Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep by Michael Schulman. Harper, $26.99
By almost universal critical consensus, Meryl Streep is considered the greatest living movie actress of her generation, and with the possible exception of Katharine Hepburn, many rank her as the greatest of all time. Everyone, that is, except Streep herself, who regards this accolade as a curse for the working actor. After reading the gay New Yorker arts editor Michael Schulman's analysis of Streep, one doesn't doubt his admiration and respect: "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." Her Again is not so much a biography as it is an artist's founding myth, covering only her early career through 1980, how she evolved into an "acting factory" (to quote the late actor Raul Julia), so by 30 she was rising to the top of her profession. Yet her success did not come without cost.
Born Mary Louise Streep on June 22, 1949, and raised in Bernardsville, New Jersey, her mother called her Meryl as there were already three Marys in the family. It was at 12, singing in a school concert, that she first felt the "intoxication of applause." Bossy as a child, she didn't care that much how she looked or whether people liked her. However, at 16 she almost willed herself to be beautiful and popular, being elected home queen at 17, with the quarterback boyfriend at her side. She attended Vassar College and discovered the stage. She was accepted at the Yale School of Drama in 1971, and her fabled classmates included Sigourney Weaver, Christopher Durang, and playwright Wendy Wasserstein, referring to their time there as the Yale School of Trauma. The training was grueling as students were expected to be skilled in any theatrical genre, so one day you were acting Shakespeare and the next thrown into a madcap student-written spoof of The Brothers Karamazov.
Her fellow Yalies, like her high school friends, began to realize "that Meryl Streep could outdo them in almost anything (she famously pantomimed performing an abortion on herself in class)," and some resented her getting all the lead roles. Joseph Papp mentored her, casting her in productions of Shakespeare in the Park, Lincoln Center, and his own Public Theater, recognizing her genius, even trying later unsuccessfully to entice her to be his successor. She was interested only in theater, as opportunities to play modern independent women were rare in movies, but her reputation preceded her to Hollywood. Despite being an unknown, she was cast in a small but noticeable part in Julia.
She only accepted the breakthrough role of Linda in Deer Hunter so she could act with her lover, actor John Cazale, having met him as Angelo to her Isabella in Papp's Measure for Measure. They seemed to share a common laserlike intensity and brilliance. He only acted in five films, all nominees for Best Picture Oscars, though criminally he was never nominated. He would die of lung cancer at 43 on March 12, 1979, nursed by Streep, devastated, never fully recovering from the loss.
Nominated for Best Supporting Actress in Deer Hunter, an Emmy for her starring role in the Holocaust miniseries and a showy part as Woody Allen's lesbian ex-wife in Manhattan �" all gave her huge exposure, so she was cast as the divorced mother who abandons her child to find herself in Kramer vs. Kramer . Her Joanna would win her first Oscar, but she insisted the part be rewritten to represent real women facing divorce and child custody battles. She had to endure the verbal and physical abuse of the Method-obsessed perfectionist Dustin Hoffman, who slapped her across the face during filming. She had become a star in less than a decade, deploring the trappings of celebrity, preferring to speak through her characters, who are fashioned from her own life experiences and imagination.
In addition to being a gay icon, she always had close gay friends, especially at Yale in the early 1970s (Durang and Albert Innaurato), and met gay hairstylist-makeup artist Roy Helland in her first (and only) Broadway production. He has been with her for 37 years. Schulman etches a mostly flattering portrait, though he mentions criticism, especially by Pauline Kael, that Streep was cold ("Ice Princess"), overly heady, and technique-driven. Schulman uses conversations with Streep's colleagues, friends, and interviews given over the decades, though she didn't meet or help him. She didn't stop him, either.
The book's pace and liveliness pick up in the second half, which concentrates on her movie career. The account of her chance encounter and marriage to Don Gummer, a sculptor, six months after Cazale's death, is brief and unsatisfying. Streep's abandonment of the theater for movies is neither explained nor explored, despite her passion for the stage. But this is a fine first portrait of Streep, maintaining a sense of mystery about her, not attempting to over-dissect her magic. Schulman excels at demonstrating how difficult it was to be an actor during the 70s in grimy, bankrupt New York. Streep could do far worse than trust the rest of her life story to Schulman; in fact, she would be wise to do so.