Her Again Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Jaime

  EPIGRAPH

  “Can I just say? There is no such thing as the best actress. There is no such thing as the greatest living actress. I am in a position where I have secret information, you know, that I know this to be true.”

  —MERYL STREEP, 2009

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Mary

  Julie

  Constance

  Isabella

  Fredo

  Linda

  Joanna

  Supporting Characters

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Photos Section

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  NOT ALL MOVIE STARS are created equal. If you were to trap all of Hollywood in amber and study it, like an ancient ecosystem buried beneath layers of sediment and rock, you’d discover a latticework of unspoken hierarchies, thwarted ambitions, and compromises dressed up as career moves. The best time and place to conduct such an archeological survey would undoubtedly be in late winter at 6801 Hollywood Boulevard, where they hand out the Academy Awards.

  By now, of course, the Oscars are populated as much by movie stars as by hangers-on: publicists, stylists, red-carpet correspondents, stylists and publicists of red-carpet correspondents. The nominee is like a ship’s hull supporting a small community of barnacles. Cutting through hordes of photographers and flacks and assistants trying to stay out of the frame, she has endured months of luncheons and screenings and speculation. Now, a trusted handler will lead her through the thicket, into the hall where her fate lies in an envelope.

  The 84th Academy Awards are no different. It’s February 26, 2012, and the scene outside the Kodak Theatre is a pandemonium of a zillion micromanaged parts. Screaming spectators in bleachers wait on one side of a triumphal arch through which the contenders arrive in choreographed succession. Gelled television personalities await with questions: Are they nervous? Is it their first time here? And whom, in the unsettling parlance, are they wearing? There are established movie stars (Gwyneth Paltrow, in a white Tom Ford cape), newly minted starlets (Emma Stone, in a red Giambattista Valli neck bow bigger than her head). If you care to notice, there are men: Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks, George Clooney. For some reason, there’s a nun.

  Most of the attention, though, belongs to the women, and the ones nominated for Best Actress bear special scrutiny. There’s Michelle Williams, pixie-like in a sleek red Louis Vuitton dress. Rooney Mara, a punk princess in her white Givenchy gown and forbidding black bangs. Viola Davis, in a lustrous green Vera Wang. And Glenn Close, nominated for Albert Nobbs, looking slyly androgynous in a Zac Posen gown and matching tuxedo jacket.

  But it’s the fifth nominee who will give them all a run for their money, and when she arrives, like a monarch come to greet her subjects, her appearance projects victory.

  Meryl Streep is in gold.

  Specifically, she is wearing a Lanvin gold lamé gown, draped around her frame like a Greek goddess’s toga. The accessories are just as sharp: dangling gold earrings, a mother-of-pearl minaudière, and Salvatore Ferragamo gold lizard sandals. As more than a few observers point out, she looks not unlike an Oscar herself. One fashion blog asks: “Do you agree that this is the best she has ever looked?” The implication: not bad for a sixty-three-year-old.

  Most of all, the gold number says one thing: It’s my year. But is it?

  Consider the odds. Yes, she has won two Oscars already, but the last time was in 1983. And while she has been nominated a record-breaking seventeen times, she has also lost a record-breaking fourteen times, putting her firmly in Susan Lucci territory. Meryl Streep is accustomed to losing Oscars.

  And consider the movie. No one thinks that The Iron Lady, in which she played a braying Margaret Thatcher, is cinematic genius. While her performance has the trappings of Oscar bait—historical figure, age prosthetics, accent work—they’re the same qualities that have pigeonholed her for decades. In his New York Times review, A. O. Scott put it this way: “Stiff legged and slow moving, behind a discreetly applied ton of geriatric makeup, Ms. Streep provides, once again, a technically flawless impersonation that also seems to reveal the inner essence of a well-known person.” All nice words, but strung together they carry a whiff of fatigue.

  As she drags her husband, Don Gummer, down the red carpet, an entertainment reporter sticks a microphone in her face.

  “Do you ever get nervous on carpets like this, even though you’re such a pro?”

