TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/81/81.40

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 24KB | 429 lines

                                                                                September 7, 1981

CINEMA

What Makes Meryl Magic


The camera sees gray clouds, a churning gray sea, the
spray-lashed stones of a harbor breakwater, and at the
breakwater's end, facing seaward, the cloaked and motionless
figure of a woman. A storm is blowing up. There is danger.
A passerby, a tall, mustached young man, makes his way out along
the breakwater to warn the solitary watcher. Over the rising
wind he calls out to her that she is not safe. Now the
mysterious figure turns, plucks aside the rough cloth of her
hood and stares at the man, through him, for a few moments. Then
she turns again, having found no reason to speak, and once more
looks out to sea. The young man, confused and troubled by what
he has seen in her face, rejoins his fiancee, with who he has
been strolling, and retreats distractedly to the solidity of the
shore.

This moody and romantic tableau, which is instantly recognizable
as the opening scene of John Fowles' novel The French
Lieutenant's Woman, is a cinematographer's delight. The
breakwater exists, just as Fowles described it, at Lyme Regis,
the small English seacoast town of which he wrote. A film
company needs only to go there, dress its actors in the costumes
of 1867 (the story is a 19th century period piece, seen with
irony through the filter of 20th century conceptions and
misconceptions) and wait for dirty weather. All true, with only
one complication:  the look that Sarah Woodruff, the distraught
figure on the breakwater, directs at Charles Smithson, the
aristocratic young idler who approacher her there, must be so
devastating that his comfortable life tumbles into chaos. He
must, as the result of this unexpected collision with a woman
of whom he knows nothing, begin a slide that leads him to jilt
his wealthy fiancee, confess publicly to dishonor and lead the
life of a lonely exile.

Clearly nothing as simple as mere beauty, or sensuality, or
torment, or any ordinary combination of these qualities will
reduce both Charles and cynical 20th century filmgoers to the
requisite mush. Fowles uses a good many words and some carefully
worked literary effects to evoke Sarah's strangeness:  "It was
an unforgettable face, and a tragic face. Its sorrow welled out
of it as purely, naturally and unstoppably as water out of a
woodland spring. There was no artifice there, no hypocrisy, no
hysteria, no mask; and above all, no sign of madness. The
madness was in the empty sea, the empty horizon, the lack of
reason for such sorrow."

Does that do it?  No. Fowles is not yet satisfied, and he goes
back to work. "Again and again, afterwards, Charles thought of
that look as a lance; and to think so is of course not merely
to describe an object but the effect it has."

A screenwriter, on the other hand, can give the cinematic Sarah
no help at all. She must lance Charles on her own, without the
assistance of metaphor, and without a line to speak. Worse, she
must do it wearing unflattering makeup, eyes and nose reddened
from the rough weather and, perhaps, from weeping. An actress
who can manage this adequately is a remarkable technician. One
who can do it well is a rarity of the sort who comes along once
or twice in a decade. What Charles sees when the cloaked woman
turns toward him is an alarming, elemental Sarah who blows
through the film like a sea storm, a Sarah who defines the role
for all time. Her name is Meryl Streep.

There is a sensible tradition among movie people to say, always,
that the actors who are finally cast for a film were the only
ones ever considered. This avoids needlessly affronting the
actors who were considered but passed over, or admitting that
some actors turned down the preferred parts. It also shields
audiences from the dampening perception that they are getting
second choices. In the case of the extraordinary new film of
The French Lieutenant's Woman, however, when Director Karel
Reisz swears that when he undertook the project he never thought
of casting any other actress as Sarah, the tendency is not only
to believe him, but to think. "Yes, of course, that's obvious."

