr. Reeve remains watchable throughout.”

  This time there was no talk of being wooden at the beginning of the run. Everything clicked perfectly from the opening night onward for the entire length of the production, so perfectly that there was even talk of a film version using the same cast, although all the studios approached considered the venture to be just too risky, meaning that, to Chris’s disappointment, in the end the venture had to be abandoned.

  But the play was exactly the type of triumph and ego boost that Chris needed, particularly as it was followed by the opening of The Bostonians, which brought him even more glowing reviews.

  Suddenly, instead of looking like someone starting on the slippery slope to obscurity, he was back with a fresh bloom on the rose and a rising reputation for the quality of his work. He even seemed to be formulating a plan for his career, claiming that he wanted to make two movies a year, in spring and fall, one serious, one a comedy, to show all the facets of his acting personality. That would leave summer free for Williamstown, the place that seemed to constantly renew him, and winter to be with his family and enjoy skiing, a sport he hadn’t had much opportunity to practice recently.

  Even if he didn’t reestablish himself as a star of the magnitude he’d been at the end of the 1970s, he’d still be doing what he loved and making a comfortable, if not extravagant, living. That would put him ahead of 99 percent of the people in his profession. And he’d be better off for it. He’d had a large dose of star status, enough to know that it didn’t sit too comfortably on him. He was more concerned with acting than image, and finally, it appeared, he was establishing a level for himself.

  Williamstown was the place that called him when The Aspern Papers ended its run in June. The family picked up and relocated back to Massachusetts, where Chris would be taking the lead in A. R. Gurney’s Richard Corey.

  As usual, the two-month run seemed like a vacation. He could spend his days relaxing with Gae and the kids, sailing, flying, walking the baby, without autograph seekers stopping him on the streets of the small town.

  The play was remarkably well received and he was offered the chance to play the title role on Broadway, but in his new maturity he declined.

  “I’m sure it would go,” he said, “but I’m not sure it would be satisfying to me. It was such a perfect little production at Williamstown. There was a time when I was struggling to show my range, but now I’m past all that. I don’t need to come and show off on Broadway.”

  On the surface it seemed like an odd statement from someone who, just four years earlier, had regarded acting in Fifth of July on the Great White Way to be something of a career pinnacle. But there were a couple of things to be considered. Chris was coming off six straight months of theater, both rehearsals and performances; he needed a change, something different. But perhaps more important was the fact that he’d already played Broadway in a lead role. It was a challenge he’d conquered, just as, to his own satisfaction, he’d already conquered Richard Corey. To have kept on doing that would have been akin to standing still, and Chris always needed to be moving forward.

  One challenge he’d hoped for was a role in Children of a Lesser God, but that didn’t happen. Instead there was an opportunity to do something lavish in the medium he’d been brought up to think of as second-class—a television movie.

  But it wasn’t any of the standard “disease of the week” vehicles. This would be as lavish as anything Hollywood had come up with lately, a pull-out-all-the-stops adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.

  In September 1984 West was West and East was still East. The chances of an American cast and crew filming the story in its native Russia were nil. Instead they found the next best place, also in Eastern Europe, but with a much more liberal attitude, where the landscape and the buildings still looked right, and the locals were pleased to work cheaply—Hungary. And that was where Chris went in September to begin the filming. It was his third period drama in a little over twelve months (and obviously his “serious” project for the year), but oddly there was no mention of him being typecast in that manner the way there had been as Superman.

  “Christopher Reeve was on top of the world when he moved to New York City—young, single, and successful. (Nancy Barr/Retna Ltd.)

  At Juilliard, Christopher perfected his craft and roomed with future megastar Robin Williams. (Jim Demetropoulos/Retna Ltd.)

  Christopher and Juilliard buddy Kevin Kline were both presenters at the 1985 Obie Awards, Off-Broadway’s Tony Awards.

  (Walter McBride/Retna Ltd.)

  Christopher with the two women in his life—Superman’s “Lois Lane” (Margot Kidder) and Gae Exton, his then live-in lover and the mother of his two eldest children. (Richard Young/Retna Ltd.)

  Superman with his female counterpart, Supergirl star Helen Slater, at the premiere of Superman III. (Richard Young/Retna Ltd.)

  In addition to the role that made him famous, Christopher also starred in a number of serious, literary dramas, including The Bostonians.

  (Camera Press/Retna Ltd.)

  Christopher and the new Mrs. Reeve, Dana Morosoni, beam for the camera. (Steve Douglas/Retna Ltd.)

  Since the accident, Christopher has lobbied tirelessly for additional funding for increased spinal-injury research. He was an inspirational speaker at the Democratic National Convention.

  (Patsy Lynch/Retna Ltd.)

  Christopher fulfilled his dream of directing with In the Gloaming, starring Glenn Close. (I.P.A. Stills/Retna Ltd.)

