Superhero Page 6

  And Chris was the kind of person who took his responsibilities seriously. All this was new to him, and he wanted to do it, as he did everything, to the very best of his ability. He’d plunged into the publicity machine and discovered he was very welcome because he was voluble, charming, and articulate, a rare combination in an actor, and rarer still in a movie star. He was concerned with his work, not his image. He was Superman, and for now that suited him very well. It never occurred to him that he’d end up completely typecast in the public eye as the Man of Steel, and that what seemed like a luxurious liberation would end up being a trap.

  Immediately, though, there was no reason for him to think that the cape of a superhero would end up being a millstone around his neck. Chris’s experience was in the theater, where that simply didn’t happen. He might be a movie star, but he was very much a novice in that game. In his world you moved from one part to the next. You performed and moved on. Granted, in film some people managed to avoid it. Harrison Ford, for example, evaded Han Solo, even though he played the character in three films. But Han wasn’t the central character—Luke Skywalker was, and Mark Hamill was never able to leave him behind. For most screen actors, that was the case. Sean Connery, and to a lesser extent Roger Moore, will forever be associated with James Bond. Michael Keaton managed to avoid being dogged by Batman largely because the hero was always masked, and because he’d already established a strong movie career beforehand.

  Chris was playing something more than just a known quantity. In America, indeed throughout the world, Superman was an icon, a symbol both of the first golden age of comic books and of America itself (and the two were intertwined, comic books being so peculiarly American). In a way, that made Chris an American ambassador of sorts. He was the focus of the film. Even though he appeared for little more than half the running time, the earlier part was merely prologue; nothing really happened until he came on-screen. And he wasn’t in a spaceship or on some alien landscape. This was quite recognizably Earth, specifically New York, in the present day. There was no mask—as Superman or Clark Kent, we saw him. Finally, of course, the film was phenomenally successful. After being seen by so many people, and so widely praised, it would have been almost impossible to have not been typecast to a degree.

  For now, though, with Superman breaking every box-office record in the book, Chris was being deluged with scripts. He was young, handsome, and hot, and everyone wanted him.

  He could have had his pick of virtually any project, but that was one thing he didn’t want. Having this Hollywood clout, he thought, should be a freedom, rather than a restriction. He should be able to do what he wanted, rather than follow the prescribed path for up-and-coming stars. He wanted to work with “the Varsity: Alan Pakula, Sidney Pollack, Lumet, Michael Apted, Ritchie—that gang—Arthur Hiller, Colin Higgins. I want to work with the pros, the top team of experienced people—David Lean, George Cukor. I like the old masters.”

  It was an impressive list of names, and it showed that Chris knew exactly who the classy filmmakers were, that he’d studied the art, just as he’d taken the time to study everything he was involved in. But Hollywood was on a cusp. These people were the old school, and it was the new school—Spielberg, Lucas, and others—who were making the films everyone wanted to see. The studios were throwing money at them. It was the dawn of the age of special effect as star, where the $40 million spent on Superman would end up seeming like small potatoes indeed.

  Chris was in a position to pick what he wanted to do next, and he was determined to make a careful choice, to end up with something that truly appealed to him, rather than simply grab the big-money roles. That in itself showed an adventurous spirit, a willingness to walk away from the yellow-brick road.

  He turned down Urban Cowboy, and then refused what was, literally, a $1 million offer to star in American Gigolo for the moral and pleasingly old-fashioned reason that “I found the idea of a man servicing older women for money quite distasteful.”

  Then there was Body Heat, which he bypassed.

  “I didn’t think I’d be convincing as a seedy lawyer,” he explained. Instead the part went to his friend William Hurt, his second major film role.

  This was Christopher Reeve as a man of staunch principle. The part was far more important than the money.

  Needless to say, his agent wasn’t happy to see him walking away from any number of open gold mines. But Chris knew what he wanted, and it was something he’d stated before, picturing himself as more of a romantic leading man. He explained it to the Detroit News: “They’ve had an awful lot of brooding leading men—complex, secretive characters played by guys like De Niro, Hoffman, Pacino. I suppose I can offer a simpler alternative.”

  In a film world where the lines between the good guys and the bad guys were becoming very blurred, Chris wanted to hark back to a more innocent age, where you knew who was who, and what was what. The only problem was that they weren’t making big films like that any more. In the late 1970s there wasn’t much call for Jimmy Stewart-type characters.

  Meanwhile, Chris’s name was still being associated with a number of projects. Dink Stover at Yale didn’t sound particularly promising, and soon vanished into the mist, never to be heard of again, as did many of the others.

  A lot of people were beginning to wonder just what it would take to excite Chris. He was still hot, but in Hollywood people can cool off very quickly. If he was going to maintain his status as a movie star, he needed to strike soon, and in a project with a big budget and plenty of visibility.

  He struck, but what he plumped for was a film that had neither a lot of money nor a great deal of visibility. When he finally put his name on the dotted line, it was for another half a million dollars to star in Somewhere in Time, an adaptation of Richard Matheson’s novel Bid Time Return.

