Her Again Page 21

  She applied the same bedrock of technique to herself, and the results pleased Schatzberg. “The scenes with her were so great,” he said, “that when the film was finished, I had a problem, because I felt that she was so good maybe Joe Tynan should have gone off with her. So I had to think of a way to diminish her character so that he goes back to his wife.”

  At the Maryland State House, in Annapolis, Schatzberg enlisted local politicians to play senators and congressmen. One delegate was under the impression that the movie was about a senator who has an affair with his secretary. “I’m actually his lawyer,” Meryl said when she heard that, adding, “That really tells you something, doesn’t it?”

  As they shot, Schatzberg and Alda continually clashed over the script. Alda wanted the actors to stick to the dialogue he’d written, while he freely improvised. Barbara Harris, who was playing his wife, complained to Schatzberg, “Anytime he wants to change his dialogue, he does.”

  Meryl stayed out of the bickering and sailed through her scenes, the beauty of autopilot being that you don’t get too involved. Alda, she said later, couldn’t have been “a more lovely, more understanding person,” given the timing. But she was nervous about their frisky bedroom scenes. Apart from the melancholy love scenes with De Niro in The Deer Hunter, she had never had to play sexy on camera. Dino De Laurentiis’s “che brutta” comment may have still echoed in her mind. At any rate, she didn’t feel so frolicsome.

  “It’s a scene that demands tremendous high spirits and a great deal of sexual energy,” John Lithgow said soon after, “and at that time, right after John Cazale had died, Meryl was in no mood for either. And she was embarrassed by the scene. She said she would perspire until she was dripping wet from embarrassment.”

  Schatzberg called as few crew members as possible to the Baltimore hotel room where they were shooting, to avoid gawking. Meryl slipped under the sheets along with Alda. The cameras rolled. In their postcoital glow, she grabbed a beer, poured it on Joe Tynan’s crotch, peeked under the covers, and drawled: “It’s true, things do contract in the cold!”

  Then it was over. “She looked at the movie as some kind of test, a test she had to pass,” Alda said later. “She was determined not to buckle.”

  MIDWAY THROUGH THE SHOOT, Holocaust aired on NBC. The relentlessly hyped broadcast lasted four nights, from April 16th through 19th. Some 120 million Americans tuned in—more than half the U.S. population. For the first time, Meryl Streep’s face was seen internationally, by families gathered around television sets.

  The broadcast inevitably ignited controversy. On the first day of its airing, Elie Wiesel, who, since the publication of Night, had become the world’s most recognized Holocaust survivor, published a scathing appraisal in the Times, calling the series “untrue, offensive, cheap.” Next to a photo of Meryl struggling against SS officers, he wrote, “It tries to show what cannot even be imagined. It transforms an ontological event into soap-opera. Whatever the intentions, the result is shocking.”

  Among the scores of letters in response to Wiesel’s was one from Joe Papp, who admitted to wincing at the series’ “Errol Flynn heroics.” Still, he argued, “The acting was first-rate. As hour by hour went by, the actors, many of whom I know personally, were no longer actors or my friends. They were Jews and Nazis.”

  In Germany, where the word “Holocaust” was not widely used, the impact was seismic. More than twenty million West Germans tuned in, many describing themselves in an official survey as “deeply shaken.” In Meryl’s fair-haired Inga, they saw a model of gentile righteousness worth emulating. The broadcast touched off a national debate that played out in newspapers, schools, call-in shows, and the halls of government. In Bonn, the Bundestag was readying to debate the statute of limitations for Nazi war criminals, many of whom were still in hiding. In the weeks following the broadcast, public support for continuing the prosecutions shot up from 15 to 39 percent. Six months later, the Bundestag voted 255 to 222 to suspend the statute of limitations, opening the door to more trials and a national reckoning.

  For Meryl, who was entrenched in tiny tragedies rather than historic ones, all this must have felt unfathomably distant. But the change in her day-to-day existence was palpable. Wandering Annapolis one Wednesday in May, wearing baggy jeans and a badly matched tweed blazer, she was approached by fans wielding Kodak Instamatics. Before Holocaust aired, she had eaten in Maryland restaurants unnoticed—unless, perhaps, she was sitting next to Alan Alda. Now, people were coming up to her.

