For Chris, this was like a dream come true. Working as part of an ensemble with names like Redgrave, Wallace Shawn, and Linda Hunt was true acceptance by his peers. He hadn’t named Merchant-Ivory as part of his dream “varsity” a few years before, but that was merely an oversight. He knew and admired their work, and he was determined to justify their faith in him.
Nineteen eighty-three was rapidly turning into even more of a banner year than 1981, and one where he’d be working just as hard. It was a time of good news. Not only was he doing exactly what he wanted, but he and Gae found out that she was expecting another child, due in December. Ridiculous as it was, once the news got out, they were forced to issue a press release through Chris’s secretary that they still weren’t planning to marry.
The filming of Superman III had occupied Chris for much of 1982, forcing him to abandon plans to spend July and August in Williamstown, but this year the schedules would fall into place, allowing him to act there, as a member of the cast of Holiday, headed up by Blythe Danner, and to enjoy two months of peace in the country.
He was even going to film his second television special, this one on a subject close to his heart—celebrity daredevils. Since he loved risk himself, never shying away from it or the opportunity to perform his own stunts, he’d been a natural as host for the ABC special. The year before, the man who’d fought for truth, justice, and the American way had been an obvious participant in I Love Liberty, a sentimental look at America and its ideals, perfect for the early Reagan years, and in 1981 he’d guested on The Muppet Show, the kind of part any parent of a young child would beg for.
Entertaining as it could be, though, television still remained a second-class medium in his mind. His stepfather had treated it that way when Chris was young, and those childish attitudes, once formed, can prove hard to break. Even playing Prince Charming in Shelly Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theater adaptation of “Cinderella” for Showtime didn’t really change that mindset. It was a fun, small part, but nothing more.
He was geared up to begin work on the spring shoot of The Bostonians. The filming took place on Martha’s Vineyard, where Chris’s brother Ben now lived. Chris already knew the area quite well, having sailed there often with Franklin when he was young, and it was a place where Chris could take his own boat out when he wasn’t required on the set. Gae was looking more pregnant by the week, and along with Matthew, by now an inquisitive three-year-old, Chris settled into a rented house at the Vineyard.
The area had long been a favorite summer retreat with the elite of the Northeast, and once people like James Taylor and Carly Simon began moving there in the early seventies, it had even acquired a thin, hip gloss over its old money.
Chris, of course, had always been careful to research his characters, a trait that separated him from many movie stars. Given that this role was especially important for him, something of a last chance to prove he could really do something away from Superman, he was particularly meticulous, reading in depth about Henry James to discover what made the author of The Bostonians tick, listening to speech patterns of southerners to first distinguish the accents and then find the one he needed for his character, Basil Ransom.
“I found Basil a very appealing part,” he said. “He’s part hero, part villain—there’s a strong contemporary theme. And with Merchant-Ivory’s reputation for integrity, I knew they would be faithful to Henry James.”
In fact, he planned on putting a lot of Clark Gable into his performance, right down to the mustache.
“I think that Clark Gable, wherever he is, would have approved of the way Basil goes about handling his women. The attitude is, well, you can come with me now or you can come with me later, but there’s no doubt about it, she’s coming with me. If that’s done in the right kind of underplayed, gentle, compassionate way, it can work well in a film.”
As the filming began, he found his admiration for James Ivory growing and growing. Without a doubt, this was the best film experience he’d ever had.
“What Jim does beautifully,” Chris explained, “is to collect people around him who are passionate in their work, and to use the best of what they can do, whether it’s the cameraman, the actors, or the costume designers. He absorbs it all, and when he’s got all their inputs, he just stands back and uses the best of it. The actors need somebody with a rational and dispassionate intelligence to say, ‘Thank you so much for all these things you’re bringing me; now here are the ones I want to use.’ He’s a terrific judge of what’s good and what isn’t. Sometimes he doesn’t know exactly how something should be done better, or what’s wrong with it. But he can certainly say, ‘No, not that. Let’s try something else.’ You end up really wanting to please.”
