Her Again Read online

  They were at an impasse. She left the office, still booked through the end of the season.

  Distraught, she went to see a school psychiatrist, who told her: “You know what? You’re going to graduate in eleven weeks, and you’ll never be in competition with five women again. You’ll be competing with five thousand women and it will be a relief. It will be better or worse, but it won’t be this.”

  Still, those were eleven long weeks, and the tenor of the school was more rancorous than ever. Over Christmas, Bobby Lewis had suffered a heart attack, catalyzed by the pressures of running the acting department. He asked that Norma Brustein, who had been his class assistant, take his place. The second-year students were furious that the dean’s wife had been made their teacher without their consultation. They sent a telegram to a bed-ridden Lewis, describing their “surprise” and “disappointment.” The Yale Daily News ran the headline: “Dissent Stirs Drama School.”

  Brustein had had just about enough. “Jealousy and meanness of spirit were rife in the School,” he wrote. “I think I preferred revolution.” He gathered all the second-year actors into the Ex and proceeded to pass out blank withdrawal slips. If anyone was dissatisfied, he informed them, they were free to fill out the forms and leave. No one took him up on it.

  Who cared if Brustein was, in his words, a “Genghis Khan presiding over a Stalinist tyranny”? He had a school to run. He fantasized about quitting or disbanding the entire program, but Norma would tear up his resignation letters. For Passover that year, he had Meryl and Chuck Levin over for seder and discussed the turmoil in the acting program, clearly singling them out as students he trusted.

  She had one more production left: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with Christopher Lloyd as Oberon. Despite her exhaustion, Helena was an irresistible role: beautiful but frenzied, farcical yet melancholy. The director, Alvin Epstein, had a romantic vision, melding Shakespeare’s text with Henry Purcell’s score for The Fairy-Queen. The set featured a gigantic shimmering moon made out of popcorn, and the quarreling lovers—Helena, Hermia, Demetrius, and Lysander—would shed their costumes as the play went along, as if melting into the sylvan scenery.

  Epstein was constantly arguing with the conductor, Otto-Werner Mueller, leaving little time to focus on the lovers. This concerned the four actors, who had to pull off one of the most intricate comic scenes in Shakespeare. “Alvin would never direct the scene,” said Steve Rowe, who played Demetrius. “He said, ‘Go off in a room and work it out.’ And we did. We came back and showed it to him. And he would say stuff like, ‘Well, it’s coming, but I just think you look like pigs in swill. Go off and work on it some more!’”

  Robert Marx, the student dramaturge assigned to the production, recorded the mounting anxiety in his rehearsal log. April 21, 1975: “lovers want more rehearsal time—the pressured schedule has led to disjoint[ed] characterizations . . . results in tense discussion with Alvin . . . general feeling of uselessness over pre-rehearsal ‘talk’ sessions about play . . . actors: too many scenes remain ‘unsolved’ for them.”

  April 29th: “evening: scheduled run-through cancelled . . . explosion with Otto: claims he hasn’t enough time for preparing and integrating the music . . . Alvin wants to use the time to stage the chorus sequences . . . orchestra dismissed early . . . Otto threatens to resign, but doesn’t . . . Staging time used for the chorus.”

  May 6th: “first complete run-through with live music . . . Chorus moves like death incarnate—they have no freedom of gesture or posture (and they wear the costumes very badly); the enunciation is poor; soloists are generally off-pitch . . . still some question as to how the music will integrate with the text . . . fairy costumes are awkward without being outrageous—a net of Victoriana seems to hang over the big fairy sequences . . . Meryl Streep (Helena) times her melodrama extremely well, but she seems too beautiful for the part; she should be Hermia.”

  By May 9th—opening night—it somehow came together: “wildly enthusiastic audience . . . everything coalesces: rustics, lovers, battles, fairies . . . cuts performed seamlessly, although the show is still running just over three hours . . . chorus moves a bit better; orchestra relatively on pitch . . . some rumblings in a few corners of the audience as to whether the play has been sufficiently dealt with from an intellectual point of view; also, some questions about the use of music . . . general consensus—a success.”

