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  Those first few weeks, Cimino knocked out the movie’s final third, the downcast post-Vietnam scenes. In Duquesne, Pennsylvania, he converted a small field into a cemetery, where they shot the funeral for Christopher Walken’s character. When they were done, they gave it to local kids to use as a ball field. In Welsh’s bar, they filmed the indelible finale, in which the mourners sing a doleful rendition of “God Bless America.” Meryl and John sat side by side, singing of mountains and prairies and oceans white with foam.

  Having shot the movie’s tragic end, Cimino then backtracked to its raucous beginning. By then, the cast had developed an easy camaraderie, which would serve the freewheeling tone. Cimino wanted these scenes to feel like home movies, as if the audience were watching snatches of its own past. He had gone to great lengths to imbue the actors with a sense of authenticity, even mocking up Pennsylvania driver’s licenses that the guys kept in their pockets.

  The centerpiece of the first act was the wedding party, which Cimino envisioned as a richly detailed set piece—far from the quick scene-setter Michael Deeley had in mind. Cimino had been the best man at a Russian Orthodox wedding just like it, and his aim was to shoot the sequence like a documentary, with as many real-life elements as possible. In that spirit, the location would be Cleveland’s Lemko Hall, a ballroom where the neighborhood’s Slavic community held celebrations.

  For three days, an instructor named Olga Gaydos taught the actors Russian folk dances like the korobushka and the troika, the dance of the three stallions. Meryl and her fellow bridesmaid Mary Ann Haenel would twirl on either side of John, laughing at his two left feet. “That’s enough,” he’d say, a little peeved. Suddenly, everyone would flood him with concern: “Are you okay?” “Do you need to take a break?”

  When they could, the couple would steal some private moments. “They talked quietly together,” Mary Ann Haenel recalled. “They had their heads together. They walked together. They looked happy. But every now and then, you would see that look that they would give each other—it was a deep look.”

  The world of Clairton was just background noise to John’s health problems. “Being in a movie was like the smallest part of the tricky part of that landscape of our lives,” Meryl would recall. “I mean, it was really tough, and nobody really knew whether these protocols would work. And we were always really hopeful that everything would work out well.”

  Finally, on August 3rd, with the schedule already delayed by weeks, Cimino began shooting one of the craziest, drunkest, longest wedding parties in movie history. Outside Lemko Hall, the street was closed to traffic and crammed with trucks and generators. Inside, the windows were cloaked in black, so that the hall remained in perpetual night. Giant high school portraits of Savage, Walken, and De Niro hung on the walls, along with banners wishing the boys well in Vietnam. The barroom in back was kept open all day long, so that everyone could pass the time playing gin rummy, maybe guzzle a bottle of Rolling Rock. Of course, Cimino didn’t mind if the actors were soused. All the better.

  The filmmakers had advertised for extras from the community, hiring some two hundred wedding guests from three different parishes. They were paid twenty-five dollars a day—two bucks extra if they showed up with a wrapped gift box. They were told to leave the presents at the back of the hall, where the boxes towered to the ceiling. Right before filming, the assistant director went up to Cimino and said disbelievingly, “Michael, everybody brought a gift!”

  “Well, we told them to,” the director said.

  “You don’t understand.” Inside the boxes were toasters and appliances and silverware and china. The parishioners had bought actual gifts, as if they were attending a real wedding.

  The party began each morning at seven-thirty and raged until nine or ten at night. Everyone was tired and confused and happy. Cimino captured the chaos with anthropological curiosity, intervening only to choreograph a moment here or there. At one point, John’s character is dancing with a bridesmaid, and the bandleader, played by Joe Grifasi, cuts in. When John notices him grabbing her behind, he leaps up and pulls them apart, then turns to the girl and slugs her on the cheek. Cimino said that his uncle did the same thing at a family wedding.

  Other moments of carousal came organically. An old man gorging himself on stuffed cabbage. Christopher Walken leaping over a mug of beer. Chuck Aspegren hauling a bridesmaid to the coatroom as she pummels him with an umbrella. During one take, De Niro was so exhausted as he carried John over to take a group photo that he lost his balance, and both men collapsed to the floor. Cimino kept the take: he was looking for accidents, not grace.

