Her Again Page 14

  For now, Meryl couldn’t stop staring at the plane ticket to London: $620.

  “When I was at Yale, people on partial assistance like me got $2.50 an hour when we were on stage,” she told her lunch date at Café des Artistes, a Village Voice reporter named Terry Curtis Fox. It was her first professional interview. “Before this year the most money I ever made was waitressing. $620. And that’s only for an audition. It’s crazy.”

  Another thing: she didn’t have a passport. She had never needed one.

  Meryl was deep into rehearsals for Henry V. Papp’s vision was simple: the bigger, the better. Down at the harbor, historical ships were converging for the coming Bicentennial, like a flotilla of ghosts. Papp would re-create the pomp and pageantry in Central Park, staging the Battle of Agincourt like a bloody reprise of Lexington and Concord. The success of A Chorus Line had given some respite from his cash-flow problems, but the producer was still banging his head against Lincoln Center. He must have understood the words of the put-upon king:

  What infinite heart’s-ease

  Must kings neglect, that private men enjoy!

  To Meryl, he seemed undaunted. “He’s going to fly right into it: let the critics compare us to the British and tear us to bits,” she told Fox, beaming. “He’s going to have the whole stage open up and shoot flaming arrows into the lake.” As the French princess Katherine, she would be offstage for the extravagant fight sequences. “I just wish I were in those scenes,” she said hungrily.

  They got the bill and headed for the door. She took her bicycle from the checkroom, threw on her backpack, and wheeled down to Rockefeller Center to see about that passport. The twenty-six-year-old actress seemed to Fox like a character from a movie: the starlet on the rise, the fresh face. Still, he would write, “There is something in Meryl Streep of the killer.”

  FROM HER APARTMENT on Sixty-ninth Street it was less than a block to Central Park. A quick bike ride got her to the Delacorte, the open-air oasis Joe Papp had built. A few steps more, and she was onstage, the Belvedere Castle towering in the background like expensive scenery, the midsummer sky wide and hot above her. Then the battles would begin.

  Papp had assembled a massive cast—sixty actors, many of them recent drama school grads looking for a break. Most had auditioned down at the Public, in the theater where A Chorus Line had originated before its move to Broadway. The white line where the chorus members had stood still ran across the stage.

  “They had a whole group of us come in and stand on that white line,” an auditioner named Tony Simotes recalled. “All of a sudden, Joe started to talk about the show and what he saw in the show. Just kind of getting the background on it. And he says, ‘Oh, by the way, you’re all cast.’ He kept talking and we’re all like, ‘What?’ We all started screaming and cheering and hugging each other.”

  A cigar perpetually hanging from the side of his mouth, Papp wielded his power like a king’s scepter. “Build me a tower,” he would say, and a swarm of carpenters would rush onstage with hammers and lumber. At one point, he took to skipping rope in front of the cast to show that he hadn’t lost his vitality.

  A few days in, he fired the guy delivering the prologue (“O, for a muse of fire that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention!”) and replaced him with Michael Moriarty. By now, Moriarty was a Tony-winning Broadway actor. From offstage, Meryl would delight at his menacing take on the prologue. It was, she said later, “the first time I realized you can pull out anything, absolutely anything, from Shakespeare. Michael found every ribald line and pulled them out for our delectation, and it was wicked and wise.”

  The two actors had something in common, besides their onstage tryst in The Playboy of Seville five years earlier. They were the only members of the company who didn’t seem terrified of the director.

  “Michael Moriarty couldn’t give two shits about Joseph Papp, which was pretty cool,” one ensemble member recalled. “He just said, ‘Yeah, you want me to play that? Alright, I’ll do it.’ A lot of the people on the set were really intimidated by him. But what I was struck by was how Meryl Streep would come and wrap her arm around him, treating him like she was his old friend.”

  She even started sounding like him in interviews. When the Times visited the Delacorte and asked her whether she envied the Shakespearean training enjoyed by the British, she shrugged and said, “I envy the wealth of experience they can call on, but we have a different tradition in America that is just as strong. It has to do with heart and guts.” Heart and guts: a Papp specialty.