  Dana and their son Will congratulate Christopher on being awarded a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. (Steve Granitz/Retna Ltd.)

  Whatever the future brings. Christopher and Dana will face it together. (Marissa Roth/Retna L.t.d.)

  But in Budapest, at least, Superman was one thing he didn’t have to worry about, since the movies had never been released there. By an ironic quirk of fate, however, Deathtrap had, which meant that “the people in the street, when they do recognize me, think of me as a gay psychotic playwright and leave me alone.”

  With his fame not preceding him for once, Chris was free to get on with the job in hand. This version of Anna Karenina should have had everything going for it. The cast, with the exception of Chris as Count Vronsky, was entirely British. Jacqueline Bissett had the title role, and the other lead was Paul Scofield, who’d won an Oscar for his performance in A Man for All Seasons. James Goldman, who’d penned The Lion in Winter, had written the script, while Simon Langton, whose television credits included Smiley’s People, was the director. In short, it was employing the crème de la crème.

  Chris’s first exposure to the world of television movies surprised him, even more than his time with Merchant-Ivory. With just $5 million to spend, he quickly learned that “the budget is the budget. You can’t steal one more minute than you’re allotted.”

  He’d originally discovered the book when he was at Cornell, calling it “a page-turner, compelling reading … possibly one of the best novels ever written,” which was only apt, given Franklin Reeve’s specialization in Russian literature. The quality of the story was what made him want to be a part of it, even though he’d be playing second fiddle to Bissett, who was, in reality, a lesser star in the pantheon than he was.

  “I just think, ‘Will I be enjoying this part?’” he asked himself, and the answer was a large yes.

  Both Chris and Bissett had their own ways of work
ing, and on such a tight schedule, with little time allowed for rehearsal, that caused problems.

  “You don’t get much from me at rehearsal,” Bissett admitted in TV Guide. “I resist being overfocused … . Chris needs to talk about things a great deal. His working process is more tortured than mine. He needs to know a zillion details before he focuses.”

  Chris wanted the cast to work together in rehearsals, “to explore the characters, to dig into the script,” he said. “[Bissett’s] way of working is to get it together on her own, which can be disconcerting to actors who are used to a different method.”

  All of which reportedly led to tension between the pair, although neither would openly admit it. In fact, in public they were perfectly amicable; in the same interview, Chris went out of his way to praise her as someone who was “always on time and word-perfect in scenes. She’s a top-drawer professional.”

  The shoot itself was an exercise in exhaustion. Much of the money for Anna Karenina had gone on its stars and the costumes, more than three thousand of them, which had been rented from Moscow and London. It was going to look grand, gorgeous, and extravagant. However, that translated into long, long days on the sets and locations, with fifteen setups a day being the rule rather than the exception (in Hollywood five would have seemed a huge load). The fact that virtually three-quarters of the crew were Hungarian didn’t speed things along, since everything had to be translated for them. And the local technical standards were well below those of their Western colleagues.

  “The people are all warm and friendly, but there is a language barrier,” Chris said. “There’s also a lack of expertise.”

  One other problem in working for television was the network censors, people he’d never encountered before.

  “In one scene, Chris was supposed to kiss the top of my cleavage, but the TV censors said it wouldn’t wash,” Bissett remembered.

  “No kissing below the neck. This put the kibosh on one of the scenes we were in the middle of,” Chris agreed with a laugh. “I was just about to make my move, and got pulled back.” But in some ways he was grateful for the restrictions, since it allowed the audiences to focus on the story, rather than the sex.

  “It’s a distortion to make a classic novel play like Dallas,” he asserted. “That’s putting twentieth-century audience needs on top of the reality of the piece. In our piece the implications are made, but we don’t cut to a bedroom to interest the audience.”

  Titillation was definitely not the order of the day, and that meshed well with Chris’s views on the entire production.

  “Our primary function is to entertain and make an intelligent story. But if it causes twenty people to want to run and pick up the novel and study it, I think that would be great … . You don’t have to play down to the lowest common denominator. You don’t have to play it down to the eleven-year-old mind. So much of television plays it down and, not being snobbish about it, how nice it is to have something that doesn’t.”

  Unlike film, where there could be a gap of a year between the shoot finishing and the premiere, time is very much of the essence in every aspect of television. The last takes of Anna Karenina had taken place in November 1984. On March 26, 1985, before Chris had even got another role, it was aired on CBS. The reactions, as usual for anything major attempted by an American network, were mixed.

  USA Today had kind words for Chris, noting that “Reeve’s Vronsky has the perfect pitch of the lovelorn naif—youthfulness, extravagance, and crass opportunism,” and the Christian Science Monitor conceded that “he finally manages to integrate his own cool persona into a fairly believable Vronsky.”

