Her Again Page 12

  The addition of Lincoln Center as his new satellite made his reach unprecedented, with outposts downtown, uptown, in Central Park, and on Broadway. Bernard Gersten, his longtime associate producer, called it Papp’s “expansionist period.” A 1972 New Yorker cartoon imagined all of New York City as a Joseph Papp production. But he was uneasy at Lincoln Center, which to him represented the establishment he had spent his life fighting against. The Vivian Beaumont reminded him of a mausoleum. He didn’t even keep an office there.

  Lincoln Center subscribers returned his disdain. When he announced the lineup for his inaugural season—a rock musical, a “black” play, a working-class drama by David Rabe—they fled in droves. One woman, describing herself as “one of the lily white subscribers who I think you would like to drop anyway,” told him: “I’m not interested in a black playwright. I’m interested in a good playwright.” “We got bales of mail,” Gail Papp recalled. “People protesting the production of black plays on the main stage. Really hateful kind of mail.” Within a year, subscriptions plummeted from 27,000 to 22,000. Far from being a goldmine, Lincoln Center was turning into financial quicksand.

  Finally, Papp relented. The Vivian Beaumont would now house the classics. He flew to Oslo to persuade the Norwegian film star Liv Ullmann to play Nora in A Doll’s House, which opened to packed crowds. He booked Ruth Gordon and Lynn Redgrave to star in Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession. But he gnashed his teeth the whole time. None of this was why he got into theater. Downtown, he was premiering groundbreaking works like Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. Uptown, he was a sellout.

  He put together the 1975–76 season at the Vivian Beaumont in a hurry. Along with Mrs. Warren’s Profession, he would transfer the Delacorte’s popular production of Hamlet starring Sam Waterston, followed by Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. The season would open with Trelawny of the “Wells,” Pinero’s crowd-pleasing comedy of manners. On July 13th, less than two weeks before A Chorus Line opened on Broadway, the Times ran the headline: “Can Shakespeare, Ibsen, Shaw and Pinero Save Joseph Papp?” He should have been riding high, but he was under fire.

  Trelawny wasn’t just a chestnut: it was a chestnut within a chestnut. Written in the late 1890s, Pinero set the play thirty years earlier. According to the author, the play “should follow, to the closest detail, the mode of the early Sixties—the period, in dress, of crinoline and the peg-top trouser. . . . No attempt should be made to modify such fashions in illustration, to render them less strange, even less grotesque, to the modern eye. On the contrary, there should be an endeavour to reproduce, perhaps to accentuate, any feature which may now seem particularly quaint and bizarre.” Nothing could be more antithetical to Papp’s vision.

  And now here he was, stuck late at work, waiting for some Yale-trained nobody—one of Brustein’s people—to read for the part of the dainty but determined Imogen Parrott. And she was an hour late.

  THE SAME DAY the Times had run its dire headline about Joseph Papp, Meryl arrived at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, in Waterford, Connecticut. The O’Neill was founded in 1964 on the Hammond farm, a leafy ninety-five-acre expanse not far from where Eugene O’Neill had spent his summers. The following year, the National Playwrights Conference was established there, providing a forum for playwrights to work far away from the critical gaze of New York City. In 1977, Wendy Wasserstein would develop Uncommon Women and Others there. The Times called it “Tryout town, USA.”

  For young actors like Meryl Streep, Joe Grifasi, and Christopher Lloyd, it was like theater summer camp. They would sprint from play to play, rehearsing under copper beech trees and spending off hours on the beach. Lloyd was the only actor with a car, a red Triumph convertible. They bunked nearby at Connecticut College, in a dorm affectionately called “The Slammer,” which Grifasi later described as “tastefully appointed with glossy enameled cinderblock, sea-green Naugahyde with cigarette-burn appliqué, and each room with a curiously dappled set of linens and a humble Protestant pillow, with the plushness of matzo.”

