Superhero: A Biography of Christopher Reeve - Softcover

CHAPTER ONE

America remains a young enough country that many of its citizens feel the need for a sense of history, a background and identity, the knowledge of where their ancestors came from before appearing on these shores.

It's a connection to the past the United States alone can't offer. Most often genealogical research confirms that emigration was the only chance a family had to evade poverty, starvation, or some other type of cruel death. The poor, tired, hungry, and the huddled masses have found welcoming arms in America for more than two centuries, even if the barriers are now starting to rise.

For some, however, the past reveals surprising amounts of wealth and power. Christopher Reeve is one of those people. His bearing and patrician good looks seem to indicate a moneyed background--which he had--but it's hardly nouveau riche. The privilege dates back generations.

On his father's side, Chris can trace the lineage all the way to thirteenth-century France, where the D'Olier family was nobility, appointed to any number of lucrative offices by the kings. Inevitably, the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century made a number of changes. Many of the hereditary aristocracylost their lives. Most others lost their titles, wealth, and land. Even those who clung on didn't have an easy time.

Chris's great-great-great-grandfather, Michel D'Olier, was born in France after the Revolution, after the Napoleonic Wars that left the country much poorer and looking for a way to climb into the nineteenth century under the Bourbon kings. As a young man he met an Irish girl and moved to her homeland, specifically county Mayo, where his son, William, was born.

If France after Napoleon had seemed like a shattered place, then Ireland in the middle of the nineteenth century must have been like one of Dante's circles of hell. The blights of the potato crop, the mass evictions by absentee landlords, and the failure of the British government to offer any real help had left the population decimated, smallholdings in ruins. Anyone who could headed west, to the land of opportunity.

William D'Olier was among them. Landing in New York with a little money, he made his way to Philadelphia. He was better off than many of the new immigrants, with some money and some skill, which he invested wisely to start the first of his cotton mills. Soon there were more, a small empire, which would bring him riches, and his heirs power.

Money bought him position in a society where the dollar was king. And it helped his children. William's son, Franklin D'Olier, became the president of Prudential Insurance during the Second World War (as well as one of the founders, and the first commander, of the American Legion).

Franklin D'Olier Reeve was Franklin's grandson, born in the family home in Philadelphia in 1928, before his parents settled in the wealthy area of Morristown, New Jersey.

Sometimes the children of fortune find themselves hating all that's been given to them on a silver platter. And that seemed to be the case of Franklin Reeve.

"He reacted against all the privilege by cutting himself off from it," Chris explained.

However, he wasn't completely without options. An extremely gifted student, by the time he parted ways from his family he already had a place at Princeton and knew that the ascetic, hermetic world of academia was where he wanted to make his future. He lived on campus, graduating in 1950 with a B.A. in English.

Franklin might have turned his back on his immediate family and their money, but that didn't mean he ignored all his relatives. One who caught his attention was Barbara Pitney Lamb, a distant cousin who had barely begun her own degree course at Vassar. In 1950, just after Franklin's graduation, they married and moved to Manhattan, where Franklin was set to begin work toward his doctorate at Columbia University.

He quickly made his name as a star student, clambering up the steps of the ivory tower. His degree might have been in English, but his real passion was Slavic, and particularly Russian, literature--hardly a field which would make him rich.

Certainly being a graduate student didn't help his bank balance, so, as well as attending school, Franklin took a variety of jobs to help support himself and Barbara--jobs that had more to do with the working than the thinking classes, as a longshoreman, a waiter, even an actor. (His political leanings were to the left, although in the early 1950s--the era of McCarthy and the HUAC hearings--that wasn't something anyone wanted to advertise.) Even living on the Upper East Side, a fairly inexpensive neighborhood in those days, making ends meet was difficult.

Barbara did what she could, penning some freelance journalism. But it wasn't too long before she had other things on her mind, discovering at the beginning of 1952 that she was pregnant.

On September 25, she presented Franklin with a son, whom they named Christopher. He was a sweet-looking boy, born with a shock of blond hair, and eyes that gradually turned blue. Itspoke volumes about Franklin's academic aspirations that he asked Frank Kermode, the British scholar and writer, to be the boy's godfather.

Within a year the couple had added another child, Benjamin. For Franklin, pressured both to support his rapidly growing family and achieve his own goals, it was a difficult time. Neither was it easy for Barbara. She was just twenty, suddenly forced to squeeze every dollar and be responsible for two babies--a shock to someone who'd grown up, if not rich, then at least in very comfortable circumstances.

Inevitably, finances put strains on the marriage, which wasn't proving to be the strongest of bonds, anyway. For almost three more years the family managed to limp along from paycheck to paycheck, things gradually worsening.

The storms around them brought Chris and Ben close together. With circumstances at home so straitened, the way to lose themselves was in their imagination. Anything was grist for the mill, even boxes that had held groceries.

"To us they became ships," Chris recalled years later, "simply because we said they were."

It was impossible for the boys not to notice the way things were going between their parents. It reached a head when Chris was three, and the Reeves filed for divorce.

In the fifties most couples stayed together, even in the bleakest marital situations, "for the sake of the children." But Franklin and Barbara's union had broken down to the point where that was impossible, where hatred seemed to replace everything else, and anything was fair game to get an advantage over the other party--even using the children.

The effect on the boys was to send them even further inside themselves, to make them small, independent beings in their own minds.

"My father and mother were always fighting over me," Chrisexplained, "and therefore canceled each other out. Consequently, I grew up not wanting to depend on them or anybody else. That's probably the key to my personality."

On New Year's Eve, 1956, Barbara left New York and moved back to her hometown of Princeton with the kids. While they lived with her, Franklin had visitation rights, which he exercised to the letter, making sure to drop the boys off close to--but not at--their mother's house. He wanted no personal contact with his ex-wife. They were pawns in what would be an almost fifteen-year war of silence and attrition between Franklin and Barbara.

"I felt torn between them," Chris would say in 1980. "They had a tendency to use me as a chess piece."

In the college town, the asthmatic Barbara managed to keep body and soul together for the family by continuing the journalism she'd begun in...