CHAPTER 7

Meryl the Martyr

The dingo took my baby!—Lindy Chamberlain

(A Cry in the Dark, 1988)

Meryl was in her element: virtually unrecognizable and onstage, belting a song. She loved to sing, especially for an audience, this time pouring her heart out, Liza Minnelli–style, to perform “He’s Me Pal” on the set of Ironweed, her second movie with Jack Nicholson. Her teeth were discolored, her clothing tattered and her eyes red-rimmed. The performance induced tears. According to actor Fred Gwynne, “There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Her voice was like an angel’s. Oh, God, it was beautiful!”

Despite the tepid response to the first Meryl-Jack pairing, the two joined forces once more to film Ironweed in February 1987. If you haven’t seen it, brace yourself: this extremely depressing film, based on William Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel of the same name and directed by Héctor Babenco, features Meryl in a supporting role as a homeless woman without hope for the future. Her character, Helen Archer, is the companion to Jack’s Frances Phelan, an alcoholic who blames himself for accidentally dropping—and killing—his baby son. Turning to the streets, Frances finds a supportive partner in Helen, who once sang professionally before she fell through the cracks. In the heartbreaking “He’s Me Pal” scene at a saloon, Helen imagines rapturous applause from the crowd. The reality is much grimmer: when she finishes the song literally one person claps. Helen’s humiliation underscores a cruelty toward poor people that pervades across history: if the derelict can’t pull herself up by her own bootstraps, it’s her own fault and the result of her own moral shortcomings. Through her empathetic portrait of Helen, Meryl appeals to our common humanity.

Meryl and Jack “were practically inseparable—no one could get between them,” Gwynne, who played bartender Oscar Reo, told Ladies’ Home Journal. Their friendship even fueled speculation of a showmance, which both denied. Sure, Meryl had dinner at Jack’s rented house in Albany, where Ironweed was filmed, though her bodyguards reportedly tagged along. She needed extra security to protect her from autograph-hungry fans on location. Yet Meryl was no diva: most days, she would make the ninety-minute drive each way to Connecticut to spend time with her family—not Jack.

That October, Meryl ventured Down Under for her next movie, A Cry in the Dark. The docudrama was inspired by the real-life witch hunt that wrongfully landed Lindy Chamberlain behind bars for killing her two-month-old daughter, Azaria. Lindy’s trial captivated Australia with breathless news coverage not unlike the O. J. Simpson obsession in the United States a decade later. It all started on the night of August 16, 1980, when Azaria disappeared during a family camping trip to Uluru, then called Ayers Rock. Lindy and her pastor husband, Michael Chamberlain, believed that a dingo, or wild dog, had run off with the baby, but the Australian media—sniffing a hot true-crime story—cast Lindy as the villain who had done the unthinkable. The anti-Lindy contingent defended the dingo as an animal too innocent to commit such an act. The bogus conspiracy theory emerged that the Chamberlains murdered Azaria as part of a creepy religious sacrifice.

Lindy, already guilty in the court of public opinion, didn’t stand a chance to walk free, nor had she done much to downplay those nasty-woman qualities that riled her haters: she was firm and resolute in maintaining her innocence and didn’t seem to care what they thought. Her steeliness raised suspicions: Why no tears or prolonged, public grief? What kind of mother was she? Lindy refused to conform to what society deemed acceptable female behavior and, as a result, would be sentenced to life in prison with hard labor. Michael was found guilty on charges of being an accessory to the crime, but he was permitted to stay home with their other children while Lindy served time. After nearly four years, a tiny matinee coat—which Lindy claimed Azaria wore when she went missing—was discovered near Uluru, confirming her story and placing blame on the real killer: a dingo.

“I loved the problem set up in that, which was the woman was vilified by how she appeared,” Meryl explained. “That interested me because it was like if she’d only been a better actress, then people would have thought she was innocent. And I wanted to defend her from the inside and not change a thing about the outside of her.”

The English producer Verity Lambert sent Meryl a copy of John Bryson’s Evil Angels, a book about the Chamberlain case. Meryl read the first forty or so pages when Grace was around three weeks old. “This is really, deeply, deeply upsetting,” thought Meryl, deciding not to finish it. One year later, the screenplay adaptation arrived at her doorstep. It stood out from other scripts she was reading. “My God,” said Meryl, “anything that has residual power like this, that plays to our deepest fears as parents… there’s something compelling in the story.”

A Cry in the Dark, produced by Lambert, partnered Meryl with Plenty director Fred Schepisi and costar Sam Neill, playing a tanned and toned Michael Chamberlain. Unlike her portrayals of the two Karens (Silkwood and Blixen), Meryl’s Lindy was a work of faithful precision. She wore an unflattering short black wig shaped like a bowl and floral dresses that made her look as though she were always going to church. She gained weight, which her image-conscious contemporaries almost never did. She mimicked the unique dialect—Australian tinged with the accent of New Zealand, where Lindy was born—as well as a precise way of talking that irked misogynists. Said Meryl, “I’m fascinated by that stuff, by how females have to be liked, by the fact that you have to break down and cry to be vulnerable, by the fact that what she was telling was the truth but how she told it was annoying or unattractive or unsympathetic.”

