Her Again Page 17

  Rehearsals got off to an awkward start. Serban knew Meryl only from 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, and when she walked in the first day, he looked at her and balked. “You’re not fat!” he growled in his thick Romanian accent. “No fat, no funny!” Things got tenser from there. Serban hated the concept of “style” and told the cast he wanted the acting to be “simple.” But what did that mean? Meryl questioned him: Wasn’t “simple” a style in itself ?

  More frustrating were the improvisation exercises that Serban led in rehearsal. In one, he had the stage managers read out the text as the actors mimed the action. In another, he had them invent a nonexistent fifth act after the play ends. Irene Worth embraced Serban’s methods, at one point impersonating a swan on the attack. But Meryl was impatient. Perhaps she was unhappy playing the servant, or maybe the improv games reminded her of those dread early days at Yale. Her irritation boiled over during one exercise, in which she acted out Dunyasha’s resentment, which by that point seemed to have fused with her own.

  “I’ve never seen an angrier improvisation come out of anyone than the one that Meryl did when she was asked to improvise how this person, this servant, viewed her life,” Mary Beth recalled. “She was crawling on the floor and spitting and hocking. That girl was really angry at Andrei Serban.”

  But Serban was pleased. “She was fearless,” he recalled. “One is usually afraid to throw oneself outside the norm of what is accepted as the standard heavy method of acting the ‘Russians’: an artificial, sentimental way of feeling for the character, but Meryl was only concerned with what was valid and alive in the moment. No methods were of any help to her except the pure discovery that came to life in improvisation.”

  Serban encouraged Meryl’s “Lucille Ball tendencies.” In return, she developed a dead-on Serban imitation, bellowing, “Falling down verrry verrry funny.” By the time the play opened, on February 17, 1977, she had found a singular take on Dunyasha: a sexy, frantic, pratfalling Matryoshka doll who tumbled to the floor whenever she made an entrance. As in 27 Wagons, her knack for physical comedy was evident, but even more so in The Cherry Orchard, which she played for pure slapstick. When Yasha the butler kissed her in Act I, she fainted and broke a teacup. When he left her in Act IV, she tackled him to the ground. She spent much of Act II with her bloomers around her ankles.

  Naturally, Serban’s clownish take on The Cherry Orchard polarized critics. In The New Leader, John Simon called it “coarse” and “vulgar,” adding, “We are not interested in the truth as a Romanian parvenu pipsqueak sees it. We’re interested in the truth as the great master Chekhov saw it.” But Clive Barnes, in the Times, delivered a rhapsody: “It is a celebration of genius, like the cleaning of a great painting, a fresh exposition of an old philosophy. . . . The State Department should send it instantly to its spiritual home—the Moscow Art Theater.”

  Audiences were similarly divided. One spectator wrote to Papp and Serban, “I think that if this horrifying production had been done in Russia, the two of you and perhaps Mr. Julia would have to face a firing squad.” Another suggested, in a letter to the Times, that the play be retitled “The Wild Cherry Orchard.” Some believed Meryl was shamelessly hogging the spotlight. When Papp wrote to subscribers about his “respect and admiration” for Serban, one recipient sent back the letter with blue scrawl in the margins: “Are you kidding?! Impossible! Can you understand a production in which the maid is the outstanding performer?”

  A MONTH INTO performances of The Cherry Orchard, Meryl hit a quiet milestone: her debut as a screen actress. With Julia not yet released, the occasion was a television movie called The Deadliest Season, about the rough-and-tumble world of professional ice hockey.

  Michael Moriarty played a Wisconsin hockey player under pressure to rev up his aggression on the ice. He checks a buddy on the opposing team during a game, and the guy is carted off to the hospital with a ruptured spleen. When the friend dies, Moriarty is tried for manslaughter. John’s friend Walter McGinn played the district attorney. Meryl was Moriarty’s wife, who desperately wants to believe her husband is innocent. The role was a variation on Adrian from Rocky, which was released in November, 1976, the same month The Deadliest Season was shot.

  Meryl had gotten the part on the suggestion of the casting director Cis Corman. When the director, Robert Markowitz, saw her audition, he went back to the screenwriter and told him to beef up her scenes. Much of the dialogue was between the hockey player and his lawyer, but Markowitz wanted to shift some of that action to the husband and wife. “She was like a centrifugal force,” Markowitz recalled.

