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  Even so, the counterculture was more visible at Dartmouth than it had been at Vassar. The boys wore their hair long—it looked like “Vassar from behind,” Meryl recalled. Raggedy clothes were in, and “the social life was incredibly open,” Dudley said, “because anybody could afford old T-shirts or whatever from the Army Navy store. Everybody had an old banger. And you could be totally cool without spending anything, other than drinks in the dorms, and the chip was either fifty cents or a dollar for a keg of beer.”

  In her isolation, Meryl took solace in the beauty of the Upper Valley. When she wasn’t waitressing at the Hanover Inn, she would read on the shores of the Connecticut River, or go to Rollins Chapel to sing to herself. It was always empty. That was the way she liked it. She tried out for a play, but lost the only female role to her best friend. She was the only woman in her dance class. In playwriting class, taught by the Trinidadian professor Errol Hill, she wrote feminist dramas: “highly symbolic, metaphorical, serious but funny” treatments of women’s lib.

  She may have taken some of her zeal from Gloria Steinem, who had delivered the commencement address at Vassar that spring. In a speech titled “Living the Revolution,” Steinem told the class of 1970, “Men’s hunting activities are forever being pointed to as proof of tribal superiority. But while they were out hunting, women built houses, tilled the fields, developed animal husbandry, and perfected language. Men, isolated from each other out there in the bush, often developed into creatures that were fleet of foot, but not very bright.”

  Meryl’s thesis project at Dartmouth was on costume design. She spent hours on the linoleum floor of her dorm room in the Choates, sketching costumes from different periods of theatrical history: pantaloons and petticoats and corsets and bustles. By winter, she had a portfolio spanning the ages, apparitions of women she might have been, or could become.

  Carol Dudley had noticed a difference between Vassar’s educational style and Dartmouth’s. “The women at Vassar would tend to take notes seriously and regurgitate stuff,” she recalled. “Whereas I found the men’s thought to be much more freewheeling, that they had more ideas that were theirs and were willing to argue their turf.” It wasn’t that the men were smarter. They had been pushed to be vocal and argumentative in class, while the Seven Sisters schools still had the vestigial whiff of “gracious living.”

  Meryl noticed it, too. “I remember thinking, at Vassar, people would sit quietly and answer questions with judicial, thoughtful, ruminative answers,” she said. At Dartmouth, no sooner did the professor start asking a question than five guys were trying to answer. “It was very inspiring. It was something I didn’t have in me,” she said. “The climate and the expectation were playing to the proactive.”

  As 1970 turned to 1971, Meryl packed her bags and headed back to Poughkeepsie. It hadn’t been easy being so outnumbered by men, but those few months in Hanover had fortified her. In class, she mimicked the enterprise she had seen at Dartmouth. Before her professors even finished asking a question, she would thrust her hand up and say, “I don’t even think that question is valid.” It didn’t matter that she had no idea what the question was. She had seen both sides of the gender looking glass, and as any Alice in Wonderland knows, things only get curiouser and curiouser.

  PROFESSOR ATKINSON COULDN’T stop putting her in plays: Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan, Molière’s The Miser. In March of her final term, she was in The London Merchant, George Lillo’s tragedy from 1731. Atkinson chose the play in part because it offered a good role for Meryl: Sarah Millwood, a prostitute who coerces her lover to steal for her. He winds up murdering his uncle, and the couple is sent to the gallows.

  Once again, the action onstage mirrored the gender war in the dorms. Disparaged as a “deceitful, cruel, bloody woman,” Millwood unloads on the male sex: “Men of all degrees, and all professions, I have known, yet found no difference, but in their several capacities; all were alike wicked to the utmost of their power.”

  Meryl tapped into the rage she had displayed in Miss Julie. Maybe she was thinking of the Dartmouth boys who had pounded their fists on her way to the library bathroom. Or maybe the times had gotten to her. The previous April, President Nixon had authorized the invasion of Cambodia, and the escalation was hotly debated on campus. Meryl had gotten a taste of the antiwar movement at Yale, where she and Bob Levin hung “We Won’t Go!” signs as students heckled them from their dorm windows. But at Vassar she felt disillusioned by the rallies and the bonfires—they all seemed to be dominated by boys, who were still a minority. When Meryl saw them holding forth on the quad, they reminded her of Abbie Hoffman wannabes, performing for a swarm of adoring girls. It was theater, but not the good kind.