  That first brush with fame was “something surreal,” she said at the time. Back in New York, she was riding her bicycle through Chelsea and some guys in a Volkswagen called out, “Hey, Holocaust!” Meryl shuddered. “Can you imagine?” she said soon after. “It’s absurd that that episode in history can be reduced to people screaming out of car windows at an actress.”

  In September, she won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series. She didn’t attend the ceremony. The statuette arrived a few months later, in a box. She placed it in her study, “propped up like an object” amid pictures of friends: inert. “I wish I could assign some great importance to it,” she said at the time, but the honor had “no lasting power.”

  The day after the Emmys, a woman came up to her at Bloomingdale’s and said, “Did anyone ever tell you that you look exactly like Meryl what’s-her-name?”

  “No,” she replied, “nobody ever did.”

  UNIVERSAL HAD A PLAN: they would open The Deer Hunter in single theaters in Los Angeles and New York, then pull it after a week. That way, it would qualify for the Academy Awards, attract some buzz during its sold-out run, and then open wide in February as public interest percolated.

  The bid worked. On December 15th, Vincent Canby described the film as “a big, awkward, crazily ambitious, sometimes breathtaking motion picture that comes as close to being a popular epic as any movie about this country since ‘The Godfather.’” Time echoed the praise: “Like the Viet Nam War itself, The Deer Hunter unleashes a multitude of passions but refuses to provide the catharsis that redeems the pain.”

  But a backlash was brewing. Leading the charge was The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, who clucked at the film’s treatment of “the mystic bond of male comradeship,” echoing the “celibacy of football players before the big game.” More damning was her assessment of the Vietnamese torturers, portrayed in “the standard inscrutable-evil-Oriental style of the Japanese in Second World War movies.” She wrote, “The impression a viewer gets is that if we did some bad things over there we did them ruthlessly but impersonally; the Vietcong were cruel and sadistic. The film seems to be saying that the Americans had no choice, but the V. C. enjoyed it.”

  Few critics could deny the movie’s psychological potency, or its agonizing depiction of war and its aftermath. But the more scrutiny it got, the more questions nagged. Did the Vietcong really force American soldiers to play Russian roulette? Was there not something homoerotic about those all-male hunting trips? And what about that final rendition of “God Bless America”? Was it meant to be ironic? Or deadly earnest?

  Providing a direct counterpoint was another Vietnam film, Hal Ashby’s Coming Home. Both featured a wheelchair-bound veteran and a woman caught between two military men. But the politics of Coming Home was explicitly antiwar, and its liberal credentials were synonymous with its star, Jane Fonda. After Julia, Fonda had been hyping Meryl around Hollywood, even trying to find her a part in Coming Home, but the scheduling didn’t work out. Playing an army wife tapped on the shoulder by history, Fonda once again personified political conscience. With her tin-soldier husband (Bruce Dern) in action, she finds a deeper bond with Jon Voight’s paraplegic pacifist, who ends the film lecturing to high school kids about the senselessness of war.

  Whereas The Deer Hunter showed people losing their way, and one another, Coming Home was about finding connection and purpose—political kinship as opposed to spiritual discontent. Fonda’s character, unlike Linda, doe
sn’t wait around for a man to rescue her: she volunteers at a VA hospital, becomes radicalized, and, with Voight’s help, achieves her first orgasm. The straightforward liberalism of Coming Home seemed to expose an unconscious conservatism in The Deer Hunter, though it lacked the latter’s sweep and horror and ambiguity.

  On February 20, 1979, the showdown was made official. The Deer Hunter was nominated for nine Academy Awards, Coming Home for eight. They would compete for Best Picture, along with Heaven Can Wait, Midnight Express, and An Unmarried Woman. Robert De Niro was up against Jon Voight for Best Actor, with Christopher Walken competing with Bruce Dern for Best Supporting Actor.

  John Cazale wasn’t nominated. But he had achieved a quiet landmark: of the five features he had acted in, all were nominated for Best Picture. And though he hadn’t lived to see it, Meryl Streep was nominated for her first Academy Award, for Best Supporting Actress.

