CHAPTER 8 Middle-Aged Meryl

Mom! You don’t give children sleeping pills when they can’t sleep!—Suzanne Vale

(Postcards from the Edge, 1990)

Tick, tock. Was the end near?

As Meryl approached her fortieth birthday, she felt comfortable in her own skin. But she also feared that time was running out. While in her early thirties, she predicted her leading roles would expire within fifteen years. By the time she turned thirty-eight, she said to Don, “Well, it’s over.” A Cry in the Dark was her third box-office clunker in a row. “She began to tell friends she was tired of the whole seriously suffering Meryl Streep persona,” wrote Rachel Abramowitz in her book Is That a Gun in Your Pocket: Women’s Experience of Power in Hollywood. “She didn’t want to be out of touch with the way films were being made.”

The top-grossing films of 1988 and 1989 centered on men: Rain Man starred Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman as brothers; Batman pitted superhero Michael Keaton against Nicholson’s Joker. Other big draws were Die Hard (Bruce Willis’s righteous macho rage saves the day), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Harrison Ford and Sean Connery fight Nazis), and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, in which slinky Jessica Rabbit—a cartoon with Kim Kardashian measurements—commanded the juiciest female role. Real women actors saw their options shrink. While Meryl’s mojo fizzled, big, comic personalities such as Bette Midler and Kathleen Turner were selling tickets in Beaches and The War of the Roses, respectively.

In this bro-centric climate, Meryl surrendered to the market, signing up for a pair of comedies that would mark a significant shift to lighter, funnier fare. She-Devil, a deliciously dark feminist farce directed by Susan Seidelman (Desperately Seeking Susan), matched her opposite the brash comedian Roseanne Barr, while she was to reteam with Mike Nichols on Postcards from the Edge, Carrie Fisher’s adaptation of her witty autobiographical novel.

Meryl didn’t need to travel far—New York and New Jersey—for She-Devil, which began shooting in April 1989. The script was based on Fay Weldon’s book, The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil, about a plain housewife seeking revenge on her cheating husband and his mistress, a rich and famous romance novelist. You’d expect Meryl to want to portray jealous suburban scourge Ruth Patchett, but no: she gravitated toward Mary Fisher, a self-absorbed, super-feminine, slightly deranged version of Danielle Steel. “It was so different than characters she had played in the past,” says Seidelman, who pitched Meryl through Sam Cohn. Initially, Meryl considered Ruth, a part that happened to fit Roseanne, the breakout sitcom star, perfectly. Cher’s name did come up, though she couldn’t pull off ordinary as well as Roseanne could. For the role of Mary’s foil, Meryl thought it was important to cast “somebody who wouldn’t stand out in a crowd,” Seidelman recalls. “Somebody who wasn’t in any way seemingly privileged or exceptionally glamorous or any of those things, just to be in contrast to the Mary Fisher character.”

A plot refresher: Mary meets Ruth’s husband, Bob, an accountant, at a fancy charity benefit in the Guggenheim Museum, and even though Bob (a game Ed Begley Jr.) embodies Boring Middle-Aged Dad, she falls hard. “Writing can be… so lonely,” she coos. Bob walks out on Ruth and their children to live with Mary. “I don’t even think you’re a woman,” he shouts at Ruth. “You’re a she-devil!” She schemes to destroy him. She sets the house on fire and drops the kids at Mary’s tranquil estate, throwing Mary, who’s less than maternal, for a loop. Ruth starts a job at the nursing home where Mary keeps her elderly mother (whom she never visits). Thanks to Ruth’s machinations, Mrs. Fisher moves in with her deadbeat daughter, bursting the carefully cultivated fantasy bubble Mary created to erase her former identity and reinvent herself as a character from one of her novels. The spark dies between Bob and Mary, who must adjust to the realities of domestic life and managing a dysfunctional family. Mary’s latest book, the laundry-themed Love in the Rinse Cycle, doesn’t sell.

While Mary’s in hell, Ruth blossoms as a successful entrepreneur. She founds an employment agency for disenfranchised women who can’t catch a break and discovers that Bob has been stealing money from clients (including Mary!). Ruth reports the creep to the authorities, thereby fulfilling her grand plan to take him down. A woman judge sentences Bob to eighteen months in prison. Mary, a “former romance novelist,” remakes herself anew—trading poofy pink for bookish glasses as the best-selling author of Trust and Betrayal: A Docu-novel of Love, Money and Skepticism. The last scene: Roseanne, sporting suffragette white, is shown walking the New York City streets, flanked by her feminist army of women she’s helped.

