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  Sal thinks for a moment and answers, “Wyoming.”

  On set, Lumet had to choke back his laughter, or else he’d ruin the take. Same with Pacino. In the script, John didn’t have a line there. Naturally, “Wyoming” made the final cut.

  Dog Day Afternoon was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and won for its screenplay. Al Pacino was nominated for Best Actor, and Chris Sarandon, as Sonny’s lover, was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. John wasn’t nominated.

  As they shot Dog Day Afternoon, Pacino was acting in a workshop of a play, Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Alberto Ui. He gathered a cast together, including John, and found a place to rehearse: Joseph Papp’s Public Theater. Papp had met Pacino in 1968, when he fired him from a play for mumbling. Now, he was happy to underwrite the actor’s passion project, paying the cast of thirty to rehearse for weeks on end, with no guarantee of a final production. Papp didn’t mind; it was enough to give Pacino a testing ground.

  But he did notice John Cazale, who might have just the right menace for Measure for Measure, which he was casting for Shakespeare in the Park that summer. Papp had given Sam Waterston the choice to play Angelo or the Duke, and Waterston chose the Duke. So the producer invited John to audition for Angelo.

  The night before the audition, John went to Walter McGinn and Robyn Goodman’s place, at Eighty-sixth and Riverside. He was nervous; he hadn’t done much Shakespeare. To make matters worse, he would be auditioning opposite the leading lady, a young drama school graduate who came with the project—Papp adored her. If he wanted the part, he’d have to impress Meryl Streep.

  Walter, who was in Henry V, knew her a bit. John peppered him with questions—about the play, about the role, and, most of all, about the actress playing Isabella. “Walter assured him that Meryl would react well to a real actor’s actor,” Goodman said. “That’s what John was.”

  The next day, John went in and read his scene from Measure for Measure. “I remember how intense John was,” Goodman said, “and how scared he was, and how he called right after to say that he thought it went okay. You know, it could have gone better . . . He was never satisfied with his work.”

  But he had satisfied Joe Papp, and, just as important, Meryl Streep. He got the part.

  In the rehearsal room, John kept mostly to himself, puffing on cigars by the window during breaks. “These are Cubans that I have brought in,” he’d tell his castmates. “Do you smoke?”

  Shakespeare’s Angelo was a prudish, domineering creep—nothing like the weaklings John had played—Fredo, or Stan, or even gun-toting Sal. Or was he? Once again, John looked for the pain, and found it.

  “He brought menacing. He brought the pain,” Rosemarie Tichler said. “But the pain, instead of being weakness, was anger. There was anger under it. If you poked at it, he wouldn’t fall apart. He would become dangerous.”

  As a casting director, she knew that the right mix of actors could give a play a startling new subtext. In the clash of wills that was Measure for Measure, John brought something that wasn’t quite on the page. His Angelo was the guy who never got the girl, the loser who sat in the corner while everyone else partied on the dance floor. That’s why he was clamping down on the brothels of Vienna. That’s why he condemned Claudio to death for fornication. That’s why he lusted so feverishly for pure-as-snow Isabella. She was every beautiful woman who never gave him the time of day.

  . . . Never could the strumpet

  With all her double vigor, art and nature,

  Once stir my temper, but this virtuous maid

  Subdues me quite. Ever till now,

  When men were fond, I smiled and wondered how.

  And so, on opening night, John Cazale and Meryl Streep sat at the Empire Diner, having ditched their own cast party, talking and laughing until five in the morning, the rising sun just beginning to glint on the mirrored walls and coffee cups and bar stools and her lemon hair. John had discovered something absolutely extraordinary. She was better than a Datsun. She was better than a Cuban cigar. She was better than getting two lights off of one match. She was someone worth staying up all night for, like a color TV—only better, because her colors were so infinite you couldn’t possibly tune them all.

  He told his friend Al Pacino, “Oh, man, I have met the greatest actress in the history of the world.”

  He’s just in love, Pacino thought. How good can she be?