  As Katherine, she had just two scenes, but they were minor coups de théâtre. One was entirely in French, as the princess learns the English words for body parts, mangling “the elbow” as “de bilbow.” Later, she returns in a ridiculous headdress and charms the English king. “It was just one light, delicious cameo, and she floated through it,” Rosemarie Tichler recalled. “You watch this poor, befuddled king being turned around and fall in love. And as he fell in love, the audience fell in love.”

  Working in Central Park had its own peculiar magic. By three in the afternoon, masses of New Yorkers would line up outside the Delacorte for free tickets. (Papp never wavered on the price, even when the city begged him to charge even a dollar.) Snaking counterclockwise toward the softball fields on the Great Lawn, the line became its own sort of Shakespearean scene, where the freaky energy of the city came out to play. One July afternoon, a conservatively dressed woman with law books stood behind a guy in a Hobie’s Surfing Shop T-shirt, as a troubadour in Elizabethan dress sang madrigals in a midwestern accent for dimes and quarters. Nearby, a hot-dog vendor competed with a falafel cart, while a man in a purple shirt and purple jeans with a purple bike told anyone who would listen, “You do not really see me. You are hallucinating. You think you are seeing purple because that is the color of the magic mushroom.”

  Around five, the staff would hand out cards to be redeemed for tickets, and the luckiest 1,800 would file into the amphitheater for the eight-o’clock show. When Michael Moriarty came out invoking the muse of fire, the sun was still blazing overhead. By Act V, when Henry kissed Katherine, the scene was lit by moonlight. At night, the park turned into a den of muggers and gropers, and the small army of actors knew to walk out together in a self-protecting horde. Then Meryl was back in her lobby, back in her elevator, and back in the apartment she had all to herself.

  FOUR DAYS AFTER Henry V closed at the Delacorte, Measure for Measure opened at the Delacorte. Ten minutes before the first show, a man in the audience had a heart attack. An ambulance rushed him to Roosevelt Hospital, but he was dead on arrival. At eight o’clock, the rain began, and the stage manager held the show for twenty minutes. They got through Act I before the downpour intensified. The performance was finally canceled, and everyone went home soaked.

  Even in dry weather, the play was challenging. Neither tragedy nor comedy, Measure for Measure is one of Shakespeare’s ambiguous “problem plays.” The plot rests on a moral quandary: Vienna has become a den of brothels, syphilis, and sin. The Duke (played by the thirty-five-year-old Sam Waterston) leaves his austere deputy, Angelo, to clean up the mess. To instill fear of the rule of law, Angelo condemns a young man named Claudio to death for fornication. Claudio’s sister, Isabella, is entering a nunnery when she hears the news. She begs for mercy from Angelo, who is knocked senseless by lust. He comes back with an indecent proposal: Sleep with me and I’ll spare your brother’s life. Despite her brother’s pleas, Isabella refuses, telling herself:

  Then, Isabel, live chaste, and, brother, die:

  More than our brother is our chastity.

  The line usually draws gasps.

  “The role is so beautiful, but there are so many problems in it,” Meryl said at the time. “One is that it’s so hard for a 1976 audience to sit back and believe that purity of the soul is all that matters to Isabella. That’s really hard for them to buy.” Sure, Angelo’s a pig, most people think. But, come on, it’s your brother’s life! Ju
st sleep with the guy!

  Meryl was determined to find Isabella’s truth, to make her dilemma real even if the audience was rooting against her—the same hurdle she would face in Kramer vs. Kramer. Could she get people to side with a fanatic nun? “Men have always rejected Isabella, right through its history,” she said during rehearsals, with anticipatory relish. From his retirement in Connecticut, her father dug up all the reading material he could find on the play. “He’s really quite a scholar,” Meryl would brag.