  Meryl got caught up in the revelry, at least when the camera was pointed at her. When De Niro spun her on the dance floor, she erupted into dizzy laughter. When she caught the bouquet, she screamed with joy. She may not have thought much of her character, but she had found a way to play her. “I thought of all the girls in my high school who waited for things to happen to them,” she said later. “Linda waits for a man to come and take care of her. If not this man, then another man: she waits for a man to make her life happen.”

  In essence, she was playing the character she’d perfected in high school: the giggling, pliable, boy-snatching cheerleader. In her poofy pink gown and bow, she channeled that forgotten girl, who knew that the best way to land a second date with a Bernards High football player was to forgo all opinions; when Michael Vronsky asks Linda what beer she prefers, she shrugs and says, “Any kind.” Meryl found that she had “stockpiled” that character and could revive her at will. Only now, of course, she was self-assured enough to banish her once the cameras stopped rolling.

  In place of the cheerleading squad, she had her fellow bridesmaids, Mary Ann Haenel, Mindy Kaplan, and Amy Wright. One day, the four of them were getting restless during a break. Meryl went out to see what the holdup was and returned to say that they had run out of film stock. (Cimino, trying to capture every moment, was burning through miles of it.) On the bright side, a guy had shown her how to kill a fly—there had been one buzzing around the dressing room all day. Meryl showed the girls what to do: clap your hands just above the fly, and it’ll zip up so you can kill it. When she tried it, the fly swooped up and escaped, finding shelter in Amy Wright’s cleavage. The girls squealed and guffawed as she frantically lifted her petticoat to let it out.

  At long last, Cimino called it a wrap, and the wedding that seemed to go on for eternity finally ended. The banners came down. The stuffed cabbage went in the trash. The extras were paid their day rates and dispersed. So did Meryl and John and Christopher Walken and Robert De Niro. With the hall eerily empty, Cimino saw a local man sitting on the stage, holding a half-empty glass of beer. He was weeping quietly.

  “What’s wrong?” the director asked him.

  Through his tears, the man said, “It was such a beautiful wedding.”

  BY THE TIME The Deer Hunter rolled out of the Rust Belt, Meryl’s scenes as Linda were done. But Cazale still had the hunting scenes, in which the hungover bachelors head to the mountains in the morning light. Cimino treated these scenes with a mythopoetic reverence, scoring De Niro’s trek through the mist to the sound of an angelic choir. Of course, Meryl might have pointed out that this celestial hunting trip was boys only, a girl like Linda having no place in the sacred union between man and nature.

  It was late summer, and none of the mountains in the Northeast were snowcapped. So Cimino flew the actors across the country, to the Cascade range in Washington State. As Stan, Cazale’s job was once again to play the fool, and the foil, amid all the bravado. On a mountain road, he emerges from the Cadillac in a rumpled tuxedo and a ridiculous fur hat. He has forgotten his hunting boots—as always—and De Niro’s Michael Vronsky refuses to let him borrow his own. “This is this,” Michael explains.

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Stan snarls back. “‘This is this.’ I mean, is that some faggot-sounding bullshit or is that some faggot-sounding . . .”

  Stan gr
abs the boots anyway, and Michael glares, holding his rifle. “What?” Stan retorts. “Are you gonna shoot me? Huh? Here.”

  With that last word, John Cazale opened part of his tuxedo shirt, exposing a small wedge of skin. He had chosen the spot of the crosshairs tattooed on his chest during radiation. It was, Cimino said later, “some strange prefiguration of his own death.”

  The crew built a cottage between two peaks, where the guys gathered to shoot a scene from the second hunting trip, after Michael has returned from Vietnam. Stan is now carrying a dinky little revolver everywhere, and, after some mild provocation, Michael grabs it and threatens to shoot Stan in the head. We see then how truly far away he is, how the inferno of war has sundered him from the old gang. At the last moment, he points the gun heavenward and shoots the ceiling.

