Her Again

by Michael Schulman

  The trio was taken aback, mostly because they hadn’t called her in for Joanna in the first place. They were thinking of her for the minor role of Phyllis, the one-night stand. Somehow she’d gotten the wrong message. Still, she seemed to understand the character instinctively. Maybe this was their Joanna after all?

  That, at least, was Meryl’s version. The story the men told was completely different. “It was, for all intents and purposes, the worst meeting anybody ever had with anybody,” Benton recalled. “She said a few things, not much. And she just listened. She was polite and nice, but it was—she was just barely there.” Dustin said, “She never opened her mouth. She never said a word. She just sat there.”

  When Meryl left the room, Stanley Jaffe was dumbfounded. “What is her name—Merle?” he said, thinking box office.

  Benton turned to Dustin. Dustin turned to Benton. “That’s Joanna,” Dustin said. The reason was John Cazale. He knew that Meryl had lost him months earlier, and from what he saw, she was still shaken to the core. That’s what would fix the Joanna problem: an actress who could draw on a still fresh pain, who was herself in the thick of emotional turmoil. It was Meryl’s weakness, not her strength, that convinced him.

  Benton agreed. “There was a fragile quality she had that made us think that this was Joanna, without making her neurotic,” he said. “Meryl’s Joanna wasn’t neurotic, but she was vulnerable, frail.” According to the director, she had never been considered for Phyllis. It was always for the role of Joanna.

  Clearly, there was a discrepancy between what they saw and how Meryl saw herself. Was she a fearless advocate, telling three powerful men exactly what their script was missing? Or was she a basket case whose raw grief was written all over her face? Was she Germaine Greer or “barely there”? Whichever Meryl Streep walked out of that hotel room, she got the part.

  THE WOMAN IS in profile, eyes cast down on her child’s bed. Her chin rests on her hand, which sports a gold wedding band. Lit by the glow of a lamp covered by a red handkerchief, her face is all cheekbones and shadows, an ambivalent chiaroscuro. She could pass for a Vermeer.

  “I love you, Billy,” she says.

  She leans down and kisses the boy, then packs a bag.

  It was the first day of principal photography on Kramer vs. Kramer, and everything was hushed in the 20th Century Fox soundstage at Fifty-fourth Street and Tenth Avenue. Robert Benton was so anxious he could hear his stomach grumbling, which only made him more anxious, since he worried the sound might wind up in the shot.

  The little boy under the covers was Justin Henry, a sweet-faced seven-year-old from Rye, New York. In her search for a kid who could play Dustin Hoffman’s son, the casting director, Shirley Rich, had looked at hundreds of boys. The blond, cherubic Justin Henry hadn’t seemed right to Dustin, who wanted a “funny-looking kid” who looked like him. But Justin’s tender, familial way with Dustin in screen tests changed his mind, along with the realization that Billy Kramer shouldn’t look like Dustin. He should look like Meryl: a constant reminder of the absent Joanna.

  Getting Meryl past the studio hadn’t been easy. Some of the marketing executives at Columbia thought she wasn’t pretty enough. “They didn’t think that she was a movie star. They thought that she was a character actress,” Richard Fischoff said, describing exactly how Meryl saw herself. But she had her advocates, including Dustin Hoffman and Robert Benton, and that was enough to twist some arms.

  In preparation, Meryl flipped through magazines like Cosmopolitan and Glamour, the kind Joanna might read. (Meryl hadn’t bothered with beauty magazines since high school.) They all featured profiles of working mothers, brilliant judges who were raising five adorable children. The assumption now was that any woman could do both: the dreaded cliché of “having it all.” But what about the Joanna Kramers, who couldn’t manage either? Meryl called her mother, Mary Wolf, who told her: “All my friends at one point or another wanted to throw up their hands and leave and see if there was another way of doing their lives.”

  She sat in a playground in Central Park and watched the Upper East Side mothers with their perambulators, trying to outdo one another. As she soaked in the atmosphere—muted traffic noises, chirping birds—she thought about the “dilemma of how to be a woman, how to be a mother, all the gobbledygook about ‘finding yourself.’” Most of her friends were actors in their late twenties who didn’t have children, women at their peak career potential, which, paradoxically, was the height of their baby-making potential. Part of her wished she’d had kids when she was twenty-two. By now, she’d have a seven-year-old.

