Even though he participated in sports (he fenced and played hockey, but steered clear of most team games), Chris tended to keep himself somewhat isolated, on the emotional sidelines. If he didn’t become involved, then he couldn’t be hurt. And so his interests were largely solitary, like music.
One thing he’d never considered was acting. After all, on the surface it was very much a group activity, involving the entire cast rather than the individual. And while theater might have been highly thought of in the Johnson house, the idea of actually performing had never been discussed.
Chris ended up in acting more or less through a side door. When he was in the fourth grade, and in the middle of a science class, a representative of Princeton’s McCarter Theater came into the room to ask if any of the kids would be interested in taking a singing role in a production of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Yeoman of the Guard.
Chris could sing, he had musical experience, and for reasons he never fully understood, he found himself with his arm raised. He really had no idea what to expect—his only stage experience had been with the school or church choirs, which didn’t involve putting himself into any kind of character. No sooner had he begun rehearsals than he discovered that he had a taste for the theater. There was something about it that suited him perfectly: he was able to lose the rather serious boy in a costume and makeup, and become someone completely different.
“If you look at pictures of me when I was a kid, I never cracked a smile,” he said in Newsweek. “Acting was a way to help me loosen up, expose myself, and relax.”
That first production certainly seemed to turn his head, and he quickly became very active in drama at Princeton Day, almost as if he felt the need to make up for lost time; of course, involvement in that did offer a few other attractions, too: “Everyone else in school would be sitting there working on some test in third period, but I’d look at my watch and excuse myself and go to the theater.”
Escaping tests and lessons was fine, but in the end it was a peripheral reason. The theater had simply captured him, in large part because “being somebody else took me away from a lot of the things I was not prepared to deal with.”
His home life might have seemed perfectly settled, plenty of money, a good education, opportunities to do almost anything he wanted, but the scars of his parents’ divorce remained quite raw. Indeed, that might well have been one of the reasons he attempted to do so much, simply to occupy his mind and his body, and to keep the darker thoughts at bay.
It didn’t help that he’d developed into a gawky and somewhat sickly teenager, not the hunk with Superman looks who’d emerge in a few years. He’d inherited his mother’s asthma and suffered from various childhood allergies. There had also been an attack of alopecia, a nervous disease which caused his hair to fall out in clumps. In his own mind, at least, Chris was still very much in the ugly duckling stage. But covered in greasepaint, he could forget about all that for a few hours, and leave real life behind.
“I was very tall and very awkward. I was six foot two by the time I was thirteen and I wasn’t well coordinated. I had Osgood-Schlatter disease [a medical condition which leaves fluid in the joints, making movement a little jerky] … . I used to stand with my legs locked all the time, and I hated dancing.”
And in 1965, hating dancing put him very much on the outside of teenage culture. The Beatles had well and truly conquered America, dragging the rest of the British Invasion in their wake. Pop music had really become the voice of a generation. Everybody danced, it seemed … except for Chris, and that only served to isolate him even more.
So, in that way too, the theater proved a solace. The way he viewed himself, he wasn’t about to get the girls, certainly not the ones he wanted. And being of a more earnest, academic nature, he wasn’t really suited to playing the flirting game. He was just too serious.
“A lot of girls weren’t ready for that,” he admitted later in Teen. “I don’t mean serious about ‘I love you,’ but about World War III and the latest article in The New Statesman. I was not a whole lot of laughs.”
Being involved in production after production meant that he could avoid the problem entirely, and simply sidestep the whole dating process.
“I can remember that it solved the problem of Friday and Saturday nights. I didn’t have to worry about how I was going to ask little Suzy out for a date, because I was too busy in the theater anyway.”
Too busy was hardly an exaggeration. As soon as he discovered acting, it seemed to take him like a fever. After The Yeoman of the Guard, he took part in his first school play, Little Mary Sunshine, and from that point he was in virtually every school play for the rest of his time there.
“He always had the imagination, the knack for capturing an adventurous character’s spirit and projecting it,” was the assessment of his drama teacher, Herbert McAneny.
But Princeton Day was only able to put on one play each term, a total of three every school year, and that wasn’t enough acting to satisfy Chris. He had the bug, and he needed to act as much as possible. The solution seemed to be with the group for whom he’d sung in The Yeoman of the Guard, the McCarter Theater.
From the time he was twelve, Chris was a regular at the theater, which was situated close to his home. From his singing role, he graduated to small dramatic parts in The Diary of Anne Frank and Our Town, and was amazed at the transformation in himself when he was acting, and the effect it had on him.
“I’m not me, I’m him. I’m the boy in Our Town . That got me through a lot of turmoil.”
Given his sheer size, it wasn’t long before Chris was taking on adult roles and beginning to realize that what he wanted in life was to make acting his career.
“I knew very early on that I wanted to be an actor,” he said. “I was saved a lot of soul searching—who am I, what am I going to do with my life. Acting is what I do best.”
