Her Again Page 5

  As 1968 turned into 1969, the women of Vassar steeled themselves for the coming boy invasion. But men were far from the first thing on Meryl’s mind. Now a sophomore, she was busy acquiring a “genuine sense of identity.” And part of that identity was the ability to become someone else. She was discovering acting, and the Drama Department was about to discover her.

  Another metamorphosis.

  MIKE BOOTH HAD begun to dread coming home. He knew that everyone would look at him differently. It didn’t matter that he was against the war, or that he’d been a medic: he’d be branded a “baby killer.” Plus, he had gotten used to adventure. Tuy Hoa was starting to feel like where he belonged, if he belonged anywhere.

  In late July, 1969, he was on a layover somewhere between Vietnam and home. He had stopped at Fort Lewis for a fresh uniform, an airplane voucher, and one last terrible Army haircut. The televisions in the airports were still playing footage of Neil Armstrong landing on the moon. But Mike didn’t share the rest of the country’s euphoria.

  “It didn’t mean anything for me, except I felt like the astronaut,” he recalled. “After being in Vietnam for a year and a half, I was in an alien world. Except, instead of being in a spacesuit, I was encased in all my memories.” God, he thought, I wonder if I’ll ever be what they call normal again.

  He hadn’t told his family which day he was arriving, because he didn’t want a welcome party. When his mother saw him at the front door, she was overwhelmed. She sat him down and related all the town gossip: who was sick, who was pregnant, who was having money problems. Jet-lagged, Mike was on the verge of falling asleep when she said, “Oh, and one more thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Meryl’s been calling here every day, wondering when you’re coming home.”

  When she walked in the door, he was astonished. Two years had elapsed since they’d seen each other. Her look had become bohemian: hoop earrings, jeans, sandals, and a backless Indian-style blouse, her yellow hair now down to her waist.

  Holy cow, he thought, she’s not a girl anymore.

  He told her about the hospital and Buddhist temples and riding motorcycles. She told him about Vassar and drama class and what books she was reading. He couldn’t get over how beautiful she was, how confident and self-possessed. To his surprise, she acted like they had never broken up. They started seeing each other every few days, driving around Bernardsville to their old haunts. In the back of his mind, he kept thinking, What the hell is she bothering with a guy like me for?

  It was as if nothing had changed. Except something had. In their letters, they had communicated their deepest longings. But in person, they felt distant. Mike was restless, not sure what to do with himself. Most people were hesitant to ask him about Vietnam, and when they did, he didn’t know quite what to say. The younger kids in town looked at him suspiciously. His elders—the men who had fought in World War II—would slap him on the back. But that didn’t feel right either.

  Meryl had changed, too. In conversation, she would casually mention the college guys she’d been seeing, like Bob Levin. Mike didn’t understand why. He just knew that she was holding back, and so was he. After a while, he asked why she kept coming to see him, then telling him about her other boyfriends. She told him she didn’t know what he was really thinking—he’d broken up with her before, and he had barely written to her when he was gone, despite all her letters. “I realized how cowardly I had been with her,” he recalled, “because I wasn’t going to come out and really let her know how I felt about her. She was kind of playing the same game with me that I was with her.”

  Mike needed to get out of town. It didn’t matter where—his parents’ house was too quiet, and Bernardsville was too small. Having missed the Summer of Love, he decided to hitchhike out to San Francisco. Maybe he could still get a taste of it, or at least another adventure. At the end of the summer, Meryl drove him an hour down Route 22, to Easton, Pennsylvania. He gave her some things he’d gotten on a thirty-day leave in India: a silk brocade, an ivory carving of Shiva.

  Before he got out of the car, she gave him a kiss and said, “Don’t forget to write when you’re out there.”

  “Sure,” he said. But he knew that he wouldn’t.

  ONE DAY IN drama class, Meryl delivered a Blanche DuBois monologue from A Streetcar Named Desire. A thickset man with a bushy mustache came rushing up from the back of the room. It was the teacher, Clint Atkinson.

  “You’re good! You’re good!” he told the stunned young Blanche.

