When the magazines came to call, she could be charming and self-effacing, but sometimes she was just impatient. For Vogue, she gamely did cheerleader splits for the photographer. But the writer who showed up at the loft couldn’t help but feel intrusive as Meryl nursed the two-month-old Gippy while complaining into the tape recorder, “I think that the notion that you owe it to your public is kind of odd. Nobody else does that except elected officials, and I’m not elected, I never ran for anything . . . And it seems bizarre to think that I have to share the few private moments I have with other people.”
She and Dustin did their best to qualify their on-set sparring, at least in front of journalists. But the results could sound passive-aggressive. “Dustin has a technician’s thoroughness and he is very demanding, but it isn’t the star temperament I’d been led to expect,” she told the Times. “It isn’t vanity. He is a perfectionist about the craft and the structuring of the film, and his own ego is subjugated to that.” Dustin gave similarly tortured compliments. “I hated her guts,” he said when the movie came out. “But I respected her. She’s ultimately not fighting for herself, but for the scene. She sticks with her guns and doesn’t let anyone mess with her when she thinks she’s right.”
The press infatuation hit a crescendo the first week of 1980, when Meryl appeared on the cover of Newsweek. She wore her (by then) signature pearl earrings and a Mona Lisa smile, accompanied by big white letters: “A Star for the ’80s.” The article posited that Meryl Streep may well become “the first American woman since Jane Fonda to rival the power, versatility and impact of such male stars as Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.” She had not yet had a leading role in a movie, and already evoked the language of superlatives. When the Time cover followed, in 1981, she “didn’t feel anything.”
It seemed to her she had already passed the sweet spot, when she could focus solely on the pleasure of acting. When she started out, she would spend 80 percent of her time on headshots or auditions or résumés, and the other 20 percent on her work. Now it was again 80 percent on peripheral things, like talking to Newsweek and Vogue. Part of her wished she had remained a “middling successful actor,” the kind nobody wants to know anything about. She was high on the homecoming float once again, flabbergasted by how thin the air was up there. Somehow it always came as a disappointment, as if someone had put her there other than herself.
THE STAR FOR the ’80s spent the first moments of the eighties at a New Year’s Eve party thrown by Woody Allen. The director, still at work on Stardust Memories, had taken over a ballet school on Seventy-fifth Street, and its rehearsal studios and winding marble staircase were now peopled with boldface names. On the second floor, Bianca Jagger leaned against a barre talking with Andy Warhol. One flight up, Kurt Vonnegut danced on a red disco floor with his wife, Jill Krementz, as George Plimpton and Jane Alexander watched from the sidelines. Gloria Vanderbilt came early; Mick Jagger came late. There were movie stars (Lauren Bacall, Bette Midler, Jill Clayburgh), literary grandees (Norman Mailer, Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller). Ruth Gordon, of Harold and Maude, could be overheard saying, “I’m astonished that anybody knows this many people.”
Earlier in the day, some teenagers had sneaked in, pretending to be with the caterers, and now wandered among the beau monde, eating appetizers. Much of the talk was about how the host, known for his shyness, was either courageous or masochistic to be throwing such a lavish affair. When the sentiment got back to Woody, he deadpanned, “There is a lot of valiancy going around.” Up in the dining room, Tom Brokaw fought through the crowd to talk to Meryl Streep, who had attended despite her apparent misgivings about the host. In a party where everybody was a somebody, she now made as big a ripple as the rest. Famousland may have been where she belonged, but she was already plotting her retreat.
She and Don had found a ninety-two-acre property in Dutchess County, which they bought for around $140,000. It was a furnished three-floor house, surrounded by five thousand Christmas trees. There was a free-standing garage that Don could turn into a studio, and they were talking about installing a windmill and a solar-power system and freeing themselves of utility companies completely. Mostly, they wanted a place where they could avoid the grime and noise of downtown Manhattan, not to mention the autograph-seekers. Before having Henry, Meryl would wander SoHo contemplating the interesting characters lurking behind each window. Now, for the first time, it seemed ugly. She had nowhere to bring the baby, and buying Tampax at the drug store made her self-conscious. They’d keep the apartment, of course, but in their wooded oasis they’d feel like homesteaders on a vast frontier. In the rush of fame, some self-protective instinct had kicked in. She would need to draw the curtain to keep a part of herself small and quiet and private.
