Somewhere in Heaven: The Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve by Christopher Andersen Read Free Book Online

kind of wondered what he was up to.”
    Her suspicions seemed confirmed when, after one cabaret per- formance, he asked if she’d like to drive over to Margaret Lind- ley Pond for a moonlight dip. “Oh, God,” she thought, “here comes the old let’s-get-naked-and-go-for-a-swim routine.”
    Before she could answer, Chris added, “I’ll drive over to your place and you can pick up your bathing suit.”
    For Dana, who was both relieved and delighted, it was a defin- ing moment in their relationship. “I thought,” she later recalled, “that that was so sweet.” As promised, Chris drove Dana back to the dorm where she was staying to pick up her swimsuit—which
    she put on under her clothes—and the two headed out to the pond. That night, they swam and engaged in a little chaste horse- play, splashing each other mercilessly. Then, in another scene straight out of old Hollywood, Chris pulled Dana toward him in the water, and they shared their first kiss.
    Still, Dana wanted to take things slow. “I thought I would look at this as ‘What I Did Last Summer,’ ” she said. “I didn’t expect to really fall in love.” Chris was equally wary. “I really wanted to make sure I was not getting into a relationship on the rebound,” he admitted. “It was a case of what happens to you when you’re not looking. Happiness sneaks up.”
    Caution aside, the romance quickly blossomed. There were dinners in town, picnics, and long drives along the narrow two- lane roads that snaked through the Massachusetts countryside. One of the things that most appealed to Dana was the fact that this major movie star tooled around in a black pickup with roll- down windows and an AM radio. “This guy is cool, ” Dana thought. Later, she recalled how they would “do all these things that were so down-to-earth. Which is what I’m like and what I like about people. I realized he wasn’t just this movie star. I found that he was very much like me.”
    Soon they were parking in the middle of fields and, in Chris’s words, “making out like teenagers.” It was during one of these sessions, when the truck was parked on a treeless hilltop with only a few cows in view, that they consummated the affair.
    Such privacy was not always attainable. On occasion, Chris would take Dana back to her dorm after the cabaret show and park outside—right next to a giant green refuse container heaped with festival garbage. While they necked in the distinctive black
    pickup, other actors would pass by and casually remark that Chris and Dana were inside steaming up the windows. “They were right on the verge,” joked a theater apprentice who worked with Chris, “of becoming a tourist attraction.”
    “We knew something was going on between Chris and Dana,” said Jennifer Van Dyke, who was performing alongside Chris in The Rover . “But there were lots of summer romances go- ing on at the time. Compared to some other people, they were pretty discreet about it.”
    Chris’s friend Edward Herrmann at first saw Dana as “another one of the beautiful, talented young fillies who came up to Wil- liamstown every summer. She was leggy and gorgeous and we were all jealous as hell. But I thought it was just another pleas- ant Williamstown summer fling.” Soon he and the rest of the Williamstown Festival community came to the realization that “they had really fallen for each other. This was the real deal.”
    Before they could read about it in the gossip columns, Dana decided to share the news of her celebrity romance with a few of her closest friends. One of the first people she called was her longtime pal Michael Manganiello.
    “I’ve met somebody,” she said, hesitating. “What?” Manganiello said.
    “Well, he’s kind of famous.”
    “So who is it?” Manganiello asked.
    “Well, I’m kind of dating Christopher Reeve.”
    Manganiello paused for a moment. “You’re dating Superman?” he asked.
    Kidding aside, Chris and Dana had legitimate