  Whatever was driving her, it erupted like lava during her final speech in The London Merchant. “The audience was just cheering as if it was an operatic aria,” said Evert Sprinchorn, who played the merchant Thorowgood. “When I read descriptions of nineteenth-century plays, it sometimes says, when there’s a piece of bravura acting, ‘The audience rose at her.’ Well, when I was onstage with Meryl Streep I felt exactly that—the audiences rising at us.”

  The Miscellany News agreed: “Meryl Streep coos, connives, weeps and screams her character alive,” it raved. “It is a roll [sic] with which Ms. Streep is familiar. Through her performances as ‘Miss Julie,’ Moliere’s Frosine of ‘The Miser’ and now as Millwood, Ms. Streep is acquiring an image.”

  Despite the praise, Meryl kept wondering whether acting was a legitimate way to make a living; for a time, she couldn’t decide whether to major in drama or economics. But Atkinson believed in her, enough to bring her to New York before she had the chance to graduate. In April of 1971, she made her professional debut, in Atkinson’s production of Tirso de Molina’s The Playboy of Seville, an early Spanish dramatization of the seductions of Don Juan. Meryl played the peasant Tisbea, one of his conquests.

  The play went up at the Cubiculo Theater, a subterranean seventy-five-seater nicknamed The Cube, on Fifty-first Street off Ninth Avenue. It wasn’t the cleanest part of town, but it was New York. Atkinson had brought a handful of Vassar girls down on their spring break, the talented ones like Meryl who could hold their own against the pros.

  Philip LeStrange was a New York actor playing Catalinon. He had acted with Meryl at Vassar, in The Miser, and she seemed to him like someone without a care in the world. Backstage, the girls would tally the laughs they were getting night to night—one of them even kept a chart, which she’d check off during the scenes. But Meryl wasn’t counting. Meryl was watching. The same was true of The Playboy of Seville. “Even in production,” LeStrange said, “she would be at a vantage point where she would be, again, watching.”

  What did she see? Among other things, she saw Michael Moriarty, the thirty-year-old actor playing the title role. Erratic, handsome, with a high forehead and intense eyes, Moriarty had a quavering, disassociated voice, like he was about to snap. He played Don Juan like a cool cat, almost bored to death.

  He didn’t make it through the three-week run. Midway through, he got cast in a Broadway show and quit. Unlike The Playboy of Seville, it was a paying gig. Atkinson scrambled for another Don Juan and found one, albeit with a completely different approach to the part. For Meryl, it was a glimpse at the winds of show business, and far from the last time she’d cross paths with Moriarty.

  She returned to Vassar, still unsure what to do with her life. She knew she was good at acting; her friends in the second row at Miss Julie had told her so. But when she thought of her holiest moments onstage, her mind kept returning to Sondra Green’s speech class.

  Meryl had become one of Green’s most beloved students at Vassar. She was one of five handpicked for Green’s advanced class in “the fundamentals of speech.” Green didn’t like improvisations, but she was curious about what Meryl would do with the assignment she had in mind.

  “I had never given it to anybody before and I never gave it to anybody after,” she recalle
d. “I told all the students I was going to go pick up my mail, and I would be back in five minutes, so they had that much time to prepare the improvisations I would assign to them. It doesn’t matter what I told the other students. With Meryl, I told her to simply get up on the stage and that she would be taking her final curtain call after fifty years in the theater.” Think of Helen Hayes, Green told her.

  When she came back, she had Meryl stand onstage behind a curtain. She instructed the other students to applaud wildly and yell “Brava!” The curtain opened, revealing a girl of no more than twenty-one. But she carried herself like a woman of sixty years or more, someone who had taken countless curtain calls on countless stages.

  She stepped forward, clasping her hands and bowing regally to her audience of five. Then she opened her arms and gave a speech.

  “This is as much your curtain call as it is mine,” she said grandly. “We have done this together, through all of these many wonderful years . . .”

