Her Again Read online

  Everyone in school knew this year’s winner, a blond, blue-eyed senior from 21 Old Fort Road. She was one of those girls who seemed to have it all together: smart, good-looking, with a boyfriend on the football team. They had seen her on the cheerleading squad. And in the choir. And in the school plays—she always got the lead. As the bow-tied student-council president escorted her onto the field, the eyes of Bernardsville fell on her limpid, peculiar face.

  She was beautiful. Everyone knew it except her. Alabaster skin. High cheekbones that seemed chiseled like statuary. Hooded eyes, set slightly close. Hair the color of cornsilk. A nose so long and forked it was practically an event.

  She wasn’t nearly pretty enough to be a movie star, she thought. Movie stars were girlish or voluptuous or demure. They were Audrey Hepburn or Ann-Margret or Jane Fonda. Movie stars were pretty. And no matter how many boys had fallen over one another for her affections, she wasn’t pretty, she told herself. Not with that nose.

  Pauline Kael would put it this way: “Streep has the clear-eyed blond handsomeness of a Valkyrie—the slight extra length of her nose gives her face a distinction that takes her out of the pretty class into real beauty.” No matter that Kael would become her most vocal critic. She was right: Meryl Streep wasn’t pretty. She was something else. Something more interesting, or at least harder to categorize. When she arched an eyebrow or twisted a lip, she could be anyone: an aristocrat, a beggar, a lover, a clown. She could be Nordic or English or Slavic. For now, what she wanted to be was all-American.

  Last year’s homecoming queen, June Reeves, had returned from junior college to fulfill her final duty: placing a twinkling diadem on her successor’s head. The newly crowned queen boarded a float bedecked with flowers, flanked by her homecoming court: Joann Bocchino, Ann Buonopane, Ann Miller, and Peggy Finn, all with flipped hair and corsages. As the float traversed the field, she waved to the crowd and smiled, flashing a white glove. She had worked hard to become the queen, primping and peroxiding and transforming herself into the person she was determined to be.

  None of her subjects knew how miscast she felt. What they saw was a role she was playing, down to the last golden hair on her head. Even her giggle was a construction: she had practiced it, making it light and lithesome, the way the boys like. She wouldn’t have called it acting, but that’s what it was. With unwavering diligence, she had spent her high school years immersed in a role. Still, as good as she was at playing it, there would always be cracks in the façade. She didn’t look like the women she saw in the magazines, not really. She had fooled these people, or most of them. The girls saw right through her.

  Waving to the crowd, she stayed in character. It felt nice to be worshiped, but perhaps a little lonely. Up on that float, she was on her own plane, a few inches closer to the November sky than any of her supposed peers. If only June or Peggy or her best friend, Sue, could join her—but there was only one queen, and her job was to be the best. Perhaps for the first time, and certainly not for the last, Meryl Streep was learning that perfection could be a prison.

  She was seventeen years old.

  SHE WOULD SOON discover that transformation, not beauty, was her calling card. It had been with her from the beginning. Call it “the zone.” Call it “church.” It was a place she visited before she knew how to describe it, though she never really figured out how.

  “I was six, placing my mother’s half-slip over my head in preparation to play the Virgin Mary in our living room. As I swaddled my Betsy Wetsy doll, I felt quieted, holy, actually, and my transfigured face and very changed demeanor captured on Super-8 by my dad pulled my little brothers—Harry, four, playing Joseph, and Dana, two, a barnyard animal—into the trance. They were actually pulled into this little nativity scene by the intensity of my focus, in a way that my usual technique for getting them to do what I want, yelling at them, never ever would have achieved.”

  That was six. This was nine:

  “I remember taking my mother’s eyebrow pencil and carefully drawing lines all over my face, replicating the wrinkles that I had memorized on the face of my grandmother, whom I adored. I made my mother take my picture, and I look at it now, of course, I look like myself now and my grandmother then. But I do really remember, in my bones, how it was possible on that day to feel her age. I stooped, I felt weighted down, but cheerful, you know. I felt like her.”