  But the New York Times didn’t see things through such rose-colored lenses. John O’Connor felt that “all done up in splendid military costumes, Mr. Reeve is indeed handsome, but rather distressingly lifeless. He seems to be devoting most of his energy to maintaining a reasonably accurate British accent. He ends up being the nineteenth-century equivalent of a big lug.”

  Even People had little pleasant to say, calling it, at best “a tepid tale of love,” and Chris’s acting “to passion what kryptonite is to Superman.”

  Unremarkably, it didn’t fare particularly well in the ratings. It seemed that the only times the Americans could offer any seal of approval to costume dramas were when they came from England and were aired on Masterpiece Theater. At the same time, it was true that Americans, however much care and money they took, were unable to offer the same subtleties as those British productions, and that anything made for the three networks was almost certainly the kiss of death for a classic, since it almost always had to be reduced to its lowest common denominators.

  Chris had his plan for two movies a year, but for it to work he actually needed to get two roles a year, and after Anna Karenina there wasn’t another one in sight. The Running Man had gone to Arnold Schwarzenegger, leaving him with no immediate prospects.

  Although The Bostonians had done well in reviews and, because of its tiny budget, made a healthy profit, it was an art film and discounted by the big studios. That meant his last major role (not including The Aviator, which had never seen general release) had been in Superman III, which was now a couple of years old. Whereas after the first two movies in the Superman series the offers had come in thick and fast, all tinkling with very healthy chunks of change, now he was having to pursue roles, and finding difficulty in securing them. Chris knew he was still doing good work, and that he’d given some excellent performances in the past, but Hollywood wasn’t coming calling anymore. He’d stopped being hot. Away from the cape and boots, Chris wasn’t a big box-office draw.

  Much of that was due to himself. His independent streak had come home to roost. After years of turning down the big-budget films, with their ridiculous salaries, the studios were finally believing that he simply wasn’t interested. Maybe he’d said no often enough for it to have finally sunk in.

  There were plenty of other options available to him, of course. There was theater, and, now that he’d broken the barrier, more television. And by the mid-eighties, other work was available for jobbing actors, like reading audio books. Even if it didn’t quite have the same glamour as flying over Metropolis, it was acting, after a fashion.

  And it was a paycheck, which was becoming a serious consideration. Chris might never have considered himself a “movie star” as such, but he’d never stinted himself on movie star’s luxuries. With Gae, he had homes in New York, Los Angeles, and London, three airplanes, and a sailboat. These were the privileges of a wealthy man, and it took a certain income level to maintain the standard of life Chris had achieved.

  Now, finding himself not heavily sought after for the lucrative movie roles, he had two choices: scale back on his lifestyle or go for anything and everything that was available, no matter what it was.

  Within limits, he chose the latter. He’d work hard, make what he needed, but there were also acting jobs he’d take because he wanted to do them, regardless of the income they brought.

  The family’s yearly sojourn in Williamstown would always be one of those. Nineteen eighty-five saw them back again for July and August, while Chris starred in The Royal Family. Performing even gave him a new idea: He’d briefly tried his hand at directing in The Aviator. Maybe it was possible to combine that with his love of theater?

  “I’d like to take a good five-character play with a lot of emotional detail and work on that,” he suggested. “I think I have the eye for it, and I feel I could really bridge the gap between the actor and the audience.”

  However, it seemed that no one was listening. No directing jobs were offered.

  On the other hand, there was plenty of television work available, and Reeve reached for it, narrating a special called Dinosaur! and one much closer to his heart, Juilliard at 80, for which he was a perfectly justifiable choice, being one of its more famous alumni, albeit not a graduate.

  By the autumn of 1985, he was back working in New York theater. It wasn’t Broadway, or any
thing close. In fact, Circle in the Square’s production of The Marriage of Figaro was unlike anything Chris had been involved in before. It was decidedly avant-garde, and he admitted that “it’s a totally different kind of theater than I’m used to—that’s why I wanted to be a part of it.

  “My own hope for my life is that I never chicken out. I’d like to keep feeling reckless about things and having that roller-coaster ride of up/down, success/failure—anything but play it safe.”

  With The Marriage of Figaro, playing it safe was something he could never have been accused of. His was essentially a comedic role in a production that seemed to resemble a car wreck more than anything coherent, and unsurprisingly, according to the critics, it seemed to fall on that down/failure side of the roller coaster, as critic Frank Rich noted when he wrote, “His efforts at clowning sink with the finality of pure lead.”

  But that was the risk he’d taken, and at least he’d been willing to take it. Chris had made some dubious choices of roles in his career, but he’d always been willing to go out on a limb for something he believed in, regardless of how little it might advance his career. He’d done everything with a great deal of integrity, and that meant more to him than any amount of money.

  The Marriage of Figaro didn’t enjoy a particularly long run, and when it was over, Chris once again found himself at a loose end. There were roles being discussed, but nothing definite set, no contracts signed or checks in the mail.