DEDICATION For Jaime EPIGRAPH “Can I just say? There is no such thing as the best actress. There is no such thing as the greatest living actress. I am in a position where I have secret information, you know, that I know this to be true.” —MERYL STREEP, 2009 CONTENTS Dedication Epigraph Prologue Mary Julie Constance Isabella Fredo Linda Joanna Supporting Characters Acknowledgments Notes Photos Section About the Author Credits Copyright About the Publisher Prologue NOT ALL MOVIE STARS are created equal. If you were to trap all of Hollywood in amber and study it, like an ancient ecosystem buried beneath layers of sediment and rock, you’d discover a latticework of unspoken hierarchies, thwarted ambitions, and compromises dressed up as career moves. The best time and place to conduct such an archeological survey would undoubtedly be in late winter at 6801 Hollywood Boulevard, where they hand out the Academy Awards. By now, of course, the Oscars are populated as much by movie stars as by hangers-on: publicists, stylists, red-carpet correspondents, stylists and publicists of red-carpet correspondents. The nominee is like a ship’s hull supporting a small community of barnacles. Cutting through hordes of photographers and flacks and assistants trying to stay out of the frame, she has endured months of luncheons and screenings and speculation. Now, a trusted handler will lead her through the thicket, into the hall where her fate lies in an envelope. The 84th Academy Awards are no different. It’s February 26, 2012, and the scene outside the Kodak Theatre is a pandemonium of a zillion micromanaged parts. Screaming spectators in bleachers wait on one side of a triumphal arch through which the contenders arrive in choreographed succession. Gelled television personalities await with questions: Are they nervous? Is it their first time here? And whom, in the unsettling parlance, are they wearing? There are established movie stars (Gwyneth Paltrow, in a white Tom Ford cape), newly minted starlets (Emma Stone, in a red Giambattista Valli neck bow bigger than her head). If you care to notice, there are men: Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks, George Clooney. For some reason, there’s a nun. Most of the attention, though, belongs to the women, and the ones nominated for Best Actress bear special scrutiny. There’s Michelle Williams, pixie-like in a sleek red Louis Vuitton dress. Rooney Mara, a punk princess in her white Givenchy gown and forbidding black bangs. Viola Davis, in a lustrous green Vera Wang. And Glenn Close, nominated for Albert Nobbs, looking slyly androgynous in a Zac Posen gown and matching tuxedo jacket. But it’s the fifth nominee who will give them all a run for their money, and when she arrives, like a monarch come to greet her subjects, her appearance projects victory. Meryl Streep is in gold. Specifically, she is wearing a Lanvin gold lamé gown, draped around her frame like a Greek goddess’s toga. The accessories are just as sharp: dangling gold earrings, a mother-of-pearl minaudière, and Salvatore Ferragamo gold lizard sandals. As more than a few observers point out, she looks not unlike an Oscar herself. One fashion blog asks: “Do you agree that this is the best she has ever looked?” The implication: not bad for a sixty-three-year-old. Most of all, the gold number says one thing: It’s my year. But is it? Consider the odds. Yes, she has won two Oscars already, but the last time was in 1983. And while she has been nominated a record-breaking seventeen times, she has also lost a record-breaking fourteen times, putting her firmly in Susan Lucci territory. Meryl Streep is accustomed to losing Oscars. And consider the movie. No one thinks that The Iron Lady, in which she played a braying Margaret Thatcher, is cinematic genius. While her performance has the trappings of Oscar bait—historical figure, age prosthetics, accent work— they’re the same qualities that have pigeonholed her for decades. In his New York Times review, A. O. Scott put it this way: “Stiff legged and slow moving, behind a discreetly applied ton of geriatric makeup, Ms. Streep provides, once again, a technically flawless impersonation that also seems to reveal the inner essence of a well-known person.” All nice words, but strung together they carry a whiff of fatigue. As she drags her husband, Don Gummer, down the red carpet, an entertainment reporter sticks a microphone in her face. “Do you ever get nervous on carpets like this, even though you’re such a pro?” “Yes, you should feel my heart—but you’re not allowed to,” she answers dryly. “Do you have any good-luck charms on you?” the reporter persists. “Yes,” she says, a little impatiently. “I have shoes that Ferragamo made— because he made all of Margaret Thatcher’s shoes.” Turning to the bleachers, she gives a little shimmy, and the crowd roars with delight. With that, she takes her husband’s hand and heads inside. They wouldn’t be the Academy Awards if they weren’t endless. Before she can find out if she’s this year’s Best Actress, a number of formalities will have to be endured. Billy Crystal will do his shtick. (“Nothing can take the sting out of the world’s economic problems like watching millionaires present each other with golden statues.”) Christopher Plummer, at eighty-two, will become the oldest person to be named Best Supporting Actor. (“When I emerged from my mother’s womb I was already rehearsing my Academy speech.”) Cirque du Soleil will perform an acrobatic tribute to the magic of cinema. Finally, Colin Firth comes out to present the award for Best Actress. As he recites the names of the nominees, she takes deep, fortifying breaths, her gold earrings trembling above her shoulders. A short clip plays of Thatcher scolding an American dignitary (“Shall I be mother? Tea, Al?”), then Firth opens the envelope and grins. “And the Oscar goes to Meryl Streep.” THE MERYL STREEP acceptance speech is an art form unto itself: at once spontaneous and scripted, humble and haughty, grateful and blasé. Of course, the fact that there are so many of them is part of the joke. Who but Meryl Streep has won so many prizes that self-deprecating nonchalance has itself become a running gag? By now, it seems as if the title Greatest Living Actress has affixed