Her Again

by Michael Schulman

“I was worried at the time that it was a rebound thing,” said Robyn Goodman, even though she’d encouraged it. Meryl and Don had been dating for just a few months. How could she possibly be sure? Was she really over John? Did it matter?

  Even the mother of the bride was a little confused. “What is she thinking about?” she asked Joe Papp at the wedding. Papp sensed some “strain” between mother and daughter, despite the appearance of good fellowship. The Taming of the Shrew had closed earlier in the month, and he could see that Meryl had “not recovered by any means” from John’s death.

  But he knew that she had a clear head, because he had seen how she worked. In a way, it all made sense: after everything that had happened, she was making her life stable again. “She does the right thing for herself at the moment,” he said later. “She is a shrewd analyst of herself.” The old leftist that he was, he observed that she was marrying “within her class.”

  Ten days later, at her mother’s insistence, Meryl wrote to Joe and Gail Papp to thank them for the clock they’d given as a wedding gift. “What immense support you have provided throughout some insupportable times,” she wrote to the couple who had once guided her and John through the medical maze. “You have been there at the bottom and top of things. We are all now in each other’s lives indelibly, forever.”

  Some thirteen years later, as he was dying of prostate cancer, Papp began looking for a successor to run the Public. His first choice was Meryl Streep. By then, she had three young children and lived in Connecticut, and hadn’t been in a play for a decade. She said no right away, stunned that Joe would ever think her capable of all the schmoozing and the fund-raising. She kissed him goodbye and went back to Connecticut, feeling “unspeakably touched that he would choose me to be his successor, stupefied that he could misconceive me so thoroughly, and sad to realize that there was no one, no one, who could fill his shoes.”

  ROBERT BENTON KNEW there was something wrong with the ending of Kramer vs. Kramer virtually the moment he shot it. He had toyed with the idea of closing the movie on a reunited Ted and Billy walking through Central Park. The camera pans out to reveal that they’re just two out of thousands of parents and children enjoying a sunny afternoon in New York City.

  But he realized early on that there were two stories embedded in the movie. One is Ted’s relationship with Billy, which is resolved somewhere around the playground-accident scene, when Ted realizes that nothing in the world comes before his love for his son. The second story is about Ted and Joanna: After the brutality of the custody hearing, how can they ever be functioning coparents?

  That’s the conflict Benton needed to resolve in the final scene, which he set in the lobby of Ted’s building. It’s the day Joanna comes to take Billy, some time after she wins the custody battle. She buzzes up and asks Ted to come downstairs, where he finds her leaning against the wall in her trench coat. She tells him she isn’t taking Billy after all.

  JOANNA:

  After I left . . . when I was in California, I began to think, what kind of mother was I that I could walk out on my own child. It got to where I couldn’t tell anybody about Billy—I couldn’t stand that look in their faces when I said he wasn’t living with me. Finally it seemed like the most important thing in the world to come back here and prove to Billy and to me and to the world how much I loved him . . . And I did . . . And I won. Only . . . it was just another “should.”

  (she begins to break down)

  Then Joanna asks if she can go upstairs and talk to Billy, and both parents get in the elevator. The picture ends with the doors closing on the Kramers, united as parents, if not as spouses.

  They shot the scene in late 1978, in the lobby of a Manhattan apartment building. But as Benton pieced the film together, the ending didn’t sit right. One problem was Joanna’s reasoning. If she had really come back because of how people looked at her in California, that meant she was the same deluded narcissist of Avery’s novel, not the ambivalent, vulnerable woman Meryl was playing. It was too much about her: her pride, her guilt, her endless search for self-actualization.

  The second problem was the final shot in the elevator. It looked too much like Ted and Joanna were getting back together. This couldn’t be a Hollywood ending, with the audience imagining the final kiss behind the elevator door. Benton wanted to leave no doubt: even if the Kramers were moving forward as parents, their marriage was definitively over.

