Her Again Page 20

  On Valentine’s Day, four more inches fell. From their fire escape, John and Meryl could see Franklin Street paved with white. It couldn’t have been a romantic image. Buried beneath the snow were muck and garbage bags and potholes. The city was sick in its guts.

  NOW WITHOUT MERYL, production of The Deer Hunter moved to Thailand, Cimino’s stand-in for Vietnam. The movie was over budget, and the schedule had gone out the window. The wedding scene, far from being a “flickering candle,” had eaten up considerable time and money, worrying EMI executives. Barry Spikings took the director on a walk by a lake.

  “Michael,” he asked, “are you doing your best?”

  Cimino assured him he was.

  Shooting in Thailand was not only costly but dangerous. The State Department had warned the filmmakers away from the country, which was controlled by a right-wing junta. On the Burmese border, where armed insurgents were rampant, Cimino and his cast stayed in thatched huts and ate green cobra, said to increase virility.

  Cimino wanted the Vietnam sequence to have the same vérité style as the Clairton scenes. He hired local nonactors to play the boys’ Vietnamese captors. As POWs, De Niro, Walken, and Savage wore the same clothes every day. They didn’t shave or shower. They slept in their uniforms. They “smelled to high heaven,” Cimino would brag. During a scene in a submerged tiger cage, a rat began nibbling at Savage’s face. Cimino put it in the movie.

  There was a strict military curfew in effect, so the film crew would set up in secret locations at two in the morning, as CIA officers supervised. (Cimino put them in the movie, too.) They were allowed to export negatives but not to reimport the prints, so they were shooting blind, without the benefit of dailies. Spikings had flown in to oversee production, and his point man was General Kriangsak Chomanan, the Supreme Commander of the Royal Thai Armed Forces. Mid-shoot, he summoned Spikings to Bangkok and kindly asked for the weapons, helicopters, and armored personnel carriers they had borrowed, since he was staging a military coup that weekend. He promised Spikings they would have everything back by Tuesday.

  The most treacherous scene was the helicopter escape, shot on the River Kwai. (Cimino relished the David Lean connection.) The water was ice-cold and full of snakes and saltwater crocodiles, and riverboat traffic had clipped the underwater bamboo into deadly spears. The scene called for De Niro and Savage to plunge almost a hundred feet from the helicopter into the current. The stunt doubles refused.

  “We’ll do it,” De Niro said. “The actors.”

  “Understand, you won’t be insured,” Spikings told him.

  “Who’s gonna tell the insurance people?”

  Savage and De Niro climbed onto a temporary steel crossing, which the crew had made to look like a rickety rope bridge. As the helicopter pulled in, one of its skids got stuck under the thirty-ton cable holding up the bridge. The copter tilted and roared, as De Niro frantically tried to free the skid. While the pilot screamed into a radio in dialect, Cimino, dressed in fatigues in the helicopter, reached out his hand for De Niro’s, knowing that the spinning rotors might very well tip over and kill him, his stars, and half his crew.

  The copter broke free, flipping the bridge upside down. The cameras were still rolling as it flew off, with De Niro and Savage dangling above the river.

  “Michael, should we drop?” Savage screamed to his scene partner, still using his character name.

  “Savage, for Christ’s sake,” De Niro howled, “we’re not in character anymore! We’re not in the fucking movie!”

  They dropped, one after the other, into the spiky, crocodile-infested, freezing river. After a moment, they emerged—still in the scene and, like their characters, astounded that they were still alive.

  “MERYL! HI!”

  She would have recognized that voice anywhere: the bubbly, high-pitched warble of Wendy Wasserstein. At twenty-seven, she was still the warm, unkempt, insecure woman Meryl remembered from the costume crew. Now she was calling for a favor.

  Two and a half years after graduation, Meryl’s Yale classmates were making inroads in the theater world. Christopher Durang and Sigourney Weaver had continued their madcap collaboration with Das Lusitania Songspiel, a Brecht-Weill parody that played on Vandam Street. Albert Innaurato’s Gemini was produced at Playwrights Horizons, also with Weaver. And William Ivey Long was about to design costumes for his first Broadway show, kicking off what would be a multi–Tony Award–winning career.