  She thought about Joanna Kramer, who did have a seven-year-old, who looked at those same super-women in the magazines and felt she couldn’t hack it. “The more I thought about it,” Meryl said, “the more I felt the sensual reason for Joanna’s leaving, the emotional reasons, the ones that aren’t attached to logic. Joanna’s daddy took care of her. Her college took care of her. Then Ted took care of her. Suddenly she just felt incapable of caring for herself.” In other words, she was nothing like Meryl Streep, who had always felt supremely capable.

  While brushing her teeth one morning, she thought about Margaret Mead, the famed anthropologist who had journeyed to Samoa and New Guinea. Meryl was reading her memoir, Blackberry Winter. It occurred to her that people outside an experience often have greater insight than the ones living it. Mead had wed her own instincts with the power of observation and gotten at something very deep. Unlike Joanna Kramer, Meryl wasn’t a mother or a wife, and she didn’t live on the Upper East Side. But she could travel there in her imagination, just as Mead had traveled to the South Pacific.

  “I did Kramer vs. Kramer before I had children,” she said later. “But the mother I would be was already inside me. People say, ‘When you have children, everything changes.’ But maybe things are awakened that were already there. I think actors can awaken things that are in all of us: our evil, our cruelty, our grace. Actors can call these things up more easily than other people.”

  Before shooting, Dustin, Meryl, and Justin had gone to Central Park with a photographer to pose for blissful group portraits. These were the photos that would decorate the Kramer household, snapshots of a once happy family. Benton had wisely cut the first part of the novel, showing the buildup to Joanna’s departure. The movie would start on the night she leaves—the night the bomb goes off in Ted Kramer’s life.

  When he first saw the set, Dustin said, “My character wouldn’t live in this apartment.” The whole thing was quickly redesigned to fit whatever was in his head. Unlike with most films, they would shoot the scenes in order, the reason being their seven-year-old costar. To make the story real to Justin, they would tell him only what was happening that day, so he could experience it instead of acting it, which would inevitably come off as phony. His direction would be communicated solely through Dustin, as a way of bonding onscreen father and son.

  On the second day, they continued shooting the opening scene, when Ted follows the hysterical Joanna into the hallway. They shot the bulk of it in the morning, and then after lunch set up for some reaction shots. Dustin and Meryl took their positions on the other side of the apartment door. Then something happened that shocked not just Meryl but everyone on set. Right before their entrance, Dustin slapped her hard across the cheek, leaving a red mark in the shape of his hand.

  Benton heard the slap and saw Meryl charge into the hallway. We’re dead, he thought. The picture’s dead. She’s going to bring us up with the Screen Actors Guild.

  Instead, Meryl went on and acted the scene.

  Clutching Joanna’s trench coat, she pleaded with Ted, “Don’t make me go in there!” As far as she was concerned, she could conjure Joanna’s distress without taking a smack to the face, but Dustin had taken extra measures. And he wasn’t done.

  In her last tearful moments, Joanna tells Ted that she doesn’t love him anymore, and that she’s not taking Billy with her. The cameras set up on Meryl in the elevator, w
ith Dustin acting his part offscreen.

  Improvising his lines, Dustin delivered a slap of a different sort: outside the elevator, he started taunting Meryl about John Cazale, jabbing her with remarks about his cancer and his death. “He was goading her and provoking her,” Fischoff recalled, “using stuff that he knew about her personal life and about John to get the response that he thought she should be giving in the performance.”

  Meryl, Fischoff said, went “absolutely white.” She had done her work and thought through the part—she didn’t need Dustin throwing shit at her. This was just like Allan Miller in her first year at Yale, pushing her to mine her own pain for Major Barbara. She wasn’t that kind of actress. Like Margaret Mead, she could get where she needed to go with imagination and empathy. And if Dustin wanted to use Method techniques like emotional recall, he should use them on himself. Not her.

