Superhero

by Chris Nickson

  It was a disconcerting, slightly disorienting period. There was no danger of him being finished as an actor, but after so many years of constant employment the lull was strange, not so much a vacation as a limbo, and one which did nothing to stave off his increasing financial worries.

  His spirits couldn’t have been helped by the fact that he and Gae seemed to be growing apart. With his work, they’d never been like a normal couple, spending every night together, but they’d grabbed their days with each other whenever they could and made the most of them.

  Now she was spending more time in London with the kids, while Chris seemed to pass most of his months in America. She had her business, which was doing well, and seemed to be developing a full life away from him. Matthew, now six years old, was enrolled in an expensive private school in England, which meant that Gae couldn’t just pick up and leave whenever the whim took her. She was becoming more firmly anchored to a life lived, more or less, in one place, and most of the time that life didn’t seem to include Chris. He had characterized her as “fundamentally a practical person … organized, focused in terms of common sense, always looking for the logic in things.” But as a parent who was often alone and a businesswoman, she had to be.

  On the other hand, he quite perceptively saw himself as “a romantic, a dreamer … . I blow hot and cold. I’m also transparent. I can’t fake anything, whereas Gae can sometimes hold back emotions. For an actor, I’m a lousy actor.”

  The couple had been together for eight years, but now it seemed as if they were slowly and inexorably beginning to drift away from each other. The tabloids had been predicting that for a long time, but in the past they’d always shown themselves to be stronger than rumor. At the same time, it wasn’t over yet. The signs were all there, but there was still a chance for Chris and Gae to salvage things before they went too far.

  The situation would certainly be improved if Chris could take care of his money worries, if serendipity would work in his favor and give him the kind of lump sum he’d been turning down a few years before. With that off his mind, he’d be able to focus on other matters.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The gods were obviously on his side. There was a big payday coming, and from the source he’d least expected—Superman. After the third movie had been so severely savaged by the critics, the Salkinds had sold off the film rights and quit while they were still ahead.

  They’d been picked up by Menahem Golem and Yoram Globus, who owned the Cannon Group. Their reputation was for producing low-budget films of not especially outstanding quality, specializing in the type of Chuck Norris bloodfests that had been so popular.

  Their movies never approached art, even from a distance, but they did have a consistent knack for ending up in the black, and since the bottom line was far more important than the content, the Cannon Group was quite successful.

  Now they were going to put their particular polish on Superman, and they wanted Chris to reprise his twin roles.

  After the debacle of Superman III he’d declared he’d never play the character again, and he meant it. But that was then, and this was now. Other producers weren’t knocking down his door with offers. The Aviator remained a skeleton in his closet, which meant that he hadn’t had a movie released for three years, since 1983’s The Bostonians. Stage work and television were fine, but a film was high-profile; he needed something that would get his name back out in front of the public, and in turn bring in more scripts.

  A film was also money, and what Cannon was offering matched the amount he’d made for Superman III.

  Chris would have gladly accepted that, since no one else was bidding for his services, but his agent decided it was time to begin some real wheeling and dealing, and get Chris the type of fee he should have had all along for Superman, as well as any other conditions he might want to impose.

  That he got everything he wanted was no surprise. When the Salkinds had briefly considered a Superman IV, they’d claimed, “The public is most interested in the character, not in the actor. If we find the right actor for the part, we’ll make the movie with him.”

  But there was only one actor, and that was Chris; he was perfect for the part. He was the person the public knew and loved, whom they associated with the role. Anyone else would have been a poor substitute at best, and that would have been reflected at the box office.

  So, for the first time in his life, even though he wasn’t one any longer, Chris got to realize the full power of the big-time Hollywood actor. He would have script approval, he’d be able to direct some of the second-unit shots (as he had on The Aviator), and most artistically gratifying of all, for Chris agreeing to make Superman IV, Cannon would finance another picture of Chris’s choice—to be made before the epic.

  And on top of all that he’d receive $4 million.

  It was big money, but totaled up, it meant that Chris had still made less than $7 million for playing the Man of Steel four times, not the kind of figure to put him in stratospheric company.

  Still, this was a very sweet deal. The money worries were off his back, and he had not one, but two projects he could sink his teeth into. One for himself, one for the bank account.

  For his “own” movie, he picked Street Smart, a fact-based drama about a New York journalist who invented his stories. The screenplay had been written by the journalist in question, David Freeman, a freelance writer who’d once concocted a story about a pimp for New York magazine.

  Unfortunately, a real pimp who bore a strong resemblance to the writer’s invention had been arrested for murder, and his lawyer decided to subpoena the journalist’s notes—which, naturally, didn’t exist. To protect himself, and not reveal the truth, the journalist was forced to stand on his First Amendment rights, and that was where the problems really began … .

  Chris had been interested in the script a few years before, when it was called “Streets of New York,” and now, rewritten, it was brought to his attention again (both Reeve and Freeman had the same agent at ICM, Jim Wiatt).

