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Summary

Unlike many actors, Reeve has no scandals to hide. This biography reveals him as the talented, heroic man that he is. In "Superhero", readers see a man who has been driven from day one, driven to succeed academically, athletically, professionally, and after his accident, even more determined--to walk again, to help others in need, and to prove that the soul and spirit can soar, even when the body can barely move. Photos. Martin's Press.

Superhero

CHAPTER ONE

America remains a young enough country that many of its citizens feel the need for a sense of history, a background and identity, the knowledge of where their ancestors came from before appearing on these shores.

It's a connection to the past the United States alone can't offer. Most often genealogical research confirms that emigration was the only chance a family had to evade poverty, starvation, or some other type of cruel death. The poor, tired, hungry, and the huddled masses have found welcoming arms in America for more than two centuries, even if the barriers are now starting to rise.

For some, however, the past reveals surprising amounts of wealth and power. Christopher Reeve is one of those people. His bearing and patrician good looks seem to indicate a moneyed background--which he had--but it's hardly nouveau riche. The privilege dates back generations.

On his father's side, Chris can trace the lineage all the way to thirteenth-century France, where the D'Olier family was nobility, appointed to any number of lucrative offices by the kings. Inevitably, the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century made a number of changes. Many of the hereditary aristocracylost their lives. Most others lost their titles, wealth, and land. Even those who clung on didn't have an easy time.

Chris's great-great-great-grandfather, Michel D'Olier, was born in France after the Revolution, after the Napoleonic Wars that left the country much poorer and looking for a way to climb into the nineteenth century under the Bourbon kings. As a young man he met an Irish girl and moved to her homeland, specifically county Mayo, where his son, William, was born.

If France after Napoleon had seemed like a shattered place, then Ireland in the middle of the nineteenth century must have been like one of Dante's circles of hell. The blights of the potato crop, the mass evictions by absentee landlords, and the failure of the British government to offer any real help had left the population decimated, smallholdings in ruins. Anyone who could headed west, to the land of opportunity.

William D'Olier was among them. Landing in New York with a little money, he made his way to Philadelphia. He was better off than many of the new immigrants, with some money and some skill, which he invested wisely to start the first of his cotton mills. Soon there were more, a small empire, which would bring him riches, and his heirs power.

Money bought him position in a society where the dollar was king. And it helped his children. William's son, Franklin D'Olier, became the president of Prudential Insurance during the Second World War (as well as one of the founders, and the first commander, of the American Legion).

Franklin D'Olier Reeve was Franklin's grandson, born in the family home in Philadelphia in 1928, before his parents settled in the wealthy area of Morristown, New Jersey.

Sometimes the children of fortune find themselves hating all that's been given to them on a silver platter. And that seemed to be the case of Franklin Reeve.

"He reacted against all the privilege by cutting himself off from it," Chris explained.

However, he wasn't completely without options. An extremely gifted student, by the time he parted ways from his family he already had a place at Princeton and knew that the ascetic, hermetic world of academia was where he wanted to make his future. He lived on campus, graduating in 1950 with a B.A. in English.

Franklin might have turned his back on his immediate family and their money, but that didn't mean he ignored all his relatives. One who caught his attention was Barbara Pitney Lamb, a distant cousin who had barely begun her own degree course at Vassar. In 1950, just after Franklin's graduation, they married and moved to Manhattan, where Franklin was set to begin work toward his doctorate at Columbia University.

He quickly made his name as a star student, clambering up the steps of the ivory tower. His degree might have been in English, but his real passion was Slavic, and particularly Russian, literature--hardly a field which would make him rich.

Certainly being a graduate student didn't help his bank balance, so, as well as attending school, Franklin took a variety of jobs to help support himself and Barbara--jobs that had more to do with the working than the thinking classes, as a longshoreman, a waiter, even an actor. (His political leanings were to the left, although in the early 1950s--the era of McCarthy and the HUAC hearings--that wasn't something anyone wanted to advertise.) Even living on the Upper East Side, a fairly inexpensive neighborhood in those days, making ends meet was difficult.

Barbara did what she could, penning some freelance journalism. But it wasn't too long before she had other things on her mind, discovering at the beginning of 1952 that she was pregnant.

On September 25, she presented Franklin with a son, whom they named Christopher. He was a sweet-looking boy, born with a shock of blond hair, and eyes that gradually turned blue. Itspoke volumes about Franklin's academic aspirations that he asked Frank Kermode, the British scholar and writer, to be the boy's godfather.

