Her Again Page 18

  By then, Meryl and John were planning their next move, one that had little to do with doctors and radiation and everything to do with what brought them together in the first place: acting. While John had the strength, they would give a piece of themselves to the only thing they considered sacred, which was make-believe. They would star together in a movie.

  A CERTAIN MYTHIC miasma would forever cloud The Deer Hunter. Even as it marched to the Academy Awards, a Writers Guild arbitration would have to sort out its byzantine list of screenwriters. The murkiness of its origins was indicative of the deeper mysteries that came to haunt the film, among them: Was Russian roulette really played in Vietnam? Does it matter? Is it even a Vietnam movie, or a meditation on grand themes of friendship and manhood? Is it antiwar—or fascist—propaganda? A masterpiece, or a mess?

  At the center of the fog, and most often its source, was the director, Michael Cimino, a man later prone to such gnomic statements as “When I’m kidding, I’m serious, and when I’m serious, I’m kidding” and “I am not who I am, and I am who I am not.” Short and soft-spoken, with a bulbous nose, thick jowls, and puffy hair, Cimino looked nothing like a debonair movie director. If his appearance was modest, his ego was boundless—he once claimed that he had been an artistic child prodigy, “like Michelangelo, who could draw a perfect circle at age five.” Of his family, he said little. He grew up in New York and started his career making commercials for L’eggs and United Airlines, before directing Clint Eastwood in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, in 1974.

  Two years later, Cimino was approached by the British producer Michael Deeley, of EMI Films. Deeley wanted him to take a look at a screenplay he had lying around, by Quinn Redeker and Lou Garfinkle. Redeker had based it on a photo spread he had seen in a magazine two decades earlier, showing a man playing Russian roulette with a Smith & Wesson revolver. He and Garfinkle spun the image into an adventure story about two guys who join a Russian-roulette circuit. Over the course of a year and some twenty-one drafts, they kept changing the setting: South Dakota, the Bahamas. By the time the script reached Deeley, who bought it for $19,000, it was set in Vietnam and titled The Man Who Came to Play.

  America had only begun to reckon with the catastrophe of the Vietnam War, but Michael Deeley was undeterred, even after five major studios told him different versions of “It’s too soon.” Besides, the real hook was not Vietnam but the harrowing scenes of Russian roulette played by American POWs. Still, Deeley thought the story needed character development, and he set out in search of a writer-director who could flesh out the script. Enter Michael Cimino. When Deeley met him, he thought he had a “muted” quality, or at least had shown one with Clint Eastwood, with whom one does not mess.

  Whether Cimino saw himself that way is another matter. After the moderate success of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, he was poised to join the crop of pioneering directors who were shaping the New Hollywood: rambunctious auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, and Francis Ford Coppola, who had jolted American movies by importing the racy inventiveness of European art-house cinema. Films like Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, and Midnight Cowboy had ushered in a creative revolution that belonged squarely in the hands of directors, who wielded more and more control over budgets and tone.

  Deeley and Cimino met for lunches at EMI’s rooftop garden in Beverly Hills, agreeing that some character background was called for, maybe twenty minutes at the beginning. Some time after Cimino had gone on his way, Deeley discovered that the director had subcontracted a writer named Deric Washburn, without mentioning it to Deeley. It was a red flag—a minor one, but the first in a series that led Deeley to doubt everything he had thought about Cimino. “All I can possibly say,” the producer said later, “is that from my point of view he appeared to be quite peculiar in lots of different ways, and one of them was in difficulty telling the truth sometimes.”

  Washburn, whom the Writers Guild would deem sole screenwriter (Redeker and Garfinkle, along with Washburn and Cimino, got story credit), remembered Cimino as “very guarded.” The exception was the three days they spent at Cimino’s house in Los Angeles, transforming The Man Who Came to Play into something decisively their own, namely The Deer Hunter.

  “The thing just flowed out,” Washburn said. “It was like a tag-team thing. We had an outline and dialogue and characters. We had the whole damn thing in three days. Never happened to me again. So I sat down and started writing. I think it took three weeks. And every night Cimino would send an assistant in to take the pages away. Of course, I had no copies of them, which came up later, because when the script was finished my name wasn’t on it.”