  ALL THAT AUGUST, the subways in New York City were plastered with illustrated posters of John Cazale and Meryl Streep: Meryl in her white nun’s habit, lips parted and eyes cast down, as if in mid-thought; John gazing at her from behind, with a yearning look and a cocked eyebrow. The thought bubbles coming out of their heads converge into a single cloud, bearing the words “Measure for Measure.”

  John was besotted. “Once he was in that play, the only thing he talked about was her,” Marvin Starkman said.

  “Walter said to me, ‘I think he’s falling in love with Meryl,’” Robyn Goodman recalled. “And I said, ‘I hope she’s falling in love with him.’ By the time the show opened they were madly in love.” Watching them, Robyn wondered if she was making out with her own husband enough—that’s how explosive John and Meryl were. Arriving at the theater, Goodman said, “Her whole mouth was chapped from kissing.”

  Meryl was transfixed by this odd, tender, hawklike creature, whose hold over her was something she couldn’t quite explain. “He wasn’t like anybody I’d ever met,” she said later. “It was the specificity of him, and his sort of humanity and his curiosity about people, his compassion.”

  Acting was their lingua franca. “We would talk about the process endlessly, and he was monomaniacal about the work,” Meryl recalled. John would think and rethink his characters, opening them up and studying them like a parking meter, never content with the obvious or easy choice. “I think probably I was more glib and ready to pick the first idea that came to me,” she said. “And he would say, ‘There’s a lot of other possibilities.’”

  One night after the show, John introduced Meryl to his brother, Stephen, who had become a musicologist. For reasons neither brother could remember, they had always called each other by nicknames: Stephen was Jake, John was Bobo.

  “Meryl,” John said proudly, “talk to Jake! He knows Italian.”

  Stephen and Meryl stumbled through some conversation in Italian, until she broke down and laughed, “I can’t! I can’t!” Stephen was charmed.

  Onstage at the Delacorte night after night, they enacted a forbidden attraction by moonlight. Offstage, their attraction wasn’t forbidden, but it was certainly offbeat. Never had Meryl fallen for someone so peculiar. Side by side, they somehow accentuated each other’s imperfections: her forked nose, his bulbous forehead. His pale skin, her close-set eyes. They looked like two exotic birds, or like Piero della Francesca’s portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino.

  “They were great to look at, because they were kind of funny-looking, both of them,” Israel Horovitz said. “They were lovely in their way, but it was a really quirky couple. They were head-turners, but not because ‘Wow, is she a beauty!’” He was nothing like her previous boyfriends: hunky Bruce or strapping Bob or pretty Phil or even brooding Mike Booth. Perhaps she no longer needed a Prince Charming to reassure her of her beauty. She and John didn’t “look good” together, but you couldn’t take your eyes off them.

  Everywhere they went, people would roll down their windows and scream, “Hey, Fredo!” “He was absolutely conflicted about the whole idea of fame,” his brother said. “I don’t think he really knew how to deal with it or wanted to.” The Godfather films had made him recognizable, but they hadn’t made him rich. When he and Meryl went to Little Italy, the restaurant owners would refuse to let them pay. So they went to Little Italy all the time, dining out on free pasta and caprese, their nights and bellies filled with “Hey, Fredo”s.

  “The jerk made everything mean something,” she said later. “Such good judgment, such
uncluttered thought. For me particularly, who is moored to all sorts of human weaknesses. ‘You don’t need this,’ he’d say, ‘you don’t need that.’” And yet John was Meryl’s gateway to the elite of the acting world; in November, she accompanied him to the legendary acting teacher Lee Strasberg’s seventy-fifth birthday bash at the Pierre, where the guest list included Al Pacino, Celeste Holm, and Ellen Burstyn.

  The romance moved as fast as John moved slow, and before long Meryl moved into the loft on Franklin Street. Now they would be pioneers together, discovering a downtown that had barely discovered itself. She soon learned what John’s past girlfriends had learned before her. “He took his time with stuff,” she recalled. “It took him a really long time to leave the house, to lock the car.” One time John decided to wallpaper a room. It took him three weeks.

  But she didn’t mind. Let time move as slow as molasses. They were happy.