Within a year the couple had added another child, Benjamin. For Franklin, pressured both to support his rapidly growing family and achieve his own goals, it was a difficult time. Neither was it easy for Barbara. She was just twenty, suddenly forced to squeeze every dollar and be responsible for two babies--a shock to someone who'd grown up, if not rich, then at least in very comfortable circumstances.

Inevitably, finances put strains on the marriage, which wasn't proving to be the strongest of bonds, anyway. For almost three more years the family managed to limp along from paycheck to paycheck, things gradually worsening.

The storms around them brought Chris and Ben close together. With circumstances at home so straitened, the way to lose themselves was in their imagination. Anything was grist for the mill, even boxes that had held groceries.

"To us they became ships," Chris recalled years later, "simply because we said they were."

It was impossible for the boys not to notice the way things were going between their parents. It reached a head when Chris was three, and the Reeves filed for divorce.

In the fifties most couples stayed together, even in the bleakest marital situations, "for the sake of the children." But Franklin and Barbara's union had broken down to the point where that was impossible, where hatred seemed to replace everything else, and anything was fair game to get an advantage over the other party--even using the children.

The effect on the boys was to send them even further inside themselves, to make them small, independent beings in their own minds.

"My father and mother were always fighting over me," Chrisexplained, "and therefore canceled each other out. Consequently, I grew up not wanting to depend on them or anybody else. That's probably the key to my personality."

On New Year's Eve, 1956, Barbara left New York and moved back to her hometown of Princeton with the kids. While they lived with her, Franklin had visitation rights, which he exercised to the letter, making sure to drop the boys off close to--but not at--their mother's house. He wanted no personal contact with his ex-wife. They were pawns in what would be an almost fifteen-year war of silence and attrition between Franklin and Barbara.

"I felt torn between them," Chris would say in 1980. "They had a tendency to use me as a chess piece."

In the college town, the asthmatic Barbara managed to keep body and soul together for the family by continuing the journalism she'd begun in New York, this time working for the local paper, Town Topics, eventually becoming an editor.

It was difficult; financially things were even tighter than when she'd been with Franklin, but at least she was free to be herself again. The real casualties were the children, with Chris in particular "a solemn child," paying the price for her freedom.

Franklin had remarried, and was still living in New York, slowly working his way up the academic ladder. He would go on to have a career even more distinguished in its own way than his son's. He'd teach creative writing at Yale, then Slavic languages at Connecticut's Wesleyan University, publishing a number of novels, twelve books of poetry, and several volumes of literary criticism. He was, Chris admitted, a remarkable man, who could "do everything--from playing Parcheesi to translating Dostoyevsky."

But Franklin's world was completely circumscribed by the boundaries of the campus and the ivory tower. He knew nothing of popular culture, or the everyday world, and didn't careto know. To a young boy whose world was changing every day, and who only saw his father on the weekends, that must have made him seem distant, possibly even cold.

For Christopher and Benjamin life had quickly become complex. But it was about to become even more so. In Princeton Barbara began dating a stockbroker, Tristam Johnson, and in 1959, Barbara Pitney Lamb became Barbara Johnson.

Johnson had done well for himself, managing brokerage houses, and for the first time in their lives, the boys found themselves living with money--not only was there was no need to watch every cent, but they were surrounded by material things.

But with this luxury came a new strangeness--two younger stepbrothers, Mark and Brock, Johnson's kids--a ready-made family. (And a family of high achievers, at that: Mark is now an architect, and Brock a classicist, having studied at Yale. Allison, the daughter Barbara and Tristam would have later, has become a doctor.)

Johnson was a generous, open man, almost the opposite of the emotionally hermetic Franklin. He'd grown up in the privileged WASP traditions, and wanted--and could afford--the best for his family. But one thing he refused to allow in the house on exclusive Campleton Circle was television, which he called "the boob tube." Certainly Chris took much of the Waspish style that has always been his trademark from his stepfather. The household offered stability for Chris and Ben after the seesawing of the last few years, an atmosphere of love and laughter, of weekends away in winter, learning to ski in the Poconos, and summers on Cape Cod.

But the past had left its mark on the boys, most certainly on Chris. The patterns had already been set, not only for independence, but also in the need to excel, to be the very best at anything he undertook--a way of pleasing and getting theattention of Franklin, because he simply couldn't understand the emotional distance his real father put between them. Without a doubt, Chris put his father on a pedestal. The man had achieved a great deal, and done it all on his own abilities. The only way his son could live up to that was to be the best at anything and everything he undertook, whatever the price. When Chris was a teenager, his father taught him to sail--a passion that would remain with him--and soon had him skippering boats.