Lindy gave A Cry in the Dark her blessing. As usual, Meryl had read every bit of research on Australia’s most notorious woman—but nothing prepared her for meeting in person. “She came with her Bible and she said ‘I want you to have this for the duration of the shoot’ and inside of [the Bible] was something she’d carried to jail with her and in the margins of certain psalms and certain passages where she took strength,” said Meryl.

The Aussie press monitored Meryl’s every move, confusing actor and subject. Reporters scrutinized Meryl as they did Lindy. A truck parked outside her house and shined a light into the windows at night. Nobody pulled that crap back home. At the time, journalist Mike Hammer reported that photographers disturbing the set at Uluru caused Meryl to “burst into tears. She was even teased by the media when she inhabited a picturesque country mansion near Melbourne early in the shooting.” The headlines snarked: “A Fortress Fit for a Hollywood Queen.”

All told, the negative attention might have actually helped Meryl feel the weight of the judgment hounding Lindy. Forget Pauline Kael. This was life or death. No public apology from the government—which wrote Lindy a check for $1.3 million in 1992—could ever fully rectify the character assassination. “There’s still people today who do believe she killed the child,” says Ian Baker, Schepisi’s cinematographer. “Somewhere in Australia, two guys in a bar will [say], ‘The bitch killed her.’”

Recently, while traveling to Palm Springs, California, I asked my Lyft driver, an Australian, whether he thought Lindy murdered Azaria. His response, paraphrased: She did, didn’t she?

“It’s her personality,” Schepisi, who’s very pro-Lindy, tells me. “She just seems an unbearable nuisance to people because she’s hard-nosed and confronting with men.… Inadvertently, she was her own worst enemy.”

Meryl had been at the fame game for nearly a decade. Unlike Lindy, she knew how to manage her public persona with finesse. In order to keep doing high-profile, meaningful work, she had to stay politic. But soon enough, Meryl, with those high principles and that deep-rooted pursuit of fairness, found it harder than ever to resist opening her big mouth.

NOT-SO-METHOD MERYL

In a press conference to promote A Cry in the Dark in 1988, Meryl was asked whether she brought Lindy Chamberlain—the character, not the real woman—home with her each night, thereby confusing her husband and three young kids. “Well, they’re used to seeing me pregnant so the weight doesn’t bother them and I take my wig off before I come home and they see me scrubbed and who they think they’re gonna see when I walk in the door,” she answered. “I don’t bring the part home. I mean, it’s too long a day with [Fred] Schepisi hours, you know. It’s too long. I want to come home. I want to forget it and it’s a relief to do that and if you have children, you know they demand your attention and something’s shaking.”

Less than two months after an Australian court overturned Lindy and Michael Chamberlain’s convictions, A Cry in the Dark hit theaters in the United States and Australia, where it was called Evil Angels. The November 1988 release ensured Warner Bros., the film’s American distributor, a position in the thick of awards-season hoopla. The strategic timing panned out: although Meryl was the only member of the movie nominated for an Oscar (she lost to Jodie Foster in The Accused), the international film community recognized A Cry in the Dark as an outstanding achievement. The AACTA Awards, Australia’s version of the Oscars, bestowed trophies in nearly all categories, including Best Actress. The Golden Globes, judged by the Hollywood Foreign Press, lavished nominations upon the movie. Nobody took home a Globe, but, in May 1989, the Cannes Film Festival crowned Her Streep-ness with its prestigious Best Actress prize.

The box office results told a different story. Stateside, A Cry in the Dark lasted just a few weeks before it was pulled from 319 screens with meager earnings of $7 million. Most surprising, given the spectacle of the Chamberlain trial, it grossed only $3 million in the Chamberlains’ home country. Maybe people were suffering from Lindy fatigue syndrome, brought on by media overexposure. Or perhaps they stayed away because they hated the woman. Either way, there were negative opinions about the authenticity of Meryl’s accent, which contained traces of Kiwi. “It was perfect,” says director Fred Schepisi, her sounding board while learning to speak Lindy. “Critics didn’t realize that Lindy had spent time in New Zealand.”

Their American counterparts didn’t seem to notice. “Streep—yes, with another perfect accent—brings her customary skillfulness to the part,” wrote the Washington Post’s Rita Kempley. “It’s not a showy performance, but the heroine’s internal struggle seems to come from the actress’ pores.” Ebert raved, “In the lead role, Streep is given a thankless assignment: to show us a woman who deliberately refused to allow insights into herself. She succeeds, and so, of course, there are times when we feel frustrated because we do not know what Lindy is thinking or feeling. We begin to dislike the character, and then we know how the Australian public felt. Streep’s performance is risky, and masterful.”