  On set in Hartford, Meryl was jumpy. Moriarty noticed her continually twirling her hair or biting her nails. She gave her character a similar set of nervous tics—biting her lip, chewing her hand, rolling her eyes. She adopted a flat Wisconsin accent (“Maybe I’ll take some cawffee out”) and a low-grade uneasiness that matched Moriarty’s disassociated gentle giant. In one scene, she sank on a hotel bed and told him, “When I watched you in a game, hittin’, checkin’, it would turn me on. I couldn’t wait to get home in bed with you. I don’t know, there was something different tonight.”

  It wasn’t exactly Tennessee Williams, and Meryl was usually hesitant to play somebody’s wife or girlfriend. But the character had her own kind of dignity, confronting her husband about the violence on the ice. As the director saw it, “She was not a subjugated wife, because she was confronting him at the heart of what he does.”

  Word of her talents was spreading. While The Deadliest Season was still being edited, three notable filmmakers came to look at the footage: Miloš Forman, who had just made One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; Louis Malle, who would soon direct Pretty Baby; and the Czech-born director Karel Reisz, who was four years away from The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Meryl’s performance also impressed the special’s producer, Herbert Brodkin, who was preparing for the miniseries Holocaust.

  The Deadliest Season got a warm response when it aired on CBS, on March 16, 1977. Two weeks later, Walter McGinn was driving in Hollywood before dawn and plunged off a cliff near Mulholland Drive. He was forty years old. Robyn Goodman had lost a husband, and John Cazale had lost one of his closest friends. A black cloud had formed over their little world, but, for Meryl and John, the worst was yet to come.

  THREE DAYS AFTER The Cherry Orchard closed at Lincoln Center, Meryl was announced as Shirley Knight’s replacement in Happy End. Nothing could be less appropriately titled than the Chelsea Theater’s production. The show was, in a word, cursed.

  The trouble started early on. Michael Posnick, who had directed the Brecht-Weill musical at the Yale Rep, was restaging it at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the Chelsea was in residence. Christopher Lloyd played the Chicago gangster Bill Cracker. Shirley Knight, who had beaten Meryl and Mary Beth for the Tony the previous year, was playing Hallelujah Lil, the Salvation Army girl who tries to convert him—the part that Meryl had taken over in New Haven on an afternoon’s notice.

  Posnick was relatively inexperienced, and the temperamental Knight was walking all over him. To make matters worse, she wasn’t much of a singer, and the conductor never knew when she’d come in. “The songs went west, the cues went north,” said Michael Feingold, who had adapted the script. One night after her first song, Knight turned to the orchestra and said, “I didn’t like how I did that. I think I’ll do it again.” The second go-round wasn’t much better.

  Chaos broke out. One actress stomped out center stage moments before the first preview, raging that there was a mistake in her bio. Another actor pushed a castmate off of a four-foot riser during the song “Brother, Give Yourself a Shove.” Two of the gangsters who were constantly fighting got locked in a dressing room together. And Christopher Lloyd was having an extreme case of nerves. “In my gut,” he recalled, “I felt this production was a disaster.”

  With the show bound for Broadway, he expressed his concerns to the Chelsea’s artistic director, Robert Kalfin. Overwhelmed by his leadin
g lady, Posnick quit at the same moment that he was fired. Then Kalfin took over as the director and promptly fired Shirley Knight. It was then that Joe Grifasi, who was playing Brother Hannibal Jackson, made a suggestion. Meryl Streep already knew the part from Yale. Why not ask her?

  Once again, Meryl learned the part of Hallelujah Lil under duress. With her kohl eyes, bowler hat, and curly yellow wig, she looked like a demented Kewpie doll, or an extra from A Clockwork Orange. “She saved the show,” Christopher Lloyd said.

  But the Happy End curse continued. Two days before it opened at BAM, Lloyd fell onstage during a fight scene and dislocated his knee. He was told he would need major surgery. The Broadway opening was postponed, and Lloyd was replaced by his understudy, Bob Gunton. At the same time, Kalfin retooled the script, infuriating Feingold and antagonizing the Brecht estate.

