In any case, Dustin had a scene suggestion of his own, one he kept secret from Meryl. Between takes, he approached the cameraman and leaned in, as if they were plotting a jailbreak. “See that glass there on the table?” he said, nodding toward his white wine. “If I whack that before I leave”—he promised to be careful—“have you got it in the shot?”
“Just move it a little bit to the left,” the guy said out of the corner of his mouth.
Dustin sat back down. “Action!”
In the next take, Dustin’s agitation was palpable. “Don’t talk to me that way,” Ted says at the end of the scene, wagging his finger in Joanna’s face. Then, as he stood up, Dustin smacked the wineglass and shattered it on the restaurant wall, its contents bursting in a deafening splat. Meryl jumped in her chair, authentically startled. “Next time you do that, I’d appreciate you letting me know,” she said.
There were shards of glass in her hair. The camera caught the whole thing.
“DEAR MR. PAPP,” wrote a resident of 5 Jane Street:
Last week I saw the Festival’s production of the Taming of the Shrew in Central Park and found it so offensive that I feel obliged to protest both your choice of the play and the interpretation it was given.
At best, it can only be called insensitive to put on a play that celebrates the subjugation of women. But to play it straight, without any acknowledgment of the dehumanization and suffering inflicted on women by the canon of male dominance, is an act of aggression against women.
It is particularly ironic that you should choose to celebrate the oppression of women this year. Just a month or two ago, the New York Police Department, under pressure of a lawsuit brought by battered women, agreed for the first time to start enforcing the laws against assault, battery, and attempted murder where women have been attacked by their husbands. Right now, after six years of politicking and back room deals, this country is still denying women the constitutional right to equal protection of the law.
If discrimination, rape, exploitation, and myths of the inferiority of women were mere antiquities, I too could laugh at the Taming of the Shrew. But I still have to get home from the theater by public transportation and be on my guard against the male criminals who think I’m an easy or deserving target because I’m a woman. I still have to earn my living in competition with men who are never held back by the notion that their true vocation is raising children. I still have to pay taxes to support programs like yours, which ennoble my oppression and call it culture.
I have urged all my friends to boycott this production, but the more I think about it, I think we really should be picketing it.
August, 1978. Onstage at the Delacorte, Meryl Streep and Raúl Juliá came at each other like poet gladiators, unleashing a nightly arsenal of wit and wordplay and physical force. Meryl, in her unkempt strawberry curls, would come on doing chin-ups, hike up her skirt, stomp on some shrubbery, then wail and slap and spit in Petruchio’s face. Raúl, strutting in his black boots, would throw her over his knees, grab her ankles and tickle her feet, wrestle her to the ground and then sit on her like a stool. And that was just Act II, Scene i.
It was love as blood sport, and the riled-up spectators were willing participants. When a sweaty, snarling Petruchio called Kate “my horse, my ox, my ass, my anything,” in Act III, he’d get an eruption of applause, followed by a smattering of boos, then a few whistles and, finally, some nervous laughter. One night, Raúl threw a piece of “mutton” and accidentally hit a woman in the audience (“but she was not injured,” the stage manager reported).
At intermission, the battle of the sexes continued. “I can’t believe how many people were applauding when he did that ‘my horse, my ass’ bit!” a young woman in the audience said one night.
“That scene is a good representation of what our relationship strives to be,” her boyfriend quipped, as the woman rolled her eyes.
During one performance, a documentary crew followed Meryl into her dressing room, where she opined on Kate the Shrew. “She lives in a very—a highly conventional society where brides are bought and sold. This is a society that constricts her,” she said, choking on the words as a dresser laced up her corset. “Don’t you think the corset’s a little tight, girls?”