"I would win a lot," Chris remembered. "But it was at a certain cost. I would terrorize my crew. I was really aggressive, demanding, and critical of myself and other people. If I didn't win, it would set me back for days."

Johnson might have been only their stepfather, but he treated Chris and Ben just like his own kids, enrolling them in Princeton Day School, exclusive and private, where they'd be guaranteed the best education and a chance to fulfill their potential (something Ben would begin to do when he was thirteen, inventing a new computer language that would be used at Princeton University). Tests quickly established that Chris was a very bright kid, and it was even suggested that he skip a grade, until an astute school psychologist realized that putting him in a situation where he couldn't excel might be emotionally damaging to Chris, which would likely have been true.

He was musically gifted, a soprano until his voice broke, singing with the madrigal group at school. And he'd shown an early talent for the piano, which had been encouraged and enhanced by lessons. In fact, it had become a great solace to him, something he could do on his own, alone, sitting there and losing himself in the compositions, with Ravel and Debussy--notably, both quite contemplative--as his favorites. (He'd go on to become an assistant conductor of the school orchestra.)

Even though he participated in sports (he fenced and playedhockey, but steered clear of most team games), Chris tended to keep himself somewhat isolated, on the emotional sidelines. If he didn't become involved, then he couldn't be hurt. And so his interests were largely solitary, like music.

One thing he'd never considered was acting. After all, on the surface it was very much a group activity, involving the entire cast rather than the individual. And while theater might have been highly thought of in the Johnson house, the idea of actually performing had never been discussed.

Chris ended up in acting more or less through a side door. When he was in the fourth grade, and in the middle of a science class, a representative of Princeton's McCarter Theater came into the room to ask if any of the kids would be interested in taking a singing role in a production of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Yeoman of the Guard.

Chris could sing, he had musical experience, and for reasons he never fully understood, he found himself with his arm raised. He really had no idea what to expect--his only stage experience had been with the school or church choirs, which didn't involve putting himself into any kind of character. No sooner had he begun rehearsals than he discovered that he had a taste for the theater. There was something about it that suited him perfectly: he was able to lose the rather serious boy in a costume and makeup, and become someone completely different.

"If you look at pictures of me when I was a kid, I never cracked a smile," he said in Newsweek. "Acting was a way to help me loosen up, expose myself, and relax."

That first production certainly seemed to turn his head, and he quickly became very active in drama at Princeton Day, almost as if he felt the need to make up for lost time; of course, involvement in that did offer a few other attractions, too: "Everyone else in school would be sitting there working on some testin third period, but I'd look at my watch and excuse myself and go to the theater."

Escaping tests and lessons was fine, but in the end it was a peripheral reason. The theater had simply captured him, in large part because "being somebody else took me away from a lot of the things I was not prepared to deal with."

His home life might have seemed perfectly settled, plenty of money, a good education, opportunities to do almost anything he wanted, but the scars of his parents' divorce remained quite raw. Indeed, that might well have been one of the reasons he attempted to do so much, simply to occupy his mind and his body, and to keep the darker thoughts at bay.

It didn't help that he'd developed into a gawky and somewhat sickly teenager, not the hunk with Superman looks who'd emerge in a few years. He'd inherited his mother's asthma and suffered from various childhood allergies. There had also been an attack of alopecia, a nervous disease which caused his hair to fall out in clumps. In his own mind, at least, Chris was still very much in the ugly duckling stage. But covered in greasepaint, he could forget about all that for a few hours, and leave real life behind.

"I was very tall and very awkward. I was six foot two by the time I was thirteen and I wasn't well coordinated. I had Osgood-Schlatter disease [a medical condition which leaves fluid in the joints, making movement a little jerky] ... . I used to stand with my legs locked all the time, and I hated dancing."

And in 1965, hating dancing put him very much on the outside of teenage culture. The Beatles had well and truly conquered America, dragging the rest of the British Invasion in their wake. Pop music had really become the voice of a generation. Everybody danced, it seemed ... except for Chris, and that only served to isolate him even more.

So, in that way too, the theater proved a solace. The wayhe viewed himself, he wasn't about to get the girls, certainly not the ones he wanted. And being of a more earnest, academic nature, he wasn't really suited to playing the flirting game. He was just too serious.

"A lot of girls weren't ready for that," he admitted later in Teen. "I don't mean serious about 'I love you,' but about World War III and the latest article in The New Statesman. I was not a whole lot of laughs."