And Chris had a great desire to please. He could tell that Ivory was drawing something special from him, the best performance he’d given on film, something genuinely outstanding. How Ivory could do what others hadn’t managed intrigued him. What made the difference between the mundane and the extraordinary? The thought planted a small seed, an idea slowly forming at the back of his mind, of eventually directing himself. It was a natural step for an actor, in many ways, to go from playing one part to overseeing others playing many parts, to stamp his own vision on a play, and to make the actors give their best.
For the moment, though, it was little more than a glimmer to tuck away for the future, a spark. There was plenty to relish in working opposite Vanessa Redgrave, a woman whose acting talent transcended any politics.
She had a way with her characters to bring out the best in anyone acting with her—a common quality of all the greats—which Chris certainly appreciated. Grounded as he was in stage work (and movie work by now), and having appeared with a number of major names, this was still an education for him.
Perhaps surprisingly, the admiration seemed to be mutual. Chris, though a liberal, hardly shared Redgrave’s support of leftist causes. But getting to know her, he could see her as more than a name or political cipher, but as a person.
“There’s an image of her over here of being completely humorless,” he mused, “which is not at all true. She’s childlike, warm, vulnerable, sweet, a person of great humanity, and one of the most gifted actresses in the world. In England her politics are not held against her [which was true only to an extent—she was seen as part of the”loony left“]; they accept her as the artist she is.”
This being a Merchant-Ivory production, and the duo being long practiced at squeezing every dollar so tightly that it squeaked, it came in on time and on budget. Overruns couldn’t happen; it was as simple and straightforward as that.
But for all the enforced parsimony, there was a real family atmosphere to the shoot. Every week, Merchant would cook Indian food for the cast, and at the wrap party everybody involved received a T-shirt emblazoned “I did it for curry.” They were small gestures, but in the long run they counted for a great deal.
As did the reviews. Playboy deemed it “intelligent and impeccably made,” if a little academic, which was more or less the same point that Time raised, although Richard Schickel did note that in Basil Ranson, Chris displayed “snaky masculine guile.”
Maybe it was some subtle influence from Redgrave, or perhaps a greater concern for the world with his second child due at the end of the year, but after filming The Bostonians, Chris’s own political conscience seemed to awaken.
He’d been so busy with career and family, as well as his recreational pursuits like flying, skiing, sailing, and music, that he hadn’t given too much thought to the world at large. He’d been a member of the council for Actors’ Equity, but that was directly involved with his profession.
Suddenly, almost out of the blue, he became involved with activists working to clean up the Hudson River and, in characteristic fashion, began to immerse himself in the science and legalities of the matter, grounding himself until he became something of an expert on the topic.
As Chris, Gae, and Matthew settled into Williamstown, and rehearsals for
Holiday got under way, Superman III opened in theaters around the country. This time there was none of the trickery of premiering overseas before America. This was done in a straight-down-the-line, traditional manner. The Salkinds had spent a lot of money on the movie, and they desperately needed to recoup it. After the first weekend it seemed as if that wouldn’t be a problem, with the film taking in a staggering $13 million.
And while it was a hit with moviegoers, eventually bringing in around $60 million—less than either of its predecessors, but still a very decent figure—it didn’t fare too well with some of the critics, although a few genuinely enjoyed it. Time offered a very positive review, and most of that was directed at Chris’s performance.
“Reeve brings both a light touch and sufficient muscle to Superman,” Richard Corliss wrote. “And when he goes bad, he is a sketch of vice triumphant, swaggering towards the vixen Lorelei … for a sulfurous kiss. It is largely to Reeve’s credit that this summer’s moviegoers will look up at the screen and say, ‘It’s a hit … it’s a delight … it’s a super sequel.’”