By Act V, the shrew was tamed, or at least that’s how it looked. Kate’s closing monologue was the hardest part to sell. How to convince a 1978 audience that wives should “serve, love and obey” their husbands? Was Kate just another brainwashed version of “the female eunuch”? If Meryl was “playing it straight,” as the woman from Jane Street had it, you could certainly see it that way. But there was something else at work. When Kate advised the ladies to “place your hands below your husband’s foot,” Meryl would kneel at Petruchio’s boot. But then Raúl would grab her palm and kiss it, lowering himself beside her as they shared a knowing gaze. Was this subjugation or an alliance?
“I feel very ambiguous,” a thirtyish woman said one night after curtain call. “Yes! I feel sick. But I also say, ‘Oh, isn’t she lucky,’ you know? And I feel sick of myself for feeling that. And it’s that whole ambiguity that makes it such a fabulous play—and such a disgusting play.”
Backstage, Meryl and Raúl put on a play of their own for the cameras.
MERYL:
When you give, it’s the greatest happiness you can feel.
RAÚL:
The ultimate satisfaction is service, believe it or not. Man or woman.
MERYL:
That’s it! Why is it so hard for someone to say, just because it’s a man, that “I’d—I’d do anything for you”? Why is it so hard?
As a stagehand mended their torn costumes, she continued, “That’s love. That’s absolute selflessness. It’s where the self disappears into the love that you’re giving to this person.”
“Exactly.”
“Absolute selflessness” was what she had learned that terrible winter at John’s bedside. Five months later, her life was like a one-woman repertory theater. Uptown, she was Joanna, the mother who leaves her son. Downtown, she was Jill, the wife who humiliates her husband. By night, in Central Park, she was Kate, the shrew to be tamed. Joanna, Jill, and Kate: three women who break the rules, leaving the men around them befuddled, cowed, and furious.
At Kramer vs. Kramer, Stanley Jaffe didn’t understand how she could possibly do his movie and a play, not to mention Manhattan. But it didn’t bother Meryl in the least. At Yale, she’d been trained to switch from part to part, slipping characters on and off like masks. Do it right, and they begin to speak to each other, a repertory of the mind. If anyone understood that, it was Joe Papp.
“Joe had no problem with that schedule as long as I showed up for work and chewed up the scenery nightly in the park,” Meryl told his biographer. “The movie producers, on the other hand, were very nervous about whether or not I’d be able to maintain the concentration and physical stamina necessary to the part of Joanna Kramer. Joe looked at actors as dray horses, muscular and fearsome, while the movies were more prone to mollycoddling. Even now when I see Joanna Kramer in television showings of the movie, I think of her red-haired alter ego, Katherine the Shrew, spitting and sweating all over the first four rows of spectators at the Delacorte.”
SHE SHOWED UP at the appointed time at Tweed Courthouse, the massive stone edifice at 52 Chambers Street. It was named after William M. Tweed, the Tammany Hall boss who embezzled funds from the construction budget, then was tried and convicted in 1873, in an unfinished courtroom of the very same building. By the time Meryl Streep arrived, 105 years later, it had long been converted into municipal offices. Now, there would be one more hearing, in the matter of Kramer vs. Kramer.
“We were all wrecked and tired,” Robert Benton recalled. Dustin was getting sick. Everyone else was sick of Dustin. And the courtroom scene would be particularly onerous. For every shot of a witness giving testimony, Benton would need three or four reaction shots: Ted, Joanna, the judge, the opposing counsel. The whole
thing would take several days.
First on the stand: Joanna Kramer. Benton had been struggling with her testimony, which he saw as absolutely crucial. It is the one chance she has to make her case—not just for custody of Billy, but for her personal dignity and, by extension, womankind. For most of the movie, she has been a phantom, with phantom motives. Then her lawyer asks, “Mrs. Kramer, can you tell the court why you are asking for custody?”
Benton had written his own version of her reply, a spin on Shylock’s “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” speech from The Merchant of Venice:
JOANNA:
Because he’s my child . . . Because I love him. I know I left my son, I know that’s a terrible thing to do. Believe me, I have to live with that every day of my life. But just because I’m a woman, don’t I have a right to the same hopes and dreams as a man? Don’t I have a right to a life of my own? Is that so awful? Is my pain any less just because I’m a woman? Are my feelings any cheaper? I left my child—I know there is no excuse for that. But since then, I have gotten help. I have worked hard to become a whole human being. I don’t think I should be punished for that. Billy’s only six. He needs me. I’m not saying he doesn’t need his father, but he needs me more. I’m his mother.