  Meryl loved the open air and free-wheeling atmosphere of the O’Neill, with its “motley, idiosyncratic bunch.” There was the scholar Arthur Ballet, doused in expensive French suntan oil. There was Edith Oliver, The New Yorker’s theater critic and a midwife of plays—a “little old lady with a smile as big as the beach.” George C. White, the O’Neill’s founder, presided in a white linen suit. From their chatty, exuberant suppers on the sloping lawn, she could see “the lights from the amusement park flickering across the water from the other side of the harbor, the other fun house no one had any time to visit because we were lighting up the sky from our own side as well.”

  Meryl would perform in five plays in four weeks—the kind of rapid-fire, improvisatory acting she had honed at the Yale Cabaret. There was no time to overthink character choices: just pick something and go with it. In Marco Polo, a commedia play for children, she and Grifo played twin Truffaldinos, clowning around like amateur acrobats. “When people saw Meryl in that first play, they realized she wasn’t just another pair of fetching cheekbones with a goofy last name,” Grifasi recalled. “No one expects a pretty girl to be that funny or insane, but the truth is that others always find Meryl prettier than she considers herself to be.”

  The most alluring title that year was Isadora Duncan Sleeps with the Russian Navy. Meryl played Isadora, the dancer who had famously died when her long, flowing scarf got caught in a wheel of the car she was riding in. Meryl’s only prop was the scarf, which she used to ensnare her many lovers before it ultimately strangled her. They had five days to stage the play, and Meryl couldn’t manipulate the scarf and hold the script at the same time. So she memorized the whole play, to the amazement of her fellow actors. (A “dull” achievement, if you asked her.)

  On a rare night off, she and Grifo went to see the year’s inescapable blockbuster movie, Jaws. It was the perfect diversion in their carefree summer, the last they’d have before the entertainment industry swallowed them whole—or took a nasty killer-shark bite out of them. The next day, Meryl jumped into Long Island Sound and splashed dramatically, as if daring the great white shark to attack. Under the setting sun, she and Grifo swam out to a float bobbing in the distance. She turned to him and confided:

  “I’m going to get married and have a bunch of children by the time I’m thirty-five.”

  Then they swam back.

  Three weeks in, Meryl got a call that turned her peaceful summer on its head. She had a callback for Trelawny of the “Wells” at Lincoln Center. When could she be in New York? Her schedule at the O’Neill was jam-packed, but she managed to convince the Public to give her a special audition slot. She would have to get in and out of the city like lightning.

  She and Grifo borrowed a car and zoomed down the highway. As Meryl drove and lit cigarettes, Grifo held the script and ran her lines. White-knuckling the wheel at eighty-five miles per hour, she calmly recited her speeches as he fed her cues, the two of them enveloped in a Marlboro cloud. As they passed New Haven, Grifo imagined the Variety headline: “Dead Thesps, Dreams Dashed in High-Speed Curtain Call.”

  By the time they pulled up to Lafayette Street—alive—she was despondent. They were so absurdly late. They’re not going to hire me, she thought. I’m going to go, but it’s doomed. She got out of the car while Grifo kept the motor running, like a getaway driver in a bank heist. The air was sticky, and she didn’t want to start sweating, so she walked instead of ran. Not that it mattered. She was doomed.

  But that’s not what Rosemarie Tichler saw. Having desperately tried to keep Papp occupied as the clock ticked, she was about to give up when she stepped outside and took one last look down the street. There was Meryl Streep, an hour and a half late, but walking.

  She swept Meryl inside and introduced her to Joe. After quickly apologizing for being late, she went right into the scene—no time for fuss.

  Tichler watched her in awe. Here she was, fresh out of
drama school, meeting the kingpin of downtown theater for the first time, late for a callback for a major part at Lincoln Center. “Ninety-five percent of actresses would get hysterical, but she just . . . handled it,” Tichler recalled.

  When she left, Tichler let a momentary silence linger. Then she turned to Papp and said: “That’s it, right?”

  Outside on the curb, Meryl hopped back into the car. She finally breathed. They would have to book it back to Connecticut.

  “I saw Joe Papp,” she told Grifo.

  And?

  “He liked me.”

  She was right. Meryl Streep had just clinched her first role on Broadway. And she hadn’t even moved to New York.

