Superhero

by Chris Nickson

“I can’t tell you how much his presence lifted everybody,” said producer Susan Winton, and Scott Henderson, Chris’s agent, pointed out that “Chris loved showing people that he’s back.”

  And back he definitely was. Speaking engagements were fine, and now he needed an immediate involvement in political issues for the disabled, but he still wanted to be involved in movies and theater. They were his lifeblood, the way he’d earned his living for more than two decades. It was one of the ways he defined himself, and to lose that part altogether would have been very hard.

  But Chris wasn’t the only one with artistic dreams; Dana, too, had had a career, one she’d put on hold to care for Chris. Not that she ever resented it; he was her husband, her priority. But she also had a need to act, to be able to have that outlet.

  She and Chris had shared many details of their private life with the media, including the fact that they could make love, even if it was a “spontaneous reaction” on Chris’s part, rather than anything they could control. Through all the interviews, Chris had lauded his wife, and the reporters had been happy to follow that angle.

  “She makes jokes about the media portraying her as ‘St. Dana,’” a friend said. “But she doesn’t want to be that. She says, ‘I am just a woman whose husband fell off a horse, and I’m going to take care of him. That’s what you do.’”

  Now she had a chance to return to work, though, and Chris wasn’t about to stand in her way. The New Jersey Shakespeare Festival was producing The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Dana had been offered the role of Julia. It was close enough to home that she could commute, and Chris had his nurses and attendants in the house.

  In truth, by now she probably needed a chance to break free, if only for a few hours a day. For virtually a year she’d spent almost every waking hour with Chris, going through some very difficult times without much in the way of light relief.

  And as Chris organized his life, he was doing more and more. Why shouldn’t she? This was more of a return to the normality they both wanted, and that they’d known before.

  In fact, Chris’s diary was becoming quite full. On April 18 he was scheduled to be in Atlanta to speak at the “Success ’96” seminar, and he would return to the city in August to be the master of ceremonies for the Paraplegic Games, whose eleven days would be televised—by CBS, no less. He’d put his name on the dotted line for a multimillion-dollar deal with Random House to write his autobiography, collaborating with writer Roger Rosenblatt.

  And on April 1 he finally signed to be the voice of King Arthur in an upcoming Warner Brothers animation, The Quest for Camelot.

  As gratifying as all his political activism was, this was perhaps the most important step he’d taken since his accident. He was working again.

  “Chris Reeve is a wonderful actor whose talents we all admire tremendously,” said Max Howard, the president of Warner Brothers Feature Animation. “He was our unanimous first choice for the role of King Arthur, and we began negotiating his participation quite a while ago, when the character was beginning to take shape. Chris’s voice will infuse the qualities of energy, power and warmth into King Arthur, whose presence is an important component of our story. We’re thrilled that he’s joining this project.”

  The plan was for Chris to record his dialogue in New York during the summer, as his schedule allowed. He’d be working alone, as the other principal voices hadn’t yet been cast.

  It was, in essence, an extended voice-over, but it was work nonetheless. And with these floodgates opening, there was more coming through.

  Before his accident Chris had signed with Ryser Entertainment to direct a romantic comedy, and that seemed likely to happen before year’s end.

  Keith Samples, the head of Ryser, was definitely looking forward to it.

  “Chris is incredibly focused, and he has a strong sense of moviemaking,” he said. “Obviously the locations will have to be very carefully thought out. Chris gets fatigued, and I don’t think you want to put him in a situation where he is shooting fourteen hour days. But I don’t think we’ll have to.”

  Chris also agreed to work on a project that struck much closer to home, narrating an HBO documentary, Without Pity: A Film About Abilities, which according to the press release “profiles Americans with a variety of disabilities who seek independence as well as access to society.”

  Then, in May came a prospect he could really sink his teeth into. HBO, eager to follow up on the idea of Chris directing a film, had requested a meeting with him.

  Fred Zollo and Bonnie Timmerman, two producers, along with Will Scheffer, a scriptwriter, and some executives of HBO NYC, an offshoot of the cable giant, drove up to Westchester County to see Chris at home.

  He’d already been sent the script for In the Gloaming, a drama dealing with a young man suffering from AIDS who returns to his parents’ house to die.

  Chris liked the idea, but he wasn’t as thrilled with the execution.

  “I said, ‘I’m gonna open with a couple of comments that may get me fired here,’” he remembered in Entertainment Weekly. “I told them [the script] had potential, but it also had problems. It read like a play … . [So] I said: ‘Basic changes need to be made. If you think it’s too much, by all means get somebody else. I’d be wrong for the movie.’”

  On the surface it sounded like a very brash move. After all, Chris had long expressed the desire to direct, but had never done anything more than second-unit work. Laying down conditions long before filming was scheduled, before a contract had even been signed, seemed very arrogant.

