Six months to pick up the pieces of her life without John and refashion them into something new and whole and lasting. How?
It started with a knock on the door. And not a welcome one.
SHE MUST HAVE been some combination of baffled and distraught when she opened the front door of the loft on Franklin Street and saw a wan, redheaded Texan she had never met. No doubt, John had told her about the girlfriend who had picked up and left for California. Or maybe not.
Only three weeks had passed since John died, and Meryl was still wandering the apartment like a blank-eyed zombie. Traces of him were in every corner, making the fact of his absence counterintuitive. When was he coming home? Because she was having trouble with everyday tasks, her brother Third had moved in with her. At least she wouldn’t have to face the day alone. Automatic pilot.
As if to break the fog and force her back into the practicalities of living, the redheaded woman now stood before her, claiming that her name was on the deed with John’s and that it was she, Patricia, who had rights to the apartment. Meryl would have to vacate at once.
Of all the things she wanted to think about, this was surely dead last. Not the apartment, exactly, but the claim this woman professed to have on John’s home. Their home. He and Meryl had been together less than two years, but what they went through seemed to bear the weight of a lifetime. What had Patricia really meant to him? And why hadn’t he handled this mess when he was alive? In a way, it was typical John, so spellbound by the present that he was blind to the future, which had now brought a ghost from his past.
Also, where was she going to live?
Her friends were shocked. “We just assumed that she could live there, or maybe Patricia would give up her rights,” Robyn Goodman said. “I mean, honestly, if it was me I would have said, ‘Meryl, it’s your loft now.’ We all thought, Oh, it’ll be fine. Because what person would kick Meryl out?”
Robyn called Patricia and pleaded with her. Was it money she wanted? Then ask for money.
When pleading didn’t work, Robyn tried intimidation: “You’re going to get a terrible reputation, because everybody knows about this.”
“Everybody” was their community of actors, the people who loved John and loved Meryl and couldn’t believe what was happening. One night, Robyn was at a bar called Charlie’s when an Italian actor they both knew came up to her.
“I hear Meryl’s having trouble with this Patricia about the loft.”
“I’m trying to make it not happen,” Robyn said. “I’m trying to help.”
The actor leaned in. “You know, I know guys in New Jersey who can take care of this girl.”
Robyn blinked. Was she being offered a hit man? This was getting into Godfather territory. “No,” she said, a little reassured but slightly terrified. “I don’t think we want to be responsible for something like that.”
Patricia wouldn’t budge.
“My brother says it’s valuable and I should have it,” she said. Her brother was right: the neighborhood increasingly known as Tribeca (though the name was in contention with Lo Cal, Washington Market, and SoSo) was already being hyped as the “international art center” of the future, and property there could be a goldmine.
“Things are not going to go well for you,” Robyn told Patricia, as if placing a curse.
It didn’t do Meryl much good. She was grieving. She was tired. And now she was homeless.
NEW YORKERS MEASURE their lives in apartments. The two-bedroom on West End Avenue that first year in the city. The loft on Franklin Street. The rental on Sixty-ninth Street. What summer was that? How many apartments ago?
When Meryl got kicked out of John’s loft, it was the end of her old life and the beginning of something she couldn’t have anticipated. But sometimes apartments write the next chapters themselves.
She and Third began packing up their stuff: an overwhelming task, and not just physically. Each box was a talisman of her life with John, holding its own sad weight. Maybe the best thing was to put it all out of sight. Third had a friend in SoHo, a block or two away, who offered to help. He was a sculptor: brawny, curly-haired, with a sweet smile, like Sonny Corleone with more bulk and less temper. Meryl had met him two or three times, but she didn’t remember him.
Even after the three of them had put everything they could into storage, there were still more boxes left over. They were like a force that couldn’t be contained, a cumbersome reminder of how messy everything was. The sculptor offered to store the remaining possessions in his studio, on lower Broadway.
