Read Somewhere in Heaven: The Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve for Free Online

Lanford Wilson’s searing drama Fifth of July . In re- searching the role at a Brooklyn Veterans Administration hospi- tal, Chris was given his first real glimpse into the challenges faced by the disabled.
    Chris followed Fifth of July up by taking on the role of Michael Caine’s psychopathic lover in Sidney Lumet’s Deathtrap . But in 1982, Reeve was persuaded by director Richard Lester to don the cape once again for Superman III . It was while filming this latest episode in the Superman saga that Chris decided to take a hot air balloon ride with his longtime friend, photographer Ken Regan. “My contract says that while I’m making Superman, I can’t fly my plane,” Reeve explained, “but it doesn’t say anything about a balloon!”
    As it turned out, they got off to a late start and wound up land- ing after dark—directly on a tree stump in an open field. Both men were jettisoned from the basket on impact. Regan managed to struggle to his feet and called out Chris’s name in the dark- ness. Nothing. “Oh no, I’ve killed Superman!” Regan thought to himself. Finally, he heard his friend moaning. “Oh, God,” he said, “I think I broke everything in my body.” Regan rushed up to help Chris, who was sprawled out on the grass. When he got there and knelt down, his friend burst out laughing. “I could have slugged him,” Regan later recalled. “He was absolutely fine.”
    As soon as Superman III was completed, Chris wasted no time again trying to distance himself from the role that had made him famous. The anti-Superman crusade continued with Merchant Ivory’s The Bostonians, in which Chris was cast as impoverished writer Basil Ransome. Later, while playing a barnstorming air- mail pilot in The Aviator (for which the thrill-seeking Chris did his own aerial stunts), Chris became a father a second time with the arrival of Alexandra Exton Reeve in December of 1983. Holding to the conviction that “in most cases marriage is a sham,” Chris made it clear that he still had no intention of tying the knot
    with Gae—no matter how “tacky” it was to have two illegitimate children.
    As devoted as he undoubtedly was to Matthew and Alexandra, the fact remained that Chris was essentially an absent father. When he wasn’t poring over scripts, acting on the stage, or away on a film location, Chris was crisscrossing the country (or flying solo across the Atlantic) at the controls of his new twin-engine Beechcraft, skiing down some of the world’s most challenging runs, or soaring over mountaintops in his glider. Reeve was also, he would later admit, seeing other women—lots of other women. He conceded that the pressures of fatherhood and family during this period made him feel “unsettled and restless.”
    The more “restless” he felt, the more chances he took. In Au- gust of 1984, Chris, Gae, and the children were vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard when Chris spotted a woman parasailing over an inlet and decided to give it a try. Having strapped himself into a harness that was being towed by a motorboat, he gave a signal and the boat took off. Chris quickly gained altitude, and when he was about ninety feet above the water he began waving at Gae and the kids with both hands. “He should have been holding on to the harness,” an eyewitness said.
    “Suddenly, the harness became loose,” the witness said, “and he began to fall, frantically waving his arms in the air.” (The harness, it turned out, was designed to carry no more than 180 pounds; Chris weighed over 200 pounds.) Reeve plunged nine stories into just four feet of water.
    “He dropped like a rock,” said artist Donald Widdis, who also witnessed the accident. Widdis raced down the beach to check on him, convinced that “no one could take a fall like that and not be severely injured or dead.”
    Incredibly, Chris, who had instinctively curled up in a ball as he fell, landed on his side. He lay in the water, moaning, until onlookers helped him