Her Again Page 4

  Step one in creating a happy home: enter a happy partnership, preferably with a boy from the Ivy League. On weekends, the ladies of Vassar would pile onto buses bound for mixers at Princeton or Yale. (If you missed the bus, the bulletin boards were papered with signs for rides.) As the buses pulled onto the men’s campus, boys in ties would crowd around, waiting to see the latest haul. If you were lucky, you’d dance with a Whiffenpoof, and if you were that kind of girl, you’d wake up the next morning in the Taft Hotel. Then it was back on the bus to Poughkeepsie.

  A decade later, Meryl would star in a television version of Uncommon Women and Others, a play by her drama school classmate Wendy Wasserstein. Based on Wasserstein’s experiences at Mount Holyoke, another Seven Sisters school, the play captured the vanishing world of midcentury women’s liberal-arts education, one in which young ladies in headbands and pleated skirts are trained in “gracious living” by the matronly house mother, Mrs. Plumm. On Father-Daughter Weekend, they sing:

  Though we have had our chances

  For overnight romances

  With the Harvard and the Dartmouth male,

  And though we’ve had a bunch in

  Tow from Princeton Junction,

  We’re saving ourselves for Yale.

  Of course, not all the women of 1967 were there to earn an M.R.S. The year before, the newly formed National Organization for Women had released its statement of purpose, in which Betty Friedan called for “a fully equal partnership of the sexes,” and the more progressive of the Vassar freshmen were of the same mind.

  In Uncommon Women, a character describes her conflict between finding Mr. Right and the thornier demands of modern womanhood. “I suppose this isn’t a very impressive sentiment,” she says to a girlfriend, “but I really would like to meet my prince. Even a few princes. And I wouldn’t give up being a person. I’d still remember all the Art History dates. I just don’t know why suddenly I’m supposed to know what I want to do.”

  Meryl arrived on campus oblivious to the changing tides. “On entering Vassar, if you had asked me what feminism was, I would’ve thought it had something to do with having nice nails and clean hair,” she said later.

  She was entranced by the school’s traditions, its pride—not the rah-rah stuff she’d known as a cheerleader, but the exalted nature of academe. A few days into her first semester, the students assembled for the convocation ceremony, signaling the end of orientation and the beginning of the fall term. It was held in late afternoon on the hills around Sunset Lake, a man-made pond where Vassar girls traditionally brought their dates. Now everyone wore white, and the entire faculty sat in robes on a platform. “A very aesthetically moving scene, right?” Meryl wrote in a letter to her old high school boyfriend Mike Booth. “No. But what really rocked me was just thinking how some of the greatest minds alive were sitting there in front of me. Little Meryl Streep, and they were actually prepared to meet me face to face in a seminar. Wow. It’s enough to strip your ego to the bone.”

  She hit it off with her roommate, Liz, and they hung out in the campus coffee shop and played guitar. The repertoire: Eddie Floyd’s “Knock on Wood,” Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Dangling Conversation,” “In My Life” by the Beatles, “Hold On, I’m Comin’” by Sam and Dave, “Here, There and Everywhere” (Beatles again), some Otis Redding. Meryl doodled a picture of herself and Liz playing on a couch. Over Liz, she wrote: “sexy dark voice, Jewish, Brooklyn, pot, beat, beads, nice, considerate.” Over herself, she wrote: “Mary Louise Streep, 18 years and five months, medium to high wiggly voice, Wasp, Bernardsville, moderate, uncertain, JM”—for Johnny Mathis—“still affectionate, hook nose like Baez, heart of gold.”

  In reflective moments, she wrote to Mike. He was stationed in Germany, en route to Vietnam. Distance may have made it easier for Meryl to confide her anxieties, as well as her zeal. “I was really apprehensive about coming here,” she wrote him, “but there are so many different people [that] I needn’t have worried about being thrown amongst debutantes and greasy grimes. There are a lot of both groups here. Some belong to both categories, but there are tons of miscellanies like myself.”