Meryl only wished the rest of America had the chance to see it. “A Cry in the Dark was a wonderful movie, but you can’t see a movie if it’s not everywhere,” she said. “I suppose distributors would rather have what they consider a blockbuster.”

Three years later, Seinfeld reintroduced millions of Americans to the movie when Elaine, affecting an Australian accent, exclaimed: “Maybe the dingo ate your baby!” Suddenly, A Cry in the Dark became part of the cultural lexicon, even if fans didn’t immediately get the reference.

In December 1988, Molly Haskell wrote a shrewd essay for Ms. magazine, observing “something defiantly perverse in choosing a character who, though a byword in Australia, is remote from moviegoers’ experience to begin with, and then giving her disconcertingly unsentimental characteristics. This is no small act of defiance when you consider that Ironweed and Plenty, two of Streep’s recent films, were box-office duds, and she could have used a more conventionally romantic vehicle, something on the order of Out of Africa, to shore up her waning audience appeal and keep her career afloat.

“But if there’s one strand running through Streep’s chameleon-like range of roles and impersonations,” Haskell continued, “it’s precisely this ‘alienation effect,’ her determination to be an actress rather than a star in the old-fashioned sense, and to do idiosyncratic, theatrical roles in a medium in which success depends on being loved by huge numbers of people. In her willingness to forgo easy identification, Streep brings to dramatic point something that has been nosing its way to the forefront of consciousness for some time: the whole issue of a woman’s lovability.”

Haskell chalked up Meryl’s contrarian choices to a combination of actorly seriousness and “the inhibitions of a well-bred Protestant”—the sort who might dismiss “playing oneself” in every role, à la Bette Davis, as a gauche demonstration of ego. “One feels a certain condescension in Streep, as if she were slumming, coming to cinema to save it from its own vulgarity,” Haskell ascertained, pondering, “Does she obscure her ‘beauty’ in order to be taken seriously, or are her disguises distractions from what she perceives as a lack of beauty? Or is it just ‘play-acting’—a refusal to play the movie-star game? The enigma remains.”

All of the above, possibly. In nearly all my interviews for this book, Meryl’s colleagues remarked, unsolicited, that she is more beautiful in person than on the screen. The fact that she resembles a movie star IRL, not always in her work, still seems to startle and confound them. But Meryl has downplayed her luminous features, attributing career longevity to a nontraditional appearance—unlike sexier actresses, tossed aside as they age, she is valued purely for her skill. Here’s Haskell again:

Hard-core movie lovers and aestheticians have always resisted Streep. Andrew Sarris sounded the note of opposition when he wrote that he preferred more intuitive and less controlled actresses, women with a sense of abandon. But intuitive actresses require someone to use them correctly. Debra Winger, Jessica Lange, Kathleen Turner are dependent on others and have their ups and downs, while Streep endures, her performances independent of her directors. Control is, of course, a key word with Streep. It’s what prevents us from warming to her, yet it’s part of her mystique.… More than Olivier, Streep sometimes appears to be running for cover while displaying her wares, hiding behind her talent rather than enjoying it. Acting is the art of revelation as much as concealment, and Streep reveals little of herself. If she were to reveal more, she might involve us in the destinies of her characters, make us feel what it is we share with them rather than what divides us.

Yet Haskell also theorized that throngs of young women admired Meryl because she projected control, strength, and independence. Meryl apparently read the Haskell piece. She repeated the writer’s language in a 1990 interview, saying, “I always think that if I’ve made a connection with my character, and I’ve gotten into her heart, then they [the moviegoing public] can get into yours. I always think about that invisible connection among us all, what we have in common as opposed to what divides us.”

That was Meryl’s roundabout way of saying that Haskell misread her intentions without acknowledging the writer by name—and letting on that she cared about the article. Such a confession would suggest that Meryl wasn’t impervious to the judgment of those who struggled to understand her. In these moments, she seemed torn between let it slide and let it rip. “I always wanted to get together a group of actors and talk about the process and then write it all down and send it to all the major critics so they’d know what actors do,” Meryl told Yale classmate Wendy Wasserstein in 1988. “Most of them—even the most sophisticated—are swept away by whether it’s a character they like or dislike. They confuse the dancer with the dance. With my work, they get stuck in the auto mechanics of it—the most obvious stuff, like what’s under the hood. They mention the accent or the hair—as if it’s something I’ve laid on that doesn’t have anything to do with the character. It’s very ingenuous, really. They’re like children who want to believe in Santa Claus. Some critics categorically refuse to believe Santa Claus is their dad with a beard.”

Meryl thought “it might have something to do with the loss of icons from the ’30s and ’40s.” Stars whose personas defined them. Katharine Hepburn. Cary Grant. Lauren Bacall. Or a new old-fashioned star like Jack Nicholson, who was born in 1937 but perpetuated a larger-than-life brand of Humphrey Bogart cool even sitting courtside at a Lakers game. Meryl could bring it, if she wanted too. Was she trying to dim her own light? Should she reveal more of herself?