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  And she had a new collaborator: J. Roy Helland, the production’s hair designer. The son of a hairdresser, Roy had run a salon in California and moonlighted as a female impersonator before going into theater. The previous spring, he was hired to primp Liv Ullmann for the Lincoln Center production of A Doll’s House. Trelawny was his second Broadway show. He was painstaking with curlers and wigs, and he knew how to soften facial flaws (say, a crooked nose) with just the right shading. Roy was appalled when the stagehands pinned up naked girlie posters backstage, so he hung up hunky Playgirl centerfolds in the wig room, where Meryl and Mary Beth became habitués. Roy told them that Ullmann was trying to lure him to Norway to style her for Ingmar Bergman films. The two young actresses straightened their backs and said, “Well, when we get to do movies, we’ll take you, too!”

  “He wasn’t just a guy down there in the darkness doing wigs,” Jeffrey Jones recalled. “He had strong opinions and good taste, and he decided immediately that she was the person to whom he would hitch his wagon.” When Roy watched Meryl in rehearsal, he noticed a professionalism similar to Ullmann’s—she didn’t act like it was her first Broadway show. He saw Meryl as a living canvas, someone who seemed to work from the outside in and the inside out at the same time. When she needed a touch-up, she would slink down to the wig room and yodel, “Oh, Roooooy!” Soon, everyone in the cast was doing it.

  MERYL STREEP CAME to New York with a primary goal: not to get typecast. At Yale, she had played everyone from Major Barbara to an eighty-year-old “translatrix.” In the real world, it wasn’t so easy. “Forget about being a character actress. This is New York,” people kept telling her. “They need an old lady, they’ll get an old lady—you’re going to get typed, get used to it.” More than once, she was told she would make a wonderful Ophelia.

  But she didn’t want to play Ophelia. And she didn’t want to be an ingénue. She wanted to be everything and everybody. If she could just hold on to that ability to carousel through identities—that repertory thing she had mastered at Yale and the O’Neill—she could be the kind of actress she wanted to be. Had she landed in a movie or a Broadway musical right out of school, she might have been pegged as a pretty blonde. Instead, she did something few svelte young actresses would do: she played a 230-pound Mississippi hussy.

  The Phoenix Theatre company had been around since 1953, when it opened a play starring Jessica Tandy in a former Yiddish theater on Second Avenue. Since then, despite its shoestring existence, it had produced dozens of shows, from the Carol Burnett vehicle Once Upon a Mattress to The Seagull, starring Montgomery Clift. Its gentlemanly cofounder, T. Edward Hambleton (his friends called him “T”), wasn’t ideological like Papp. His guiding principle was: produce good plays.

  By 1976, the Phoenix was operating out of the Playhouse, a small Broadway theater on West Forty-eighth Street. Like other theater companies in town, it was planning an all-American season to celebrate the coming Bicentennial. First up: a double bill showcasing the twin titans of mid-century American playwriting, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. Both men were in their sixties, their reputations secure enough to render them slightly out of date. And yet the contrast would give the evening some frisson: Williams, the lyrical, sensuous Southerner; and Miller, the lucid, pragmatic Northerner.

  When Meryl saw the part she was reading for, she couldn’t quite believe it. Set on a front porch in the Mississippi Delta, Williams’s 27 Wagons Full of Cotton is a tour de force for whoever plays Flora, a raunchy Southern sexpot with a big cup size and a low IQ. Flora is married to the unsavory owner of a cotton gin who calls her “Baby Doll.” When a rival cotton gin mysteriously burns down, the superintendent comes by asking questions. Flora suspects her husband (who of course is guilty as sin), and the superintendent traps her in a randy cat-and-mouse game, wangling information out of her with coercion, threats, and sex. In Baby Doll, Elia Kazan’s 1956 film adaptation, Carroll Baker had immortalized the role as a Lolita-like seductress, her sexuality practically bursting from her dress—nothing like the 125-pound slip of a thing that called itself Meryl Streep.

