Still Me

by Christopher Reeve

  Before long I was cast in small parts with the professional repertory company at McCarter. It felt like a family. I was part of a group of people who worked together every day on projects they believed in. All the horses were pulling the wagon in the same direction, toward opening night. And during the rehearsal process the excitement grew as a play started to jell. I loved the whole atmosphere. No strife, no tension here, at least none that I could see. I behaved myself and tried hard, and the adults liked me. Right there was the beginning of a way to escape the conflicting feelings I had about my two families. I’m sure that’s why I became an actor.

  That early success set me up for life. I didn’t know what I was doing at first, didn’t have a clue. As a result I did quite well; I just instinctively responded to the material and did what I was told by the director. They began to use me more and more at McCarter Theater, and by my senior year in high school I was playing some good parts.

  The actors there were a wonderfully eccentric group. They were tolerant and kind—unless you missed an entrance or really screwed up in the work. But even then the consequences weren’t too serious. I remember a time when John Lithgow, Tom Tarpey, Jim LaFerla, John Braden, and I were in a not-too-terrific production of Troilus and Cressida. During one Sunday matinee we were all down in the greenroom watching the NBA play-offs. A real cliffhanger was in progress: the Knicks against the Celtics in double overtime. We were listening to the play on the monitor, but we couldn’t drag ourselves away from the game. We all missed our entrance. I think it was a council scene or a camp meeting where the Greeks are making plans against the Trojans. Unfortunately, the scene just didn’t happen. The lights came up, and gradually six actors wandered on. Only the fact that so many of us were involved made it look like it might have been done on purpose.

  While I was developing my interest in theater and working at McCarter, Ben’s natural talent for things mechanical and mathematical took him down to the engineering quadrangle at Princeton. At the age of twelve or thirteen, he was working on computers with a lot of the “brains” at the university, often staying out until one or two in the morning. He helped write a computer language that was taught at Princeton for many years,

  Ben also had access to the university radio station, WPRB. He had permission to use their spare studios in the bottom of Nassau Hall. I would be the DJ, he’d be the engineer, and we’d pretend to do a show, cuing up songs and commercials and imitating Walter Cronkite reading the news.

  These moments of collaboration and friendship were wonderful, but as we became teenagers there were not nearly enough of them. Too often we would push each other’s buttons and one of us would get fed up and walk away. I remember when I was about thirteen, coming home from a visit to Franklin’s house in Higganum, Connecticut. By then my father was teaching at Wesleyan and my stepmother at Connecticut College. I came into Ben’s room and found him smoking a cigarette, listening to a Janis Joplin record. I tried to talk to him about what was going on up at Franklin’s, that they had just moved to an old Victorian farmhouse (where my stepmother still lives today). Ben just clamped down. I felt that he wanted to know, he wanted to be included, but he didn’t want to appear too interested. Perhaps he resented the fact that I’d been there by myself.

  I wrote a short story about that episode for English class. It ended with the main character walking down the hall to his room saying, “Oh well, we’ll have to try again. There can be more attempts, but it’s getting late. I had thought that physical distance might have solved the problems of distance brought on by being in the same place.” Ben and I lived in the same house but usually felt miles apart. We kept trying to connect. Whenever we lost touch we missed each other and looked forward to reconnecting. But somehow we were never able to develop the real closeness that would have made our growing up easier for both of us.

  Both Ben and I misbehaved fairly frequently in our new house at 25 Campbelton Circle, and by 1963 there were two new half siblings, Jeff and Kevin, who provided plenty of distraction. My brother would often stay out late or not even come home some nights. I used to take the family car and go down to Bay Head in the middle of the night, and there was the episode of raiding the Browns’ liquor cabinet. I also liked to hang out with my older stepbrother Johnny and his friends, especially during the summer after his senior year in high school. Once I went out on Barnegat Bay in somebody’s motorboat and at one point found myself sitting in the cabin with a Marlboro in one hand, a Budweiser in the other, and a seventeen-year-old blonde in my lap. Obviously, my mother was right: I was in a hurry to grow up.