  A FEW WEEKS after Meryl’s audition for Julia, Fred Zinnemann gave the title role to Vanessa Redgrave—hardly an unknown. He offered Meryl a small part as Lillian Hellman’s gossipy friend Anne Marie. But he had too many blondes in the movie already: Would she consider wearing a wig? Of course, Meryl told him. She’d do anything.

  In the fall, she flew to London to film her scenes. It was her first time acting in a movie—in the company of Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave, no less. As on that first plane ride out of Bernardsville, her world was getting bigger.

  Her first day on the set, she broke out in hives. For one thing, she looked awful: the curly black wig she’d been given made her look harsh, and her costumes were all absurd hats and furs and red period dresses. The scene was a party for Lillian Hellman thrown at Sardi’s, the theater-district restaurant that had been replicated in London. Meryl prepared dutifully, as she would for Shakespeare, but when she showed up she was handed a rewrite. Her panic was evident in the red splotches below her neck, which the makeup people frantically pancaked over.

  Most intimidating: her scenes were all with Jane Fonda. At thirty-eight, no film actress was more prominent or more controversial. Her sex-kitten Barbarella days were behind her. So was “Hanoi Jane.” With Fun with Dick and Jane, she had reclaimed her stature as a mainstream star, and now used her clout to foster socially conscious projects like Julia, which featured her bravely outwitting Nazis.

  Meryl was brought over to meet Fonda. “She had an almost feral alertness,” Meryl recalled, “like this bright blue attentiveness to everything around her that was completely intimidating, and made me feel like I was lumpy and from New Jersey, which I am.”

  They rehearsed once through, and Fonda encouraged her to improvise. On the first take, Meryl embellished a bit. It seemed to work well. On the second take, feeling bold, she thought: I’ll try something else!

  Fonda leaned in and told her, “Look down.”

  “What?”

  “Over there.” Fonda pointed down. “That green tape on the floor. That’s you. That’s your mark. And if you land on it, you will be in the light, and you will be in the movie.”

  She was grateful for the help—she needed it—but she also observed the way Fonda carried her stardom. It seemed as if half of what Jane Fonda did was maintain the machinery of being Jane Fonda, as opposed to acting. “I admire Jane Fonda,” Meryl said not long after. “But I also don’t want to spend all my time immersing myself . . . in the business of myself . . .”

  She was similarly awed by Vanessa Redgrave. They didn’t share any scenes, but they shared a car ride. Meryl worried about being tongue-tied, but luckily Redgrave talked the whole time about politics and Leon Trotsky. Meryl didn’t know much about Trotsky, but she knew something about Redgrave: this was the kind of screen actress worth revering, someone who led with her convictions and never cowed to expectations.

  On days off, she would hang out with John Glover, who played her brother. Neither of them had much to do, so they’d kill time in the bar below her hotel, in South Kensington. (Meryl kept her per-diem money in a suitcase in her room, until one day she returned to find it had all been stolen.) Or they’d go to Harrods, where Meryl would study the shopgirls’ accents. She was determined to nail the English pronunciation of “actually.”

  Other days, she would visit Glover at the house where he was staying. Over lavish homemade dinners, the actors and their hosts would play a game called Adverbs: whoever was up had to act in the manner of a word, and the other players would guess what it was. When it was Meryl’s turn, she pretended to wake up in the morning and look out the window.

  Everyone yelled out the word at once: “Beautifully!”

  Midway through, Cazale flew over to visit. Her socializing with the other actors abruptly ended: she and John were back in their own all-consuming universe. When they returned to New York, John found out his agent had been trying to reach him. There was an offer to do a TV movie about the blacklist. No one could find him, and the part had slipped away. “What do you mean, you couldn’t find me?” John said, uncharacteristically furious. They knew he was going to England, and he and Meryl needed the money.

  When Julia came out the following fall, Meryl was equally vexed. Not only did she look ghastly in her marcelled black wig; half of her part had been cut, and the lines from one vanished scene had been transported to her mouth in another. Fred Zinnemann sent her a note of apology.

  I’ve made a terrible mistake, Meryl thought. No more movies.

  JOE PAPP WAS flailing at Lincoln Center. Like a losing baseball coach, he kept changing his strategy, but nothing stuck: challenging new plays, well-mannered chestnuts. Finally, he hit on a hybrid idea: matching classic plays with experimental directors, who could radically rethink them on a grand scale. “You can’t do the classics conventionally anymore,” he said. “They lay on you like bagels.”