  The Virgin Mary was a natural first role: Meryl came from a long line of women named Mary. Her mother was Mary Wolf Wilkinson, whose mother was Mary Agnes, shortened to Mamie. When Mary Wolf’s first daughter was born, in Summit, New Jersey, on June 22, 1949, she named the baby Mary Louise. But three Marys in one family was a lot, and before Mary Louise had learned to speak her name, her mother had taken to calling her Meryl.

  She knew little of her ancestors growing up. Her mother’s side was Quaker stock, stretching back to the Revolutionary War. There were stories of someone getting hanged in Philadelphia for horse thievery. One grandmother busted up bars during the Temperance movement. Her grandfather Harry Rockafellow Wilkinson, known as “Harry Pop” to his grandchildren, was a joker and a gesticulator. When Meryl was little, her maternal grandparents still said “thee” and “thou.”

  Mary Wolf had a wide, warm face and a bright humor inherited from her father; years later, playing Julia Child, Meryl would draw on her mother’s immense “joie de vivre.” She was born in 1915, in Brooklyn. During World War II, she worked as an art director at Bell Labs, and later studied at the Art Students League in New York. Like most of her peers, Mary gave up her wartime work to be a full-time wife and mother: the kind of woman Betty Friedan wanted to galvanize with the 1963 publication of The Feminine Mystique. But Mary didn’t suffer from the malaise Friedan observed in so many housewives, perhaps because she never abandoned her artistic pursuits. While she raised the kids, she worked in a studio on the back porch as a commercial artist, drawing illustrations for local publications and businesses. Had she been part of her daughter’s generation, she might have gone out and had a career. As it was, she kept her finger in the pie, and the extra income didn’t hurt.

  Meryl’s paternal side had none of the same ebullience. “Streep” was a German name, though for many years she thought it was Dutch. Her father, Harry Streep, Jr., was an only child. (Harrys and Henrys were as plentiful in her family as Marys.) Nicknamed “Buddy,” he was born in Newark in 1910 and went to Brown on a scholarship. After a year, the Depression hit and he was forced to leave. For three decades, he worked in the personnel department of Merck & Co. The job was mostly hiring and firing. Meryl noticed some melancholy in her father, possibly inherited from his mother, Helena, who had been institutionalized for clinical depression. Helena’s husband, Harry William Streep, was a traveling salesman who left her alone with their son much of the time. As an older man, Meryl’s father would watch his grandson, Henry Wolfe Gummer, in a high school production of Death of a Salesman and weep, saying, “That was my dad.”

  When Meryl visited her paternal grandparents’ apartment, she could sense a pervading sadness. The shades were drawn so as to let in only a sliver of light—nothing like the warm Wilkinson house. Her grandmother reused absolutely everything. She would save pieces of tinfoil and wrap them into a ball, which she kept under the sink as it grew larger and larger, to Meryl’s fascination.

  In the postwar glow, a bright, suburban American dream was within reach for families like the Streeps. They moved around central New Jersey as the family got bigger, first to Basking Ridge and then to Bernardsville. After Meryl, there was Harry Streep III, nicknamed “Third.” Then there was another boy, Dana, a skinny jokester with freckles. Meryl’s parents would bring her to her brothers’ Little League games, but she was just as rambunctious and athletic as they were, maybe more so.

  In Bernardsville, they lived on a tree-lined street on top of a small hill, just a short walk from the public high school. The town sat on New Jersey’s “wealth belt,” about forty-five miles west of New York C
ity. In 1872, a new railroad line had transformed it from a tranquil collection of cottages to a bedroom community for affluent New Yorkers, who built summer homes far away from the city din. The tonier among them erected mansions on Bernardsville Mountain. The “mountain people,” as some below called them, sent their children to boarding schools and trotted around on horses. In later years, they included Aristotle and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who kept a ten-acre Bernardsville estate.

  The railroad bisected the rest of the town: middle-class Protestants on one side; on the other, working-class Italians, many of whom made their living constructing the mountain people’s homes. There were few local industries, save for Meadowbrook Inventions, which made glitter. Aside from its equestrian upper crust, the town was like its many cousins along the Erie Lackawanna line: a place where everyone knew everyone, where bankers and insurance men took the train into the city every morning, leaving their wives and children in their leafy domestic idyll.