  Most everyone agreed. Brustein called the production “the culmination of everything we had ever done.” Linda Atkinson, who played Puck, said that it “just took off like a flying carpet.” Mel Gussow, from the Times, found it “haunting” and “lustrous,” though he added, “The production falters a bit with its star-crossed lovers. Except for Meryl Streep (who clearly is one of the most versatile members of the Yale company) as Helena, they are not quite sportive enough.”

  Word spread that Midsummer was the funniest thing in New Haven, particularly the “Pyramus and Thisbe” scene, led by Meryl’s friend Joe “Grifo” Grifasi as Flute. Spectators would crowd in just to see it. “The house manager used to have to pry people away, because he was a retired fire marshal and it was a fire hazard,” Feingold recalled. As Helena, Meryl made herself an awkward, teetering mess, someone unaware of her luminous beauty. Amid the reverie, the fall of Saigon, on April 30th, had brought the Vietnam War to an end, closing a nightmarish chapter for the country. The mood on campus, buoyed by the intoxicating Midsummer, was one of belated release.

  Approaching graduation, Meryl took stock of her Yale experience. What exactly had she learned there? There had been no cohesive training, just a mishmash of techniques. “That kind of grab-bag, eclectic education is invaluable, but only out of adversity,” she said later. “Half the time you’re thinking, I wouldn’t do it this way, this guy is full of crap, but in a way, that’s how you build up what you believe in. Still, those years made me tired, crazy, nervous. I was always throwing up.”

  She had an agent in New York and a fluency with diverse theatrical styles: Brustein’s ideal of the repertory player. But there had been darker lessons, too. The pain of not being noticed for one’s achievements. The bitterness of competition, even when you win. She had learned what happens when you succumb to powerful men and allow them to rob you of your agency.

  And she learned that she was good. Really good.

  Brustein begged her to remain with the company after graduation. He knew what he had, and didn’t want her to sacrifice her talent to something as banal as stardom. Three days after she turned twenty-six, she wrote to Brustein, apologizing for taking so long with her decision. “The Rep is home,” she wrote, “I’m no ingrate, and you’ve given me opportunities and encouragement that form the basis of my confidence in and commitment to the theatre.” However, she continued, “right now everything in me wants to try out what I’ve learned in New Haven away from New Haven. Just got to see what it’s like.”

  On May 19th, the class of 1975 marched into Old Campus in caps and gowns. Within the sea of black, one woman stood out like a blaze of light. It was Meryl Streep, in a bright white picnic dress. Viewed from the Connecticut sky, she must have looked like a diamond glistening in the muck. Once again, Meryl had done everyone one better.

  “All the rest of the women in the class went: ‘Bitch,’” William Ivey Long recalled. “‘Why didn’t I think of that?’”

  Isabella

  THE SUMMER OF 1975 was a brutal time to start an acting career, and the graduates of the Yale School of Drama had that drummed into their heads. The country had been slogging through a recession, taking the entertainment industry and all of New York City down with it. Times Square had devolved into a wasteland of garbage and strip joints. Broadway theaters were empty, or being turned into hotels. Even day jobs were hard to come by. As Linda Atkinson sighed to the New Haven Register shortly after graduation, “Unfortunately, the jobs selling gloves at Macy’s are getting as hard to find as acting jobs.”

  The math was bleak: six thousand more degrees in
dramatic arts had been awarded across the country than the previous year. The cast of A Midsummer Night’s Dream would soon disappear into an ocean of aspiring Pucks and Hermias, each armed with a stack of eight-by-ten glossies. Many would try their luck in New York, while others fanned out to regional theaters. One Yale actor was off to Massachusetts to operate a kite shop.

  And where was Meryl Streep, the undisputed star of the class of 1975? Meryl Streep, who had two degrees, four thousand dollars in student loans, and almost no professional credits to her name? Stuck on the interstate from Connecticut, an hour late to meet Joseph Papp, one of the biggest producers in New York City. I’m twenty-six, she had told herself. I’m starting my career. I better make it next year.

  A lot was riding on this one, because she had already screwed up. Before graduation, the acting students had taken a trip to New York to audition for the Theatre Communications Group, which placed young actors at regional theaters across the country. The TCG audition was so important that Yale offered a special class on it. The drama students would be up against their counterparts from Juilliard and NYU, and whoever made it through the New York round would be sent to finals in Chicago. Impress the panel, and you might get hired to join a company in Louisville or Minneapolis. It wasn’t New York, it wasn’t Hollywood, but it was a job.

