Still Me

by Christopher Reeve

  Vanessa and I enjoyed continuing the working relationship we had begun on The Bostonians. I was awed by her range. In the film we were archrivals for a young girl’s affections. In the play she was a sequestered spinster who is flattered by the attentions of a young American literary sleuth who arrives in search of the private letters of the romantic poet Jeffrey Aspern. She was completely convincing as both characters. I felt privileged to share the stage with her.

  The Aspern Papers, London, 1984.

  In the summer of 1985 I had a great time chewing up the scenery as Tony in The Royal Family at Williamstown, then played the Count in an off-the-wall production of Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro at the Circle in the Square in New York. The clothes were from the ’30s and all white, until the last act, when the director, Andrei Serban, dressed us in proper eighteenth-century costumes, but all in black. Some characters zoomed around the polished floor of the set on roller skates. I made my first entrance on a bicycle, then spent most of my scenes striding around in riding clothes, carrying a crop. When an actor would ask Andrei for the logic behind an action, he would simply reply in his thick Romanian accent, “I like. Is interesting.”

  In early ’86, still trying to find a decent film project, I was looking through my bookshelves and came across a script called Street Smart. It had been sitting there for years; I couldn’t even remember where it had come from. As I reread it I liked it immediately and wondered why I hadn’t responded to it before. The lead character, Jonathan Fisher, is an amoral yuppie who fabricates a profile of a pimp in order to keep his job on the staff of a slick New York magazine. As he does research for the article, he crosses paths with a real pimp named Fast Black and soon finds himself drawn into a dangerous underworld. The script makes it clear that the smarmy young writer and the treacherous pimp are much alike but that the pimp is actually more honest.

  I took the project to Cannon Films and was given a green light. Jerry Schatzberg, who had directed the gritty urban drama Panic in Needle Park with Al Pacino, was brought in to direct. The role of Fast Black was offered to Danny Glover; he liked the script but after The Color Purple didn’t want to play another unsympathetic character. Jerry knew of a talented actor who had not yet gained the recognition he deserved and whose steady job at the time was playing Easy Reader on The Electric Company. At the first read-through I knew I would have to work very hard to keep up with him. This was my introduction to Morgan Freeman.

  Because of the low budget of Street Smart, we had to shoot in Montreal, and the art department had to make it look like New York. When we worked on the street, all the signs in French were covered up and the prop people littered the sidewalks with newspapers and garbage. We did film in Harlem for three days, and I was amazed that this footage blended so well with the scenes shot in Canada.

  I was not aware that Morgan was a grandfather. One evening as I was waiting to shoot a scene, he and his wife pulled up at the location in a big station wagon with a cute little girl sitting behind them in a baby seat. They had driven all the way from New York during his week off, typical American tourists on a summer vacation. I watched as he kissed them fondly and sent them off to their hotel. Then he disappeared into his trailer. A half hour later the grandfather was gone and out came the dangerous pimp, with the flashy clothes and gold-capped tooth. Even though I had worked with him for weeks, I was startled by the transformation. Later that night we shot a scene in which the pimp drags Jonathan Fisher into the bathroom of a Harlem restaurant, smashes his face into the sink, and puts a gun to his head. That kind of threat has been used in countless films without producing a real impact: the viewer knows that the star of the movie probably isn’t about to be blown away. But Morgan could take a clichéd moment and make it real. As we shot the scene I actually felt he might kill me any second. No one was surprised when he was nominated for an Oscar and his career took off.

  Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, the owners of Cannon Films, produced and financed Street Smart on the condition that I play Superman in at least one more sequel. They had bought the rights from Ilya Salkind and his father, Alexander, the financier, over dinner in Cannes the previous May. While we were filming in Montreal, the writers Larry Konner and Mark Rosenthal were busy churning out the script for Superman IV. The premise this time (based largely on input from me, I’m sorry to say) was that Superman would intervene in the nuclear arms race. Superman had been used as a morale booster for the troops in World War II. Now, when President Reagan was referring to the Soviet Union as “the evil empire” and summit talks with Mikhail Gorbachev were at an impasse, I thought the character could be used effectively in the real world once again. Big mistake.

  Morgan Freeman as a dangerous pimp in Street Smart.

  We were also hampered by budget constraints and cutbacks in all departments. Cannon Films had nearly thirty projects in the works at the time, and Superman IV received no special consideration. For example, Konner and Rosenthal wrote a scene in which Superman lands on Forty-second Street and walks down the double yellow lines to the United Nations, where he gives a speech. If that had been a scene in Superman I, we would actually have shot it on Forty-second Street. Dick Donner would have choreographed hundreds of pedestrians and vehicles and cut to people gawking out of office windows at the sight of Superman walking down the street like the Pied Piper. Instead we had to shoot at an industrial park in England in the rain with about a hundred extras, not a car in sight, and a dozen pigeons thrown in for atmosphere. Even if the story had been brilliant, I don’t think that we could ever have lived up to the audience’s expectations with this approach.