  As members of Bernardsville’s earthbound middle class, the Streeps were nothing like the mountain people. They didn’t own horses or send their children to private academies. Unlike the Colonial-style houses popular in town, theirs was modern, with a Japanese screen in the family room and a piano where Mr. Streep would play in the evenings. Outside was a grassy yard where the Streep kids could while away summer afternoons.

  Harry had high expectations for his children, whom he wanted on the straight and narrow—and in Bernardsville, the straight and narrow was pretty straight and pretty narrow. Mary had a lighter touch, and an irreverent wit. Aside from their birthdays, the siblings would get “special days,” when they could do whatever they wanted. For a while, Meryl chose the zoo or the circus, but soon her special days were all about Broadway shows: Oliver!, Kismet, Ethel Merman in Annie Get Your Gun. Meryl adored musicals, which, as far as she knew, were the only kind of theater there was. At a matinee of Man of La Mancha, she sat in the front row “shooting out sparks,” as her mother would recall.

  She was bossy with her little brothers, coercing them into imaginative games, whether they liked it or not. They were, after all, her only scene partners. Third acquiesced, later describing her as “pretty ghastly when she was young.” But the other kids in the neighborhood weren’t so easy to manipulate. “I didn’t have what you’d call a happy childhood,” she said in 1979. “For one thing, I thought no one liked me . . . Actually, I’d say I had pretty good evidence. The kids would chase me up into a tree and hit my legs with sticks until they bled. Besides that, I was ugly.”

  She wasn’t hideous, but she certainly wasn’t girlish. When she watched Annette Funicello developing curves on The Mickey Mouse Club, she saw a gamine cuteness that eluded her completely. With her cat-eye glasses and brown, neck-length perm, Meryl looked like a middle-aged secretary. Some of the kids at school thought she was a teacher.

  When she was twelve, she got up at a school Christmas concert and sang a solo rendition of “O Holy Night” in French. The audience leaped to its feet, perhaps stunned to hear the neighborhood terror produce such a pure, high sound. It was the first time she felt the intoxication of applause. Among the surprised were her parents. Where had Meryl been hiding her coloratura?

  Someone told them to enroll her in singing lessons, so they did. Every Saturday morning, she would take the train into New York City to see Estelle Liebling. Miss Liebling, as her students addressed her, was a link to a vanished world. Her father had studied with Franz Liszt, and she was the last surviving pupil of the great Parisian voice teacher Mathilde Marchesi. Miss Liebling had sung Musetta at the Metropolitan Opera and toured two continents with John Philip Sousa. Now she was in her eighties, a chic matron in heels and crimson lipstick, imposing despite her petite frame. She knew everyone in the opera world, and she seemed to mint star sopranos as fast as the Met could take them.

  With such a lofty teacher, there was nothing stopping the adolescent Meryl from becoming a world-famous soprano. Not that she was crazy about opera—she preferred the Beatles and Bob Dylan. But that voice was too good to waste. Weekend after weekend, she went to Miss Liebling’s studio near Carnegie Hall, standing beside the piano as the octogenarian teacher ran her up and down scales and arpeggios. She taught Meryl about breathing. She taught her that breathing is three-dimensional, reminding her, “There’s room in the back!”

  As she waited outside Miss Liebling’s studio for her 11:30 a.m. appointment, a glorious sound would echo from inside. It was the 10:30 student, Beverly Sills. A bubbly redhead in her early thirties, Sills had been coming to Estelle since she was seven years old. Meryl thought Beverly was good, but so was she. And nobody had ever heard of Beverly either.

  Of course, that wasn’t quite true: Sills had been singing with the New York City Opera since 1955, and was only a few short years from her breakout role, Cleopatra in Handel’s Giulio Cesare. “Miss Liebling was very strict and formal with me,” Sills wrote in her autobiography. “When she was at the piano, she never let me read music over her shoulder, and she got very annoyed the few times I showed up unprepared. One of Miss Liebling’s favorite admonitions to me was ‘Text! Text! Text!’ which she said whenever she felt I was merely singing notes and not paying attention to the meaning of the lyrics. Miss Liebling wanted me to sing the way Olivier acts, to deliver what I was singing in such a way that my audience would respond emotionally.”