  Kevin and Jeff at six and four.

  But somehow I almost never got into trouble, perhaps because no one suspected that someone of my apparently upstanding nature would do these kinds of things. But I did, and almost always got away with it. Ben did not.

  He and my father couldn’t seem to get along. Alya, Brock, Mark, and I all had ways of getting Franklin’s approval, but I think it was much more difficult for Ben because it wasn’t in his nature to go out of his way to placate anyone. Franklin’s love for his children always seemed tied to performance. Perhaps my father was even a little afraid of Ben because he was so intelligent and wouldn’t submit to his will. The rest of us were more pliable and had a much easier time. Over the years Ben and Franklin saw less of each other, until their relationship broke down completely.

  For years Franklin talked as though our relationship with him had been decided by the divorce proceedings. He lost custody of us, then had to watch as Tris Johnson became the dominant figure in our lives. I think he felt that if we’d spent more time with him, if he had been given the teaching position at Princeton, if he’d been able to have a greater influence on us, we would have turned out better. Often when he heard what Ben was up to, he would just shrug his shoulders and say, “What can we do? We saw this coming years ago.” Fortunately, his fears were unfounded. Ben graduated from Princeton and got a law degree from Northeastern. Today he does consulting work and is writing a book on systems and structures in politics and the law. His research into all aspects of spinal cord injury has been a tremendous help to me since my accident, and he has often given speeches on my behalf. Alya is a neuropsychiatrist; Mark is an environmental lawyer; Brock got an MBA from Harvard and works as a management consultant. I became a successful actor, although probably too much in the mainstream for my father’s liking. Nevertheless, I did not end up a taxi driver or a waiter still hoping to make it at age forty-five.

  Franklin himself had a difficult upbringing. Lives repeat themselves in succeeding generations, often in the worst ways, and patterns of behavior can be difficult to break. Like Ben and me, Franklin and his brother, Dickie, are about a year apart. Dickie literally tried to kill Franklin a couple of times, once with a shotgun, once with a bow and arrow. They also had a complex relationship with a father who became a distant figure in their lives.

  I only saw my grandfather Big Dick Reeve a couple of times in my life. When I was thirteen, in the spring of 1966, he flew my mother and Ben and me out to his place in Arizona. It was a big adventure. We were picked up in Tucson and driven out to his ranch, a spread of 400,000 acres where he raised cattle and trained Labrador retrievers. I think he loved those dogs more than any offspring he produced.

  Our grandfather Richard Reeve.

  One day he invited my brother and me to hunt coyotes with him. We were to meet him by the fireplace in the main house—we were staying out in the guest lodge—at 5:30 in the morning. Typical teenagers, we overslept. I was mortified because I’d made a mistake. Whenever I made a mistake I’d go to pieces with embarrassment.

  I woke Ben up, and we appeared in the main lodge forty minutes late to find our grandfather staring into the fireplace with his back to us. In we came, apologizing profusely. And he said, “Well, all right, we’ll go out there, but it’s too late.” We went off in his Jeep, riding in silence to one of the more remote parts of the ranch. We waited, looked around for a while
. No signs of anything except a beautiful sunrise. Our grandfather was taciturn, his face set in stone. Suddenly he announced that he had business with his foreman. Before we knew it he’d disappeared. He’d driven off in the Jeep, leaving us out there on a dirt road, both with loaded guns.

  The mood was grim. Ben and I were pissed at each other because we’d both screwed up. I remember being very frightened. Walking back, I made sure Ben stayed in front—it was not impossible that one of us might take a shot. Further proof that Tophy and Beejy were not very different from Franklin and Dickie.

  I didn’t see my grandfather again until the summer of 1976, when I flew out in my first airplane, a little Cherokee 140 I had bought secondhand. After that I didn’t see him until the summer of 1985, when he knew he was dying of cancer and made a trip east. He went around and touched base with everybody in the family. Franklin probably hadn’t seen his father in thirty-five years, but now there was a reconciliation. They spent time together in Vermont. Franklin told me what a great old man Richard was, how much he respected him. It was a complete turnaround.