Many parents would have discouraged such a path, since it would seem to be one full of disappointments and poverty. But Barbara and Tristam Johnson took the opposite tack—they were completely supportive of Chris’s decision since it was quite apparent, as Barbara said, that “he seemed happy only when he was in a play.”
The people at the McCarter Theater would play a big part in Christopher’s development, not only as an actor, but also as a person. His mother and stepfather did all they could to encourage him, but it was with the group that he really began to blossom and find himself, to learn his weaknesses and his strengths and begin to accept them.
“The people I really owe my upbringing to are the repertory actors at the McCarter Theater in Princeton,” he’d publicly acknowledge once he became a star. “In that atmosphere I learned to think for myself.”
McCarter was a true repertory company, tackling anything and everything, from Broadway musicals to comedy to tragedy. Run by the parents of John Lithgow (the first of a number of Reeve associates who’d go on to fame and fortune), the playhouse had no set agenda beyond good entertainment. Even if an actor didn’t have an onstage role, he or she was expected to help out in one way or another, sometimes in the most menial of tasks, like sweeping up. It was perfect training for those who saw drama as a career, since they’d definitely be starting at the bottom. For Chris, with his special talent, that often meant helping with the music, singing in the chorus or playing the piano—putting his other skills to good use.
Even when he was doing something as simple as that he seemed to stand out, to have a presence that made people notice him.
“I remember a director I worked under named Milton Lyon,” Chris said. “I had just been in a production of Finian’s Rainbow, which he directed. He said to me, ‘You better know what you want, because you might get it. I think you might be the one in ten thousand who really has the potential to go a long, long way.’ That encouraged me; handed to me at age fourteen, it made a lasting impression.”
And it was bound to; at that age—possibly any age—a boy with his heart set on becoming
a professional actor would eat up such praise, and it would spur him on. Not that Chris needed much encouragement, really He already seemed completely dedicated to the theater, and pursued it as doggedly and thoroughly as everything else he attempted. He read his way through the great plays and all the books on acting he could find. The summer between his ninth and tenth grades were spent in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, studying stagecraft and makeup at the Lawrenceville School. The year after that, 1968, he spent his first summer at the Williamstown Theatre in Massachusetts, as an apprentice, more or less an assistant stage manager, doing any job that needed doing around the theater. Neither summer was particularly glamorous, but it was all part of the training, the background experiences he needed to make him into a real theatrical actor, which was the only kind of acting he considered at the time. The stage was art, and that appealed to the intellectual in him. Anything else—film, and most particularly television—was a lesser form, appealing to the lowest common denominator.
Certainly all his work paid off quite handsomely, since the next summer found him on stages all over the country. At the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he had the role of Beliaev in A Month in the Country. From there he traveled up to Maine and performed in the Boothbay Playhouse, then rounded out the school break playing Aeneas in Troilus and Cressida in the San Diego Shakespeare Festival—which was enough to get him membership in Actors’ Equity, the next step to making the stage his profession.
For someone who wasn’t yet seventeen, it was like a dream come true. Going from coast to coast performing the classics was exactly what he wanted from life. His classmates might have gone to Europe or traveled during the vacation, but none of them could have enjoyed their time as much as he.
At the time, he was quite content to be a part of the company, paying his dues. He knew that was the way things went. And it also suited him to be one of the crowd, not particularly singled out. After hiding inside himself all through his childhood, he was still learning just who he might really be, and how this person who was Christopher Reeve could affect people.
And affect people he definitely could, at least on the stage. Once he turned seventeen Chris had an agent to handle his theatrical work. He’d been noticed and heartily approved of. However, in the Johnson family, there was no question of him graduating from high school and plunging straight into the profession, testing his fortune on the boards without a solid academic foundation. First of all he’d have to go to college.
The males of the Reeve line had been Princeton men—both Chris’s father and grandfather had gone there, and it was expected that he would, too. So when he announced that he planned to attend Cornell, Franklin Reeve wasn’t especially happy. Chris insisted it was because of Cornell’s excellent theater arts department (although he was going to study English and music theory), but there were a number of other reasons operating below the surface.
Chris had spent virtually his whole life in Princeton. Going to college there would have offered him no new horizons; it might even have closed a few. He was at an age where he needed to go off on his own, to have a life away from home where he could be himself, free from the constraints of family. But, perhaps more importantly, choosing Cornell rather than blindly following family tradition was a way for him to assert his independence. Chris admired his father, and was certainly proud of his academic achievements, but on a more personal level there was a great deal more ambivalence. If he went to Princeton, what he did there could be directly compared to his father, just as he had been for the last eighteen years. He had a need to excel, and to earn his father’s praises. Scholastically he couldn’t directly compete with Franklin; hardly anyone could have. Going elsewhere he could neatly sidestep that, and begin to really become his own person.
