Her Again Read online

As a newfound adherent to American teenage conformity, Meryl longed to join the cheerleading squad. So did Debbie. But Debbie couldn’t do a cartwheel to save her life. Meryl, who was not only self-assured but athletic, was a pro. Some days, Debbie would follow Meryl home after school, where Meryl would try to teach her to do a cartwheel on the lawn. As Meryl guided her legs over her head, Debbie’s hands would grate against the pebbles that came up after the rain. In the end, it was all for naught. Debbie didn’t make the squad. Meryl, naturally, did.

  On fall weekends, the student populace would converge at the football games. With the exception of the brainiacs and the greasers, everyone showed up. Everyone had a place. There were the twirlers. There was the color guard, where Debbie landed a spot. There was the marching band, which was quite good, thanks in part to a precocious senior named John Geils, who within a few years would trade in his trumpet for a guitar and start the J. Geils Band.

  But the cheerleaders, or “cheeries,” stood apart from the rest. Not that they were mean, but they were close-knit, bonded by their good looks and popularity. With the letter “B” emblazoned on their outfits, they would chant, “Thunder, thunder, thunderation!” Meryl became best friends with her fellow cheery Sue Castrilli, who worked at the Dairy Queen. There wasn’t much to do in Bernardsville, besides driving on a loop on the 202 between the DQ and the train station and then back again. When Sue was on duty, she would give her friends double dips.

  In class, Meryl was attentive when it suited her. She had a knack for languages—the accents, at least. When she didn’t care for the teacher, she got C’s. She dreaded the geometry teacher, whom the kids called Fang. Even worse was biology. “Just remember Biology and the Biology exam and you’ll never sleep again,” one boy wrote in her sophomore yearbook. “I don’t know what you’d do if I didn’t tell you all the answers,” wrote another.

  As the sister of two brothers, she was comfortable around boys, maybe more so than she was around girls. She loved the guys who sat in the back row, because they were funny; from them she picked up comedic lessons she wouldn’t use until much later. For now, Meryl was content to be their audience, careful not to step out of character. At home, the dinner table was a clamorous exchange of ideas. But opinions, Meryl learned, didn’t get you a second date—boys didn’t like to be contradicted. Opinions, for now, took a backseat.

  IN THE SPRING of 1964, when Meryl was a freshman, she met Mike Booth. She had gone on a date or two with his cousin, J. D. Mike was a sophomore with longish dark hair and a toothy grin. He wore Shetland sweaters with the sleeves cut off halfway—the closest Bernards High came to rebellion. His father thought he was a failure, and Mike proved the old man right by drinking and getting into fights. He had barely passed the ninth grade.

  “Do you like it here at Bernards High?” Meryl said, when J. D. introduced them.

  “I do now.”

  Mike thought that Meryl was swell. “Her eyes were extremely bright,” he would recall. “Her smile was genuine. She didn’t smirk or run with a pack, like a lot of girls. Yet there was a slight awkwardness about her, as though she was certain her dress didn’t look right, or her shoes didn’t fit, or she was just plain ugly.”

  Mike began walking her home from school—he didn’t have a driver’s license. During the summer, they’d go to his Aunt Lala’s place for picnics and swim in the pond, or play baseball. On nights, they’d go to parties or the Bernardsville movie theater, rushing home to make Meryl’s eleven o’clock curfew. Mike wrote her poems, and she gave him a volume of modern American and British poetry, a Christmas present from her father.

  In the middle of the summer, Mike began football practice, and Meryl started practicing with the cheeries. They’d meet for lunch; Meryl would share one of her trademark peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, which they washed down with a Tab and a leftover brownie or piece of cake, which Meryl joked was “aged like a fine cheese.” Mike liked her self-deprecating humor, which she’d use to brush off anything that irked her. Sometimes she did impressions for him—he thought she was a “terrific mimic.” When he asked if she liked to swim, she switched on a Jersey accent and said, “Duh, yeah,” flexing her biceps and bragging, “I’m really quite atletik—for a girl.”

  On their walk to the community pool one day, they spotted a discarded ring glinting up from the side of the road. It was a promotional item from American Airlines, with a metallic eagle encircled with the words JUNIOR PILOT. Mike put it on Meryl’s finger. They were going steady.