  I was renting a house on Martha’s Vineyard with Gae and the children. My grandfather chartered a boat out of Newport and came over to visit. I had my Swan 40, Chandelle, and we sailed in tandem from Menemsha over to the Sakonnet River, just east of Newport. We anchored for the night and had dinner, talking and catching up on missing years. I was astonished to learn that this formidable outdoorsman, veteran of Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal, had driven twenty miles down from his ranch into Tucson to see Superman and loved it. He couldn’t have been nicer—he thoroughly charmed Gae, who thought he was wonderful. The next morning we sailed back, and that was the last time I ever saw him. He died the next year.

  My last visit with my grandfather.

  In 1988 my relationship with Franklin broke down completely. I had recently returned from Chile and was working with the novelist and playwright Ariel Dorfman on a screenplay based on my experience there, trying to save the lives of seventy-seven actors who had been threatened with execution by the Pinochet regime. I showed Franklin the outline for the film and asked for suggestions, but he strenuously objected to being “used” in this way and stormed out of the house. Two days later I received a letter saying he didn’t want to see me anymore or have anything to do with me.

  I was stunned. I had thought that sharing my ideas for the film would be received as an invitation for us to become collaborators. I certainly didn’t think I was taking advantage of his talent as a writer for my personal gain. I remember wondering if we were going to play out the same scenario as Franklin and his father. After we hadn’t seen each other for almost four years, I asked myself: Are we going to have a reconciliation scene when he’s an old man? Or when he’s in the hospital, completely defenseless, and needs visitors? What are we going to say to each other then? Of course, I didn’t anticipate my accident and the irony of that speculation.

  I kept trying to put an end to it, kept trying to break the cycle. Once during the years we didn’t speak, I was on a train that had stopped on the bridge over the Connecticut River. I looked out the window and remembered how we used to circle around in his little sailboat, the Sanderling, waiting for the bridge to open. I wrote him a note recalling those fond memories, but he wrote back accusing me of cheap sentimentality.

  Much to my surprise, he came to my wedding in 1992, but there were at least sixty people there, and we never found a moment to talk. In August 1994 he watched me compete on my horse Denver at a combined training event up in Vermont. We shared a tailgate picnic, and he seemed to enjoy watching our two-year-old Will run around. But nothing really substantial came of our relationship until my accident. Since then I have felt a new reaching out on both sides. My father has gone out of his way to visit me and has been constantly in touch. Every time I have a minor medical setback, he is terribly concerned. We have had long, satisfying talks in hospital rooms. Out of this disaster has come a new beginning.

  But in my boyhood and teenage years, Princeton and Tris Johnson and McCarter Theater were my home base, the place where I felt most secure. I had great admiration for Tris, which I felt I had to conceal. There was even a time when I wanted to change my name to Christopher Johnson, to commit to the Johnsons as my real family. It would be Tris, Barbara, me, Jeff, Kevin, and Ben, all fitting in as best we could. I admired Tris’s ability to give without expecting much back. He wanted to see all his children find their own way without imposing his values on them.

  I thrived on Tris’s generosity. He put me through Princeton Day School and Cornell and the Drama Division at Juilliard. He had been the lighting designer for the drama club when he was a student at Yale, so we had that in common: he liked the theater. In tenth grade I was Hal in William Inge’s Picnic. It was a big success. After my performances we would always come home, make chocolate milkshakes in the blender, and sit around and talk about the play.

  Once I went with Tris to see Johnny at Berkshire Academy in Sheffield, Massachusetts, and he let me drive the car up the Taconic by sitting right next to him and steering. He thought it would be good practice. Of course he had no idea that I’d previously “borrowed” the car and sneaked off to the shore with it.

  We used to have a little applesauce industry going at the house. We would turn on the radio to listen to the Princeton football games and climb our big apple tree next to the driveway at Campbelton Circle. We’d go way up in the tree, pick apples, and lower them down in a bucket while my mom would be making applesauce in the kitchen. I loved it. I loved the family dinners.