The reasons added up, and Chris had made up his mind; no matter what was said, he wasn’t about to be dissuaded. Before he could start life anew as a freshman, though, he had an acting engagement for the summer, his biggest so far, as part of the national touring company of The Irregular Verb To Love, with the venerable Celeste Holm in the lead role. Not only was it a major break for a young man, it was a rough-and-ready education, moving around the country for almost three months, playing the male ingenue night after night after night. It was the longest run he’d been involved with, but the repetition didn’t make the magic of the theater pall. Quite the opposite; it left him even more convinced that this was what he’d been born to do.
Childhood hadn’t been easy for Chris. His social skills hadn’t been highly developed, and he’d never quite mastered male banter or the kind of small talk that seemed to hold girls’ interest. Shyness had kept him from trying to be accepted by the crowd. But acting, the process of losing himself in someone else, had not only given him a destiny; it was, ironically, slowly forming a Christopher Reeve with confidence and a certain maturity, beginning to be comfortable with himself, and accept himself, faults and all.
He was still a fairly gawky teenager, tall, skinny, quite a physical distance from the handsome young man who’d be turning heads as Superman in a few years. His coordination had been improving (over a decade of skiing, fencing, and sailing had helped), and the Osgood-Schlatter disease that had plagued him had faded.
One thing that had remained strong was the urge to succeed at anything he undertook. To be so driven, so young, was far from a good thing, but that was simply Chris, and he’d made it work to his advantage as an actor. He’d gone after every challenge, drunk in every experience he possibly could. And he’d succeeded; to be fully professional with an agent while still a junior in high school was a remarkable achievement.
Acting in the legitimate theater was something his father, as someone who taught and wrote literature, could approve of, an important factor to Chris, who was constantly seeking his father’s approval, both in his actions and his successes. Finally, having done so well and accomplished something quite concrete, he could begin to put that obsession behind him and let his sense of self, as well as his self-esteem, really develop.
He’d been lucky, spending most of his childhood surrounded by money and with parents who fully supported his theatrical leanings, even though they weren’t likely to offer him either money or security. They realized, as Barbara Johnson said, that only when he was in the theater did he really come alive, and for someone so scarred by his parents’ divorce that was an important consideration.
Though he was willing to satisfy everyone by putting a college degree under his belt, Chris already knew that it wouldn’t change his feelings about the future. A B.A. in English might help during the lean times, but he still wanted to act. With him it had become a true vocation. And so, in September 1970 his parents drove him, and most of his worldly belongings, to the Cornell campus in Ithaca, New York. A new life was calling.
CHAPTER TWO
It was a new life, but it contained strong echoes of the old. Cornell was an Ivy League school like Princeton, the type of place Chris knew instinctively, and as a sort of straight-arrow, he fitted right in. All around him the youth movement had been going on, a social and sartorial revolution, but he had no interest in either. He was, and would remain, an archetypal preppy, wearing “khakis, button-down shirts, and crew-neck sweaters—Ivy League clothes like Princeton in the sixties.”
Nor did the political furors raging all around affect him. The Vietnam War was at its height. Earlier that year, 1970, a protest at Kent State University against the war had seen four people shot dead by National Guardsmen. Much closer to home, Cornell itself was experiencing student sit-ins at its administration buildings. Turmoil seemed to fill the air.
But Chris walked through it all as if none of it was happening. His only political contribution during his time at Cornell was to help establish a dorm for acting majors.
He’d come to learn, to become rounded and acquire the polish of a degree, and he was going to get what he wanted without any distractions. He structured his time to make sure of it.
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��I believe in the old-fashioned kind of education,” he explained. “Studying science and math gives you the discipline to take on challenges.”
Of course, he ensured there was plenty of time for theater. It might not have been his major, but it was certainly his avocation (although, in winter, there seemed to be strong competition from skiing). He socialized with the drama students; they spoke the same language, shared the same hopes and dreams. The most glaring difference was that while they remained firmly focused on student productions, Chris had his eyes very much on the outside world, taking part in professional work as his time allowed. After his freshman year he was back on the road, touring in Forty Carats with Eleanor Parker. All in all, it was a juggling act, working in the demands of education and the desire to be constantly treading the boards—with the boards winning easily in his heart.
“I managed to continue working as an actor during Cornell because I had an understanding agent who set up auditions around my class schedule,” he said. “Somehow I managed to balance the academic and professional sides of my life.”
In fact, it was the summers that really kept him going, providing his major opportunities for dramatic work. But even within his declared major, he was making theater his real focus. For one semester he managed to get leave from Cornell, with credit, to go to Europe and become a backstage observer at both the Comedie-Francaise in Paris and the Old Vic in London, two of the grandest and most celebrated of the Old World theaters. In London, he ended up doing more than observing, getting work (through his agent) as a dialect coach for a production of The Front Page, teaching the actors to speak with credible American accents, and also having “a grand time” wangling his way into working on “the first British production of Equus.”
The time away was an entire education in itself. Chris saw how other countries looked at theater, holding it in somewhat higher esteem than most Americans, made friends and contacts that might be useful later, and accumulated more experience and a wider worldview.
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