  As if that wasn’t enough, Bob Gunton came down with rubella, a.k.a. the German measles. On a Tuesday at one p.m., the cast lined up to receive gamma globulin injections to prevent further infection. That night, Christopher Lloyd returned in a hip-to-ankle cast and a painkiller haze, becoming the understudy to his understudy. “When I opened my mouth to sing my first song, I was an octave too high,” he recalled. “It was kind of torture. But Meryl was there, and she had a wonderful way of teasing and fun.”

  Meanwhile, John Cazale’s plans to share a double bill with Al Pacino had fallen apart, now that Al was starring on Broadway in The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel. Still mourning over Walter McGinn, John had found a suitable alternative: Andrei Serban’s production of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, with music by Elizabeth Swados. John would play Agamemnon and Aegisthus. It would start at the Vivian Beaumont two weeks after The Cherry Orchard closed, continuing the Serban streak.

  By the end of April, 1977, Meryl and John were both in rehearsals for separate Broadway shows. Come May, she’d be starring in Happy End as it limped to the Martin Beck, while he played the title role in Agamemnon twenty blocks north. By day, they’d have the cobblestones of Franklin Street. At night, they’d have the lights of Broadway.

  There was just one problem: John Cazale was coughing up blood.

  Linda

  THE MOURNERS ARE gathered at a hilltop cemetery. It’s November: bare trees, gray skies pumped with smoke from the nearby steel mills. A priest swings a censer and sings a dirge. Meryl Streep turns to her left and, through a thick black veil, sees Robert De Niro. She searches his face—he seems utterly lost. She looks down at her feet in the withered grass. The grief in the air is lacquered by disbelief. Nobody thought it would turn out like this, least of all her.

  One by one, they approach the coffin. Meryl lays down a white flower with a long stem, looking like a woman whose innocence has been torn asunder, her great love scythed down before it ever got to blossom. She crosses herself and follows De Niro to the cars. She does not turn around, and therefore does not see the pale, mustachioed face of John Cazale. He is the last one to lay down a flower, and the last to leave.

  Pull the frame out a few inches, and the trees are resplendent, the grass green. A vast stretch of summer surrounding a patch of brown fall, like an oasis in reverse. It’s the set of The Deer Hunter. The coffin is empty.

  HAPPY END was finally getting to Broadway, curse or no curse. Despite its haunted house’s worth of calamities, it had one unassailable asset: Meryl, who had relearned the part of Hallelujah Lil in three afternoons. Still, time was short, and on the day the scenery loaded into the Martin Beck, everyone was on edge. The cast had one chance to run through the show. And Meryl was nowhere to be found.

  Uptown, Agamemnon was wrapping up its first week of previews, and it, too, was missing its star. On May 3, 1977, the stage manager wrote in his daily report: “John Cazale was out most of the day for medical tests, so Jamil played Agamemnon.”

  It had become clear that something was seriously wrong with John. Meryl had noticed “disturbing symptoms,” and at her urging he agreed to see a doctor—previews be damned. But the two actors knew nothing about navigating the Manhattan medical world, where the doctors’ offices on Park Avenue could be booked up for weeks. Luckily, they knew someone with clout, maybe the one person in the downtown theater who could get anything he wanted with a phone call: Joseph Papp.

  Beleaguered as he was by his bloated theatrical empire, Papp would throw everything aside to help an actor or a playwright in an hour of need. Mary Beth Hurt had learned this firsthand, when he salvaged her from the psych ward at Roosevelt Hospital. For Meryl and John, he would do no less. He arranged for them to see his doctor, William Hitzig, at his practice on the Upper East Side.

  An Austrian-born septuagenarian, Dr. Hitzig had a warm bedside manner that belied his vast influence. Aside from Papp, his patients included Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and the Indian statesman V. K. Krishna Menon. He had been given the key to the City of Hiroshima after treating two dozen women disfigured by the atomic bomb, and later flew to Poland to care for survivors of Nazi medical experiments. Despite his global humanitarian efforts, he was also one of the few New York doctors who made house calls.

  If Dr. Hitzig had an extravagance, it was his vintage Rolls-Royce, painted, Gail Papp recalled, in “some outrageous color like citron.” At Papp’s request, Hitzig agreed to have his chauffeur pick up John and Meryl, and they spent the day being driven to what seemed like every cancer specialist in the city. It was grimly ironic: here they were, like two movie stars arriving at a premiere, but with any sense of luxury erased by the hovering dread.

