Still Me

by Christopher Reeve

  I took surviving the ride as another sign from the gods. I rushed up the stairs and into Gae’s room just as Matthew appeared. As soon as he was breathing, I had the privilege of handing him to Gae, who was crying from both exhaustion and joy. Instead of bawling at the top of his lungs, as I had expected, Matthew snuggled in quietly and drifted off to sleep. But just before he dozed off, he opened one eye and looked right at me. It seemed to me that he was asking, “Who are you?” And then, satisfied that I was meant to be there, he fell asleep. I think that look of complete acceptance from my child within moments of his birth somehow taught me the most important lesson about being a parent: unconditional love is everything.

  After I finished Superman II the following spring, Gae and I took Matthew and his nanny to Los Angeles and set up camp in another rented house in the Hollywood Hills. I got my instrument rating in my new airplane, an A36 Bonanza, read a lot of scripts, and floated Matthew in the crook of my arm around the shallow end of our swimming pool. I wasn’t able to find a project I liked, and by June, tired of our Hollywood lifestyle, I picked up the phone and called Nikos Psacharopoulos in Williamstown. Would it be possible for me to join the festival at some point during the summer? I had been rejected there for years because I had become a professional when most people my age were still students and didn’t have to be paid. But now Nikos welcomed me with open arms.

  We agreed to do The Front Page by Hecht and MacArthur, to be directed by Robert Allan Ackerman, one of the hottest Broadway directors at the time. Edward Herrmann and Richard Burton’s daughter, Kate, still a drama school student, would be the other leads, and Celeste Holm was cast in a cameo as my prospective mother-in-law. Gae and Matthew and I packed our bags again, closed the door on our rented life, and I was soon reunited with the WTF family.

  With Ed Herrmann in The Front Page.

  Robin Williams came up to visit during the run and seemed to enjoy it tremendously. One evening we went out to a local seafood restaurant, and as we passed by the lobster tank I casually wondered what they were all thinking in there. Whereupon Robin launched into a fifteen-minute routine: one lobster had escaped and was seen on the highway with his claw out holding a sign that said, “Maine.” Another lobster from Brooklyn was saying, “C’mon, just take da rubber bands off,” gearing up for a fight. A gay lobster wanted to redecorate the tank. People at nearby tables soon gave up any pretense of trying not to listen, and I had to massage my cheeks because my face hurt so much from laughing. Later Robin would use this material for his appearance at a huge gala for the Actors Fund at Radio City Music Hall.

  The Front Page turned out to be one of the biggest successes of the summer, and I was delighted to be back onstage after a four-year absence.

  In the fall I was asked to do Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July on Broadway. We bought a duplex apartment on Seventy-eighth Street and Columbus Avenue, and Gae furnished it while I began preparing for the part. The play had originated at Circle Rep, where Bill Hurt had distinguished himself once again as Ken Talley, a former schoolteacher and Vietnam vet who is now a bilateral amputee. I felt honored to have been asked to take over the role when the play moved to Broadway. My first task was learning to simulate walking on artificial legs. To me one of the most exciting things about acting is doing the homework: learning whatever is necessary to be convincing in the role.

  The research for Fifth of July took me to a VA hospital in Brooklyn and into the world of the disabled. A Vietnam vet named Mike Sulsona became my coach. In 1969 Mike was an eighteen-year-old soldier finishing his second tour of duty and scheduled to go home just one week later. Then he stepped on a mine that blew off both his legs. At first I was awkward and self-conscious around him, but he soon put me at ease. He explained that before he went to ’Nam, he was a high school dropout hanging out on the street. Now he was married, the father of two children, and a budding playwright. The accident had given meaning to his life. He taught me how to stand up, sit down, and move like an amputee. Braces were made to keep my legs rigidly in place. I had to be especially careful not to move my toes and spoil the illusion. That physicality—the technical requirements—got me into the part.