  But one thing Christopher Reeve has never been is a fool. He realized full well that now his name had cachet, and the idea of Christopher Reeve, the quadriplegic, directing a film about AIDS had great publicity value for HBO. His name would bring in many viewers who wouldn’t otherwise watch it. HBO wanted him as much as he wanted to direct, and that put him in a very powerful position, where he could make statements that would seem outrageous coming from most novice directors.

  Of course, Chris didn’t say what he did simply as a power play. He was a professional. He’d been in the business long enough to know when a script worked and when it didn’t. If he was going to put his name on this piece, he wanted it to be the very best it could be, from beginning to end.

  In the Gloaming had been adapted by Scheffer from a story by Alice Elliott Dark which had appeared in The New Yorker. However, in Chris’s view, it had “too many words.”

  Having received a promise of a full rewrite, the group then began to talk about casting. HBO wanted big names, people like Gene Hackman, up-and-comer Leonardo DiCaprio, or Johnny Depp. Chris had other ideas, actors who in general weren’t such household names, but nonetheless superb.

  “It’s part of [HBO’s] process,” Chris said later. “If you came in with Ordinary People, they’d have ideas. But that’s what helps you discover what you really want. I call them ‘over my dead body’ moments.”

  In the end he did win. Robert Sean Leonard was the son, David Strathairn the father. The only really major name was Glenn Close, who agreed to play the mother.

  “I was in the middle of a twelve-week shoot in Australia when Chris faxed me,” she recalled. “The last thing I was thinking of was to work again.”

  For her, one of the deciding factors—apart from working with Chris—was that a location in Pound Ridge, New York, close to Chris’s house, had been quickly settled on, and Close lived nearby.

  The other big plus was that she’d known and respected Chris for fifteen years and “really wanted to be with him in his first directing attempt.”

  Robert Sean Leonard, from a different generation and not personally close to Chris, was more sanguine about things.

  “I’m always skeptical of first-time directors,” he said, “because the job’s much harder than people think.”

  At the same time, he had to admit that Chris came into the project with a strong reputation as a craftsman, someone who wouldn’t take on a job he couldn’t c
omplete—and complete well.

  Shooting was set for the fall, giving everyone plenty of time to prepare.

  For Chris, however, it stood as a prelude to a remarkably busy summer. His first trip was to Washington, where he was once again lobbying for more money to be spent on research for spinal-cord injuries.

  “We know him as Superman, flying through the air,” said Senator Arlen Specter after his appearance. “To see him come in, propped up in a wheelchair, is really heartbreaking.”

  But when it came to pushing Congress to spend more money on something that would directly affect his own future, Chris didn’t mind playing the Superman card if it helped.

  His stature and previous activism certainly helped get him an appointment with President Clinton, who promised $10 million in new funding. Given the total federal budget, it was little more than a raindrop in an ocean, but every amount, no matter how small, counted. And in the Senate, Specter was willing to try to have that amount increased to $40 million, a slightly larger raindrop.

  Given the way that research was advancing, this really was a case where throwing money at a problem could solve it. As Chris worked the names in Washington, Science published an article from researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, who’d severed the spinal cords of rats, then transplanted nerves from other parts of the body. The new nerves had regenerated and produced enough of a recovery for the rats to walk.

  That was a massive breakthrough, but only one of many going on around the globe, particularly in the United States. Steroids were being experimented with, a substance called 4-AP had proved hopeful in clinical trials, and the Salk Institute was experimenting with gene splicing.

  Everything offered hope, although scientists had come to the conclusion that there wouldn’t be one single cure, as had long been thought, but that a series of remedies working in concert might end up working miracles.

  For Chris, and the hundreds of thousands like him who wanted to walk again, it was all good news. But Chris had one more immediate ambition in particular. On his fiftieth birthday, in 2002, he wanted to stand unaided and raise a toast to the family who’d supported him so much. The way everything was progressing, it didn’t seem unreasonable at all.

  In the meantime, he was doing everything in his power to help generate the money that could bring it about. He kept playing the political game in Washington, and he wrote about the funding problem in Good Housekeeping, urging readers to write if they supported increased funding (an article which resulted in Specter’s office receiving some twenty-five thousand letters).

  His work had been so excellent, his visibility and profile so high, that the American Paralysis Association was pleased to elect him chairman of its board of directors.

  And even the American Medical Association gave him a special award for his work to try and remove caps on medical insurance.

  But most importantly, Chris was asked to address the Democratic National Convention in August. Since his accident he’d shown himself to be such a symbol of courage, refusing to give in to his disability, that he’d become a symbol of bravery in America.

  At least, he had to most people. But there was a vocal minority among the disabled who objected to the stance he was taking. To them, the idea of searching for a “cure” implied that they were sick, which they wouldn’t accept. They regarded themselves purely as differently abled.

  Cyndi Jones, who published Mainstream, a magazine which campaigned for rights for the disabled, said that she was “in favor of research that makes a difference in the lives of people with disabilities as they live them.” That meant not only access to buildings, and housing designed for them, but “bowel and bladder function—there’s all kinds of stuff they could put a little bit of money into.”