  “Yes, you should feel my heart—but you’re not allowed to,” she answers dryly.

  “Do you have any good-luck charms on you?” the reporter persists.

  “Yes,” she says, a little impatiently. “I have shoes that Ferragamo made—because he made all of Margaret Thatcher’s shoes.”

  Turning to the bleachers, she gives a little shimmy, and the crowd roars with delight. With that, she takes her husband’s hand and heads inside.

  They wouldn’t be the Academy Awards if they weren’t endless. Before she can find out if she’s this year’s Best Actress, a number of formalities will have to be endured. Billy Crystal will do his shtick. (“Nothing can take the sting out of the world’s economic problems like watching millionaires present each other with golden statues.”) Christopher Plummer, at eighty-two, will become the oldest person to be named Best Supporting Actor. (“When I emerged from my mother’s womb I was already rehearsing my Academy speech.”) Cirque du Soleil will perform an acrobatic tribute to the magic of cinema.

  Finally, Colin Firth comes out to present the award for Best Actress. As he recites the names of the nominees, she takes deep, fortifying breaths, her gold earrings trembling above her shoulders. A short clip plays of Thatcher scolding an American dignitary (“Shall I be mother? Tea, Al?”), then Firth opens the envelope and grins.

  “And the Oscar goes to Meryl Streep.”

  THE MERYL STREEP acceptance speech is an art form unto itself: at once spontaneous and scripted, humble and haughty, grateful and blasé. Of course, the fact that there are so many of them is part of the joke. Who but Meryl Streep has won so many prizes that self-deprecating nonchalance has itself become a running gag? By now, it seems as if the title Greatest Living Actress has affixed itself to her about as long as Elizabeth II has been the queen of England. Superlatives stick to her like thumbtacks: she is a god among actors, able to disappear into any character, master any genre, and, Lord knows, nail any accent. Far from fading into the usual post-fifty obsolescence, she has defied Hollywood calculus and reached a career high. No other actress born before 1960 can even get a part unless Meryl passes on it first.

  From her breakout roles in the late seventies, she was celebrated for the infinitely shaded brushstrokes of her characterizations. In the eighties, she was the globe-hopping heroine of dramatic epics like Sophie’s Choice and Out of Africa. The nineties, she insists, were a lull. (She was Oscar-nominated four times.) The year she turned forty, she is keen to point out, she was offered the chance to play three different witches. In 2002, she starred in Spike Jonze’s uncategorizable Adaptation. The movie seemed to liberate her from whatever momentary rut she had been in. Suddenly, she could do what she felt like and make it seem like a lark. When she won the Golden Globe the next year, she seemed almost puzzled. “Oh, I didn’t have anything prepared,” she said, running her fingers through sweat-covered bangs, “because it’s been since, like, the Pleistocene era that I won anything.”

  By 2004, when she won an Emmy for Mike Nichols’s television adaptation of Angels in America, her humility had melted into arch overconfidence (“There
are some days when I myself think I’m overrated . . . but not today”). The hits—and the winking acceptance speeches—kept coming: a Golden Globe for The Devil Wears Prada (“I think I’ve worked with everybody in the room”), a SAG Award for Doubt (“I didn’t even buy a dress!”). She soon mastered the art of jousting with her own hype, undermining her perceived superiority while putting it on luxurious display.

  So when Colin Firth calls her name at the Kodak Theatre, it’s a homecoming three decades in the making, a sign that the career rehabilitation that began with Adaptation has reached its zenith. When she hears the winner, she puts her hand to her mouth and shakes her head in disbelief. With the audience on its feet, she kisses Don twice, takes hold of her third Oscar, and resumes the time-honored tradition of cutting herself down to size.

  “Oh, my God. Oh, come on,” she begins, quieting the crowd. She laughs to herself. “When they called my name, I had this feeling I could hear half of America going, ‘Ohhh, no. Oh, come on—why? Her. Again.’ You know?”

  For a moment, she actually seems hurt by the idea that half of America is disappointed. Then she smirks.

  “But . . . whatever.”

