CHAPTER 5 Meryl the Lion

I had a farm in Africa.—Karen Blixen

(Out of Africa, 1985)

Meryl was frustrated. She tried to connect with her character, with the script, and with her costar, but doing so seemed impossible. This time, she had a problem—and didn’t know how to fix it.

“I just couldn’t get a scene right,” Meryl said of Still of the Night, an Alfred Hitchcock homage written and directed by Robert Benton. “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.”

While Silkwood wound down in Texas, a new Meryl—a femme fatale with a shady past—was slinking into movie theaters nationwide on November 19, 1982. In Benton’s whodunit, originally titled Stab, she played Brooke Reynolds, a glamorous auction house employee and suspected psycho killer. Things go awry when Manhattan psychiatrist Sam Rice (Roy Scheider) becomes obsessed with the murder of a married patient. The mistress, Brooke, is chilly, self-possessed, and opaque, a real Hitchcock blonde. But did she do the dirty deed? (I won’t spoil it for you.)

Meryl shot the thriller between The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Sophie’s Choice and now considers it a blip in her filmography. Her frustration produced friction with costar Scheider, which affected their chemistry on screen. “Scheider and Streep are no [Cary] Grant and [Grace] Kelly,” wrote Newsweek film critic David Ansen. “You can’t strike a flame with two metallic matches.”

Au contraire, Meryl and Kevin Kline set off palpable sparks in Sophie’s Choice, which opened the next month to largely positive reviews—for Meryl, not the movie itself, which Variety dubbed “handsome” yet “astoundingly tedious.” Still of the Night was already a forgotten fluke. Everyone was talking about Sophie. To Janet Maslin of the New York Times, Meryl had accomplished “the near-impossible, presenting [the character] in believably human terms without losing the scale of Mr. Styron’s invention.” Her performance perplexed Vogue’s Molly Haskell, who argued, “Alan Pakula’s scrupulously faithful and richly atmospheric adaptation gives full rein to Streep’s chameleon-like inventiveness in her most physical performance to date. She trips over ‘the English’ in her charmingly comical Polish accent, falls on the floor with anemia, blossoms under the solicitude of her mad lover Nathan… in the end, her guilt defines her, and we know no more about her interior life than we did in the beginning. What was missing from the character to begin with is still missing: some core identity that is just what Meryl Streep, a mistress of self-disguise who will never be accused of just ‘playing herself,’ can’t supply.”

As a result, Haskell became “more intrigued by the actress than moved by the character.” Pauline Kael, the most prominent reviewer this side of Roger Ebert, unleashed a contrarian opinion in the New Yorker that accused Meryl of… acting. “She has, as usual, put thought and effort into her work,” sniffed Kael. “But something about her puzzles me: after I’ve seen her in a movie, I can’t visualize her from the neck down. Is it possible that as an actress she makes herself into a blank and then focuses all her attention on only one thing—the toss of her head, for example, in ‘Manhattan,’ her accent here?” That approach, she pondered, “could explain why her movie heroines don’t seem to be full characters, and why there are no incidental joys to be had from watching her.”

Ouch. Meryl seemed to make Kael uncomfortable. Her inscrutable alter egos, from Sarah Woodruff to Sophie Zawistowska, suffered more than they laughed. The women lacked roundness because their identities weren’t fixed. They were running from the past, starting new lives, and dodging quicksand underneath. Rather than present Sophie’s foundation as consistently solid, Meryl served the character by vividly internalizing her struggle to overcome survivor’s remorse. A strong, complex personality born before Technicolor and raised in an era when movie stars were movie stars, Kael was prone to champion actors whose raw sexuality colored their screen presences. She refused to drink the Meryl Kool-Aid. This oddball It Girl, with her patrician chill and self-possession and limitless tones, failed to thrill Kael as she had captivated other major (predominantly male) critics. But there was joy, as Haskell suggested, in watching the artist create.

“It killed me,” Meryl has said of Kael’s criticism. In 2008, she conceded to the Guardian that she was “incapable” of ignoring it. “And you know what I think?” she said, breaking her interview persona (classy, warm, likable) to deliver a low blow. “That Pauline was a poor Jewish girl who was at Berkeley with all these rich Pasadena WASPs with long blonde hair, and the heartlessness of them got her. And then, years later, she sees me.”

