Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep

247 Pages·2016·2.3 MB·English

by  Schulman

DEDICATION
For Jaime
EPIGRAPH
“Can I just say? There is no such thing as the best actress. There is no
such thing as the greatest living actress. I am in a position where I have
secret information, you know, that I know this to be true.”
—MERYL STREEP, 2009
CONTENTS
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Mary
Julie
Constance
Isabella
Fredo
Linda
Joanna
Supporting Characters
Acknowledgments
Notes
Photos Section
About the Author

Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
NOT ALL MOVIE STARS are created equal. If you were to trap all of
Hollywood in amber and study it, like an ancient ecosystem buried beneath
layers of sediment and rock, you’d discover a latticework of unspoken
hierarchies, thwarted ambitions, and compromises dressed up as career moves.
The best time and place to conduct such an archeological survey would
undoubtedly be in late winter at 6801 Hollywood Boulevard, where they hand
out the Academy Awards.
By now, of course, the Oscars are populated as much by movie stars as by
hangers-on: publicists, stylists, red-carpet correspondents, stylists and publicists
of red-carpet correspondents. The nominee is like a ship’s hull supporting a
small community of barnacles. Cutting through hordes of photographers and
flacks and assistants trying to stay out of the frame, she has endured months of
luncheons and screenings and speculation. Now, a trusted handler will lead her
through the thicket, into the hall where her fate lies in an envelope.
The 84th Academy Awards are no different. It’s February 26, 2012, and the
scene outside the Kodak Theatre is a pandemonium of a zillion micromanaged
parts. Screaming spectators in bleachers wait on one side of a triumphal arch
through which the contenders arrive in choreographed succession. Gelled
television personalities await with questions: Are they nervous? Is it their first
time here? And whom, in the unsettling parlance, are they wearing? There are
established movie stars (Gwyneth Paltrow, in a white Tom Ford cape), newly
minted starlets (Emma Stone, in a red Giambattista Valli neck bow bigger than
her head). If you care to notice, there are men: Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks, George
Clooney. For some reason, there’s a nun.
Most of the attention, though, belongs to the women, and the ones nominated
for Best Actress bear special scrutiny. There’s Michelle Williams, pixie-like in a
sleek red Louis Vuitton dress. Rooney Mara, a punk princess in her white
Givenchy gown and forbidding black bangs. Viola Davis, in a lustrous green
Vera Wang. And Glenn Close, nominated for Albert Nobbs, looking slyly
androgynous in a Zac Posen gown and matching tuxedo jacket.
But it’s the fifth nominee who will give them all a run for their money, and
when she arrives, like a monarch come to greet her subjects, her appearance
projects victory.
Meryl Streep is in gold.
Specifically, she is wearing a Lanvin gold lamé gown, draped around her
frame like a Greek goddess’s toga. The accessories are just as sharp: dangling
gold earrings, a mother-of-pearl minaudière, and Salvatore Ferragamo gold
lizard sandals. As more than a few observers point out, she looks not unlike an
Oscar herself. One fashion blog asks: “Do you agree that this is the best she has
ever looked?” The implication: not bad for a sixty-three-year-old.
Most of all, the gold number says one thing: It’s my year. But is it?
Consider the odds. Yes, she has won two Oscars already, but the last time
was in 1983. And while she has been nominated a record-breaking seventeen
times, she has also lost a record-breaking fourteen times, putting her firmly in
Susan Lucci territory. Meryl Streep is accustomed to losing Oscars.
And consider the movie. No one thinks that The Iron Lady, in which she
played a braying Margaret Thatcher, is cinematic genius. While her performance
has the trappings of Oscar bait—historical figure, age prosthetics, accent work—
they’re the same qualities that have pigeonholed her for decades. In his New
York Times review, A. O. Scott put it this way: “Stiff legged and slow moving,
behind a discreetly applied ton of geriatric makeup, Ms. Streep provides, once
again, a technically flawless impersonation that also seems to reveal the inner
essence of a well-known person.” All nice words, but strung together they carry
a whiff of fatigue.