  Having broken the tension with an impeccable fake-out, she proceeds to the business of gratitude.

  “First, I’m going to thank Don,” she says warmly. “Because when you thank your husband at the end of the speech, they play him out with the music, and I want him to know that everything I value most in our lives, you’ve given me.” The camera cuts to Don, patting his heart.

  “And now, secondly, my other partner. Thirty-seven years ago, my first play in New York City, I met the great hair stylist and makeup artist Roy Helland, and we worked together pretty continuously since the day we clapped eyes on each other. His first film with me was Sophie’s Choice, and all the way up to tonight”—her voice cracks briefly—“when he won for his beautiful work in The Iron Lady, thirty years later.” With Thatcheresque certitude, she underlines each word with a karate chop: “Every. Single. Movie. In. Between.”

  She shifts her tone again and continues, “I just want to thank Roy, but also I want to thank—because I really understand I’ll never be up here again.” (With that, she gives an almost imperceptible side-glance that says, Well, we’ll see . . .) “I really want to thank all my colleagues, all my friends. I look out here and I see my life before my eyes: my old friends, my new friends.”

  Her voice softening, she goes for the big finish: “Really, this is such a great honor, but the thing that counts the most with me is the friendships and the love and the sheer joy we have shared making movies together. My friends, thank you, all of you, departed and here, for this, you know, inexplicably wonderful career.”

  On “departed,” she looks skyward and raises a palm to the heavens—or, at least, to the lighting rig of the Kodak Theatre, where show-business ghosts lurk. Any number of ghosts could have been on her mind. Her mother, Mary Wolf, who died in 2001. Her father, Harry, who died two years later. Her directors: Karel Reisz, who cast her in The French Lieutenant’s Woman; Alan J. Pakula, who made her the star of Sophie’s Choice. Surely, she thought of Joseph Papp, the legendary theater producer, who plucked her from obscurity months after she finished drama school.

  But at this moment, seeing her career come to yet another climax, it’s hard to imagine that she didn’t think back to its beginnings, and its beginnings were all wrapped up in John Cazale.

  It’s been thirty-four years since she saw him. Thirty-six years since they met, playing Angelo and Isabella in a Shakespeare in the Park production of Measure for Measure. Night after night in the sticky summer air, she would beg him to show mercy for her condemned brother: “Spare him, spare him! He’s not prepared for death.”

  John Cazale was one of the great character actors of his generation, and one of the most chronically overlooked. Forever Fredo of the Godfather movies, he was her first deep love, and her first devastating loss. Had he lived past forty-two, his name might have become as familiar as De Niro or Pacino. But there was so much he hadn’t been around to see. He hadn’t seen Meryl win two Academy Awards by the time she was thirty-three. He hadn’t seen her age into regal self-possession. He hadn’t seen her play Joanna or Sophie or Karen or Lindy or Francesca or Miranda or Julia or Maggie.

  John Cazale hadn’t lived to see her onstage now, thanking her friends, all of them, for this “inexplicably wonderful career.” After one last “thank you,” she waves farewell and heads toward the wings, having burnished her reputation once again. Meryl Streep, the Iron Lady of acting: indomitable, unsinkable, inevitable.

  BUT IT WASN’T always so.

  Forty-two years earlier, Meryl Streep was a pellucid Vassar student just discovering the lure of the stage. Her extraordinary talent was evident to all who knew her, but she didn’t see much future in it. Although she possessed an idiosyncratic beauty, she never saw herself as an ingénue. Her insecurity worked in her favor: instead of shoehorning herself into traditionally feminine roles, she could make herself foreign, wacky, or plain, disappearing into lives far beyond her suburban New Jersey upbringing. Neither a classic beauty in the mold of Elizabeth Taylor nor a girl-next-door type like Debbie Reynolds, she was everything and nothing—a chameleon. One thing she knew she was not: a movie star.