  Harry Streep didn’t like the idea at all. At first, he limited Meryl to seeing Mike just once a week. Then it was every two weeks. Then he insisted that she go on dates with other boys, since she was too young to go steady with anyone. One day at the pool, Meryl won a race at a swim meet, and when she got out Mike gave her a kiss on the cheek. Word got back to Mr. Streep, who chastised his daughter for the public display of affection.

  Finally, he cut her off from Mike entirely. They met secretly on a path through the woods between their houses, which were a mile apart. Mike handed her a love poem. Meryl’s eyes were red from crying. She went home that night and warned her father: If you don’t give me some freedom now, I’ll be one of those girls who goes berserk once she leaves for college. He relented.

  In her notes to Mike, Meryl daydreamed about their future together. After high school, they’d get married and move to a remote island where they’d join the Peace Corps and “civilize the natives.” Then Meryl would go to Sarah Lawrence, or maybe Bard, while Mike got his law degree and became a part-time writer. He’d win the Pulitzer Prize. She’d accept the lead in a Broadway play and immediately become rich and famous. They’d buy a villa on an island off of Nice—early-American style, of course—and throw parties twice a weekend.

  Mr. Streep watched Mike with a wary eye. Nevertheless, Mike observed, “There was this constant joking and bantering that went back and forth between Meryl, her mother, and her brothers. They made fun of each other, but in a delightful sort of a way. I remember thinking, Jeez, these people really enjoy each other.”

  Mike and cheerleading may have dominated her time, but they didn’t monopolize it. Bolstered by her father’s sense of drive, she raced through high school in an extracurricular frenzy. Her freshman year, she was class treasurer. She did gymnastics and became the secretary of the French Club. She was the head of the announcers, who recited the lunch menu into the loudspeaker each morning. She drew art for the yearbook. She swam.

  Meanwhile, she kept up her singing. She joined the choir, which performed in stately robes. One year at the Christmas concert, she scored a solo in Vivaldi’s Gloria, performed at the Short Hills Mall. The 1965 edition of the Bernardian yearbook pictured her in a sweater and flipped hair, with the caption: “A voice worth noting.”

  But Meryl wasn’t so sure of her vocal abilities. She confessed to Mike that she thought her voice was “sharp and shrill.” He thought it was beautiful. When they approached her house, she would announce herself by wailing, “Ooooo-eee! Ooooo-eee!” Miss Liebling would have killed her.

  “I’m going to strangle you, Meryl dear, if I hear that falsetto one more time!” her mother would call back, holding her ears.

  It was in part her mania for activities that led Meryl to audition, her sophomore year, for The Music Man. She had seen Barbara Cook play Marian the Librarian on Broadway. Now she surprised half the school by winning the role for herself. Third, who was a freshman, played her lisping little brother, Winthrop. When it came time for the big show, she sang “Goodnight, My Someone” with a voice as light and high as a feather. She told Mike that he was the “someone.”

  Even her chemistry teacher took to calling her “Songbird.” The next April, she played Daisy Mae in Li’l Abner, singing and dancing in fringed cutoffs. Days after the curtain went down, she was still glowing. “Almost every day for the past two months has been a ‘Typical Day’ in Dogpatch, so the song goes,” the sixteen-year-old Meryl told the school newspaper, ad
ding: “It’s pretty hard to put this out of your mind so quickly.” The following year, she was Laurey in Oklahoma! Her best friend, Sue Castrilli, was in the cast. So was Third. Playing these dainty ingénues, she didn’t think about the acting part. “I thought about the singing part,” she said later, “the showing-off part, and the dancing part.”

  It was a way to feel loved, something she hadn’t quite convinced herself she was. “I thought that if I looked pretty and did all the ‘right things,’ everyone would like me,” she said of the teenage self she would later abandon. “I had only two friends in high school, and one of them was my cousin, so that didn’t count. Then there’s that whole awful kind of competition based on pubescent rivalry for boys. It made me terribly unhappy. My biggest decision every day used to be what clothes I should wear to school. It was ridiculous.”