itself to her about as long as Elizabeth II has been the queen of England. Superlatives stick to her like thumbtacks: she is a god among actors, able to disappear into any character, master any genre, and, Lord knows, nail any accent. Far from fading into the usual post-fifty obsolescence, she has defied Hollywood calculus and reached a career high. No other actress born before 1960 can even get a part unless Meryl passes on it first. From her breakout roles in the late seventies, she was celebrated for the infinitely shaded brushstrokes of her characterizations. In the eighties, she was the globe-hopping heroine of dramatic epics like Sophie’s Choice and Out of Africa. The nineties, she insists, were a lull. (She was Oscar-nominated four times.) The year she turned forty, she is keen to point out, she was offered the chance to play three different witches. In 2002, she starred in Spike Jonze’s uncategorizable Adaptation. The movie seemed to liberate her from whatever momentary rut she had been in. Suddenly, she could do what she felt like and make it seem like a lark. When she won the Golden Globe the next year, she seemed almost puzzled. “Oh, I didn’t have anything prepared,” she said, running her fingers through sweat-covered bangs, “because it’s been since, like, the Pleistocene era that I won anything.” By 2004, when she won an Emmy for Mike Nichols’s television adaptation of Angels in America, her humility had melted into arch overconfidence (“There are some days when I myself think I’m overrated . . . but not today”). The hits— and the winking acceptance speeches—kept coming: a Golden Globe for The Devil Wears Prada (“I think I’ve worked with everybody in the room”), a SAG Award for Doubt (“I didn’t even buy a dress!”). She soon mastered the art of jousting with her own hype, undermining her perceived superiority while putting it on luxurious display. So when Colin Firth calls her name at the Kodak Theatre, it’s a homecoming three decades in the making, a sign that the career rehabilitation that began with Adaptation has reached its zenith. When she hears the winner, she puts her hand to her mouth and shakes her head in disbelief. With the audience on its feet, she kisses Don twice, takes hold of her third Oscar, and resumes the time-honored tradition of cutting herself down to size. “Oh, my God. Oh, come on,” she begins, quieting the crowd. She laughs to herself. “When they called my name, I had this feeling I could hear half of America going, ‘Ohhh, no. Oh, come on—why? Her. Again.’ You know?” For a moment, she actually seems hurt by the idea that half of America is disappointed. Then she smirks. “But . . . whatever.” Having broken the tension with an impeccable fake-out, she proceeds to the business of gratitude. “First, I’m going to thank Don,” she says warmly. “Because when you thank your husband at the end of the speech, they play him out with the music, and I want him to know that everything I value most in our lives, you’ve given me.” The camera cuts to Don, patting his heart. “And now, secondly, my other partner. Thirty-seven years ago, my first play in New York City, I met the great hair stylist and makeup artist Roy Helland, and we worked together pretty continuously since the day we clapped eyes on each other. His first film with me was Sophie’s Choice, and all the way up to tonight”—her voice cracks briefly—“when he won for his beautiful work in The Iron Lady, thirty years later.” With Thatcheresque certitude, she underlines each word with a karate chop: “Every. Single. Movie. In. Between.” She shifts her tone again and continues, “I just want to thank Roy, but also I want to thank—because I really understand I’ll never be up here again.” (With that, she gives an almost imperceptible side-glance that says, Well, we’ll see . . .) “I really want to thank all my colleagues, all my friends. I look out here and I see my life before my eyes: my old friends, my new friends.” Her voice softening, she goes for the big finish: “Really, this is such a great honor, but the thing that counts the most with me is the friendships and the love and the sheer joy we have shared making movies together. My friends, thank you, all of you, departed and here, for this, you know, inexplicably wonderful career.” On “departed,” she looks skyward and raises a palm to the heavens—or, at least, to the lighting rig of the Kodak Theatre, where show-business ghosts lurk. Any number of ghosts could have been on her mind. Her mother, Mary Wolf, who died in 2001. Her father, Harry, who died two years later. Her directors: Karel Reisz, who cast her in The French Lieutenant’s Woman; Alan J. Pakula, who made her the star of Sophie’s Choice. Surely, she thought of Joseph Papp, the legendary theater producer, who plucked her from obscurity months after she finished drama school. But at this moment, seeing her career come to yet another climax, it’s hard to imagine that she didn’t think back to its beginnings, and its beginnings were all wrapped up in John Cazale. It’s been thirty-four years since she saw him. Thirty-six years since they met, playing Angelo and Isabella in a Shakespeare in the Park production of Measure for Measure. Night after night in the sticky summer air, she would beg him to show mercy for her condemned brother: “Spare him, spare him! He’s not prepared for death.” John Cazale was one of the great character actors of his generation, and one of the most chronically overlooked. Forever Fredo of the Godfather movies, he was her first deep love, and her first devastating loss. Had he lived past forty- two, his name might have become as familiar as De Niro or Pacino. But there was so much he hadn’t been around to see. He hadn’t seen Meryl win two Academy Awards by the time she was thirty-three. He hadn’t seen her age into regal self-possession. He hadn’t seen her play Joanna or Sophie or Karen or Lindy or Francesca or Miranda or Julia or Maggie. John Cazale hadn’t lived to see her onstage now, thanking her friends, all of them, for this “inexplicably wonderful career.” After one last “thank you,” she waves farewell and heads toward the wings, having burnished her reputation once again. Meryl Streep, the Iron Lady of acting: indomitable, unsinkable, inevitable. BUT IT WASN’T always so.