What is remarkable about Meryl Streep's brief film career--Sarah
is her first really big role--is that she has brought this same
feeling of inevitability even to relatively minor parts. In The
Deer Hunter she had only a few important scenes, but it requires
a wrenching effort now to imagine another actress playing Linda,
Christopher Walken's shy girlfriend. Casual television viewers,
who cared not at all that she had made her reputation as a stage
actress at the Yale School of Drama and at Joseph Papp's Public
Theater in New York City, were struck by her portrayal of a
gentile woman married to a Jew among the haunted faces of the
Holocaust series. As Woody Allen's lesbian ex-wife in
Manhattan, she was chilling and fun, and an exquisite
counterpoise to the agitated femininity of Diane Keaton. In
The Seduction of Joe Tynan, she was utterly convincing, cornpone
accent and all, as the other woman, a Southern civil rights
lawyer who falls in love with Alan Alda, a liberal Senator from
New York. But to be convincing is merely to be competent, and
Streep managed to give enough humanity to a routine role that
when the cardboard Senator predictably told her that he was
returning to his cardboard wife, viewers worried about what
would become of the seductress.

Well before she played Joanna, the wife who walks out on Dustin
Hoffman and their son in Kramer vs. Kramer, an astonishing
public clamor had set up around this almost gawky-looking blond,
all bones and angles. When Kramer opened the outcry redoubled.
Though the script was weighted too much toward sympathy for
Hoffman and the boy, Streep brought the film back into balance.
By playing Joanna as a woman baffled and hurt not simply by her
husband's shortcomings but by her own failures, she gave it a
subtlety it would not have otherwise possessed.

The reviews of Kramer were rapturous, and she won an Academy
Award for Best Supporting Actress. But the din from feature
writers eager to probe her personal life was oppressive to
Streep, a private person who feels (following the fashion of
Actor Robert De Niro and some lordly professional athletes) that
newsprint could wrap fish even better if reporters did not go
through the messy and wasteful process of putting ink on it.

"For a while there it was either me or the Ayatullah on the
covers of national magazines," she says with no pleasure. "It
was excessive hype."  Of course, the line between excessive hype
and just the right amount of hype is difficult to draw in show
business. But the excitement Streep stirs whenever she appears
on a screen or a stage has nothing to do with puffery. It is
a real, if sometimes clumsily expressed, response to an artist
of rare skill and presence. Film Maker Robert Benton, who
directed Streep in Kramer and a thriller called Stab, to be
released next spring, calls her "one of a handful of really
great actresses."  It is nearly impossible to find a
knowledgeable person in the film and theater worlds who does not
use superlatives when talking about her. "There's nothing she
can't do," Benton goes on. "Like De Niro she has no limits.
I've watched Meryl over the years, and she's so staggeringly
different in Kramer from the way she is in Deer Hunter--and try
as I might, I can't figure out why. She has an immense backbone
of techniques, but you never catch her using it."

A viewer finds himself watching Meryl Streep much more closely
than he is accustomed to watching actresses. More seems to be
going on. It is not simply that she manages to make her face an
astonishingly clear reflection of her character's complexities.
It is not merely that this pale face, with its small, amused
eyes and its nose long and curved as a flensing knife (when she
kissed Alan Alda injudiciously in Tynan, this precarious nose
displaced the flesh of his cheek up toward his eyeball), is
poised fascinatingly between beauty and harshness. What makes
the viewer sit forward in his seat is that Streep is so
thoroughly a creature of change. Her expression is shadowed by
a dizzying mutability. There is no doubt that in an instant this
woman could take flight toward any state of emotion or mind.

In The French Lieutenant's Woman, a film in which the sanity of
her 19th century character is in grave doubt, what Streep
manages to convey when she is not speaking is extraordinary.
She is pleased with the performance. "I luff effrythink I do,
darlink," she says, giving a brief Zsa Zsa Gabor imitation.
Then she lapses into the somewhat prosy shoptalk of a
college-educated actress:  "When I read the book, it elicited
an emotional reaction in me and I determined to re-create it for
someone else through thinking and design, thought and craft. The
arc I designed for the character went up and happened."  Then
the arc-and-craft jargon drops away, and she says a bit
wistfully:  "Watching the film, I couldn't help wishing that I
was more beautiful. There comes a point when you have to look
the part, especially in movies. In Victorian literature,
passion, an illicit feeling, was always represented by darkness.
I'm so fair that dark hair makes me look like some old fish, so
I opted for auburn hair instead. I really wished I was the kind
of actress who could have just stood there and said it all."