  As the Oscars approached, the debate over The Deer Hunter intensified. In December, Cimino had given an interview to the New York Times, in which he insisted that anyone attacking the film on its facts was “fighting a phantom, because literal accuracy was never intended.” The piece noted that Cimino, who gave his age as thirty-five, “joined the Army about the time of the Tet offensive in 1968 and was assigned as a medic to a Green Beret unit training in Texas, but was never sent to Vietnam.”

  Michael Deeley was among the first to raise an eyebrow: his insurance records indicated that Cimino was just short of forty. Thom Mount, the president of Universal, got a call from a studio publicist: “We got a problem.” The reporter couldn’t corroborate what Cimino had said about his military service, and, as far as Mount was concerned, “He was no more a medic in the Green Berets than I’m a rutabaga.” (The Times ran it anyway.) In April, the Vietnam correspondent Tom Buckley published a full accounting in Harper’s of what he considered Cimino’s distortions. The Pentagon had told him that Cimino enlisted in the Army Reserve in 1962—nowhere close to the Tet Offensive—and spent a placid six months in New Jersey and Texas.

  What bothered Buckley was not the personal distortions (which Cimino vehemently denied) but the way they were “mirrored” in the film. His most pungent criticism, like Kael’s, was of its portrayal of the Vietnamese. “The political and moral issues of the Vietnam war, for ten years and more this country’s overriding concern, are entirely ignored,” Buckley wrote. “By implication, at any rate, the truth is turned inside out. The North Vietnamese and the Vietcong become the murderers and torturers and the Americans their gallant victims.”

  But the legacy of The Deer Hunter was far from settled. Jan Scruggs, a former infantry corporal, saw the film one night in Maryland. Back in his kitchen, he stayed up until three a.m. with a bottle of scotch, kept awake by a torrent of flashbacks. In the boys of Clairton, he saw the unspoken pain of a generation of soldiers, some who came back, some who didn’t. The next morning, he told his wife that he’d had a vision: a memorial for Vietnam veterans, listing the names of the fallen. It was the beginning of a three-year journey that ended on the National Mall.

  ONE VETERAN WHO agreed with the criticisms was Mike Booth. Five or six years had passed since he had seen Meryl, having lost himself in his studies in Mexico. After changing his major from art to philosophy to Latin American studies and, finally, to American literature, he finished up his degree in Santa Cruz, where he met a girl and got engaged. One day in 1977, he took her to see Julia and blanched midway through. “That’s my old high school girlfriend!” he told her.

  Now approaching thirty, Mike yearned to settle down, to “try to be a normal person instead of a vagabond.” He brought his fiancée back east, to Newport, Rhode Island. He dreamed of being a writer, but he wanted to support a family, so he took a job at his father’s pigment business, in Fall River, Massachusetts. It had a small office in an old mill building, and Mike took on various tasks: typing invoices, loading trucks, sometimes mixing batches of color in the factory. He would end his days in sweaty coveralls splotched with red and yellow pigment.

  When he saw Meryl in magazines, he admired how she was pursuing the thing she loved, how accomplished she was. He had just gotten married when his sister told him not to see The Deer Hunter, because she thought it would “hit close to home.” He went anyway. When he saw the Vietcong holding the Clairton boys in underwater tiger cages, he started feeling the old fire that had propelled him to Nixon’s motorcade. “The Communists did plenty of nasty things,” he said later, “but from what I recall our side used the tiger cages.” And Russian roulette? He had never heard of anything like that in Vietnam.

  But, as he sat in the Newport movie theater, he saw other things, too. He saw Robert De Niro, on his first night back in Clairton, seeing the “Welcome Home” sign hung in his honor and telling his driver to keep on driving. He saw Christopher Walken, at a military hospital in Saigon, staring at a photo of the girl back home. He saw verdant jungles rocked by explosions, and halting conversations with old friends, and some inkling of the way he felt when he got home to Bernardsville.

  And he saw Meryl.

  Meryl catching the bouquet.

  Meryl tossing rice at the newlyweds.

  Meryl giggling and twirling on the dance floor.

  Meryl fixing her hair in the shop window.

  Meryl breaking down in tears in the supermarket storeroom for reasons she can’t possibly explain.

  Meryl telling a distant Michael Vronsky, “Can’t we just . . . comfort each other?”

