Read Online Somewhere in Heaven: The Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve by Christopher Andersen - Free Book Online
Authors: Christopher Andersen
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eighty miles an hour. He dropped to his knees just before one wing passed over him and I breathed a sigh of relief.”
Incredibly, Chris drew himself up and asked to shoot the stunt again. The screams of crew members on the ground, terrified as they watched the plane pass just inches over Chris’s head, were clearly audible on the tape. He felt they were too distracting.
As always, Dana was impressed by Chris’s bravado. But she was also concerned that he would someday push the envelope too far. “The show was a tribute to Hollywood stuntmen,” she cracked, “not a tribute to dead actors trying to do their own stunts.”
As horrifying as Chris’s stunt special was, it was not nearly as shocking as the news he and Dana received from his business manager in 1989. Britain’s Inland Revenue Service was claim- ing that, since all four of his Superman films were shot largely in England, he owed $l million in back taxes to the UK.
To pay off this whopping tax debt—not to mention support a lifestyle that included a New York apartment, a country house, a seven-passenger Cheyenne II turboprop he referred to as “Mike,” a glider, and a yacht—Chris took on even more televi- sion work. In the span of a few months, he hosted an environ- mental documentary titled Our Common Future, Night of 100 Stars III , the 16th Annual People’s Choice Awards, The Earthday Party , and the highly rated Valvoline National Driving Test, which also featured the diverse likes of Betty White, Paul Newman, and Walter Cronkite.
There would still be challenging roles onstage—in Joseph Papp’s production of The Winter’s Tale at New York’s Public The-
ater, in a national tour of A. R. Gurney’s Love Letters playing op- posite Julie Hagerty, and of course in numerous productions at Williamstown. But increasingly, it was the acting he did on the small screen—particularly in made-for-TV movies—that paid the bills.
Starting with The Rose and the Jackal on Ted Turner’s TNT net- work—a Civil War–era drama in which a bearded Reeve portrayed Secret Service founder Allan Pinkerton—Chris starred in a Life- time network thriller called Death Dreams and the CBS movie of the week Bump in the Night, followed by Disney’s Road to Avonlea, PBS’s The Road from Runnymeade, HBO’s Tales from the Crypt, and the USA Network’s Mortal Sins —all in the span of twenty months. Despite his prolific output on television, Chris was no longer being asked to spend months at a time on a movie set. That meant he had more time to devote to the causes he felt passion- ately about. A committed environmentalist, he narrated a docu- mentary on the Exxon Valdez oil spill, spearheaded a campaign to block a coal-fired electric plant in upstate New York, urged legislators in Albany to enact a law that allowed private citizens to sue polluters, and went to Washington to urge passage of the
federal Clean Air Act.
One of Chris’s pet crusades ended up pitting him against real estate mogul Donald Trump. Chris had joined others in protest- ing The Donald’s plans to build a huge development bearing his name on Manhattan’s West Side. But when the two men met face-to-face at Trump’s offices on Fifth Avenue, they quickly dis- covered they could work together to make Trump City more palatable to West Siders. “It was,” Trump later said, “the start of a beautiful friendship.”
The list of Chris’s humanitarian works—causes in which Dana became no less involved—ranged from Save the Children and ChildHope to the National Jewish Hospital for Asthma Re- search, the American Heart and Lung Association, Amnesty In- ternational, and MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving). A turning point came when Reeve, outraged by attempts to cut back funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, teamed up with actors Ron Silver, Blair Brown, Stephen Collins, and Bed- ford neighbor Susan Sarandon to form a group called the Cre- ative Coalition. In addition to coming to
Incredibly, Chris drew himself up and asked to shoot the stunt again. The screams of crew members on the ground, terrified as they watched the plane pass just inches over Chris’s head, were clearly audible on the tape. He felt they were too distracting.
As always, Dana was impressed by Chris’s bravado. But she was also concerned that he would someday push the envelope too far. “The show was a tribute to Hollywood stuntmen,” she cracked, “not a tribute to dead actors trying to do their own stunts.”
As horrifying as Chris’s stunt special was, it was not nearly as shocking as the news he and Dana received from his business manager in 1989. Britain’s Inland Revenue Service was claim- ing that, since all four of his Superman films were shot largely in England, he owed $l million in back taxes to the UK.
To pay off this whopping tax debt—not to mention support a lifestyle that included a New York apartment, a country house, a seven-passenger Cheyenne II turboprop he referred to as “Mike,” a glider, and a yacht—Chris took on even more televi- sion work. In the span of a few months, he hosted an environ- mental documentary titled Our Common Future, Night of 100 Stars III , the 16th Annual People’s Choice Awards, The Earthday Party , and the highly rated Valvoline National Driving Test, which also featured the diverse likes of Betty White, Paul Newman, and Walter Cronkite.
There would still be challenging roles onstage—in Joseph Papp’s production of The Winter’s Tale at New York’s Public The-
ater, in a national tour of A. R. Gurney’s Love Letters playing op- posite Julie Hagerty, and of course in numerous productions at Williamstown. But increasingly, it was the acting he did on the small screen—particularly in made-for-TV movies—that paid the bills.
Starting with The Rose and the Jackal on Ted Turner’s TNT net- work—a Civil War–era drama in which a bearded Reeve portrayed Secret Service founder Allan Pinkerton—Chris starred in a Life- time network thriller called Death Dreams and the CBS movie of the week Bump in the Night, followed by Disney’s Road to Avonlea, PBS’s The Road from Runnymeade, HBO’s Tales from the Crypt, and the USA Network’s Mortal Sins —all in the span of twenty months. Despite his prolific output on television, Chris was no longer being asked to spend months at a time on a movie set. That meant he had more time to devote to the causes he felt passion- ately about. A committed environmentalist, he narrated a docu- mentary on the Exxon Valdez oil spill, spearheaded a campaign to block a coal-fired electric plant in upstate New York, urged legislators in Albany to enact a law that allowed private citizens to sue polluters, and went to Washington to urge passage of the
federal Clean Air Act.
One of Chris’s pet crusades ended up pitting him against real estate mogul Donald Trump. Chris had joined others in protest- ing The Donald’s plans to build a huge development bearing his name on Manhattan’s West Side. But when the two men met face-to-face at Trump’s offices on Fifth Avenue, they quickly dis- covered they could work together to make Trump City more palatable to West Siders. “It was,” Trump later said, “the start of a beautiful friendship.”
The list of Chris’s humanitarian works—causes in which Dana became no less involved—ranged from Save the Children and ChildHope to the National Jewish Hospital for Asthma Re- search, the American Heart and Lung Association, Amnesty In- ternational, and MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving). A turning point came when Reeve, outraged by attempts to cut back funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, teamed up with actors Ron Silver, Blair Brown, Stephen Collins, and Bed- ford neighbor Susan Sarandon to form a group called the Cre- ative Coalition. In addition to coming to
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