Streep's unusual looks give her, at 32, the flexibility to play
anything from a hag to a beauty, and she is aware of this. "I
know I'm good-looking enough to play any of the women I usually
play--individuals in the world. But for this character with
her intense beauty, it wasn't enough."  She laughs at herself.
"I once went up for King of the Gypsies, a Dino De Laurentiis
film. His son, who has since died [in July] in a plane crash,
remarked to his father in Italian, 'But she's not beautiful.'
It didn't bother me as much that he said it, as that he said
it in Italian. I did Italian 105 at Vassar. I told him I
understood and that it didn't matter anyway. But I never forgot
it. 'What does he mean?' I told myself, 'I was voted Best
Looking in my high school.

The remark is made with airy irony, but the fact is that she
went through an ugly-duckling stage in late childhood--glasses,
fat cheeks, permed hair and a bossy, show-offy disposition, as
she recalls it. "She was pretty ghastly," admits her younger
brother. "Third" (Harry Streep III), 30, a modern dancer who
heads the Third Dance Theater in Manhattan. It was by no means
a terrible childhood, Streep says now. The family lived
comfortably in a succession of pleasant New Jersey towns. Harry
Streep II was a pharmaceutical company executive, and his wife
Mary Louise a commercial artist. The parents were "fond of us,
to put it mildly; they thought we were the greatest thing ever
born," says Meryl. The elder Streeps, now retired and living
in Mystic, Conn., were forever taking Meryl and their two boys
(Brother Dana, 28, is a bond salesman who lives in New Jersey)
to museums, the theater, the ballet and ball games. But Meryl
had few friends, and as far as anyone knew only one asset, a
"nice, light, coloratura voice."  At twelve she began taking
singing lessons in Manhattan with Voice Coach Estelle Liebling
(and gradually became aware that the "nice lady who had the
lesson before me" was Opera Star Beverly Stills).

Singing was not enough, however; a complete transformation was
required. The passage of time and the ingestion of enough
peanut butter sandwiches usually do transform twelve-year-old
children, of course. But Streep sees what she calls "my
makeover" as a willed act, accomplished with contact lenses, a
bottle of peroxide and an iron determination. By the time she
entered Bernards High School in Bernardsville, N.J., she had
indeed become "the perfect Seventeen magazine knockout," acting
out what she calls "my first characterization; I played the
blond homecoming queen for several years."  It was not a
mindless, giddy time, however; a highly developed sense of irony
intruded, she says, with the result that "I had friends, sort
of."  She was a cheerleader, she was popular with boys, and best
of all, she was the star of all of the high school musicals.
She had seen The Music Man on Broadway and had fallen in love
with Star Barbara Cook. Now at 15, she won the Cook role of
Marian the librarian.

"If I can locate the moment when I was first bitten, that was
it," says Meryl. "The whole audience stood up when I came out.
Mind you, I've never had that experience since. It must be
like what Lady Diana felt on the balcony."  English Teacher Jean
Galbraith recalls dropping in on a rehearsal and hearing her
sing Till There Was You. "I thought, that can't be the kid in
the first row who sits next to the windows?  I mean that's
professional, that's fantastic."  Brother Third, who played
Winthrop, Marian's little brother, says that there was some
jealousy when she went on to get the leads in Li'l Abner and
Oklahoma. The present Bernards High drama teacher, a veteran
road-company actor named Dick Everhart, happened to be applying
for a job when Meryl played Laurie in Oklahoma. Her enormous
natural gift was clear even then. Says he:  "When she walked
on the stage there was nobody else there."

Streep's career had begun, and its record since then has been
a matter of theater people of increasing authority repeating
those first cries of astonishment. She enrolled at Vassar, then
a college for women. In the nonconformist atmosphere of the late
1960s she was able to stop around there in jeans, with an old
felt hat pulled down to her ears, and drop her pom-pom girl
impersonation for good. She established herself quickly as an
actress at Vassar. She never seemed to care especially about
being a star, recalls Clinton Atkinson, who directed her in the
demanding lead role of Strindberg's Miss Julie. But it was
clear that she would go beyond college theater. "Onstage," say
Atkinson, "something happened within her that glowed. Men were
always falling in love with her. I found her acting hair
raising, absolutely mind-boggling."