  Often my work provided a welcome distraction from the complexities of my private life. Not this time. Not only was the film a mess but my relationship with Gae was deteriorating. In spite of the tremendous sorrow I felt about leaving the children behind, Gae and I could no longer keep up appearances. When the production ended in February 1987, I moved back to New York. Gae and the children remained in our house on Redctiffe Road.

  The next few months were truly miserable. I came back to an empty apartment and an empty life. My friend Michael Stutz and I went to Barbados for a week, but even as I went scuba diving and met a number of available women, I couldn’t lift myself out of my depression. I realized that what I needed wasn’t a vacation but time to grieve.

  Still trying to pull myself out of the depths, I went to Williamstown in the dead of winter and literally did something constructive: I met with a local architect and drew up plans to expand and improve the house. The builders started to work in the early spring. I was always amused that they had coffee and donuts at seven, but at about nine-thirty they switched to Budweiser. By the end of the day they had finished a couple of six-packs. I didn’t mind, however, because even though they built my house with a slight buzz on, the framing was excellent and all the corners were square.

  After Gae and I separated, time with the children was even more valuable.

  My half brother Jeff moved in early in the spring and got a job as a Little League coach in Pittsfield. In the evenings we shared take-out food at a card table in the partly finished dining room. I flew to New York occasionally for meetings and picked up a few jobs to keep an income flowing. When I hosted a documentary about the future of aviation at the Smithsonian in Washington, I recorded my trip on video for Matthew and Alexandra. But they were unimpressed. Gae told me over the phone that the shots of the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial had bored them. They watched for a while, then turned it off.

  One of the clear indications that I was still deeply depressed was that I lost the willpower to make my own decisions. I had switched agents in the fall of ’85 because I wasn’t getting the roles I wanted. The first project my new agents at ICM had put together for me was the Street Smart/Superman IV deal, which turned out to be a disaster. Golan and Globus had spent no money on advertising and promoting Street Smart, so it quickly vanished from sight despite excellent reviews. Superman IV was simply
a catastrophe from start to finish. That failure was a huge blow to my career. Now I let my team of agents talk me into the third lead in Switching Channels, yet another remake of The Front Page. The movie would star Kathleen Turner and Michael Caine.

  The newly completed Williamstown house.

  I thought doing a comedy might cheer me up, and it had been great fun working with Michael on Deathtrap. In the 1940 version of the story, His Girl Friday, Ralph Bellamy is sincere but too square for Rosalind Russell. The idea this time was to make him a vain buffoon: a rich tycoon obsessed with clothes and the color of his hair. Thrown in for good measure was a fear of heights, which the creative team felt would be an amusing takeoff on my Superman image.

  My big moment as Blaine Bingham III takes place in a glass elevator. When it gets stuck between floors in a shopping mall he has a major panic attack. Everyone assured me this would be hysterically funny. Before I knew what was happening, I had signed a contract and found myself on location in Toronto making a fool of myself. I had taken the job as a distraction from pain, which made it all the more difficult to be a light comedian at work every day. To make matters worse, after two weeks of filming with Kathleen, we learned that Michael Caine would not be able to join us. He was filming Jaws IV in the Bahamas, and the mechanical shark had broken down; the film was delayed indefinitely while they waited for new hydraulic parts to be sent from Ohio. Burt Reynolds was brought in to replace him. Unfortunately, he and Kathleen couldn’t stand each other, so I had to take on the added burden of being a referee. Trying to be funny while dealing with personal problems and a tense atmosphere on the set was absolutely exhausting.

  Gae’s brother Jonathan lived in Toronto at the time, so when she brought Matthew and Al over during their spring vacation, they had a place to stay. The kids spent a few nights with me at the Sutton Place Hotel. They loved room service, playing in my trailer at work, and tossing a ball around in the park. But underneath I think they couldn’t understand why their parents were in two different places in the same city. Part of me was tempted to put all the pieces back together again; it certainly would have been easier and more convenient. But every time I thought about doing that, I was stopped by the realization that ease and convenience can’t be the basis of a permanent relationship. I knew that somehow I had to get through this difficult period, and I believed that in the long run we would all be the better for it. Later that year Gae and I worked out an amicable agreement that provided for joint custody of the children and financial security for the three of them. I’m extremely grateful that in the years since our separation we have never had a serious disagreement about any aspect of the children’s upbringing.

  Switching Channels was doomed from the start by a number of factors: material that was too broadly written, the lack of chemistry between Burt and Kathleen, and my own overexertions in the role of Blaine Bingham III. For the first time in my career I had accepted a job for all the wrong reasons, without any genuine creative purpose. And I learned the hard way that doing comedy doesn’t necessarily pull you out of depression. At the preview that fall I could tell by the audience’s halfhearted response that Switching Channels would go down the drain. Coming so soon after the debacle of Superman IV, it marked the end of my nine-year tenure as an above-the-line movie star.