  A plum role for Meryl Streep was one reason Papp had booked Measure for Measure, but the timeliness of the plot was likely another. Shakespeare’s Vienna is rife with corruption and perversity and grit, and the New Yorkers who had lived through the city’s near bankruptcy could relate. Meanwhile, the whole country had gotten a lesson in official pardons, like the one Isabella seeks for Claudio. Two years earlier, President Gerald Ford had pardoned Richard Nixon for his Watergate crimes and now was paying a heavy toll in his electoral run against Jimmy Carter. Everywhere you turned, someone in the halls of power was making a shady backroom deal, or a city was crumbling under the weight of its own filth.

  The director, John Pasquin, envisioned a Vienna that would reflect New York back to New Yorkers. Santo Loquasto’s set looked like a subway station, or like the men’s room right outside the theater: all sickly white tiles, practically reeking of urine, against a skyline of painted demons. While Angelo and his officials sneered from a raised walkway, the bawds and whores of Vienna rose up from a trapdoor, as if ascending from the underworld. It was Park Avenue society meeting the drifters of Times Square, the bifurcated city Papp had tried to unite in his theaters.

  Meryl read the long and churning play over and over again. Cloaked in a white habit, she had only her face and her voice to work with. And in the park, exposed to the elements, her meticulous characterization could get easily thrown off course. One night, during the climax of her big soliloquy—“I’ll tell him yet of Angelo’s request, / And fit his mind to death, for his soul’s rest”—what sounded like a Concorde blasted overhead, and she had to scream “his soul’s rest.” “It’s ludicrous,” she said soon after, “but it costs me my heart’s blood, because I carefully put together a person and a motive, and then something comes along that’s not even in the book, and ruins it.”

  But something else was happening to Meryl Streep, something she had even less control over than jumbo jets roaring over Manhattan. In her scenes with the forty-one-year-old actor playing Angelo, it was there for everyone to see: the push and pull of wills, the saint and the sinner locked in a battle of sex and death. It gave off heat. She stared into her leading man’s coal-like eyes, his sallow face betraying a whimpering sadness. He gave her fire, she answered with icicles:

  ANGELO

  Plainly conceive, I love you.

  ISABELLA

  My brother did love Juliet,

  And you tell me that he shall die for’t.

  ANGELO

  He shall not, Isabel, if you give me love.

  Meryl’s understudy, Judith Light, would watch the Isabella and Angelo scenes every night, memorizing the contours of Meryl’s performance in case she ever had to go on. (She didn’t.) “It was their dynamic that carried the production along, and watching the two of them develop something together was incredibly electric,” Light recalled. “You could see that something was developing, and that she was allowing herself to also be lifted by him.”

  Michael Feingold, Meryl’s old friend from Yale, saw it, too. “The physical attraction between them was very real,” he said. “And the idea of starting an Isabella-Angelo relationship with that present, not only in the actors’ lines but in their lives . . . It puts an extra charge on everything, and she had that even inside the nun’s habit.”

  Even the Times critic Mel Gussow picked up on it: “Miss Streep,” he wrote, “who has frequently been cast as sturdier, more mature women, does not play Isabella for sweetness and innocence. There is a knowingness behind her apparent naïveté. We sense the sexual give-and-take between her and Angelo, and she also makes us aware of the character’s awakening feelings of self-importance and power.”

  If he only knew the half of it.

  When Measure for Measure is about a nun putting her principles over her brother’s life, it’s a problem play. But this Measure for Measure was about a man and a woman battling their unquenched sexuality, making pronouncements and questioning them at the same time, their ideals betrayed by their irrepressible desire. It is Isabella’s purity that lights Angelo aflame, as the whores of Vienna could not. The two actors were nearly as preposterous a couple as their characters: the ice princess and the oddball. And yet everyone, onstage and off, seemed to feel their spark.

  On opening night, Meryl and her Angelo slipped away from the cast party. They wound up at the Empire Diner in Chelsea, a greasy spoon tricked out in Art Deco silver and black, with a miniature Empire State Building on its roof. They ate and talked, and by the time she got home it was five in the morning. She couldn’t sleep.