When the clocks struck midnight at the ballet school, Meryl Streep and practically every celebrity in New York said farewell to the seventies. People were already talking about a “new conservatism,” which would penetrate not just politics but the movies. Some people saw it in Meryl’s refined face and pearl earrings—“the Lady,” as Vogue called her—but that was mostly a projection. In any case, the new conservatism couldn’t have been much in evidence at Woody Allen’s New Year’s party: this was the man, after all, who in Annie Hall had affectionately described his city as the epicenter of “left-wing Communist Jewish homosexual pornographers.”
In February, Kramer vs. Kramer was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture (Stanley Jaffe, producer), Best Actor (Hoffman), Best Director (Benton), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Benton again). Eight-year-old Justin Henry, nominated for Best Supporting Actor, became the youngest Oscar nominee in history. And Meryl, along with Barbara Barrie (Breaking Away) and Candice Bergen (Starting Over), would compete for Best Supporting Actress against two of her costars: Jane Alexander from Kramer vs. Kramer and Mariel Hemingway from Manhattan.
There was no doubt now that Meryl could carry a leading role in a movie, and Sam Cohn set to work finding the right project—or projects. After Manhattan and Kramer vs. Kramer, she wanted to play anyone but another contemporary New Yorker. “Put me on the moon,” she told Cohn; he got her as far as the end of a stone pier on the English Channel. By mid-February, she was contracted to star in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, a costume drama based on the John Fowles novel, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter. It would begin shooting in Dorset in May. She would play two characters: a mysterious Victorian siren and the modern-day actress portraying her in a big-budget film.
At the same time, she was in contention for a screen adaptation of William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice, about a Polish Holocaust survivor living in Brooklyn. Landing the role would be a fight: the director, Alan J. Pakula, had a Czech actress in mind, and Meryl would beg him to reconsider. And as early as March, her name was being tossed around in connection with a project about the Oklahoma nuclear-plant worker Karen Silkwood. Nineteen-eighty had hardly begun, and her next three years of work were already mapped out—as was her niche as an accent-wielding tragedian. It would be a long time before anyone thought of Meryl Streep as funny.
Meanwhile, Kramer vs. Kramer was cleaning up the awards season. At the Golden Globes, Meryl wore her white-silk wedding dress and began lactating during the ceremony. She accepted the award with one arm across her chest. The movie was now opening on screens around the world, from Sweden to Japan. On March 17th, it was shown at a special screening in London at the Odeon Leicester Square, for an audience that included Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. Meryl flew over, along with Dustin Hoffman, Robert Benton, Stanley Jaffe, and Justin Henry. She wore a long white dress and a matching blazer with the collar turned up. As Liv Ullmann and Peter Sellers looked on, she held out a hand to Her Majesty, touching white glove to white glove. The queen leaned in to talk to Justin. Was this his first acting job?
“Yes,” he told her.
The queen asked if the movie would make her cry.
“Yes,” he replied. �
�My mom cried four times.”
APRIL 14, 1980. Outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the stars of the new decade arrived in style: Goldie Hawn, Richard Gere, Liza Minnelli, George Hamilton. Among the movie gods was Meryl Streep, one of the only women not in sequins. She wore the same white dress she’d worn to meet the queen, minus the gloves.
Inside, she took her seat between her husband and Sally Field, nominated for Best Actress for Norma Rae. Henry Mancini, in a huge bow tie, opened the show by conducting the theme from Star Trek. Meryl applauded when the Academy president, Fay Kanin, spoke of the institution’s “glorious heritage.” She sat nervously through Johnny Carson’s monologue, with zingers covering The Muppet Movie, Bo Derek’s cornrows in 10, the Iranian hostage crisis, Dolly Parton’s chest (“Mammary vs. Mammary”), and the fact that three of the big films that year were about divorce. “It says something about our times when the only lasting relationship was the one in La Cage aux Folles,” Carson joked. “Who says they’re not writing good feminine roles anymore?”
