From there it was on to Nightmare in the Daylight, with Jaclyn Smith, the Charlie’s Angels actress who’d become something of a mainstay on the TV movie circuit, although—perhaps because the movie was an embarrassment to all concerned—it wouldn’t be aired for another year.
It all meant that he was seen by more people than at any time since his Superman days, although this time he was confined to the small screen. But it was a base, and coming off his excellent stage work the previous year, there seemed to be a new confidence and vitality about him.
Politically all the work he’d done had also helped him grow in stature. In his capacity as one of the heads of the Creative Coalition, he put himself forward to defend the National Endowment for the Arts against people who wanted to cut its funding, in the Hatch-Pell Amendment.
He traveled to Washington to offer testimony on the idea, and found himself going up against the political right, as Senator Jesse Helms and evangelist (and presidential hopeful) Pat Robertson fought hard to stop artists offensive to their morality being funded by the government.
It was an important issue, since the vote on it would delineate the boundary between politics and art, and Chris was overjoyed when the Senate finally refused to go with Helms.
“Congress decided that the NEA’s critics should not be given official status as the moral guardians of America, and that politicians should not be empowered to decide what is art,” he told McCall’s. “Those decisions should be made, as they have been made for the last twenty-five years, by a panel of peers. And if an artist is found guilty of obscenity in court, he or she is asked to give the NEA back the money … . Politicians should never have the authority.”
Naturally articulate, and with a presence born of many years of stage experience, Chris presented himself well at the hearings, showing an understanding of the processes in Washington and an eagerness to work for a cause he firmly believed in. The Creative Coalition, in fact, “helped introduce the concept behind the amendment that allowed a compromise to be reached,” according to Chris.
It was enough to convince the head of the NEA, Jane Alexander, that Chris could have a strong political career ahead of him if he wanted it, and she urged him to run for the Senate. The Williamstown seat had just become available, following the death of Silvio Conte, who’d represented the area. But while it could have been a viable option, professional politics held little interest for Chris. Involvement in the issues that mattered to him was one thing; it was a labor of love. But to do it as a job, on a day-to-day basis, was altogether different. He knew he’d quickly lose his edge.
Besides, he had his first movie project in a few years to think about. As if someone had seen his creative fires burning a little brighter, he’d been offered a role in Noises Off—two roles actually, as Frederick Dallas and Philip Brent. It teamed him with Michael Caine again after a decade, Julie Hagerty, Carol Burnett, and Denholm Elliott, all under the direction of Peter Bogdanovich. He was nowhere near the head of the cast list, closer to the bottom in fact, but he was back in movies, and earning one hundred thousand dollars—which seemed like a very healthy figure to him now—for the privilege.
Based on the play by Michael Frayn, it was nothing more than a farce about a touring group of actors, but it was fun for the ensemble, and it would mark Chris’s return to the big screen.
While writers generally agreed that the play was better than the film, Newsweek loved it, noting that it “supplies so many belly laughs it seems ill-spirited to complain … . No farce lover should miss it.”
In his personal life things were looking up as well. Dana was pregnant, due in June 1992, and the couple decided to marry, after four years of living together.
Over dinner, “virtually at the same time we both said, ‘Let’s get married,’” and the words themselves turned out to be an aphrodisiac, Chris revealed. “We put down our forks and went straight to the bedroom. It was extremely erotic.”
They had a small ceremony in Williamstown on April 11, with Dana seven months pregnant. Both sets of parents attended; Matthew and Alexandra were flown over for the event, and a few guests were invited.
It was a theatrical wedding, in the sense that they were both working and had no opportunity for a honeymoon. Dana was undertaking her last role before motherhood, playing in Sight Unseen Off-Broadway. Chris was finishing promotion for Noises Off, which would not do well, even with a respected cast.
Inevitably, Chris was grist for the mill for most interviewers, given the way his star had fallen, and he was the first to admit, “I haven’t made intelligent choices.” Elsewhere, he went into a little more detail, noting that “in the late seventies and early eighties, when I was in a position to pick and choose, I don’t think I was ready for it. That can happen in this business, where the opportunity and your development don’t go together, particularly if you have a big success early.”
There was talk—although it would go no further than that—of Superman V, and Chris let it be known that he might be willing to play the hero one last time, if the circumstances were right.
“If I did it, it would have to be the swan-song, the thank-you-and-good-night. People don’t want to see Superman with a spare tire hanging over his yellow belt.”
Chris was thirty-nine now, and perhaps too old to offer America Superman’s kind of action. Lines had begun to form on his face, and whereas his looks had occasionally seemed callow when he was young, now he’d fully grown into his face. And, it seemed, into his life.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Will Reeve came into the world on June 7, 1992, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, the place Chris and Dana had more or less made their home.
The parents had joked about naming him Murray, after the Murray Hill section of Manhattan where a sonogram had revealed the child’s sex, but Will it was going to be.