  Some other part of her was trying to claw its way out. On afternoons after school, she’d come home and put on her parents’ Barbra Streisand albums, imitating every breath, every swell. She found that she could express not only the emotions of the song but the other feelings she was having, the ones that didn’t fit the character she was playing. Even as she mouthed along to the truism that “people who need people are the luckiest people in the world,” its irony was apparent: at school, she was surrounded by people, but she didn’t feel lucky. She felt phony.

  “Often success in one area precludes succeeding in the other,” she would say. “And along with all of my exterior choices, I worked on my, what actors call, my interior adjustment. I adjusted my natural temperament, which tended—tends—to be slightly bossy, a little opinionated, loud (a little loud), full of pronouncements and high spirits. And I willfully cultivated softness, agreeableness, a breezy, natural sort of sweetness, even a shyness, if you will, which was very, very, very, very, very effective on the boys. But the girls didn’t buy it. They didn’t like me; they sniffed it out, the acting. And they were probably right. But I was committed. This was absolutely not a cynical exercise. This was a vestigial survival courtship skill I was developing.”

  Mike Booth didn’t seem to notice. The “slight awkwardness” he had noticed when they met had disappeared, and in its place was “exuberance,” he recalled. “Somehow she had become even prettier than the year before.”

  Meryl had taken up drawing and gave him her cartoons, most of which were at her own expense. She’d render herself with hairy arms and an elongated nose, still in her cheerleading outfit, or as a lifeguard with bulging muscles and a mustache. Her insecurities were practically begging to be noticed, but Mike saw only talent, which he thought he had none of. At seventeen, he was a middling athlete and an even worse student.

  In May, Mike took Meryl to the prom at Florham Park. With her white gloves and corsage, she was a “vision of smiling light,” he thought. They had been dating for more than a year. That August, Mike brought her to see the Beatles at Shea Stadium. The band was barely audible above the screaming. Luckily, they knew all the songs by heart. Their favorite was “If I Fell,” which they called “our song.” It told them what they already knew: that love was more than just holding hands.

  Pitted against the bigger, badder players across New Jersey, the Bernards High football team was accustomed to humiliating defeats. But the first game of the season in the fall of 1965, against Bound Brook, was different. Thanks to a magnificent fifty-yard run by a junior named Bruce Thomson (sprung loose by a key block from Mike Booth, the left guard), the Mountaineers pulled off a rare win. Mike eyed Meryl on the sidelines, screaming her head off in her red-and-white cheering uniform.

  But Meryl’s attentions were wandering. She had set her sights on Bruce Thomson, who had brought the Mountaineers their brief moment of glory. Bruce was a sandy-haired, broad-shouldered hunk with an ego to match. His girlfriend was the captain of the color guard. She was a senior, like Mike, and had grown suspicious of Meryl. So had some of the other girls. Meryl was someone who got what she wanted. She wanted Bruce.

  Mike was planning a road trip down south with a friend, a last hurrah before the wide world swept them up. The night before they left, he went to a dance and saw Meryl and Bruce in each other’s arms. He could only blame himself. A couple weeks earlier, he had broken up with Meryl. He didn’t want to be tied down, now that he had a fleeting chance at freedom. He had let Meryl slip away, maybe for good. A few months later, he enlisted in the U.S. Army as a Medical Corpsman.

  IN THE FALL of her senior year, Meryl was elected homecoming queen. No one was surprised. By then, she had built a coalition of wary admirers: the cheeries, the chorus girls, the boys who could make her giggle and glance. “Like, okay,” Debbie recalled thinking, “we know Meryl will get it.”

  Her again.

  There she was, at the big football game against Dunellen, the senior-class queen of Bernards High. Bruce Thomson had become her new beau, and they looked good together: the homecoming queen and the football star, a high school power couple. From the float, she gazed down on her subjects: the twirlers, the color guard, the jocks, the class clowns from the back row, all arranged in a teenage taxonomy. The plan she had put in motion the day she tore off her old-lady glasses was complete. She had pulled it off, almost too well.

  “I reached a point senior year when my adjustment felt like me,” she would recall. “I had actually convinced myself that I was this person and she me: pretty, talented, but not stuck-up. You know, a girl who laughed a lot at every stupid thing every boy said and who lowered her eyes at the right moment and deferred, who learned to defer when the boys took over the conversation. I really remember this so clearly, and I could tell it was working. I was much less annoying to the guys than I had been. They liked me better and I liked that. This was conscious, but it was at the same time motivated and fully felt. This was real, real acting.”