  Ken Talley was a breakthrough role for me. I was able to put together bits and pieces from school, from Hepburn, from film work, and from my own experience and bring all of it to the work. Having mastered the technical demands of the role, I tried to be spontaneous, truthful, and “in the moment.” This is an acting term, which means the opposite of planning in advance. You know the lines and have rehearsed the scene, but at each performance you go with what you are actually feeling at the moment rather than trying to re-create something that happened during rehearsals or at yesterday’s performance.

  As Ken Talley with Jeff Daniels in the Broadway production of Fifth of July.

  One of a bilateral amputee’s greatest fears is of falling backwards, because the amputee has no way to protect the back or spinal cord. In Act II of Fifth of July another character bumps into Ken, and he falls straight back. That scene produced unexpected results at every performance. Even though the words were always the same, my experience was different every time. Sometimes I felt anger and denial. Then my attitude was: Don’t help me, I don’t need anybody. Sometimes I cried, and would reach out for help. Sometimes I tried to pretend it hadn’t happened. The dialogue never changed; but you can say “pass the salt” and load the words with any number of meanings, depending on what’s happening within you.

  During the previews at the New Apollo Theater, Ellis Rabb materialized again. His advice to me was as concise and to the point as it had been in San Diego: “Your performance is brilliant; your curtain call is a disgrace,” He told me that I was cheating the audience by coming out at the end as if I was in a hurry to go home. He reminded me that I was billed above the title and taught me how to take a proper curtain call. He coached me not to rush the entrance: once you arrive center stage, you stand at your full height and take time before you bow. Most important of all was what you should be thinking during a curtain call: you look to the balcony on one side, to the balcony on the other side, to the right side of the orchestra, to the rest of the orchestra, and each time, you think: Thank you for being here, it was a pleasure to perform for you, and then you bow. I tried this the next night, and the result was a standing ovation. I understood what made the difference: I was embracing the audience. Instead of implying, Yes, I was in it, now I’m out of here, my new thought was: We shared this, didn’t we? I busted a gut here for you tonight, and I’m glad you noticed. What he suggested sounded egotistical to me until I learned that when people have witnessed a good performance, they want a chance to applaud. A proper curtain call completes the experience of the play for actors and audience alike.

  Fifth of July received outstanding reviews. I was happy because I felt it confirmed that I could play complex characters, play against type, and be successful. My next role was even further away from the conventional leading man than Ken Talley. I played a psychopathic student opposite Michael Caine in Sidney Lumet’s film of Deathtrap. The twisted relationship between the two characters in this Ira Levin thriller shocked many of our fans, but Michael and I played the parts without apology, and the film was well received. When I look back on it now, the performance still holds up.

  Deathtrap prepared the way for James Ivory’s film of The Bostonians. (He was one of the directors who cast me because he had liked my work in Superman.) I was offered the lead role of Basil Ransom, an impoverished writer from Mississippi who comes to New York in the 1870s. Although he fails to find a publisher, he succeeds in wooing and winning Verena Tarrant, a rising star in the feminist movement. The budget was only about $2 million, but the cast included Vanessa Redgrave, Jessica Tandy, Wallace Shawn, and Linda Hunt. Jim Ivory and his producing partner, Ismail Merchant, had worked with the novelist and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala since the mid-1960s, and had established a reputation for elegant and intelligent films like The Europeans, Bombay
Talkie, and Heat and Dust. I was thrilled by the offer; this was exactly the kind of film I wanted to do.

  Clifford Anderson, the charming psychopath in Deathtrap.

  Ismail could only afford to pay me $100,000, less than a tenth of my established price at the time. I insisted that money was not an issue, that this was the kind of work I ought to be doing, but my agent told me, “If you do that picture with those wandering minstrels, it will be one foot in the grave of your career.” (Years later, after the tremendous success of A Room with a View and Howards End, the very same agency took Jim and Ismail on as clients.)