  Early in 1979, the director called back Dustin and Meryl for reshoots. Meryl had been rehearsing a new play at the Public called Taken in Marriage, an all-female ensemble piece by Thomas Babe. She had ended 1978 with a disappointment, playing the title character in Elizabeth Swados’s musical adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The twenty-seven-year-old Swados was overwhelmed with her directing duties, and shortly before previews Papp scuttled the production. Instead, he offered a three-night concert version over Christmas. Meryl played not only Alice but Humpty Dumpty and other denizens of Wonderland. “This is a mature actress who has reinvented herself as a magical, ageless child,” the Times review said. “By the end of the concert we are convinced that Alice is tall, blond and lovely—just like Meryl Streep.”

  The lobby where Benton had filmed the first ending of Kramer vs. Kramer was unavailable, so the crew built a replica. It had been the cinematographer Néstor Almendros’s idea to paint Billy’s room with clouds around his bed. They would symbolize the cocoon of home and act as a reminder, like Justin Henry’s flaxen hair, of the missing mother. In the rewritten ending, the clouds were the catalyst for Joanna’s change of heart, which was no longer about her but about her son.

  JOANNA:

  I woke up this morning . . . kept thinking about Billy. And I was thinking about him waking up in his room with his little clouds all around that I painted. And I thought I should have painted clouds downtown, because . . . then he would think that he was waking up at home. I came here to take my son home. And I realized he already is home.

  Meryl delivered the speech with trembling certainty, inserting a fortifying gasp between “painted” and “clouds.” It was Joanna, as Benton saw it, who now performed the film’s ultimate heroic act: sacrificing custody not despite her love for Billy but because of it.

  This time, Joanna got in the elevator alone. In the final moments, she wipes the tear-drenched mascara from her eyes and asks Ted how she looks. “Terrific,” he says, as the door closes between them. Her wordless, split-second reaction was as richly textured as Dustin’s stare at the end of The Graduate—both flattered and disbelieving, the face of someone who’s been given just the right gift at just the right moment, by the most unlikely person. What does the future hold for this woman, dangling between fragility and conviction?

  “This picture started out belonging to Ted Kramer, and by the end it belonged to both of them,” Benton said. “And there was no way Dustin could shake her. No way he could do anything to shake her. She was just there, and she was an incredible force.” When she told Dustin she planned on going back to the theater, he said, “You’re never going back.”

  Something else had changed between the first ending and the second: this time, Meryl was pregnant. Not enough to show, but enough that Joanna’s choice—a harbinger of Sophie’s—suddenly seemed unconscionable. She told Benton, “I could never have done this role now.”

  “THIS IS THE SEASON of Meryl Streep,” Mel Gussow wrote to his editor at the New York Times Magazine in the fall of 1978:

  On Dec. 14, “The Deer Hunter,” her first starring movie, opens. Advance reports (I have not seen it yet) indicate that it is a powerhouse and an Academy Award contender—both the movie and her performance in it. She co-stars in this Vietnam period movie with Robert De Niro and the late John Cazale (her former love; she was recently married to someone else). Meryl also plays the title role in Liz Swados’s “Alice in Wonderland,” now in rehearsal at the Public Theater, and beginning previews Dec. 27. This fall she also filmed “Kramer Vs. Kramer,” playing the f
emale lead opposite Dustin Hoffman, as well as Woody Allen’s “Manhattan.”

  Before her “season,” she was clearly the most interesting and original actress on the American stage. I say this having followed her career from its genesis at the Yale Repertory Theater, where she did everything from Strindberg to Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato. What makes her special is that before she became a lovely leading lady, she was already a versatile character actress. Her most notable Yale appearance was as an octogenarian, wheelchair-confined Constance Garnett in a Durang-Innaurato mad musical travesty of all arts and literature called “The Idiots Karamazov.” Shall we be the first to do the complete Streep?

  On November 13, 1979, a year after Mel Gussow’s pitch, Meryl gave birth to a six-pound, fourteen-ounce baby boy, whom she and Don named Henry Wolfe Gummer. He was due on Halloween but arrived two weeks late, delivered by Caesarean section to avoid a breech birth. The father, Variety noted, was a “non-pro.”

