Superhero

by Chris Nickson

  “I thought, what the hell. And they buried the hatchet. Afterward we all went out and got bombed!”

  That part of the evening went well. Otherwise the first night wasn’t exactly a total success. Although he knew the part perfectly well, Chris was terrified before his Broadway debut, with a bad attack of first-night nerves. Hepburn advised him, “‘Now be fascinating, Christopher, now be fascinating.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s easy for you to say. The rest of us have to work at it.’”

  The vast majority of the audience was there for Katharine. Even as an older woman, she had real star quality, a true charisma as well as an incomparable acting ability, the likes of which had become rare in America.

  But Chris had a few supporters of his own, some women who’d become smitten with his Love of Life character, which was still a recent memory, as well as some alumni of Princeton Day School, happy to cheer on one of their own. So when he made his appearance, he was greeted with a short smattering of applause. That was the type of reception usually reserved for headliners, and Hepburn, as the big name in the play, naturally noticed and “shot me a look.”

  A Matter of Gravity wasn’t a box-office smash, by any means. The New York critics seemed to find it unsatisfying, elusive in its aims, and unfocused. The mere presence of Katharine Hepburn on a stage again was enough to keep audiences coming for a while, but the notices were hardly glowing. Where there was any praise at all, it was reserved, as it was meant to be, for Hepburn; the rest of the cast hardly warranted a mention.

  But even though the major critics weren’t falling over themselves in discovery of his talent, it was truly a pivotal experience for Chris. He loved, even idolized Katharine, and she, in turn, had a great deal of affection for him, calling Chris “a very sweet fellow, absolutely charming and lovely to look at. He’s honest and true; you can see it in his eyes. You believe him.”

  Over the course of the run, a special relationship grew between them. She could seem like a smothering relative at times, at others coquettishly flirtatious, but she was genuinely interested in Chris, and fond of him; the two would correspond regularly for several years afterward.

  “She lets me know what she thinks in no uncertain terms,” he said. “She called me once to tell me about a role I had done. She didn’t like the actress I was working with at all—didn’t approve of her, I think was how she put it.”

  Being a gentleman, Chris naturally refused to name names.

  But the burgeoning friendship didn’t stop Kate from keeping Chris on his toes during the run of the play by inserting the occasional subtle change.

  “Three performances a week I would make an entrance and get a hug and a kiss from her,” he recounted to New York Newsday. “The rest of the performances she would raise the cane she was using to appear old, and stab me right in the solar plexus.”

  She was exercising her prerogative as both a star and an old woman, and thoroughly enjoying every moment of it.

  The only sadness was that she was unable to exercise it for too long. After two months, A Matter of Gravity closed on Broadway. Even the Hepburn magic couldn’t keep it alive without glittering reviews. And so the cast went their separate ways.

  Chris was left in turmoil. He’d had the greatest experience of his career, and now there was nothing. But what could he hope to do, anyway? At twenty-three he’d already been to the very top. It was as if he’d already done everything. What could be left for him in acting?

  At the time it seemed impossible to believe there could be more, and the fact that the play was closing so quickly yanked his security from under him. Still young, he hadn’t thought beyond it, that there’d be other parts, a whole future. It had been the be-all and end-all, his complete focus.

  Depression of a sort set in, along with confusion, although his agent managed to stave it off for a little while by getting Chris his first Hollywood role, such as it was.

  In Grey Lady Down he worked with a superior cast (Charlton Heston, Ned Beatty, Stacy Keach, and David Carradine) in one of the seventies’ biggest genres—the disaster movie. Unfortunately, this didn’t prove to be another Towering Inferno. Instead, it passed by, barely noticed, and Chris, in a small part as Officer Phillips, hardly received—or warranted—a mention, although Playboy did single him out for “nice work in a minor role.”