  Meryl stayed over in New York the night before the audition. When she woke up the next morning, she looked at the clock and went back to sleep. She just didn’t go. She couldn’t stand the idea of going up against the same seven or eight people again. Perhaps she also knew that she didn’t belong in Louisville. As she drifted back to unconsciousness, she could hear her classmates’ voices in her head: “Gawd, where’s Meryl? Oh, man, she’s really fucked herself now!”

  Was she finished? Not quite. Because soon after, Milton Goldman, the head of the theater division at ICM, called up Rosemarie Tichler, the casting director at the Public Theater.

  “I want you to meet someone,” he told her. “Robert Lewis, the acting teacher at Yale, said she’s one of the most extraordinary people he’s ever taught.”

  “If Robert Lewis says that, I’d be happy to meet her,” Tichler replied from her office in the East Village. Of course, this could be Milton exaggerating, she told herself.

  Days later, Meryl was standing onstage on the third floor of the Public, a mazelike red building that had once housed the Astor Library. Now it was the hub of the downtown theater world, the place where Hair had originated and where A Chorus Line had opened that April to ecstatic reviews.

  Like most casting people, Tichler asked for a classic monologue and a modern one. Meryl began with the warlike Queen Margaret from Henry VI, Part 3, taunting the captured Duke of York:

  Off with the crown, and with the crown his head

  And, whilst we breathe, take time to do him dead.

  Watching from the house, Tichler smiled. Meryl had captured not just Margaret’s viciousness but the glee she takes in torturing her political rival. “She was,” Tichler recalled, “a wonderful monster.”

  Then Meryl shifted her body, becoming girlish, sexy, demure. Her voice melted into a sultry Texas drawl. She was now Southern Comfort, a flirtatious twentysomething wild child from Terrence McNally’s Whiskey.

  “I grew up right here in Houston,” she purred. “I was pretty, I was the national champion baton twirler and I only dated football players. Sound familiar?”

  It did, to the actress onstage—this was her high school persona, the character she had played to the hilt in Bernardsville, recast as a Southern hussy.

  She went on, as Southern Comfort, to describe all the jocks she’d made it with: Bobby Barton, in the backseat of his father’s Ford Fairlane; Tiny Walker, who had a blood-red Plymouth Fury with dual carburetors. All the boys were killed on the football field shortly after sleeping with her, but she described their liaisons with delectation—especially the cars.

  Tichler was in hysterics. “When she talked about sleeping with them, it was always about the car,” she recalled. Meryl had shown some of her chameleonic gift, but Tichler didn’t know the full extent of it. “I just knew she had great beauty, she had a lightness of touch,” she said. “She had grace.”

  A few weeks later, Tichler was casting Trelawny of the “Wells,” a Victorian comedy by Arthur Wing Pinero, about the ingénue of a theater troupe who gives up the stage for marriage. The show would go up at the Vivian Beaumont at Lincoln Center, which had lately become an outpost of the New York Shakespeare Festival, a sprawling entity that included the Public Theater and Shakespeare in the Park. Tichler was looking for someone to play Miss Imogen Parrott, an actress who doubles as a theater manager. She had to be charming but authoritative, good with money and at telling people what to do. Tichler thought back to the Yale actress who had done that crackling Queen Margaret and called her in for the director, A. J. Antoon.

  But Antoon wasn’t sold. He liked Meryl, but he liked other people, too. At her second audition at the Public, he hadn’t seen what Tichler had seen—that one-in-a-million thing. Tichler kept pushing, but Antoon’s wasn’t the opinion that really mattered. The person who mattered was Joe Papp, the man who founded the New York Shakespeare Festival and ran the Public and employed just about half of the actors, playwrights, and directors in New York City.

  Meryl was still in Connecticut and couldn’t make the normal audition times, so Tichler and Antoon had her come in for Papp after hours. Seven o’clock turned to eight o’clock, and there was no Meryl Streep. Papp was getting restless—patience wasn’t his strong suit—and the sky was getting dark. As he paced, Tichler nervously kept the conversation going. She wanted him to see this girl. Where in God’s name was she?

