Still Me Read online

  And then there was Dana. She rescued me when I was lying in Virginia with a broken body, but that was really the second time. The first time she rescued me was the night we met.

  After my first tries at acting at McCarter, I was accepted at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts. I began as an apprentice when I was fifteen and ultimately performed there for fourteen seasons. Even at the height of my film career, I tried to keep my summers free to rejoin the Williamstown family.

  There is a cabaret attached to the festival, where many of the actors perform in a local inn after the shows. Some of us, myself included, really have no business singing, but admission is cheap and the theater audiences love to hear us perform everything from ’50s doo-wop to Irving Berlin and Cole Porter. It’s one of the delights of the festival.

  Fortunately for the audience, a group of four or five real singers known as the Cabaret Corps holds the evening together. In the summer of 1987 Dana was one of the corps, and I was appearing in Aphra Behn’s The Rover. I’d been separated from Gae for five months. I had finished filming Switching Channels out in Chicago and came back to Williamstown determined to be alone, to mind my own business, to focus on the work and fixing up the house I’d bought just outside of town. It was set in the middle of forty acres on a hillside with one of the most spectacular views in the Berk-shires. My plan was to have a quiet and reflective summer. I was certainly not looking for a relationship. But I went to the cabaret one night, and Dana Morosini stepped out onstage to sing.

  She wore an off-the-shoulder dress and sang “The Music That Makes Me Dance.” Oh, my God. Right then I went down, hook, line, and sinker. All my friends who were there saw it happen. Afterwards I went backstage. This was difficult, because whenever I’m really attracted to someone, really knocked out, I can be very clumsy. At the time I was a successful film actor and pretty established. You wouldn’t think I’d have a problem with a simple conversation trying to meet a woman, but I could become very awkward. Playing Clark Kent was no stretch for me.

  I went backstage and introduced myself, complimented her on her song, then offered her a ride over to a party at a place called The Zoo. It was located in one of the Williams College dormitories, very much an anything-goes kind of place, which is how it got its name. But when I offered her a ride, she said, “No thanks, I have my own car.” All I could think to say was, “Oh. “Then she was caught up in the swirl of her friends, and gone. I dragged myself out to the parking lot and sat for a while in my old pickup truck, trying to plan my next move. Later she told me that a couple of her friends had said, “You idiot, why don’t you go with him? We’ll drive your car. Go for it!”

  Dana performing at a recent benefit looking virtually the same as the night I met her in 1987.

  We both ended up at The Zoo, and I tried again. I wandered over and opened up a conversation. I have no idea what we talked about, but people who were there said we didn’t sit down, we didn’t get a drink, we didn’t move. We stood in the middle of The Zoo and talked for a solid hour. Everything evaporated around us. And then I thought to myself, I don’t want to make a mistake here and ruin this. I’m not going to try to rush things tonight. Much to my surprise, I found myself saying, “Well, it was very nice to meet you.” Then I hopped in my truck and drove home.

  We started dating in a very old-fashioned way. One day I found myself riding my bike along Route 7 toward Pittsfield, and on an impulse I stopped and went out in a field and picked wildflowers. I didn’t want to be riding toward Pittsfield, I wanted to go back to the theater, where I knew Dana was rehearsing another cabaret number. I had the bunch of wildflowers in my hand, but as I cycled back I became more and more shy about actually giving them to her. Outside the rehearsal hall I lost my nerve. I found a girl passing by and said, “Would you go in there and give Dana Morosini these flowers? Tell her they’re from me, but don’t make a big deal out of it.” She was happy to be a messenger for me and went right in. Dana was surprised and pleased, and she came out of the rehearsal to say thank you. But I’d left, thinking that was a stupid thing to do.

  Dana and I went slowly because I was concerned about Matthew and Alexandra, who were with me for the summer. I didn’t want the children, who were only seven and three at the time, to come into the bedroom in the morning and find a strange woman in bed with me. It was a delicate matter to handle. So for most of the summer Dana and I just dated. One night I suggested we go swimming in a nearby pond after the cabaret but quickly offered to drive her back to pick up a bathing suit. Later she told me this had pleasantly surprised her and made the evening even more romantic.

  Dana’s parents made frequent trips up to Williamstown to see her perform in the cabaret. As I got to know Chuck and Helen Morosini, we developed an easy rapport. I remember telling Chuck how much I was enjoying dating Dana. I also told him about the additions I was making to my house, and that one of the best features was the huge master bedroom shaped like an octagon, with spectacular views in all directions and an especially comfortable California king-size bed in the middle of the room. He was polite enough not to make any comment. But at the rehearsal dinner the night before our wedding in April 1992, he recalled this story as he toasted us, and remembered thinking that his daughter was dating “the ultimate bozo.”

