But he’d admit several years later to Elliott Forrest that “it was one of the few times I’ve ever been really gratified by the Superman image.”
It took a great deal of bravery to go into the lions’ den and stand up for an ideal he’d taken for granted all his life, to personally try and stop an evil happening to people he didn’t know, and hadn’t even heard of. At home he might be an actor who was spending a lot of his time looking for work, but in some places the fame he’d once enjoyed could still help bring some positive changes. Five months after the demonstration, Pinochet was out of office. That single event had galvanized the people, made them stand up and cut out the cancer in their society. Part of the responsibility for that lay with Chris, as big a feat as Superman ever managed, and all done by a mere mortal.
Although he chose to be low-key about his involvement in Chile, there were plenty of others who took note. In 1988 his work brought him two awards more valuable to him than any Oscar could ever be—a special Obie for his support of the Chilean actors, and the annual award from the Walter Briehl Human Rights Foundation.
It was only a week of his time, but perhaps the most important he’d ever spent. Being in Chile put everything else in his life into perspective. Down there actors had risked their lives every day to perform; they were people who truly did suffer for their art. Chris’s career might have been on a gentle downward slope, but compared to them he had it easy; his was a life of luxury.
The start of 1988 came, and Chris and Dana settled in together, getting to know each other. The year at least began with an acting job for Chris: Not a movie, but a return to the world of the television miniseries in The Great Escape II: The Untold Story.
The original had become one of the classic war movies, and although this was unlikely to have the same immortality, Chris wasn’t about to let the fact that it was “merely” TV affect the way he approached the role.
It was particularly important that everything he do be as good as possible, because each part was a possible calling card for another. So he was thorough, researching his character, Major John Dodge, a man who’d actually existed, interviewing his family, and coming away impressed by a man whose life, apart from escaping German prison camps, had been one long adventure—fighting in both World Wars, swimming the English Channel, and even climbing the Matterhorn. He was the man of action that Chris had always seen himself as being, prepared to take on any challenge.
“Surprisingly, I resemble him,” Chris said. “He was tall, had the same hawk nose I have, and strong features. He also wore a mustache, which I wear in the film.”
It was aired over a Sunday and Monday night late in the year. Like most miniseries, it wasn’t about to break any records for quality, but it was nowhere near as bad as most that were aired during the average season. And, being neither particularly good nor especially bad (although Jeff Jarvis, in People, called it “cotton”), it simply vanished.
From Germany (actually Yugoslavia, where the filming was cheaper, and which looked more authentic), Chris went back to working on the West Coast for the first time in a few years. In 1986 he’d had the lead in Summer and Smoke at Williamstown. Now he was offered the same part for a production of the play in Los Angeles. With the stage as his first love he’d have accepted anyway, but to perform it in Los Angeles, where the executives of the movie world could see him, was perfect.
In fact, it was becoming a very visible year for Chris. The play and The Great Escape II: The Untold Story were followed in quick succession by two television specials, Superman’s 50th Anniversary: A Celebration of the Man of Steel (hosted, oddly enough, by Dana Carvey, when Chris was the only living actor to have played the role—a natural choice, on the surface) and The World’s Greatest Stunts: A Tribute to Hollywood Stuntmen, which he did host.
To be fair, it was nothing remarkable, and when Switching Channels premiered in the theaters, there was nothing remarkable about that, either, but Chris was present, his face could be seen, people knew he was still around.
And making money, it was to be hoped, because right now he needed it. An awful lot of it. Britain’s Inland Revenue had just sent him a tax demand for the kind of figure most people would imagine was an error—$1 million.
Right now, to Chris, that was the kind of nightmare he could live without. He was hardly a pauper, since he’d been well paid in the past. But at the same time, his houses and grown-ups’ toys didn’t come cheap. He’d established something of a champagne lifestyle. And it turned out he’d made some poor investment choices with his savings, losing a lot of what he’d hoped might leave him financially comfortable for the rest of his life.