So, yes, She-Devil is amazing. It’s a shame that Roseanne is not as progressive and enlightened as Ruth Patchett. As for Meryl, “I knew she was a great actress, so I hoped she’d be funny,” says Seidelman, her first-ever female director. “With comedy you really need to know when you can push it and go for that moment—just go all out for that moment and make it work. And she had the skill and smarts to know when to do that and when to pull back as well.”

Meryl’s timing impressed the director, who points to a scene that begins with a close-up: “She’s in bed and you think she’s having sex with maybe Ed Begley, and as the camera pulls back you realize her dog is licking her feet. And you just watch her face go from the beginnings of pleasure to ecstasy to surprise to horror in one continuous motion. That’s hard to do and pull off, and she does.”

Off camera, Meryl was nothing like Mary. She was professional. Generous. Normal. She was lampooning traditional notions of beauty and the way women alter their voices when addressing men, but the joke flew over crew members’ heads. They treated her “real nice” when she put on Mary’s Barbie outfits, lacquered makeup, and fake nails. Funny how that happens.

On June 22, 1989, Meryl turned the big 4-0. No, it wasn’t over. Several months later, she relocated to Los Angeles for the higher-profile Postcards from the Edge, channeling none other than Carrie Fisher: author, brainiac, addict, Princess Leia, daughter of Debbie Reynolds. Carrie’s debut screenplay mirrored the honesty that made her book, published in 1987, such a pioneering piece of addiction literature. Comparing Postcards to Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero, the Los Angeles Times critic Carolyn See wrote, “This is not an inspirational novel, but something on the order of a tough look at reality; a ‘serious’ piece of work.… The outtakes from the life of an actress are sobering, sad, and—again, the word keeps coming back—interesting. Will Suzanne ever fall in love, get married, live a normal life? It’s an iffy concept, because she’s been programmed to like swine: ‘I know boring men are the ones to go for but all I can see is the light glinting off the edges of the interesting ones.’”

“I’ve always thought of myself as 40,” she told Vogue in 1992. “I mean, even when I was 17, I never felt ingénue. I missed that. So the day I arrived at 40, I felt comfortable for the first time. My daughter Mamie is like that; she’s just who she is, she stands on the balls of her feet. I don’t imagine she’ll ever be different. I respond to the spirit of people, divorced from their chronological whatever. Some of my closest friends are women who are ageless—Carrie Fisher, Tracey Ullman—and I had the horrifying revelation that they’re seven and 10 years younger than me; another friend, [costume designer] Ann Roth, is 59, but to me, she’s like me: she’s a kid.”

Carrie had intended to turn Postcards into a one-woman show, but Nichols—snapping up the rights—guided her to make it a movie that focused more heavily on the mother-daughter dynamic. The women were front and center, the men merely supporting players. Meryl laughed while reading the script on a snowy night, brimming with excitement. “I never really get offered parts like that,” she said. “I was happy. I was really happy.” She leaped at the chance to take on a character as warm, candid, and fascinating as Carrie—er, Suzanne. “When I read the book, I thought: Here is somebody who has endless resources to survive. She is relentless about her demons but is equally relentless about her humor. She serves her jokes like dessert for her own amusement, and it makes everybody else feel good, too.”

The Carrie character, Suzanne Vale, attempts to get her acting career back on track following an overdose and a stint in rehab. Her poison: cocaine and Percodan. Her mother, Doris Mann (Shirley MacLaine), is a showbiz veteran with a larger-than-life personality not unlike Reynolds. Suzanne, in recovery, reluctantly moves into Doris’s home so that she’ll be insured by a movie studio—and thus approved to keep working. She films a humiliating role as a cop in a B movie. A caddish producer (Dennis Quaid) seduces her, then reveals his true colors. Suzanne and Doris engage in a shouting match, with the former accusing the latter of giving her sleeping pills as a child. “They were not sleeping pills!” Doris responds. “It was store-bought and it was perfectly SAFE! Now don’t blame ME for your drug-taking! I do not blame my mother for my misfortunes or for my drinking!”

Gradually, Suzanne gets her life together. Then poor Doris—tipsy from wine and Stoli smoothies—crashes her car into a tree; she lands in the hospital, where mother and daughter make amends. Hilariously, Suzanne turns down a date with the doctor (Richard Dreyfuss) who pumped her stomach after she OD’d. The final scene is a triumph: she performs a spirited rendition of a country song, “I’m Checkin’ Out,” for a new film she’s in that won’t require her to wear a police badge. Success!

Meryl and Carrie became fast friends, prompting Nichols to gripe that they were ganging up on him. Carrie viewed herself as “much more neurotic than Meryl. More girlish and creature-like. She is very specifically womanly and more rooted in the world than I am.” Meryl, however, thought they shared a “certain cynicism and sense of humor and a willingness to be optimistic and put yourself out there.” After more than a decade in the movies, transforming into enigmatic ice queens of another time and place, Meryl lowered her guard to portray someone “closest to me, the way I really look, the way I really sound.”

