Challenge of any kind stimulated him, brought him alive, and during a break from the studio filming in Pinewood, in December 1979, Chris found himself facing the biggest challenge of his life—becoming a father. He’d been absent for virtually all of Gae’s pregnancy, working on Somewhere in Time and now Superman II.
As the big moment drew near, he initially decided not to be present for the delivery, but finally there was enough pride and curiosity, and enough of the New Man inside him to overcome the traditionalist and have him present at the birth. It was a decision he didn’t regret for a second when Matthew Reeve finally came into the world on December 20 at London’s Welbeck Hospital.
“There was a great satisfaction when Matthew came forth and I was the first person he saw. He was placed on Gae’s stomach and opened one eye and took a look at me. The first human he saw was me! That was the kind of thrill that is really indescribable, and I think I would really have missed something if I hadn’t been there. It strengthens the bond between the three of you tremendously.”
However strong the bond was, though, it didn’t stop Chris quickly packing his bags and taking off for Switzerland and skiing, hardly the normal action of a new father. When questioned, he pointed out that this was his first break since before Somewhere in Time, and that several months more filming were waiting once he returned. He needed the break.
Even Gae, who must have wanted him close by in those first days of parenthood, came to his defense.
“He works so hard,” she told People, “and besides, afterbirth blues were setting in and I didn’t want him to see me weepy.”
Whatever the root cause—and it was quite possible that he was simply frightened by the new responsibility of being a parent—the birth, and Chris’s sudden departure, led gossips to wonder just what was going on in Chris’s relationship with Gae. Was it falling apart? Would they marry? The general consensus seemed to be that marriage was in the cards. After all, they were parents now, so they owed it to themselves and their son to do the sensible, adult thing.
Even the couple themselves didn’t seem sure what road they’d take. Chris was bitterly angry when one magazine termed Matthew illegitimate, a harsh term but one that was legally true.
“He’s not illegitimate,” Chris answered. “His name is Reeve. He calls me Daddy. I was in the delivery room when he was born. I’m with him twenty-four hours a day when I’m not working.”
That wasn’t, of course, strictly accurate. He’d gone off to Switzerland, and Chris and Gae were in the financial and social position where they could afford to hire a nanny. But his point was made.
Being a mother, Gae, on the other hand, seemed to look at things slightly differently, a little more protective of her family, and with one eye on the future.
“One illegitimate child is fine,” she said, “but two is, well, tacky.”
It seemed to indicate that if she was going to have more children—and with one barely born, that had to be a large if—she wanted marriage.
Whatever decision the couple was going to come to would have to wait, with Chris off again, completing the filming of Superman II. This time the location proved to be far less hospitable than the sun and sand of St. Lucia (where cast and crew had all decamped to film a single scene), with a trip to northern Norway, where an interview Chris gave to a journalist managed to raise the ire of the country’s population.
“We’re about ten minutes from the North Pole,” Chris recounted to Clifford Terry, “way the hell up there, five and a half hours north of Oslo by car. We’re staying at this old hotel and having a gay time getting drunk every night and playing billiards and having these incredible meals—wonderful time—and I’m doing this shot. I’m standing out in the middle of the road and there’s nothing but mountains and snow and polar bears, and this Norwegian reporter shows up, having tracked the company all the way from Oslo to get a quote from Superman.”
The quote he got was that Chris “loved being in the middle of nowhere,” and that didn’t sit too well with the Norwegians. It was obvious that Chris loved the country, and he was enough of a gentleman never to idly disparage someone’s homeland, but they didn’t react pleasantly to outsiders referring to their country as a tundra, even when he was talking about an area far removed from any metropolis. Finally the brouhaha reached such proportions that the film company was forced to issue an apology on Chris’s behalf, noting that what he “was really saying was that after the hustle and bustle of the big city, how refreshing it is to come to your country, with its peaceful, tranquil solitude.” It was fudging, and everybody on both sides knew it, but face was saved and it settled the ruffled feathers. The crew finished their shot and quietly returned to Pinewood.
The experience of filming Superman II was much smoother than the original. The money was there, with no worries about it running out this time, there was no directorial conflict, and there was no specter of Brando and his millions of dollars hanging over the whole thing. It had a unified, let’s-pull-together feel. But Chris ultimately thought some of the credit should go to ousted director Richard Donner.
“We missed Dick very much, all of us,” he said in the Los Angeles Times. “Throughout the film we tried to preserve his style and intentions. It was very much as if he were the architect who’d done the blueprint and we were just the contractors.”
Architect or no, Donner’s name never appeared on the film.
Chris finished all his work on the movie in late spring 1980. It had been a good time, since his dealings had been with Richard Lester, rather than directly with the Salkinds. In fact, everything had been good enough, with a warm enough afterglow, that he was willing to contemplate playing a superhero for the third time.
“No question. I never forget how much I owe Superman. If it hadn’t been for him, I wouldn’t be talking to you. I’d probably be out there parking cars.”
Superman paid the bills, there was no question of that, and paid them quite handsomely. Now that he was more relaxed and comfortable with both the character and the idea of appearing on film, Chris could really appreciate that. Nine months of a cape and tights allowed him a lot of luxuries, like disappearing for the summer to Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he’d performed twelve years before, as a teenager.