Two gentlemen from Price Waterhouse, charged with guarding the envelopes, came onstage and took a bow. Then Jack Lemmon and Cloris Leachman came out to deliver the first award of the night: Best Supporting Actress.
When she heard her name, last among the nominees, Meryl rubbed her hands together and mumbled something to herself. “And the winner is . . . ,” Leachman said, before handing the envelope to Lemmon.
“Thank you, my dear.”
“You’re welcome, my dear.”
“Meryl Streep in Kramer vs. Kramer.”
The hall reverberated with Vivaldi’s Mandolin Concerto in C Major, the movie’s theme. As she hurried to the stage, she leaned over and kissed Dustin on the cheek. Then she glided up the stairs to the microphone and took hold of her first Academy Award.
“Holy mackerel,” she began, glancing down at the statuette. Her tone was placid. “I’d like to thank Dustin Hoffman and Robert Benton, to whom I owe . . . this. Stanley Jaffe, for giving me the chance to play Joanna. And Jane Alexander, and Justin”—she blew a kiss—“for the love and support during this very, very delightful experience.”
To the people in the audience, and to the millions watching at home, she seemed like a star fully hatched, a poised Venus on the half shell. Only she knew how unlikely the whole thing was: that “movie star” was her job description. It was another metamorphosis, like the one that had set her course a decade ago, as she stood amid the ersatz scent of lilacs as Miss Julie. That she had scaled the mountain of show business in ten short years was merely a reflection of what Clint Atkinson knew then, and what Joe knew, and what John knew, and what perhaps even she knew: that Meryl Streep had it in her all along.
After one last “thank you very much,” she held up the Oscar and headed left, before Jack Lemmon was kind enough to point her right.
Vivaldi played again for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Actor. Dustin Hoffman, accepting his Oscar from Jane Fonda, reiterated his well-known contempt for award shows (“I’ve been critical of the Academy, and for reason”). Justin Henry lost to Melvyn Douglas (Being There), seventy-one years his senior, becoming so distraught that Christopher Reeve, a.k.a. Superman, had to be called over to console him. At the end of the night, Charlton Heston announced the winner for Best Picture: it was a Kramer vs. Kramer sweep.
In the moments after the ceremony, the Kramer winners were shown into a room of about a hundred reporters. “Well, the soap opera won,” Dustin boomed as he walked in, anticipating their disdain. It was clear that this wouldn’t be a typical glad-handing press conference, and the reporters were eager to match Dustin’s feistiness. The columnist Rona Barrett remarked that many women, particularly feminists, “feel this picture was a slap to them.”
“That wasn’t said at all,” Dustin snapped back. “I can’t stop people from feeling what they are feeling, but I don’t think everyone feels that way.”
As they argued, Meryl bounded onto the platform. “Here comes a feminist,” she said. “I don’t feel that’s true at all.” Having commandeered the stage, she continued, “I feel that the basis of feminism is something that has to do with liberating men and women from prescribed roles.”
She could have said the same about acting—or at least her version of it, the kind she had fought so hard to achieve. She was no longer the college freshman who thought that feminism had to do with nice nails and clean hair. In fact, it was inseparable from her art, because both required radical acts of imagination. Like an actress stretching her versatility, Joanna Kramer had to imagine herself as someone other than a wife and a mother in order to become a “whole human being,” however flawed. That may not have been apparent to Avery Corman, but it was to Meryl, and tonight’s triumph seemed to underscore that she was right.
No longer would she have to sneak her character through the back door, the forgotten woman in the screenplay. In the decade to come, she would bend the movies toward her, stretching her ability to reveal the wrinkles of consciousness as wide as the screen could allow. With the help of Sam Cohn, who remained her agent until 1991, she would command the kind of complicated female roles she had thought impossible in Hollywood: a Danish adventurer, a Washington grandee, a Depression-era wino, an Australian murder suspect. After 1981, she would all but give up theater, returning only for stints at the Delacorte. Part of the reason would be her children: three more after Henry, named Mamie, Grace, and Louisa, raised with nary a gap on her résumé. Her marriage to Don Gummer, which seemed almost impetuous at the time, would prove one of the most enduring in Hollywood.