  Miss Liebling had another mantra: “Cover! Cover! Cover!” She was speaking of the passaggio, that tricky vocal stretch between the lower and upper register. For some singers, it was a minefield. Cover it, Miss Liebling told her charges, with certain vowels only: an “ooh” or an “aww,” never a wide-open “ahh.” Make the transition seamless. For a gawky adolescent with braces and knotty brown hair, the idea must have held some extra appeal: cover the transition. Make it seamless.

  In the fall of 1962, Meryl’s parents brought her to City Center, the home of the New York City Opera. Sills was debuting as Milly Theale in Douglas Moore’s The Wings of the Dove. It was the first opera Meryl had seen, and she was rapt. Until then, Beverly had been the nice lady whose lessons preceded her own. Now, watching her onstage, Meryl saw what all those drills on Saturday mornings were for—the glory that capped all the grueling hours of work.

  She realized something else that night: she didn’t have a voice like Beverly’s, and she would never be an opera singer.

  After four years, she quit her lessons with Miss Liebling. The reason wasn’t just that she had given up her dreams of debuting at the Met. Meryl had come through the passaggio of puberty, and what lay on the other side was far more tempting than Verdi: she had discovered boys.

  It was time for a metamorphosis.

  AT FOURTEEN YEARS old, Meryl Streep took off her braces. She ditched her glasses and started wearing contacts. She doused her hair in lemon juice and peroxide until it gleamed like gold. At night, she wore rollers—it was torturous, but she’d wake up with a perky flip. As Meryl primped for hours in the bathroom mirror, surely to the chagrin of her younger brothers, she discovered that beauty gave her status and strength. But, like most teenagers rushing headlong toward womanhood, she was barely conscious of what she was leaving behind.

  “Empathy,” she would say, “is at the heart of the actor’s art. And in high school, another form of acting took hold of me. I wanted to learn how to be appealing. So I studied the character I imagined I wanted to be, that of the generically pretty high school girl.” She emulated the women in Mademoiselle and Seventeen and Vogue, copying their eyelashes, their outfits, their lipstick. She ate an apple a day—and little else. She begged her mother to buy her brand-name clothes, and was refused. She fine-tuned her giggle.

  She worked day and night, unaware that she had cast herself severely against type. She studied what boys liked, and what girls would accept, and memorized where the two overlapped: a “tricky negotiation.” She found that she could mimic other people’s behavior with faultless precision, like a Martian posing as a
n Earthling. “I worked harder on this characterization, really, than anyone that I think I’ve ever done since,” she recalled. Gone was the ugly duckling, the brassy little bully of Old Fort Road. By fifteen, that Meryl had disappeared. In her place was “the perfect Seventeen magazine knockout.”

  She was an excellent imposter.

  NEWS OF THE SIXTIES seemed not to reach Bernardsville, even as the counterculture caught fire elsewhere. Sure, her friends listened to the Beatles and “Light My Fire,” but transgression took the form of a beer, not a joint. The place looked like something out of Bye Bye Birdie. Girls wore A-line dresses down to the knees, with Peter Pan collars cinched with a small circle pin. Boys wore khakis and Madras jackets and parted their hair. The vice principal would come around with a ruler to measure their sideburns: too long and they’d be sent home.

  Fun was a hamburger at the luncheonette in the center of town, or a movie at the local cinema. At the “Baby Dance,” the freshmen dressed up in bonnets and diapers. The next year, it was the “Sweater Dance.” After that, the Junior Prom, which was themed “In Days of Olde.” It was a fitting motif. “We felt like we were in a little shell, that we were protected and everything would be safe there,” said Debbie Bozack (née Welsh), who, like Meryl, entered ninth grade in September, 1963, two months before the Kennedy assassination.

  Debbie met Meryl in homeroom on one of the first days of class. At Debbie’s old school, there were only five kids in her grade, and the crowded hallways at Bernards High terrified her. So did the prospect of changing for gym. Meryl, though, seemed confident and fearless. They had most of the same classes, so Debbie followed her around like a disciple.