  And then sometimes Tris wouldn’t come home. The table would be set, and he wouldn’t show up. He would disappear for a couple of days at a time without any explanation, without even saying that he owed us an explanation. Just that he was on business, just doing what he was doing. I had such high hopes that this little family would take hold, particularly when my half brothers, Jeff and Kevin, came along. But it didn’t work; it wouldn’t jell. We weren’t able to come together under one roof. My mother convinced Tris that we should move to a much larger house over on Cleveland Lane, under the assumption that things would improve if we had more space. But in fact this created greater isolation in the household. Jeff and Kevin kept to themselves up on the third floor; Ben and I were separated by a long hallway as well as our natural jealousy of each other; my mother and Tris were experiencing the beginning of the end.

  From my childhood I developed the belief that a few isolated moments of contentment or happiness were the best you could hope for in relationships—and they probably wouldn’t last. Everything seemed to be built on shifting sand. Even in the theater, a play, a season, was a moment. Inevitably it would be over and everybody would move on. New friendships, new alliances would have to be built. I developed a tendency to stick to myself and not get too close to anybody. I didn’t want to risk too much, to get too involved, because I was certain that loss and disappointment would inevitably follow.

  I found relief from all this uncertainty in playing characters. I liked knowing the entire story line—beginning, middle, and end. At the same time I loved taking risks. Whether onstage or as goalie on the hockey team, I kept putting myself on the line.

  Those years at Campbelton Circle—the coziness of that house, picking apples in the fall, playing soccer in the front yard, the kids on Allison Road, going to Bay Head in the summer—also lacked a solid foundation. Two things were going on at once, and they opposed each other: my dream house and the real house. By the time Jeff and Kevin were in grade school, it was all starting to fall apart. Tris was leaving my mother at loose ends. I didn’t know the kind of distress she was in.

  Both households were troubled. I remember asking my father why he left my stepmother, Helen, in his midfifties. He had always described the two of them as joined at the hip, “so close that we’re like one person. We share everything. This is what a family is.” And I thought, of course it is—this cozy Victorian farmhouse in Higganum. Brock, Mark,
and Alya were such adorable, brilliant children—the makings of a perfect family. When he did separate from Helen in the late 1970s, I asked Franklin when he first knew that the marriage wasn’t working. And he said, “In Paris, in 1956.” I was stunned. More shifting sand, more illusions.

  Looking back now at Princeton and Higganum, I still wonder why such wonderful, extraordinary people couldn’t build relationships that lasted. I came to believe that marriage was merely a set of obligations undertaken under false pretenses. It wasn’t until I met Dana and knew I was falling seriously in love with her that all that changed. But it took time, and therapy, and Dana’s patience with me to overcome that disrespect, that fear of marriage.

  I saw marriage as a loss rather than a gain. All my life I had heard people say that they loved each other and that they would be together forever, to have and to hold from this day forward, and so forth, and then it would turn out not to be true. Or irreconcilable differences would emerge. My father was an intellectual, my mother was not. My stepfather was a staunch Republican, a Nixon supporter, while she was a romantic about Kennedy and very liberal. Eventually they, too, had little to say to each other. I witnessed a gradual loss of respect. My father had an affair. My stepfather often would not come home. When I was old enough to understand what was happening, I concluded that in most cases marriage is a sham.

  Even the family that Gae and I created years later with Matthew and Alexandra wasn’t completely genuine, because I still couldn’t see the point of marriage. When we met there was a period of intense romance, but I think ultimately we should have been friends rather than lovers. I know that in many ways I was holding back. In fact we were friends, which is why when we separated in 1987 we did it amicably and were able to work things out well between us. We have joint custody of the children and discuss every aspect of their upbringing. Over the past ten years there have been no serious disagreements, no rancor or bad feelings. It was exactly the opposite of what happened when my mother and father divorced. But after we separated I didn’t think I had much of a future as far as love and family were concerned. A good marriage seemed more improbable than ever.