Her Again

by Michael Schulman

  Three decades later, Corman was living on East Eighty-eighth Street with his two small sons and his wife of ten years, Judy Corman. His novel Oh, God! had brought him some acclaim, especially after it was made into a movie starring George Burns. His father had called him once, when Avery was twenty-six; the conversation was fruitless, and for years he did nothing. By the time he hired a private detective to learn more, his father had been dead for six years.

  For now, Avery concentrated on being the husband and parent his father never was. When he met Judy, she was a music publicist, but now she stayed home with the kids, taking an occasional job as an interior decorator. She didn’t mind not working full time, but it wasn’t the fashion. In 1974, she joined a women’s consciousness-raising group, one of many that were sprouting up in living rooms and church basements across the country. Each member would speak on a topic—anything from breast-feeding to orgasms—the idea being to organize women into a self-empowered political class. Judy did and didn’t fit in. At one meeting, she asked the group, “If we met at a party and you asked me what I did, and I said I was home with two young children, what would you do?” One woman admitted she’d probably go talk to someone else across the room.

  Inspired by what she heard at the group, Judy created a fixed schedule dividing domestic responsibilities between her and Avery. Whoever shopped for dinner also cooked and did the dishes, giving the other person an uninterrupted night off. The experiment fell apart after six months. Their older son, Matthew, had little concept of one parent being on duty or off, and would constantly disrupt Avery’s writing. The bulk of the childcare fell back to Judy.

  Avery began noticing something he didn’t care for in the women’s movement. “I could not reconcile some of the rhetoric I was hearing with my own personal experience as a father, as well as the personal experiences of many of the men I knew,” he said later. “It seemed to me that the rhetoric from feminists was lumping all men together in one box as just a whole bunch of bad guys.”

  Avery felt that there was an entire precinct going unrecorded: good fathers. From what he could tell, the loudest voices of the feminist movement were those of unmarried women, who were more qualified to tackle workplace inequality than to dictate how married men and women should behave at home. Not only that: he had seen some seemingly happy relationships collapse after the woman aired her grievances at a consciousness-raising group. One friend’s wife had even walked out on her marriage. “I saw a few examples of what we would call self-absorption and narcissism in the service of fulfilling one’s personal destiny,” he recalled.

  In these disconcerting trends, Avery saw the makings of his next novel, one that would counteract the “toxic rhetoric” he was hearing and make the case for the good father. His protagonist was Ted Kramer, a thirtysomething workaholic New Yorker who sells ad space for men’s magazines. He has a wife, Joanna, and a little boy named Billy. In the early chapters, their marriage is portrayed as superficially content, with wells of ennui underneath.

  The problem is Joanna Kramer. Described as “a striking, slender woman with long, black hair, a thin elegant nose, large brown eyes, and somewhat chesty for her frame,” she quickly finds that motherhood is, by and large, “boring.” She tires of playing with blocks and of discussing potty training with other mothers. When she suggests to Ted that she might want to return to her job at an advertising firm, he balks—after the babysitting fees, they’d end up losing money. She starts taking tennis lessons. Sex with Ted is mechanical. Finally, about fifty pages in, Joanna informs Ted that she’s “suffocating.” She’s leaving him, and she’s leaving Billy.

  “Feminists will applaud me,” she says.

  “What feminists? I don’t see any feminists,” he snarls back.

  After that, Joanna more or less disappears. Ted gets over his shock, hires a nanny, and gets back into the swing of single life. More important, he learns how to be a good father. The turning point comes when Billy falls and slashes his face. Ted rushes him to the emergency room, standing close as the doctor stitches him up. The child, who once seemed alien to Ted, is now “linked to his nervous system.”

  It is at this revelatory moment that Joanna does the unthinkable: she returns and tells Ted she wants custody. Having undergone a journey of self-discovery in California, she is now fit to be a mother. The ensuing custody battle, which gives the novel its title, lays bare the ugliness of divorce proceedings and the wounds they allow people to inflict on each other. The judge awards custody to Joanna, but in the final pages she has a change of heart and leaves the boy in the care of his father.