With all that sorted out, Meryl went off to Maryland to shoot The Senator. One day, Third came to visit her on set, along with the sculptor. Once she got back to New York, she wouldn’t have a place to stay, so the sculptor said she could crash at his loft. He was about to go on a trip around the world on grant money, so she’d have the place all to herself. She accepted the offer.
Left alone, she started to wonder about her host. Once again, she was living among the detritus of an absent man, though this time the house was full of life, not death. She was intrigued by the sculptures spilling from his workspace: massive, gridlike hulks of wood and cable and Sheetrock.
She began writing him letters. Replies came from faraway places like Nara, Japan, where he was studying the patterns on folding screens and floor mats. In his second year of college, the master sculptor Robert Indiana had told him, “If you’re going to be an artist, you should travel and see the world.” Now he was heeding the advice, soaking in the geometry of the Far East, which would linger in his mind before surfacing someday in his hands, just as Meryl absorbed people’s gestures and cadences, knowing they might turn up one day in a character.
As she pored over his letters, surrounded by his handiwork, Meryl learned more about the man she had met only a handful of times. His name was Don Gummer, and he was thirty-one. He was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and grew up in Indiana with five brothers. Objects had always spoken to him. As a boy, he built tree houses and model airplanes and forts. There were new houses going up in his neighborhood all the time, and he would play for hours in the construction sites. Then he’d come home and make his own edifices with an Erector Set.
He was at art school in Indianapolis when Robert Indiana told him to see the world, so in 1966 he moved to Boston, with little more than $200 and a pair of pants. He was married to his college girlfriend, but she stayed back in Indiana and the relationship fell apart. While Meryl was at Vassar, discovering Miss Julie, Don was at the Boston Museum School, discovering the hidden voice of objects. A lecture by the painter T. Lux Feininger planted the idea that abstract shapes could be expressive, a lesson reiterated by George Rickey’s book Constructivism. He became obsessed with materials and space and what happened when you put the two together.
In 1969, he found a dark piece of stone that reminded him of Brancusi’s Fish. He sawed it in half and suspended the two pieces above a concrete slab, placing a small patch of grass below the bisected stone. Between the two halves of rock, he kept a tiny sliver of empty space—like the space between two repelling magnets, or the schism within a soul. He called it Separation.
The next year, he went to Yale for his M.F.A., where he continued making large-scale installations. He covered an entire room with dry earth and rock, stretched a wire mesh over the expanse, and called it Lake. He got his degree in 1973, unaware of the drama student improvising her own death down the street. In New York, he took a job as a union carpenter at the Olympic Tower. The work trickled into his sculptures, which started resembling deconstructed tabletops. Gravity interested him. Shadow interested him. A year into his New York life, he was picked by Richard Serra to mount his first solo show, on Wooster Street. He filled the gallery with a huge, complicated structure he called Hidden Clues.
All this was new to Meryl, a language she didn’t speak but could instinctively understand, as someone who was also constantly remixing the raw materials of life. Then again: What exactly was going on here? I
t had been only weeks since John died, and here she was in another man’s apartment, her mind pulled between her grief and the vitality that seared through Don’s letters.
Their epistolary flirtation came to a head with the alarming news that Don had been injured in a motorcycle accident in Thailand. He was laid up at the Lanna Hospital, in Chiang Mai, where he spent the hours making sketches for a new piece—a relief of painted wood, arranged in crisp rectangular patterns like the ones he had seen on Tatami floor mats. He would construct it when he got home to New York, which would now be sooner than expected.
Meryl sat with Robyn Goodman in the loft, a note from Don in her hand. It wasn’t a love letter, exactly, but the tone had changed. He wanted to spend time with her when he got back, in some serious way that frightened her. As in her best roles, the conflict must have played out across her face. She was pulled between desire and guilt, past and future, loss and life. She had nursed John for so many months, putting his needs before her own with a single-minded devotion that rendered everything else irrelevant. Now the world beyond was coming back into focus, and her eyes hadn’t quite adjusted. Was it too soon? Was she betraying John? Should she be chaste like Isabella? Surely not—but this was all happening so quickly.