  Often Dana and I would take my truck up to a hill overlooking Williamstown and park in the middle of a field. We would make out like teenagers, then I’d take her back to the dorm. There was a big green Dumpster in front of it where all the festival trash went, and of course it took us a long time to say good night. For some reason we always parked right in front of the Dumpster. Friends walked by and said, There’s Chris Reeve and Dana Morosini parked by the Dumpster. Very strange. But it was as close as I could get to the dorm. I never went up to her room, and she didn’t stay over at my house until much later in the summer. She would come for dinner and start getting to know the kids, or we would go down to a little place near Pittsfield to play miniature golf, which they loved. They both took an incredible shine to her and she to them. She was instantly comfortable with them, which was wonderful to see. It filled me with joy.

  When I saw Dana’s natural ability and ease with the kids, and her sense of fun, I was relieved and thrilled that something that worked for me also worked for them. It all just fell into place. Late in the summer, after Gae had taken Alexandra back to England, Dana and I went sailing in Maine with Matthew and my half brother Kevin. Matthew and Kevin each had a single berth in the main salon, but Dana and I were in the double berth up forward. I worried about what Matthew would think when he saw us together in the morning, but he came right in and climbed up between us. Soon we were wrestling and pillow-fighting and playing mountain. I thought, This is going to be okay.

  When the children came over again to be with us in Williamstown during the Christmas holidays, I felt Alexandra was ready to see us together as well. She and Matthew began a morning ritual. They would quietly sneak down the back stairs and make their way to the circular staircase that led to our bedroom. Then they would climb up on top of the dresser right behind our bed and jump on us with shrieks of delight. Dana and I usually had a favorite blue blanket over us, and the kids decided that our bed was a swimming pool. They took turns diving off the dresser into the pool and swimming around all over us, sometimes pretending they were alligators. Occasionally we would hear creaking steps and suppressed giggles as they tried to sneak up on us, but most of the time we were dead to the world after a long day of rehearsals, performances, and the cabaret. So it was quite a shock when they landed on us at 6:30 in the morning.

  In spite of that joyful summer, I was still carrying all my emotional baggage around with me. I was proceeding with caution—terror, actually. It took a long time for me to make the commitment that we finally realized in April 1992. Dana shared an apartment in the city with her sister, and I was over on West Seventy-eighth Street, but we were really at my place most of the time. We took it step by step
while we pursued our separate careers. In January 1988 I went to Los Angeles for Summer and Smoke with Christine Lahti at the Ahmanson, and Dana stayed behind to audition for jobs in New York. Out in Los Angeles I found I was happy to concentrate on my work. I spent a lot of time playing tennis with friends, working on a screenplay, and missing Dana.

  With Matthew and Al on a hike up Mt. Greylock in the summer of 1987.

  Matthew and Al enjoying a Williamstown summer. My time with them was always precious.

  At one point I decided to throw a party for the cast and crew at Tommy Tang’s, a Thai restaurant on Melrose. That same day Dana decided to hop on a plane to come out and surprise me. A close friend of mine heard about it and told her, “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Don’t surprise him; surprises aren’t good.” He’d been one of my partners in crime throughout the early ’80s. But Dana said, “Well, if I’m going to go out there and find him with someone else, it might as well be now.” So she flew out, and there we were at Tommy Tang’s, the whole cast and crew. She walked into the room to find me talking to one of the electricians. We were thrilled to see each other, and I think so relieved that neither of us had strayed.

  We knew that the relationship was growing. She stayed with me for a while in a house I’d rented on Tiana Road, and we had a lovely time together in Los Angeles. She came to the play about five times, because she enjoyed watching the production evolve. I had played Dr. Johnny once before at Juilliard, and once again at Williamstown, but she helped me find new layers in the role. After the run was over in April, I went to Yugoslavia to film The Great Escape II, and Dana joined me for most of the shoot. We loved being on location together. I particularly enjoyed riding together out in the countryside, often stopping for lunch in a fourteenth-century castle in the town of Mokrice.

  We both went to Williamstown again that summer, and this time Dana was hired as an actress. We lived together at my house, which we began to think of as our house because the additions were made after I separated from Gae. It felt like a clean slate.

  When the kids came over that summer, we felt like a little family. But not having a firm commitment from the man she was giving so much time and attention to, and having to function as the stepmother of his children, was making the situation difficult for Dana. It wouldn’t become a crisis until later.

  Summer and Smoke in Los Angeles, 1988.

  Enjoying a few days in Colorado.

  Dana and I shared wonderful times together and with friends, cruising the coast of Maine in Chandelle. At first she wasn’t much of a sailor. In fact, her father often told me about his frustrating attempts to teach his three daughters to sail on Long Island Sound when they were kids. Dana usually felt fine on deck and soon learned to steer extremely well, but two minutes below in any kind of a sea would make her absolutely miserable. But she never complained and was always game for another trip because she knew how much I loved it.

  Once she and Kevin and I sailed nonstop from Portland, Maine, to Shelburne, Nova Scotia. In the middle of the second night we were becalmed in dense fog off Cape Sable, not far from Blonde Rock, a navigational hazard that I had circled on my chart with three exclamation points, to be avoided at all costs. Of course at that moment our normally reliable diesel engine decided not to start. I had no choice but to call the Canadian Coast Guard at Clarke Harbour and hope they could get to us before we drifted into serious trouble. A forty-foot cutter arrived within an hour and towed us back to shore at such a high speed that I thought we would turn into a submarine at any moment. The next morning we met just about everybody in town, and Dana served coffee and breakfast to the Coast Guard crew who had helped us out.