What he needed to set things right was a big movie. But that simply wasn’t happening. He’d been up for the lead in Bonfire of the Vanities (although, in hindsight, he was perhaps better off not being associated with that particular film), but the role went to Tom Hanks.
“I sat there and made an impassioned plea as to why it should be me,” Chris railed in the Boston Herald, “and they said, ‘You’d be absolutely perfect. I think you’d be great casting for the role and there’s no way we’re giving you this part.’
“What was not being said—the filling in the blanks said—was ‘I’m not going with somebody who hasn’t had a hit in two years.’ That’s the problem with [Hollywood]. It’s just like stocks. Instead of being a sixty-dollar stock you’re an eighteen-dollar stock.”
In point of fact, it was four years since Chris had enjoyed anything that even approached a hit, with Superman III. But his point was real. He was no longer hot. And the only way to get hot again was to be in a big movie. But he wasn’t going to be cast in a big movie unless he was hot. It was a vicious circle, and Chris was quite firmly trapped in it. The film industry was no longer about entertainment. The big studios were run not by people who thought about cinema, but by accountants. The bottom line had become the be-all and end-all of the business. As Chris would note, “Because I haven’t had a hit domestically in a few years, they can’t justify doing a fifteen-million-dollar movie with me.”
It was galling, but unfortunately there was no escaping it. The only thing Chris could do was scare up all the work he could find from other sources to keep him going and pay off his tax debt. But there were a few compensations, like life with Dana.
“One of the things that’s so great about Dana is we sail together, we dive together, we ride together … . We’re both really good skiers,” he enthused in US. “She plays a good game of tennis. She’s a great dancer. She laughs all the time. She thinks life is to be enjoyed. So I’ve got a partner.”
And this time, he said, there was a “very strong possibility” of marriage, a strange about-face for a man who’d been so dead set against the institution just a few years before. But he found himself able to share more with Dana than he ever had with Gae. As a person, he’d blossomed and opened with her. She was an actress; she understood the life, with its ups and downs. Gae had been a businesswoman, with heavy daily responsibilities on top of her family, a real, established life of her own that stood apart from Chris’s.
When they weren’t working, Chris and Dana took to spending more and more time in Williamstown. Apart from its resonances as the place they’d met, Chris loved the town, its casual atmosphere, the countryside surrounding it. It had, to all intents and purposes, become his primary residence, and as such, he became involved in town politics, helping to save the movie theater by organizing a series of screenings (including his own Street Smart), with the actors coming in to discuss the films shown.
“We’re all doing thirty minutes of questions and answers with the audience,” he explained to the New York Times.
He kept working. Nineteen eighty-nine brought more television, which was rapidly becoming his bread and butter, although that butter seemed to be spread rather thin when he ended up hosting specials like Our Common Future and The Valvoline National Driving Test. The highlight was a ghost story TV movie called Things That Go
Bump in the Night.
But bills had to be paid, and that British tax debt had to be erased. If that was all that was on offer, then that was what Chris would take. He knew the work he was capable of, and that it was of a much higher level than this, but he didn’t let pride enter into the equation. For most of his acting career he’d done remarkably well, and had been employed far more regularly than the vast majority of people in the profession.
And in the spring he’d be gainfully employed again, back onstage, in New York, working for the impresario Joseph Papp in the New York Public Theater’s production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Although his character, Polixenes, wasn’t the protagonist of the play, it was still an important role, and reunited him with one of his Juilliard classmates, Mandy Patinkin, as well as Alfre Woodward. It was the biggest thing that had happened to Chris for a while, and even if New York’s critic wasn’t especially kind to him, saying that Chris “does not so much speak his lines as gargle with them, in some sort of artfully snotty Ivy League accent,” he was celebrating his return to New York theater.