  Making Street Smart before Superman IV was a clever move. It meant there was no danger of the big picture being made and then Cannon backing out of the smaller one. And it allowed Chris to get his indulgence out of his system first, before he got down to the lucrative work. With its small budget of $3 million, if it didn’t make money, Cannon could easily absorb the loss; they stood to make plenty from Superman.

  “The central character (Jonathan Fisher) is not likable and definitely not a hero,” Chris explained about his pet project. “But he’s like many people in their mid-thirties, facing a dilemma of personal ethics versus ambition. He’s sort of lost, just getting along, but he wants to be famous. When he gets the opportunity, he takes it.”

  In other words, he saw a few reflections of himself in Fisher. After all, Chris was himself in his mid-thirties, and trying hard to balance art and commerce, “just getting along.”

  “Life is not about good guys and bad guys. It’s about people trying to survive, it’s about personal ethics versus the pressure to succeed. I felt it would be interesting to play a man who is really quite lost, very weak, dishonest, and stupid in many ways.”

  Now, more mature, with a few lines adding character to his face, Chris was really old enough to attempt a role like this. If he’d done it at the height of his fame it would have seemed a deliberate attempt to erase the Superman image. Now it seemed like nothing more than an actor coming to grips with good material.

  For his research into the world of pimps and hookers he spent a couple of weeks with the NYPD vice squad, patrolling, being present at arrests, and talking to the women plying their trade out on the street.

  “A lot of the girls recognized me from films,” he told the New York Daily News, “and were excited not only to talk to me but to proposition me. At a discount. I also had some freebie offers, which is saying a lot, and some interesting combination offers.”

  Chris, however, kept his virtue intact, although he readily admitt
ed, “There is some very attractive talent down there.” He had a picture to make, and not much money with which to do it. Jerry Schatzberg was picked to direct, and a remarkably strong supporting cast was assembled, as Morgan Freeman, Mimi Rogers, and Kathy Baker all signed on to the project, with the legendary Miles Davis providing the music.

  Since this was very much Chris’s baby, he took a hands-on role throughout. He worked with Freeman on the script, and stayed on the sets for hours. Even illness couldn’t stop him. After an emergency appendectomy forced him into the hospital, he was back at work two days later, getting to grips with a fight scene.

  Street Smart was definitely gritty, exactly as Chris had hoped. The problem, as with much of the other work he was proud of, was that hardly anyone saw it. Cannon had agreed to finance it, but distribution was another matter. With its very dark subject matter and a decided lack of action sequences, it was never a very marketable proposition, far more art than commerce—something well out of Cannon’s depth. In the end it was shown in a few places, but like The Aviator (although for completely different reasons) it never saw general release.

  Those few showings were enough, however. Chris had taken on the challenge of surrounding himself with quality acting talent, and in the end—perhaps because he was trying to do too much on this film—they shone more strongly than he did. Morgan Freeman, in particular, turned in sterling work, enough to walk away with four awards as a supporting actor, and an Oscar nomination in the same category, while Baker got one award as supporting actress.

  Chris fared nowhere near as well. For him there were no awards, and precious little praise, which must have been particularly galling after giving so much of himself to the film.

  In The New Yorker, Pauline Kael liked much of the film, but not the screenplay with its “thin, brassy attitudes,” and she remained unimpressed by Chris, who she felt was “physically too inexpressive to play inexpressiveness; it isn’t the character who’s a lug—it’s Reeve.” People wasn’t convinced by any of the movie, and Peter Travers wrote that it “should be sentenced to cable TV, followed quickly by obscurity.”

  As soon as Street Smart was through postproduction, Chris had to attend to his other obligation, Superman IV. The idea for the script had largely originated with him, and reflected his new concerns with world peace.

  “We’re going for something emotional,” he told AP. “Ultimately we would all like to see a world without nuclear weapons. The question is, why can’t somebody just take them away?”

  That somebody, of course, would be Superman. But Chris certainly wasn’t in shape to lift one nuclear weapon, let alone the global arsenal of them. He hadn’t let himself go to seed, but now that he was well past thirty his physique no longer resembled the Man of Steel’s, either. There was plenty of working out, both mental and physical, to be done before filming began at Cannon’s Elstree Studio in England.

  At least he could be with Gae and the kids (both Matthew and Alexandra would be in the film), although the relationship was far from what it had once been. The time apart, and the way they’d grown in different directions, had put strains on their love that were finally beginning to look irreversible. After the way it had all begun with a bang, it looked as if, almost ten years later, it was going to end with a whimper.

  Not just yet, though. For the moment they were still together, or as together as they could be when Chris was in the middle of filming. With his demands all met, he had a lot of responsibility for this movie, working on the script with writers Lawrence Kohner and Mark Rosenthal. Beyond the basic idea of Superman gathering up the world’s nuclear armaments and throwing them into the sun, he even penned a few of the scenes himself, as well as undertaking a great deal of the second-unit direction.

  In theory, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, as it was to be known, should have seen a return to the standards of the first two films in the series. Gene Hackman was back to play Lex Luthor again, Jackie Cooper had returned, and Margot Kidder had Superman as her boyfriend again, while Mariel Hemingway had a turn as Clark Kent’s love interest.