  He hired Richard Foreman, the outré founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, to direct Threepenny Opera. The production, which opened in the spring of 1976, was a controversial success. As Measure for Measure ran at the Delacorte, Papp was juggling a trio of hits: Threepenny at the Vivian Beaumont, the Broadway-bound for colored girls, and A Chorus Line, which was grossing more than $140,000 a week at the Shubert. But somehow it wasn’t enough. Despite playing to capacity, Lincoln Center was running a $1.2 million deficit.

  Amid the turmoil, there were at least two people Papp wanted to keep busy: John Cazale and Meryl Streep. John and Al Pacino were anxious to work together again, and they talked about doing a double bill of Strindberg’s Creditors and Heathcote Williams’s The Local Stigmatic down at the Public. Meryl, meanwhile, would help ring in 1977 at the Beaumont, in a new production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard directed by Andrei Serban.

  The Romanian-born, thirty-three-year-old Serban had been working at La MaMa when Papp discovered him. Serban found the Off Off Broadway world amateurish, preferring the discipline of the Eastern European avant-garde. Meryl saw his rigidity as an incentive. “That’s when you can really work,” she said before rehearsals began, “when a director knows exactly the construct he wants. I hate ‘laid back’ directors. I’d probably fare very badly in California.”

  Serban’s Cherry Orchard would do away with the solemn psychological realism of most Chekhov productions and look for, in his words, “something much lighter and closer to the fluidity of real life.” Chekhov had, tantalizingly, called The Cherry Orchard a comedy, a description that Stanislavsky had ignored when he directed the 1904 premiere, enraging the playwright. Serban wanted to defy Stanislavsky and restore The Cherry Orchard as a rip-roaring farce.

  He would be aided by Elizabeth Swados, a moody twenty-six-year-old composer and Serban’s frequent collaborator at La MaMa. Serban, Swados, and Foreman were key to Papp’s last-ditch plan to solve the riddle of the Vivian Beaumont. For the role of Madame Ranevskaya, Papp secured the sixty-year-old stage star Irene Worth. Meryl had seen her the previous season, in a Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth, and gushed soon after that “you could
have taken away all the other characters in the play, the sets, everything, and still have understood every theme in the play.”

  In the lead-up to the Tony Awards, Meryl and Mary Beth Hurt had attended an awards breakfast at the Regency Hotel. When the young actresses arrived, Arvin Brown offered to introduce Meryl to Miss Worth, who was nominated for Best Actress in a Play. Starstruck, she and Mary Beth decamped to the ladies’ room to smoke cigarettes, until Arvin knocked on the door: “Come out of there—I’ve got Irene.”

  Meryl slinked back out and was delivered to Miss Worth.

  The great actress looked Meryl up and down and asked her, “What do you plan to do in December?”

  “Unemployment, I guess,” she stammered.

  “Fine,” Worth said. “Think about The Cherry Orchard.”

  She did. Her regard for Worth—or, more to the point, Papp—was enough that she took the role of Dunyasha, the chambermaid. It was a small part, one that she might have otherwise turned down. “Everybody was talking about this fantastic young actress, and many were surprised she accepted to play such a small part in The Cherry Orchard, when she could have already been offered a Broadway lead,” Serban recalled. “But she decided she still wanted to learn from watching the elders, in this case from the great Irene Worth playing Ranevskaya. I remember Meryl coming to rehearsals even when she was not called, quietly sitting and knitting on the side, watching every detail of Irene’s unique technique and being fascinated.”

  Papp had assembled a powerhouse cast, including Mary Beth Hurt as Anya and the high-spirited Puerto Rican actor Raúl Juliá (one of Papp’s notable finds) as Lopakhin. He envisioned the Cherry Orchard ensemble forming the nucleus of an American classical acting company, the kind Tony Randall dreamed of as well. Meryl and Mary Beth shared Dressing Room No. 18. J. Roy Helland was back doing the wigs, and he fashioned Meryl a wacky, nimbus-like updo.