CHAPTER 9

Meryl the Immortal

We have to take care of each other. I’ll paint your ass; you paint mine.—Madeline Ashton

(Death Becomes Her, 1992)

In Los Angeles, Meryl ran into actor-comedian Albert Brooks at Carrie Fisher’s house. Carrie, a social butterfly, was having a party. Meryl and Brooks got along famously. Afterward, Brooks offered her a role in Defending Your Life, a comedy he wrote about a neurotic advertising executive named Daniel Miller who dies in a car accident. The gimmick: Daniel must persuade heaven’s gatekeepers that he’s learned from past mistakes and deserves to pass through the pearly gates. Brooks was to direct and star, and he was looking for someone to play his love interest, Julia. But he didn’t even consider the notion of casting Meryl until encountering her.

“What are you working on?” she had asked Brooks.

“I just finished a movie I’m about to shoot,” he replied.

“Is there a part for me?”

They laughed. Driving home later, Albert thought to himself, “Oh my goodness, is there a part for her?”

Without telling Warner Bros., the studio, Brooks sent Meryl the script. “She read it and she loved it,” he recalls. “So then I told [Warners], ‘Can we get Meryl Streep?’ Everybody was… ‘What?’”

They heard right. Brooks had been surprised by Meryl’s naturally fun and easygoing personality. This was the real Meryl? Who knew? For Julia, he wanted Meryl to be relaxed—like the charming woman from Carrie’s get-together. (An offbeat analogy, but this part reminds me of the time Lady Gaga shed her avant-garde meat dress and began dressing conventionally while hitting the road with unlikely tour-mate Tony Bennett. I realize this makes Meryl the Lady of the Gah and Albert, of the romantic comedy Broadcast News, Tony Bennett. Don’t @ me.)

Defending Your Life is, at heart, a romantic comedy, featuring Meryl as a Zen pixie dreamgirl who teaches Brooks’s hapless Daniel how to let go and take risks. They cross paths in Judgment City, where souls go when they die. The place resembles an airy, soothing Southern California spa: limbo, it turns out, is a wonderful getaway. Julia and Daniel can eat as much as they like without repercussion. Why go back to earth? Ah, but a panel of heavenly tribunals might soon order Daniel’s return, reincarnating his soul into another body. An amusing scene at the Past Lives Pavilion, in which Shirley MacLaine makes a self-mocking cameo as a hologram, shows Daniel watching a highlight reel of his former selves, which include a dressmaker and a tribesman running from a lion.

Julia was a whaler, a tailor, and Prince Valiant. The mother of two drowned after hitting her head and falling into the pool: she accepts her death but resents how it happened. “I’m still pissed,” she complains. “I was a good swimmer.” When attorneys review Julia’s life, judging whether she’s fit to move on to heaven, the highlights reveal a Meryl-esque model of perfection: she rescues her kids (and a Persian cat) from a house fire! But Daniel’s earthly existence reveals trauma. The son of an abusive father, he shrinks through life as a passive bystander, allowing alphas to walk all over him. He never learns to stand up for himself. Hence, the tribunal puts him on the Do-Over Bus, en route to reincarnation, while Julia earns passage to heaven. Showing uncharacteristic bravery, Daniel takes a leap of faith and jumps aboard Julia’s bus to follow her into the great unknown. The limbo lawyers nod their approval.

ALL THE TIMES THAT MERYL DIED IN THE MOVIES

It should come as no surprise that La Streep is very, very good at playing dead. She certainly fooled director Héctor Babenco on the set of Ironweed, when she laid still for a frightening length of time while filming Helen Archer’s final moments. “What’s going on? She’s not breathing!” a crew member said to Babenco, who went forward with the scene. Meryl remained motionless a full ten minutes after Babenco got his shot. “Now that is acting!” the filmmaker enthused. “That is an actress!”

She’s got the track record to prove it.

Film: Sophie’s Choice

Cause of death: Unable to live with the loss of her children to the horrors of the Holocaust, Sophie commits suicide by ingesting cyanide alongside her lover Nathan.

Film: Silkwood

Cause of death: Officially? A single-vehicle accident. But questions remain as to whether nuclear-facility whistleblower Karen Silkwood was pushed off the road en route to meet a journalist.

Film: Ironweed

Cause of death: Helen Archer succumbs to illness in a shabby hotel room, frail and alone, a casualty of an unjust society that trapped her in poverty.

