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In January, Joan Irvine Smith, a California philanthropist and horsewoman who was impressed by Reeve's energy and by the fact that he never blamed his horse for the injury, donated $1 million for the establishment of the Reeve-Irvine Center for spinal-cord research at the University of California at Irvine; the state will match her million. She also established $50,000 prize for the neuroscientist who made the greatest progress in a given year. In February, Reeve did the Larry King Live show, making an explicit appeal for donations for the American Paralysis Association--another considerable success. The following month he took part in the dedication ceremony for a new $18 million rehabilitation unit at the St. Francis Health Care Center in Green Springs, Ohio.
In May, Reeve went to Washington to lobby directly for research funds. He met with President Clinton and secured his promise to add $10 million to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) research money; Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter of the Senate subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services offered to add $40 million more. Soon after, as the new a.p.a. chairman, he flew to Puerto Rico and helped raise $600,000 at a benefit. Last week he was host of the Paralympics in Atlanta. Next week he addresses the Democratic National Convention with a nonpartisan appeal for research support.
"When John Kennedy promised that by the end of the 1960s we would put a man on the moon," he says, "everybody, including the scientists, shook their heads in dismay. But we did it. We can cure spinal-cord injuries too, if there's the will. What was possible in outer space is possible in inner space."
All this forward motion comes naturally to Reeve, whose task-oriented and detail-oriented nature was heretofore applied to such activities as flying, sailing, scuba diving and horseback riding as well as working for such causes as the environment, children's issues, human rights and the National Endowment for the Arts. His success as an actor was a result of concentration and diligence as much as good looks. "I'm not a naturally gifted actor," he says. "Acting was a long process for me." He adds, "I was just getting the hang of it."
From the age of 13, he devoted himself to theater--beginning at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, New Jersey, where he would go after school to play any part they would give a kid. McCarter, he says, became his family. He had lost the security of his real family: his parents divorced when he was three and his brother Ben a year younger. His father is the poet and literary scholar Franklin (F.D.) Reeve. His mother Barbara Pitney Lamb remarried, a stockbroker, Tristan Johnson, who was a kind and generous stepfather to Reeve and had four children from a previous marriage. Then the Johnsons had two children of their own. F.D. Reeve also remarried, adding three more children. In the separate civilizations of the burgeoning new families--one in Connecticut, one in Princeton--the one stable place in Reeve's life became the theater. "It was all just bits and pieces," he says. "You don't want to risk getting involved with people for fear that things are going to fall apart. That's why I found relief in playing characters. You knew where you were in fiction. You knew where you stood."