  Exhausted after an eight-hour Trelawny rehearsal, Meryl arrived at the audition in a plain skirt, a blouse, and slip-on shoes. Carrying a supply closet’s worth of tissues she had swiped from the ladies’ room, she introduced herself to Arvin Brown, the director. Sitting next to him was John Lithgow, who was directing another Phoenix show. Lithgow recalled what happened next:

  “As she made small talk with Arvin about the play and the character, she unpinned her hair, she changed her shoes, she pulled out the shirttails of her blouse, and she began casually stuffing Kleenex into her brassiere, doubling the size of her bust. Reading with an assistant stage manager, she began a scene from 27 Wagons Full of Cotton. You could barely detect the moment when she slipped out of her own character and into the character of Baby Doll, but the transformation was complete and breathtaking. She was funny, sexy, teasing, brainless, vulnerable, and sad, with all the colors shifting like mercury before our eyes.”

  Arvin Brown hired her immediately. But he must not have noticed the transformation that had occurred right in front of him, because when rehearsals began, he took a good look at his leading lady and panicked. Her magic trick had worked so well he hadn’t realized it was all an illusion. “She was so slim and blond and beautiful, and somehow or another in the audition she had convinced me that she was this really slatternly, sluggish redneck,” Brown recalled. He thought, Is this going to work?

  Meryl was getting worried, too. Her fake D cup had been a way to trick not just the audition room but herself. Without the reams of paper stuffed in her brassiere, she was losing her grip on the character. “Let me try something,” she told Brown.

  She went out and returned with a slovenly old housedress and prosthetic breasts. She had found Baby Doll—and Brown once again saw a “zaftig cracker.” Far from playing a femme fatale, Meryl tapped into Flora’s innocence and vulgarity, which should have contradicted each other but didn’t. Like Evert Sprinchorn at Vassar, Brown sensed a hint of rebellion: “I had the feeling she was kind of kicking the traces of a fairly conventional background.”

  Onstage at the Playhouse in January, 1976, Meryl’s Baby Doll announced herself with a squeal in the dark:

  “Jaaaaaake! I’ve lost m’ white kid purse!”

  Then she clomped into view in high heels and a loose-fitting dress, a buxom, babbling dingbat with a voice like a bubble bath. Between her lines, she cooed, cackled, swatted at imaginary flies. At one point, sitting on the porch with her legs splayed, she looked down at her armpit and wiped it with her hand. Moments later, she picked her nose and flicked away her findings. It was the funniest and most grotesque thing Meryl had done since The Idiots Karamazov. But, like Constance Garnett, her Flora was rooted in a goofy kind of humanity.

  The Village Voice called her

  a tall, well-upholstered, Rubenesque child-woman; a sexy Baby Snooks, tottering around on dingy cream-colored high-heeled shoes, giggling, chattering in her little-girl voice, alternately husky and shrill, mouthing her words as if too lazy to pronounce them properly (and yet you can understand every word), tonguing her lips, smiling wet smiles, playing with her long blonde hair, cuddling her boobs in her arms, lolling and luxuriating in her body as if it were a warm bath. And all this extravagant detail is as spontaneous and organic as it is abundant; nothing is excessive; nothing is distracting; everything is part of Baby Doll. What a performance!

  Few people in New York—Rosemarie Tichler, John Lithgow—had known the extent of Meryl’s talent for metamorphosis. While her Baby Doll was a bravura feat of physical comedy, the true shock of 27 Wagons Full of Cotton was what came after. The play was on a double bill with Arthur Miller’s A Memory of Two Mondays, set in an auto-parts warehouse in Depression-era New York City. The look and feel couldn’t have been more different: where the Williams play oozed sex and lemonade, the Miller was pert, industrial, like a dry martini. The cast included Lithgo
w and Joe Grifasi, with Meryl in the throwaway part of Patricia, a secretary.

  But that’s where she played her trump card. At the end of the Williams play, the lights went down on Flora, singing “Rock-a-bye Baby” to her purse in the Mississippi moonlight. After intermission, she marched back on as Patricia: black marcelled hair, smart dress, hand on her hip, showing off her pin from a date the night before. As if on cue, there was a rustling of paper in the dark as playgoers thumbed through their programs: Could this possibly be the same actress?

  “It’s not just that she was playing these two wildly different characters,” Arvin Brown recalled, “but she also had created two entirely different energy outlays. 27 Wagons was all languorous and at times almost bovine. And all of a sudden, there would be this slash of energy as she walked onstage in the second play, and she had this dark wig and everything was urban, steely, fast. It was just a jolt.”

  Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller avoided being seen together. They knew that the pairing of their plays would inevitably play like a competition, and they didn’t want to encourage the question of who was the great American playwright. So Miller came to the final dress rehearsal and Williams came to opening night. When the curtain came down on 27 Wagons, Meryl ran backstage to transform from blowsy hillbilly to steely secretary. Aiding her was J. Roy Helland, who had followed her from Lincoln Center and helped mastermind the two competing looks. In the lobby, Williams cornered Arvin Brown to tell him how much Meryl’s performance had astounded him.

  “It’s never been played like that!” he kept saying, which Brown took to mean her naïveté—nothing like the purposeful, pouty bombshell Carroll Baker had played in the film.

  Brown slipped into the dressing room to tell Meryl about the playwright’s euphoria. After the show, he would bring Williams backstage so he could praise her in person. But Williams never showed up at their appointed meeting place. By curtain call for A Memory of Two Mondays, he had vanished.

  No one knew why until the next day, when the director got an apologetic call from Williams’s agent. What happened was this: Meryl had an understudy named Fiddle Viracola, whose round face and kooky personality made her a natural Baby Doll. Viracola had a bizarre pastime: she would go up to celebrities and ask them to draw her a picture of a frog. At the dress rehearsal, she’d approached Arthur Miller and requested a frog for her collection.

  On opening night, Williams had been walking into the lobby to meet Brown when a woman bore down on him yelling something about a frog. The playwright panicked and ran for a taxi. He never made it backstage to tell Meryl how much he loved her Baby Doll.

  DESPITE HER ADVANCEMENTS, she still didn’t see herself as a movie star, and neither did the rest of the world. Or so it appeared one afternoon, as she sat across from Dino De Laurentiis, the Italian film producer whose credits included everything from Fellini’s La Strada to Serpico. De Laurentiis was casting a remake of King Kong, and Meryl had come in to audition for the part made famous by Fay Wray—the girl who wins the heart of the big gorilla.

  De Laurentiis eyed her up and down through thick square spectacles. From his office at the top of the Gulf and Western Building, on Columbus Circle, you could see all of Manhattan. He was in his fifties, with slicked-back salt-and-pepper hair. His son, Federico, had seen Meryl in a play and brought her in. But whatever the younger De Laurentiis saw in her, the older certainly did not.

  “Che brutta!” the father said to the son, and continued in Italian: This is so ugly! Why do you bring me this?

  Meryl was stunned. Little did he know she had studied Italian at Vassar.

  “Mi dispiace molto,” she said back, to the producer’s amazement. I’m very sorry that I’m not as beautiful as I should be. But this is what you get.

  She was even more upset than she let on. Not only was he calling her ugly—he was assuming she was stupid, too. What actress, much less an American, and a blonde at that, could possibly understand a foreign language?

  She got up to leave. This was everything she feared about the movie business: the obsession with looks, with sex. Sure, she was looking for a break, but she had promised herself she wouldn’t do any junk. And this was junk.

  When she learned that Jessica Lange had gotten the part, she didn’t pout. She hadn’t wanted it that badly, to tell the truth. She knew she wouldn’t have been any good in it. Let someone else scream at a monkey on top of the Empire State Building. They wanted a “movie star,” and she wasn’t one.

  She was too brutta.

  Theater was where her heart was. After the victory in 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, she stayed on with the Phoenix for another play that spring: Secret Service, a Civil War melodrama by William Gillette. Her old friend Grifo was in the cast. So were her Trelawny castmates John Lithgow and Mary Beth Hurt.

  The play was a thriller from 1895—nothing revelatory, but it was fun to play Edith Varney, a Richmond belle who falls for a Union spy, cannons booming in the background. In her plaid dress and bonnet, she and a mustache-twirling Lithgow played love scenes that would have seemed overblown in Gone With the Wind:

  “What is it—love and Good-bye?”

  “Oh no—only the first!—And that one every day—every hour—every minute—until we meet again!”

  It was borderline camp, and the actors never quite figured out how tongue-in-cheek to play their scenes. But the Phoenix kids just wanted to work together, on anything. A close-knit ensemble formed, onstage and off: spunky, squeaky Mary Beth; impish Joe Grifasi; chin-stroking leading man John Lithgow; and Meryl, the Waspy blonde who could do just about anything. They would drink at Joe Allen after shows, then bike home together to the Upper West Side, like New York transplants from Jules and Jim. They felt, Mary Beth recalled, like “princes of the city.”