  That was the theory, at least. The reality was that while Cannon wanted a big-budget movie, they weren’t prepared for it, and the production quite literally ran out of money five months before everything was due to be finished.

  It left both cast and crew in limbo. Instead of something classy and entertaining, the scenes which still had to be completed ended up being shot cheaply and shoddily.

  For the want of investing a little more money, Cannon would end up paying the price many times over once the film was released. And not only Cannon. For everyone involved it looked like this was going to be a disaster, but for none more so than Chris.

  He’d end up with his money, which was the ultimate reason he’d undertaken to play “the guy in the boots” one last time, and the movie he wanted had been made, but he certainly didn’t need to suffer the indignity of walking away from all this with his reputation in tatters.

  “The movie was his idea and the idea was great,” said Jon Cryer, who played a criminal in it, “and the shooting was great, and Gene Hackman was doing wonderful improvisational stuff—I loved working with him—and then Cannon ran out of money … and released an unfinished movie … . They used the same flying shot like four times. That was the problem with it, and that’s why Chris leveled with me and said, ‘It’s a mess.’ And I said, ‘Oh, great.’”

  Chris had been so closely involved that it would be impossible for him to disavow this one. His name was all over it. The best he could manage was to finish his work to the best of his ability and move on, which is precisely what he did, completing the filming in June and immediately flying back to Massachusetts for another summer season with the Williamstown Theatre, this time in Summer and Smoke.

  For once, though, he undertook the journey alone, and spent the summer by himself, while Gae and the kids remained in London. The fractures in the relationship were there, worse than they had been; it was over in everything but name.

  Williamstown was the place he felt comfortable, a sort of spiritual home, and in his solitude he determined to make it a physical home as well, spending just over a quarter of a million dollars to buy a farm in the Berkshires, on the New York—Massachusetts border.

  In many ways he found a real bargain, although he’d end up spending another hundred thousand dollars on the property over the next couple of years. It was more modern manor than farmhouse, two stories, with five bedrooms and six and a half baths, constructed of wood, pine and cherry inside, cedar shingles outside.

  “The house is facing the wrong way for the view,” he said expansively, “so I’m adding a wing and dabbling in landscaping—put an orchard here, move the pond there.”

  And the acreage was exactly what he needed for all his indulgences: “I can park my glider, and there’s a cross-country ski run, livestock, a trout stream.”

  He’d finally joined the landed gentry, but doing it on his own meant that in the main it was a lonely summer, broken only when he was contacted by U.S. senator Patrick Leahy, who was hoping for Chris’s support on the campaign trail in the upcoming 1986 election.

  Chris was surprised, and probably a little flattered. It wasn’t unusual for actors to lend their names to political causes—indeed, it was a time when a former actor was in the White House—but his real political involvement had been minimal. He had his own beliefs and he’d worked with the Hudson River conservation group, but that was as far as his commitment extended.

  Chris wasn’t about to lend his name to anything or anyone without doing his homework. He discovered that Leahy was, like himself, a liberal Democrat, one who’d opposed aid to the contras in Nicaragua. He was a staunch environmentalist. If his name could be of any use, Chris was prepared to let him use it, and once the summer season in Williamstown was over, he even went up to Vermont to make campaign appearances on Leahy’s behalf, making speeches, signing autographs, and appearing at fund-raisers.

  A goo
d deal of that was a genuine wish to help. But it was also a way of filling time. There was no family to return to, and for the moment he had no work waiting—he might even have wondered if he’d ever work again once the world saw the debacle known as the new Superman movie. This way he could at least channel his energy in a positive direction.

  Gratifyingly, it worked: Leahy kept his seat in the November election. But that was the only high spot as winter came rolling in. After a series of long-distance conversations, he and Gae agreed there was nothing to be salvaged in their relationship, and that the best thing was just to put an end to it. There were the children to be considered, however. They’d live with Gae and be brought up in England, but they’d still spend time with Chris whenever schedules permitted.

  “I trust the communication between Gae and me will be good enough so that we can work out whatever’s best for the kids,” Chris finally explained to McCall’s in the wake of it all. “For now, they understand they have two homes, and they’ll be fully loved and accepted in each.”

  It was all perfectly civilized, but sad. One thing it wasn’t was public. These were their private lives, the kind of dirty laundry no one else needed to see, and it would be another six months, after repeated press inquiries, until any kind of statement about the breakup was issued.

  Even then Chris was reluctant to talk about it. The McCall’s interview was the only time he’d even go into detail about the end of the relationship, in spite of all the speculation in the tabloids (who, in the summer of 1987, had him dumping Gae for the kids’ baby-sitter, Dana Morosini; in fact, she and Chris had only just met that year, and Chris’s split with Gae had happened months before).

  Nor did he leave Gae in the lurch; Chris was too much of a gentleman for that. With part of his recent Superman money, he bought a house in London for her and the children, so they’d have a solid base. Legends was doing well for her, making money, and though she had to work hard to keep it going and raise a family alone, the years of Chris frequently gone on location had made her no stranger to that.