  She took drama and English and, “just for the hell of it,” introductory Italian. There were no boys around to dress up for, or to fight over with other girls. The spawning ground—“where the boys are”—was a bus ride away, and that was far enough that she could finally exhale. People were staying up all night smoking cigarettes and arguing about feminism and race and consciousness. Meryl read Soul on Ice, Eldridge Cleaver’s account of being black and imprisoned in America—who even knew about the Black Panthers back in Bernardsville? She could wear the same turtleneck for weeks on end, put her hair up in a hasty bun, do Turkish dances in the dorms. No one cared. For once, female friendship was untainted by competition or envy.

  “I made some very quick but lifelong and challenging friends,” she said later. “And with their help, outside of any competition for boys, my brain woke up. I got up and I got outside myself and I found myself again. I didn’t have to pretend. I could be goofy, vehement, aggressive, and slovenly and open and funny and tough, and my friends let me. I didn’t wash my hair for three weeks once. They accepted me, like the Velveteen Rabbit. I became real instead of an imaginary stuffed bunny.”

  Not that boys were out of the picture. She began seeing a Yale junior named Bob Levin, the fullback of the football team—“my new thing at Yale,” she’d call him. Her roommate had set them up on a blind date. She would cheer him on at football games, including an infamous Yale-versus-Harvard match that tied 29 to 29. (Tommy Lee Jones was a Crimson guard.) On weekends, she’d go to parties with Bob at DKE, where one of his fraternity brothers was George W. Bush. At the end of his senior year, Bush tried to tap Bob for his secret society, Skull and Bones, but Bob declined, preferring the more informal Elihu Club. Meryl would be his dinner date at Elihu on Sunday evenings. She wouldn’t say much, still unsure of a girl’s place in the old boys’ club.

  Her taste in men hadn’t changed much since high school, but her sense of their importance was eroding. At Vassar, there was an unspoken rule: if you made plans with a fellow student on the weekend—say, a concert at Skinner Hall—those plans would be immediately usurped if either girl landed a date. The boy took precedence. “I remember when I was, like, a sophomore that someone brought up that probably this was rude and weird and cruel, and that friends were as important as boys,” Meryl recalled. “That was a new idea, completely new idea.”

  She had overpowering reactions to art, to books, to music. One weekend, she went up to Dartmouth to see Simon and Garfunkel. When Garfunkel sang “For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her,” she was transfixed. The last line, especially—Garfunkel’s wailing, searching declaration of love—moved her for reasons she struggled to articulate. It’s an “understatement,” she wrote to Mike, in a letter enclosed with a pressed orange maple leaf, “but somehow when he sang the words it was almost like the beautiful feeling you have when someone first tells you the same thing. I can’t understand how he can, after singing that song as many times as he has, still make it so earth rocking.”

  It was a lesson in performance. A lesson in emotional truth.

  One night in her dorm, she sat in bed reading James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. When she got to the last page, she closed the book, the words still ringing in her ears: “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

  Meryl thought she was having a “severe identity crisis.” She went down the hall and asked a girl if she had a fever, just to feel another person’s hand on her forehead. The book had confused her, but in a way that felt unbearably exciting. Everything else now seemed trivial: the inane dorm-hall chatter outside her door, her intellectualizing with Bob. She wanted something real, something that hit her in the face and shook her out of her constant preoccupation with herself. B
ut what was “real”? What was Joyce trying to tell her? It was as if he was pushing her somewhere she wasn’t ready to go, or wasn’t willing.

  She started writing a letter to Mike, so many miles away: “I tend now, however, perhaps because of distance (physical/spiritual?) to make you, ‘Mike,’ what I am searching to find, or something which you represent to me, something I value above all things. I wish so hard you were here always. I miss your presence or at least your word. James Joyce really has me flying around. His ‘Portrait,’ you know, some sort of autobiography, is so greatly personal. I see you there, me, everybody. There is so much I cannot understand in his work.” She signed off in Italian: Te aspetto e le tue parole come sempre.

  I await you and your words as always.

  AT TWO O’CLOCK in the morning, Mike Booth was woken up in his barracks and told to report to the emergency room. The clamor of descending helicopters erased whatever was left of his sleep. The Vietcong had overrun a base down the coast, and now the medics hauled out bleeding soldiers one by one from the choppers.