  When he’d finished his short stint on the movie set, Chris stayed in Los Angeles. He wasn’t happy there, but there was the prospect of some television work as a lead in the television miniseries The Captains and the Kings. With others, he was brought in to audition, and he honestly believed the part was his. After the disappointment and deflation of a Broadway closing and a movie debut that he knew did no justice to his talents, he needed something meaty, a challenge of almost any kind to really bring him alive again.

  The Captains and the Kings wasn’t destined to be it. The lead went to Richard Jordan. Chris couldn’t even do well in television now, it seemed. He began to question his ability and whether he’d made the right decision in dedicating himself to acting.

  “I was twenty-four years old and being very hard on myself. I felt, I’m really not very good. I felt tense and unhappy. I went to L.A. and sat on the beach for a while. Whenever my agent tried to find me for a callback, I’d be gone. It didn’t seem to matter, which is one of the signs of depression.”

  Gone for him meant flying, his ultimate escape, where the drudgery of everyday life couldn’t reach him. Piloting gave him a great deal of satisfaction, one of the few things in his life at the time that did, given that he seemed to be in an emotional tailspin.

  He also began gliding, an escape even more extreme than flying, since the sailplane had no motor, relying on air currents, thermals, and the pilot’s skill to keep it aloft and in control.

  Seeing just how far he could push things was about the only way he could really tell he was alive. He needed it to counter the numbness that seemed to be taking over everywhere else in his life. He didn’t care about working, dating, where or how he lived.

  For someone who’d been such a workaholic about his acting career, it was very worrying. As he put it, “I absolutely wrote myself off. I was sponging off friends, sleeping on couches, turning into a vegetable, and then one day I said, ‘This isn’t right.’”

  Five months had passed, and he’d barely noticed the days going by. His family, his friends, and his agent had all been concerned. What turned him around again?

  Even Chris didn’t know. His attitude just seemed to change all of a sudden. There was no trigger, no revelation. He woke up one morning realizing that “you can only thrash around like that for so long. My father helped. My agent helped, and one day I was able to say to myself, ‘It’s time to stop flying off into the sunset.’”

  One thing was certain—California hadn’t been kind to him. The East Coast, especially the theaters of New York, was home to him, where he was known and felt comfortable. Besides, the stage, not the screen, was the place that felt right to him.

  The time since the movie was the only period he’d been out of work in his entire career, quite an achievement in a profession where 90 percent of the participants are usually “resting” at any one time. Now, returning to his old stomping grounds was like starting afresh. He had no work lined up, and found himself regularly attending auditions.

  But late in 1976 things began to go his way. He was a settled New Yorker again, and he landed a role in Corinne Jacker’s play My Life, for the Circle Repertory Company. It wasn’t Broadway, and it had no huge names like Katharine Hepburn, but that was fine with Chris. His part, as the kite-flying grandfather, offered the challenge of age and teamed him with a former Juilliard classmate, William Hurt, who had the lead. They made a good team, respectful of each other’s abilities, a pair with true belief in acting (Hurt, like Chris, would continue to remain faithful to his theater roots, even as his movie career took off).

  One of many plays opening and closing in New York, it didn’t attract too much attentio
n, and what it received was somewhat mixed. Back Stage, though, singled Chris out as “gifted and appealing.”

  It was satisfying work, but eighty-five dollars a week—the prevailing rate of pay—wasn’t going to keep the wolf from the door, particularly as Chris hadn’t worked at all since May. He needed money, and that meant doing any kind of acting work he could find. He auditioned for commercials and other theatrical parts, whatever might help his bank account stay in the black.

  Like virtually every actor who’d been in a movie, Chris kept his head shots on file at the Screen Actors Guild. It was a place for casting directors to search for new faces when lining up possibilities for films. While nothing usually came of it, it was something that didn’t require any work, money, or maintenance. It was one of those long shots that could occasionally pay off.