  Meryl was still riding the success of 27 Wagons and A Memory of Two Mondays. “Those two plays at the Phoenix Theatre did more to bring me attention, along with Trelawny, than any three plays I could have done on Broadway in three years playing three blondes,” she said later. She won her first professional theater prize, the Theatre World Award, and was nominated for a Drama Desk. Then, in late March—less than a year out of drama school—she was nominated for a Tony Award for the Phoenix double bill. She was up against her own castmate Mary Beth, who was nominated for Trelawny.

  On April 18th, a few days after Secret Service opened at the Playhouse, both actresses filed into the Shubert Theater for the ceremony. Backstage were the heavies of the entertainment world: Jane Fonda, Jerry Lewis, Richard Burton. Onstage was the bare set of A Chorus Line, which was up for nearly every musical category. Its cast members kicked off the ceremony with the already iconic opening number, “I Hope I Get It.” For the nominees in the audience, the sentiment was apt.

  It was Easter Sunday. Mary Beth showed up in oversize glasses and her trademark red bob. Meryl still had Civil War ringlets falling across her brow. Sitting in the audience, she felt “profoundly uncomfortable.” During commercial breaks, she could sense the nominees licking their lips. It all felt so silly.

  Sure enough, A Chorus Line made a clean sweep, winning half of the eighteen award categories. By the time it beat out Chicago and Pacific Overtures for Best Musical, the orchestra seemed to have “What I Did for Love” playing on a loop. No one could deny it now: Joe Papp had a juggernaut.

  Alan Arkin came out to present Best Featured Actress in a Play. When he read Meryl’s name, her lips tensed. But the winner was Shirley Knight, for Kennedy’s Children. Both Meryl and Mary Beth went home empty-handed. When they showed up for work the next Tuesday, it was back to Richmond, Virginia, 1864.

  AT THE DRESS rehearsal for Trelawny of the “Wells,” Joe Papp had told her, cryptically, “I may have something for you.” Then, on Christmas Eve, 1975, the phone rang.

  “How would you like to play Isabella in Measure for Measure in the park?” the producer said. “And maybe Katherine in Henry V?”

  Meryl was . . . confused. Had he lost his critica
l faculties? She knew he had his favorites, and anyone let into Joe’s inner circle was employed for life, like at a Japanese corporation. But Isabella? Wasn’t that the lead?

  “What I thought was great about him was that he treated me as a peer,” she said. “Right from the beginning, when I was this unknown, completely ignorant drama student, way before I was ready for it, he admitted me to the discussion as an equal.” The two of them had the same birthday, June 22nd, and they felt like they were cosmically linked.

  “His conviction about me was total,” she recalled, “but somewhere in the back of my brain I was screaming: ‘Wow! Wow! Look at this! Wow!’”

  Winter turned to spring, and she rode her bicycle everywhere. Downtown to the Public, where she was rehearsing Measure for Measure. Uptown to Lincoln Center, where Papp was rehearsing Henry V. One day in May, she deposited her bike in the checkroom at Café des Artistes, on West Sixty-seventh, two blocks from her new apartment. A bit early, she wandered the wood-paneled dining room, staring at the bucolic murals of wood nymphs dancing merrily in the nude. The surrounding trees had something of Bernardsville about them—the old Bernardsville, when she was a bossy little girl. Now there were expressways going up, and the whole place was different. Besides, her father had just retired, and he and Mary Wolf were relocating to Mason’s Island, in Mystic, Connecticut.

  By any actor’s standards, her first season in New York had been charmed: back-to-back Broadway plays, a Tony nomination, and, coming up, two roles in Shakespeare in the Park. Plus, a few days earlier, there was a phone call.

  Them: “Would you like to fly to London?”

  Meryl: “Sure.” (Pause.) “What for?”

  The answer was an audition for Julia, a film based on a chapter from Lillian Hellman’s memoir Pentimento. The story (of questionable veracity) concerned the playwright’s childhood friend, who was always more daring than she. Julia becomes an anti-Nazi activist, and enlists Lillian to smuggle money to Resistance operatives in Russia. Unlike King Kong, this was the kind of movie Meryl saw herself in: a tale of female friendship and daring—i.e., not junk. Jane Fonda was playing Lillian. The director, Fred Zinnemann, was thinking about casting an unknown for Julia.