  I cheerfully ignored their advice and went to work on my Missisippi accent. My coach was a gentleman named Haley Barbour III, a prominent lawyer from Yazoo City, who later served as chairman of the Republican National Committee. I sent him a phrase book that I had from my Edith Skinner days at Juilliard. He recorded the sentences, sometimes adding items from newspapers and magazines, then sent the tapes to me up in Williamstown, where I was working again at the festival. I reported for filming in Boston in August 1983.

  James Ivory’s films are so well crafted that most people think the scripts are set in stone and the actors have to do exactly as they are told. In fact the opposite is true. He gathers talented artists on both sides of the camera who are committed to the project and full of their own ideas. Then he culls the best of what everyone has to offer and turns out a polished gem. Ruth Jhabvala used to say that her screenplays were merely blueprints; she left it to the filmmakers to build the building. I don’t think she ever even visited the set. Jim was so relaxed, confident, and easygoing that he brought out the best in the entire company. He was always ready to take advantage of what was actually taking place in front of him. As a director, he, too, was “in the moment.”

  One day we were filming a scene on a beach on Martha’s Vineyard. Basil Ransom is telling Verena (Madeleine Potter) about his difficulty getting published, complaining that no one listens to his ideas. As Madeleine and I ran the lines and Jim lined up the shot, a young cocker spaniel came over to us. I casually picked up a stick and threw it for him while we continued to rehearse the dialogue. He brought the stick back, so I threw it again. We played back and forth until Jim was ready to shoot. I started to coax the dog out of the shot, but Jim suggested we keep playing the game. On the first take, as I was talking about what a failure I was and how hopeless life seemed in New York, I threw the stick, and my new friend chased it as usual. But this time he took it and ran off. I called out for him to come back, but he continued running down the beach, so I turned to Madeleine and said, “See? Nobody listens to me.” Jim liked it and used it in the film. Then he polished the scene with a cutaway shot of the dog running away. This sort of thing happened nearly every day. Working with Jim, I learned that a good film needs these “lucky accidents.”

  The Bostonians for Merchant Ivory, 1983.

  The Bostonians succeeded beyond everyone’s expectations. Daily Variety ran a long article about it under a banner headline that read, ART HOUSE PIC SHOWS SURPRISING B.O. STRENGTH. It opened in a few selected cities, but soon the distributor, Almi Pictures, needed to make additional prints. This time Vincent Canby raved in The New York Times about all the performances (especially Vanessa Redgrave’s, which earned her an Oscar nomination). At the end of his review, he concluded that our film was “the best adaptation of a literary work yet made for the screen.”

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  One of the most enjoyable aspects of filmmaking for me was the opportunity to go on location all over the world without feeling like a tourist. In Rome, Budapest, Zagreb, Paris, or Vancouver, we got to know the locals and were often invited into their homes and their private lives.

  I also enjoyed keeping up with my various sports interests during production. While we made The Bostonians I lived aboard Chandelle on a mooring in Vineyard Haven. Every day I would row ashore and wait on the dock for the crew van to pick me up. Sometimes on weekends my brother, Ben (who lives on the Vineyard), and I would take cast and crew members sailing. Once Jim Ivory came with us for a nighttime sail. I don’t think he’d ever done anything like that before; he seemed impressed that we could navigate confidently in the dark. I took him flying as well and was grateful that he trusted me to bring him back in one piece.

  During the shooting of Superman III, I raced my sailplane on days when the weather was right—puffy cotton-ball clouds from a cold front are ideal. Otherwise I would make my way down to Redhill, in Surrey, home of the Tiger Club. Like going to Mackinac Island, this was a journey into the past. The club was a group of genuine aviators, many of whom had served in the Royal Air Force and flown in the Battle of Britain. The “Tiger” referred to the Tiger Moth, a vintage World War I combat plane; several of them, as well as other open cockpit biplanes like the Stampe and the Stearman, were still maintained by the club. I showed the club president my American license and was thrilled when I was invited to join as an Overseas Member. Before long I too was wearing a flight suit with a leather jacket, a helmet, and goggles, and joining in mock dogfights over the sleepy English countryside. Occasionally five or six planes would fly in tight formation. Sometimes we would have balloon-bursting contests: balloons were released from the center of the airfield, and we would maneuver to hit them with our propellers before they climbed out of sight.