Benton wasn’t happy with it. At the end of the second day of shooting—right after Dustin slapped her and goaded her in the elevator—the director had taken Meryl aside. “There’s a speech you give in the courtroom,” he told her, “but I don’t think it’s a woman’s speech. I think it’s a man trying to write a woman’s speech.” Would she take a crack at it? Meryl said yes. Then Benton walked home and promptly forgot he’d asked her.
Now, several weeks and many frayed nerves later, Meryl was handing the director a legal pad scrawled with her handwriting and telling him brightly, “I have the speech you told me to write.” She had written it on the way back from Indiana, where she was visiting Don Gummer’s parents.
Oh, why did I do that? Benton thought. He had no time for this. Now he’d have to overrule her. I’m going to lose a friend. I’m going to lose a day of shooting. I’m going to maybe destroy a performance.
Then he read the speech, and exhaled. It was wonderful—though about a quarter too long. Working fast, he and Meryl crossed out a few redundant lines, then had it typed up.
She took the stand in a tan blazer and a matching skirt, her hair in a ponytail flung over her left shoulder. As the cameras rolled, Meryl delivered her lines with the precarious certitude of a woman who’d rehearsed them carefully. Unlike Kate or Jill, or certainly Meryl, Joanna is always one inch from collapse, even as she reveals that her new salary as a sportswear designer is more than what Ted makes.
When it came time for the big speech, Meryl spoke the words she had written herself:
JOANNA:
Because he’s my child . . . And because I love him. I know I left my son, I know that that’s a terrible thing to do. Believe me, I have to live with that every day of my life. But in order to leave him, I had to believe that it was the only thing I could do. And that it was the best thing for him. I was incapable of functioning in that home, and I didn’t know what the alternative was going to be. So I thought it was not best that I take him with me. However, I’ve since gotten some help, and I have worked very, very hard to become a whole human being. And I don’t think I should be punished for that. And I don’t think my little boy should be punished. Billy’s only seven years old. He needs me. I’m not saying he doesn’t need his father. But I really believe he needs me more. I was his mommy for five and a half years. And Ted took over that role for eighteen months. But I don’t know how anybody can possibly believe that I have less of a stake in mothering that little boy than Mr. Kramer does. I’m his mother.
Tearily, she repeated, “I’m his mother.” But the word that slayed Benton was “mommy.” “I could have never imagined writing that,” he said. No longer the aloof tennis addict of Avery Corman’s novel, Joanna now had a vivid inner life, full of yearning and tenderness and regret.
Benton filmed the speech in wide shot first, reminding Meryl to save her energy for the close-up. But she delivered it with “the same sense of richness” each time, even when the cameras turned on Dustin for his reaction. “Part of the pleasure she must have taken is showing to Dustin she didn’t need to be slapped,” the director said. “She could have delivered anything to anybody at any time.”
They wrapped for the day. When they returned to Tweed Courthouse, it was to shoot one of the most wrenching scenes in the film: Joanna’s cross-examination by Ted’s lawyer, Shaunessy, played with cowboy-like bluster by Howard Duff. Benton had taken this sequence nearly word for word from the book, and its purpose was clear: to dismantle Joanna’s tenuous self-esteem in a way that even Ted finds heartless.
Right away, Shaunessy badgers Joanna with questions: Did Mr. Kramer ever strike you? Was he unfaithful? Did he drink? How many lovers have you had? Do you have one now? As Joanna begins to falter, he goes in for the kill. Hunching over her on his cane, he asks her to name the “longest personal relationship” of her life. Wasn’t it with her ex-husband?
“Yes,” she murmurs.