  She had spent the final months of her pregnancy like a student cramming for a test, reading The First Twelve Months of Life and Our Bodies, Ourselves. But she still felt unprepared for motherhood. When she saw Don holding the newborn, it felt, she said, like “the most natural thing in the world.” They brought the baby home, where Don had made him a nursery. To avoid confusion with the other Henrys in her family, she nicknamed him “Gippy.”

  Any journalist looking for the “complete Streep”—there were now many—would have to be prepared to pause the interview for breast-feeding. “My work has been very important,” she told one of them, “because if you want a career, I feel that you have to build a foundation in your twenties. But we wanted to have a child because we felt that not enough people in our circle of friends were having children. Friends of mine from college, who are very accomplished, are delaying children until they are older because of their careers.”

  She had turned thirty that summer, during her second trimester. While they still had their freedom, she and Don took a cruise ship to France and spent two and a half months driving a rental car through Europe, stopping at the tiny towns between Paris and Florence. They got back for the premiere of The Senator, in August. At the insistence of Lew Wasserman, the chairman of Universal, Alan Alda had retitled it The Seduction of Joe Tynan, lest anyone assume that the adulterous “senator” was based on Wasserman’s friend Ted Kennedy. The movie was a modest success, with cordial reviews. But the “season of Streep,” which began with her Oscar nomination for The Deer Hunter and continued with the April release of Manhattan, was now in full swing.

  Robert Benton spent the intervening months finishing Kramer vs. Kramer with his editor, Jerry Greenberg. It was beginning to feel less like a total disaster. (Too bad his wife had already canceled that ski trip.) In test screenings, he would stand in the back of the theater and watch the audience, taking note of every fidget and cough. Wondering how a divorce movie would play in middle America, he screened the film in Kansas City, Missouri. He was dismayed when he saw a man get up during a critical scene. How could anyone go to the bathroom now? He followed the man outside. Instead of going to the men’s room, the guy stopped at a pay phone and called his babysitter to check on his child.

  We’re home free, Benton thought.

  The film opened on December 19, 1979. As the producers had hoped, it was received less as a movie than as a cultural benchmark, a snapshot of the fractured American family, circa now. “Though the movie has no answers to the questions it raises, it recharges the debate by restating issues in new and disturbing terms, or perhaps in the oldest terms of all: through agonizingly ambiguous human truths,” Frank Rich wrote in Time. From Vincent Canby, in the Times: “‘Kramer vs. Kramer’ is a Manhattan movie, yet it seems to speak for an entire generation of middle-class Americans who came to maturity in the late 60’s and early 70’s, sophisticated in superficial ways but still expecting the fulfillment of promises made in the more pious Eisenhower era.”

  Avery Corman had not been involved in the film adaptation of his novel. He was shown a rough cut, which he found “tremendously powerful.” (A colleague of his remembered him being “pissed” that so many secondary characters had been cut.) Shortly after it opened, Avery took his wife and two sons to a public screening, at Loews Tower East on Seventy-second Street. He recalled, “When the movie ended and the lights came on and I looked around, gathered throughout the theater were a bunch of teenagers sitting sort of silently, quietly in their seats. They didn’t get up to leave. They were just sitting there. And I said to my wife, ‘Oh, my God. That’s the secret audience for all of this: children of divorce.’”

  Indeed, the public greeted the film with open wallets. On its opening weekend, it played in 524 theaters, grossing more than $5.5 million. In the filmmaking world that Star Wars had wrought, a chamber drama about a failed marriage was no longer Hollywood’s idea of big money. But the U.S. gross of Kramer vs. Kramer would total more than $106 million, making it the biggest domestic moneymaker of 1979—beating out even Star Wars progeny like Star Trek and Alien, starring Meryl’s former classmate Sigourney Weaver.

  It was a movie people wept over and argued over, a well-made tearjerker about a father and son. Anyone who was or ever had a loving parent could relate to that story. But there was a trickier story lurking within—the shadow narrative of Joanna Kramer. In celebrating the bond between Ted and Billy, had the movie sold out not only her but the feminist movement? Some people seemed to think so. The Washington Post’s Gary Arnold found it “difficult to escape the conclusion that Dear Mrs. Kramer is a dim-witted victim of some of the sorriest cultural cant lately in vogue.”