  As he rehearsed My Life, Christopher Reeve had no idea that it would pay off in a very big way. And, beyond the financial rewards, he wouldn’t have really cared. After his period in the wilderness he felt renewed, back doing the thing he loved. He’d regained his sense of perspective, that an actor’s life was “You do one part and then you play another one. You finish with that one and you play another one.” Some were bigger, others smaller, but you made the most of each one.

  Even so, when his agent called in December 1976 and told him he’d set up a meeting with Ilya Salkind and Richard Donner, the producer and director of the much-hyped Superman movie, Chris wasn’t thrilled. The idea of making a movie from the comic book didn’t fill him with anticipation, even when he was told that he was up for the starring role—two roles, really, as Superman and Clark Kent. A serious boy, he’d never been one for reading comic books. Superman held no special place in his memory.

  But work was work and money was money, and even though he strongly doubted that he’d end up with the part, he went to the meeting because “as an actor you always go up on appointment.” Even if he didn’t get the role he was auditioning for, it might eventually lead to some kind of work, something small but lucrative.

  At first it didn’t seem promising. Chris’s photo had been picked from the Screen Actors Guild files by Lynn Stalmaster, who was in charge of casting for the film, and Salkind had liked both his look and resume. Now, in the same room, Chris didn’t seem as convincing. He was tall, but not especially muscular, and there wasn’t enough maturity in his face to make anyone believe he was capable of saving the world. Still, there was enough of a resemblance to the DC Comics character to have Donner and Salkind go through the motions.

  Once they asked him to offer his Clark Kent, things changed. With the help of a pair of lensless glasses, Chris immediately transformed himself into a completely different person.

  “I alter my body to fit the part by controlling my spine,” Chris explained later. “As Clark, I shorten myself, round my shoulders in a slouch, hold my head differently.”

  It was also a matter of attitude.

  “Kent’s attitude is ‘What’s going on?’ … Clark is [Superman’s] puppet.”

  It was enough to startle Salkind and Donner. They hurriedly arranged to have Chris flown to London, where Superman would be filmed, for his screen test. For a morning that had started out with just another job interview, things had got distinctly out of hand. The big question now was would the camera find him believable?

  The answer came through a week later.

  Superman had been discovered, and his name was Christopher Reeve.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Truth to tell, Chris knew exactly why he’d been chosen for the role, and he told the New York Post:

  “The part came to me because … I have the look. It’s 90 per cent look. If I didn’t look like the guy in the comic book, I wouldn’t be here. The other 10 per cent is acting talent.”

  He was right, but only to a point; “the look” could only carry him so far. In his first screen moments as both Clark Kent and Superman it would be the way he looked that astounded audiences. Once those seconds had passed, however, it would be his acting skills that kept them in their seats.

  The choice of Chris was pure luck, more than anything else. He was picked almost literally at the last minute, with just three months to go before filming was scheduled to begin. The actor whom the Salkinds had really wanted to portray the superhero was Robert Redford, the biggest star of the era. He knew it wasn’t right for him, and he turned them down. Then they asked Paul Newman, one of the unlikeliest Supermen ever. He obviously thought so, too, and declined. After that virtually every major name in Hollywood was considered. Clint Eastwood said no. Warren Beatty, Charles Bronson, Burt Reynolds, and Ryan O’Neal were all put forward and rejected. After that, the names became more and more unlikely, sometimes even bizarre—Ilya Salkind’s wife’s dentist was screen-tested.

  Finally, in the middle of 1976, the producers seemed to have settled on someone—Bruce Jenner, the Olympic decathlete who seemed to represent the best American ideals. His feats (and his medals) had captured America’s heart.

  Had it worked, it would have been a marvelous fit, someone lithe and graceful playing the Man of Steel. But a screen test scotched that idea. On film Jenner simply wasn’t convincing, or, as someone who saw his clip noted very briefly “Jenner is not an actor.”

  With filming due to begin in March 1977, everyone connected with the production was becoming extremely nervous. Warner Brothers had committed $25 million to the project, while European backers had added another $15 million. The stakes were incredibly high. The Salkinds, and Richard Donner, whom they’d hired as director, needed big names, box-office draws certain to bring in the crowds. So far they had nobody.