  Dana at the helm on the way to Nova Scotia.

  This adventure didn’t put her off in the least, so in 1989 we sold our beloved Chandelle and bought a Cambria 46, which we named the Sea Angel. She was built from scratch especially for us by David Walters in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. We would spread out blueprints on the dining-room table and talk about the shape of the galley or the main salon. At least once a week we flew up to Portsmouth to go over details with David and watch “our baby” being built.

  Finally she was launched in July of that year. Dana presented me with a photo album titled “The Birth of a Sea Angel,” which showed every stage of the process from the first design meeting to the champagne celebration after our sea trial. Creating this boat with Dana was a complete joy and a new kind of experience for me. I was feeling more and more that we were meant to be together.

  By 1990 we were living together on Seventy-eighth Street, but it was a place I had shared with Gae. Dana felt that we ought to start our own life in our own place, but I wasn’t quite ready to do that. I still couldn’t get past the issue of marriage. Our relationship nearly went on the rocks in ’91, when I was shooting a movie called Morning Glory in Vancouver. It was a summer of many phone calls back and forth. Dana finally said that she’d had enough, that there was no future for us.

  We had planned a weekend on Galiano Island, a few miles off the mainland. We were going to charter a boat and sail out there, then stay at the Galiano Inn, one of the most romantic spots in the world. Even though Dana had decided it was over, she ended up coming out for the weekend. We were supposed to be breaking up, yet we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. It was the most agonizingly bittersweet time. After that weekend we realized that we couldn’t be without each other, but something had to change. So I agreed to go into therapy as soon as I got home. During the fall of 1991 and for most of 1992, I finally talked through everything I had always feared about marriage.

  The finished product, our pride and joy. Cruising Narragansett Bay with friends in August 1989.

  Suddenly it spilled. And in very short order, I realized that I would be a fool to lose this woman, this relationship. We had moved down to East Twenty-second Street by this time, to an apartment without ghosts and memories. I’d always liked living on the Upper West Side near the park, but Dana is nine years younger than I am, and she wanted to be a part of the downtown New York scene. So we found a wonderful apartment near the Flatiron Building. It was fun—a beautiful atrium upstairs, great restaurants, and the farmers’ market at Union Square on weekends.

  And then one night we were having dinner, and about halfway through the meal I just put down my fork and asked her to marry me. We didn’t finish dinner, we went straight to the bedroom. I have never been happier, never. It was tremendously exciting to say those words. We hadn’t planned it; it was a moment whose time had come. I have never looked back.

  We were married in Williamstown in April 1992, although I still think of our real anniversary as June 30, the night I first saw Dana at the cabaret. I still feel that I met her yesterday. A crisis like my accident doesn’t change a marriage; it brings out what is truly there. It intensifies but does not transform it. We had become a family. When Dana looked at me in the UVA hospital room and said, “You’re still you,” it also meant that we’re still us. We are. We made a bargain for life. I got the better part of the deal.

  Chapter 4

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  On June 28 I was taken to Kessler to begin the long process of preparing to go home. I no longer needed to be in intensive care, but I still required a great deal of help and attention. I had an infection in my lungs and had lost a lot of weight because I couldn’t eat. At UVA a tube had been inserted into my stomach, and though I absorbed 2,000 calories from a gastrostomy tube every night, it was not enough to keep me from looking gaunt.

  My body, devastated by the injury, was still very fragile. I learned that I had never fully recovered from the malaria I’d contracted in Kenya in 1993. My hemoglobin, normally at 13 or 14, was down to 9, which is alarmingly low. My protein levels were also low, about 2.7 rather than the normal 4.0. I was given several blood transfusions during the first few weeks, yet there were no signs of improvement. My blood seemed to be disappearing, and Dr. Green was concerned because he couldn’
t understand where it was going. There was a possibility that my bone marrow was not producing red blood cells, and this required a further series of tests. I also needed chest X rays almost daily because there was still fluid in both lungs, and I was in danger of developing pneumonia. The process of rehabilitation had to be delayed until all these problems could be resolved.

  I was emotionally fragile as well. Kessler is a first-rate institution—light, open, and spread out among lawns and trees—but it is still a place for the ill, and it bears the inner harshness of all such places. I looked around and saw nothing but green walls, linoleum floors, and damaged people. I had a hard time realizing that I was going to spend quite a long time in an institution devoted to the disabled. I couldn’t accept myself as one of them.

  It seemed surreal, even though I instantly took to many of the people assigned to my care—particular nurses, certain aides—and even though I was in one of the nicest rooms in the hospital. I had a single room, while many others were in rooms of four to six people. They had no privacy; they could hear everybody. At least in the beginning I’m not sure I would have been able to stand that.