  Green was transported. So was Meryl, who was in tears.

  “I’d never made myself cry before, even when I wanted to, you know, to get something when I was younger,” Meryl recalled, many years, and many curtain calls, later. “I was never able to do that, but this really killed me . . . It was just sort of a glimpse into an imaginative leap that I thought, Ooh, you know, you can thoroughly sort of lose yourself in this thing.”

  She had gone back into the church of make-believe—and discovered herself, fifty years in the future.

  MIKE BOOTH HAD finally found another adventure. His mother, in her unyielding quest to get him to move on with his life, had shown him a catalog for the University of the Americas, in Mexico. On the cover was a picture of two snowcapped volcanoes, Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl. It looked beautiful. It looked like a place where he could get away from the past.

  Back home on break, he got a job at a shoe store in downtown Bernardsville. A few days after he started, Meryl walked in the door. In her scarf and long coat, she looked worldlier somehow. Her cheerleader skip had become a swagger.

  They met up a couple times, just as friends. Mike no longer felt like the sad sack he’d been when he first came home. Now he was a swashbuckler, a globetrotter. And he had met a girl in Mexico. He made sure to mention her to Meryl when they were back at his place.

  “She’s beautiful, and she’s half-Mexican,” he said, thinking back to the summer she’d bragged about her Ivy League suitors.

  “Really?” Meryl said, perhaps with a flicker of regret. They had watched each other change over these breaks in Bernardsville, each time drifting further and further apart. Back in high school, their world had been so small and safe. Now they no longer made sense together. The boy she had once confided in about James Joyce had found a new chunk of the world to get lost in.

  But she had found something, too, something just as entrancing and all her own. On one of their breaks, she had told him excitedly, “I finally did some acting at Vassar.”

  “No kidding.”

  Meryl said she’d been in a play called Miss Julie. She’d been covered in fake canary blood, and all her friends had come and laughed their heads off.

  “Can I do a scene for you?”

  Mike snapped to attention as Meryl transformed into Miss Julie at her most withering, after Jean has defiled her: “You lackey! You shoeshine boy! Stand up when I talk to you!”

  In hindsight, Mike wondered whether she had chosen the scene for a reason. Was some of Miss Julie’s rage directed at him—latent anger or disappointment about the way things had worked out between them? As he watched, the source of her emotions didn’t occur to him. He simply marveled. He hadn’t seen her do any acting since Daisy Mae. Nothing like this.

  Man, he thought, has she come a long way.

  SHE GRADUATED FROM Vassar on May 30, 1971. The commencement speaker was Eleanor Holmes Norton, the black feminist leader and future congresswoman. Still wondering whether she should apply to law school, Meryl returned to the Upper Valley. Some friends of hers had started a theater company in New Hampshire. She was all set to join them, until she found a better offer.

  One day, she and her friend Peter Maeck, who had been in her playwriting class at Dartmouth, were flipping through the campus newspaper and saw an ad for a new summer-stock company called the Green Mountain Guild. It paid $48 a week—not bad. Peter and Meryl drove to Woodstock, Vermont, to audition. They both got in.

  Its founder was Robert O’Neill-Butler, a theater professor who ran the company with his younger wife, Marj. O’Neill-Butler was grand and a bit tyrannical. The actors, who called him “O-B,” could never quite tell if he was British. Offstage, Meryl sang jazz standards she’d learned from her mother and played with O-B’s six-month-old son, whom she nicknamed Crazy Legs.

  They would travel from town to town, putting on plays in Stowe and Killington and Quechee, sleeping in lodges and bunkrooms, everyone crashing together commune-style. One night as they all went to bed, Maeck deadpanned, “So this is the theater.” They all cracked up in the pitch-black.

  Nothing felt serious, especially acting. In John Van Druten’s The Voice of the Turtle, Meryl and Peter Maeck had to eat milk and cookies. In the middle of a scene, Meryl raced offstage, then walked calmly back on and said, “Sorry, I had a cookie stuck in my throat. Now, where were we?”

