Prior to his senior year at Cornell, Chris was given a rare opportunity—to become a part of the advanced drama program at the Juilliard School for Drama in New York. He possessed both the professional and academic qualifications, and his time there would build the credits to help him graduate from Cornell in 1974, after which he’d stay on to complete his second year at Juilliard.
How could he refuse? Not many people were given chances like this. Juilliard had one of the highest reputations in the country. Among the many glittering names in its faculty—someone who’d be one of Chris’s teachers—was John Houseman, an actor who’d earned a towering reputation over the last half century.
And so he packed again—this time cramming his belonging into the Fiat sports car he’d bought himself with his earnings—and moved down to Manhattan.
As it turned out, Chris would be attending Juilliard at a most propitious time. Not only was he able to learn from Houseman (who’d shortly go on to a sort of television stardom in The Paper Chase), but his classmates proved to be a remarkably talented group—William Hurt, Kevin Kline, and Mandy Patinkin were just a few among them who’d go on to illustrious careers of their own, not to mention the man who’d be Chris’s roommate, and soon one of his closest friends—Robin Williams.
As a student there, Chris became part of the Juilliard Acting Company, which presented classical drama in schools throughout New York. It gave him the chance to see just how powerful theater could be, and learn how to win over audiences that apparently had no interest in it.
“I went on tour … in a play by Molière called The Love Cure,” he recalled in a talk at the New School. “We toured some very, very heavy high schools and junior high schools in the Bronx and Staten Island and in Queens and in Bedford-Stuyvesant. We went places with our little laces and shoes and swords and funny hats, and we’d walk in there and there were some people there who would sit in the audience and would want to cause trouble and not show that they were going to be interested. Within ten minutes they were hooked … . They stopped moving. They got into it. They started to respond and they were taken in by Molière, who they probably never even heard of before.”
It was the kind of experience that taught him a lot about his profession, and a little something about himself, and it offered food for thought, raising questions in his mind about the role of the artist.
One thing that was never in question, though, was Chris’s ability. Even among such future stars, he positively shone. By now he’d spent a full decade learning his craft, but his acting qualities were, at heart, completely instinctive. Houseman recognized that and offered him fulsome praise and encouragement, tempered by the kind of pragmatism he’d soon follow himself: “Mr. Reeve, it’s very important that you become a serious actor. Unless, of course, they offer you a load of money to do something else.”
The first year at Juilliard sped by. He and Williams, complete opposites in personality, found themselves becoming the best of friends. Chris didn’t try to keep up verbally with his roommate, who had already developed his wild style; instead he played Robin’s straight man whenever he’d take off on his flights of fancy and free association. Twenty years later, after Chris’s accident, stories would arise about a promise that whoever became successful first would help the other, but back then they were young men who were busy and totally focused on their work.
Chris’s work at Juilliard was more than adequate for him to get his bachelor of arts degree from Cornell, although he never did make it to his graduation ceremony. The cap and gown had to remain in the closet, as he was already on tour for the summer in a play, and putting his talent to work took precedence over sitting in the sun for an afternoon and receiving a piece of paper.
At that point, circumstances meant that it had to. Chris still had a year to go at Juilliard, and that wasn’t going to be cheap. His mother and stepfather had put him through Cornell, but now that he was in all ways an adult, Chris wanted to be able to make it on his own, and it wasn’t going to be easy. Certainly, what he’d earned during the summer wouldn’t be enough by itself. He needed something with a regular income, a “real” job if necessary, but preferably something that would allow him to make use of his talents.
The answer came from television, the medium Tristam Johnson hadn’t allowed in the house when Chris was young, and one for which Chris himself didn’t have much regard. Unlike most shows, the soap operas were all taped in New York, and Chris auditioned and won the role of Ben Harper on CBS’s Love of Life.
Initially it was a small part, playing a tennis pro who was also a bigamist. Being on-screen a couple of times a week was great exposure for someone who was, to all intents and purposes, still very much an unknown, but, more important in the short term, it was also enough to pay for college and allow him to live in the kind of hand-to-mouth fashion so natural to students. And he was able to find something in the character of Harper, “if only for the challenge of making something out of bad material. In college you perform the masterpieces. It isn’t like that in real life.”
That was a lesson well worth remembering. Chris was already discovering the craftsman in himself.
For a few months everything went swimmingly. He taped the show, picked up his paycheck, and still had plenty of time for his studies without stretching himself too thin. Then something he’d never imagined happened: Ben Harper clicked with the viewers. He was a bad guy, a villain, but Chris’s smooth way of playing him, and his youthful good looks—even though he was still callow, there was no doubt he was handsome—made him popular. At twenty-three, Christopher Reeve was turning into a soap star.
In turn, that created problems. The writers and producers quite naturally wanted to have a popular character on more than a couple of times a week. In fact, they wanted him on-screen every day. It was impossible for him to do that and continue his studies at Juilliard.