  I especially loved flying inverted. Even though I was strapped in by a seat belt and shoulder harness and was wearing a parachute, as I flipped the plane upside down I always had that little moment when I felt I was going to drop straight out of the cockpit and land in a cornfield below. One crucial thing to remember before turning upside down was to switch to the inverted fuel tank; otherwise there would be a brief coughing and sputtering of the engine followed by a chilling silence. If you were lucky, you could flip the plane upright again and the engine would restart; if not, you would have to make a dead-stick landing in a field. I never had any difficulty flying these vintage aircraft, but I was prepared for “outlandings” from my experience in sailplanes.

  It was a complete coincidence when I received a script called The Aviator, about a taciturn airmail pilot in the 1920s on the route between Elko, Nevada, and Boise, Idaho. The mail was carried in the front compartment of a Stearman. The producers had no idea that I could actually fly a Stearman but agreed with me that if I did my own piloting, we would have opportunities to make the film more realistic than if we had to use a double. I could throw a couple of mailbags into the plane and then hop in, start the engine, and take off, all in one shot. We would also be able to film air-to-air from a helicopter instead of having to cut to close-ups shot in the studio.

  We filmed near the town of Kranjska Gora on the border of Yugoslavia and Austria. My favorite days involved flying, acting, and a little directing as well. A camera would be mounted on the wing, and I would take off with instructions from the director of photography to find a suitable location to film myself on the mail run. The director and crew would hang around the airfield until I returned a couple of hours later.

  Piloting the 1928 Stearman over Yugoslavia.

  Edgar, the introverted main character in The Aviator.

  One afternoon I landed and was given the message that my daughter had just been born in London. Gae and I had been hoping for a weekend, but the baby had decided to arrive a few days early. Before dawn the next morning I drove across the border into Austria and down to the city of Klagenfurt, caught a flight to Vienna, then one from Vienna to London, followed by another high-speed cab ride to the hospital in Wimbledon. I felt extremely guilty about having to race back to work the next day, and also that Gae and I had not decided on a name. Finally, after a month of phone calls and visits between London and Yugoslavia, we decided to call this tiny blond creature with the huge blue eyes, Alexandra.

  Anyone looking at a picture of me and Gae and these two beautiful little children would have thought it a Christmas card portrait of a perfect young family. But I still
had not overcome my reservations about marriage. Even though Gae and I made a genuine, valiant effort to build the bond between us, I still felt unsettled and restless. I was frequently away from home, busying myself with film projects, sports, and work for various social and political causes. Now I had responsibilities that had come to me sooner than I had expected. Even though I was uncertain about my future with Gae, I adored these two little people—and still do. I was determined that no matter what happened, I would always try my hardest not to subject them to the kinds of family difficulties I had faced as a child.

  Alexandra at two.

  As I journeyed back to Yugoslavia, I was in turmoil—elated over the birth of Alexandra but confused and anxious about the direction my life was taking. I continued to brood through the night without finding any solutions. I was greatly relieved when the alarm went off at 6:30 and it was time to go back to work.

  Chapter 9

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  Throughout the 1980s I kept the commitment I had made to avoid action pictures in favor of smaller films with more complex roles. Whenever I couldn’t find a good film project, I went back on the stage. In 1984 I appeared with Vanessa Redgrave and Dame Wendy Hiller in The Aspern Papers in London’s West End. The play, based on the Henry James novella, was written by Vanessa’s father, Sir Michael Redgrave, who had played the lead himself in the 1950s. It was Vanessa’s idea to revive the play as a tribute to him for his seventy-fifth birthday. He never came to rehearsals, but on opening night he took the place of honor in the royal box. This put him so near the stage that as I played his part in his play, it was hard to concentrate because he was watching me so intently. When I met him at the party afterwards, all I remember him saying was, “Keep your head up.”