Superhero

by Chris Nickson

  “There was never an incident, never an act of cruelty or a betrayal between Gae and me,” Chris said. “It was just a growing awareness that we were the wrong people for each other. It’s not sugary and fake, but we’re friends. That’s really all there is to say. That is the whole truth.”

  Still, it was a bleak period for Chris. He had no partner, the movie on which he’d staked so much of his reputation seemed certain to be a critical and commercial failure, and there was no lucrative work on the horizon, beyond the opportunity to narrate a documentary called Future Flight; at least the subject was close to his heart.

  His plan to make two movies a year had perforce gone by the board. He could only make them if he was offered the roles, and the phone simply wasn’t ringing the way it once had. It was as if Christopher Reeve had gone out of fashion. His reputation was still intrinsically sound, but, outside of Superman, his name just didn’t set the cash registers tinkling, and what Hollywood wanted in its male leads were proven box-office draws. The studios were no longer in business to walk the artistic edges. It didn’t really matter how good or how bad the actors were in the roles. It didn’t even matter if the movies themselves were awful, as long as the finished product looked slick and the crowds kept coming. With stars, writers, everybody demanding more money, and the spiraling cost of all those special effects the public seemed to lap up, the studios were less and less willing to take chances. Chris might have been able to act rings around many of the men whose names were appearing above the titles, but it was becoming less and less likely he’d have the opportunity.

  By reappearing as Superman he’d done his wallet a big favor, but in the long term he’d hurt his career—not merely because of Superman IV’s lack of quality (although he knew that wasn’t going to help him), but because he’d become associated with his character yet again. It had been one of those pairings that had been so perfect from the beginning that he’d never be able to leave it behind entirely, but coming back again just reinforced it in the mass consciousness.

  So when a movie offer came along, he grabbed it with both hands. The money was welcome, but far more important was working again. He wasn’t a star in this, but that didn’t matter. The order in which the names appeared was important to some actors, but not Chris. Here was a chance to exercise his comedic muscles, playing a none too bright rich man, Blaine Bingham, in Switching Channels.

  The story itself was far from new. It had started movie life in 1931 as The Front Page (and even then it was an adaptation of a stage play) and had then become His Girl Friday, and it seemed to get dusted off and taken out every few years for a remake, each one adding a slight twist to the original.

  This variation offered Kathleen Turner as the female lead, a television news anchorwoman working for her ex-husband, played by Burt Reynolds (making this version something like The Front Page crossed with The Mary Tyler Moore Show). Chris was her hopeful suitor, a sporting goods manufacturer, eventually rejected in favor of career.

  Inspired was one thing it wasn’t, and Chris with dyed blond hair was a sight that just didn’t look right. However, he insisted he enjoyed the role.

  “Blaine is such a weenie,” he announced, “but I got a kick out of playing him because he’s different.”

  And indeed he was. Chris played Bingham as someone closer to Clark Kent than any Superman, more caricature than character, and Time would say in its review that “Christopher Reeve brings a new macho wimpitude to the role of [Turner’s] new beau—he’s Clark Kent with a preening ego.” Even Playboy liked him, calling him “the movie’s happiest surprise, playing a sort of Ken-doll character and fine-tuning the sophisticated comic flair he brought to Superman.”

  The filming was quick, smooth, on time and on budget, but then again, these were all seasoned professionals without the need for any prima donna antics. They all knew the drill—just turn in the best performance possible and move on to the next project.

  “I really did that movie just to fool around,” Chris said. “I thought it could work, but it was played much too broadly. None of the characters were vulnerable enough to get much sympathy, and you ended up not caring about anybody.”

  Had he really taken it “just to fool around”? Given that he wasn’t being showered with offers, it seemed unlikely. He’d become what he’d originally set out to be—a jobbing actor, working at whatever was on offer as long as it kept him in the business and paid the bills. The promise of a decade before, and the big roles and big money he’d refused, weren’t about to be repeated.

  “I’ve become philosophical about it,” he admitted. “There have been so many highs and lows, and I don’t always want to take the roller-coaster ride anymore.”

  That might have sounded like an admission of defeat, but by spring 1987, Chris was weary. After he’d completed Switching Channels, once again there were no more movie offers waiting. In fact, beyond Williamstown, there was nothing at all. It would be four years before he’d work in a cinematic film again.

  With no work, and no family to console him, he returned to Williamstown for their 1987 season. There, at least, was a feeling of comfort, surrounded by people he knew—many of whom he’d worked with every summer for years—and who accepted him for who he was. Onstage in Williamstown he might be on show, but it was his retreat from the world.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  That season he was due to play in The Rover at Williamstown. It wasn’t a lead, merely support, a fairly easy, gentle passage through the summer. Emotionally, his life was slowly beginning to come back together, even if things still looked fairly bleak professionally.

  He’d gone to Williamstown in June to begin rehearsals and relax on the farm, and on the thirtieth of the month went down with friends to the 1896 House, a cabaret, for a few drinks and a chance to relax and catch up.