The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s more difficult plays, and director James Lapine made few concessions to a modern audience. The production found praise in The New Republic, although Robert Brustein felt that Chris’s Polixenes “has a stately, aristocratic bearing, but also a muted naturalistic delivery that robs him of forthrightness and resolve.” The Nation disliked both the production and Chris, calling him “all profile, and he delivers his lines out of the corner of his mouth with occasional flicks of the tongue for emphasis.”
“The theater is my home,” he said. “I’ve done about one hundred plays in twenty-one years. Many actors say their first love is theater, and you ask them when they were last in a play and they say, ‘Ten or twelve years ago.’ I do at least one, two, three plays a year.”
And that was perfectly true; he’d always made time for the theater, whether at the height of his fame or at a low career ebb. It remained important to him, and now, among the TV specials, it was a lifeline of sorts, a reminder to himself of why he still loved acting so much and wanted to remain a part of it. With his credentials, Chris could quite probably have obtained a post teaching drama to college students, but being in the business, acting himself, was what he really loved. Every occasion when he became a character made even the downside worthwhile.
But The Winter’s Tale was strictly a limited run, done in time for Chris and Dana to go up to Williamstown for the summer, where Matthew and Alexandra would visit. Chris had custody of the children for one-third of the year, which meant, essentially, that they spent all their school vacations with him. Chris relished the opportunity to be with them, and they liked Dana, which was just as well since she’d be mostly looking after them. It certainly helped that Dana immediately also took to Alexandra and Matthew.
“They were so darling and fantastic that when it was time for them to visit, I’d literally drop everything. I wouldn’t take auditions. I wouldn’t do jobs. Family, even before it was my official family, was always my priority.”
Once again Chris would be performing at the Williamstown Theatre. This time it was in a new play, John Brown’s Body, which was set after the Civil War. The New York Times came up to see how things were progressing under the new artistic directors, Peter Hunt and Austin Pendleton (Nikos Psacharopoulos had died earlier in the year), and left saying that with this play, the season had started “on a note of eloquence,” and that “Mr. Reeve brings great conviction to his part.”
Chris was thirty-seven now. His movie career seemed effectively over, and his work in television and plays didn’t fill his time the way a three-month shoot once did. For several years he’d had some political involvements. Now that seemed to come more to the fore as Chris fully reached his maturity. He began to realize that he could make more of a difference that way than with any film he could be in.
“What I get most involved in are things like toxic waste, recycling, water, deforestation, the greenhouse effect, and global warming. These are important issues to me, and if there’s anything I can do to help along these lines, I’ll do it.”
Earlier in the year, in New York, he’d worked to help stop the development of Trump City, even meeting with Donald Trump himself, and being part of a group that suggested a compromise that pleased all the groups campaigning on the issue.
He was the narrator for the documentary Black Tide, which detailed the effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and he took part in the American Tribute to Vaclav Havel and a Celebration of Democracy in Czechoslovakia, a fitting person to do so, since he’d been willing to face danger in the face of a dictatorship. In a prediction for the future in US he’d stated, “People are not going to stand dictatorships any longer. A certain level of personal freedom will be guaranteed around the world, and the global issue will not be freedom versus tyranny.”
That may not have materialized as much as he’d hoped, but it wasn’t for lack of effort on his part. One thing he’d seen and taken full note of was the erosion of artistic freedom at home, in the land of the free, and it worried him. The cuts in funding to the National Endowment for the Arts were motivated by politics, not economics—some politicians wanted to maintain control over government-funded artwork. It led him to wonder what he could do, and conversations with friends like Stephen Collins and Susan Sarandon brought about the formation of the Creative Coalition, dedicated to educating people in the entertainment field about political issues, and fighting for their artistic rights.
But he still had to work, since, as he told TV Guide, “Real life hit me in the face in the eighties.” And playing Allan Pinkerton, the man who founded the Pinkerton detective agency and the Secret Service, in a television movie was about as real as work had been lately. Chris was far from sure that he was right for the part, but need dictated that he take it when offered. As television budgets went, it was more than generous, and it was a leading role, the kind of thing that wasn’t coming often enough anymore.