  Leaving the theater with her fifteen-year-old daughter, the writer Barbara Grizzuti Harrison felt a trifle manipulated. Why do we applaud the noble self-sacrifice of Ted Kramer, she wondered, when the same thing is merely expected of women? How does Joanna land a reentry job for $31,000 a year? Why can’t Ted seem to hire a babysitter? And what to make of Joanna’s hazy quest for fulfillment? “I keep thinking of Joanna,” Harrison wrote in Ms. magazine, the standard-bearer of mainstream feminism. “Is she outside howling at the gates of happiness, or is she satisfied with her job, her lover, and occasional visits to Billy. Who is Joanna, and did she spend those 18 months in California in vain?”

  More and more journalists, not to mention the vast ticket-buying public, were asking themselves a related question: Who is Meryl Streep?

  HERE ARE A few things you might have been interested to know, if you were Time or People or Vogue or even Ms. magazine: Meryl Streep bought her dungarees on MacDougal Street. One of her favorite articles of clothing was a Hawaiian jacket she’d had since college. She was partial to pearl earrings and ate apple slices and took out the garbage herself. If you called her answering machine, you got a recorded message saying, “Hello . . . um . . . if you want to leave a message, please wait for the beep, because . . . um . . . I don’t know . . . otherwise the thing cuts off. Thank you.”

  She loved visiting art galleries. She loved riding the subway. She thought that all politicians should ride the subway and be forced to confront the “reality of life.” She was outspoken about male contraception, because too many of her female friends had fertility problems after using IUDs or the pill. She was looking, for the first time, for a lawyer and an accountant. Also, a part-time nanny. She preferred doing theater to movies, and she hoped one day to play Hamlet. Her dream was to put together an all-star Shakespeare troupe that would perform in repertory across the country, with actors like Al Pacino and Robert De Niro and Mary Beth Hurt. Joe Papp would produce, and they would go to places “less glamorous than Gary.” If not now, maybe when they were all fifty-five.

  She did not always get what she wanted. She had put out her “feelers” for Evita on Broadway, because “charismatic leaders are very interesting,” but she was pregnant and the part went to Patti LuPone. She was approached about a remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice, but it required nudity, and when she asked if Ja
ck Nicholson would be willing to show the same amount of skin, the role went to Jessica Lange. She thought people who described French actresses as “mysterious” and “sexy” because they talked in a babyish whisper were “full of shit.” She loved Bette Davis and Rosalind Russell and Lina Wertmüller and Amarcord. She admired Zero Mostel because he “put his life on the line for comedy.” She hated parties—the most boring thing in the world was a night at Studio 54. She disapproved of the new “slink” in fashion, preferring the green cowboy boots her husband bought her for Christmas.

  She was, various journalists suggested, one of the “anti-ingénues” who were now on the rise in Hollywood. She was like Faye Dunaway, but less vampy. Jane Fonda, but less self-satisfied. Jill Clayburgh, but less ingratiating. Diane Keaton, but less neurotic. She was a throwback to Katharine Hepburn or Carole Lombard. Her name sounded like the “cry of a bird.” She looked like a “tapered candle” or a “Flemish master’s angel.” She was a dead ringer for Alesso Baldovinetti’s Portrait of a Lady in Yellow. Her cheekbones were “exquisite.” Her nose was “patrician.” There wasn’t even a word for her pale blue eyes—maybe “merulean”? She was “more than just a gorgeous face.” She could make you “identify with Medea.” She was living, by her own admission, a “Cinderella story.” She evinced a “go with the flow” philosophy. She hated hot weather, which made her feel like cheese left in the sun. She had never been south of Alexandria, Virginia.

  In truth, she had no idea why anyone should care where she bought her dungarees, or why her face should appear on the covers of Parade, Playgirl, and Ladies’ Home Journal. The “excessive hype” mystified her at best and irritated her at worst. “For a while there it was either me or the Ayatollah on the covers of national magazines,” she complained two years later, in a cover story for a national magazine (Time). Perhaps Brustein’s admonitions about Hollywood “personalities” still lingered, but she saw celebrity as an unwelcome side effect to her craft. Also, it was becoming harder and harder for her and Don to visit art galleries.