  Stepping out into the New England night, Mike was shaken. He had seen distortions, yes. But he’d also seen the girl to whom he’d once given that “JUNIOR PILOT” ring, now arm in arm with her man in uniform. For all the reasons his sister had warned him, the movie did hit home. But “it hit home, also,” he recalled, “because she looked so beautiful.”

  ON APRIL 9, 1979, Meryl arrived at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, wearing a black silk crêpe dress she had bought off the rack at Bonwit Teller and ironed herself the night before. (“I wanted something my mother would not be ashamed of,” she said.) That week, she had passed through the Beverly Hills Hotel unrecognized. She even took a dip in the pool: a rookie move, as it was designed to be lounged beside, not swum in. But Meryl knew little of the etiquette of Hollywood, nor did she care. Apart from the palm trees swaying overhead, it might as well have been the community pool in Bernardsville.

  Now, as the car pulled closer, Meryl heard demonstrators from Vietnam Veterans Against the War, protesting the movie for which she was nominated. Some, in fatigues and berets, waved placards that said “NO OSCARS FOR RACISM” and “THE DEER HUNTER IS A BLOODY LIE.” There were reports of rocks being hurled at limos. By the end of the night, thirteen people had been arrested.

  The case against The Deer Hunter had become increasingly rancorous. At the Berlin International Film Festival, the socialist states had protested in solidarity with the “heroic people of Vietnam.” At a house party, a female war journalist went up to Barry Spikings and punched him in the chest, saying, “How dare you?” When confronted, Cimino would say that the characters “are not endorsing anything except their common humanity.” Meryl was similarly apolitical. “It shows the value of people in towns like that,” she said. “There is such a fabric of life to look at.”

  Inside the hall, the tensions were subdued. Neither Michael Deeley nor Deric Washburn was on speaking terms with Michael Cimino. As the awards began, Johnny Carson, hosting for the first time, welcomed the crowd with the immortal line, “I see a lot of new faces. Especially on the old faces.”

  Over the next three hours, The Deer Hunter went head to head with Coming Home, in what seemed like a battle for Hollywood’s political soul. Jane Fonda won Best Actress and delivered part of her speech in sign language, because “over fourteen million people are deaf.” Christopher Walken beat Bruce Dern for Best Supporting Actor. Robert De Niro, who had stayed home in New York, lost to Jon Voight for Best Actor. Coming Home won Best Sc
reenplay, but then Francis Ford Coppola handed his “paisan” Michael Cimino the Oscar for Best Director. “At a moment like this,” Cimino said in his speech, “it’s difficult to leaven pride with humility.”

  And in the race between Meryl Streep and Coming Home’s Penelope Milford, the winner was . . . Maggie Smith, for California Suite. Meryl smiled and applauded gamely.

  At the end of the night—an endless one; the East Coast broadcast lasted until 1:20 a.m.—John Wayne came onstage to present Best Picture. The Duke looked uncharacteristically feeble, ravaged by the stomach cancer that would kill him two months later. When he announced The Deer Hunter as the big winner, the applause, the Los Angeles Times reported, was “respectful but well short of thunderous,” as if tinged with buyer’s remorse.

  On the way to the press area, Michael Cimino found himself in the elevator with Jane Fonda, who had blasted The Deer Hunter as a “racist, Pentagon version of the war,” before admitting that she had not seen it. Both of them held their Oscar statuettes. Fonda refused to look him in the eye.

  When the Oscars were over, Michael Cimino went back to work on his next film, The Johnson County War, which would be released the following year as Heaven’s Gate. John Cazale slid into a posthumous obscurity, forever the ghost in the New Hollywood machine. And Meryl Streep, having begun what no one yet knew to be a record-breaking streak of Academy Award nominations, returned to New York City with her husband.

  Joanna

  SIX MONTHS.

  That’s how long it took. Six months and change. On March 12, 1978, the love of Meryl Streep’s life died as she sat by his bedside. By late September, she was married to another man.

  Six months in which Michael Cimino hacked away at the dailies. Six months in which Holocaust broadcast her face into living rooms from Hollywood to Hamburg. Six months in which the actress who was now turning twenty-nine would play three indelible roles at the exact same time. Six months in which, depending on whom you ask, she was either an emotional wreck or a virtuoso reaching the culmination of her craft.