Free Still Me by Christopher Reeve Page A

both cases the older one usually got the first crack at everything and was often preferred. When we were very young our parents used to dress us alike. Later I often joked that the only way you could tell us apart was that I had the blue mittens and Ben had the red ones. I think today most parents are much more conscious of the need to allow each child to establish his own identity. But in the early fifties there was still a tendency to lump siblings together—particularly twins or children close in age. We were often referred to as Tophy and Beejy. I remember wanting to separate myself quite early on, and I think Ben did, too.

    Tophy (right) and Beejy on a Sunday morning.
    My parents’ romance began during the Christmas holidays in 1950, when he was at Columbia and she was still at Vassar. They met because of an unusual family connection. Mahlon Pitney was my mother’s uncle, and he married my father’s mother, Anne d’Olier Reeve, after her divorce from Richard Reeve, Sr. My mother and her parents, Horace and Beatrice Lamb, were invited to Mahlon and Anne’s house on a hilltop in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. My mother had not been particularly interested in going until Horace told her that Anne had two sons, Franklin and Richard Reeve, Jr., who were both bright, handsome college students.
    She was immediately taken with Franklin. As they were decorating the Christmas tree in the great family room, Franklin pulled a Styrofoam ball off a branch and teasingly threw it at my mother, who quickly grabbed another one and threw it back at him. A playful indoor snowball fight ensued. They spent most of the family holiday together, and no sooner had she returned to Vassar than my father called and asked to come visit her the following weekend. She was both excited and taken aback by the intensity of Franklin’s interest in her. But this was a part of his character, which I think I inherited: the single-minded pursuit of a particular objective. My father was a real romantic in those days, prone to strong passions, whether in politics, ideals, or love. Whatever captured his interest became all consuming, at least for a time. He courted my mother ardently, driving up from Columbia almost every weekend. They took long walks by the Hudson and lingered in coffee shops near the campus. Soon her mailbox was filled with stories, poems, and love letters.
    In the summer of 1951 my mother went to Europe with several of her college classmates. My father wanted very much to come along on this trip, but Horace and Beatrice strongly objected. I think they felt their daughter was too young for such an intense romance. So instead Franklin spent the summer working on the docks on the West Side waterfront, “shaping up” every morning with the longshoremen, waiting to be chosen to unload banana boats. From this experience he developed an interest in the labor movement and socialism.
    Franklin had come from a prominent Mainline Philadelphia family. His grandfather, Col. Richard d’Olier, was the CEO of the Prudential Insurance Company for more than twenty-five years. Money was never an issue; all his heirs attended the best prep schools and colleges in the East. On the other hand, Horace Lamb had come from a working-class family in Sandusky, Ohio, won a scholarship to Cornell, and eventually become the senior partner in one of New York’s most prestigious law firms, with homes on Sutton Place and in New Canaan, Connecticut—virtually the definition of a self-made man. I think he resented the idea of my father, a rich young Princeton graduate, transforming himself into a “workingman.”
    In spite of the long hours on the docks, Franklin always found time to send passionate letters to various American Express offices in Europe, keeping up with my mother’s itinerary. When her ship docked in New York in early September, my father greeted her on the pier with an engagement ring. Over my