  She woke up the next morning to let a reporter up to her apartment. As they talked over orange juice and croissants, her eyes were bloodshot, her face devoid of makeup. Even as she fielded questions about her extraordinary first year out of drama school, her mind kept returning to John Cazale. There was something about this guy. Something.

  She heard herself say, “I’ve been shot through with luck since I came to the city . . .”

  Fredo

  TIME MOVED DIFFERENTLY for John Cazale. Everything went slower. He wasn’t dim, not by a long shot. But he was meticulous, sometimes maddeningly so. Even simple tasks could take hours. All of his friends knew about the slowness. It would drive them crazy.

  His friend Marvin Starkman: “We had a house up in the country, and John would come up quite a bit. If his car was ahead of mine and we got to a tollbooth, he’d pull up and he’d look to see if the guy had a name or a number listed outside. He’d look at the guy, make sure he knew who he was talking to, take out a quarter or whatever it was: ‘Here you go.’ I mean, you would die in the car behind him.”

  Robyn Goodman, who was married to his friend Walter McGinn: “We got a color television. It was a brand-new thing, and we were all excited. Walter called John and said, ‘Come up and help me, we’re going to put it together.’ And John said, ‘Well, let’s get the color all right.’ That was around ten o’clock at night. I went to sleep about midnight, and they were still working. I think they were up most of the night tuning that thing.”

  The playwright Israel Horovitz: “We had to give him a key to the theater, because he was so slow taking off his makeup. We’d go to the restaurant around Astor Place, and he was supposed to meet us. We were all going to eat, and we’d be finished before he got there. He was just the slowest person I knew.”

  His friend Al Pacino: “You eat a meal with him, I mean, you’d be done—washed, finished, and in bed—before he got halfway through his meal. Then the cigar would come out. He’d light it, look at it, taste it. Then finally smoke it.”

  John moved like he had all the time in the world.

  He was like that with characters, too. Directors called him “Twenty Questions,” because he wouldn’t stop interrogating them in rehearsal. Before he could do anything, he had to know everything. He would try one thing a million different ways—there were so many possibilities. Marvin Starkman used to kid him: “Jesus, I bet your foreplay takes five hours.”

  He looked like no one else in the movies: spindly frame, honking nose, forehead as high as a boulder, bisected by a throbbing vein. When John set his sunken eyes on something, he could look as wounded and desperate as a dying dog.

  “He was like from another planet,” Robyn Goodman said. “He had such depth and truthfulness. There wasn’t a false bone in his body, as a person or as an actor. And he experienced the world in a profound way.”

  John was slow because everything fascinated him. He loved his Datsun. He loved
The Bicycle Thief. He loved Cuban cigars, which he smoked like crazy. “With John, he had a childlike curiosity and it wasn’t put on,” Starkman said. “If you didn’t know him, you’d say, ‘What’s this bullshit?’ It was no bullshit.”

  One time, he and Walter McGinn (John called him Speedy) found a parking meter lying on the sidewalk. They decided to bring it back to John’s place and take it apart so they could see how it worked. Somebody must have reported them, because the police showed up and arrested him. He spent the night in jail.

  “God, what was that like?” Starkman asked when he got out.

  “Well, I made some friends there,” John said. “And I found out how to get two lights off one match.”

  His characters shared his childlike innocence, but there was always melancholy pulsing underneath. “There was an undercurrent of sadness about him,” his brother, Stephen, said. “I don’t know how you’d explain it.” He and Walter would talk for hours about acting, as Robyn Goodman watched. “They both had a very profound understanding that at the center of every character was a kind of pain,” she recalled. “You could see that there was a little bit of damage in both of them that they were turning into art.”

  It was pain that defined his most vivid character, Fredo Corleone, in The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II. It’s there when he’s drunkenly hitting on his brother’s girlfriend, Kay, at their sister’s wedding. It’s there when he’s in his mustard-yellow suit and aviator sunglasses, playing big shot with girls and booze in Las Vegas. And it’s there in the boathouse in Tahoe, when it all comes roaring to the surface.

  MICHAEL