It wasn’t the “loads of money” that John Houseman had referred to a year before, but CBS was offering enough for Chris to feel that he could make a reasonable living as an actor in New York. Even if it wasn’t Shakespeare or Greek tragedy, this was what he’d aspired to since The Yeoman of the Guard. In his mind there was really no option but to drop out of school and take his chances with the show.
Although the decision seemed cut-and-dried, it wasn’t an easy choice to make. Juilliard still had a lot to offer him. He’d made plenty of friends there, with whom he could discuss the serious business of acting. And he knew there was still plenty left to learn. But Chris had been acting for over a decade, as a professional with an agent for almost half that time. He knew enough to realize the value of regular work in an actor’s life, even if it was television soap opera, something quite low on the artistic scale.
He grabbed it with both hands.
The stint on Love of Life lasted another year, which was more than enough time to allow Chris to settle into a new life. He found an apartment, living alone for the first time on the Upper West Side. It was small (he called it “a hole in the wall” that “looks like downtown Calcutta”), and far from what he’d been used to in Princeton, furnished as it was with castoffs, but it was a special place, his first home of his own.
What he didn’t spend on his living quarters—and he spent as little as possible—went to really indulge something that had long been his secret fantasy: flying. He’d already had some lessons earlier in the year in Princeton, taught by a man named Robert Hall (“same name as the clothes guy; he is one of the real tough, grouchy, chain-smoking, coffee-drinking, nail-biting instructors who is just worth his weight in gold”). Back in New York, “I resumed flying at Teterboro Flight Academy, where I got my final polishing … . I took my check ride for the private [license] in that summer of 1975.”
And then he put together the money he’d saved, eight thousand dollars, and bought a Cherokee 140 “with 5,000 hours on the airframe. It’s a good little machine, you know. I thought, ‘Hey, this is great.’”
Flying, particularly
flying alone, represented the ultimate independence and freedom. Unbeholden to anyone else, he could take off and go anywhere he wanted, which he did whenever the chance or the desire occurred.
“I used to go everywhere in the little airplane and camp out,” he told Flying. “I went to … Burlington, Vermont; London, Ontario; all those little towns on the way to Chicago; then down to New Orleans. I parked in grass fields every night and camped out with a sleeping bag.”
For someone who’d spent much of his childhood emotionally withdrawn, being able to do all this was something of an extravagance, as far away from crowds, from everything, as he could possibly get. Chris also had something of a fascination with the idea of flying.
“I just love coming down after three or four hours in the sky and being someplace else. It still amazes me. I am not yet caught up in 20th century technology.”
That would happen soon enough. For now there was almost an innocence in the way he approached his life, working on the soap opera, living frugally, and pouring all his money into his new passion.
Something he was learning was that the ugly duckling he’d always felt himself to be had somehow become a fairly good-looking young swan, much to his amazement. Added to that, the “scoundrel” he played on television made him somewhat recognizable, and therefore desirable, even if it didn’t always work to his advantage: Once, while Chris was quietly eating in a restaurant, a woman walked up and began hitting him with her purse, yelling, “How dare you treat your poor pregnant wife that way!”
It was the first—but very far from the last—time he’d be confused with the character he portrayed.
Mostly, though, his small celebrity worked in his favor with the opposite sex. At Princeton Day, even on the few occasions he’d tried, he’d never been able to date the girls he wanted. At Juilliard he’d been too busy. Now things were a little different. He was grown-up, handsome, and tall—Chris had ended up six feet four inches—with confidence and presence.
And this was the mid-seventies, the height of the sexual revolution, before herpes and AIDS had become widespread, when the Pill still seemed like the answer to all women’s problems. It was the era when free love and the one-night stand were in full swing, and Chris had his share.
“That phase of my life was entertaining, up to a point,” he’d admit five years later, “but it’s also embarrassing and vaguely disappointing to wake up with someone and literally not know what she likes for breakfast. You make love and then try to communicate, which is all backward. I guess those experiences are part of growing up.”
His character of Ben Harper might have been full of smooth lines, but Chris was still close enough to the awkward Princeton teen who’d been raised with all the social proprieties that pickup lines simply refused to float easily off his tongue.
“I used to get bad attacks of cold feet,” he said in Mademoiselle . “I found it difficult … to approach some girl who’s sitting at a bar, minding her own business.”
Somehow, the idea made him uncomfortable, even if it obviously didn’t stop him entirely. It wasn’t that he was on a quest for the love of his life; Chris was far too busy to have the energy for a real, involved relationship, but at the same time he found the brief flings somehow tawdry.
Love of Life paid the bills, but it didn’t come close to fulfilling Chris’s artistic cravings. Nor did the hurried schedule of rehearsals and tapings stretch his abilities or keep him sharp, and he quickly realized that. So he began to work with a couple of drama coaches and work during the evenings in small companies, the Circle Repertory Theater and the Manhattan Theater Club. It was all well off-Broadway, but it kept him busy, honing his skills and sating his need for “legitimate” theater.
He was still convinced that the stage was where his future lay. Television was all well and good, and movies had their place, but the stage was “real” acting.