Film: Defending Your Life

Cause of death: Accidental drowning. In this dramedy about the afterlife by writer-director Albert Brooks, Meryl’s character, Julia, perishes after tripping, hitting her head, and falling into a pool.

Film: Death Becomes Her

Cause of death: When Madeline Ashton’s husband pushes her down the stairs, he believes her to be a goner. But thanks to an age-defying serum, she’ll be undead for an eternity.

Film: The House of the Spirits

Cause of death: Clara, a saintlike clairvoyant, dies from an apparent heart attack while decorating her home for Christmas. She returns as a ghost to visit her estranged husband.

Film: The Bridges of Madison County

Cause of death: Old age or heartbreak? Francesca Johnson, a lonely Iowa housewife, requests her ashes be scattered at the bridge where she fell in love with photographer Robert Kincaid.

Film: One True Thing

Cause of death: It seems that Kate Gulden, a devoted wife and mother dying of cancer, kills herself by overdosing on morphine. This just might be Meryl’s saddest goodbye.

Film: The Manchurian Candidate

Cause of death: With a single bullet, veteran Ben Marco (Denzel Washington) shoots and kills evil Senator Eleanor Prentiss Shaw (Meryl) and her mind-controlled congressman son Raymond (Liev Schreiber).

Film: Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events

Cause of death: Although Aunt Josephine lives in constant danger that her house, propped on stilts, will crumble, it’s sadistic Count Olaf (Jim Carrey) who leaves her stranded in leech-infested waters.

Film: Florence Foster Jenkins

Cause of death: Before heart failure felled her, the New York socialite and wannabe opera diva said, “People may say I couldn’t sing, but no one can ever say I didn’t sing.”

Film: Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again

Cause of death: MURDER. The killer: writer-director Richard Curtis, who suggested producers kill off Donna Sheridan in the sequel to the megahit Mamma Mia! and explain her backstory with younger actress Lily James.

Unlike other actors with whom Brooks collaborated, Meryl came prepared and ready to work. She never held up the set and said “I don’t know how to do this.” She’d worked everything out beforehand. She was open to suggestions, ignoring bad ones. In a 2010 interview with Vanity Fair, Meryl quoted Brooks as saying, “‘Could you just make it a little sweeter?’—and that’s been repeated by other people in the years since then. But I don’t listen to it.”

She didn’t tune out Brooks when he tried to ease her disappointment over Evita. The window of opportunity to play a splashy part like that was closing on her as she entered her forties, and the passage of time—and with it, the sting of further rejection—appeared poised to crush her spirit. “You know, Meryl, you could do this and it would be the toughest thing you’ve ever done in your life. It would be monumental. It would be fantastic. It would be huge. And everyone would say, So what? What else is new?” Brooks rationalized.

She-Devil premiered in December 1989, flopping hard. As the movie’s cult status grew over the years, reviews would improve. “I was conscious of needing to work and there was nothing to do,” Meryl said in a post-release disclaimer of sorts, adding, “I loved She-Devil but in the mix, it didn’t work.” At the time, she received the best press. “Given the outline of an inherently comic role, and dialogue that doesn’t sabotage it, Miss Streep appears to be flying on her own,” Vincent Canby wrote. “She has the intelligence and speed of something that passes through sound barriers without a wobble. She is almost worth the price of admission.” One critic’s trash is another’s treasure. Roger Ebert reviewed She-Devil with a serious consideration uncommon to his male brethren who often snubbed movies about women and made for women. “If Barr is correctly cast, so is Streep, who has always had a rich vein of comedy bubbling through her personal life—few people are merrier during interviews,” observed Ebert, writing of Seidelman, “She has a sure touch for off-center humor, the kind that works not because of setups and punchlines, but because of the screwy logic her characters bring to their dilemmas.”

Ebert got it, says Seidelman, pointing out that “some men took offense from the subject matter—maybe took offense that we had the audacity to put an unattractive frumpy housewife as a leading character in the movie.”

Forty-year-old Meryl received offers for three separate witch roles within one year, an insult which she attributed to studios not knowing what to do with actresses who had graduated to middle age—the “most vibrant [time] of a woman’s life,” she thought. “I think there was, for a long time in the movie business, a period of—when a woman was attractive and marriageable or fuckable, that was it.”