  Washburn worked twenty-hour days. When he was done, Cimino took him out to a cheap restaurant off the Sunset Strip, along with his associate producer and sidekick, Joann Carelli. When they finished dinner, according to Washburn, Carelli looked at him and said, “Well, Deric, it’s fuck-off time.” The next day, Washburn got on a plane and resumed his life in Manhattan as a carpenter.

  The script that Cimino then delivered to EMI retained almost nothing of The Man Who Came to Play. It was set in the industrial town of Clairton, Pennsylvania. The original protagonist had been split into three, all steelworkers of Russian extraction. The movie would have a triptych structure. In Act I, the carefree young men of Clairton prepare to go off to war. In Act II, they face the verdant hell of Vietnam, where prison guards force them to play Russian roulette. Act III, back in Clairton, shows the devastating aftermath. Michael, the noble sufferer, returns alive but alienated. Steven comes back without his legs. And Nick becomes a shell-shocked zombie, doomed to play Russian roulette in a Saigon betting ring, until a bullet finally ends the pain.

  Deeley’s business partner Barry Spikings recalled being on a plane with Cimino, who turned to him and said, “You know what that Russian roulette thing is? It’s really a metaphor for what we’re doing with our young men, sending them off to Vietnam.” Ultimately, the script had less to do with the politics of the war than with the profundity of male friendship. Critics would later observe that the director and his protagonist shared a first name, Michael. More revealing was the character’s last name, Vronsky, borrowed from Anna Karenina—a clue, perhaps, to Cimino’s Tolstoyan sense of scale. He had solved the problem of character development with a raucous Act I wedding party for Steven and his girlfriend, Angela. In the screenplay, it took up seven and a half pages.

  “Michael, this could really eat us up a bit,” Spikings would say.

  “Oh, no, it’s going to be a flickering candle,” Cimino assured him. “We can knock it out in a couple of days.”

  In the midst of the men’s camaraderie, Cimino and Washburn placed a woman: Linda, a supermarket checkout girl, torn between her engagement to Nick and the deeper allure of Michael. Described in the screenplay as “a fragile slip of a thing with a hauntingly lovely face,” she was less a fully realized character than the archetypal girl back home, the Penelope waiting at the end of a modern-day Odyssey.

  Knowing that a movie about Vietnam would be a hard sell, EMI needed a star to play Michael Vronsky. Aside from being noticeably non-Russian, Robert De Niro couldn’t have been more tempting. His roles in Mean Streets, The Godfather: Part II, and Taxi Driver had solidified him as the rough-and-tumble hero of the New Hollywood. EMI paid the asking price of $1.5 million, then placed a full-page ad in Variety announcing its coup, showing De Niro in sunglasses, holding a rifle.

  Cimino and De Niro began scouting for actors to round out the cast. At a steel mill in Gary, Indiana, they got a tour from the burly foreman, Chuck Aspegren, and then enlisted him to play Axel, the group’s hard-drinking rascal. Back in New York, De Niro nabbed the thirty-four-year-old Christopher Walken, who had recently starred opposite Irene Worth in Sweet Bird of Youth on Broadway, to play Nick. He saw John Savage in American Buffalo and thought he would be perfect for Steven, the bridegroom turned amputee. And at the Vivian Beaumont, he saw Meryl Streep as the pratfalling Dunyasha in The Cherry Orchard
. The role was nothing like the demure Linda, but when Cimino caught her a few weeks later, singing “Surabaya Johnny” in Happy End at BAM, she got the offer.

  Movies didn’t rank high among her ambitions, and she had told herself she wasn’t an ingénue. Linda, she would say, was “the forgotten person in the screenplay and also in the other characters’ lives.” The girlfriend part, the blonde in the love triangle—that was someone else’s job, someone else’s dream. Rather than “hitting it big as some starlet,” Meryl had planned her burgeoning stage career to achieve the opposite. In less than two years she’d been a nun, a French princess, a Southern floozy, a Manhattan secretary, a Civil War belle, a clumsy Russian maid, and a Salvation Army crusader—not to mention the menagerie of parts she’d played at Yale. Linda the checkout girl could erase all that.

  “They needed a girl between two guys,” she said later, “and I was it.”