On April 11, 1983, Meryl and Don arrived at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for a super-fancy, high-pressure date night: the Fifty-Fifth Academy Awards. Sophie’s Choice had scored five Oscar nominations, notably Best Actress for Meryl. It was the Holy Grail of awards. The year before, Katharine Hepburn took home the prize, but this time Meryl wasn’t the dark horse. In January, she won the Golden Globe for Best Actress, establishing her front-runner status. The Academy snubbed newcomers Kevin Kline and Peter MacNicol and, most glaringly, Sophie’s Choice as Best Picture. It faced stiff competition: Gandhi (the winner), E.T. (the cultural phenomenon) and Tootsie (Dustin Hoffman in drag), each making the cut—plus more money at the box office. (Sophie’s Choice pulled in a decent $30 million on a $9 million budget.) Also up for the top prize: Missing, a historical drama starring Sissy Spacek and Jack Lemmon, and The Verdict, a legal drama with Paul Newman.

Meryl was up against three fellow cool kids—Spacek, Jessica Lange (Frances Farmer), and Debra Winger (An Officer and a Gentleman)—as well as a beloved icon: Victor/Victoria’s Julie Andrews. Meryl looked nervous but resplendent in a loose-fitting gold gown that concealed some personal news: she was pregnant with baby number two, due later that summer. When Sylvester Stallone introduced the nominees, Meryl drew an enthusiastic round of applause. She smiled, looked down, touched her chin and glanced to her right, where Don, the embodiment of Zen calm, sat stoically.

Finally, after ninety seconds that seemed like two years, Stallone announced her name. She kissed Don and made her way to the stage, dropping a piece of paper on which she wrote her speech. She retrieved it and then hovered at the podium for a few seconds, bubbling with happiness. Finally, she spoke: “Oh boy! No matter how much you try to imagine what this is like, it’s so incredibly thrilling right down to your toes.” She thanked Pakula, Roy Helland, her Polish coach, her German coaches, and, last but not least, Kline and MacNicol, to whom she dedicated her second Oscar in four years.

Five months later, she welcomed her second child in four years.

Daughter Mary Willa, whom Meryl called Mamie after her grandmother, was born in New York on August 3, 1983, weighing 7 pounds and 1 ½ ounces. While in utero, Mamie had an arrhythmic heart. A doctor assured Meryl that in 60 percent of instances, the condition was temporary. Meryl worried Henry’s sibling would fall “into the 40 percent” category, winding up with “severe cardiac disease.” Compounding her fears, the hospital placed fragile Mamie—greeting the world for the first time—in infant intensive care. The good news: she was OK.

Meryl’s second Oscar win!

Afterward, according to the April 1984 edition of Ladies’ Home Journal, Meryl suffered a bout of postpartum depression. She would turn on the TV news and cry. When Mamie was six weeks old, Meryl brought her along to an interview with Ladies’ Home Journal to promote Silkwood, slated for release in December. Mamie’s nanny had the flu, and a mother’s got to do what a mother’s got to do. The housewives who read the magazine would approve. With Mamie in tow, Meryl presented a sweeter, more wholesome image that countered the tragic malcontents she portrayed on film. She was just a nice, normal mom taking a year off from acting to focus on family.

“Successful women are people whose life has more of an ebb and flow to it,” she told Claudia Dreifus, her interviewer. “It’s certainly true of me. I have this period of great activity, and then I pull away. It isn’t because my interest wanes. It’s because it’s necessary. You can’t have two young children and be away on location. I had to take time out to have a baby. I just couldn’t have balanced it all physically. Motherhood has a very humanizing effect. Everything gets reduced to essentials.”

She said of her husband, “Don and I are a lot alike. He’s a hermit and so am I. We like to be alone—with each other and with our kids. We don’t like the razzmatazz, the photographers, and the glitz. We hardly ever go to Broadway openings because of all that. Some of our happiest times are when we’re alone together in the country.”

The Gummers bought a ninety-six-acre Christmas tree farm upstate in 1980, though they continued to make Manhattan their home base. The couple divided childcare duties, with Don taking Henry to school in the mornings and Meryl picking him up in the afternoons. Meryl cooked; Don tidied up. Besides a nanny, they employed a housekeeper.