  The 91st Evacuation Hospital, in Tuy Hoa, usually treated Vietnamese civilians, but when something like this happened, they made an exception. Mike darted among the wounded GIs, cutting their fatigues off with scissors. Some of them needed tourniquets, badly—they might lose a limb, but it was their only chance of making it through the night. By daylight, nine Americans were dead.

  Such a stupid war, Mike thought to himself. It shouldn’t be going on in the first place.

  Mike hadn’t waited for the draft, or evaded it like some of his friends. He enlisted, hoping for a big adventure. Like a lot of people back home, he had his doubts about the war, but he decided that if he became a medic he’d have something to be proud of, no matter what. After three months of basic training and three months of medical training, he shipped out to Germany, where he worked in a dispensary and drove an ambulance.

  Most guys were thrilled to be stationed in Germany, but Mike wanted to be where the action was. A friend of his had requested a transfer to Vietnam, and the Army was happy to oblige. After a beer-filled night, Mike decided to do the same. Within two or three weeks, he got his orders and flew to the air base in Guam.

  Three times a day, Mike would go to the replacement center, as names and service numbers were called out like in a game of bingo. Private So-and-So! You’re going to Da Nang! Report to Officer So-and-So! When someone got called to one of the “bad places,” the other guys would turn their backs, as if he had a disease. Mike wound up in Tuy Hoa: right in the action. From the plane, he looked down on the Vietnam coastline: all lush jungles and winding beaches, as alien as a Martian landscape. He was finally getting his adventure.

  He rode on the back of a truck to the hospital, vaguely aware that he was sniper bait. When he got to the barracks, he dropped his duffel bag on his new bed and went to meet the other men in the unit. Out back, he found twenty or thirty guys, blasting music on a tape deck and smoking dope like there was no tomorrow. Past the barbed wire were an artillery unit and a trucking unit and then sand and cactus as far as the eye could see.

  The next day, he reported to the hospital, where there were more patients than beds. He began working twelve-hour shifts, six days a week. He saw traumatic amputations, gunshot wounds, fragmentation wounds, women, children, Vietnamese soldiers. Some had third-degree napalm burns all over their bodies. It was ghastly, but he considered himself lucky. Had he been sent to the front lines as a field medic, he would have been a walking target.

  On days off, the guys rode in a truck down to a shantytown, where girls were available and you could get cartons of cigarettes stuffed with marijuana. Mike would wander off to the countryside and amble into Buddhist temples, where the monks would pour him tea. Sometimes, he and a buddy would rent motorcycles and ride them to the edge of town, jumping over ravines like aspiring Steve McQueens. Other days, he would lie in the barracks, reading books from the camp library. “I felt like such a loser being in Vietnam,” he recalled, “but I said, ‘Well, I’m going to read. I’m going to develop my mind.’ And so I read an awful lot of philosophy and existentialism: Dostoyevsky, Camus, Sartre. A lot of poetry—Baudelaire, Rilke, Rimbaud, Yeats. Books about Buddhism and Eastern philosophy.”

  He knew he was missing out: on college, on rock and roll, even on the antiwar protests that he read about in the paper. When he turned twenty, he got a letter from Meryl. She had just been down to Yale to hear the author William Manchester speak. “I’m not flunking here,” she wrote. “It’s not hard at all. The reading is fantastic. Read Joyce, ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,’ and also very very great is Richard Rubenstein ‘After Auschwitz.’”

  Back in Bernardsville, Mike had always talked to Meryl about books. But all this breathless rumination over Joyce and roommates and Simon and Garfunkel only made her—and home—seem farther away. “I felt,” he recalled, “like I was on the other side of the world.”

  THOSE FIRST TWO years at Vassar, she walked around campus in a liberated daze. But it wouldn’t last. The all-female haven that had emancipated Meryl Streep was under imminent threat. Like her, the school was having a severe identity crisis.