“In film, the best movies have the most lucky moments: when the light was right, the camera was right, the makeup was right, and the horses went by at the right time. Theater, on the other hand, is a place where, through doing it again, you find out how to get past what satisfied you yesterday, and you see if maybe there is something more there. It’s that process of digging for a deeper truth that is ultimately much more rewarding.”
The magic that had first drawn him in hadn’t palled, and, in fact, never would. And so, when he had the opportunity to appear on Broadway—something that was more or less the pinnacle for any serious American actor—all the Ben Harpers in the world couldn’t have held him back.
CHAPTER THREE
The prospect of Broadway would have been enticing enough on its own, a huge break for a twenty-three-year-old actor, even if he had already been in some seventy-five plays. But A Matter of Gravity was set to star Katharine Hepburn, one of the icons of American drama. That made it irresistible.
The play, by Edith Bagnold, was a comedy about self-levitation, with Chris cast as Hepburn’s grandson. It was very much a supporting role, but then anything other than the lead would have been. A Matter of Gravity was intended to be a Hepburn vehicle pure and simple, a triumphant return.
Quite naturally, Chris was both overawed and thoroughly nervous at the prospect of working with such a legend.
“When we started rehearsals I came on like a wooden Indian. There I was, playing the grandson of a star I’d seen on screen since childhood, and the whole work process became one of trying to relax and meet her halfway.”
Hepburn, with all her years of experience, had plenty of advice to give to a young actor, and was quite happy to offer it.
“She said to me, ‘You must remember you are already a real person, and a real person is always more interesting than any fiction, because you exist and the piece of fiction doesn’t. So don’t deny your own reality. Don’t think, “Oh my God, here I am over here and there is this part over there, how am I ever going to get to it?” Assume there is a good reason you were cast in the part. Assume you have the power within you to play it. Allow yourself to say, “All right, this is me.”’”
In fact, Hepburn and Reeve got along remarkably well during rehearsals. She took him under her wing, supervising aspects of his education that she felt were lacking, to try and make him into a well-rounded and presentable young man.
It was a horrifyingly busy time for him. Ben Harper was still very much in evidence on Love of Life, meaning that Chris was effectively working two jobs. In the mornings he’d go into the studio and record his part, before going on to play rehearsal. Once A Matter of Gravity went on the road, he found himself flying in from Philadelphia in the mornings for taping, until Harper was finally written out of the show.
Perhaps the most important lesson Chris learned from Hepburn in a time he’d later refer to as “my B.A. in drama” was that acting didn’t have to be an obsession—it was possible to think of other things, to live.
“I look at her and say, ‘Now here’s a woman who can cope with reality. She can laugh. She can have fun. She can live. She has enthusiasm. She has outside interests. She does other things. She’s a human being with capital letters and she’s an actress, too.’”
But it was just one of the many things he’d pick up from her in their six months together. Chris had inevitably developed his own theories of acting, cobbled together from various teachers and ideas that just somehow seemed right to him. Kate managed to explode them all and offer him a fresh perspective.
“I’d always thought of acting as a way to lose yourself,” he explained, “disappear into a part and thus find a kind of freedom. She taught me that quite the opposite is supposed to happen. You must bring your own convictions, things you really love and hate, to the character and then adjust after that.”
So, for all his years of trying to escape himself, what Chris really needed to do was explore himself more deeply.
Rehearsals complete, A Matter of Gravity took to the road, for pre-Broadway tryouts in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. The critics w
ere kind to it, Hepburn being the sort of star it was almost impossible to attack. Chris found himself singled out for snippets of praise as Nicky, with the Washington Evening Star noting that he “makes a nice transition from playboy grandson to browbeaten husband.”
Performing seemed to bring out the grande dame in Hepburn, something which had long been there, but in her old age she felt the freedom to exercise it fully. She seemed to want to take charge of everyone’s life. For Chris that meant having her chauffeur drive him to various Washington museums in the morning, then lunching with her. She had her routines, and expected everyone else to fall in with them, no matter what their preferences.
“The first thing she does when she comes to the theater is open all the doors so we get some fresh air,” Chris recounted. “So we breathe. She asks everyone what they’d had for dinner, and if it wasn’t steak and ice cream—her idea of the essence of nutrition—you were ordered to go out and have some.”
But while her attentions could become a little overpowering, there was no denying that occupying the same stage as the legendary actress was the “best unconscious acting lesson” of Chris’s life.
Finally, having been tinkered with and run through, the play was ready for New York, where it opened at the Broad-hurst Theater on February 3, 1976. To Chris, this was the apex of everything he’d ever wanted to do, a real high point in his life—in more ways than one.
He’d given tickets for the opening night to his mother and stepfather—after all, it was a big occasion for them, too—and after a great deal of consideration, also sent tickets to his father and his family. For him to come and see Chris, not just onstage but on Broadway, would really prove that his son had been able to accomplish something.
Barbara and Franklin hadn’t spoken to each other in close to twenty years. Whether they’d say anything now and be able to keep within social conventions, or just yell, remained to be seen. But this was Chris’s big night, and he wanted them to be a part of it.
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