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  In improvisation exercises, she was more inventive, as if dozens of possibilities swarmed her head when one would do. At one point, Haas told them each to walk through a fake door and wordlessly communicate where they were coming from and where they were going. They couldn’t use their faces, just their bodies. Meryl was wearing a long caftan with a hood. As she stood facing the door, she pulled her arms inside and turned the caftan around so that the hood was covering her head. Her face was not only expressionless but obscured. “Even in the way she did the exercise, she beat us,” Walt Jones said.

  In Moni Yakim’s movement class, the students were instructed to blow around the room like leaves in the wind. The actors wafted about, arms akimbo, trying not to make eye contact lest they burst into laughter. “All of us were blowing around the room making asses of ourselves, and she was in what looked like a modern-dance position up against the wall,” Jones recalled. Another student blew by and asked, “What’s up with you?” Meryl answered dryly: “I got caught on a twig.”

  A new phrase entered circulation: “to Streep it up.” William Ivey Long defined it this way: “Take the stage. Own your character. Make us look at you.” For better or worse, she was now setting the standard for her own classmates.

  She undercut her burgeoning reputation with playful humor. One day after a rehearsal, she and Jones were goofing off at the piano. Jones pretended to be her accompanist in a nightclub act as she sang the Roberta Flack song “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” “How long do you think I can hold that note?” she asked him. He played the phrase “the first tiiime.” As Meryl held the note, Jones ran to the lobby and pretended to make a phone call. When he got back, she was still singing “tiiime.” He sat down, played the next chord, and the song continued. “It was just for us,” he said. “There was nobody else there.”

  After drilling the students’ death scenes for weeks on end, Haas finally moved on. They would perform Chekhov’s Three Sisters, but with a few twists. Each actor would pull the name of a character from a hat, regardless of gender. Meryl picked Masha, the middle sister. In their scenes, they were allowed to speak only in numbers, or to isolate a single word from each line and repeat it over and over. The idea was to find the potency within the poetry, to dive beneath language and return with pearls of subtext.

  Alan Rosenberg was playing Solyony, the boorish army captain. In one scene, he proclaims that when women philosophize, the result is “nothing.” Masha snaps back, “What do you mean, you dreadful man?” Meryl reduced the line to the word “what,” which she hurled at Rosenberg like a fusillade of darts. “What.” “What?” “WHAT.” “It had to be thirty times,” Jones recalled. “And Alan kind of shrunk back into the floor.”

  In truth, he was falling into a deep infatuation.

  “I was in painfully unrequited love with Meryl,” Rosenberg said. Since they both lived in New Jersey, they would travel together on holidays. He visited her over Christmas and met her family. Some weekends, they’d go to New York—maybe to catch the new Ingmar Bergman movie, maybe just to crash at a friend’s place, where they’d play guitar and sing and forget to go outside. Rosenberg didn’t take Haas’s improv games seriously, and his irreverence rubbed off on Meryl. “She’d be a bit of a bad girl with me sometimes,” he recalled. In January, 1973, they went to Washington to protest Nixon’s second inauguration. Meryl wasn’t as politically minded as Rosenberg, but she skipped classes to go. The faculty noted her absence.

  The problem, at least for Rosenberg, was Phil Casnoff. When he visited on breaks from Godspell, the other students took note of his pretty-boy good looks. Not only was Meryl the perfect fencer, tumbler, singer, and improviser: she had a perfect-looking boyfriend, too. But Phil was barely around, and even when he was, he would float on the margins of the drama students’ close-knit, high-stress little world. Meryl drifted closer to Rosenberg, juggling the attentions of two very different suitors: Prince Charming and the Court Jester.

  Meanwhile, the Three Sisters exercise reached its culmination, a three-hour-long presentation for the faculty. Michael Posnick, a directing teacher, recalled, “Center stage was a sofa. On the sofa was Meryl Streep in the role of Masha with a book. She was lying down on the sofa holding the book, reading the book. And I became aware that she was humping the sofa. And I suddenly saw something about Masha that I had never understood or seen before.”