After Vassar she toured Vermont colleges and ski areas for a
few months with the Green Mountain Guild, a rep company, playing
Shaw and Chekhov for $48 a week--"and it wasn't even the
Depression."  Then she made her commitment, and sent off an
application to the Yale School of Drama. Yale awarded her a
three-year scholarship and, as it turned out, the privilege of
playing twelve to 15 roles per year.

"It was terribly intense," she says now. "Those years made me
tired, crazy, nervous. I was constantly throwing up, on my way
to an ulcer." She loathed the in-fighting for roles. Robert
Lewis, a Yale drama professor, recalls a scene she did playing
Alma in Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke. "It was certainly
the best I ever saw that part played, and that's a reaction you
don't usually feel when acting student do scenes, you know. It
was so clinical you could hardly look at it. It was like
looking into somebody's life."  Lewis also marvels at Meryl's
range. He recalls her flying about in a wheelchair, playing a
crazy, octogenarian translator of Russian literature in a
Christopher Durang play. "It was really the most imaginative
farcical performance I've ever seen."

By the time this favored child of a dozen college directors
received her degree from Yale in 1975, she was, in that odd way
common to sensitive people who have received a great deal of
praise, choking on success. "I resign myself to being lousy on
opening nights," she says. "It's not getting easier, but
harder. You look out and see people with pads in their laps
judging you."  That the judgements are nearly always ecstatic
does not really help. She seems uncomfortable with the fact she
was praised so high (she received an Obie award) for her rousing
performance last winter in a Public Theater musical. Alice in
Concert, for which the playwright, her friend Elizabeth Swados,
was roundly panned. "It's insane to have winners and losers in
art. We live in a society plagued by sports mania. To say
that one performance is better than another is just plain dumb.
You wouldn't think of comparing two colors in a painting, would
you:  this blue is better than that blue?"

As a matter of fact, yes, you would. And Streep's remarkable
parade of successes marched without a pause from Yale to New
York. It does not seem accurate to speak of lucky breaks.
Streep talked herself into a Public Theater audition for
Pinero's Trelawny of the Wells and Impresario Joe Papp asked her
to play a featured part. But the truth surely is that if it had
not been Papp who took her in hand, it would have been some
other director. The Trelawny role was followed by a spectacular
success at Manhattan's Phoenix Theater, when she played two
utterly different characters on the same evening, a sexy
secretary in Arthur Miller's one-act A Memory of Two Mondays,
and a 170-lb. floozie in Tennessee Williams' 27 Wagons Full of
Cotton. Playgoers were shocked to realize that they were seeing
the same actress. "That sort of thing is done all the time,"
she says now, "but to do it on the same night was considered
pretty impressive."

Papp's Shakespeare in the Park gave New York some of its most
exciting theater a few years ago, and the 1976 production of
Measure for Measure, with Streep as Isabella, was one of the
high points of the series. Also in the cast was John Cazale,
who had played Fredo, the weak brother, in the Godfather films.
They fell in love and lived together until Cazale died of bone
cancer two years later, at 42. By the time they worked together
in Michael's Cimino's Deer Hunter, Cazale was fighting for the
strength to say his lines. Streep had contracted to film
Holocaust in Austria, where, as Cazale was dying in the U.S.,
she played a woman whose husband was imprisoned in a
concentration camp. It was a grim experience, but, says Actor
Fritz Weaver, who worked with her, "there was not one moment of
self-pity. She has tremendous professional devotion."  Back in
the U.S., she dropped her career to stay with Cazale for the
months that remained until he died, in March 1978.

Afterward, she says, "I was emotionally blitzed. All my energy
was channeled into my work. I was doing Joe Tynan at the time.
It was a selfish period, a period of healing for me, of trying
to incorporate what had happened into my life. I wanted to find
a place where I could carry it forever and still function."

Within a few months her life changed again. She began keeping
company with Don Gummer, a sculptor friend of Third, a tall,
dark-haired fellow in his early 30s, who had graduated a few
years before from Yale's School of Arts. After a couple of
months the two were married, and late in 1979 Henry Wolfe
Gummer, called Gippy, was born. When she was in England during
the next spring and summer portraying the unhappy outcast Sarah,
she was, in fact, a contented young mother, who breast-fed her
baby during lunch break. Her husband stayed with the film
company for the first month, then had to return to New York to
get his own work--architectural constructions, mostly of wood
or stone--ready for shows. Says Streep:  "He felt so cut off
... the phone bill for five weeks in Lyme Regis was $500."