  Because of the casting difficulties, rumors were already circulating that Superman was in trouble, and filming hadn’t even begun. Certainly there was an air of desperation starting to rise from it, which only increased when Marlon Brando was offered the outlandish sum of $3.7 million or a percentage of the gross, whichever turned out to be higher, to play Superman’s Krypton father, Jor-El—a total of twelve days’ work. It would make him the highest-paid actor in screen history, a distinction he wasn’t about to let pass by.

  Nor did Gene Hackman turn down the $2 million he was presented with to be Lex Luthor. It was looking as if Superman: The Movie was going to be a bonus payday for veteran actors.

  What it meant was that by the time Chris signed his contract at the start of 1977, there wasn’t much money left in the kitty for the ostensible star of the show. As Variety reported, the deal was that Chris would receive $250,000 for a full year’s work (in an unusual and optimistic strategy, Superman and its sequel were to shoot concurrently), with $5,000 for every additional week past that. Even though it was far more than Chris had ever made, it was hardly a fortune, although Ilya Salkind seemed to feel the amount was perfectly generous.

  “We’re paying Chris a good salary for someone just launching a motion picture career. We want him to feel like a star. And don’t forget, his salary has an escalator clause for each additional picture.”

  When all was said and done, there was no way Chris could turn it down. By the standards of the day, the money was more than fair, especially for an unknown. Even if he appeared on Broadway for a year, he’d never earn anything like that. Nor would he have the worldwide exposure.

  “Bill Hurt, who’s one of the best actors of this generation, was sharing a dressing room with me [in My Life] when I got that part,” Chris recalled, “and he just about fell on the floor with jealousy. Any actor would have done that role.”

  And now the work had to begin, the real physical work of making Christopher Reeve into Superman. For the screen test, his costume had been padded. For the movie, he’d be all muscle. As much as anything, that made it a race against time. He was placed on a diet of four meals a day, and was suddenly weight-lifting three hours every day, under the supervision of British bodybuilder David Prowse, who’d provided the physical manifestation of Darth Vader in Star Wars.

  At 188 pounds, Chri
s had filled out from his teenage days, but by Superman standards he remained little more than a twig. Another 30 pounds were needed, and in the right places—the chest, arms, and legs, while his waist stayed slim enough to provide the V of the comic-book hero.

  “I looked at it like sketching. I was designing a body,” Chris recalled, although he was really more the canvas than the artist. “I always worked looking at myself in a mirror, and not because I was in love with myself. I started out straight as a tree and gradually worked into a wedge shape, always keeping in mind that Superman had wide shoulders and no waist.”

  His idea of “gradually” was perhaps a little off-kilter, given that there were only three months to make the physical transformation, an extremely hectic and demanding time. When he wasn’t working out, Chris had to make the preparations for his roles.

  “I worked out complete makeup changes for both Clark Kent and Superman,” he said. “I got old suits and bought glasses, and really practiced.”

  The production might have seemed to be hanging by a thread, but Chris was ready to give it all he had. And he’d given a great deal of thought to how to tackle the character.

  “It’s important to humanize Superman,” he told Michael Petrou. “He walks through walls and can hold up the Golden Gate Bridge with his hands and so forth. So if on top of all that he said to himself, ‘My God, am I good!’ then you’d have a real prig, a boring piece of cardboard … . What makes Superman a hero is not that he has power, but that he has the wisdom and maturity to use the power wisely. From an acting point of view, that’s how I approach the part.”

  He’d even gone to the source, Jerry Siegel and Joel Shuster, the creators of Superman, for advice. They gave him two keys: that Superman was an orphan, which “governs his emotional behavior,” and the reminder that he was “an alien, and what makes him super is he’s got the wisdom to use his powers well,” which Chris had obviously already figured out.