  As Avery wrote the climactic court scenes, Judy came down with pneumonia. Saddled again with the household chores, he struggled to get to the final page. When his wife read the manuscript, she was pleased to see that Joanna hadn’t been demonized. “That was my main concern,” she said when it was published, “how the woman was going to be portrayed.” Still, in the wrenching last chapters, it’s hard to see Joanna as anything but an obstacle between father and son, who now share a loving bond, and an exemplar of the “narcissism” Avery had observed in his social circle.

  The novel was destined to hit a nerve. Divorce had become a staple of American life, with the trend line only going up. In 1975, divorces in the United States passed the million-per-year mark, more than double the number recorded a decade earlier. When Kramer vs. Kramer was published, many readers assumed that it was the story of Avery Corman’s own awful divorce. In fact, he was happily married, and would be for thirty-seven years, until Judy’s death. What almost no one realized—“the Rosebud,” he said—was that the author was the child of divorce. He wasn’t Ted Kramer. He was Billy Kramer.

  Before Kramer vs. Kramer even hit the bookstores, the manuscript fell into the hands of Richard Fischoff, a young film executive who had just accepted a job with the producer Stanley Jaffe. Fischoff read the book overnight in Palm Springs. He thought it tapped into something new: the divorce phenomenon from a father’s point of view, allowing that the man’s side of the story had the same “range, depth, and complexity of feeling” as the woman’s. It was the first property he brought to Jaffe’s attention.

  Ted Kramer reminded Fischoff of an older version of Benjamin Braddock, the character played by Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. In perhaps the most indelible screen image of the sixties, Benjamin ends the film in the back of a bus with his beloved Elaine, having rescued her from her own wedding to someone else. Riding off into their future, their exhilarated faces melt into ambiguity and something like fear. Did they think this through? What really lies ahead? Ted and Joanna Kramer, Fischoff thought, were Benjamin and Elaine ten years later, after their impulsive union has collapsed from the inside. The movie would be a kind of generational marker, tracking the baby boomers from the heedlessness of young adulthood to the angst of middle adulthood. No one was yet calling people like the Kramers “yuppies,” but their defining neuroses were already in place.

  Jaffe had gone through a difficult divorce involving two young children, so Fischoff knew the book would resonate with him. It did. What they needed next was a director, and Jaffe went to Robert Benton. Kindhearted and approachable, with a rumpled white beard (his friend Liz Smith called him “Professor Bear”), Benton, as everyone called him, was best known for cowriting Bonnie and Clyde. Jaffe had produced his first directorial feature, Bad Company, and Benton was presently in Germany promoting his second, The Late Show. He had already read and rejected Kramer vs. Kramer, after getting the manuscript from Arlene Donovan, Avery’s agent at ICM. Unlike his previous work, Kramer was completely character-driven. How am I going to do this? he thought. Nobody carries a gun.

  Benton thought of writing the screenplay for his friend François Truffaut to direct, but the French auteur had other projects lined up. Jaffe wanted to move fast, and started talking to other directors. Benton, meanwhile, was working on a draft of an art-world whodunit called Stab, which would later become the Meryl Streep movie Still of
the Night. When he showed the screenplay to Sam Cohn, the agent told him, “This is terrible.” (It probably tasted bad, too.) Scrambling for a directing project, Benton asked Jaffe if Kramer was still available. The producer reached him in Berlin to tell him it was.

  Everyone liked the idea of a spiritual sequel to The Graduate, which meant that the one and only choice for Ted Kramer was Dustin Hoffman. Midnight Cowboy and All the President’s Men had made the forty-year-old actor the era’s antsy everyman, but he was now at one of the lowest points of his life. Amid contentious experiences filming Straight Time and Agatha, he was mired in lawsuits and countersuits and had decided to quit movies and go back to the theater, where he’d have more creative control. He was in the middle of an emotional separation from his wife, Anne Byrne, with whom he had two daughters. She wanted to pursue her acting and dancing career; Dustin objected. “I was getting divorced, I’d been partying with drugs, and it depleted me in every way,” he said later. Instead of endearing him to Kramer, as with Stanley Jaffe, the familiarity of the material repelled him. He sent word to Jaffe and Benton that the character didn’t ring true: “not active enough.”