Meryl and Don left the kids at home to attend Silkwood’s Los Angeles premiere on December 12, 1983. Ebert gave the movie four out of four stars, writing, “The movie isn’t about plutonium, it’s about the American working class. Its villains aren’t monsters; they’re organization men, labor union hotshots, and people afraid of losing their jobs.” He lauded Meryl’s attention to detail. “Silkwood walks into the factory, punches her time card, automatically looks at her own wristwatch, and then shakes her wrist: It’s a self-winding watch, I guess. That little shake of the wrist is an actor’s choice. There are a lot of them in this movie, all almost as invisible as the first one; little by little, Streep and her co-actors build characters so convincing that we become witnesses instead of moviegoers.”

Vincent Canby called Silkwood “unlike anything [Meryl has] done to date, except in its intelligence. It’s a brassy, profane, gum-chewing tour de force, as funny as it is moving.” Even Pauline Kael admitted that Meryl had delivered a “very fine performance,” even if “she’s the wrong actress for the role.”

Like clockwork, the Academy bestowed a Best Actress nomination upon Meryl as well as nods for Cher (Supporting Actress), Mike Nichols (Best Director), and Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen (Best Original Screenplay). Nobody won, but, according to Arlen, it truly was just an honor to be nominated. Meryl lost to Shirley MacLaine, who broke hearts in Terms of Endearment, a heartwarming, apolitical blockbuster that better matched the climate of Reagan-era Hollywood. Oh well. You can’t win ’em all. Buzz Hirsch saw Meryl at dinner following the ceremony. She seemed quite different from the Texas spitfire he remembered.

“How can I describe it?” he recalls. “She just had taken on this persona of a very fragile, easily broken, overly sensitive, almost frightened person. Just me theorizing: It was the Meryl who she felt she had to present publicly, because she was this woman who was getting all this acclaim and all these nominations. Meryl’s very smart. She was smart enough to know that, ‘Hey, if you’re gonna climb to the heights, don’t go the glamour route.’ I watch the Oscars every year, and she’s always there. It amazes me how frumpy she makes herself look. She deliberately does this. And it’s because she knows how jealous people can be of her success, and when you get up to a place as she has, there are a lot of people who are going to want to take you down.”

Fame came with certain rules: thou shalt not talk politics in the political sphere. Meryl resented having to be extra cautious about giving her opinion freely. So she let it rip (sort of) while addressing graduates at her alma mater:

When I was going to California for the Academy Awards, my dad called and said, “If you win, when you get up there, keep it short, sparkling and nonpolitical.” I told him my dress would sparkle enough for both of us, and if I could get up at all at that moment, I promised I wouldn’t say one word about the [Meryl makes the sound effect for a bomb exploding]. That’s a nice-sized audience, 300 million people, and the desire to say whatever you want to say to everybody on earth in two minutes is strong. However, on that occasion I could see his point about what was appropriate to the moment. But when he gave me the same advice today, I had to disagree. Because we are all political actors, aren’t we, to be judged by our sins of omission as well as commission, by our silence as much as by our expressed opinions, by what we let slide as much as by the things we stand up for.… I think we feel in this country that it’s “inappropriate” for even the most vaguely expressed political views to intrude on what should be short, sparkling, and entertaining. Anyhow, I’m not going to try to make you share my political views today, but I do exhort you to investigate your own and follow through on them. Even at inappropriate gatherings like this.

Following maternity leave, Meryl cleared her schedule for three disparate films: the infidelity drama Falling in Love, opposite Robert De Niro; the stage-to-screen adaptation of David Hare’s Plenty, produced by Broadway guru Joe Papp; and the epic romance Out of Africa, costarring Robert Redford.

First, she filmed Falling in Love, an obscure but affecting little movie about a topic that touches lots of marriages. It reveals how good people can surprise themselves by having affairs—and wrecking families in the process. Frank (De Niro) is a sensitive architect with two young kids; Molly (Meryl) is a shy, winsome artist who lost a child two years earlier. Both commute to New York from Westchester County on the Metro-North train. They meet-cute in a Manhattan bookstore, and casual friendship turns into romantic love. The star-crossed cheaters part ways before consummating the relationship, thereby rendering them more likable to moviegoers for whom sex crosses the line. Ultimately, Frank and Molly leave their spouses and reconnect after bumping into each other via the Metro-North.

