Somewhere in Heaven: The Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve by Christopher Andersen Page B

was indeed calculated in part to impress the woman he loved. “She is a wonderful rider— a real pro,” he allowed. “I mean, she’s been doing this since she was six! I wanted her to know that I wasn’t a total tenderfoot when it came to horses—that I could keep up.”
    Conversely, Dana pushed aside her natural inclination toward seasickness and embraced Chris’s love of sailing. Over the years,
    they would cruise up and down the Eastern Seaboard, explor- ing the coastline from Nova Scotia down to the Chesapeake. More than once, she came up from belowdecks looking, Chris said, “a little green around the gills.” But she never whined, and over time proved that nothing—not even a raging storm or the imminent threat of being dashed against a rock in rough seas— could rattle her.
    On one excursion north to Nova Scotia, the Chandelle en- countered a fog bank and began to drift dangerously close to the rocky shore. While Chris and his half brother Kevin sweated out the arrival of the Canadian Coast Guard, Dana seemed unper- turbed. After a Coast Guard cutter showed up in the nick of time to tow the Chandelle and its passengers to safety, Dana thanked the cutter’s crew by whipping up some breakfast and serving it to them on deck.
    These shared passions only served to draw Chris and Dana closer together. “One of the things that’s so great about Dana,” he gushed to one writer when they returned to the United States, “is we sail together, we dive together, we ride together. She plays a good game of tennis. She’s a great dancer. She laughs all the time. She thinks life is to be enjoyed. So I’ve got a great partner.”
    Now when they returned to Williamstown for the summer, they both felt they were returning to their house. “Gae really had had nothing to do with the Williamstown house,” Chris explained, “but Dana’s influence was everywhere. We felt like a real couple.” While his personal life was coming together, Chris found he was persona non grata as far as major Hollywood producers were con- cerned. He stormed out of an audition for Pretty Woman when it
    became clear that the director Garry Marshall was not seriously considering him for the lead role (it went to Richard Gere). When it came time to bring Tom Wolfe’s blockbuster novel The Bonfire of the Vanities to the screen, Chris met with the producers and made an impassioned plea as to why he was perfect for the part.
    “I know this guy. I am this guy,” he said of the book’s Ivy League–educated Park Avenue protagonist. “There is no part of him that I don’t understand, and there is no part of him that I can’t play.”
    The producers agreed. “You would be absolutely perfect,” one said. “I think you’d be great casting for the role, and there’s no way we’re giving you this part.”
    No one had to explain why. “What was not being said,” Chris later explained, “and I mean the ‘filling in the blanks’ said, was ‘I’m not going with somebody who hasn’t had a hit in two years.’ ”
    Chris began taking jobs he wouldn’t even have considered just a few years earlier. He was forced to stand idly by as Saturday Night Live ’s Dana Carvey hosted Superman’s Fiftieth Anniversary: A Celebration of the Man of Steel on CBS, but Chris jumped at the chance to host another prime-time TV special: The World’s Great- est Stunts: A Tribute to Hollywood Stuntmen.
    No one who knew the thrill-seeking Chris was surprised when he agreed to do the stuntman special. It quickly became clear that, in making the special, he was eager to take some chances of his own. At one point during the shooting, Chris stood on the tar- mac as a small plane zoomed out of the sky and headed straight for him.
    “It was Chris’s idea to end the special that way,” the plane’s pilot, Jim Petri, recalled. “I could hardly believe what he was
    asking.” When it came time to shoot the scene, Petri went on, “I headed right for him at about