  Now, it was Wasserstein’s turn. In the summer of 1977, she had gone to the O’Neill to workshop Uncommon Women and Others, the play she’d begun at Yale. The Phoenix produced it that fall on the Upper East Side. The all-female cast, whose characters were based on Wendy’s classmates at Mount Holyoke, included rising talents like Jill Eikenberry and Swoosie Kurtz. The thirty-year-old actress Glenn Close played Leilah, the restless wallflower who longs to graduate and study anthropology in Iraq.

  With Uncommon Women, Wendy had dramatized her generation’s ambivalence about second-wave feminism and the sky-high promises it failed to keep. In the college-flashback scenes, the girls gab about Nietzsche and penis envy and how they’ll be “pretty fucking amazing” by the time they’re thirty. When they reunite six years later, they’re in therapy or working at an insurance company or pregnant, certain they’ll be pretty fucking amazing when they’re forty. Maybe forty-five.

  The three-week run garnered good reviews and Wasserstein’s first taste of public validation. By the time the play closed, on December 4, 1977, TV’s Thirteen/WNET had selected it to air on PBS, as part of its “Great Performances” series. (Secret Service, the Civil War drama starring Meryl and John Lithgow, had aired the previous winter.) The Off Broadway cast would reunite for the filming, with one exception: Glenn Close was due at a Buffalo tryout of The Crucifer of Blood, a Broadway-bound Sherlock Holmes drama. Wendy needed a fast replacement. She called Meryl.

  Leilah was one of the smallest parts in the play, and it certainly wouldn’t do anything for Meryl’s career. But Wendy was asking for a favor, and it would be only a few days. She said yes. But she would have to bring John.

  A few weeks into 1978, Meryl took the trip to Hartford, Connecticut, where the play was being shot in a television studio. (For PBS, “pretty fucking amazing” became “pretty amazing.”) John mostly stayed at the hotel. Steven Robman, who directed the play and codirected the taping, remembered Meryl from her first year at Yale, when she was in his production of The Lower Depths. Her air of confidence had always struck him, but now it was accompanied by camera experience that outpaced his own. Filming a scene with Ellen Parker, she stopped and said, “Steve, do we have a camera on Ellen’s face right now? It’s a really great reaction, and I think you might want to have it in the can.” It was like a replay of Julia, with Meryl now the knowing scene partner Jane Fonda had been to her.

  Meryl’s take on the part was appropriately lost and languorous. Her interpretation didn’t diverge widely from Close’s: both were angular beauties who managed to tap into Leilah’s yearning solitude. But Robman saw the gap in their upbringings leak through. Close had grown up in a stone cottage in Greenwich, Connecticut, the daughter of a surgeon. “That was the difference to me,” Robman said. “How does an aristocratic girl feel about being isolated like this, versus a girl who wishes she was homecoming queen?” It was the first of many times the actresses would be compared to each other.

  As February turned into March, the snow kept pummeling New York City, and layers of sludge coated the streets. With its broken-down fleet of mechanical sweepers, the city was powerless against the onslaught. When the snow finally began to thaw, it revealed sidewalks covered in slimy debris that had been buried for two months. Tribeca reeked of rotting trash.

  Meryl’s brother Third had been calling the loft, hoping for good news about John, who was now too ill to leave the house. Usually Meryl averted his concern with an upbeat deflection: “We’re doing great!”

  Then, one day, her answer was different. “He
’s not doing so good.”

  It was the first time she had betrayed any lack of hope. It was the day John Cazale moved into Memorial Sloan Kettering for the last time.

  Meryl kept watch in the hospital at all hours, as John seemed to shrink into his neat white bed. She kept his spirits up with the only elixir she had: performance. She filled the room with comic voices, reading him the sports pages with the whiz-bang delivery of Warner “Let’s go to the videotape!” Wolf.

  When friends visited, they saw not Meryl’s weariness but her fortitude. “She took care of him like there was nobody else on earth,” Joe Papp said. “She never betrayed him in his presence or out of his presence. Never betrayed any notion that he would not survive. He knew he was dying, the way a dying man knows it.” Nevertheless, “She gave him tremendous hope.”