  O-B assigned them Affairs of State, a hoary 1950 boulevard comedy. Peter Parnell, another Dartmouth friend, was playing a politician who falls in love with his secretary. Meryl played the secretary, a part Celeste Holm had originated on Broadway. Left to their own devices, the young actors found the script so old-fashioned that they secretly rewrote it as a campy genre parody, with Parnell imitating Cary Grant and Meryl doing mousy-secretary-turned-bombshell. When O-B showed up on opening night, he was aghast—but too late to stop them.

  As the weather cooled, O-B transformed the summer-stock company into winter-stock. Meryl and three other actors moved into an old farmhouse in Woodstock with a mile-long driveway. When it snowed, which it did almost constantly, the place felt like a colonial homestead, something out of a fairy tale. “It was really quite idyllic,” Maeck recalled. “We’d rehearse right in the house and cook for each other and have friends over. It was really quite the life.”

  They performed in ski lodges and barns and converted restaurants, storing their props on unused tray racks or whatever was at hand. The audiences were tired and sunburnt after a day on the slopes. Sometimes Meryl would hear snoring in the dark. She sold ads for the programs and wrote plays, which she didn’t show to anyone. She starred in Shaw’s Candida in a beautiful old barn, and her parents came from New Jersey to see it. On New Year’s Eve, some Dartmouth friends drove up from Boston in two Volkswagen Beetles. The first day of 1972, they woke up bleary-eyed and happy.

  But she was feeling restless. Fun as her little “dilettante group” was, she knew that better theater was being done elsewhere. She was ready to be a real actress, whatever that meant. On a day off, she and Maeck went down to New York so Meryl could audition for the National Shakespeare Company, a touring troupe that operated the Cubiculo, where she’d done The Playboy of Seville. She thought the audition went well, but they rejected her, “which she just found crazy and unbelievable,” Maeck said.

  She figured if she was going to act—really act, not frolic around in ski lodges—she would have to study acting. She looked at applications for the two top drama schools in the country, Juilliard and Yale. The application fee for Yale was $15. For Juilliard it was $50, more than she was making in a week. Meryl wrote Juilliard a letter dripping with self-righteousness—something like, “This just shows what kind of cross-section of the population you get at your school.”

  That left Yale. Like most places, the drama school required two audition monologues, one modern and one classical. For modern, she picked an old standby: Blanche DuBois, A Streetcar Named Desire. For classical, something stately: Portia from The Merchant of Venice. “The quality of mercy is not st
rained; / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven . . .”

  In that snow-covered farmhouse, she drilled her speeches. The thrill of it came in switching back and forth. One minute she was neurotic, sexually frustrated, sweating in the New Orleans heat. The next, she was brainy, cool, pontificating about the quality of mercy. The thrill of it was metamorphosis. That she could do.

  From Woodstock, it was a straight shot down to New Haven. In late February, the spires of Yale were just beginning to thaw in the resurgent sun. Wearing a long dress, she was greeted there by Chuck Levin, a first-year acting student. He was the brother of Bob Levin, her Yalie ex-boyfriend. Meryl and Bob had broken up when he graduated and moved to North Carolina. They had talked vaguely about marriage (cohabitation wasn’t an option), but once again Meryl’s father had kept her on the straight and narrow. His ultimatum to Bob: “You want to provide for her? Pay for her last two years of school.” That was the end of that.

  At Yale, Chuck ushered her to a former fraternity building that had been taken over by the drama school. Up a musty flight of stairs was a rehearsal room with a small wooden stage. As Chuck waited outside, Meryl stood in front of a panel of professors. She showed them Venice. She showed them New Orleans.

  Peter Maeck was staring out the window of the farmhouse when he saw Meryl’s Nash Rambler huffing up the snowy driveway. She popped out of the car and climbed up the steps—she was practically strutting. She fixed her glowing eyes on him and smiled.

  “I knocked ’em dead.”

  Constance

  SIGOURNEY WEAVER. Christopher Durang. Wendy Wasserstein. Meryl Streep. The talents who converged at the Yale School of Drama between 1972 and 1975 would cement those years as the school’s undisputed golden age. They would work together for decades, even as Broadway and blockbusters and Pulitzer Prizes catapulted their careers. For now, they were bright young actors and playwrights and eccentrics, sewing costumes and stumbling through Chekhov amid the ivied walls of Yale.