  What happened next was a series of breaks that every actress on earth dreams of, though few have the raw talent to seize them. By the end of the seventies, she had become the star student at the Yale School of Drama; headlined on Broadway and in Shakespeare in the Park; found and lost the love of her life, John Cazale; found the second love of her life, Don Gummer, and married him; and starred in Kramer vs. Kramer, for which she would win her first Academy Award—all within ten dizzying years.

  How did she get there? Where did she learn to do what she does? Can it even be learned? The questions don’t exist in a bubble: the same decade that made Meryl Streep a star represented a heady, game-changing era in American film acting. But its biggest names were men: Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman. Against her instincts, she joined the cast of The Deer Hunter to be with the ailing Cazale and broke into the Godfather clique. But it was the nuance and dramatic wit of her performances that earned her a place there. She excelled at the in-between states: ambivalence, denial, regret. Makeup and accents made her unrecognizable, and yet each performance had an inner discontent, a refusal to inhabit any one emotion without coloring it with the opposite emotion. Her interior life was dialectical.

  “It’s like church for me,” she once said, before stumbling on the question of where she goes when she is acting. “It’s like approaching the altar. I feel like the more you talk about whatever it is, something will go away. I mean, there’s a lot of superstition in it. But I do know that I feel freer, less in control, more susceptible.” Her immense craft was not without its detractors. In 1982, Pauline Kael, The New Yorker’s maverick film critic, wrote of her performance in Sophie’s Choice, “She has, as usual, put thought and effort into her work. But something about her puzzles me: after I’ve seen her in a movie, I can’t visualize her from the neck down.”

  The phrase stuck, as did the idea that Meryl Streep is “technical.” But, as she is quick to explain, she works more from intuition than from any codified technique. While she is part of a generation raised on Method acting, rooted in the idea that an actor can project personal emotions and experiences onto a character, she has always been skeptical of its self-punishing demands. She is, among other things, a collage artist, her mind like an algorithm that can call up accents, gestures, inflections, and reassemble them into a character. Sometimes, she doesn’t know from what or whom she has borrowed until she sees it up on the screen.

  Coming of age during the ascendance of second-wave feminism, her discovery of acting was inextricable from the business of becoming a woman. During her cheerleading days at Bernards High School, she modeled herself on the girls she saw in women’s magazines. Her world opened up in 1967 at Vas
sar College, which was then all-female. By the time she graduated, it had opened its dorms to men, and she had intuited her way through her first major acting role, in August Strindberg’s Miss Julie. A decade later, she starred in Kramer vs. Kramer, as a young mother who has the audacity to abandon her husband and child, only to reappear and demand custody. The film was, on one level, a reactionary slant against women’s lib. But Streep insisted on making Joanna Kramer not a dragon lady but a complex woman with legitimate longings and doubts, and she nearly hijacked the movie in the process.

  “Women,” she has said, “are better at acting than men. Why? Because we have to be. If successfully convincing someone bigger than you are of something he doesn’t want to know is a survival skill, this is how women have survived through the millennia. Pretending is not just play. Pretending is imagined possibility. Pretending or acting is a very valuable life skill, and we all do it all the time. We don’t want to be caught doing it, but nevertheless it’s part of the adaptation of our species. We change who we are to fit the exigencies of our time.”

  The years that changed Meryl Streep from winsome cheerleader to the unstoppable star of The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Sophie’s Choice had their own exigencies, ones that also transformed America, women, and the movies. The story of her rise is also the story of the men who tried to mold her, or love her, or place her on a pedestal. Most of them failed. To become a star—never high on her list of priorities—she would do so on her own terms, letting nothing other than her talent and her otherworldly self-assurance clear her path. As she wrote to an ex-boyfriend her freshman year of college, “I have come to the brink of something very frightening and very wonderful.”

  Mary

  ON THE FIRST Saturday of November, the student body of Bernards High School gathered for a sacred rite. Homecoming: the ratification of a hard-fought teenage hierarchy. On a crisp green football field tucked behind a Methodist Church, the notoriously hopeless Bernards Mountaineers faced off against their rivals from Dunellen, a New Jersey borough not unlike their own. At halftime, the players cleared the field. Then it was time to crown the homecoming queen of 1966.