  The entire budget for the film was $4 million (which would eventually rise to $6 million). This wasn’t something with blockbuster written all over it, and that suited Chris perfectly. It was his chance to “escape the cape.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  While Chris now had the opportunity to see his professional life blossom, on a personal level he was becoming far more focused, and he had Superman to thank for that, too.

  His days of haunting Manhattan’s singles bars and waking up with women whose names he didn’t know were now behind him, just as he was coming into his own as a sex symbol. For now Chris had a real established girlfriend, the first relationship he’d enjoyed that had lasted more than a few months. He’d been smitten on the odd occasion before, but this, beyond any doubt, was the real thing.

  Her name was Gae Exton, and he’d met her at Pinewood Studios. He had, quite literally, bumped into her at the studio commissary. In costume (as Superman, and amazingly not as Clark Kent) he’d stepped back from the counter backward and trodden on her toe.

  It wasn’t the most auspicious first encounter.

  “She just thought I was a large American person with black hair and wore red boots,” he recalled. While she didn’t seem overly impressed with his appearance, he couldn’t quite get her out of his mind. So it was serendipity when they met again a few weeks later. This time Gae managed to emerge without injury. But she did walk away with something else—a date with Chris.

  Like a lot of women, she found him attractive, partly for those blue eyes of his. But she was quite adamant that “it wasn’t love at first sight.”

  Gae Exton was an ambitious woman. She always had been. Just a few months older than Chris, she’d already done a lot with her life. Growing up every bit as resolutely middle-class as Chris, after convent school she’d worked in the restaurants her father owned, before opening her own place when she was just twenty-one.

  Not content with that, on the side she’d also had a moderately successful modeling career. For a kid who’d been even more sickly than Chris, in and out of hospitals until she was a teenager, she’d developed a huge amount of drive and energy.

  After a while Gae ha
d had enough of the camera, and decided to apply her management skills and model contacts to running a modeling and casting agency in London. The day she met Chris she’d been at Pinewood talking to casting directors for various television shows.

  Unlike Chris, she wasn’t exactly single when they met. In fact, Chris noted, emotionally she “was fragile as an eggshell when we met.” Her marriage to David Iverson had collapsed, and the couple had only recently separated. Iverson had come up from the working classes, a coal miner who’d remade himself as a businessman before finally turning to crime (in 1979 he’d be sentenced to three years in prison for cocaine smuggling). The last thing Gae was looking for in her life was a new relationship, a romantic involvement.

  Nonetheless, she went out with Chris. Their first date took place on October 16, 1977 (Chris, showing a strong romantic side, would refer to their first date as “our anniversary” with both Gae and later with Dana Morosini), when he took her to see The Belle of Amherst starring Julie Harris, playing on Shaftes-bury Avenue in the West End—London’s equivalent of Broadway—before they went on to enjoy a quiet dinner.

  By the end of the evening Gae knew she liked Chris, a feeling that petrified her. She knew where it could lead, and she just wasn’t ready to deal with that.

  “I didn’t want him to kiss me. I was scared of my physical attraction to him … . I jumped out of the taxi, shouted, ‘Bye!’ and ran away. The first kiss didn’t take place until the third date.”

  Wary she might well have been, but the attraction was strong enough that she didn’t turn him down when he asked her out again … and again. Chris had to dismantle her defenses, and he did it slowly and carefully, being every inch the gentleman.

  “She was shocked that I wasn’t going to muscle past the door into her bed. I think the fact that we tiptoed into the relationship helped.”

  Prior to Gae, Chris’s girlfriends had all been actresses, as much a part of the theater as he was. While those relationships can, and have, worked for some, it takes two remarkable people to thrive together in such a hermetic world. For most it’s a recipe for disaster. Gae’s connection to the business was peripheral. Even if she saw the same things as Chris, her perspective was utterly different, that of an outsider. There was no inherent sense of competition between them.

  And that meant Chris could relax around her, “let go” as he put it. She was quite successful in her own right, established in her profession, so she wouldn’t simply be an adjunct to him, the little woman on his arm.

  Once Gae’s wariness had finally worn off, and she relaxed too, she quickly found herself falling for Chris. It was completely mutual; he was crazy about her. Four months after their first date he moved into her apartment in Knightsbridge, right in the heart of London.

  It was a major step for both of them. Chris had never lived with anyone before—he’d never had a relationship that had been anywhere near as serious. And for Gae to let someone become so close so soon after her marriage showed just how deeply she felt, that she was willing to risk all this. It was love, true love.

  Initially there was no question of them marrying, in large part because Gae was still legally married to David Iverson. More than that, however, neither of them felt the need to have a wedding ring keeping them together.

  Some people thought that the reluctance to marry was all on Chris’s part, that the divorce his parents had gone through when he was young had left him somehow scarred and afraid to make that same commitment himself. But he wasn’t about to give credence to thoughts like that.

  “It’s true that I was the product of a certain polarity in a divorcing family,” he explained in Cosmopolitan, “but I refuse to trace my attitude back to my parents. That’s a sixty-five-dollar-an-hour question.”