  But there was another pull to The Deer Hunter, one that superseded her typecasting concerns: it had a role for John Cazale. Stanley the steelworker was the jester of the group, the “failed alpha male” (in Cimino’s summation) who rankles his buddies with cheap jabs and gossip. He was the guy who preens in the mirror despite his receding hairline, who wagers twenty bucks that the Eagles quarterback is wearing a dress. Like Fredo Corleone, he was the weakling in a band of brothers, quick to overcompensate with a trashy date or a defensive barb, always fighting a comic brawl with his lagging masculinity.

  John, according to Cimino, wanted the chance to act alongside De Niro. But he was hesitant to take the role, for reasons he didn’t initially make clear. Finally, he came to Cimino and told him he was undergoing radiation for lung cancer. If the director didn’t want to take the risk, he would understand. Stunned, Cimino told him they would go ahead as planned. The actors were required to take medical exams before the shoot—what should I say? John wondered. Tell the truth, Cimino told him. They would all hold their breath and wait.

  The Deer Hunter was set to begin filming in late June, just as Meryl was wrapping up her run in Happy End. Weeks went by without a word about the physical, until, the day before shooting, Cimino got a frantic call from an executive at EMI, most likely Michael Deeley. The studio had to insure the film, and suddenly the awful reality of John’s health was a matter of dollars and cents. According to Cimino, “the morons at EMI” told him to fire John. The director exploded. “I told him he was crazy,” Cimino said later. “I told him we were going to shoot in the morning and that this would wreck the company. I was told that unless I got rid of John, he would shut down the picture. It was awful. I spent hours on the phone, yelling and screaming and fighting.”

  Barry Spikings and Michael Deeley both deny that EMI ever demanded that John be fired. “There was no question of letting him go,” Deeley said. “He was Meryl Streep’s lover and had been introduced to us by Robert De Niro, and both of them would have been very upset.” The medical advice they received indicated that John would not reach a “crisis-point” until his work on the film had been completed. They would shoot out of order to get his scenes in the can first. Still, Deeley thought it sensible to have some kind of Plan B. He asked Cimino to devise a backup scene explaining Stan’s disappearance, so that any completed footage would not be compromised in the event of John’s death.

  This set off another explosion. In Cimino’s telling, the director found the request so unseemly that he consulted a psychiatrist. This was beyond moviemaking. I’m getting out, he thought. I can’t do this. It is not worth it, talking about life and death like this. Finally, he agreed to write the alternative scene, some “absolute dreadful piece of shit” that he had no intention of using. He slammed down the phone in disgust.

  But there was still the matter of insurance. In later years, the story got out that Robert De Niro secured the bond on John’s participation with his own money. It was a real-life analogue to the loyalty portrayed in The Deer Hunter, in which Michael vows not to leave Nick in the wilds of Vietnam. Publicly, De Niro would play coy about the insurance, with vague assertions like “He was sicker than we thought, but I wanted him to be in it.”

  But Deeley and Spikings both insist this never happened. “Who was going to be the beneficiary?” Deeley said. “EMI wasn’t, because EMI had no involvement in insuring him. We couldn’t get insurance. What makes anybody think that Robert De Niro has any special edge in the insurance business?” Nevertheless, Meryl was so convinced of De Niro’s magnanimity that she repeated the story decades later. Like almost everything about The Deer Hunter, it acquired the ring of legend.

  If John were to go uninsured, as the producers claim he did, everyone would simply have to pray that his health held out long enough to complete his scenes. According to Savage, the actors were asked to sign an agreement, promising that if John were to pass away during filming they would take no legal action.

  Time was now everything. The longer the shoot went on, the more complicated it would be to edit around his scenes if the unspeakable occurred. The making of The Deer Hunter was turning into its own game of Russian roulette, with each round of dailies a fresh bullet in the chamber.

  TWO FIGURES WALK along the main street of Clairton, Pennsylvania, arm in arm. The man is a Green Beret in uniform, the woman in a crisp blue coat. To the townsfolk passing by, they look like a happy couple promenading down the dusty boulevard. But their faces are tense, and they rarely make eye contact. When someone stops to greet the man on the street, the woman furtively glances at a shop window to fix her hair.

  “Cut!”

  Meryl removed her arm from Robert De Niro’s. It was the first day of shooting on The Deer Hunter, and everything was out of order. The scene of Michael and Linda stepping out together in Clairton was from the story’s post-Vietnam third act. They would have to imagine all that came before: the flirtatious glances across the wedding hall, the tentative homecoming. All that they’d film later.