  He handed her a script. “Read Miss Julie,” he said.

  She looked down at the words from August Strindberg’s 1888 masterpiece. Sure, she had gotten the leads in the high school musicals. But this was no Marian the Librarian. Nothing in her experience seemed to match up with that of Strindberg’s heroine, a tortured Swedish aristocrat. At least, not at first. But as Meryl read, Atkinson’s eyes widened. He saw something in this lissome twenty-year-old, something that she had not yet seen in herself. He had found his Miss Julie.

  He went to the head of the department, Evert Sprinchorn, and told him he wanted to do Miss Julie. Sprinchorn balked: “You can’t do that!” Unlike Atkinson, who was a working director, Sprinchorn was an academic, and a Strindberg scholar at that. Atkinson was up for contract renewal, and Sprinchorn was certain he was trying to butter him up by suggesting a Strindberg play.

  But he knew that it wouldn’t work. For one thing, he told Atkinson, there are only three characters. To fulfill the student demand, they’d need something with at least five or six parts. Besides, the role was much too demanding. Miss Julie is a psychological minefield, a woman self-immolating from the pressures of her class and the fire in her heart. Playing games with her own authority, she seduces—or is seduced by—her father’s servant, Jean. Miss Julie is a rebel, a lady, a lover, and a mess. And she has to carry the entire play. What undergrad could pull that off?

  Atkinson pleaded: “Why don’t you come to a reading tonight and see what you think?” Sprinchorn agreed. Hours later, he and Atkinson were sitting side by side in the student greenroom, watching Meryl Streep read the part of Miss Julie.

  Within ten minutes, Sprinchorn leaned his head in to Atkinson’s: “Go ahead with it.”

  Lights up on the kitchen of a Swedish country manor. It’s a midsummer night, and Miss Julie is causing her usual scandal at a dance nearby. Waiting in the wings to make her entrance, Meryl watched the two actors playing the valet and the cook, gossiping about the mistress of the house. (“Tonight she’s wild again. Miss Julie’s absolutely wild!”) Her hands rested on her ruffled blue gown, with an opulent bow atop the bustle. Her lemon-colored hair was pinned up. It was the first serious play she had ever seen, and she was starring in it.

  The student theater had once housed a riding academy, and when it rained some of the backstage rooms still smelled of the stables. In the lead-up to the play, Atkinson had asked a couple Vassar girls to go into New York to find lilacs for the set. Since it was not actually midsummer, but midwinter, they had failed. So he sprayed the theater with lilac scent, just enough to cover the whiff of horses. When Meryl heard her cue, she stepped into the light, a lilac dew settling on her brow.

  Some of the drama majors, who had put in long hours at the shop, had balked at the casting. Meryl didn’t appear to mind. “She just seemed much more mature than I was,” said Judy Ringer (née Metskas), who played Christine, the cook. “I’m sure she was in many ways. But in terms of her acting style and her ability to access her emotions, she had much more maturity than anybody else in that department. And who knows where that came from—I can’t say.”

  On the surface, she seemed nonchalant. “I don’t remember her having any particular investment in it,” recalled Lee Devin, the young instructor who played Jean. Boys had yet to enroll at Vassar, and, as usual, the male roles were played by teachers or hired professionals. Onstage, Devin was her seducer, servant, and tormenter. Offstage, he tried to play professor, but sh
e had no interest in intellectual banter. “My kind of curioso instructional pompous attitude was not for her,” he said. “She just did the stuff.”

  But the play seemed to work a strange magic on her. “It was a very serious play, and I had no idea what I was doing, really none,” she said later. “But oh, my God, it just was a place to tap into all sorts of feelings that I never had I guess admitted to myself, or felt like parading in front of a group of people.”

  It was as if Miss Julie’s emotional landscape had unlocked Meryl’s own, transforming it from black-and-white to Technicolor. Strindberg’s heroine runs the psychological gamut: imperiousness, lust, entitlement, disgust, self-disgust, self-hatred, pleading, wailing, dreaming, panic—all before wandering back into the night in a suicidal trance, Jean’s razor in hand. “She is the first neurotic, with her inner self fighting, and eventually destroying, the outer shell of respectability,” the Poughkeepsie Journal wrote in its rave on December 13, 1969. “A tall order for any actress . . . one that Miss Streep handles with surprising ease.”