This time there would be no transatlantic parenting. The couple would have a nanny, but there’d be no shuttling around the globe for this kid. Chris and Dana finally sold their apartment in the city and bought a farmhouse in Westchester County, not far from Dana’s parents.
“We love New York,” Chris said of their decision, “but we didn’t want to raise our child in the city. It was time to move. We like our privacy.”
Along with his new parenthood, Chris seemed to have really found his feet again, after several years in the wilderness, and he was beginning to undergo something of a professional renaissance. He’d never be a major star again, he realized that. But he was also happier with it. The pressure was off. He could get on with his life and enjoy himself. Work was coming in thick and fast, with any number of television specials, ranging from the self-help Mending Hearts to What’s Cookin’?
And the TV movies kept on coming, too. He was Father Thomas Cusack, torn between the sanctity of the confessional and the need to stop a murderer in the rather doubtful Mortal Sins (which, bad as it was, still outclassed the dreadful Monsignor), and Humphrey Van Weyden in an adaptation of Jack London’s The Sea Wolf. Neither was likely to bring him awards, but it was work, pushing his name out there again and keeping him afloat.
Shortly after Will was born, Chris undertook his yearly appearance at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, playing Nandor, the lead in a revival of The Guardsman. This time, however, would mark his last time performing there. Much as he loved it, under the regime of the new artistic directors things had changed in a way that didn’t suit him, and it was time to let it all go. Just from the festival; not from the town—it seemed unlikely he’d ever really leave that—but from the annual round.
Williamstown’s theater festival had been good to him. It was a place he could always find excellent work, and more importantly, the place where he’d met Dana. But all good things must come to an end.
As soon as the run was over, he went happily back to the grind of making movies. The watershed that had threatened to sink his career had passed, and now there was a small cinematic demand for his services again, in the type of strong
character roles that played to his strengths. Morning Glory had him cast opposite Deborah Raffin, in a script she’d help write from LaVyrie Spencer’s book. He was cast as an ex-con during the depression trying to establish a new life, working on Raffin’s farm, only to find himself the prime suspect when a woman in town is murdered. It wasn’t challenging drama; in the end it proved to be little more than lightweight entertainment. But Chris still ensured that his performance was solid. Over the years he’d become something of an acting craftsman, a person who could work with any kind of role. Sometimes there’d be inspiration, and he’d turn in something incandescent, but for the most part now he was proving himself to be solid and honest, with a weight lent by years.
Filmed on a small budget, Morning Glory was one of those independent releases that are destined to see only limited release on the art house circuit. But that was still enough for Newsday to offer a reassessment of Chris:
“This movie isn’t big enough to make Reeve a star again. But the impression he makes here is good enough to suggest that a reversal of perception—and fortune—won’t be long in coming.”
Indeed, it already had. Chris wanted to act, and projects were beginning to come his way. And just after he finished filming Morning Glory, an offer arrived that would offer him new artistic respect—the part of Lewis in The Remains of the Day, the new film from Merchant-Ivory.
It was a definite move back up the ladder. In the past ten years the Merchant-Ivory team had gone from strength to strength, and the Oscar that was about to come for Howards End would mean they’d finally be classed among the big producers. And they’d done it all while keeping to very strict budgets, without sacrificing the quality of their films to try to appeal to fickle commercial markets. They made the films they wanted to make, the way they wanted to make them. Being asked to act for them was an honor, as Chris knew only too well. It served to negate any image forming that he’d become just another TV face, another Robert Urich.
The Remains of the Day was a curious story, centered around the life and relationship—or nonrelationship, really—of a butler (Anthony Hopkins) and the housekeeper (Emma Thompson) in an English country house. Chris played Congressman Lewis, an American guest at a country estate in the 1930s, who returns as its new owner in the 1950s.
It wasn’t a heroic part, not a major role, or even pivotal in the movie. But the whole piece had depth and gravity, to match its marvelous acting, and it put Chris in very fine company indeed. As he noted, it was “nice to be able to play characters with some mileage behind them. That’s more rewarding.” But he’d entered his forties now; he had plenty of mileage of his own behind him now. The days when he could play an ingenue or an action hero were long since gone.
It was the first time in many years that Chris had been involved in anything this lavish. He had nothing but respect for the other talents involved, most especially Emma Thompson, an actress who, as he said, could easily produce “Great Moments.” Unusual and unlikely as the story was for American audiences (essentially Upstairs Downstairs with a very psychological twist and remove), it proved popular.
And it was rewarded with eight Academy Award nominations. Even though it didn’t win in any category, a virtually impossible task against Schindler’s List and The Piano that year, it remained a cinematic highlight. And chief among its fans was Chris himself, a member of the supporting cast.
“I don’t regard that as my movie—I was a visitor—but it’s the best movie I’ve ever been in. Anthony Hopkins gave one of the best performances ever captured on film.”
For Chris, whose Lewis represented the New World politically and symbolically in the film, standing as the lone voice not espousing fascism in the 1930s dinner party for a visiting Nazi official, it offered a political prelude to his activities in 1992, working for the Clinton-Gore ticket in the presidential election.