  If only she could see beyond Bernardsville, past the proms and pompoms and tiaras and “Goodnight, My Someone”s. At eighteen, she took her first plane ride. Passing over Bernardsville, she peered down and saw her whole life below: all the roads she knew, her school, her house. All of it fit in the space she could make with two fingers. She realized how small her world had been.

  In high school, there had only been one game to play, so she played it. The 1967 edition of the Bernardian yearbook revealed just how limited the options were. Beneath each coiffed, combed senior portrait, the descriptions of the graduates read like a generation’s collective aspirations, a handbook for what young men and women were supposed to be. Between the genders was a bold, uncrossable line.

  Just look at the boys, with their gelled hair and jackets:

  “Handsome quarterback of our football team . . . big man in sports . . . likes to play pool . . . partial to blondes . . . usually seen with Barbara . . . Avid motorcycle fan . . . likes cars and working on them . . . fond of drag racing . . . enjoys U.S. History . . . whiz at math . . . future in music . . . future engineer . . . future mathematician . . . future architect . . . looking forward to a military career . . . most likely to succeed . . .”

  Compare the girls, miniature Doris Days in pearl necklaces:

  “Wants to be a nurse . . . captain of the cheeries . . . keeps the D.Q. swinging . . . a sparkling brunette . . . what beautiful eyes . . . Steve, Steve, Steve . . . loves to sew . . . Twirling is one of her merits . . . a whiz on the sewing machine . . . Cute smile . . . loves shorthand . . . future as a secretary . . . Future nurse . . . giggles galore . . .”

  Amid these future architects and future secretaries, the eye is barely drawn to Mary Louise Streep, who spent four years trying to ace conformity and succeeded. Beneath her lustrous portrait is a hard-won summation:

  “Pretty blonde . . . vivacious cheerleader . . . our homecoming queen . . . Many talents . . . Where the boys are.”

  IN THE SOUTHWEST corner of Vermont, Meryl Streep sat in front of a stern-looking administrator at the Bennington College admissions office. Her father was waiting outside.

  “What books h
ave you read over the summer?” the woman inquired.

  Meryl blinked. Books? Over the summer? She was on the swim team, for crying out loud!

  She thought back: there had been that rainy day at the library, when she read this one book cover to cover. Something about dreams, by Carl Jung.

  But when she said the name of the author, the woman balked.

  “Please!” she sniffed. “Yung.”

  Meryl crumpled in her seat. That was the longest book anyone she knew had read over the summer—anyone on the swim team, at least—and this woman was giving her grief for mispronouncing the author’s name?

  She found her father outside. “Daddy, take me home.” And he did.

  So maybe she’d flubbed Bennington. There were other options. She was, in her estimation, “a nice girl, pretty, athletic, and I’d read maybe seven books in four years of high school. I read The New Yorker and Seventeen magazine, had a great vocabulary, and no understanding whatsoever of mathematics and science. I had a way of imitating people’s speech that got me AP in French without really knowing any grammar. I was not what you would call a natural scholar.”

  Still, she knew she wanted something more than secretarial school, where Debbie and some other girls were headed. She liked languages, enough to fake a little French. Maybe she could be a United Nations interpreter?

  The straight and narrow, it turned out, led to Poughkeepsie. In the fall of 1967, she made the ninety-minute trip from Bernardsville for her first term at Vassar College. And this time she knew how to pronounce “Carl Jung.”

  Julie

  “PURITY AND WISDOM” was the motto of Vassar College, though it had long disappeared from the school insignia. Founded in 1861, Vassar was the first of the Seven Sisters schools to be chartered as a college, with the goal of providing a liberal-arts education for young women equivalent to what Harvard or Yale offered young men.

  By 1967, though, purity was seriously out of fashion, and the refined living of the all-female campus seemed like something from another century. The expectations were clear: Vassar women were to marry well and raise families, perhaps volunteer or pursue part-time careers if they had the time. Sarah Blanding, the president of Vassar in 1961, assured a luncheon audience that the school was “successful in preparing young women for their part in creating happy homes, forward-looking communities, stalwart states, and neighborly nations.”