  Decades later, Al Pacino would say, “When I saw that girl there with him like that I thought, There’s nothing like that. I mean, that’s it for me. As great as she is in all her work, that’s what I think of when I think of her.”

  Around three in the morning on March 12, 1978, John closed his eyes. “He’s gone,” the doctor said. But Meryl wasn’t ready to hear it, much less believe it. What happened next, by some accounts, was the culmination of all the tenacious hope Meryl had kept alive for the past ten months. She pounded on his chest, sobbing, and for a brief, alarming moment, John opened his eyes.

  “It’s all right, Meryl,” he said weakly. “It’s all right . . .”

  What was it that brought him back? A final rush of blood to the brain? Her sheer force of will? Whatever it was, it lasted only for a second or two. After that, John Cazale closed his eyes again. He was forty-two.

  Meryl called his brother, waking him up.

  “John is gone,” she told him.

  “Oh, God,” Stephen said.

  She burst into tears. “I tried.”

  She returned to the loft, shell-shocked. In the days that followed, she found herself unable to help plan a memorial or even “negotiate the stairs.” She meandered from room to room in John’s apartment, the one with the floor so strong it could hold stacks of tomato cans. Suddenly, that didn’t seem strong enough.

  She sleepwalked through the memorial service, where luminaries of theater and film paid homage to their perpetually undersung collaborator. Israel Horovitz wrote in his eulogy:

  John Cazale happens once in a lifetime. He was an invention, a small perfection. It is no wonder his friends feel such anger upon waking from their sleep to discover that Cazale sleeps on with kings and counselors, with Booth and Kean, with Jimmy Dean, with Bernhardt, Guitry, and Duse, with Stanislavsky, with Groucho, Benny, and Allen. He will make fast friends in his new place. He is easy to love.

  John Cazale’s body betrayed him. His spirit will not. His whole life plays and replays as film, in our picture houses, in our dreams. He leaves us, his loving audience, a memory of his great calm, his quiet waiting, his love of high music, his love of low jokes, the absurd edge of the forest that was his hairline, the slice of watermelon that was his smile.

  He is unforgettable.

  Meryl was “emotionally blitzed.” “It was a selfish period, a period of healing for me, of trying to incorporate what had happened into my life,” she recalled. “I wanted to find a place where I could carry it forever and still function.”

  After the memorial, she packed some things and went to Canada to stay at a friend’s house in the country. Left alone, she drew sketches. The same images kept recurring, as if they were living things trying to break through. Sometimes she drew Joseph Papp, the man who had held her hand throughout this ordeal, and who now had her unconditional loyalty.

  But mostly she drew John, over and over again, like the French lieutenant’s woman sketching her faraway paramour. She just wanted to see his face.

  IT TOOK MICHAEL CIMINO three months just to look at all the footage he had shot, working thirteen or fourteen hours a day. With the editor Peter Zinner, he began chipping away at it, carving out a movie. He finished dubbing one night at three in the morning and delivered a rough cut to EMI. It was three and a half hours long.

  By then, Michael Deeley, the president of EMI Films, had come to think of Cimino as “deceitful” and “selfish.” The movie, budgeted at $8.5 million, had cost $13 million. The character development he had asked for had ballooned into an extra hour. A three-hour film would lose a quarter of the potential revenue, since it could only be shown in theaters so many times per day. Even so, Deeley and Barry Spikings were thrilled with the rough cut, sensing its raw power.

  But when they screened the film for their American partners at Universal, it got a decidedly lukewarm reaction. The suits were appalled by the movie’s violence and, especially, by its length. Even Cimino conceded the screening was a “disaster,” recalling one executive exclaiming, when De Niro shot the deer, “That’s it! We lost the audience! It’s all over!” Another, Sid Sheinberg, took to calling it “The Deer Hunter and the Hunter and the Hunter.” They wanted an hour cut. Why not start with that wedding scene?