  However, one thing he felt no need to do was parade his romance in public. He might be getting plenty of attention for the role he was playing in Superman, but this was his private life, and he was determined to keep the two separate.

  For her part, Gae saw no need to have legal ties to someone she shared her life and love with. She’d done it once and been burned; there was no call to repeat the mistake. She was a strong, independent woman, not threatened or intimidated by Chris’s impending stardom.

  “That was one of the things that attracted me to her,” Chris said. “She was and is singularly unimpressed by celebrities. You’re a movie star? Fine. A shoe salesman? Fine. That quality is very attractive to me, because you know you have to sink or swim on your own personality.”

  She was certainly his rock and his touchstone with reality as the hype about the movie grew during 1978. Without even trying, Chris was becoming famous. He and Gae went out together, but privately—to dinner, the theater, dancing. And that was a good thing, since it gave the relationship a chance to grow and develop away from the spotlight.

  By the time they made their first public performance they’d been together for a year. But when they revealed themselves publicly as a couple, it was in the very highest style, when Superman was screened for Queen Elizabeth, and Chris got to introduce Gae to Her Majesty.

  Even for such an occasion, Chris was reluctant to subject Gae to scrutiny.

  “I’m going to have to be a public person, but I was keen on Gae not becoming a household name, because then we could lose what we have.”

  Interestingly, the part of their relationship which came under the microscope more than any other was the fact that they lived together without being married. In England it hardly raised an eyebrow, but the American press frequently brought it up as a topic. In the United States, of course, it was deemed fine to marry and divorce frequently, but to “live in sin” was somehow morally reprehensible, and certainly something Superman would never have done. It forced Chris into a corner, having to defend the way he and Gae had chosen to live their lives, rather than having people just accept them as a couple.

  “I’m not advocating our solution to the general public,” he found himself almost apologizing, “but it works for us. We are as married as any couple in America. We are absolutely together and faithful to each other, but I appreciate Gae more when I don’t have her locked up and filed under ‘G.’ … Our feelings are still growing and changing. We have a commitment, yet with an improvisational quality to it that keeps it alive.”

  That it should even have been commented on showed a great deal of hypocrisy on the part of the press, but in the late seventies the whole idea of “alternative lifestyles” and “living together” still smacked very heavily of the hippie days of free love, drugs, and social anarchy.

  In retrospect it seems more than a little over-the-top, if not completely ridiculous. But at that time, and to a lot of people, particularly in Middle America, it was a contentious issue, and one that brought about even more debate once Gae became pregnant in 1979.

  It was unplanned, but still completely wanted. Once the news leaked out—inevitably, after a while it was impossible not to notice Gae was pregnant—the questions, which had eventually died down, started anew.

  “Having been married once, I’m in no hurry to do it again,” Gae said. “Chris and I have an excellent relationship the way it is, and we don’t want to change it. We’re a couple in everybody’s eyes—I think most people forget we’re not married.”

  In the end, what did it matter, anyway? Married or not, they were together, they were happy, in love. Living together without benefit of clergy was hardly something new or even that radical. In terms of their generation, it was quite common, virtually normal. The “problem,” if there really was one, was just in the eyes of the beholders.

  The era of the two-career couple had begun, and Chris and Gae were quite definitely part of it. So she tended her business in London when he went off to film Somewhere in Time in 1978.

  The location, while not as exotic as he’d have had if he’d accepted some of his other offers, was still unusual—Mackinac Island, in Michigan.

  It was a place that presented logistical probl
ems for crew and cast, in large part because no cars were allowed on the island (although a dispensation was granted for the vehicles used in the film). Transportation was either by horse or bicycle, neither of which was conducive to moving heavy film equipment or film actors more used to being driven in limousines.

  Nonetheless, the producers had decided this was the ideal place to film a sweeping romantic drama. Chris found himself working opposite Jane Seymour, a British actress who’d first become noticed as a Bond girl, one of 007’s many lovers (she had been in Live and Let Die). She was still really waiting for her career to take off, little suspecting that her real future would be in television.

  There were plenty of naysayers who were still predicting that this would be a big mistake for Chris, that he needed something with a great deal more visibility (not to mention money).

  “My team told me not to take the part,” he admitted in the New York Times. “They said I should only do a movie directed by Michael Cimino. It should be opposite Jane Fonda or Barbra Streisand. But I like the character—a man who’s incomplete. He has all the material things he needs, all the comforts, but he’s missing a passionate commitment to something other than himself, and goes in search of it.”

  Granted, the whole action Chris took was something of a reaction to the commercialism of Superman, with its tie-in lunch boxes, action figures, and every other possible piece of merchandising—the Salkinds were soaking it for every penny. His portrayal of the Man Of Steel might have been wonderful, but somehow the innocence had ended up being a little lost and irrelevant in the hoopla and hype of the franchise. Somewhere in Time would offer him a chance to shine, to be more himself (and he most definitely was a romantic at heart). It was, he said, “an absolutely honest attempt to create an old-fashioned romance. It’s based on love rather than on sex or X-rated bedroom scenes.