  IN SOME WAYS, Joe Papp was another Robert Brustein. Both were powerful, pugnacious men who started theaters, started fights, and towered over an army of artists from whom they extracted undying loyalty. Both were New York Jews educated in public schools, and both thought that theater could change the world. Between New York and New Haven, they competed over plays and actors, maintaining a (mostly) friendly rivalry.

  And there, for the most part, was where the similarities ended. While Brustein operated from the ivory tower, Papp never went to college. Brustein summered in Martha’s Vineyard; Papp rented cottages on the Jersey Shore. Born Joseph Papirofsky, to penniless Eastern European immigrants, he had worked as a barker at Coney Island as a teenager and sold tomatoes and pretzels from a pushcart. After serving in World War II, he joined the Actors’ Lab in Los Angeles, where he forged his populist ideology: theater was for everyone, not just for the elite. Even as he fought his way to the top of the New York theater world, he felt out of place, a working-class Yid in a white-collar universe.

  Like Shakespeare’s best characters, he was a walking, bellowing contradiction. The critics could never make up their minds about whether he was a cultural paragon or an autodidactic huckster. He spoke of his impoverished Brooklyn boyhood with Dickensian relish, yet two of his four consecutive wives were under the impression that he was Polish Catholic. He joined the Young Communist League when he was fifteen and kept his affiliation through his early thirties, but he rarely spoke of it, wary of putting his theater’s funding at risk. As he dashed through the halls of the Public, a trail of assistants would scurry behind, trying to make sense of his conflicting pronouncements. He was punny, allusive. When someone burst into his office to tell him that an actor had been injured rehearsing Hamlet, he shot back: “Well, you can’t make a Hamlet without breaking legs.”

  With little more than chutzpah (which he had in spades), Papp had built an empire. In 1954, he staged Romeo and Juliet in a church on Avenue D, the beginning of what he would call the New York Shakespeare Festival. His dream was to build a home for free Shakespeare in Central Park, leading him into a contentious standoff with the city’s all-powerful parks commissioner, Robert Moses, who was in his seventies and had no intention of bending to the will of “an irresponsible Commie.” The ensuing bat
tle made Papp a municipal celebrity, a scrappy showbiz Robin Hood who took on the big bad commissioner and brought high art to the masses.

  Finally, Moses allowed the plans for a Central Park amphitheater to move forward, and the Delacorte opened in 1962, when Meryl Streep was thirteen. The first Shakespeare in the Park production was The Merchant of Venice, starring James Earl Jones and George C. Scott. Four years later, Papp opened the Public Theater, in the East Village, where he would produce bold new plays by writers like David Rabe, whom he treated as a surrogate son.

  From the beginning, part of his mission was to forge an American style of Shakespearean acting: muscular and raw, nothing like the plummy British oratory of Laurence Olivier. “We seek blood-and-guts actors . . . actors who have the stamp of truth on everything they say or do,” he wrote. “This humanizes the language and replaces verse-reading and singsong recitation—the mark of old-fashioned classical acting—with an understandable, living speech.” His actors would look and sound like New York City itself: multiethnic and real and tough.

  Although Papp kept up a face of irrepressible bravado, he was plagued by anxiety, usually over the Festival’s constant money problems. His attitude was: do something big now, pay for it later. “He always felt under duress and embattled,” said Gail Merrifield Papp, who ran the play-development department and in 1976 became the fourth and final Mrs. Papp. The Festival was perpetually in debt, and the fiscal worries of the seventies made the crisis an existential one. Then came a deus ex machina: A Chorus Line, the revolutionary musical drawn from the stories and struggles of Broadway dancers. The show opened downtown in April, 1975, and transferred to Broadway that July. Its smash run would bankroll the Festival for years, keeping the Delacorte open and free to the masses and allowing Papp to keep coming up with crazy schemes.

  One scheme in particular had him worried. In 1972, the management of Lincoln Center, the massive cultural complex that had revitalized Manhattan’s West Sixties, asked him to consult in finding a new director for its theater division. The more he consulted, the more he realized he had the perfect candidate: himself. He loathed the idea of catering to well-to-do matinee ladies uptown, but the Festival was more than a million dollars in debt. Taking over the Vivian Beaumont, Lincoln Center’s cavernous eleven-hundred-seat house, he could tap into the kind of cash flow that was unavailable to him at the Public. And, in the process, he could give his brood of audacious young playwrights a national platform.