  Cimino refused to shrink his epic, certain that the movie’s dark magic lay in its “shadows.” EMI threatened to take him off his own picture. “I told them I would do everything I could,” he said. “I took things out of the movie and then put them back in. The thought that I would be removed and someone else would take over made me physically ill.” He went to bed every night with a headache, then woke up with his head still throbbing. He gained weight. “I was willing to do anything I could to prevent this picture from being taken away from me and ruined.”

  Universal agreed to test-run two different cuts: an abridged version, which they’d show in Cleveland, and Cimino’s longer version, which they’d show in Chicago. According to Cimino, he was so worried that the Cleveland audience would like what they saw that he bribed the projectionist to jam the film halfway through. The three-hour version won.

  Meryl watched the film over and over again at a screening room on Sixth Avenue, six times in all. She always shielded her eyes during the torture scenes, but somehow it wasn’t quite as hard to watch John. As the screen flickered in front of her, she saw all the sly and silly human touches he had left behind in his final performance:

  John crossing himself in the church.

  John tapping his foot as the bride walks down the aisle.

  John checking his fly as the wedding guests pose for a photo.

  John running after the newlyweds, throwing rice like a boy hurling a baseball.

  John’s craggy profile, half in shadow, as the barkeep plays a Chopin nocturne.

  John telling Meryl at Michael Vronsky’s welcome-home party, “I know Nick’ll be back soon. I know Nick. He’ll be coming back, too.”

  John looking at his pale reflection in the Cadillac window, straightening his collar, and declaring: “Beautiful.”

  One Sunday morning, John’s brother, Stephen, met Meryl at the screening room. They waited anxiously for the movie to roll. “When is it going to staaart?” Meryl groused with mock impatience. They sat back and watched. When he got home that night, Stephen went to bed with a bottle of vodka.

  MERYL HAD BARELY worked during the five months she cared for John. Now her schedule was bleakly open. “I don’t want to stop replaying the past—that’s all you have of someone who is dead,” she said at the time, “but I hope that working will offer some diversion.” She was ready to dig out of the trenches and act again.

  Fortunately, there was a movie offer: The Senator, a political fable written by Alan Alda, the amiable star of M*A*S*H. Alda would play the senator, Joe Tynan, a principled family man lured astray by backroom dealing and adultery. Meryl was offered the part of his mistress, a Louisiana labor lawyer with a breezy sexuality and an insider’s grasp of the Washington game. “When I want something, I go git it,” she tells Joe Tynan. “Just like you.”

  In other words, she was everything Linda the checkout girl was not: a brashly independent “modern woman,
” as Meryl described her. As a vocal feminist and advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment, Alda had observed the sleaze of politics close up. Campaigning for the ERA in Illinois, he saw a state legislator telling a female lobbyist he’d consider voting for it while offering her a key to his hotel room. Alda didn’t have the blind spots Meryl had encountered in other male collaborators, who shoehorned female characters into broad archetypes. Had her heart not been so heavy, it would have been a thrilling opportunity.

  The director, Jerry Schatzberg, visited her in John’s loft. He could sense the sadness of the place, but they didn’t discuss why. He told her he was looking for a pinch of Southernness, but not a strong accent. Meryl adopted the same Dinah Shore drawl she had used in Trelawny of the “Wells.” Then, four disorienting weeks after John’s death, she packed a bag and headed down to Baltimore.

  As on Holocaust, her upbeat presence masked a dull pain. “I did that film on automatic pilot,” she said soon after. Work was a distraction, not a comfort: “For some things, there is no comfort.” In keeping with her character, she kept things light. Rip Torn, her former costar in The Father at the Yale Rep, had a supporting role as a skirt-chasing lawmaker. Schatzberg was working with Meryl on her costume and told her he was about to see Rip. “Oh,” she responded, “tell him not to be such a pain in the ass!”

  She was also reunited with Blanche Baker, her sister-in-law from Holocaust, who was playing Joe Tynan’s teenage daughter. Baker had a big crying scene with Alda, and she made the mistake of bawling her eyes out during the master shot. Then everyone broke for lunch. When they came back for her close-up, she felt tapped out. Meryl saw that the young actress was panicking, and once again played the role of big sister. “It’s there,” she assured her. “You just have to trust it. Just be more specific.”