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

question, they can survive separation,” he later said. “When we get together, we fall right into place.”
    For now, he and Gae were keeping the split out of the press. But later, Chris would insist “there was never an incident, never an act of cruelty or a betrayal between Gae and me. It was just a growing awareness that we were the wrong people for each other.”
    Reeve and Exton would, for the sake of the kids as much as anything else, remain friends. That did not, however, keep Chris from sinking into a deep depression. “I knew I would always be a part of their lives,” he said, “but by separating, we were just acting out what I’d seen in my family over and over again. It was painful.”
    From the depths of his depression over the breakup, Reeve mulled his options. For the time being, he would retreat once more to the place where he felt safest: peaceful, bucolic, nurtur- ing Williamstown. It was there that, in early 1987, he threw him- self into renovating a cedar-sided contemporary house he bought just outside of town on Treadwell Hollow Road, for $260,000. Situated on thirty-six hilltop acres with sweeping views of the Berkshires, the house boasted five bedrooms and seven bath- rooms as well as a garage/barn big enough to accommodate Chris’s glider. He placed a king-sized bed smack in the middle
    of the octagonal master bedroom, so that when he woke up there would be a dazzling vista in every direction.
    By the summer of 1987, Chris was getting tired of waking up alone in that giant bed with the wraparound view. But before he could do anything about that, his half brothers Kevin and Jeff showed up to keep him company. They were joined at the end of July by Matthew and Alexandra, on vacation from school in London. As he attacked his role in the Williamstown production of The Rover with his customary laserlike intensity (“No one took his craft more seriously than Chris— no one, ” said fellow cast member Edward Herrmann), Chris seemed genuinely content. “I’m at a place right now,” he told one of his fellow actors, “where I’m feeling optimistic about things. Maybe I just don’t need to be in a serious relationship to be happy.”

    Enter Dana. After that first meeting at the 1896 House cabaret show and the hour-long conversation at The Zoo that followed, Chris could not get her out of his mind. For the next ten days, he courted Dana in a manner that could have been straight out of the script for Somewhere in Time .
    There was yet another random encounter—this time on a Williamstown street—during which the two were once again lost in conversation. The next day while biking near his home, Chris suddenly decided to stop and pick wildflowers for Dana along the side of the road. He gathered them up in a bunch, rushed back to the theater where Dana was rehearsing one of her cabaret numbers, and then just as suddenly got cold feet. In- stead, he asked a coed to go inside and deliver the flowers to
    Dana for him. The young woman was obviously delighted to act as a go-between.
    Dana had just finished her number when the girl walked in from the wings and handed them to her. “Christopher Reeve asked me to give these to you,” she said.
    Dana’s eyes widened with surprise and her hand went to her mouth. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said, then without miss- ing a beat asked when and where he gave them to her.
    “About two minutes ago,” the coed answered.
    Dana rushed outside to thank him, but Chris was gone. Em- barrassed by his impulsive gesture—and, incredibly, fearing re- jection—Chris had pedaled off “feeling stupid. It was all so corny, and for whatever reason, it occurred to me that maybe she would think I was a jerk.”
    If anything, Dana was both flattered and beguiled by this movie star who seemed so unsure of himself. Yet she was also more than a little suspicious. “It seemed a little fishy,” she said, “that he could be quite so charming and obviously very shy. I