  FOUR YEARS BEFORE Woody Allen romanticized it in Manhattan, New York City was in a rut. Budgetary foibles and urban decay had left a miasma of neon, sleaze, and crime. Murders and robberies had doubled since 1967. Under Mayor Abraham Beame, the city was hurtling toward bankruptcy. In July, 1975, the city’s sanitation workers went on a wildcat strike, leaving garbage to pile up and fester in the heat—people were worried about the health risks of flies.

  Filmmakers like Sidney Lumet and Martin Scorsese captured the grime and corruption in Mean Streets, Serpico, and Dog Day Afternoon, the last of which opened on September 21st, just as the muggy “dog days” of summer were turning into a ruddy fall. Soon after, the city was denied a federal bailout, and the Daily News ran the immortal headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” Like a dirt-smudged orphan, New York was on its own.

  For Meryl Streep, who had just moved to Manhattan, it was the place to be. She had a job on Broadway and a room on West End Avenue, in an apartment she shared with Theo Westenberger, a photographer friend she had met at Dartmouth. Westenberger would become the first woman to shoot the cover of Newsweek and Sports Illustrated. For now, she found an ideal subject in her roommate, whom she shot leaning on a television in a kimono, or straddling a stool in a leopard-print jumpsuit.

  Soon after, Meryl got her own place a few blocks away, on West Sixty-ninth Street, just off Central Park West. The neighborhood was rough—there were drug deals on Amsterdam Avenue all the time—but it was the first time she was living alone, free of roommates or brothers. However hazardous, she found the city glamorously lonesome.

  “I got three bills a month—the rent, the electric, and the phone,” she recalled. “I had my two brothers and four or five close friends to talk to, some acquaintances, and everybody was single. I kept a diary. I read three newspapers and the New York Review of Books. I read books, I took afternoon naps before performances and stayed out till two and three, talking about acting with actors in actors’ bars.”

  And, unlike much of New York City, she was employed.

  At her first reading of Trelawny, she was petrified. The company was large, with veteran stage actors like Walter Abel, who was born in 1898, the same year the play premiered. But there was a younger set, too. A tightly wound twenty-two-year-old Juilliard dropout named Mandy Patinkin was also making his Broadway debut. So was the bug-eyed character actor Jeffrey Jones. At twenty-nine, the broad-faced Harvard graduate John Lithgow was on his third Broadway show. And, in the title role of Miss Rose Trelawny, the bee-voiced, auburn-haired Mary Beth Hurt was on her fourth.

  Mary Beth was also twenty-nine, having come out of NYU’s drama school in 1972. Her marriage to William Hurt, a drama student at Juilliard, had imploded just as she was finding her professional footing. In 1973, Papp cast her as Celia in As You Like It in Central Park, and during rehearsals she became so distraught that she checked into the psych ward at Roosevelt Hospital. “I thought that I had really failed,” she said later, “that I was supposed to be the perfect wife.” Papp called her every day at the hospital, saying, “We’ll hold the role open for you as long as we can. Please come back.”

  “Once Joe loved you—and it really did feel like love; it didn’t feel like trying to use someone—he loved you forever,” Mary Beth said. After three days, she checked herself out and went on as Celia.

  At the read-through of Trelawny, Meryl was trembling. At one point, she realized her upper lip was wiggling, completely independent of the lower one. A. J. Antoon had reset the British play in turn-of-the-century New York, and smack in the middle of one of her lines, she heard a booming voice: “Do a Southern accent.”

  It was Joe Papp.

  “Yessuh,” she said, instinctively modeling her drawl on Dinah Shore’s. (“See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet . . .”) And suddenly her character started to make sense—an ingénue getting on in years, shifting from Southern belle to savvy theater manager, able to boss people around. Joe was right.

  “The curvaceous, desperately subtle flirtation in the cadences moved me toward a way of holding myself and of moving across the room, a way of sitting, and above all an awareness, because a Southern accent affords self-aware self-expression,” she said later. “You shape the phrase. Not to get too deep into it, it was a valuable choice and it was not mine, it was his and I still don’t know where the hell he got the idea. This is the essence of his direction. He’s direct. Do it, he says.”