  I retreated to Williamstown once again and immersed myself in rehearsals for The Rover and the completion of the house with its octagonal bedroom. Jeff left his job in Pittsfield to coach a team in town. My other half brother, Kevin, joined us and found work as a carpenter. We spent many afternoons knocking fly balls out toward the pasture. One day we took turns hitting the ball as far as we could from the front porch. I marked the winning spot and decided to put a fence there, turning the expanse in between into our front lawn. I called the children frequently in London and waited anxiously for them to visit as soon as school ended in the third week of July. With rehearsals going well and enjoying the company of my two younger half siblings, I began to feel a bit better about life in general, and to socialize occasionally with some of the other actors. And then, on the evening of June 30, I went to the cabaret and saw Dana.

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  * * *

  Since the accident I’ve had time to look back—much more time than I would have liked. I could never have imagined that in my forties I would have the time or the inclination to dwell on the past when my future seemed so bright and full of potential. But during those long afternoons at Kessler, and even now when Will and Dana are out and about, I can’t help thinking about the past and discovering certain patterns. One image that keeps coming to mind is a bar graph with three columns. Column A is talent and skill. Column B is career. Column C is personal life. I often imagine that ideally the three columns should remain equal, progressing steadily upwards. In my case—and I guess the same is true for most people—the graph presents a very different picture. Beginning with my first real commitment to acting when I was a teenager, Column B took the lead. It seems that I succeeded very quickly, perhaps too quickly, in my career. The bar rose steadily as I journeyed from the McCarter Theater and Williamstown to Cornell, Juilliard, Broadway, and film stardom. By the age of twenty-five, I was recognized everywhere and seemed firmly established on the Hollywood A list. But Column A, talent and skill, progressed more slowly, somewhat hampered by the way the system works: when you become a star many directors and producers assume you will automatically work magic for them without any guidance. I walked onto many film sets at the height of my career and was treated like royalty—certainly good for the ego, but damaging to growth and to the creative process. It’s easy to let yourself be spoiled and skim over the part instead of digging in and doing the kind of work that you had to do to prove yourself as an unknown. Column C, my personal life, was often relegated to the background. My desire to succeed and to maintain my independence seemed more important than my relationships.

  By the late ’80s and early ’90s, one door had slammed shut in my face. I was no longer an A-list actor; now my agents had to fight for meetings. Sometimes I had to audition, which had not been necessary for over a decade. When I tried out for the part Richard Gere played in Pretty Woman, I prepared three scenes from the film for the director, Garry Marshall. But when I arrived at the production office for my appointment, I was told that Julia Roberts had other business to attend to and would not be there to read with me.

  I had to play the scenes with the casting director, who kept her nose buried in the pages and read about as well as a reject from some community theater. Halfway through the second scene, anger, frustration, and humiliation got the better of me. I ripped the pages in half, dropped them on the floor, told Garry Marshall and the producers that they had no right to treat any actor this way, and stalked out of the room. Many times my agents, Scott Henderson and Arnold Rifkin (I had switched to William Morris in 1988 and have been happy there ever since), would submit me for a part only to be told that even though I was right for the role, the producers wanted “a fresher face.”

  But I was always able to find some kind of work, though I have to admit I thought it was ironic that my film career had bottomed out just as I was making real progress in my development as an actor. Sometimes I did a TV movie of the week to pay the bills, but even then I worked diligently with Harold Guskin, my extraordinary coach, to make the most of it. Some projects, like the film Morning Glory, and The Rose and the Jackal and The Sea Wolf (both for TNT), were pieces I really believed in and still think of as some of my best work.

  And where one door had closed, another had opened. Dana’s and my marriage was blossoming, and my personal life became more important and satisfying than ever. Now when I went on location, my contract always included a house big enough for all of us: Dana and me, Will, the nanny, and Matthew and Al when they came to visit. I made sure there was always something for everyone and activities for the whole family. This was a radical change from the old days, when location work was so often a means of escape. When I filme
d The Sea Wolf in Vancouver in the summer of ’92, Matthew and Al spent every day with me aboard the schooner that stood in for the Ghost. In the evenings we would all take turns trying to soothe six-week-old Will, who was suffering from colic. The next summer I spent ten weeks in Calgary doing The Black Fox for CBS, a western set in Texas in the 1860s. Al played the daughter of one of the families in the fort, while Matthew made a little money directing traffic and playing a young sheriff’s deputy. On weekends we drove up to Banff and went hiking in the Rockies. One afternoon I carried Will on my back as we all climbed up to a secluded lake for a swim, then hiked back down to the Banff Springs Hotel for a family supper. Al and I went riding together; Matthew and I played tennis; Will enjoyed being a part of any activity but especially loved it when I gave him his bath.

  In October 1992 there was a brief period when my professional and personal life seemed perfectly balanced. That spring Dana and I had attended the premiere of Howards End at Lincoln Center and sat behind Jim Ivory and Ruth Jhabvala. I thought the film was brilliant. When the lights came up I tapped Jim on the shoulder and said, “Any part in your next film, it doesn’t matter what it is.” The next morning he called and offered me the part of Lewis, a young American congressman, in The Remains of the Day, which was to begin filming in England in September.