  Posnick, like others, had come to realize that Meryl was up to something far more ambitious than her classmates. She was taking more risks, making stranger choices. By the spring term, the first-year students were calling themselves the Meryl Streep Class, though the phrase might have carried a tinge of resentment. And then Haas did something no one anticipated: he put her on probation.

  It didn’t make sense. “Our class names ourselves the Meryl Streep Class, and this asshole puts the namesake of the class on probation!” William Ivey Long said. “Of course, we all assumed he was jealous of her. Everyone was just in revolt of him because of this behavior.” Rosenberg worried that it was because she was spending too much time with him. He never got put on warning, because no one had any expectations of him. With her, it was different.

  “What Tom said to us is that there is nothing that she can’t do, but I don’t think she’s pushing herself hard enough,” said Walt Jones, who noticed that Haas had been in tears by the end of Three Sisters. “And I remember thinking that that was bullshit. I mean, who could do more than she did?”

  Even the staff was mystified. In one faculty meeting, Haas said of her talent, “No, I don’t trust it. It doesn’t seem to have future potential.” Posnick couldn’t believe what he was hearing: it was like standing in front of the Empire State Building and complaining that it’s blocking the sun.

  “He said that I was holding back my talent out of fear of competing with my fellow students,” Meryl would recall. “There was some truth in that, but there was no reason to put me on warning. I was just trying to be a nice guy, get my M.A. and get out of drama school.” Besides, she was beginning to doubt Haas’s whole conception of character. “He said, ‘The minute you come into a room in a play, the audience should know who you are.’ I feel that the minute you leave a room, half the audience should know who you are, and the other half should be in complete disagreement with them.”

  Branded a problem child for the first time, Meryl burrowed into her work. The acting students were rehearsing Gorky’s The Lower Depths, set in a Russian boardinghouse for the destitute. This was the first time the older classes at the drama school would see the first-years at work. Albert Innaurato, then a second-year playwright, attended expecting—maybe even hoping for—a train wreck. “Everyone was saying, ‘They’re awful, they couldn’t find anybody good. And the pretty one is just horrible. She’s just really bad.’”

  The “pretty one” was Meryl Streep, who was playing the keeper’s wife. At the climax of Act III, she attacks her own sister in a jealous rage, pushing her down the stairs and scalding her with a bucket of hot water. In the lobby afterward, there was talk of the “charming” actress playing Vassilisa, despite the violence she had just inflicted onstage. “I knew this girl was obviously destined for something very big,” Michael Feingold said, “because if you can do that and have everyone talk about how charming you are, you obviously have some hold over an audience.”

  Even Brustein got a taste of Meryl’s abilities. In December, he flew back from London for eight days. On the afternoon of the last day of classes, the school held a Christmas party at the Cabaret. Orange juice and vodka were on the tables, and students performed ribald interpretations of fifties pop songs. After a long semester, it was a welcome opportunity to blow off steam. But, for the first-year students, it was another audition of sorts: their chance to make an impression on the all-powerful dean. In his memoir, Brustein wrote, “I took special note of a very beautiful and talented first-year actress from Vassar named Meryl Streep.” He had finally found someone with the “languorous sexual quali
ty combined with a sense of comedy” to play Lulu in Frank Wedekind’s Earth Spirit, though he never did get to see her in the part. What he didn’t realize was how little Tom Haas cared for her supposed talents.

  Relief, of sorts, came in the spring, when Haas was pulled away to direct a Brecht play at the Yale Rep. Allan Miller, an associate acting professor, came in to direct the first-years. No one was pained to see Haas go, but they were unnerved. Whereas Haas was academic, Miller was more “street.” A Brooklyn guy with no appetite for bullshit, he preferred scene studies to improvisations. It was a completely different approach.

  Miller had mentored a young Barbra Streisand when she was just fifteen, and later coached her during rehearsals for Funny Girl. When he got to Yale, he thought the student actors were “pretty intelligent” but “hardly ever visceral.” He was blunt in his criticisms, and proud of the fact that he didn’t filter his thoughts or lard them with tact. He was also coming off an eighteen-year marriage. Meryl was taken aback one day when he asked her out on a date. It was a Friday night, and he was going to see a show at the Yale Rep. Would she come? “She was a little weirded out by it and said no,” Rosenberg said. She told him she already had plans with her boyfriend from New York. Rebuffed, Miller asked out Meryl’s classmate Laura Zucker, who accepted.