She showed the letter to Robyn and said, “I think he’s trying to say something that I’m not ready for.”
Robyn knew how she felt. After Walter McGinn’s car plunged over the Hollywood Hills the year before, she had found herself a widow at twenty-nine. For a while, she couldn’t leave the house. “Nobody’s ready to be a widow,” she said later. “Nobody at that age—at our age—was ready. You don’t know until it happens to you whether you’re ready for it or whether you’re any good at it.”
Then Robyn got a call from Joe Papp, who, in his benevolent way of commanding people what to do, informed her that he had a role for her at the Public. Arguing was useless.
“Joe, I don’t—”
“Here’s the rehearsal date.”
Robyn had forced herself to leave the house to do the play. And then life kicked back in. She met someone and had an affair, ignoring the concerned comments from friends who thought it was too soon. “It’s been eight months!” she’d say. “I mean, can I sleep with someone, please?” It wasn’t long after that that Joe told her she was meant to be a producer. In 1979, she would cofound the company Second Stage, which would make its home at an Upper West Side theater christened the McGinn/Cazale.
It had been eerie, John and Walter dying a year apart, leaving these two young women to sort out the pain. But with her running start at rejuvenation, Robyn knew the worst thing that Meryl could do was wait.
“Look,” Robyn told her. “I had an affair. I’m not judgmental about that. You have to get on with your life. If you like Don, spend time with him.”
It seemed so simple. But it wasn’t. Any room she made for Don in her heart would have to coexist with the huge space she had carved out for John.
When Don got back, he built Meryl a little room of her own in his loft. Suddenly, she was home. She’d snapped out of automatic pilot, in more ways than one. She was now, as she recalled later, “greedy for work.”
FORTUNATELY, THERE WAS someone just as greedy for Meryl’s success: Sam Cohn, the show-business swami of ICM. Since Yale, her representatives at the agency had been Sheila Robinson and Milton Goldman, in the theater department. But now that her star was rising in movies, she’d caught the attention of Cohn, whose official title was “head of the New York motion-picture department.” That didn’t even begin to cover it.
Since negotiating the merger that created ICM, in 1974, Cohn presided over his own busy fiefdom, a boutique agency within the agency. His colleague Sue Mengers called him “agent-auteur.” From his desk on West Fifty-seventh Street, he would cook up projects for the dozens of actors, writers, and directors he represented, from whom he expected—and received—bone-deep loyalty.
His deal-making prowess was legendary. “Sam gets away with more than anybody else I know can get away with,” the Broadway producer Gerald Schoenfeld once said. “He does more what he wants to do when he wants to do it and in the way he wants to do it than anybody I know and gets away with it.”
But he didn’t look like a bigwig, his wardrobe consisting of baggy V-neck sweaters, ill-fitting khakis, and thick glasses through which he squinted enigmatically. At first glance, he seemed shy, until you got an earful of his speaking voice, which The New Yorker described as “a confident staccato, as unstoppable as a bunch of marbles rolling down a hill.” By the end of a meeting at an associate’s office, he’d somehow wind up in the host’s chair, his feet perched on the other man’s desk.
As notorious as his power-brokering—but connected to it by mysterious threads—were his habits, at once peculiar and rigidly consistent. Morning: arrive at work, fling his coat across the desk for an assistant to retrieve, and bark out the names of the four or five people he needed to get on the line. Sam Cohn and the telephone were a curious pair: by one estimate, the phones in his offices would ring about two hundred times per day, and he was never off of them. And yet he was one of the hardest people to reach in New York City.
“We had a rolling list every morning, called the Unreturned List,” Susan Anderson, his executive assistant for twenty-eight years, recalled. “And the further you got down on the Unreturned List, the chances were likely you weren’t going to be hearing from him. Because he was such a person who lived in the present that the top of the Unreturned List is pretty much what got done every day.” Friends joked that his tombstone should read: “Here lies Sam Cohn. He’ll get back to you.”