And Rolling Stone felt it was “the funniest, liveliest and most original Superman movie yet,” with Chris renewing “his vitality every time he plays the Man of Steel,” while The New Republic called it “more amusing than expected.”
Playboy praised Chris’s work in the film, but thought the series was beginning “to show signs of strain.”
In truth, beyond Chris the film had very little to recommend it. The first two movies, for all the problems surrounding them, seemed to have been crafted with love. As Chris had noted, this one seemed motivated solely by greed. The money had been spent to make it as lavish as possible, but it remained utterly devoid of any heart or soul.
It would be the last of Chris’s youthful films, the final movie of his twenties. With his thirtieth birthday in 1982, it seemed as if a mantle of maturity had begun to settle around his shoulders, albeit uneasily at times. There would still be plenty of mistakes to be made, upheavals to be undergone, but he was beginning to grow into himself, to understand and accept that he’d never be fully able to shake off the image of “the guy in the boots,” that he must integrate it into his personality rather than constantly fight it.
In many ways The Bostonians did him a service that The Bounty never could have. It not only allowed audiences to take him seriously as an actor (which even his excellent work in Deathtrap hadn’t managed), it allowed him to take himself more seriously, to see how far he’d come, and how far he could go with all of this.
CHAPTER NINE
It was all well and good to have discovered these new ideals about acting and how to get the most out of himself as an actor. But there was always going to be a side to Chris that wasn’t going to pass up the chance to self-indulge.
The only problem was that when the chance came, it placed him in a bind. He was offered the lead in a romantic adventure movie, The Aviator, which would allow him not only to fly—actually piloting a plane rather than moving through the skies in a blue suit—but also to do some second-unit direction. Those were the good points. The downside was that it would put him in Eastern Europe when his daughter was due to be born.
Understandably, it was a difficult decision to make. Being at Matthew’s birth had been a huge experience for him, a bonding. At the same time, the chance to both fly and direct was remarkably tempting. And the script, from Ernest Gann’s novel, was “deliberately romantic, old-fashioned family entertainment—the kind of film they don’t make anymore.”
That old-fashioned quality was also what had originally drawn him to Somewhere in Time, and he knew full well how that had turned out. This time, though, the director would be George Miller, who’d done a good job on The Man from Snowy River, a film that combined action and sensitivity.
Finally, Chris opted to do the film; this first opportunity to direct couldn’t be ignored. If it went well, it could offer another career option for the future, and being in charge of some of the second-unit shots wouldn’t be too much responsibility for a beginner.
That’s not to say that getting to fly an old biplane over Yugoslavia (where the location shooting would be done) didn’t offer plenty of attractions of its own. There was no question of getting someone else for the flying and stunt sequences, even if the insurance necessary whenever Chris went aloft added a fair chunk to the budget.
Alexandra Reeve was born at Welbeck Hospital in London, exactly where her brother had come into the world four years earlier. Her father was able to fly home and be there when she was born, interrupting filming for this far more important event, and staying with Gae and the children for several days before rushing back to Eastern Europe to finish his work there.
His directorial debut was still to come. He’d expected standard second-unit material—the sort of background and establishing shots that would have been simple enough—but in the end he got something much meatier than that, a chance to direct himself.
His character, Edgar Anscombe, had crashed into a mountain in the middle of winter, and was forced to fight off a pack of wolves determined to make him into dinner. Those were the scenes Chris was given to work with—notably the coldest and most isolated of the whole film. As always, given the option, he wasn’t going to use a stunt double.
“It wasn’t really dangerous,” he explained. “They were trained wolves; you can’t get scared of animals with names like Max and Ivan. All you do is hold a piece of chicken or meat in your hand, and on command they go for it.”
