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

ashore. Reeve suffered bruised ribs and was bleeding from the mouth, but within a few weeks he had fully recovered. “You’re lucky,” one of his rescuers told him, “you didn’t break your neck.”
    Gae Exton would never forget that day. “I’ve never been so terrified,” she said, “as when I saw him falling.”
    The following month, after being turned down for the lead in Children of a Lesser God (the role went to his friend William Hurt), Chris agreed to do his first made-for-television movie. He was to play Count Vronsky opposite Jacqueline Bisset in the CBS adap- tation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina . With a screenplay by The Lion in Winter author James Goldman and a cast that also included Acad- emy Award–winner Paul Scofield, Chris looked forward to being part of what, for all intents and purposes, looked like a quality pro- duction. As for advisors who told him to wait for a vehicle of his own before making the jump to television: “I just thought: ‘What a beautiful story. I’d like to be part of it.’ ”
    Before filming began in Budapest, Chris decided to get some formal instruction in horseback riding from an instructor near his brother Ben’s home in Martha’s Vineyard. Once he arrived in Hungary, it quickly became apparent that Chris, who still took antihistamines to control his allergy to horses, needed all the pro- fessional help he could get. In one of Anna Karenina ’s key scenes, Vronsky’s horse is injured in a steeplechase and the count is forced to put him down with a single bullet. Chris had no experience jumping fences or hedges, but he did want to try to keep up with the other riders in the scene—all members of Hungary’s national equestrian team—during the opening stretch on flat ground.
    As it turned out, his horse tore away from the pack and out of range of the camera truck. After several takes, Chris was hooked. When he returned to the United States in late 1984, he decided to take up riding seriously. In addition to working with trainers in Bedford, New York, he often spent days at a time riding through the Green Mountains of Vermont. His mount for the Vermont rides, a temperamental mare named Hope, made a habit of throw- ing him off whenever the mood struck her. “She was definitely a tough cookie,” he later said. “But she kept you on your toes.” Another of Chris’s many close calls occurred on the set of his next film, one that Chris hoped would finally help him emerge from the long shadow of Superman. In the gritty Street Smart, Chris portrayed an ambitious young reporter whose manufac- tured stories land him in a dangerous spot between the police and a homicidal pimp (played by big-screen newcomer Morgan Freeman). Driven to once again prove his versatility as an actor, Chris refused to be sidelined by something so minor as an emer- gency appendectomy. Just two days after surgery, he defied doc- tor’s orders and returned to the set—to do a fight scene. “Don’t forget,” Chris cautioned Freeman jokingly, “what happened to
    Houdini.”
    Street Smart earned an Oscar nomination for Freeman, but Chris’s performance was widely panned. He had no illusions about what the reaction to his next project would be: Offered
    $4 million to reprise the role, Chris donned his cape yet again, for Superman IV . It was a decision, he later conceded, “I lived to regret.” “ Superman IV, ” he said, “was a catastrophe from start to finish. That failure was a huge blow to my career.” His next film, a clumsy remake of The Front Page called Switching Channels,
    hammered the final nail in Chris’s professional coffin—“the end of my nine-year career as an above-the-line movie star.”
    By late 1986, Chris’s decade-long relationship with Gae Ex- ton was over. They agreed that she and the children would con- tinue to live in the London house Chris had purchased for them, while Chris returned to live in New York. As for the children, “If the love is not in