Lunch, without fail, was at the Russian Tea Room, where Cohn had the first booth on the right. (The first booth on the left was reserved for Bernard B. Jacobs, the head of the Shubert Organization.) Cohn relished the fact that he was the only male patron not required to wear a blazer. “Oh, that guy’s not wearing a jacket,” the other diners would say. “It must be Sam Cohn.”
Then it was back to the office until quarter to eight, when he would leave for the opera, or, more often, the theater, which he loved—he saw approximately seventy-five plays a year. After curtain call, he’d eat dinner, typically at Wally’s, where he ordered the sirloin steak with peppers and onions. There, or at lunch, he met with his high-strung, high-powered cadre of friends, who were almost always his clients: Bob Fosse, Roy Scheider, Paddy Chayefsky, Paul Mazursky. “It was never one on one,” recalled Arlene Donovan, who worked in the literary department. “It was like one on five.”
The next morning, he’d start the crazy routine again: dodging calls, making deals. New York (midtown, specifically) was his universe. He loathed Los Angeles, which he considered a cultural desert, and spent as little time there as someone in the movie business possibly could. At the Oscars, which he attended grudgingly, he’d sit and read the New York Times. “I can’t stay longer,” he’d say, running to catch a redeye. “I’m afraid I’ll like it.” But he never did.
Of all Cohn’s eccentricities, the strangest was his tendency to eat paper. Newspapers, matchbooks, screenplays: somehow they’d end up wadded into little balls in his mouth, before he deposited the remains in an ashtray. He would rent a car at the Los Angeles airport and eat the claim check before reaching the garage. “One time, he was supposed to meet me somewhere,” Donovan recalled, “and he ate the paper about where he was supposed to meet me.” Another time, a seven-figure check arrived for his client Mike Nichols, who had sold some fine art. It had to be reissued after Cohn unconsciously ingested the signature.
By 1978, one of the few people who could break through the bulwark of Cohn’s telephone line was Meryl Streep. As a compulsive theater-goer, he knew what she was capable of before Hollywood did. Unlike his inner circle of nebbishy middle-aged men, she was like a daughter to be doted on. (Along with Robert Brustein and Joe Papp, she was lousy with Jewish father figures.) He didn’t consider most people smart, but Meryl was smart.
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p; “He was in awe of her,” Donovan said. “And he was very careful in her selection of material.” Cohn saw Meryl as she saw herself: as an actress, not a starlet. But he also knew how big a career she could have. It was just a matter of picking the right projects. No shlock.
“She wasn’t making the kind of money that being in a blockbuster would have afforded her,” Anderson said. “But that was never the plan. The plan for Sam was always quality first.”
At the moment, there was a screenplay on his desk that hadn’t yet been chewed up into spitballs. It was written by another client, Robert Benton, based on a novel by Avery Corman, and it was called Kramer vs. Kramer.
UNTIL AVERY CORMAN was eleven years old, he believed his father was dead. In the Bronx apartment where he lived with his mother and sister, the man was seldom discussed. When pressed, his mother said he’d been killed in the Canadian Army. Later, the story shifted to a car crash. Avery got suspicious.
One day around 1947, he was playing cards with his aunt and told her that some boys at school had teased him for being fatherless. This was a lie. “Do you want to know where your father is?” his aunt, who was deaf, said in sign language. She swore him to secrecy.
“California.”
Avery fished out the truth by means of another lie. He told his mother brightly, “If your father is dead, you have to be bar mitzvah-ed at twelve and not thirteen because you have to become a man earlier in the Jewish religion.” As the boy was about to turn twelve, she had no choice but to sit him down in the living room and confess that his father was alive.
The details spilled out: Avery’s father had always struggled to hold down a job. He’d sold newspapers and been fired. He ran a shoe store, but it went under. As his debts mounted, he resorted to gambling—Avery’s mother was still paying off a collection agency on his behalf. At one point, Avery learned later, he’d been caught robbing a candy store. He had filed divorce papers in 1944, making Avery’s mother one of the only divorced women in the neighborhood. “I told you he was dead,” she said, “because he’s as good as dead.”
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