  Taking the criticism to heart, Benton rewrote the script. In the winter of 1977, he and Jaffe flew to London, where Dustin was still filming Agatha. At four in the afternoon, they went to the Inn on the Park and found the actor alone in the lobby. Benton knew immediately he was going to say no—otherwise, he would have invited them up to his room. When they went to sit for tea, the maître d’ apologized that there were no free tables. They had no choice but to go up to Dustin’s suite, where the three men talked for more than two hours. Benton laid out the case, dad to dad: “This is a movie about being a father.” (His son went to preschool with Dustin’s oldest daughter.) By the end of dinner the next night, Dustin had agreed to play Ted.

  Back in New York, the trio met at a suite at the Carlyle Hotel, where they spent a week hashing out the script, working twelve-hour days. “It was almost like group therapy: talking, talking, knowing that no one would repeat outside what was being said,” Jaffe recalled. With a tape recorder on, Benton and Dustin would spiral off into “what if”s, until Jaffe reeled them back in. Benton’s aim was to tailor the script to Dustin, “like fitting a suit.” Minor characters from the novel—the grandparents, the nanny—fell away, leaving a taut chamber drama in which every moment throbbed with emotion. The “spine” they agreed on, Dustin would recall, is that “what makes divorce so painful is that the love doesn’t end.”

  The men wrote as fathers and as husbands, as people who had loved and failed and picked up the pieces. But, as they refashioned the script in their own image, the thing they were missing was the voice of Joanna Kramer, the woman who abandons her child and then reclaims him for reasons she is barely able to articulate. In the case of Kramer vs. Kramer, the scales of dramatic justice were weighed decidedly toward Ted. “We didn’t do that much work on Joanna,” Benton recalled. “Now that I think back on it, probably because Joanna wasn’t in the room.”

  JOE PAPP HAD once again coaxed a traumatized actor from the brink, offering a renewed life on the stage. This time the actor was Meryl Streep, and the play was The Taming of the Shrew, which he announced for the 1978 summer season at Shakespeare in the Park. Meryl was playing the shrew.

  It was a bold choice: an all-out war of the sexes in which a man turns a headstrong woman into an obedient wife. In Shakespeare’s plot, the demure Bianca cannot wed until a husband is found for her older sister, Katherina, known throughout Padua as an “irksome, brawling scold.” In comes Petruchio to woo the unruly Kate, whom he starves, deprives of sleep, and practically abducts in his quest to domesticate her.

  Clearly, the play was at odds with the consciousness-raised New York City of 1978. In modern times, directors had undercut the play in every which way, trying to make sense of what seemed like a sexist broadside. How could any self-respecting actress deliver the final monologue, a paean to feminine submission?

  I am ashamed that women are so simple

  To offer war where they should kneel for peace,

  Or seek for rule, supremacy and sway,

  When they are bound to serve, love and obey.

  One day, Meryl sat in a rehearsal room at the Public, her skirt hiked up to reveal two red kneepads—protection for Act II, Scene i, Kate’s first knockout brawl with Petruchio. Beside her was her leading man, Raúl Juliá.

  With his flamenco dancer’s physique and peacock’s flair, Juliá seasoned Shakespeare’s blank verse with piquant Latin cadences. “She swings as sweetly as the nightingale,” he said, reciting a line. Then he caught himself—“Jesu Christ!”—and leaped out of his chair. “Sings. She sings as sweetly as the nightingale.”

  Picking up on his flub, Meryl snapped her fingers and swing-danced in her chair. When she first met Raúl, she was “terrified” by the sheer size of his eyes, his gestures, his smile. As she came to discover, he was an engine of combustible joy. At one point, he stopped a rehearsal mid-scene to declare, “The girl is an acting factory!” If anyone could match his live-wire machismo, zinger for zinger, it was Meryl.

  To her, the play was perfectly compatible with the women’s movement, if you saw it—and acted it—with the right slant. In preparation, she was reading Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, one of the sharpest polemics of second-wave feminism, which argued that women are victims of their own enforced passivity, muzzled by a male-supremacist society that seeks to repress the female sexual instinct. Greer wrote of Kate and Petruchio, “He wants her spirit and her energy because he wants a wife worth keeping. He tames her as he might a hawk or a high-mettled horse, and she rewards him with strong sexual love and fierce loyalty.” Imagine a woman like Greer succumbing to the charms of Petruchio, who calls his conquest “my goods, my chattels.” What contortion of the will would it take?