  As the term went on, the students became aware that Miller and Zucker were a couple. Meanwhile, his treatment of Meryl hardened. “There was no question about her talent—she was brilliant some of the time, but cold,” Miller said. He started calling her the Ice Princess in faculty meetings. In class, he would scold her for not trying hard enough. Maybe, on some level, she wasn’t. But the students suspected Miller and Zucker were teaming up on Meryl. “They expressed their vociferous and vindictive feelings passively at first,” Walt Jones said, “but it grew.”

  The semester culminated with a production of Shaw’s Major Barbara. Miller thought that Meryl’s “great galloping zeal” would be right for the title role, the moralistic Salvation Army girl who spars with her father, an arms industrialist. He cast Zucker as Barbara’s mother. In rehearsal, she would glower at Meryl with a look that said: “She’s not that great, really.” At night, she’d needle Miller: “How come I’m sleeping with the director and I don’t get the part of Major Barbara?”

  Miller pushed the students to ground Shaw’s pronouncements in rage, disgust, or self-doubt. But no matter how hard Meryl tried, she couldn’t please Miller. “She was having a miserable time with him,” Walt Jones said. “She didn’t know what he was actually trying to say to her. She was doing everything she could, but he was pushing her like she wasn’t.” The other students were struggling, too. One actor was so irked by Miller that he raised his fist at him, but at the last moment punched the wall instead of the director’s face.

  During one improvisation, Miller threw out a suggestion and noticed Meryl shaking it off like a bad scent, turning her back to him. “Come on, Meryl, let it out,” he urged her. “She whipped around at me with this terrific look of both desire and pain, and then stopped,” Miller recalled. “She stopped the emotional flow. She didn’t want to be vulnerable, and that’s why her nickname was the Ice Princess.”

  Meryl found Miller’s tactics “manipulative.” She was skeptical about the concept of mining her own pain, believing that misery was irrelevant to artistry. What her instructors saw as laziness or evasion was a growing intellectual revolt against the orthodoxy of Method acting, which had shaped the previous generation of actors. She wasn’t willing to excavate her personal demons to fuel Major Barbara’s. She preferred imagination—and thought that Miller’s approach was “a lot of bullshit.” “He delved into personal lives in a way I found obnoxious,” she said later. Then again, maybe she was holding something back.

  By most accounts, though, Meryl’s Major Barbara was an object lesson in “Streeping it up.” “They’d gotten rid of the artificiality,” Feingold said. “This was generally true, but not everybody in the class did it with Meryl’s fervor.”

  The Monday after the performance, the cast gathered in the studio for a formal evaluation. (The students had taken to calling them “devaluations.”) One by one, the faculty critiqued the actors, starting with the minor parts and working up to the leads. The movement teacher would declare, “Well, you cahn’t really move.” The voice teacher would trill, “Your accent was a disgrrrrace!”

  “It was a bloodbath,” said Walt Jones, who played Barbara’s father. “We were all crisped, but Meryl got it between the eyes. A final dose of Allan’s vitriol he had been giving her throughout the term.”

  By the end, she was holding back tears. But then, so was everyone.

  The students were stunned. The easiest target, they reasoned, was the most preposterous target. Meryl had delivered something that Miller couldn’t recognize, and certainly couldn’t take credit for. So better to tear it down, in public.

  At the end of the semester, Allan Miller left Yale. So did Laura Zucker. Not long after, they moved to Los Angeles together and got married. The acting class was down one.

  Meryl was torn about whether Yale had a place for her. She had friends there, including the smitten Alan Rosenberg. But her teachers had been dismissive at best, authoritarian at worst. Much of this was trickle-down from Brustein. “They were very influenced by Bob’s high-handedness and meanness,” Innaurato said. In the absence of a coherent power structure, the students had found solidarity in each other. “We were allowed to feel ownership of our time, of our year,” William Ivey Long recalled.