Set during the Civil War (a period he seemed to keep coming back to lately), it was hardly high art, more rollicking entertainment, with Chris acquitting himself handily in the end. It wouldn’t make him a big name again, but it wouldn’t tarnish his reputation either, and he was learning that in the long run, a reputation was one of the most important things a man could have. Money couldn’t buy it, but every action could affect it. And Chris’s reputation was still of the highest.
It gained an even brighter sheen when he and Julie Hagerty (a woman whose movie roles only hinted at her acting ability) spent the spring on a national tour of the play Love Letters. Chris had taken over the role from Matthew Broderick in Boston, where it ran for several weeks. In the Boston Globe, Kevin Kelly compared the styles of the two men, writing that “Reeve plays it straighter … . [He] doesn’t get as many laughs, but he is closer, I think, to the essential pathos at the heart of Gurney’s script. The emotion in Christopher Reeve reading the final apostrophic letter, the tears streaming down his face … right now I can’t imagine it without Reeve and Hagerty.”
That response was typical in every city they played. They were among the most triumphal stage reviews he’d ever received, and the fact that the tour was for a good cause (Heart Strings, an AIDS organization) only improved the luster of it all.
Coming off that, he attended his twentieth class reunion at Princeton Day School, where, to his joy and surprise, he was presented with the Alumni Award for “extensive involvement in human services.” And certainly it was warranted. Not only had he gone to Chile, and worked for the environment and the NEA, he’d also been involved with MADD, the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, and many others. The name Christopher Reeve still had clout, and now it was beginning to take on resonance.
There were more TV specials, whose fees helped pay the rent. He hosted Night of 100 Stars III, The 16th Annual People’s Choice Awards, The Earthday Birthday, and The World’s Greatest Stunts
, but what he looked forward to was heading back to Williamstown in the summer and acting again.
With Love Letters he seemed to have found a new fire in himself, and it was apparent when he took the stage that summer in a revival of the old chestnut Death Takes a Holiday, where he starred with Maria Tucci and Blythe Danner, another Williamstown regular. Seeming somewhat surprised, the New York Times commented, “More than anything it is [Chris’s] drollness that helps invigorate this creaky vehicle.”
But great stage reviews didn’t pay the bills, and television didn’t offer the same paychecks as movies. The simple fact was that Chris didn’t have the money to live the way he once had. So he and Dana sold the Upper West Side penthouse and moved further downtown, and he put one of his planes on the market. As answers to the financial problems went, these were little more than temporary solutions, but at least they gave them some breathing room.
Television was welcoming Chris with open arms, and there was plenty of work for him there, including a guest shot on the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s Avonlea series. Still, if he was going to do television, the money there was in the made-for-TV movie market. The budgets were fair, the salaries were decent, and the shoots were quick. Chris had done some, but during 1990 the number seemed to escalate.
First of all it was Death Dreams, with Marg Helgenberger, of China Beach fame. It was the kind of hokum Chris hated, utterly corny and predictable, but he wasn’t going to give anything less than his best, even with a cliched script.
And then it was Things That Go Bump in the Night. This was a part he most certainly didn’t like, in a piece about pedophilia. However, after wrestling with his conscience, he decided that in its own way it was important, and his role only took seven days to film. Before it aired, though, he was quick to offer a warning to parents in the Washington Post.
“I seriously hope that parents will take control of the TV set on the Sunday night that this is on. There might be some kids out there who hear I’m in the movie. They’ve got to explain that just because he was Superman in one movie doesn’t mean he’s the same in this one and they should take the time to say an actor often pretends, that it’s fun to pretend, that he doesn’t really do these things … . This is a movie for adults to watch, not for children.” And, he added, his own kids would certainly not be seeing it. It was the responsible action of a father concerned for all children.
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