  At a first, quick glance, he must have thought the woman who climbed onstage to sing “The Music That Makes Me Dance” was Gae; there was a strong resemblance between them. Both were tall, with long, shiny dark hair, and leggy. And he was still very susceptible to any woman who reminded him of the person with whom he’d spent almost ten years, the mother of his children.

  When her set was finished, immediately attracted, Chris introduced himself, and discovered that her name was Dana Morosini, and invited her out to an after-hours club. At first she refused.

  “My friends were telling me, ‘You’re crazy. Give us your keys. He wants to give you a ride!’” she recalled, “and I said, ‘Well, I have a car, I can get there on my own.’”

  Chris finally persuaded her to follow him to the club, and there, he remembered, “We ended up talking for an hour. We didn’t get a drink, we didn’t sit down, we didn’t move. Everything just vanished around us.”

  Dana was intrigued by him, but it was anything but love at first sight for her. Chris was smitten, but she remained guarded. She wasn’t about to jump into something with a man who was essentially still on the rebound. After a quick kiss on the cheek, she left and went home—alone.

  At twenty-six, she was enjoying her first season in Williamstown. She wasn’t cast in the “big” play, but in another, smaller one, as well as doing other work around the festival, anything to keep her close to the theater.

  Like Chris, Dana Charles Morosini had a fairly privileged background. She was born in New Jersey; her father was a doctor, and her mother worked in publishing. As a child, the family had moved to the New York suburb of Westchester County, an area where wealth was the norm, and Dana was a normal child, a bit of a tomboy who ended up doing chores like chopping wood. She learned to ride, but discovered she enjoyed singing and acting in school plays at Edgemont High School.

  That was where the acting bug entered her system. After graduation she moved on to Yale, to study drama under Nikos Psacharopoulos, the man who was also the artistic director at the Williamstown Theatre. She took part in the usual student productions and attended all the commercial auditions she could, but without much success.
And once she’d got her degree she headed west.

  Not to try her luck in Los Angeles and the world of movies and television, however, but to pursue a more academic life, studying for an M.F.A. at the prestigious California Institute of the Arts, more or less a Left Coast version of Juilliard.

  With her master’s in her hand, Dana Morosini returned to New York. Her love was stage work, and to pursue that she really needed to be in Manhattan. But it wasn’t easy. There were small roles in Off-Off-Broadway shows that hardly anyone attended, in places the big reviewers would never venture. The highlight of her career—and by far the biggest payday she’d ever had—was appearing in a television commercial for Tide. Still, she wasn’t about to give up her dream.

  That was why, when Psacharopoulos had offered her work in Williamstown, she’d come along. There were no other pressing plans for the summer. It got her out of the heat of the city, and surrounded her with theater people. The cabaret gig was fun, another string to her bow, some pin money for luxuries.

  One thing she hadn’t headed north in search of was a boyfriend, even if he was Christopher Reeve. But Chris wasn’t about to let her slip away so easily. He sent her flowers, the typical romantic gesture, and kept inviting her out again. Finally, after ten days she gave in and agreed to see him.

  The date turned out to be a moonlight swim at Margaret Lindley Pond, just outside town, which set off all manner of red lights for her.

  “I thought, ‘Oh God, here comes the old let’s-get-naked-and-go-for-a-swim routine,’” Dana said. Chris, however, was being much more upright than that. Swimsuits were the order of the evening. “I thought that was so sweet. That night was our first kiss.”

  After that, they were together as much as they could be for the remainder of the summer.

  “He’d come over and watch me rehearse,” she’d remember later. “He’d pick wildflowers and have them carried over by an apprentice. Talk about your college romances.”

  It was corny and cliched, but it worked. Dana found herself quickly succumbing to his charms, baggage and all. Very soon they were more than just an item, they were in love. He picked June 30, the day they met, as “our anniversary” (he’d done the same thing a decade earlier with Gae). Dana found that Chris was just a normal guy.

  “I thought, this guy is cool. We’d do all these things that were so down-to-earth. Which is what I’m like and what I like about people. I realized he wasn’t just this movie star. I found he was very much like me.”

  All of a sudden Chris was enjoying life again.

  But one thing he did not do that summer was attend the world premiere of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace in London. Even without seeing what Cannon had managed to cobble together, he knew it was going to be bad, and that the reviewers would justifiably rip it apart (although People did note that “the first half of this film is sheer delight”—until it fell apart—and that Chris “still gives Superman a lively, engaging presence”). By staying away, he could at least try to distance himself from the disaster. Gae would have no such choice; with Matthew and Alexandra having small roles in the film—something Chris had originally arranged as a treat for his children—she was more or less compelled to attend with them.

  Chris was right about the media’s reactions, although it hardly took a fortune-teller to see that. They unanimously loathed it.

  That was bad enough, but even worse was to come. Two men in California sued Chris, Cannon, and Warner Brothers for supposedly plagiarizing their film treatment.

  “I most emphatically did not,” Chris told Larry King. “I can’t comment more than that.”