  By placing himself at the forefront of research for a cure to spinal-cord injuries, Chris incurred their wrath, and raised the dust of controversy. In a way, this minority had a point. People ended up in wheelchairs for any number of different reasons, such as multiple sclerosis or strokes, which weren’t going to be really addressed by the research Chris was advocating. For them, research into the things that would make life easier was needed. But it was impossible to address everyone’s problems. Some had chosen to resign themselves to life lived in a wheelchair, and Chris was unwilling to do that. He was fighting it every inch of the way.

  It was sad, then, that in his refusal to buckle under, he found himself opposed by groups like Incurable but Able to Vote, a group which opposed him as a spokesperson for the disabled. They planned a demonstration at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, stating that instead of spending money on a cure that might or might not happen, the dollars would be much better spent enforcing the Americans with Disabilities Act. They even demanded another disabled speaker at the convention to address the need for civil rights.

  This was America; they had their rights of protest and dissension. But it was Chris who, more than anyone, had made people around the country aware of the problems of the disabled. In television interviews by Barbara Walters, Larry King, and Katie Couric, the public learned of the daily tribulations, the seemingly mundane things like pressure sores and lack of bladder control that those in wheelchairs have to live with all the time. More than that, they’d seen how in less than a minute the man who’d flown across their screens could become a quadriplegic, down to earth with a bang.

  And the fact that he was determined to overcome his limitations, to break through the bonds that had been placed on him by nature, made him a wonderful role model, someone who had, quite literally, turned into a superman.

  Having him as the opening-night speaker for the Democratic National Convention on August 26, 1996, showed just how much of a symbol he’d become.

  “We use his personal example in trying to overcome a debilitating injury, and having a community rally around him, and the inspiration he has given to others in struggling to overcome his injury,” was the assessment of David Eichenbaum, who was the communications director for the Democratic National Committee, which had issued the speaking invitation.

  But to others, most particularly the Republicans, the choice of Christopher Reeve simply highlighted the perception that the Democrats were more about personalities—more specifically, show-business personalities—than politics, which was strongly denied by Kiki Moore, in charge of communications for the convention.

  “If anybody believes that because Christopher Reeve makes a living in the entertainment field, that takes away from his real-life experience, then they are probably missing an opportunity to learn some valuable lessons,” she responded.

  And so, on a steamy August night in Chicago, Chris directed his wheelchair onto the convention podium. By now the sustained applause had become a standard response to his appearance. This, however, was the most important address of the many he’d delivered in the last few months. Televised live across the country, it gave him a chance not only to make his pitch for more funding, but also to give a message to America.

  He began by touching on the issue of family values, so heavily touted by the Republicans in 1992.

  “I think it means we’re all family, and we all have value,” Chris said. “And if that’s true, if America really is a family, then we have to recognize that many of our family are hurting.”

  To blunt the swords of groups like Incurable but Able to Vote, he praised the Americans with Disabilities Act, saying it “must be honored everywhere … . Its purpose is to give the disabled access not only to buildings, but to every opportunity in society.”

  The truly important thing, though, in Chris’s mind was to work for a cure.

  “When we put our minds to a problem, we can usually find solutions. But our scientists can do more.” He pointed out that nationally the government spent $8.7 billion on the disabled through various programs. “But we spend only $40 million a year on research that would actually improve the quality of their lives, get them off public assistance, or even cure them. We’ve g
ot to be smarter, do better.”

  He cited the example of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the former president who’d put the New Deal into place in the 1930s, and himself a man who’d spent much of his life in a wheelchair because of childhood polio. When FDR had dedicated the new buildings for the National Institutes of Health, before the Second World War, he’d said that “the defense this nation seeks, involves a great deal more than building airplanes, ships, guns, and bombs. We cannot be a strong nation unless we are a healthy nation.”

  In conclusion, Chris said, “America is stronger when it takes care of all of us. Giving new life to that ideal is the challenge before us tonight.”

  It was, as he’d intended it to be, directed at the hearts and consciences of a nation. All across the political spectrum there were stirrings to cut back funding wherever possible, and Chris wanted to remind the politicians of their duties and responsibilities to look after the country’s citizens.

  His years as an actor helped, but what really made Chris into such an inspirational speaker was passion. The political had become extremely personal, and every time he spoke he was quite literally fighting for his future. He could breathe without the respirator, but he couldn’t speak without using it, making every word doubly important.

  In the end, of course, Clinton handily regained the White House, but while the Democrats had a president, they didn’t have control of either the House or the Senate, which meant that at best the Democrats could only hope for compromise, and often failure.

  Chris was eager to make his directorial debut. He’d waited years for the opportunity to come his way, dropping hints, and now he was more than ready. All the preparations had been made, and his anticipation was rising at the thought of the challenge. Before filming began on In the Gloaming in late September, though, he had two important engagements in Canada, the first to start the fund-raiser for the Toronto Hospital and the Hospital for Sick Children. Their goal was to raise $12 million for neuroscience research, and who better to kick it all off than Chris.