In the end, though, for all its pleasures, being involved with The Aviator proved to be largely a waste of time. For a start, movies like this historically didn’t really do well. High Road to China, a year or so earlier, had been fashioned as an aviation adventure vehicle for Tom Selleck (of Magnum P.I. fame), and hadn’t exactly burst the studio coffers. For some reason, America didn’t seem intrigued with the earlier days of flight, and adventure was only palatable when mixed with state-of-the-art special effects.
That was definitely part of the problem for The Aviator, and one which really should have been anticipated. The other was that George Miller had amazingly managed to make a boring film about flying, fighting wolves, and about a romance between Chris and Rosanna Arquette (who played an heiress). What emerged on-screen was little more than formulaic; even the action sequences seemed laid out by the numbers—the general consensus was that The Aviator simply didn’t cut the mustard. There was no spark or sizzle. MGM-UA, who’d bankrolled it, agreed, and in the end it only found its way to a few theaters before quickly vanishing altogether. Reportedly, after seeing the final cut, Chris asked that it never be released, he was so displeased with it. He was having problems finding movies that would add to his luster.
But then again, how often had he been happy with the films he’d made? In Superman he had done a solid job, but he was young, still learning the ropes. He’d been pleased with his work in Superman II, Deathtrap, and The Bostonians. On the other hand, his work in Somewhere in Time, Monsignor, Superman III, and now The Aviator hadn’t matched the standards he’d set for himself. Batting .500 might be excellent for baseball; for a movie actor those statistics didn’t look so wonderful.
Perhaps it was that realization that made him decide to take a year off from movies. Some distance from the medium certainly wouldn’t hurt, rather than working on slipshod productions that would end up doing his career no favors. He wanted to be able to spend time with his new daughter. And it wasn’t as if he had no work lined up; 1984 was already fully booked, two-thirds of it with a return to what he loved best, stage work.
Vanessa Redgrave had apparently been very impressed with Chris’s acting ability and his interpretation of Henry James. After completing filming on The Bostonians, she approached Chris about them working together again, in the West End this time, on a revival of The Aspern Papers, adapted from Henry James by Vanessa’s father, Sir Michael Redgrave, who’d been largely responsible for the play first appearing in Shaftesbury Aven
ue, and she wanted to stage it as a tribute to him.
Of necessity, changes had to be made. A modern crowd of theatergoers would be less inclined to sit through a long production, so cuts had to be made. And Chris, at thirty-one, was much younger than Redgrave had been when he played Henry Jarvis, so some revisions were also in order there.
Rehearsals, understandably, took place in London in early 1984, so Chris, Gae, Matthew, and Alexandra, barely a month old then, found themselves shuttling back across the Atlantic and settling into their London house for a few months.
The timing was perfect for Chris. The relative routine of a theatrical play meant he could be home every night with his family, offering support to a slightly frazzled Gae. Rehearsals lasted the length of winter, from January until the beginning of March, followed by a tryout quite a way out of town—in sunny Monaco.
Initially, Chris’s presence seemed to be on sufferance from the rest of the cast and crew. Being British, they knew him not from his stage work, but from his movies, and that left them dubious about his ability, to say the least, in spite of all Redgrave’s recommendations.
The play’s director, Frith Banbury, offered him a backhanded compliment by saying that “anyone who has the guts to come to London to play this difficult part is to be admired and congratulated.”
It didn’t take long to win them over, however. As he’d shown in The Bostonians, Chris seemed to have a natural affinity for Henry James—they’d both, after all, been born in New York and enjoyed privileged, Ivy League educations—which melded well with his natural talents. The ensemble, which also included the remarkable Dame Wendy Hiller, came together quickly around the script and were ready for the opening at the Theatre Royal on March 8, 1984.
The play was excellently received, as it had every right to be, but the surprise for the English reviewers was how good Chris was. Based on his movie work (The Bostonians would not be released until later that year), it had been anticipated that he’d fall flat on his face in such exalted company, but he more than held his own. The Daily Telegraph put it simply, writing, “He can act!” but other papers offered more in-depth assessments of his work onstage.
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