On August 1, 1990, Meryl mouthed off in an amazingly sassy—and no doubt cathartic—speech at a Screen Actors Guild women’s conference. “In a season where most of the female leads are prostitutes, there’s not going to be a lot of work for women over 40. Like hookers, actresses seem to lose their market appeal around that age,” she said, referencing a drop in the share of film roles for women to 29 percent. By 2010, she warned, “we will have been eliminated from movies entirely.”

Earlier that year, Pretty Woman, starring Julia Roberts in her dazzling, breakout role as a hooker with a heart of gold, crossed the $100 million mark within two months. When Meryl delivered her SAG keynote address, the blockbuster fairytale remained high atop theater marquee signs. Speaking to the LA Times, Meryl said she was “upset that 15-year-old girls want to go see that four and five times. I know it’s the Cinderella thing, but it disturbs me. There are a lot of women screenwriters and a lot of women in development, but I guess because those women want to make it past the glass ceiling, maybe they think they have to say, ‘Do Die Hard II. Now let me be vice president.’”

Although Meryl might have felt some commercial clout slipping away and that she had nothing to lose, nobody could take away her legendary status. It provided protection of a sort, and credibility: when she issued a rare public complaint, people paid attention; when she addressed the objectification and unfair treatment of women in Hollywood, it mattered.

“No, I’m not like Jack [Nicholson] with $11 million up front,” said Meryl, ripping the industry for paying actresses less than their male counterparts. “I don’t feel greedy, but when Rick Moranis makes what Michelle Pfeiffer makes, when he’s as big a draw, supposedly—who knows what anybody makes because nobody talks about it, but it is all the way down the line until you hit scale—women make 40 to 60 cents on the male dollar. Now, really, that’s all I have to say. I’m not a spokesman. Now I want my brothers in the union to speak up on my behalf. As well as my sisters. I want to hear somebody support us.”

Imagine if you were the best in the game, the Serena Williams of your field, but you got paid Rick Moranis money. You might not be happy about that either.

According to a 1989 Screen Actors Guild study, men accounted for 71 percent of movie roles, earning a collective $644 million to women’s $296 million. Rachel Abramowitz reported that Meryl, truth-teller, was regarded as “petulant rather than heroic, a Cassandra-like figure spouting verities that no one wanted to hear. Other actresses distanced themselves. They weren’t paid equally, but they were paid well.” An unnamed agent dismissed Meryl’s efforts in the Los Angeles Times, saying, “Bottom line, until there is a huge box-office hit with a huge female star as the lead—and there are only [a few] actresses in the country that currently have that kind of clout—nothing will change.”

The statement, made by a coward cloaked in anonymity, shifted blame to women rather than hold to account the powerful men who could, if they wanted to, help change the industry from within. Without male allies, it’s no surprise that women who lacked Meryl’s pedigree felt powerless to say something. Not everyone could afford to challenge the system, though in doing so, Meryl was paving the way for younger actresses who would someday interlock arms and declare, Time’s up.

A month after Meryl’s feisty rant, Postcards topped the box office, ultimately raking in $39 million amid strong reviews. Meryl, wrote Hal Hinson of the Washington Post, “gives the most fully articulated comic performance of her career, the one she’s always hinted at and made us hope for.”

On March 25, 1991, she skipped the Oscars for the first and only time as a nominee. Meryl and Don were expecting their fourth child, Louisa, who would arrive in June. Meryl, forty-one, was slated to perform “I’m Checkin’ Out,” a Best Original Song contender. After she backed out because of her pregnancy, Reba McEntire stepped in to sing it—and sing it 7,000 times better, Meryl thought. She had been up for Best Actress alongside two significant challengers: Julia Roberts, the Pretty Woman sensation and male fantasy, and Kathy Bates, the male nightmare, whose terrifying turn in Misery scared the living daylights out of men who feared she’d kidnap and torture them like she did James Caan. Bates won. They seemed to prefer a simplified, binary view of women: angel/devil. Nurturing wife material/psycho single career woman. Julia Roberts/Kathy Bates.

Meryl could not be squeezed into a box. No wonder they didn’t know what to do with her.