  John called in sick to Agamemnon the next night. And the next. That first week of May was a blur of medical tests, hopping in and out of Dr. Hitzig’s Rolls-Royce, with Joe Papp on hand to make sure they were treated like royalty. “He checked us in at the hospital, sat in the chair for hours and waited for the results of the tests,” Meryl would recall. “He asked the questions we were too freaked out or too ignorant to ask.” After this, Papp would no longer be the man who gave Meryl her first job in New York City. He would be Papa Joe, the only boss she ever loved.

  After several exhausting days, Meryl and John sat in Dr. Hitzig’s office with Joe and Gail Papp. Nothing in the doctor’s kindly demeanor betrayed the horror of the diagnosis: John had advanced lung cancer, and would need to start radiation immediately. “He broke the news to him in his way, holding out a branch of hope for the future, although there was in fact none,” Gail Papp recalled. “His cancer had spread all throughout.” It was the kind of news, she said, that makes you feel “like you’ve been struck dead on the spot.”

  John fell silent. For a moment, so did Meryl. But she was never one to give up, and certainly not the kind to succumb to despair. Maybe it was just the uncanny sense of confidence that she was always able to trick herself into having, or at least showing. But right then, Meryl dug into some great well of perseverance and decided that, as far as she was concerned, John was going to live.

  She looked up and said, “So, where should we go to dinner?”

  LIKE AGAMEMNON, WHO returns home from the Trojan War only to be killed by Queen Clytemnestra, John Cazale had been dealt a terrible fate. With Meryl on his arm, he sulked into the Vivian Beaumont on May 6th and took aside the director, Andrei Serban. He would no longer be able to continue with the production. That evening, the stage manager’s report simply read: “After tonight, Jamil Zakkai will play Agamemnon and Aegisthus.”

  Meryl returned to Happy End, in some sense the latest victim of the curse. If she was roiled by the backstage chaos or the unfolding tragedy at home, she didn’t show it: her fellow actors saw nothing but dogged professionalism. One time, she took John and the cast to Manganaro’s, the old-school Italian eatery on Ninth Avenue, famed for its hanging salamis and meatballs in marinara sauce. It was John’s favorite restaurant, Meryl told her castmates, a steely grin on her face.

  When John showed up backstage, everyone who knew what was going on was staggered to find him still smoking Cuban cigars. Meryl had declared her own
dressing room smoke-free, so John would go down to her costar Grayson Hall’s quarters, which had become the company’s unofficial smoking lounge. Christopher Lloyd, still in his hip-to-ankle cast, took note of Meryl’s fortitude. “She had a kind of a tough love about it,” he said. “She didn’t let him malinger.”

  But the reality was becoming hard to ignore, especially for John. When his brother, Stephen, showed up at the loft and heard the words “They found a spot on my lung,” he knew instinctively that it was a lost cause. He went out onto John’s fire escape and broke down into heaving sobs. All John could say was, “Did you ever think of quitting smoking?” Not long after, the three of them went out to lunch in Chinatown. Stephen was horrified when John stopped on the curb, hunched over, and spit blood into the gutter.

  Their friends were hopeful, or tried to be. Robyn Goodman, still adjusting to life as a young widow, thought to herself, John always looks sick. How bad can this be? Al Pacino sat in the waiting room as John went in for treatment, but the patient’s attitude was always some variation of “We’re gonna get this thing!” John repeated the sentiment, like an incantation, to Israel Horovitz, interrupting his optimism only to wonder aloud, “Will they let me work?”

  Night after night at the Martin Beck, Meryl sang her weary solo, “Surabaya Johnny,” Hallelujah Lil’s account of a distant love affair with a pipe-smoking scoundrel from the East. In the song, she follows him down the Punjab, from the river to the sea, until he leaves her flat. With her own stage-door Johnny lying in her dressing-room cot, Meryl gave each lyric a rueful sting:

  Surabaya Johnny, why’m I feeling so blue?

  You have no heart, Johnny, and I still love you so . . .

  That June, Happy End was up for a Tony Award for Best Musical. The producers asked Meryl to perform “Surabaya Johnny” live at the broadcast. She looked at them and said, “No, I don’t have enough confidence to do that,” in a manner so confident that the answer seemed to contradict itself. In any case, Christopher Lloyd performed another song, on crutches, and the show lost to Annie.