He’d been accepted for the two-month summer season at the Williamstown Theatre, committing to work in three plays, The Cherry Orchard, The Front Page, and The Heiress, and earning the princely sum of $225 a week. Naturally, Gae and Matthew traveled with him, and they set up a temporary home in northeastern Massachusetts, close to the ocean.
Gae still had her business to attend to, so on his days off, Chris was in charge of the baby, a new experience for him, and one he still had to adjust to. On one occasion he took Matthew to the beach, leaving his stroller in the shade while he went snorkeling.
“But when I surfaced, Matthew was no longer in the shade. His poor little face was all red on one side. I thought—fried baby. But luckily, he was fine.”
It was a quick, and thankfully relatively pain-free, lesson in child care. From that point on Chris knew he had to take a slightly less cavalier attitude toward looking after his son.
The summer of stage work was like a vacation to him, replenishing his spirit after the long, grueling months of take after take of the same scene. Returning as an adult, he realized that he loved both the Williamstown area and the theater there. They seemed to center him and offer the “breathing space” he needed.
The present was being taken care of with the round of plays and the presence of his family, but like any actor, Chris needed to be looking ahead. Somewhere in Time might have bombed with audiences, but that didn’t mean Chris’s stock had fallen; quite the opposite. Already there was quite a buzz about Superman II, that it would be even better than the original, and Chris was seen as one of the hottest leading men around, part of an up-and-coming generation with Harrison Ford, Richard Gere, and John Travolta.
The new opportunities were arri
ving thick and fast with his agent, and once more Chris was asserting his independence by turning most of them down immediately. Stardom for its own sake, he’d decided, was “just a waste of time.”
“If you are a star, you just occupy a special corner of the market and try to be the best product of yourself that you can be, and you stay there. But if you want to act, you have to keep saying, ‘All right, I don’t know where it’s going to take me or what I’m going to do. I’m not going to worry about image.’”
Money, though more than welcome, given that he’d established a fairly luxurious lifestyle and wanted to keep it, was not going to be the yardstick by which he lived his life. That became quite apparent when he refused a massive $1.5 million to star in a film, opting instead for art over commerce.
He’d been offered the lead in Lanford Wilson’s new play, Fifth of July, a chance to star on Broadway in a drama by one of America’s leading playwrights. It was a sequel to Talley’s Folly, which had won Wilson the Pulitzer Prize. That seemed a far more tantalizing prospect to Chris.
Although he’d be on the Great White Way, Chris’s role would be far from glamorous, portraying a bitter, gay, paraplegic Vietnam veteran. He considered it an honor to be asked, especially since the request had come from Wilson himself. It was the type of part any serious actor would almost kill to have, and Chris didn’t even have to think twice before answering yes.
The salary was very good by theatrical standards—five thousand dollars a week or 7.5 percent of the gross, whichever sum was larger—but it wasn’t about to make him a rich man the way movies could. He was quite literally putting his money where his mouth was.
Fifth of July represented another peak for him, another challenge. The last time he’d appeared on Broadway had been in a supporting role, barely noticed by the critics. This time, back as a star, they couldn’t ignore him, and he’d have to win them—and their innate prejudice against “film stars”—over, as well as captivate an audience. Far more than any screen role, it was a supreme test of his acting abilities.
August over, and Chris’s time at Williamstown complete, he, Gae, and Matthew moved back to New York, where he began rehearsals.
In a few quarters there was immediate uproar over the choice of Christopher Reeve as Kenneth Talley. Gay activists felt quite strongly that the character, as a gay man, should be portrayed by a gay actor. In fact, once the play had begun its run, three actors from the Gay Activists Alliance confronted Chris backstage before a performance. He asked them to watch him, “and tell me if I had done anything to offend gay pride. They came back after the show and said they had been absolutely devastated by it. The part had worked.”
To him, it was all acting, creating the illusion and getting the audience to suspend their disbelief—in other words, using his God-given talent.
“Why should I have a problem playing a homosexual, since the only difference is that the object of my affection is different? Whether you are in love with your car or your stamp collection, the feeling is the same. You don’t put a value judgment on it. You don’t say, ‘Gee, I’m straight.’”
The production teamed him with a number of stalwarts from the New York stage, with people like Swoosie Kurtz and Jeff Daniels (who, despite his abysmal later movie career, was a fine actor) as his support. Still, throughout, the focus was on him. He had to carry the play. He had to rely on his years of theatrical experience, far more extensive than most of the public could ever imagine, and his colleagues to see him through every performance.
“Innocence,” he said. “Innocence is the key. Innocence means I’m going onstage not knowing any more than I need to know at this moment and I’m going to trust that as we roll along and we get to those big moments, all the homework that I’ve done, all the life that I’ve lived, all my trust in the other actors is going to allow something real to happen, where just like in life I don’t know how I’m going to respond.”
His “homework” for the role had been quite extensive. He was approaching this, as it deserved, with the utmost respect and seriousness. For a week he lived in a VA hospital, spending his days with former soldiers from Vietnam and World War II, some of whom, like Kenneth Talley, were paraplegics.