  De Niro, who had studied everything from POW testimonials to hunting guides in preparation, thought the scene would play better if there was a live round in the gun. “Are you crazy?” Cimino said. De Niro insisted that they ask John.

  “John, Bob would like to play this with a live round in the gun,” the director said.

  Cazale looked at him and blinked.

  “Okay,” he said. “But I have to check the gun first.”

  Before each take, John would spend a half an hour checking the gun to make certain the bullet wasn’t in the wrong place, driving everyone crazy: again, the slowness. Why had he agreed to this? He had spent months looking his own mortality in the face. And yet nothing thrilled him like the electric charge between two actors.

  Those days in the mountains were majestic but harried. Whenever the fog cleared, Cimino would sound the alarm and everyone would rush into position, knowing the sun might disappear again at any moment. But time worked differently for John Cazale. Cimino would catch him between takes, smelling the mountain flowers.

  ALL MERYL WANTED to do was be with John, but fate was pulling her in two directions. One: the hard-fought road to his recovery. The other: show business, where she was increasingly in demand.

  Herbert Brodkin, the producer of The Deadliest Season, had hired her for his next project, the nine-hour television miniseries Holocaust. The series would tell the story of a single German family scattered to the winds by the rise of the Nazis. In scope and seriousness, it would follow the mold of Roots, the epic ABC miniseries about the African-American experience, which had aired the previous January to unprecedented ratings. Hoping to give NBC its own prestige blockbuster, Brodkin hired Marvin Chomsky, one of the directors of Roots, to film the entirety of Holocaust.

  Meryl took the job for one reason: money. She had been quietly helping to pay John’s medical bills, and after The Deer Hunter, neither of them knew when he’d be able to work again. She expected John would go with her to Austria, but when the time came he was just too weak.

  In late August, she flew to Vienna alone. Austria was “unrelentingly Austrian,” she said later. “The material was unrelentingly grim. My character was unrelentingly noble.” She was playing Inga Helms Weiss, a gentile German woman who marries into a Jewish family, not expecting the calamity that would follow. Her husband, Karl, played by James Woods, is a painter and the son of a prominent Berlin doctor. Seized for “routine questioning,” Karl is sent to Theresienstadt, which the Nazis presented as a “model” camp for propaganda purposes. There, he joins a band of artists plotting to smuggle drawings of their true conditions to the world.

  Like Linda, Inga represented an ideal: the “good Aryan” bystander who stands with the Jews in the face of Nazi treachery. In one sickening sequence, she allows an SS officer to defile her in exchange for taking Karl off quarry duty and delivering her letters. (“I’ve had to do things to get these letters to you,” she writes, “but my love for you is undying.”) Finally, she materializes at his art studio in Theresienstadt, having sacrificed her freedom to be with her husband.

  Vienna was “extraordinarily beautiful and oppressive,” Meryl wrote in a postcard to Joe Papp on August 29, 1977. She was entranced by the city’s artistic legacy but appalled by its lingering Nazi presence. The city would shut down at nine; sometimes, there would be two separate movie houses showing films on Hitler on the same night. It was not lost on her, either, that Vienna was the setting of Measure for Measure. It had been only a year since she and John had played those scenes. She told Joe that she missed the “hurly burly” of New York.

  In Holocaust, Meryl was reunited with Michael Moriarty, who played the über-Nazi Erik Dorf with sociopathic relish. She didn’t do much research, apart from reading Erich Fromm’s The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. But the wrenching history she was enacting was evident all around her. Filming on location at the Mauthausen concentration camp was “too much for me,” she recalled. “Around the corner there was a hofbrau, and when the old soldiers got drunk enough, and it was late enough, they would pull out their souvenirs of the war; it was very weird and kinky. I was going crazy—and John was sick and I wanted to be with him.”

  The shoot kept extending; she felt like she was in prison for two and a half months. Marvin Chomsky saw how badly Meryl wanted to be somewhere else, and he knew why. “She may have made associations between the potential of losing John and the character of her husband,” he said. “How she used it was how she used it. I didn’t ask, I didn’t suggest. I did not want to take advantage of the passion that she had privately. She wanted to rely on professional passion. That was more than enough.” Stunned by her abilities, he asked her between takes, “Meryl, tell me: where does it come from?” She replied coyly, “Oh, Marvin . . .”