“I’ve watched in despair as every environmental law is trashed by [the Bush] administration and Quayle’s Council on Competitiveness,” he said in anger.
He had the ear of Al Gore, himself very concerned with the environment, and toured some of the most polluted sites in the Northeast with him.
After his run-ins with Republican politicians who wanted to exercise their own form of censorship over the arts, and the desecration of the environment to aid industrial corporations under Bush (and before him, Reagan), it was natural that Chris would gravitate toward lending his support, time, and name to the Democrats. He was concerned not just with the world he lived in, but the one that Matthew, Alexandra, and now Will would eventually inherit. So when the Democrats achieved victory that November, with Clinton taking over the White House, Chris was naturally jubilant, trusting that the shift in the winds would mean more liberality in Washington, and a much tougher stand on environmental issues.
Indeed, for him, work seemed to be involving politics in one form or another during much of the next year, 1993. There was the release of The Remains of the Day, with its political subtext; a television special, Earth and the American Dream, devoted to ecology; and a Larry King presentation of November 22, 1963: Where Were You?, a recollection of John F. Kennedy’s assassination on its thirtieth anniversary.
Most important was his involvement in what had originally seemed like a local censorship issue. It had been taken up by the press and made into something of a cause célèbre. In Tucson, Arizona, a high school drama teacher had been fired from her job after letting her class perform a scene from The Shadow Box, a play which had won both Pulitzer and Tony Awards when on Broadway.
Its subject was cancer and death, but underneath it offered a vague theme of homosexuality, which was ample to offend a number of parents, who demanded that the play be banned by the school. Under that kind of pressure, it was, and then the teacher, Carole Marlowe, was ordered by the principal to go through all the plays in the school’s drama library and censor—quite literally black out—every “objectionable” word.
She did that, even though to many people such bowdlerization seemed ridiculous. But when she let her class—at their request—perform a scene from The Shadow Box during the school’s Fine Arts Week, the authorities gave her no choice but to resign.
The students demonstrated in her support, making the incident national news. At that point the Creative Coalition became involved. Chris flew to Tucson and made a speech, appearing as part of a panel of actors defending Marlowe and her actions. Then, that same evening, the impromptu troupe gave a reading of The Shadow Box to a packed theater (notably the citizens of Tucson didn’t stay away in droves). Joining him were Creative Coalition cochair Blair Brown, Estelle Parsons, Michael Tucker, and others—all very well known and respected names in the business. None of it managed to help Marlowe retain her job, but in a show of solidarity, her colleagues throughout Arizona nominated her for the state’s Teacher of the Year award.
While it wasn’t anything like a complete triumph for the Coalition, they had at least done all they could, and awareness had been raised. Perhaps, next time, the parents and the principal might think before overreacting.
Chris’s career continued to hum along at a steady pace. The momentum that had begun over the last couple of years continued with back-to-back movie offers.
First there was a comedy, Speechless, somewhat freely based on the romance of Mary Matalin and James Carville, who’d worked on opposite sides of the political fence as spin doctors during the ’92 election, before marrying each other.
With stars like Michael Keaton and Geena Davis, neither of whom was a massive draw, it was never going to be a major film, but it was typical of the workaday projects that filled Chris’s calendar. The script was perfectly likable, funny and charming in parts, with Chris as usual heading up the supporting cast, playing a very egotistical television reporter who was engaged to Davis’s character.
The work, and the knowledge that for most of the next year he’d be based in Los Angeles, made Chris and Dana decide to temporarily relocate there, rather than ha
ve him commute between coasts in his free time. It kept the family together, and that, above all, was what Chris and Dana wanted—no separations. So they rented a house in the Hollywood Hills and settled in for the duration.
One item of trivia that the papers were quick to pick up on with Speechless was the fact that it contained both the big-screen Batman and Superman in the same movie. By now, though, Chris was quite adamant that his superhero days were a thing of the past. Whatever discussions there had been for a Superman V had come to naught, and if they were revived, they would no longer include him. He had, he said, been the “custodian” of the role for a while, but “if they do it again, there should be a new custodian for this generation.”
Speechless, when it appeared in theaters, turned out to be exactly what it had looked like—a small, pleasant comedy, soundly and capably acted. Chris performed well as the reporter who’d been everywhere and done everything, and found himself singled out for praise in the New York Times.
“The story’s sidelines are especially enlivened by Christopher Reeve,” Janet Maslin wrote, while critic Gary Arnold went one step further, noting that “Mr. Reeve has quietly evolved into a versatile character actor … . It’s only a matter of time before he’s ‘officially’ rediscovered and celebrated, like John Travolta in Pulp Fiction.”
And indeed there were some parallels in the careers of Chris and Travolta. Both had been big stars at the same time, only to fade from the limelight. Unlike Chris, though, Travolta had kept active in movies, even having some hits with the Look Who’s Talking series, even if no one seemed to take him that seriously. But Pulp Fiction saw his real rehabilitation as an actor and a star, after which he returned to the ascendant.
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