Shirley, Meryl, and Carrie.

All the same, Meryl hadn’t lived Carrie’s colorful past—her father, Eddie Fisher, leaving Debbie for Elizabeth Taylor; her Star Wars success; her on-off relationship with Paul Simon; her substance abuse, and all the coke she did.

“I had to explain to her what drugs are like because she hadn’t really done that,” Carrie said. “I do that very well; I have a lot of practice. I didn’t know that it was going to turn out to be helping Meryl as research; that’s probably what I did it for—as research for Meryl. I had to teach her to be a truant, like a bad girl. I had to teach Meryl bad behavior—and anybody who wants that kind of training, that’s my specialty. She understood the notion of it very well.”

Meryl shadowed Carrie on the set, and like Carrie, was constantly eating and hovering around craft services. According to actress Barbara Garrick, who had a small role in the movie, when Meryl walked into a room, she was hyperalert to her surroundings and aware of everything happening around her, even if the activity was happening far away. Garrick found this behavior highly unusual.

Meryl connected to this quote from Suzanne: “I can’t feel my life. I look around me and I know so much of it is good. But it’s like this stuff with my mother. I know that she does these things because she loves me… but I just can’t believe it.”

Postcards was Suzanne’s journey to gain control of her own life, on her own terms, Meryl thought. She begins feeling her life when she stops making choices in reaction to other people. Like her mother.

Meryl kept Shirley MacLaine at a respectful distance. “I never got close to Meryl,” Shirley recalled. “I saw that wasn’t in the cards right away. We never had dinner, never even had lunch together. But, remember, she becomes the part, so you have to go along with the technique of how she works.”

One day, Shirley struck up a conversation on the set.

“Meryl, how do you like California?” she asked.

“You know, I feel sort of guilty, but I love it,” Meryl replied. “I love it, I don’t know why. It has flowers all the time. I love it—the only thing is, I’m a little bit scared of the earthquakes.”

People laughed. But not Shirley. Dead serious, she probed, “How long do you plan on being out here?”

“I don’t know—maybe two years at the most.”

“Well, you’re all right, because there’s not going to be a major earthquake until the winter of 1994.”

Lo and behold, a magnitude 6.7 earthquake shook LA on January 17, 1994. To Meryl’s astonishment, Shirley—always in touch with her spiritual intuition—correctly predicted it.

In her scenes with Shirley, she appears to regress into a young girl living under the roof of a matriarch as sparkly as Mary Streep, who would push insecure, tweenage Meryl to sing for relatives and neighbors. Domineering Doris craves the limelight; Suzanne, passive and reserved, has learned to loiter in the shadows so as not to outshine her mom. At her welcome home party for Suzanne, Doris requests Suzanne perform a song but then steals the show to croon a cabaret-fabulous spin on “I’m Still Here.” Suzanne smiles adoringly, happy to bask in Doris’s sunshine.

When the roles reverse in “I’m Checkin’ Out,” Suzanne’s grand finale, Doris beams with pride as her daughter owns the stage. It was a tricky day for Meryl. “We did it once and they didn’t like the shimmering curtain at the back,” she remembered. “Now, I don’t have the highest confidence in my performing skills in that area, and I thought I had aced this and gotten away with murder, and I said, ‘Well, can you use the track so I can lip sync to that? I’ll never be able to sing it again.’ And they took the shimmering curtain away, we reshot it and I did it…a little bit better. And we drank a lot of Champagne, and I did a little impromptu concert for the extras, and the word came back from the lab that we had to shoot it again.”

Meryl had been bitterly disappointed in the fall of 1989 when a salary dispute, among other studio nonsense, scuttled plans to headline a big-budget adaptation of Evita, a dream role where she could flaunt her singing chops. (I’m sorry I told you about this. Meryl as Eva Perón is a loss from which we may never fully recover.) It wasn’t “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” but Meryl appeared to have a blast during the Postcards performance. Unfortunately, she was required to loop the song over the visuals in postproduction because ancillary noise ruined the original audio.

The sound editors expected to spend two days with Meryl, looping three minutes of lyrics, frame by frame. Instead, to their amazement, Meryl recorded it seamlessly from beginning to end, somehow matching the music to her lips in the scene. “That’s impossible what she did,” recalls Postcards producer Bob Greenhut. “No one could ever do that again.”

Meryl proved herself a technical whiz that day, but her first time acting with special effects would test her patience. The clever script, Death Becomes Her, a satire about bitter enemies aging badly, was too tempting to pass up.

CHAPTER 8

Middle-Aged Meryl

MERYL ON TURNING FORTY

INTERMISSION