Being involved in production after production meant that he could avoid the problem entirely, and simply sidestep the whole dating process.

"I can remember that it solved the problem of Friday and Saturday nights. I didn't have to worry about how I was going to ask little Suzy out for a date, because I was too busy in the theater anyway."

Too busy was hardly an exaggeration. As soon as he discovered acting, it seemed to take him like a fever. After The Yeoman of the Guard, he took part in his first school play, Little Mary Sunshine, and from that point he was in virtually every school play for the rest of his time there.

"He always had the imagination, the knack for capturing an adventurous character's spirit and projecting it," was the assessment of his drama teacher, Herbert McAneny.

But Princeton Day was only able to put on one play each term, a total of three every school year, and that wasn't enough acting to satisfy Chris. He had the bug, and he needed to act as much as possible. The solution seemed to be with the group for whom he'd sung in The Yeoman of the Guard, the McCarter Theater.

From the time he was twelve, Chris was a regular at the theater, which was situated close to his home. From his singing role, he graduated to small dramatic parts in The Diary of Anne Frank and Our Town, and was amazed at the transformation in himself when he was acting, and the effect it had on him.

"I'm not me, I'm him. I'm the boy in Our Town . That got me through a lot of turmoil."

Given his sheer size, it wasn't long before Chris was taking on adult roles and beginning to realize that what he wanted in life was to make acting his career.

"I knew very early on that I wanted to be an actor," he said. "I was saved a lot of soul searching--who am I, what am I going to do with my life. Acting is what I do best."

Many parents would have discouraged such a path, since it would seem to be one full of disappointments and poverty. But Barbara and Tristam Johnson took the opposite tack--they were completely supportive of Chris's decision since it was quite apparent, as Barbara said, that "he seemed happy only when he was in a play."

The people at the McCarter Theater would play a big part in Christopher's development, not only as an actor, but also as a person. His mother and stepfather did all they could to encourage him, but it was with the group that he really began to blossom and find himself, to learn his weaknesses and his strengths and begin to accept them.

"The people I really owe my upbringing to are the repertory actors at the McCarter Theater in Princeton," he'd publicly acknowledge once he became a star. "In that atmosphere I learned to think for myself."

McCarter was a true repertory company, tackling anything and everything, from Broadway musicals to comedy to tragedy. Run by the parents of John Lithgow (the first of a number of Reeve associates who'd go on to fame and fortune), the playhouse had no set agenda beyond good entertainment. Even if an actor didn't have an onstage role, he or she was expected to help out in one way or another, sometimes in the most menial of tasks, like sweeping up. It was perfect training for those who saw drama as a career, since they'd definitely be starting at the bottom. For Chris, with his special talent, that often meant helpingwith the music, singing in the chorus or playing the piano--putting his other skills to good use.

Even when he was doing something as simple as that he seemed to stand out, to have a presence that made people notice him.

"I remember a director I worked under named Milton Lyon," Chris said. "I had just been in a production of Finian's Rainbow, which he directed. He said to me, 'You better know what you want, because you might get it. I think you might be the one in ten thousand who really has the potential to go a long, long way.' That encouraged me; handed to me at age fourteen, it made a lasting impression."

And it was bound to; at that age--possibly any age--a boy with his heart set on becoming a professional actor would eat up such praise, and it would spur him on. Not that Chris needed much encouragement, really He already seemed completely dedicated to the theater, and pursued it as doggedly and thoroughly as everything else he attempted. He read his way through the great plays and all the books on acting he could find. The summer between his ninth and tenth grades were spent in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, studying stagecraft and makeup at the Lawrenceville School. The year after that, 1968, he spent his first summer at the Williamstown Theatre in Massachusetts, as an apprentice, more or less an assistant stage manager, doing any job that needed doing around the theater. Neither summer was particularly glamorous, but it was all part of the training, the background experiences he needed to make him into a real theatrical actor, which was the only kind of acting he considered at the time. The stage was art, and that appealed to the intellectual in him. Anything else--film, and most particularly television--was a lesser form, appealing to the lowest common denominator.

Certainly all his work paid off quite handsomely, since the next summer found him on stages all over the country. At theLoeb Drama Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he had the role of Beliaev in A Month in the Country. From there he traveled up to Maine and performed in the Boothbay Playhouse, then rounded out the school break playing Aeneas in Troilus and Cressida in the San Diego Shakespeare Festival--which was enough to get him membership in Actors' Equity, the next step to making the stage his profession.