  They wrapped, and Meryl left the studio in a rage. Day 2, and Kramer vs. Kramer was already turning into Streep vs. Hoffman.

  WOODY ALLEN WAS making his next picture in luminous black and white, which is how he saw his subject, Manhattan. Coming off of Annie Hall and Interiors, he’d established himself as the chronicler of the modern urban neurotic: the squash players and the therapy-seekers and the name-droppers he met at Elaine’s, where he ate dinner nearly every night for ten years.

  Meryl arrived one morning at Washington Mews, a gated row of houses just north of Washington Square Park. She was there to film two short scenes for Manhattan, playing Woody’s ex-wife, Jill. For a comedy, the mood on set was dead serious: no joking around. The director sat in a corner, reading Chekhov. He said very little, even to the actress he had hired to belittle him.

  It was a small part, requiring only three days’ work. That’s all she had anyway, given that she was also acting in Kramer vs. Kramer and The Taming of the Shrew. Woody’s longtime casting director, Juliet Taylor, recalled feeling “very, very lucky” to get her—so white-hot was the buzz that had attached itself to her name, even with The Deer Hunter still six months from release.

  Of the film’s constellation of women, Jill was easily the least developed: “more of an authors’ idea than a character,” according to Woody’s cowriter, Marshall Brickman. Unlike Diane Keaton’s pretentious journalist or Mariel Hemingway’s underaged ingénue, or even the oblivious hausfrau played by Anne Byrne—Dustin Hoffman’s real-life estranged wife—Jill is more talked about (derisively) than seen. Having left Woody’s character, Isaac, for another woman, she is now penning a devastating memoir of their relationship, Marriage, Divorce, and Selfhood, which reveals not only Isaac’s sexual foibles but the fact that he cries during Gone With the Wind. For Allen, who had been divorced twice, she was clearly the manifestation of some Freudian anxiety: a woman who castrates her husband not just once, with lesbianism, but again, with public humiliation. “I think he just hated my character,” Meryl said later.

  Taylor, who had done casting for Julia, needed someone with “dimension,” who could bring fullness to a part that was “maybe even slightly underwritten.” There wasn’t much chance to dig deeper. As was Woody’s custom, Meryl got her six pages shortly before filming; only a select few got to read the whole script. Over at Kramer vs. Kramer, Benton encouraged the actors to improvise, treating his own screenplay as a mere blueprint. At Manhattan, the script was more like scripture. “Woody would say, ‘Um, there’s a comma in the middle of that sentence,’” Meryl would recall. “‘It’s there for a reason, and maybe you should just do it the way it’s written.’”

  When she got to the set, she introduced herself to Karen Ludwig, the woman playing her lover. In the scene they were about to shoot, Isaac shows up at their door to pick up his son and pleads with Jill not to publish the memoir. (This is after he stalks her on the street, begging her not to write about their marriage.) Jill accuses him of trying to run her lover over with his car. Upon meeting, the two actresses had only moments to establish their screen relationship.

  “Let’s pretend that we’ve just made passionate love on the kitchen table,” Meryl told Ludwig.

  “Okay,” Ludwig said. She took off her chunky turquoise necklace and gave it to Meryl—a secret token of their intimacy.

  Woody got up from his chair and called “Action.” Then he was “Isaac,” the bumbling television writer, in love with Groucho Marx and Swedish movies and the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony, and a mess when it came to everything else, especially women. As in all her scenes, Meryl’s job was to keep moving—clearing the table, gliding from room to room—like a morose firefly Isaac can never quite catch in his net. None of the three actors made eye contact. But the erotic secret Meryl had concocted with Ludwig made Isaac seem like even more of an intruder, a man always chasing after a woman’s turned back.

  Despite her short screen time, Meryl would leave a memorable mark on the film, her silk hair and darting frame more a compositional element than a person. “I don’t think Woody Allen even remembers me,” she said two years later. “I went to see Manhattan and I felt like I wasn’t even in it. I was pleased with the film because I looked pretty in it and I thought it was entertaining. But I only worked on the film for three days, and I didn’t get to know Woody. Who gets to know Woody? He’s very much of a womanizer, very self-involved.”