Could it be… a happyish ending? “My mother says if I die one more time, she won’t speak to me again,” Meryl explained. She had been eager to do a love story and reteam with Deer Hunter costar De Niro, whom she idolized since Taxi Driver. “That’s the kind of actor I want to be when I grow up,” she told herself in 1976. Flash-forward seven years later: They were colleagues. Collaborators. Members of the same food group. Meryl and De Niro had initially planned a project based on the Ferenc Molnar play The Guardsman. But that fell through. They found the script of Falling in Love, written by Michael Cristofer, and decided to give it a go. As a scene partner, De Niro was meticulous in his pursuit of the perfect take.

Meryl much preferred De Niro to Charles Dance, the Englishman who played her beleaguered husband in Plenty. After completing Falling in Love, Meryl headed to London to shoot the period picture with Charles and Australian director Fred Schepisi. She was playing Susan Traherne, an irascible housewife. The cast included Tracey Ullman as her bohemian best friend and Sting (yes, Sting) as her fling at whom she fires a gun (yes, a gun) amid a violent tantrum. Kate Nelligan originated the juicy role in London’s West End, and the film version proved catnip to Meryl, who lived to flex her theatrical muscles. Don, Henry, and Mamie joined her on location.

David Hare adapted the script from his award-winning play. He was inspired to write Plenty after reading a startling figure: 75 percent of married women who worked as British spies during World War II got postwar divorces. His antiheroine, Susan, had been a spy in occupied France; she longs to relive her exciting wartime mission, which filled her with purpose. Back home, Susan marries courtly diplomat Raymond Brock (played by Charles in the movie) but feels trapped in her secondary station as Raymond’s wife, relegated to keeping the conversation flowing at stuffy social events. Susan begins to make life hell: she embarrasses Raymond in a dinner-party scene, going off on a rant that Ullman’s character, Alice, amusingly labels “psychiatric cabaret.” When Raymond tells Susan to stop talking, she screams, “I WOULD STOP, I WOULD STOP, I WOULD STOP FUCKING TALKING IF I EVER HEARD ANYBODY ELSE SAY ANYTHING WORTH FUCKING STOPPING TALKING FOR!”

(Otherwise, she spoke in a breathy Princess Diana voice.) Meryl crushed both the part and that memorable one-liner, one of Meryl’s all-time favorite bits of dialogue. She and Charles, a tall ginger in his late thirties, did not see eye to eye. They had different working methods. Charles, known for playing bureaucrats and villains, was part of the Royal Shakespeare Company before moving on to the television series Father Brown and The Jewel in the Crown. Generally, the pace of a TV production is faster than it is in the movies. A TV actor might require a take or two, nothing more. Now, Meryl wasn’t overly precious about her work, but she did aim for precision in terms of emotional truth and the details of a scene. Schepisi did a lot of takes, milking actors’ performances, and Meryl, within reason, would do as many takes as necessary to deliver a better performance. Charles once praised Shirley MacLaine, his costar in ABC’s 1987 miniseries Out on a Limb, at Meryl’s expense: “Where Meryl Streep is intellectual, Shirley follows her gut. I like that better.”

Of Meryl, “Let’s just say I found her a little distant,” he confessed. “I hardly got to know her. We had dinner a couple of times, but she only spoke about work. I didn’t find her easy to work with, but it’s not her job to make it easy for me.”

Ian Baker, the cinematographer, wondered whether she “deliberately” alienated Charles. In a pattern Mike Nichols observed, could it be that Meryl had re-created their characters’ animosity for the movie’s sake? Did Charles dislike Meryl… or Susan? On the flip side, Meryl and Ullman became close friends, echoing Susan and Alice. Toward the end of filming Plenty, the partners in crime survived a near-death experience on a crowded flight home from Tunisia, where they shot several scenes. They were drinking champagne and talking smack about Charles. “Guess what happens? An engine blew on the plane, and the other one cut out,” Ullman recalled. “And we began to descend. And the lights went out. And a young air stewardess started crying, which is never a good sign. And after the initial screams, we both went very pale, and we held hands and we became reflective.”