  John Lithgow had met Meryl a few months earlier, at a reading of a play by a Harvard friend of his—something about hostages in Appalachia. He had noticed “a pale, wispy girl with long, straight, cornsilk hair” and an odd name. “She appeared to be in her late teens,” he would recall. “She was so shy, withdrawn, and self-effacing that I couldn’t decide whether she was pretty or plain. The only time I heard her voice was when she spoke her lines. She had a high, thin voice and a twangy hillbilly accent. She was so lacking in theatrical airs that I surmised that perhaps she wasn’t an actress at all.” He wondered whether the play was actually based on her.

  When he spotted her at the first rehearsal of Trelawny of the “Wells,” she was like a different person, animated and eager and confidently beautiful. As usual, she wasn’t letting her nerves show. “I’d been watching actors act my whole life,” he recalled. “I wasn’t easily taken in. But when I’d mistaken her for a hayseed hillbilly at that play reading a few months before, either I had been a myopic fool or this young woman was a brilliant actress.”

  OCTOBER 15, 1975: opening night of Trelawny of the “Wells.” Meryl was backstage at the Vivian Beaumont, waiting to go on. Her upper lip, once again, was trembling. She willed it to stop, but it was no use. She tried not to think about the critics, who were out there scowling in the dark. She told herself: My student loans are going to be paid off!

  Michael Tucker, the thirty-one-year-old actor playing Tom Wrench, was already onstage. He was nervous, too. Meryl thought of the swanning, confident woman she was about to play, and walked onstage.

  “Well, Wrench, and how are you?” was her first line on Broadway.

  They played the scene, a little stiffly. Then Tucker caught his sleeve on a prop, and it fell onto the table. Meryl caught it before it broke. She placed it back up.

  “And from that moment everything was just fine,” she recalled, “because something real had happened, and it pulled us right onto the table, into the world. And then all the work we had done in rehearsal and the life we had lived and who we were, we just located ourselves in the tactile world and there we were.”

  The critics had other ideas.

  “Mr. Antoon has transposed the play to New York at the turn of the century. Why?” Clive Barnes practically screamed in the Times the next morning. “What new resonances does he get from it? Is he trying to make it more relevant to American audiences or easier for American actors? Does this make it more meaningful? Or is it merely another example of the Shakespeare Festival determination to do almost anything just as long as that anything is different. This is a folly. And symptomatic folly at that.”

  Walter Kerr piled on in the Sunday edition, under the headline “‘A Chorus Line’ Soars, ‘Trelawny’ Falls Flat.” “The lights are no sooner up on a theatrical rooming-house,” he wrote, “than the good folk carrying the opening exposition are cackl
ing like wild geese to assure us that something is, or is going to be, hilarious around here.” However, he added: “In the overstressed onrush, only two figures emerge at all: Meryl Streep as a glossily successful former colleague who has gone on to ‘star’ in another theater, tart, level-headed, stunningly decked out in salmon gown and white plumes; and Mary [B]eth Hurt, as Rose Trelawny herself, who is at the very least deeply satisfying to look at.”

  No doubt, the show was a turkey, at least with critics. The cast was stunned—the audiences seemed to be having a good time.

  Meryl wasn’t glum. Along with Kerr’s peck on the cheek, the show had collateral benefits. Shortly before Thanksgiving, the screen legend Gene Kelly came and greeted the starstruck cast backstage. With him was Tony Randall, famous from The Odd Couple. Randall told the actors that he was planning to start a national acting company and he wanted the Trelawny cast to join. It sounded heavenly (though it wouldn’t materialize until 1991). Still, the young cast didn’t take him entirely seriously: Why wait for Tony Randall? They already felt like a repertory company. They had each other.

  Meryl’s new cohort included Mary Beth Hurt, with whom she shared Dressing Room No. 4. “It was full of smoke,” Hurt recalled. “It was fun. We laughed. Mandy would drop in, or Michael Tucker. Everybody was visiting everybody. The doors were open. Nobody ever shut their doors unless they were changing clothes.”