  Also, this wasn’t Clairton. The real town hadn’t fit Michael Cimino’s vision for his mythic middle-American hamlet. Instead, he had cobbled together bits and pieces of seven different towns in the corner of the heartland where Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia converge. The movie’s Clairton would be a compendium of places like Weirton, Duquesne, Steubenville, and Follansbee. In Cleveland, he had handpicked St. Theodosius, a historic Russian Orthodox cathedral, for the wedding ceremony. In Mingo Junction, Ohio, he remodeled Welsh’s Lounge, a dive bar down the street from the steel mill, to serve as the local watering hole.

  Wherever the cast and crew descended like a traveling circus, the local papers rushed to the scene, printing headlines like “Mingo Citizens Elated by Film” and “Movie Makers Leave Cash, Not Pollution, Here.” Only Lloyd Fuge, the mayor of the real Clairton, Pennsylvania, seemed wary, telling Steubenville’s Herald-Star, “They say the nature of the scenes down there would not be beneficial to our town.” He was probably right. The Clairton of Cimino’s imagination was a gray place, with dusty shop signs and furnaces choking the sky with smoke.

  The screenplay called for drab November: deer-hunting season. But when the crew set up in the Rust Belt, it was one of the hottest summers on record. Once the cast and the financing had come together, the filmmakers knew they had to move fast, and the ticking time bomb of John Cazale’s health made waiting for autumn even more dangerous. Instead, they would tear the foliage off the trees, spray the green grass brown, and scatter the ground with dead leaves. The citizens of Mingo Junction could be forgiven for wondering why the trees outside the Slovak Citizens Club had gone bare in late June.

  The heat was punishing on the actors, too. Even in scorching ninety-degree weather, the actors wore flannel shirts and wool caps, while the crew was in shorts. After each take, they would trade their sweat-drenched clothes for a dry set. George Dzundza, who played the barkeep, wore fake sideburns that continually slid off his face. Meryl kept a blow dryer handy, to make sure her hair wasn’t limp on camera.

  Few people around M
ingo Junction took notice of her—unlike De Niro, who couldn’t walk down Commercial Street without his picture landing in the Steubenville Herald-Star. She filled the dead hours between shots knitting sweaters, just like her character. When she could, she explored the town. At Weisberger’s clothing store, she bought a scarf and made small talk with the owner. The shopkeeper delighted in conversing with a movie actress, unaware that she was working, absorbing the pace and the particulars of life on the Ohio River.

  She still had her doubts about Linda, and she wasn’t keeping them quiet. When the New York Times came to town to report on the “Vietnam Movie That Does Not Knock America,” she was astonishingly forthright.

  “Linda is essentially a man’s view of a woman,” she said. “She’s extremely passive, she’s very quiet, she’s someone who’s constantly vulnerable. She’s someone who always has a tear in her eye but an unbreakable spirit, someone who cares a lot but who is never depressed. Someone who’s beaten down a lot by everybody, but who never gets angry about that.”

  Driving the point home, she continued, “In other words, she’s really far from my own instincts. I’m very much of a fighter myself. So this is very hard for me. I want to break her out of her straitjacket, but of course I can’t even let that possibility show. I tend to think she’s someone who will grow up into one of the millions of neurotic housewives. But this is a man’s movie, it isn’t about Linda’s problems. I think the point of view of the story is that she’s a lovely person.”

  For a no-name actress filming her first big movie role, airing such grievances to the Times was beyond bold.

  Her main concern wasn’t Linda, though; it was John. On set, she watched him carefully, making sure he didn’t overextend himself. He was weak, and it showed. Beneath his flannel shirt was a small tattooed mark on his chest made by the radiation techs, like the crosshairs in a hunting rifle’s scope. Most of the cast knew what he was up against, though nobody really talked about it. Perhaps Meryl had finally convinced him to quit smoking, and now he would chastise anyone who lit a cigarette. “One look and he’d come up behind us and grab it and put it out, scream at us,” John Savage recalled. “He put people at ease by slamming them with criticism, with humor. Basically, ‘If you’re gonna smoke, you’re gonna die. Don’t screw around with that!’”