Confecting an English accent was easy for her:  "I think of
myself as a great mimic."  Classical training also helped,
"primarily in getting me used to wearing a corset for hours at
a time."  Playing Sarah posed problems "because the reasons for
her actions were so vague. I knew only that she was
'ambitious.'  And because so much was covered up during
Victorian times, i had to come on as though there was a fire
inside, while remaining outwardly calm, I had, as the English
say, to be careful about not going over the top. I played the
monologue like a dialogue with myself. What my eyes said was
the truth, and what came out of my mouth wasn't."  Says Fowles,
who is well satisfied with Streep's Sarah:  "She was very shy
about me. When I appeared on the set, she'd hide. She had some
extraordinary notion that I didn't want an American actress.
But there's no English actress of her age group who could have
done it."

Now, with The French Lieutenant's Woman opening across the U.S.
and Stab in the editing stage, Streep is enjoying a few months
without professional commitments. She plays with Gippy, escapes
with her husband whenever they can to a tree farm they bought
not long ago in Dutchess County, and when she is in Manhattan
tries to stay out of midtown, where every tourist comes equipped
with a celebrity detector. She and Gummer are moving from his
loft in Tribeca, an area in downtown Manhattan favored by
artists, to a larger but equally unpretentious place just to the
north, in Little Italy. Streep is now and forever a New Yorker,
without a trace of a tan or of West Coast show-biz gloss. She
bounces into a magazine photo session, wearing a dime-store sun
dress and dark glasses held together by a safety pin. She is a
fan of egg creams (a New York soft drink made of seltzer,
chocolate syrup, milk and, of course, no eggs), and a resolute
rider of subways; if the middle class and the rich don't use the
subways, she argues, they will continue to fall apart and so
will her beloved city. Streep is a liberal who is outraged by
the Reaganauts in Washington, and a feminist who support the ERA
and who gets angry at the way films exploit women in sex scenes.

When she talks about herself nowadays, it is to tell about
blowing sky high--not remembering her speech--when she presented
an award at the Tony ceremonies a few months ago. Or to
describe how, on the set of Stab, "I just couldn't get a scene
right. The dialogue seemed false. I got madder and madder
because I knew the answer lay within me, but I couldn't wrestle
it up, I sulked all day--something I never did before. There's
a lot of tension toward the end of a film, because the answers
have to be there."

The privacy that she folds around herself falls away when she
talks about her next project, which is Pakula's film of the
William Styron novel Sophie's Choice. She says with deadly
intensity, "I really wanted that part."  She obtained a pirated
copy of the script"through nefarious means," and, she continues,
"I went to Pakula and threw myself on the ground. 'Please, God,
let me do it,' I begged." Her own part secure, she urged that
Actor Kevin Kline, 33, play opposite her as Nathan. ("The man's
mad, he's brilliant.")  Streep has the professional weight to
do that now and make it stick, and Kline, who has been playing
the pirate king in Papp's production of The Pirates of
Penazance, got the part. The Sophie-Nathan pairing should be
a memorable collision. Since Sophie must speak with a Polish
accent, Streep plans to study Polish five days a week for three
months before filming begins. "I don't know how I see the
character yet," says Streep. "I'm still in the 'intuit' stage,
and I haven't picked her apart yet. First I'll learn Polish.
Then I'll forget me. Then I'll get to her. That's my plan of
action."

Beyond Sophie?  There is a film on the horizon about Karen
Silkwood, an antinuclear activist who was mysteriously killed
in an auto crash while working on an expose in 1974. And
afterward?  It is a little startling to realize that Meryl
Streep has appeared in only one Broadway show (Happy End in
1977). Another Broadway musical?  A filmed musical?  Some
really alarming risktaking on one of Joe Papp's stages?  Says
her friend Papp:  "I'm convinced we haven't yet begun to see the
richness of her talent."  In fact, says this cheerfully biased
stage director, "in films--which always do the obvious--we've
only seen about ten percent of her."

--By John Skow. Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York