On top of that, he made several visits to another paraplegic, Mike Sulsona, a man who, like Kenneth Talley, had lost both his legs in Vietnam, and who showed Chris the way a man would walk with arm braces and artificial legs. Unlike Talley, he’d fashioned a positive life for himself.
“He taught me the meaning of optimism,” Chris said. “He’s lost his legs, but he’s become a painter, sculptor, playwright, he’s married and has a three-month-old baby. He’s become somebody.”
He was able to put his lessons to good use, both directly and indirectly. Sulsona’s humanity showed in Chris’s portrayal of Talley: “His journey in the play is that he finally reaches out and embraces people.”
But Chris was also able to make the crowds believe he had no legs. In the script Talley had to fall and Chris “learned to do the stunt so that literally when I fell backward it would get a gasp from the audience because they had believed in the illusion all evening.”
Naturally, the name of Christopher Reeve was a big attraction in itself to theatergoers, bringing in plenty of people who’d probably never heard of Lanford Wilson, but wanted to see Superman in more intimate confines. Like it or not, he was a star, and stars sold tickets.
When the play had originally been performed in workshop, it was William Hurt—Chris’s old friend and classmate—who’d played Talley. But for Broadway you needed the biggest names to compete, and Hurt (who’d starred in the recently released Altered States) was off making the movie that would bring him star status—Body Heat.
The cast settled into the New Apollo Theater, completed rehearsals, and were set for the November 5 opening. For Chris it was both a luxury and a novelty to be working and also to be home every night with Gae and Matthew, a very welcome change from months of location shooting.
Everything seemed to be coming together well in the production. But even more than with movies, it seemed to be the critics who ultimately decided the fate of a play in New York. And in the newspapers of November 6, they pronounced judgment.
Frank Rich, in the New York Times, thought that Hurt had done a better job as Talley than Chris, who “works earnestly, and in later scenes lets us see some of Kenny’s pain. But by then it’s too late. His placid face never suggests someone who has lost his legs in the hell of Southeast Asia, and his voice lacks presence and maturity. At most, he gives us the wry surface of the character.”
Newsweek’s Jack Kroll, one of Chris’s big supporters, felt that “Christopher Reeve, whose charming performance in the movie Superman was underrated, is a young but long-committed stage actor, and he’s effective and winning.”
Time, on the other hand, took a completely different stance, remarking glibly that “through the miracle of commercial casting, cinema’s Superman has become a homosexual cripple. Reeve gives the role his old college try—fervent amateurism.”
Meanwhile, Women’s Wear Daily, in the person of Howard Kissel, might almost have been seeing something completely different, as he wrote that Chris “gives a sensitive performance, punctuated by a scathing wit. Reeve makes it a deeply believable part of the character rather than just a way of getting laughs.”
The critics were obviously strongly divided. Amazingly, though, that didn’t seem to hurt attendance figures. Whether because of Chris’s presence in the cast, or the fact that this was a major new play by a Pulitzer Prize winner on Broadway, it was a hit.
Chris readily admitted that on the opening night he’d been “wooden,” but also felt that he’d been unfairly judged—as a movie star taking a dilettante turn, rather than as an actor.
Once he’d fully settled into the part, he claimed he was pleased with his performance, calling it “the thing I’m proudest of in my career so far.”
He had been Kenneth Talley for little more t
han a month when Superman II opened all over the world—everywhere except America. In South Africa the film immediately set box-office records.
A Superman movie not opening in America? What was going on?
It seemed a backward way of working, even downright ridiculous, to have an American film open abroad first—it would be the middle of 1981 before American audiences would be able to see it—but there was a method to what seemed liked madness.
Superman had done particularly well in what were now being termed the “international markets”—it was one of the first films to alert Hollywood to how lucrative they could be. So this was an experiment of sorts, a gamble, but one that ended up paying off quite handsomely, bringing millions of dollars into the Hollywood coffers, and sending anticipation for the American release soaring through the roof.
Chris was obviously happy with his work in the movie, happy enough to get a print and screen it for the cast of Fifth of July, who were real fellow professionals, and a tough audience to please.
It was, he asserted to a reporter, “much better than part one. It’s not so heavy, it’s not so pretentious. This one has a much lighter tone and there’s much more action and humor. I mean, it got a standing ovation [from the Fifth of July cast] at the end. I think people are going to like it.”
Chris stayed with Fifth of July for almost five months, leaving the cast in March of 1981. He’d thoroughly enjoyed his time there, the communal feeling of the production—which would eventually be nominated for five Tony Awards, with Swoosie Kurtz being named Best Actress—and, most particularly, being home by 11:30 every night. He was relaxed and happy, even appearing on Merv Griffin’s talk show and playing piano, demonstrating a side of himself that most people didn’t know existed.
But, as he had all his life, he felt the need for new challenges, new areas to push. He’d conquered Kenneth Talley; that was done. Greener pastures were waiting for him—in particular a new movie, which would have him costarring with another of the film greats, Michael Caine.
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