  The urbane world that Woody had created didn’t impress her, either—more of the “narcissism” that she, like Avery Corman, saw pervading the culture. “On a certain level, the film offends me because it’s about all these people whose sole concern is discussing their emotional states or their neuroses,” she remarked at the time. “It’s sad, because Woody has the potential to be America’s Chekhov, but instead, he’s still caught up in the jet-set crowd type of life and trivializing his talent.”

  ACROSS A SMALL table covered in a checkerboard cloth, Dustin Hoffman glared at Meryl Streep. The crew had taken over J. G. Melon, a burger joint on Third Avenue and Seventy-fourth Street. Today’s pages: a pivotal scene in Kramer vs. Kramer, in which Joanna informs Ted that she plans to take back their son.

  The weeks had been fraught, and Benton was panicking. “I was in unfamiliar territory,” he said: no guns, no outlaws. “The suspense had simply to do with emotion, not anything physical.” Benton and his wife had planned to take their son skiing in Europe after the shoot. But two-thirds of the way through, convinced he was never going to work again, he came home and told his wife, “Cancel the trip. We need to save all the money we have.”

  Dustin, meanwhile, had been driving everyone nuts. In his effort to fill every screen moment with tension, he would locate the particular vulnerability of his scene partner and exploit it. For little Justin Henry, who experienced the story day by day, Dustin’s methods elicited a child performance of uncommon nuance. Before playing a serious scene, Dustin would tell him to imagine his dog dying. For the harrowing sequence in which Billy falls from the monkey bars at the playground, Justin had to lie on the pavement and cry through fake blood. Knowing how Justin had befriended the crew, Dustin crouched over and explained that film families are temporary, and he would probably never see his pals again.

  “You know Eddie?” Dustin said, pointing to a crew guy. “You may not see him.”

  Justin burst into tears. Even after the scene was done, he couldn’t stop sobbing.

  “Did it feel like you did a good job?” Dustin asked him.

  “Y-yeah.”

  “How do you feel about that—when you do a scene you really cry?”

  “T-terrific.”

  “You’re an actor, then.”

  With his grown-up costars, Dustin’s tactics had more mixed success. Gail Strickland, the actress hired to play Ted’s neighbor Margaret, was so rattled by the intensity of their scenes that she developed a nervous stammer within the first few days. When it became clear that most of her dialogue would be unusable, she was replaced by Jane Alexander. (The papers reported “artistic differences.”) Alexander had acted with Dustin in All the President’s M
en and enjoyed his “febrile” way of working. She was taken aback, though, when she told Dustin she didn’t care to watch the dailies and he responded, “You’re a fucking fool if you don’t.”

  Then there was Meryl. Unlike Strickland, she hadn’t buckled when Dustin identified her vulnerability. When asked, she’d say she regarded him like one of her kid brothers, always seeing how far he could push. “I never saw one moment of emotion leak out of her except in performance,” Benton said. She thought of the movie as work, not as a psychological minefield.

  At the moment, she had a question. The way the restaurant scene was written, Joanna starts off by telling Ted that she wants custody of Billy. Then, as Ted berates her, she explains that all her life she’s felt like “somebody’s wife or somebody’s mother or somebody’s daughter.” Only now, after going to California and finding a therapist and a job, does she have the wherewithal to take care of her son.

  Wouldn’t it be better, Meryl asked on set, if Joanna made the “somebody’s wife” speech before revealing her intention to take Billy? That way, Joanna could present her quest for selfhood as a legitimate pursuit, at least as the character saw it. She could say it calmly, not in a defensive crouch. Benton agreed that restructuring the scene gave it more of a dramatic build.

  But Dustin was pissed. “Meryl, why don’t you stop carrying the flag for feminism and just act the scene,” he said. Just like Joanna, she was butting in and mucking everything up. Reality and fiction had become blurry. When Dustin looked across the table, he saw not just an actress making a scene suggestion but shades of Anne Byrne, his soon-to-be ex-wife. In Joanna Kramer, and by extension Meryl Streep, he saw the woman making his life hell.