As she drags her husband, Don Gummer, down the red carpet, an
entertainment reporter sticks a microphone in her face.
“Do you ever get nervous on carpets like this, even though you’re such a
pro?”
“Yes, you should feel my heart—but you’re not allowed to,” she answers
dryly.
“Do you have any good-luck charms on you?” the reporter persists.
“Yes,” she says, a little impatiently. “I have shoes that Ferragamo made—
because he made all of Margaret Thatcher’s shoes.”
Turning to the bleachers, she gives a little shimmy, and the crowd roars with
delight. With that, she takes her husband’s hand and heads inside.
They wouldn’t be the Academy Awards if they weren’t endless. Before she
can find out if she’s this year’s Best Actress, a number of formalities will have to
be endured. Billy Crystal will do his shtick. (“Nothing can take the sting out of
the world’s economic problems like watching millionaires present each other
with golden statues.”) Christopher Plummer, at eighty-two, will become the
oldest person to be named Best Supporting Actor. (“When I emerged from my
mother’s womb I was already rehearsing my Academy speech.”) Cirque du
Soleil will perform an acrobatic tribute to the magic of cinema.
Finally, Colin Firth comes out to present the award for Best Actress. As he
recites the names of the nominees, she takes deep, fortifying breaths, her gold
earrings trembling above her shoulders. A short clip plays of Thatcher scolding
an American dignitary (“Shall I be mother? Tea, Al?”), then Firth opens the
envelope and grins.
“And the Oscar goes to Meryl Streep.”
THE MERYL STREEP acceptance speech is an art form unto itself: at once
spontaneous and scripted, humble and haughty, grateful and blasé. Of course, the
fact that there are so many of them is part of the joke. Who but Meryl Streep has
won so many prizes that self-deprecating nonchalance has itself become a
running gag? By now, it seems as if the title Greatest Living Actress has affixed
itself to her about as long as Elizabeth II has been the queen of England.
Superlatives stick to her like thumbtacks: she is a god among actors, able to
disappear into any character, master any genre, and, Lord knows, nail any
accent. Far from fading into the usual post-fifty obsolescence, she has defied
Hollywood calculus and reached a career high. No other actress born before
1960 can even get a part unless Meryl passes on it first.
From her breakout roles in the late seventies, she was celebrated for the
infinitely shaded brushstrokes of her characterizations. In the eighties, she was
the globe-hopping heroine of dramatic epics like Sophie’s Choice and Out of
Africa. The nineties, she insists, were a lull. (She was Oscar-nominated four
times.) The year she turned forty, she is keen to point out, she was offered the
chance to play three different witches. In 2002, she starred in Spike Jonze’s
uncategorizable Adaptation. The movie seemed to liberate her from whatever
momentary rut she had been in. Suddenly, she could do what she felt like and
make it seem like a lark. When she won the Golden Globe the next year, she
seemed almost puzzled. “Oh, I didn’t have anything prepared,” she said, running
her fingers through sweat-covered bangs, “because it’s been since, like, the
Pleistocene era that I won anything.”
By 2004, when she won an Emmy for Mike Nichols’s television adaptation
of Angels in America, her humility had melted into arch overconfidence (“There
are some days when I myself think I’m overrated . . . but not today”). The hits—
and the winking acceptance speeches—kept coming: a Golden Globe for The
Devil Wears Prada (“I think I’ve worked with everybody in the room”), a SAG
Award for Doubt (“I didn’t even buy a dress!”). She soon mastered the art of
jousting with her own hype, undermining her perceived superiority while putting
it on luxurious display.
