A LEAP OF FAITH
by Ty Wenger as in the Magazine Marie Claire Dec. 2001
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We challenged Sex and the City's sensible Charlotte to face down her two biggest fears: Heights and snakes. Geronimooooo!
In the bad dream, Kristin Davis is falling. She's walking in a Victorian mansion. It's dark and spooky. A camera crew trails her, waiting to document the terror that Kristin senses is waiting around every corner. Even swamped in fear, she's afraid she's blocking the camera and ruining the scene - an actress to the end. Suddenly, at the top of a long flight of stairs she turns, loses her balance, and falls... and falls... and falls...
I'm thinking of this dream as I watch Kristin shuffle to the open rear batch of a perfectly good airplane and perch on the edge, preparing to jump out. From the look of abject horror in her eyes, she's thinking about it, too. We're 10,000 feet high. The wind is whipping by the door. And Kristin Davis is about to leap headfirst into her worst nightmare. |
Earlier that day, when we arrived at the skydiving school in upstate New York, I doubted that Kristin would even get on that plane, let alone jump out of it. And, really, why would she? HBO, the network that pays her hefty seven-figure salary per season to costar on its Emmy-winning show Sex and the City, has discouraged her from going. Her fellow cast members - the ones she's "as close to as sisters" - don't even know she's here. And last night, before she went to bed, her mother reminded her that her stepsister - a commercial pilot, no less - was so terrified when she tried to skydive herself that her instructor had to push her out of the plane.
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Oh, and did we mention that she also has a history of fainting?" As you can imagine," Kristin says, "I didn't sleep very well."
Here we are, at a tiny airstrip about 30 minutes from Woodstock. It's a cross between a hippie commune and an Air Force Base: scuffy tents, dilapidated trailers and a canopy covering the central staging area. We are ushered into the "classroom," a rusty, broken-down school bus with a TV monitor. To the left of the TV sits a small statue of the Grim Reaper. (I am not making this up!) Inside, an instructional video is cued; it feels more like a sitcom's bloopers segment: The tape's cursory demonstrations of arching and landing are aborted when the instructors fall over laughing ; a soundtrack of Pink Floyd and Jimmy Hendrix plays throughout, adding to the whole "we were stoned when we shot this" vibe. None of this, mind you, seems particularly educational. |
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The waivers we all have to sign, however - with their overblown "you die, it's on you" language - deliver a dose of inescapable reality. I consider briefly if this is the right time to mention Kristin that about 35 Americans perish each year skydiving. I think better of it. Besides, I'm going to be jumping with her. Why spook myself? "My lawyer would kill me if he knew I was signing this!" she exclaims, flashing her most plucky and courageous grin but appearing a bit pale as she chambers out of the bus in her jeans and T-shirt. Still, we've been told we will receive a two-hour training course before we actually jump with our tandem-diving partner, so there is no need to panic - yet.
"Next jump group, you're going in 10 minutes! Get suited up!" yells a passing instructor. Maybe panic is entirely appropriate. "But what about the two hour class?" Kristin asks.
"Two-hour class? Who told you that? Time to suit up!" the instructor bellows back.
The corners of Kristin's mouth curl down. "This is bad," she says. "I'm not ready for this. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do. As an actress, there's nothing worse than not knowing your cues."
She's clearly ready to back out. Then Geoff appears. |
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Geoff the Dashing British Instructor (GDBI), masculine in that Old Spice - cologne kind of way, sweeps in. Six-foot-six and 225 pounds with a crew cut, deep set blue eyes, and a character-enhancing scars, Geoff will be Kristin's diving partner. He is the kind of Marlboro man with whom any woman would jump out of a plane - or out of the space shuttle.
I turn to Kristin, who looks relieved. I'm tempted to ask what Alec Baldwin, her well-publicized current beau, would think of GDBI but again hold my tongue. "I'm an actress who likes a strong communicative director, and Geoff just became my director," she says.
And that is how 36-year-old Kristin Davis, a woman mortally afraid of falling, ended up here 15 minutes later - in the hatch of the deHavilland Twin Otter plane, poised to plummet two miles to the ground with a mountain of a man strapped to her back. |
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As the plane climbs to an altitude of nearly 10,000 feet, she and Geoff inch to the edge of the door, I watch as she reminds her to keep her feet together. Kristin's mind happily latches on to this tidbit: Feet together. Feet together. Feet together. And then, in a flash, they jump into the sky.
There's a curious phenomenon that a skydiver experiences during his or her first jump: total sensory overload. It's impossible to come to grips with the sensation on unbridled gravity, the feeling of falling at 120 miles per hour. And so, Kristin's mind does the natural thing. It goes fzzzzzzzzzt.
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When it's my turn to jump, I shuffle to the door and am paralyzed by fear. Consciously, I know that I need to exit the plane, yet every cell in my body is acutely aware of what a lousy idea this seems to be. (Note to self: Ask for more money next time a magazine asks you to jump out of an airplane with an actress.) Thankfully, my tandem partner has no such qualms, and together we tumble out.
As I freefall, I crane my neck to try to see Kristin and spot her a few hundred yards away, seemingly floating in midair. But the truth is very different - she is actually dropping at a rate of 200 feet per second. After 45 seconds of dreamy free fall, her mind snaps back to reality. Her first thought is to check the altimeter on the back of her left wrist. This is a good thought. During training, we had been instructed to keep checking our altimeter and prepare to pull the ripcord at 6000 feet. Kristin glances at her altimeter. It reads 6000 feet. |
"I thought to myself, I know that's important. I'm supposed to do something at 6000 feet," she says later. "But for the life of me, I could not remember what the heck I was supposed to do!"
Thankfully, with more than 5000 jumps under his belt, GDBI has seen his share of frozen brains. Five seconds later, while Kristin roams the middle of the sky trying to remember exactly what is supposed to happen, Geoff releases their chute. It deploys perfectly.
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If skydiving is like sex - which, according to Kristin (who, given the show she's on, should know), it most certainly is - the freefall is the orgasm. The warm afterglow comes after the parachute deploys. You spend five minutes floating to the ground, your heart pounding, adrenaline pumping, mumbling away like a fool about how beautiful life is and how good you feel. Indeed, as I drift down 100 yards away from her, I almost weep with joy at the sheer beauty of the moments.
Kristin and Geoff gently land - she on his legs, like a girl on Santa's lap - she untangles herself from the harness and begins jumping up and down, giddy and euphoric. "Let's go again! Let's go again, right now!" she yells over and over.
Fear? What fear?
"The best comparison I can make is to the buzz of a really great scene," she tells me later. "Sometimes, when you're acting, you are so in the |
| moment that you don't even remember what just happened. The director
says, 'Cut!' and you look around, and everyone is looking at you saying, 'Wow. That was really great!' And you just have this blank look on your face, because you don't remember a thing. It doesn't happen very much, but that's what it feels like."
A few hours later, true to her word, Kristin jumps again.
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