  Her cheery professionalism, though it masked an internal restiveness, was a relief, given the subject matter. On their days at the gas chambers in Mauthausen, the set would erupt in squabbling. “The reason was that we felt so awful in a place like that, and we tended to take it out on the people we were working with, when in fact, we were feeling this rage against the Nazis,” James Woods observed soon after. “In a situation like that—and there were many of them—Meryl was the one who could always say just the right thing to defuse the tension.”

  Blanche Baker, the twenty-year-old playing Meryl’s sister-in-law, was in awe of the older actress, who at twenty-eight seemed like the most sophisticated person in the world. Despite being the daughter of an Auschwitz survivor (the director Jack Garfein), Blanche was less interested in atrocities than in flirting with Joseph Bottoms, who played her brother. On days off, she and Meryl went out to Viennese bakeries and ordered pastries mit Schlag (with whipped cream). Meryl confided in Blanche about her ailing boyfriend back home—to her, it all seemed very grown-up.

  Blanche was raised in show business; her godfather was Lee Strasberg and her mother was the actress Carroll Baker, who had immortalized Tennessee Williams’s Baby Doll on screen. Still, the impressionable Blanche saw Meryl as the model of serious acting, and did her best to imitate her. Before “Action,” Meryl would take a quiet moment to turn away and collect herself; Blanche started doing the same. Meryl’s script was scrawled with notes in the margins; Blanche started writing notes in her script, too. She had studied sculpture as a girl, and Meryl’s meticulous scribbles reminded her of a sculptor’s sketches.

  Meryl spent her last three weeks on set counting the hours, sleeplessly waiting for dawn under “that damn eiderdown” covering her bed. She didn’t stay in Austria a moment longer than she had to. “She was very anxious to do her very last scene and then zip back and out,” Chomsky recalled. “I mean, I don’t even think we had a moment to say goodbye.” When she returned to New York, John was limping. He was in worse shape than ever.

  NO ONE SAW Meryl for a while. No one saw John, either. Offers for parts came and went. Friends called the loft for John, and Meryl would pick up.

  “He’s really ready to go to sleep at the moment. Maybe another time . . .”

  Click.

  They went out sparingly, and with great effort. One time, Meryl’s old Yale classmate Albert Innaurato spotted them at
a diner on Barrow Street, and was startled to find Meryl supporting John as they made their way to the table. “It was not a side of her I ever expected to see,” he said.

  On trips to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the doctors took note of John’s undaunted companion. When one surgeon remarked on her distinctive beauty, John said that it was an example of nature at its finest: “One that I hope to keep seeing as long as possible.”

  Her resolve convinced everyone—couldn’t they tell she was acting her heart out? As she wrote her Yale acting teacher Bobby Lewis, “My beau is terribly ill and sometimes, as now, in the hospital. He has very wonderful care and I try not to stand around wringing my hands but I am worried all the time and pretending to be cheery all the time which is more exhausting mentally physically emotionally than any work I’ve ever done. I have not worked, thank God, since October, or I don’t know how I’d have survived.”

  John’s lung cancer had metastasized to the bone, and he got weaker by the day, which Meryl attributed to the chemotherapy. The accoutrements of her old life now seemed trivial; the only role she had time for was nurse. Despite their troubles, Meryl valued that time, with the distractions of show business far away and the two of them alone together, sharing the intimacy of close quarters. “I was so close,” she said, “that I didn’t notice the deterioration.”

  The months went by: 1977 turned to 1978. In January, freezing snow and rain covered the city, and hundreds of thousands of people lost power. Two weeks later, thirteen inches of snow came down—the biggest blizzard of the decade. The metropolis that had just weathered a blackout and Son of Sam now found itself unable to clear the mountains of drifted snow and trash in the streets. Every few days, the city would declare a “snow emergency,” a phrase used so often that it became meaningless.