In May, she made headlines after dropping Sam Cohn and signing with rival agent Bryan Lourd at the powerful Creative Artists Agency. (Back then, Lourd was dating Carrie Fisher.) The move seemed logical on the surface: Meryl and her family had made the giant leap from Connecticut to Los Angeles, where they took up residence in the upscale Brentwood neighborhood. The erstwhile East Coaster, now stationed in the entertainment capital of the world, was closer to her industry’s movers and shakers. Cohn pledged allegiance only to New York. But, behind the scenes, he betrayed her trust. Mike Nichols had been planning to make the movie of Kazuo Ishiguro’s prize-winning 1989 novel The Remains of the Day, which had a plum role for Meryl: Miss Kenton, the housekeeper who harbors feelings for her colleague, a butler married only to his job. Both Meryl and Jeremy Irons read Remains for Nichols, but the filmmaker opted not to cast them in roles later filled by Emma Thompson (ten years Meryl’s junior) and Anthony Hopkins (twenty years Emma’s senior). Cohn, who was also Nichols’s agent, didn’t make it clear to Meryl that she was no longer a candidate for Miss Kenton. “I left because of something Mike did that I felt Sam should have protected me from,” she told the New York Times Magazine. “Mike knows what he did, but unfortunately Sam wears the scar.” She eventually absolved Cohn and Nichols, emphasizing that she had “too much of a need for forgiveness in my life.”

In her popular gossip column, Liz Smith reported chatter that “Meryl has changed a lot” and quoted a source as saying, “She has gone from being legendary to being difficult.”

While The Remains of the Day snagged eight Oscar nominations, leaving the 1994 ceremony empty-handed, her next lowbrow film, the campfest Death Becomes Her, would outlast the highfalutin, ultimately forgettable prestige drama. It became a cult classic—one that touched on the timeless themes of a woman’s desire to stay young (especially in Hollywood) and the zero-sum clash of female rivals for male attention and limited professional breaks. “It was about women and cosmetic surgery and changing yourself, twisting yourself into a contortion,” she said. “To be what? A ghastly version of something that used to look like you in your twenties?”

Meryl thought the movie was ahead of its time. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, Death Becomes Her costarred Meryl’s friend Goldie Hawn in a slapstick battle over Bruce Willis, who minimized his machismo to play meek plastic surgeon Ernest Menville. (The part was originally earmarked for Kevin Kline, a bit of perfect casting that never transpired. Kevin dropped out to join Richard Attenborough’s Chaplin biopic.)

The hijinks commence after Ernest and his fiancée, Helen Sharp (Goldie), attend a terrible Broadway show starring Helen’s frenemy Madeline Ashton (Meryl), a narcissist who heartlessly steals Ernest away from Helen—then marries him. A distraught Helen winds up in a psychiatric hospital. She’s bitter, slovenly, and obsessed with revenge. Helen plays the long game. Years later, she publishes a buzzy novel dubbed Forever Young and, true to the title, looks as if she’s drunk from the fountain of youth. Among the guests at her book party: unhappily married couple Madeline and Ernest. Madeline’s star has dimmed with age; Ernest is an alcoholic toiling as a reconstructive mortician. Helen, living her best life in a red body-con gown, seduces Ernest, while a desperate Madeline tries to stop the clock on the aging process. She drinks a potion given to her by the beautiful, ageless Lisle Von Rhuman (Isabella Rossellini), who says she’s seventy-one. (She looks thirty-five.)

Madeline regains her youthful bloom but at a cost: she must heed Lisle’s advice and disappear from public life after ten years to keep the serum’s existence secret. Newly refreshed, Madeline confronts Ernest, taunting him as a “flaccid undertaker,” a sick burn. He pushes her down the stairs—and she breaks her neck, loses her pulse, but… she’s technically not dead. After overhearing Helen insult her in the worst way imaginable (“she was a bad actress”), Madeline retaliates by shooting her nemesis in the stomach. Uh oh: Helen rebounds with a gaping hole in her body and eyes like a demented Siberian husky. It so happens that Helen knows all about the secret serum; she’s swallowed it, too. Madeline and Helen engage in a violent duel, using shovels to take swipes at one another. “You should know not to compete with me! I always win!” bellows Madeline, in a line made for Meryl.

Ernest wants to wash his hands of both women, yet they persuade him to stay and help reconstruct their damaged bodies. See, without Ernest to constantly maintain them, they’ll fall apart. So they scheme to get that serum in his system—and trap Ernest into an eternal life of surgical servitude. But he rejects the elixir, moving on to happily remarry and embrace mortality to its fullest. Thirty-seven years later, Madeline and Helen commiserate in the pews at Ernest’s funeral. They literally start to crack in a grotesque parody of modern-day plastic surgery gone to unsubtle extremes. After the service, the two go all Humpty-Dumpty, tripping down some stairs and losing their heads. Helen’s closing one-liner: “Do you remember where you parked the car?”