  She was back in the zone, in the church, in the place she had visited as a child playing the Virgin Mary.

  “How did you know how to do that?” her friends asked.

  She had no clue.

  Evert Sprinchorn had a theory about why the play so transmogrified its leading lady. “Meryl Streep, whether she knew it or not, identified with the character,” he said. “Miss Julie sort of hates men. Well, there’s an aspect of Meryl Streep—she’s rebelling against male society.”

  “I loved my father,” Miss Julie tells Jean, “but I took my mother’s side because I didn’t know the whole story. She had taught me to hate all men—you’ve heard how she hated men—and I swore to her that I’d never be a slave to any man.” Strindberg wrote Miss Julie about a disappearing world, in which the old elite was falling apart in the wake of a new industrial class. Julie and Jean, according to the playwright, are “modern characters, living in a transitional era,” one that throws aristocrat and servant into a deadly danse macabre.

  In other words, it was not unlike the college campus where the play was being staged. It was December, 1969—the eve of a new decade, the eve of a new Vassar. Soon men would be in the classrooms, the dorms, even the bathrooms. Gone would be the demeaning weekend mixers, yes. But what else would be lost? Would the women of Vassar still talk in class when there were boys in the back row? Would they still leave their hair unwashed?

  For those first male students to set foot on the Vassar campus, the world had gone topsy-turvy. Women were used to being in places they weren’t wanted. Now men were the novelty. Men were the minority. Rarely had they encountered a world so unprepared for their existence. There were no urinals in the bathrooms. Flowery chintz drapes hung in the living room at Raymond House. (They mysteriously disappeared two days into the semester.) One aspiring bodybuilder practiced his five-hundred-pound dead lift in his dorm room, until a space was found for him in the basement. Jeff Silverman, of the class of 1972, transferred from an all-male school, dreaming of a hormonal adventure. “Being the only man—in class, at the dinner table, or just perambulating through the quad—was something we all had to get used to, just as we had to get used to seeing curlers in the morning and nightgowns at night, and making no big deal of either,” he recalled. “The rules had yet to be written. Proper etiquette was made up as we went along. At first no one knew what to say at 8 a.m. to the woman sitting next to you at breakfast. But we quickly learned that ‘Pass the sugar, please’ would do for a start.”

  The women, meanwhile, were adjusting to the sound of male footfalls in the dining rooms. For Meryl Streep, the change was acute. “The men came my junior and senior years,” she recalled. “I lived in Davison and Main, and they moved in with us: demitasse, the dress code, the parietals disappeared. But so did some of the subtler eccentrics. They went underground, I think. I remember the first coed year when suddenly it seemed that the editorships of the literary magazine, the newspaper, the class presidencies, and the leadership of the then very important student political movements were all held by men. I think that was temporary deference to the guests. Egalitarianism did prevail. Vassar evolved. So did we. I think we were ready for them, the men, but I know I was personally grateful for the two-year hiatus from the sexual rat race.”

  In Miss Julie, Jean remembers growing up in a shack with seven siblings and a pig. From his window, he tells Miss Julie, he could see the wall of her father’s garden, with apple trees peeking out from the top. “That was the Garden of Eden for me, and there were many angry angels with flaming swords standing guard over it. But in spite of them, I and the other boys found a way to the Tree of Life. . . . I’ll bet you despise me.”

  Miss Julie shrugs and says, “All boys steal apples.”

  MIKE BOOTH WAS still restless. He had hitchhiked all the way to California. On the way back, he hiked through the Grand Canyon. For a time, he worked in a restaurant in North Carolina. Then he got a job driving a cement truck. Nothing stuck.

  His mother had sent his high school transcript to a college-placement center, and every time he came back home she showered him with catalogs.

  “Look! Hiram Scott College, out in Nebraska!”

  “I don’t think so, Mom.”

