My Father the Superman
Christopher Reeve
Born in New York City in 1952, Christopher Reeve was an actor best known for his starring role in the 1978 film Superman and its sequels; his career spanned Broadway and television as well. In 1995, he was injured in a horse-riding accident that left him paralyzed from the neck down. He continued to work, directing the movie In the Gloaming and starring in a remake of Rear Window for which he won a SAG Award; writing a bestselling memoir, Still Me; and raising money for spinal cord injury research, establishing the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation. Reeve had three children, Matthew, Alexandra, and Will. He died in 2004 at age fifty-two.
Christopher and Matthew (four years old) with their dog, Bonjour, in London, 1983
i was born just a year after my father’s first Superman film came out, when he went from being a relatively unknown actor to one of the biggest movie stars in the world almost overnight. So much of my early life was bound up in the fame and attention that came from that franchise. And although the rest of the world thought of him as that character, to me, he was just Dad. And what I remember most was what he did offscreen.
Prior to his accident, my father was an incredibly athletic man, a highly skilled sailor, an accomplished pianist, and an avid pilot. By the time he was twenty-three, he had flown across the United States in a little Cessna 172, landing in fields and sleeping under the wings before setting off again. Later, he crossed the Atlantic twice.
I was fifteen when my father was paralyzed. My sister, Alexandra, was eleven. My brother, Will, was almost three. (In fact, we celebrated his third birthday in the ICU of the University of Virginia Medical Center, where my dad had been airlifted immediately after the accident.) So while my brother doesn’t remember my father being able-bodied, my sister and I do. Some of my earliest, fondest memories with him involve airplanes. We used to drive up to Teterboro, New Jersey, where he kept a small twin-engine turbo-prop. And from there we would fly out to Martha’s Vineyard or up to Vermont or Massachusetts, where we had family.
I remember once, when we were in London (where my sister and I mostly grew up—all the Superman films were shot at Pinewood Studios), sitting in the passenger seat of his bright purple Triumph TR6 convertible, with black leather seats, a walnut-paneled dash, and a chrome gear stick. The top was down, and my dad—all six feet four inches of him, in his prime and at the height of his career—was like an eyeball magnet. Everyone looked as we drove by. We were headed to an airfield on the edge of town where we’d hop in an old World War II biplane with an open cockpit and cruise around the skies. In retrospect, I mean, how cool is that? But to six-year-old me, it was just another weekend with my dad.
When we were in his plane, more often than not I’d sit next to him in the copilot seat. A plane is not like a car: Sitting in the copilot’s seat, you have the controls right there in front of you, within reach, and the throttle and the gauges, too. You can really make things go wrong if you don’t do exactly as instructed. But Dad started giving me responsibility from an early age. He’d have me lower the flaps for landing or raise the landing gear after takeoff. There was so much to learn. When we were in the air, there wasn’t a lot of chitchat, because you’re always on the Air Traffic Control radio. But sitting there, side by side, thousands of feet off the ground, was the best father-son bonding a boy could ever ask for.
When I was six years old, my mother, Gae, and my father split up and Dad moved to New York to live full-time. He soon met Dana, an amazing woman who would become very dear to me. They eventually married, and when I was twelve, they had Will and moved to Westchester County in New York. My sister and I were still going to school in England, but we visited every break.
Around that time, my dad got back into horse riding, which he had learned years earlier for his role as Count Vronsky in Anna Karenina. Westchester was horse country, and my dad, who was always active, became more involved in the sport. Over Memorial Day weekend in 1995, he went down to Culpeper, Virginia, for a three-day competition. During the second day’s cross-country event, his horse stopped suddenly in front of an obstacle and my dad’s momentum carried him forward, over the horse’s head and onto the ground. For some reason, he couldn’t break his fall with his hands (perhaps they were entangled in the reins—at least that’s the story I’ve heard). He landed on his head, and the impact shattered his first and second cervical vertebrae. Thankfully, there was an off-duty EMT at the event who performed an emergency tracheotomy so my dad could breathe. Then he was airlifted to Charlottesville.
I was staying in London alone at the time, while my mother and sister were in Hampshire. Dana called the house super early on Sunday morning and asked if my mom was there. I said she wasn’t. Dana, trying not to alarm me, told me that my dad had had a little accident and hurt his neck and that she was going to call my mom. Dana hung up, and a few minutes later my mom called me and told me to pack a bag for the airport. By the time we left on Monday, news of my dad’s accident had gone public. I remember actually first learning of the gravity of the situation from the front pages of the newspapers at the airport. The press reported that my father’s condition was very touch and go and his survival was uncertain. At the same time, I was a savvy schoolboy—or so I thought—who knew that papers were just trying to sell copies, so I was hoping, somehow, that the stories were all sensationalized. That his injuries weren’t as serious as they said.
But of course they were. For the first four to five weeks after the accident, we didn’t know if my dad was going to live through the night. Although he stabilized, and eventually was able to move to a rehabilitation facility in New Jersey, then, six months later, finally return home, I’d estimate that during that period, he flatlined three or four times. Meanwhile, letters would arrive at the hospital by the boxful from all across the world. One I remember, from England, was addressed simply, “Superman, USA.” We would open these letters and hold them up to his face so he could read them. Often they were notes of sympathy and support. Some people wrote of fellow loved ones who had been paralyzed or injured, and offered advice and guidance. Others would say anything they could think of to try to relate to him. They sent introductions to shamans and doctors, little trinkets and charms, and pictures of themselves. The love my father received from the public was a little bit overwhelming, but it gave him strength and motivation to keep going.
After Dad’s accident, obviously, there was no more flying, no more sailing, no more buzzing through London in a Triumph with the top down. By necessity, our father-son bonding became much more verbal. We would sit and talk, something we never did before. We were still navigating journeys together, just this time on the ground.
Even before he returned home, Dad became involved in helping others with spinal cord injuries. He was so driven to find a cure, he became obsessed. He knew he could use his celebrity to raise awareness—and donations—and become a voice for a whole community of people who didn’t really have one. Every night, he was either on the phone with researchers, corresponding with other people with spinal cord injuries and giving them advice on how to keep going, talking with policymakers, or trying to navigate the tangled bureaucratic web of insurance companies. He was data driven, and just as he used to pore over his thick book of flight maps, planning approaches to various airports, he now assiduously read up on the latest scientific developments related to his injury. And he was eager to tell everyone what he learned. In fact, he was so passionate about it that Dana ultimately banned all research conversation from the dinner table.
As his son, I could see both how different he was after the accident, how his physical body and all that he could do narrowed dramatically in scope, and also that his spirit—curious, indomitable, charismatic, kind—was never broken. When he was first injured, no one was sure what lay ahead—least of all him. I was privileged to bear witness to an amazing evolution as he found and harnessed an incredible inner strength and resolve to carry on and do what he did. A couple of years before he died, I made a documentary with my father about his journey after the accident. His final lines in that film resonate with me. He says, “Everyone always tells me I’m such an inspiration. I don’t know about that. I try to emphasize that the ability to endure, the ability to love, is something we all have inside us, and you don’t have to be a Superman to do it.”