From 30,000 feet, Meryl worried, “Oh damn, that woman who’s writing that horrible unauthorized biography on me will have a terrific ending!”

Diana Maychick, author of the 1984 book The Reluctant Superstar, would not get to write a tragic final chapter to an extraordinary life: the plane made an emergency landing in Nice, France, where the French ground staff treated passengers—even Meryl—like dirt.

Midair panic attacks aside, Meryl was “cool as a cucumber” on Plenty, says Baker. When Schepisi and company captured footage she wasn’t in, she stayed on the set and curled up like a cat, reading a book.

Perhaps she had been studying Karen Blixen’s memoir, Out of Africa, in preparation to portray the Danish writer on the big screen. Next, Meryl would fly to Kenya, joining Redford (and some rented lions), for Universal Pictures’ adaptation of the book. Blixen (pen name: Isak Dinesen) was a baroness and owner of a coffee plantation near Nairobi. In 1913, she moved to the East Africa Protectorate, a British colony, and married her second cousin, Swedish Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke. They purchased a farm, hiring Kikuyu tribespeople to cultivate land that belonged to the tribe before colonial occupation. Blixen started a school on the premises for the tribe’s children. Within eight years, she divorced her husband and ran things solo. The farm fell into debt for various reasons, including soil conditions and the plunging price of coffee. Blixen sold it in 1931 and returned to Denmark, publishing Out of Africa six years later.

The book was bound to reach the movie theater sooner or later, especially given Blixen’s love affair with Denys Finch Hatton, a charismatic big game hunter born into British aristocracy. The same year Blixen gave up her farm, Hatton died when his biplane crashed after takeoff. She documented the tragedy in Out of Africa’s final chapters.

Director Sydney Pollack, who previously helmed the Oscar-nominated Tootsie, met with Judy Davis and Julie Christie about playing Blixen. Jane Seymour screen-tested with Redford. Kate Capshaw appeared to lobby for the role in a note to Pollack with letterhead from Copenhagen’s Hotel d’Angleterre: “Somewhere in my heart, it feels that I have also come full circle with ‘Out of Africa.’ And now finally I can lay it to rest and be at peace with my creative exploration with this fascinating lady,” she wrote, praising Pollack. “You have helped me define yet further the quality of peers I strive to work with.”

Sam Cohn pitched Meryl, but Pollack wasn’t interested. Meryl persisted until the director reluctantly agreed to meet with her. She heard through the grapevine that he didn’t think she was sexy enough to play Blixen. “I went out and got a padded bra, one of those dreadful frilly low-cut blouses for our first meeting—and I got the part,” she recalled. “Now, I’m sure it was because of my Danish accent and my intelligence and my ability to portray a writer. But it also probably had something to do with the cleavage.”

Pollack disputed Meryl’s account. “She tells the story that she wore this push-up bra, and that’s why I hired her. You have to trust; it wasn’t the push-up bra,” he insisted.

Once Pollack glimpsed Meryl face-to-face, Pollack forgot Sophie, Silkwood, and Joanna. He believed he could see the real Meryl and that she was absolutely right for Blixen. During 101 days of filming in Africa, Meryl’s endurance impressed him. (“Everybody got sick but her,” he said.) She played it cool when things got rough, like a stage actor adapting to a prop mishap in real time. While filming a long, seamless take of Blixen arriving at her farm, Meryl was totally composed. “But the instant Sydney said ‘Cut!’ her face contorted and she smashed her fist against her chest and she yelled, ‘Get this thing out of here!’” witnessed Out of Africa screenwriter Kurt Luedtke. “The costume person tore open her dress, and out fell an enormous insect! It had been crawling around in there all through the scene, but she had forced herself to ignore it.”

In another feat of courage, Meryl took over for her stunt double in the scene where Blixen fends off a lion who raids her campsite. The beast terrified the stunt double. “That girl was really scared, you know, and she had the sense to be scared,” Meryl remembered. “I didn’t. I was out there with all I had.” Meryl grabbed the whip. “Well, that lion wouldn’t do anything to get excited, so Sydney untied the lion while I was whipping it—and didn’t tell me because he wanted the shot. It was the last shot of the film, before we got to go home. I could have killed him.”