  One rainy night, President Nixon came to Morristown, near Bernardsville, to campaign for a gubernatorial candidate. Mike and a friend went to protest. When Nixon’s motorcade arrived, he was up front, shouting, “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war!” Nixon flashed a victory sign with his fingers and ducked inside the hotel. When he came out, a half hour later, the protesters were even angrier. Nixon went for his limo, and the crowd surged forward, propelling Mike until he was five feet away from the president. He looked Nixon in the eye and chanted at the top of his lungs.

  Once Nixon drove away, Mike heard someone say, “That’s the guy!” Suddenly, three men in suits came over and threw him on the ground. They emptied his pockets, then hauled him inside to an empty office for an interrogation.

  “Who are you working for—the Communist Party?” one of them asked.

  Mike cackled. “Are you kidding? I’m a vet who just got home from the war, and I don’t approve of the shit that’s going on there.”

  They asked what he was doing at the protest.

  “I was only trying to get his autograph,” he snarled back. “I’m starting a local chapter of the Tricky Dick Fan Club.”

  The incident made the local papers. When reporters called the house, his mortified father said he had left for college in Colorado. Of course he hadn’t. He was right there, even if he seemed worlds away. One week, he’d tell his parents he was going to hike the Appalachian Trail. The next, he wanted to go to Taiwan to study Chinese. All he knew was that he couldn’t sit still.

  Then he realized what was going on: he missed Vietnam. He missed the excitement. He missed the jungles. He missed riding into town on the back of a truck in the middle of a monsoon rain.

  Meryl kept asking when he was going to visit Vassar, and finally he took the train to Poughkeepsie. He hung out with her college friends, who now included men. He drank wine—too much, probably. He was nervous. They talked poetry, and when Mike began extolling Ezra Pound, one of the guys shot back that Pound was an anti-Semite.

  “I know that, but he’s also a great poet!” Mike said, before pronouncing that “Ballad of the Goodly Fere” was one of the best poems ever written. But what did he know? He’d never been to college.

  Before he left, Meryl told him that he should think about enrolling at Vassar, now that it was open to men.

  But Mike knew it would never happen. “As a vet, I felt so out of place with all those privileged kids,” he recalled. “Maybe I was insecure, but I knew Vassar wasn’t the place for me.”

  THE FALL SEMESTER of her senior year, Meryl did the last thing someone bemoaning a crumbling matriarchy would do. She spent the term at all-male Dartmouth as part of a twelve-school exc
hange, one of sixty women on a campus of nearly four thousand. It was the mirror image of Vassar.

  When she got to campus in late 1970, she realized what she was in for. Like the men at Vassar, the women who had crash-landed in Hanover, New Hampshire, were a novelty, often an unwelcome one. “They really didn’t want us here,” she recalled. “There was an us-and-them feel to campus.”

  One day, Meryl and a girlfriend were studying in the corridor of Baker Library and had to use the bathroom, which was on the other end of the room. They could feel the eyes of male students on them, so they waited and waited, until they couldn’t anymore. As they crossed the library, the boys started tapping their toes in rhythm with their footsteps. Then they started pounding their hands on the desks. “It was completely hostile,” Meryl said.

  Dartmouth’s social scene was dominated by the fraternities on Webster Avenue. One night, Meryl’s classmate Carol Dudley saw a desk careen out of a window. Moments later, two men in a drunken brawl rolled down three flights of stairs and out into the snow, wearing nothing but shorts. Meryl would balk at the women who would “bust into houses like cattle to the slaughter,” disdainful of the rigid gender roles she had only recently learned to transcend at Vassar.

  Academic life was similarly jarring. “I got straight A’s. My eyes crossed when I got the printout,” she would recall. “At Vassar they had a party in the English Department when the first A was given out in twenty years. At Dartmouth, it seemed to me, A’s were conferred with ease and detachment. ‘Ah,’ I said to myself, ‘that’s the difference between the men’s and women’s colleges.’ We made A’s the old-fashioned way. We earned them. At the men’s schools, they seemed to be lubricants in the law-school squeeze, and a fond alma mater was anxious to see her boys do well.”