In later years, she would voice her politics more firmly, urging Congress to revive the Equal Rights Amendment and describing Walt Disney as a “gender bigot” at the 2014 National Board of Review gala. She would note with dismay that of all her characters, men her age—Bill Clinton among them—always told her that their favorite was Linda, the pliant checkout girl from The Deer Hunter. No wonder she had taken the role with such trepidation; she knew how easily the world could turn a woman into an ingénue. It was a measure of how much times had changed, she said in 2010, that men had finally started mentioning another favorite character: Miranda Priestly, the power-fluent fashion editor from The Devil Wears Prada. “They relate to Miranda,” she reasoned. “They wanted to date Linda.”
For now, she stood in front of a room of reporters, Oscar in hand, with a simple declaration: “Here comes a feminist.”
Someone asked her, “How does it feel?”
“Incomparable,” she said. “I’m trying to hear your questions above my heartbeat.” If she seemed composed, it was all an act. Earlier, as she wandered backstage after her acceptance speech, she had stopped in the ladies’ room to catch her breath. Her head was spinning. Her heart was pounding. After a moment of solitude, she headed back out the door, ready to face the big Hollywood hoopla. “Hey,” she heard a woman yell, “someone left an Oscar in here!” Somehow, in her tizzy, she had left the statuette on the bathroom floor.
SUPPORTING CHARACTERS
ALAN ALDA—Actor best known for the long-running TV show M*A*S*H. Writer and star of The Seduction of Joe Tynan.
JANE ALEXANDER—Stage and screen actress and four-time Oscar nominee, for her roles in The Great White Hope, All the President’s Men, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Testament.
CLINT ATKINSON—Streep’s drama teacher at Vassar who directed her in Miss Julie and other plays. He died in 2002.
LINDA ATKINSON—Yale acting student, class of 1975.
BLANCHE BAKER—Streep’s costar in The Seduction of Joe Tynan and Holocaust, for which she won an Emmy Award. Later played the title role in Lolita on Broadway.
ROBERT BENTON—Oscar-winning writer and director of Kramer vs. Kramer. Also known as the cowriter of Bonnie and Clyde and as the director of The Late Show, Places in the Heart, and Nobody’s Fool.
MIKE BOOTH—Streep’s high school boyfriend, with whom she corresponded from Vassar while he served in the Vietnam
War.
ARVIN BROWN—Director of 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and A Memory of Two Mondays. He was the longtime artistic director of the Long Wharf Theatre, in New Haven, Connecticut.
ROBERT BRUSTEIN—Dean of the Yale School of Drama from 1966 to 1979 and the founding director of the Yale Repertory Theatre. He later founded the American Repertory Theater, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
STEPHEN CASALE—Brother of John Cazale. As a young man, he changed his last name from “Cazale” to its original Italian spelling.
PHILIP CASNOFF—Stage and television actor who dated Streep while she was at Yale.
JOHN CAZALE—Stage and screen actor best known as Fredo Corleone in The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II. His other films include The Conversation, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Deer Hunter. Costarred with Streep in Measure for Measure in 1976 and dated her until his death, in 1978.
MICHAEL CIMINO—Oscar-winning director of The Deer Hunter. His other films include Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Year of the Dragon, and Heaven’s Gate, considered one of the most disastrous financial flops in movie history.
SAM COHN—Talent agent at ICM who represented Streep until 1991. His clients also included Bob Fosse, Woody Allen, Mike Nichols, Nora Ephron, Robert Benton, Paul Newman, and Whoopi Goldberg. He died in 2009.
AVERY CORMAN—Author of the novels Kramer vs. Kramer, The Old Neighborhood, and Oh, God!
MICHAEL DEELEY—Former president of EMI Films and producer of The Deer Hunter, Blade Runner, and The Man Who Fell to Earth.
CHRISTOPHER DURANG—Playwriting student, class of 1974, at Yale, where he cowrote The Idiots Karamazov with Albert Innaurato. His later plays include Beyond Therapy, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, and the Tony-winning Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.
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