  It would be another three years before the suit finally went before the American Arbitration Association, who found in favor of the defendants. But that didn’t stop the two men from pursuing it further in the courts, and losing at every step, all the way to the California Supreme Court.

  It was more than infuriating for Chris. It was also expensive, at a time when he didn’t have money to waste on lawyers, and it besmirched his reputation, something of which he’d always been justly proud. He’d always been a very fair man, upright in his dealings, and had he ever read the treatment and used its ideas, he would naturally have seen that the writers received full credit and compensation.

  Once the Williamstown season was finished, Dana Morosini returned to New York, and Chris went with her. They continued to see each other, becoming closer and closer. Professionally, their situations were quite alike; both were looking for work. The only difference was that Chris had the bigger name. Still, it didn’t seem to be helping him get roles. He was making ads (for Maidenform bras, of all things), taping audio books, how-to aviation videos, almost anything that was offered that let him sleep at night in good conscience.

  And he did it all with remarkably good grace. Many actors, having tasted stardom, would have been bitter and angry at this reversal of fortunes. Instead, there seemed to be a part of Chris that was almost relieved. Now he could be a real person again, a regular guy. If it meant he had to hustle, then that was fine; he’d done it before, back when he was still unknown. His trade was actor, not star. If there was a job going in that field he could do, whether it was starring in a big-budget epic or reading a book for tape, he’d go after it, and do his best to get either one. That was what the business had always been about.

  With his profile being so much lower now, he even began to think he might, finally, be able to shake off the Superman tag and be taken completely on his own terms.

  For the moment he had plenty of freedom in which to think and speculate. As fall 1987 lengthened, he was able to spend plenty of time with Dana, talking about many things. And one of the topics that came up was her moving in with him.

  It was almost as if Chris was trying to repeat the pattern he’d established with Gae, as if it was a blueprint his relationships had to fit into. The fact that Gae and Dana shared some physical characteristics only heightened the impression that Dana could possibly become Gae, Mark II. In both cases there’d been the whirlwind romantic courtship, soon followed by the suggestion of cohabiting. Notably Chris didn’t break tradition by immediately asking Dana to marry him.

  But after some thought she did agree to move in.

  They were in love, there was no doubt of that, and it was probably a logical next step, but it was hard for an observer not to notice how things seemed to be repeating themselves. She gave notice at her apartment and began packing.

  But Chris and Dana decided to take a break for Thanksgiving and go up to his Williamstown house to enjoy the holiday in the country. And it was there Chris got a call asking him to be Superman again. Not for a film, not even in costume, but in spirit.

  In Chile, the repressive Pinochet regime had taken power through a coup in 1973, after which they’d ridden roughshod over all manner of freedoms, particularly freedom of speech and freedom of thought. Death squads moved quite freely through the cities, towns, and villages, as the toll of the disappeared and the killed steadily rose.

  Now, to make the point that the regime’s control was absolute, a warning had been issued to seventy-seven actors who were given until the end of November to leave the country or face execution.

  “An urgent call came out through Amnesty International that artists were needed to go to Santiago and stand by [the artists] through the hour ’cause they weren’t going to leave the country,” Chris said.

  The call that asked him to go came from Actors’ Equity, who wanted to send a representative. Someone internationally famous as Superman—the hero who triumphed over evil and upheld all the best values of democracy—seemed like the perfect choice.

  The plea touched Chris on a number of levels. More than anything, he wanted to leave the Man of Steel behind, but if he was ever going to drag the image out again, then this was the perfect reason. And as someone who’d become more politically involved, he knew he couldn’t resist the request, even though it was dangerous.

  With Angelica Dorfman, wife of
the exiled Chilean activist Ariel Dorfman, as his interpreter, Chris flew to Santiago, joining actors from around the globe entering the country to quite literally put their lives on the line for colleagues they’d never met. The mission wasn’t sanctioned by any government. They were all there as private citizens, completely without official portfolio.

  Some thirty actors stayed with the people on the death squads’ lists, to act as witnesses, or more hopefully, as protection. And on the thirtieth, the day those named were supposed to quit the country, they, and their foreign visitors, went to a political rally in National Stadium, where, as Chris ironically noted, “the coup had begun back in 1973.”

  It quickly turned into a spontaneous event, canceled by the police, only to find a new home a few blocks away, growing bigger by the minute as more and more people turned out to add their voices to the idea of freedom, in defiance of the police. It was the biggest outpouring of anti-Pinochet feeling since the coup.

  Chris was asked to speak, and he did, movingly and forcefully. So many in the crowd knew his face as Superman, and here was a hero telling them how brave they were.

  “[That demonstration] was the moment, as I understand it, in the Chilean political story, where people began to believe it would be possible to overthrow Pinochet,” Chris said later in A&E Monthly.

  When he returned home, though, he preferred to be quite typically modest about his contribution to the proceedings.

  “This was not Superman to the rescue,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “It was me as a private citizen, as an actor … . If you know me as Superman, fine. But we have to remember that Superman is light entertainment. This was real life. This was not just an adventure story, this was not in the comic books.”