Pollack denied advising the lion trainer to let the animal off leash, instead blaming Meryl’s “creative memory.” The director recruited at least six trained lions and lionesses to join the production, and hired crew to stand by with fire extinguishers in case shit went haywire. Pollack’s goal: to contain a rogue lion, not hurt it. But Meryl’s inventive mind—a potent force when acting in the moment and responding to threats, real or imagined, in the world around her character—could not so easily be contained.

Pollack preferred that Meryl stay blonde, even though Blixen was brunette. Meryl and Roy Helland overruled him, deciding to go dark. “She’ll never be prettier,” Roy told Pollack. Meryl’s right-hand man consulted on Out of Africa’s most erotic—er, iconic—interlude: when Denys shampoos Blixen’s hair by the riverside. The sudsy round of foreplay provoked watercooler conversation akin to Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze’s lusty pottery sequence in Ghost, but with extra sexual tension because Blixen had not yet slept with Denys. Redford solicited Roy’s advice on how to wash Meryl’s mane. “Pretend like you’re in there with dirty socks,” Roy said.

“A lot of people thought Bob was wooden in Out of Africa,” Meryl said. “I didn’t. I thought he was subtle—and just right. But then I’m the worst one to ask. I had a big crush on him. He’s the best kisser I ever met in the movies. Anyway, Sydney had the idea that Redford’s essence lined up with Denys Finch Hatton’s, and I agree. Redford is that kind of guy. He’s an adventurer and loves to put himself in danger. He cares about the disappearing wilderness. He likes to be alone. He likes a good story. And good wine. And he’s a heartthrob, you know.”

Redford “fulfills what’s usually the woman’s part,” Meryl continued. “Where there’s a central male character, there’s the elusive woman he’s always trying to get. Meanwhile, he can’t sleep and his job is going to hell because there’s this spectre of love and happiness out there and he just—can’t—get—her! Anyway, in Out of Africa the roles are flip-flopped. The woman is central, the man is unattainable. Bob felt that was the balance, and he very generously played it that way.”

He and Meryl “probably got along too well,” Redford recalled, according to his biographer Michael Feeney Callan. “It caused ripples. We liked to talk. We’d be off camera, between takes, taking it easy. We had a sense of humor in common. But Sydney didn’t like that. He would break it up. It bothered him that I was connecting with her in some way that didn’t fit his picture of me, or of us as a team. That wasn’t easy to deal with, because I felt I was in a vise and I became resentful.”

In Redford’s view, Sydney encouraged Meryl “to fly” but treated Denys as “a symbol, not a character.” Redford was essentially asked to play an even more swashbuckling version of “Robert Redford” the movie star. Meanwhile, Meryl loved Nairobi, “but Redford didn’t,” she said. “He couldn’t go out—even there. He was self-conscious all the time. I went everywhere, saw whatever I wanted to see.” She felt sorry for him. He was too famous. The deeply private matinee idol and father of three offered a parenting pointer that Meryl took to heart. He said of her children, “They are not your props.”

To Meryl, Kenya was “paradise.” The country had a positive effect on Don, too. Later, he painted watercolors featuring animal skulls and African artifacts and sold the paintings for about $5,000 apiece. The couple’s serene, isolating experience helped inspire their move to a $1.8 million estate in rural Salisbury, Connecticut, a two-hour drive from New York. The property boasted a forty-seven-acre lake and spacious studio for Don. “What we really bought was privacy,” Meryl explained. “A house that can’t be seen from the road. In Kenya when we woke we looked out the window at Mount Kilimanjaro in the mist. And I thought, ‘After this, can we really go back to Eighty-Seventh Street, where the only place the kids can play is in a dog park full of poop and diesel exhaust?’”

When Pollack showed her the first print of Out of Africa, Meryl’s doubts crept in. Would a mainstream audience pay to sit through nearly three hours of Meryl attempting yet another accent to play an imperious, lovesick aristocrat?

She went home and cried. Despite her perfect image, Meryl wasn’t immune to insecurity—especially during dark nights of the soul when the mind tends to ruminate on uncertainty, regret, and rejection. This would make her an inspired choice to play Nora Ephron in Heartburn.

AN EXCERPT FROM MERYL’S SPEECH TO VASSAR’S CLASS OF 1983

CHAPTER 5

Meryl the Lion

INTERMISSION