For someone who wasn't yet seventeen, it was like a dream come true. Going from coast to coast performing the classics was exactly what he wanted from life. His classmates might have gone to Europe or traveled during the vacation, but none of them could have enjoyed their time as much as he.

At the time, he was quite content to be a part of the company, paying his dues. He knew that was the way things went. And it also suited him to be one of the crowd, not particularly singled out. After hiding inside himself all through his childhood, he was still learning just who he might really be, and how this person who was Christopher Reeve could affect people.

And affect people he definitely could, at least on the stage. Once he turned seventeen Chris had an agent to handle his theatrical work. He'd been noticed and heartily approved of. However, in the Johnson family, there was no question of him graduating from high school and plunging straight into the profession, testing his fortune on the boards without a solid academic foundation. First of all he'd have to go to college.

The males of the Reeve line had been Princeton men--both Chris's father and grandfather had gone there, and it was expected that he would, too. So when he announced that he planned to attend Cornell, Franklin Reeve wasn't especially happy. Chris insisted it was because of Cornell's excellent theater arts department (although he was going to study English and music theory), but there were a number of other reasons operating below the surface.

Chris had spent virtually his whole life in Princeton. Going to college there would have offered him no new horizons; it might even have closed a few. He was at an age where he needed to go off on his own, to have a life away from home where he could be himself, free from the constraints of family. But, perhaps more importantly, choosing Cornell rather than blindly following family tradition was a way for him to assert his independence. Chris admired his father, and was certainly proud of his academic achievements, but on a more personal level there was a great deal more ambivalence. If he went to Princeton, what he did there could be directly compared to his father, just as he had been for the last eighteen years. He had a need to excel, and to earn his father's praises. Scholastically he couldn't directly compete with Franklin; hardly anyone could have. Going elsewhere he could neatly sidestep that, and begin to really become his own person.

The reasons added up, and Chris had made up his mind; no matter what was said, he wasn't about to be dissuaded. Before he could start life anew as a freshman, though, he had an acting engagement for the summer, his biggest so far, as part of the national touring company of The Irregular Verb To Love, with the venerable Celeste Holm in the lead role. Not only was it a major break for a young man, it was a rough-and-ready education, moving around the country for almost three months, playing the male ingenue night after night after night. It was the longest run he'd been involved with, but the repetition didn't make the magic of the theater pall. Quite the opposite; it left him even more convinced that this was what he'd been born to do.

Childhood hadn't been easy for Chris. His social skills hadn't been highly developed, and he'd never quite mastered male banter or the kind of small talk that seemed to hold girls' interest. Shyness had kept him from trying to be accepted by thecrowd. But acting, the process of losing himself in someone else, had not only given him a destiny; it was, ironically, slowly forming a Christopher Reeve with confidence and a certain maturity, beginning to be comfortable with himself, and accept himself, faults and all.

He was still a fairly gawky teenager, tall, skinny, quite a physical distance from the handsome young man who'd be turning heads as Superman in a few years. His coordination had been improving (over a decade of skiing, fencing, and sailing had helped), and the Osgood-Schlatter disease that had plagued him had faded.

One thing that had remained strong was the urge to succeed at anything he undertook. To be so driven, so young, was far from a good thing, but that was simply Chris, and he'd made it work to his advantage as an actor. He'd gone after every challenge, drunk in every experience he possibly could. And he'd succeeded; to be fully professional with an agent while still a junior in high school was a remarkable achievement.

Acting in the legitimate theater was something his father, as someone who taught and wrote literature, could approve of, an important factor to Chris, who was constantly seeking his father's approval, both in his actions and his successes. Finally, having done so well and accomplished something quite concrete, he could begin to put that obsession behind him and let his sense of self, as well as his self-esteem, really develop.

He'd been lucky, spending most of his childhood surrounded by money and with parents who fully supported his theatrical leanings, even though they weren't likely to offer him either money or security. They realized, as Barbara Johnson said, that only when he was in the theater did he really come alive, and for someone so scarred by his parents' divorce that was an important consideration.

Though he was willing to satisfy everyone by putting a collegedegree under his belt, Chris already knew that it wouldn't change his feelings about the future. A B.A. in English might help during the lean times, but he still wanted to act. With him it had become a true vocation. And so, in September 1970 his parents drove him, and most of his worldly belongings, to the Cornell campus in Ithaca, New York. A new life was calling.

SUPERHERO: A BIOGRAPHY OF CHRISTOPHER REEVE. Copyright © 1998 by Chris Nickson. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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