  Meryl found the answer between the verses. “Feminists tend to see this play as a one-way ticket for the man, but Petruchio really gives a great deal,” she told a reporter. “It’s a vile distortion of the play to ever have him striking her. Shakespeare doesn’t do it, so why impose it? This is not a sadomasochistic show. What Petruchio does is bring a sense of verve and love to somebody who is mean and angry. He’s one of those Shakespearean men who walk in from another town. They always know more, see through things. He helps her take all that passion and put it in a more lovely place.”

  A year ago, her answer might have been different, her judgment of Kate harsher. But in talking about “giving,” she was talking about her months at John Cazale’s bedside. “I’ve learned something about that,” she continued. “If you’re really giving, you’re totally fulfilled.” She had put a man’s needs before her own and come out more fully human—a counterintuitive feminist principle if there ever was one. Now she would have to stand in front of a crowd of Manhattanites and exhort the women to “place your hands below your husband’s foot.”

  “What I’m saying is, I’ll do anything for this man,” she reasoned. “Look, would there be any hang-up if this were a mother talking about her son? So why is selflessness here wrong? Service is the only thing that’s important about love. Everybody is worrying about ‘losing yourself?’—all this narcissism. Duty. We can’t stand that idea now either. It has the real ugly slave-driving connotation. But duty might be a suit of armor you put on to fight for your love.”

  In a way, Petruchio reminded her of John, the way he had stripped her down to the essentials: “you don’t need this,” “you don’t need that.” In their darkest hours, only the life she gave him remained, and “losing yourself” hadn’t been a question. That truth still guided her like a torch, not just through Shakespeare but through her breakneck romance with Don Gummer. On afternoons, they would go to museums; he’d see shapes, she’d see characters. Or vice versa. “She’s learned how to look at objects and I’ve learned how to look at people,” as Don put it soon after. Theirs was a bond built on “a very deep-rooted feeling of trus
t,” he said, as sturdy and foundational as the concrete base of one of his sculptures.

  It was this Meryl Streep—simultaneously grieving and infatuated—who got word from Sam Cohn about a possible role in Kramer vs. Kramer. The part of Joanna had been given to someone else: Kate Jackson, the “smart one” on Charlie’s Angels. Jackson had the name recognition and the crystalline beauty that Columbia Pictures required. But the negotiations had hit a snag when Aaron Spelling asked for a firm stop date, so that Jackson could get back to production on Angels. The Kramer team knew they couldn’t guarantee one, and Spelling wouldn’t bend his schedule. Jackson was forced to pull out of the film, kicking and screaming.

  According to Richard Fischoff, who was billed as associate producer, the studio sent over a list of possible replacements, essentially a catalog of the bankable female stars of the day: Ali MacGraw, Faye Dunaway, even Jane Fonda. Katharine Ross, who had played Elaine in The Graduate, was a natural contender. With The Deer Hunter still in postproduction, the name Meryl Streep meant nothing to the West Coast, apart from sounding like a Dutch pastry. But she and Benton shared an agent, and if anyone knew how to get someone into an audition room, it was Sam Cohn.

  Meryl had met Dustin Hoffman before, and it hadn’t gone well. During drama school, she auditioned for All Over Town, a Broadway play he was directing. “I’m Dustin”—burp—“Hoffman,” he said, before putting his hand on her breast, according to her. What an obnoxious pig, she thought.

  Now surer of herself, she marched into the hotel suite where Hoffman, Benton, and Jaffe sat side by side. She had read Avery’s novel and found Joanna to be “an ogre, a princess, an ass.” When Dustin asked her what she thought of the story, she told him in no uncertain terms. They had the character all wrong, she insisted. Her reasons for leaving Ted are too hazy. We should understand why she comes back for custody. When she gives up Billy in the final scene, it should be for the boy’s sake, not hers. Joanna isn’t a villain; she’s a reflection of a real struggle that women are going through across the country, and the audience should feel some sympathy for her. If they wanted Meryl, they’d need to do rewrites.