Meryl, serpentine in a long platinum wig, disliked having to maneuver around Zemeckis’s sophisticated special effects, but, naturally, she proved a quick study. The inorganic tedium of technology and prosthetics wasn’t for her, though she relished playing a shallow mega-bitch angry at the world. “Madeline Ashton didn’t seem to have a drop of kindness or compassion in her body,” she said. “I was worried about that. But I was so ready to play someone this vile. I’ve wanted to play a mean person for a long time. It’s fun!”

For Goldie, the effervescent star of the hit comedies Private Benjamin and Bird on a Wire, playing a villain was doubly fun because she’d been typecast as the lovable, funny girl stretching back to the late-1960s NBC sketch show Laugh-In.

THE DEATH BECOMES HER ENDING THAT NEVER WAS

Director Robert Zemeckis scrapped the original finale after test audiences gave the thumbs-down. In it, Tracey Ullman, Meryl’s BFF and Plenty costar, appeared as Toni, a bartender who helps Ernest (Bruce Willis) fake his own death so he can escape Madeline (Meryl) and Helen (Goldie). Years later, the undead vixens spy Toni and Ernest, older but happier, holding hands in Switzerland. Goldie recalled the gist of her dialogue with Meryl:

Madeline: “Look at them, they’re so old and decrepit.”

Helen (welling up): “I wanted that. I wanted a normal life.”

Madeline: “Where do you want to go next? Paris?”

According to Goldie, the scene “was on-theme, but not funny.” Zemeckis and the movie’s writers rewrote a darker, funnier denouement that nailed the absurdist tone. And so we see the bitter antiheroines trying, and failing, to keep up appearances at Ernest’s funeral, in which he’s eulogized for living a rich, rewarding life. They proceed to physically crumble—breaking into pieces after tripping on stairs. The sight of their disembodied heads signals to the audience that, this time, the women can’t be put back together again. Rather than expressing shock and sadness, Helen deadpans, “Do you remember where you parked the car?”

Goldie first met Meryl through her partner, Kurt Russell, Meryl’s Silkwood boyfriend. She says Kurt came up with the idea of Helen “getting insanely fat” after Ernest dumps her for Madeline. The dramatic weight gain, achieved via prosthetics and a rubber suit, made Helen’s svelte revenge body that much more satisfying. Otherwise, Goldie thought Martin Donovan and David Koepp’s script was really good and found it tough to turn down. It was rare to find a movie that featured strong, complicated women. Thelma & Louise was a prime example. Meryl and Goldie went out of their way to pitch themselves as the titular outlaws in the 1991 feminist road movie. Meryl would play the controlled Louise to Goldie’s flaky Thelma. Director Ridley Scott, who ultimately cast Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis, thought Meryl was “wonderful” but questioned whether she was “tough” enough to tackle a heat-packing badass. Like lots of people, she had a strong opinion on the controversial ending, which involved the women driving off a cliff. According to Becky Aikman, author of the Thelma & Louise history aptly named Off the Cliff, Meryl posed the idea of altering the script so that Louise heroically pushed Thelma out of the car before taking the plunge, sparing her friend a grisly—and iconic—demise.

Scott didn’t think Goldie was right for Thelma. But Death Becomes Her offered Goldie another chance to do a movie with her buddy. She and Meryl shared a spontaneous streak. “Just as she wasn’t sure what was going to come out of my mouth, I thought the same of her,” recalls Goldie, saying of the shovel scene, “It was like we were on the playground together.”

Though Meryl balked at going under the knife, she sought to understand the insecurity that drove Madeline to change her appearance. This she-devil wasn’t entirely soulless. Meryl persuaded David Koepp, the screenwriter, to make a revision so that Madeline mistakenly believed that her young hunky side piece had genuine feelings for her. An earlier draft showed Madeline wielding the power in the relationship.

It was another case of Meryl advocating for her character and using her clout to tweak the script for the better. Back in her trailer on the Los Angeles set, she played NPR and kept a cappuccino maker as well as framed photos of her children. “I have a sickening feeling they all want to be in the business,” she said of her kids.

Henry, now twelve years old, was into hockey and the opposite sex. Once, he asked his mother a question for which she had the wisest nonanswer.

Henry: “Who do you think is the prettiest girl in my class?”

Meryl: “Who cares?”

She would let go of vanity—and prescient dark comedies about aging—for The River Wild, which required Meryl to navigate the most dangerous waters of her career.