So, hadn’t she failed at the most important relationship in her life?
“It did not succeed,” she answers weakly.
“Not it, Mrs. Kramer,” he bellows, sticking an accusatory finger in her face. “You. Were you a failure at the one most important relationship in your life? Were you?” It’s at that moment we see the “whole human being” Joanna believes herself to be crumble before our eyes, trapped like a sea creature in a fisherman’s net.
Before the take, Dustin had gone over to the witness stand to talk to Meryl. He needed her to implode on camera, and he knew the magic words to make it happen: “John Cazale.” Out of Benton’s earshot, he started whispering the name in her ear, planting the seeds of anguish as he had in the elevator scene. He knew she wasn’t over the loss. That’s why she’d gotten the part. Wasn’t it?
Now, with a fat finger waving three inches from her face, Meryl heard the words “Were you a failure at the one most important relationship in your life?” Her eyes watered. Her lips tensed. Dustin had instructed her to look at him when she heard that line. When she did, he gave a little shake of his head, as if to say, “No, Meryl, you weren’t a failure.”
Who exactly was up on the stand? Was it the actress who had stormed into the hotel room, guns blazing, telling three powerful men to rewrite their screenplay? Wasn’t that who she had always been: self-assured, proficient at everything, the girl who could swim three lengths without taking a breath? Or was Dustin right? Was she “barely there,” just like Joanna Kramer?
Since Miss Julie, acting was the one thing that had never failed her. She had willed herself through the wasp’s nest of Yale Drama School. She’d done Constance Garnett in a wheelchair, Shakespeare in the rain, Tennessee Williams in a fat suit. She’d learned Hallelujah Lil on three days’ notice. She’d danced the troika and done pratfalls. There was only one problem her talent hadn’t been able to solve: it hadn’t kept John alive.
Had she been a failure at the most important relationship of her life? The question wasn’t a fair one, but it had been asked, and answered, by Dustin Hoffman. “No,” he said, with a shake of his head.
As she sat on the witness stand, defending her life, was she thinking about John? Or was she acting despite Dustin’s meddling? By her own admission, the grief was still with her. “I didn’t get over it,” she said soon after. “I don’t want to get over it. No matter what you do, the pain is always there in some recess of your mind, and it affects everything that happens afterwards. John’s death is still very much with me. But, just as a child does, I think you can assimilate the pain and go on without making an obsession of it.”
She had never believed that actors had to suffer. With almost alien precision, she could simulate any emotion she needed to. But if Meryl was now an emotional wreck playing an emotional wreck, could
anyone (including her) really say whether she was faking it? Could she be “real” and a simulacrum at the exact same time?
When Benton saw Meryl glance to the side, he noticed Dustin shaking his head. “What was that? What was that?” the director said, bounding over to Dustin. Unwittingly, Dustin had created a new moment, one that Benton wanted in the scene. He turned the cameras around and had Meryl act the cross-examination again, this time recording Dustin’s reactions. Now, the head shake meant something else. It was Ted Kramer telling Joanna Kramer, “No, you didn’t fail as a wife. You didn’t fail as a mother.” Amid the rancor of the court proceeding, it was a final gesture of the love they once had.
They filmed the remaining testimonies, and the court sequence was in the can. At one point between takes, Dustin went up to the actual court stenographer they’d hired to sit behind the typewriter.
“Is this what you do?” he asked. “Divorces?”
“Oh, I did them for years,” the woman said, “but I burned out. I couldn’t do it anymore. It was just too painful.” She added cheerfully, “I really love what I’m doing now.”
“What?” Dustin asked.
“Homicides.”
ON SEPTEMBER 30, 1978, an Indian-summer day, Meryl Streep married Don Gummer. The Episcopal ceremony took place in the garden of her parents’ home on Mason’s Island, in front of about fifty guests. Don, who was still recuperating from the motorcycle accident, limped down the aisle on crutches. Some of the guests may have been forgiven for thinking, Wait a second. Who is this guy?
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