  In the kitchen of their yellow Victorian house, Meryl poured out her grievances to Long, whom she affectionately called “Wi’m.” If she was as flawed an actress as they claimed, why stay? Then again: If she was as talented as her classmates seemed to believe, why give up?

  If she had learned anything her first year, it was tenacity. Maybe if she worked hard—even harder than she had on Major Barbara—someone with sway would recognize her.

  And then Robert Brustein came back.

  ON SEPTEMBER 5TH, 1973, the Yale School of Drama assembled in the University Theatre. The man who walked out onstage was known only to the third-year class, which now included Sigourney Weaver and Christopher Durang. To the rest, he had lived only in legend: the indomitable Robert Brustein, here to give his welcome address.

  “It’s a curious sensation to see so many unfamiliar faces gathered together in this auditorium,” he said from the podium. “For the first time since I’ve been Dean, I find it necessary to introduce myself not only to the incoming class, but to the second year as well.” He looked out over those faces, including Meryl Streep’s. “Still,” he went on, “you can be certain, given the small size of the school and the intimate nature of the work, that we’ll all get to know each other fairly fast.”

  For the uninitiated, Brustein laid out his ideals—and his disappointment when they weren’t met. “I still find it flabbergasting that a performer could turn down a series of challenging roles in exciting plays, earning a decent wage among a community of artists, for a chance at a television series, a film, or a minor part in some commercial play,” he proclaimed. “It’s rather like a writer working all his life to be a novelist, and when a publisher finally offers him a contract for a book, rejecting the offer for the sake of a more highly paid job in advertising.”

  Over the summer, Brustein had become obsessed with the unfolding Watergate scandal. He even did a dead-on Nixon impression. As someone who ruled his own small kingdom with a tight fist, he was tickled by the foibles of the powerful. But the scandal troubled him.

  “Some years ago,” he continued, “in a spirit of optimistic renewal, some Americans were proclaiming that we were a Woodstock nation. From this vantage point, it seems more accurate to call us a Watergate nation. All of us—young and old, culture and counter-culture, men and women, politicians and artists—must bear the taint of that event.”

  He concluded: “The American theatre is now testing our character
s, and our parts in it will determine its future. If the profession fails the test, it has joined the Watergate nation, and helped to deliver the country over to its betrayers. To change the face of theatre, then, we must change our own faces, keep the faith, and try to rekindle the light that once kept our hearts aflame.”

  Lofty stuff, but not everyone was sold. “He arrived with a red Mercedes that he brought from London,” one of the acting students recalled. “Then he gave a big speech about how we never should go into the theater as a way to make money. I’m looking at the red Mercedes, I’m looking at this guy, and I’m thinking: Who is this guy?”

  Brustein had decided to overhaul the acting program, which he observed was “rife with factionalism, competitiveness, backbiting.” He later wrote, “My resolve was strengthened when I discovered, soon after returning from England, that the actress who had impressed me so much the previous year, Meryl Streep, had been put on probation.”

  Chief among his worries was the absence of a guiding philosophy. To that end, he had brought in Bobby Lewis as “master teacher.” Lewis was a legend in the profession. As an original member of the Group Theatre, along with Harold Clurman, Stella Adler, and Lee Strasberg, he had helped popularize the Method in American acting. In Hollywood, he had acted alongside Charlie Chaplin and Katharine Hepburn.

  Some of the students found Lewis (and Method training) old-fashioned. “There was a tradition about him that seemed dated to us,” Walt Jones said, “but I don’t know who we thought we were.” Once again, they were getting instructional whiplash. “Every year, there’d be a coup d’état,” Meryl recalled. “The new guy would come in and say, ‘Whatever you learned last year, don’t worry about it. This is going to be a new approach.’”

  Still, it was hard to resist Lewis’s Elmer Fudd voice (“I’m whiting my memwaws”) or his eccentric teaching style. With his golden retriever, Caesar, at his side, he would spout anecdotes about himself and the greats: Marlon Brando, Charlie Chaplin. Then he would tell the same stories a second time, or a third. It was a wonder anyone got to act.