  Across the country, single-sex education was falling out of favor. By 1967, nearly two-thirds of the Vassar student body came from coeducational public high schools like Meryl’s, and the idea of giving up boys (whatever the benefits) was becoming harder to accept. Alan Simpson, the Oxford-educated historian who had become Vassar’s president in 1964, was a firm believer in liberal-arts colleges for women. But applications were drying up. Unlike the other Seven Sisters schools, which were located close to their male counterparts, Vassar was relatively isolated, and it held less and less appeal for young women who wanted to interact with men seven days of the week.

  In the fall of 1966, President Simpson formed the Committee on New Dimensions, which would plan for Vassar’s future. At its first meeting, he noted that Hamilton was creating a college for women, and Wesleyan and Yale were likely to follow. Ideas were floated: maybe Vassar could create a coordinate men’s college, or affiliate with an existing one nearby? The committee began to explore potential “dancing partners.”

  What the committee didn’t know was that Simpson was considering a much more radical plan. In December, he met with Kingman Brewster, the president of Yale, to discuss a possible merger between the two universities. Vassar would sell off its Poughkeepsie campus and relocate to New Haven. He kept the plan quiet, knowing it would be an academic bombshell.

  But word got out, and news of an impending “royal marriage” drove Vassar’s alumnae to near hysteria. “How unthinkable,” one wrote to the alumnae magazine, “to change this quiet and beautiful atmosphere for a huge city complex with its pressures and tensions.” Professors were similarly opposed, fearing they would be overshadowed or supplanted by their Yale counterparts. A headline in Life magazine echoed the growing sentiment: “How Dare They Do It?”

  The undergraduates, though, were intrigued. Sure, they might lose their identity as Vassar students. But “saving ourselves for Yale” would now be a cinch, minus the three-hour round trip. Some took to singing “Boola Boola,” the Yale fight song, on the quads. A survey in the spring of 1967 asked students: “Would the presence of men in class improve the quality of discussion?” and “Do you think that the absence of men in Vassar classes involves any important loss in perspective?” Sixty-eight percent said “yes” to both.

  Like most everyone at Vassar, Meryl followed the fracas closely. Few students believed the Yale merger would really go through. The relocation would be costly, and those pearl-clutching alumnae might write Vassar out of their wills, to the detriment of students on scholarships. But most of them liked the idea nonetheless, including Meryl.

  “I really think they should move to New Haven if we are going to catch up, or maybe loosen up as much as, say, Antioch or even Swarthmore,” she wrote to Mike. “It’s really so unnatural, especially the social relationshi
ps. Hectic, frantic, rushed, etc etc. Now they have affiliations between certain colleges at Yale and houses here at Vassar. That sets up an easier way to have, you know, friends-lovers instead of weekend LOVER babies.”

  On November 12, 1967, President Simpson informed President Brewster that the Vassar-Yale study was dead. Burying his thwarted enthusiasm, he proclaimed: “Full speed ahead in Poughkeepsie!”

  But how? The idea of creating a coordinate men’s college still hovered. Then came a dramatic reversal: on May 30, 1968, the faculty voted 102 to 3 in favor of admitting men to Vassar. This option had received minimal scrutiny, but it now seemed like the least apocalyptic scenario. Had Simpson not pursued the Yale merger with such brio, the elders of Vassar might never have considered coeducation. On July 11th, as the students were enjoying the summer of ’68, the board of trustees approved the plan. Starting in autumn, 1970, Vassar would admit men for the first time since World War II.

  “Vassar to Pursue Complete Coeducation; Method and Cost Under Consideration” ran the front-page headline in the Miscellany News, Vassar’s student newspaper. As the fall semester began in 1968, the students were abuzz with excitement, angst, even droll curiosity. In a Miscellany News column titled “Vassar Men—Facing a Comic Doom,” a student named Susan Casteras imagined life for the incoming males. How would a “6 ft. 2 brawny superman” fit into a “female-tailored bed”? Would the bathtubs have to be rescaled to fit more “Amazonian proportions”? “Meals, too would have to be replanned to avoid a starvation diet image. One delicate scoop of cottage cheese on two wilted lettuce leaves, one 3 inch square of meat, one wiggly slab of red jello, and a glass of ice tea (with or without the lemon) are not the stuff of which wonder-strong men are made.”