So when Colin Firth calls her name at the Kodak Theatre, it’s a homecoming
three decades in the making, a sign that the career rehabilitation that began with
Adaptation has reached its zenith. When she hears the winner, she puts her hand
to her mouth and shakes her head in disbelief. With the audience on its feet, she
kisses Don twice, takes hold of her third Oscar, and resumes the time-honored
tradition of cutting herself down to size.
“Oh, my God. Oh, come on,” she begins, quieting the crowd. She laughs to
herself. “When they called my name, I had this feeling I could hear half of
America going, ‘Ohhh, no. Oh, come on—why? Her. Again.’ You know?”
For a moment, she actually seems hurt by the idea that half of America is
disappointed. Then she smirks.
“But . . . whatever.”
Having broken the tension with an impeccable fake-out, she proceeds to the
business of gratitude.
“First, I’m going to thank Don,” she says warmly. “Because when you thank
your husband at the end of the speech, they play him out with the music, and I
want him to know that everything I value most in our lives, you’ve given me.”
The camera cuts to Don, patting his heart.
“And now, secondly, my other partner. Thirty-seven years ago, my first play
in New York City, I met the great hair stylist and makeup artist Roy Helland,
and we worked together pretty continuously since the day we clapped eyes on
each other. His first film with me was Sophie’s Choice, and all the way up to
tonight”—her voice cracks briefly—“when he won for his beautiful work in The
Iron Lady, thirty years later.” With Thatcheresque certitude, she underlines each
word with a karate chop: “Every. Single. Movie. In. Between.”
She shifts her tone again and continues, “I just want to thank Roy, but also I
want to thank—because I really understand I’ll never be up here again.” (With
that, she gives an almost imperceptible side-glance that says, Well, we’ll see . . .)
“I really want to thank all my colleagues, all my friends. I look out here and I see
my life before my eyes: my old friends, my new friends.”
Her voice softening, she goes for the big finish: “Really, this is such a great
honor, but the thing that counts the most with me is the friendships and the love
and the sheer joy we have shared making movies together. My friends, thank
you, all of you, departed and here, for this, you know, inexplicably wonderful
career.”
On “departed,” she looks skyward and raises a palm to the heavens—or, at
least, to the lighting rig of the Kodak Theatre, where show-business ghosts lurk.
Any number of ghosts could have been on her mind. Her mother, Mary Wolf,
who died in 2001. Her father, Harry, who died two years later. Her directors:
Karel Reisz, who cast her in The French Lieutenant’s Woman; Alan J. Pakula,
who made her the star of Sophie’s Choice. Surely, she thought of Joseph Papp,
the legendary theater producer, who plucked her from obscurity months after she
finished drama school.
But at this moment, seeing her career come to yet another climax, it’s hard to
imagine that she didn’t think back to its beginnings, and its beginnings were all
wrapped up in John Cazale.
It’s been thirty-four years since she saw him. Thirty-six years since they met,
playing Angelo and Isabella in a Shakespeare in the Park production of Measure
for Measure. Night after night in the sticky summer air, she would beg him to
show mercy for her condemned brother: “Spare him, spare him! He’s not
prepared for death.”
John Cazale was one of the great character actors of his generation, and one
of the most chronically overlooked. Forever Fredo of the Godfather movies, he
was her first deep love, and her first devastating loss. Had he lived past forty-
two, his name might have become as familiar as De Niro or Pacino. But there
was so much he hadn’t been around to see. He hadn’t seen Meryl win two
Academy Awards by the time she was thirty-three. He hadn’t seen her age into
regal self-possession. He hadn’t seen her play Joanna or Sophie or Karen or
Lindy or Francesca or Miranda or Julia or Maggie.
John Cazale hadn’t lived to see her onstage now, thanking her friends, all of
them, for this “inexplicably wonderful career.” After one last “thank you,” she
waves farewell and heads toward the wings, having burnished her reputation
once again. Meryl Streep, the Iron Lady of acting: indomitable, unsinkable,
inevitable.
BUT IT WASN’T always so.