CHAPTER 11 Meryl the Romantic

I was acting like another woman, yet I was more myself than ever before.—Francesca Johnson

(The Bridges of Madison County, 1995)

A month before The River Wild surged into theaters in September 1994, Meryl and Tracey Ullman took their kids on a rafting trip to “a little bitty river in Massachusetts,” said Meryl, recalling that Tracey—whom she’s christened her “soulmate”—wanted “me to show off for her so she could make fun of me.” The sound of the water made Meryl’s heart pulse with a familiar shot of adrenaline and “desire to be there; to do it.”

She “emerged from River Wild with a lot of metaphors for living,” she told the New York Times Magazine while doing press for the movie. “Metaphors about taking risks, calculable risks, and being as strong as you can and then just sort of knowing it’s all up to fate anyway.”

Word-of-mouth momentum was building. An early screening in New York whipped up something of a frenzy, with an audience member standing up to scream, “That’s some big woman!” Meryl had been incensed by Universal Pictures’ decision to include footage of her wielding a gun in The River Wild trailer. “It really made me mad,” she said. “I’m always mad, you know, when they say they’re going to do one thing and they don’t really mean it. They’re just saying it to mollify the woman. And so they said: ‘Oh, it’s only two weeks. And we really can’t find any other close-up that’s as powerful in the whole movie.’ And so I—I objected to this being my Christmas gift to America, because they were just gonna run it for two weeks in the theaters at Christmas. Then they got such a great response from the whole trailer that they decided to run it forever.”

She refused to be shown with a firearm in the promotional poster. As she explained to More magazine in 1999, “Every movie star who stands up and points a gun at America is not only selling the movie—they’re selling the gun. The NRA couldn’t pay these people enough money to stand there and hold the rifle for their ad—but in the end, they’re making that ad and they’re making it gratis. I think our profession doesn’t take responsibility for the images that we put out in the world.”

Even though Universal’s marketing team seemingly reinforced the belief that gun imagery sold movies, The River Wild glorified neither guns nor violence. Gail killed Wade out of self-defense. Meryl was proud to flip the gender roles in a genre dominated by the usual suspects (see: Cruise, Tom) and, increasingly, unlikely action heroes such as Speed’s buzzcut-heartthrob Keanu Reeves.

“I made a movie my girls would be excited to see,” she said. “They could put themselves in the hero’s role and project it without being a burly man, without having to make the leap girls are used to making. This is not my offering to the male action audience. If they like it, it’s great. If they don’t, well, we tried.”

On August 15, 1994, news hit the trades that Clint Eastwood had cast Meryl in his hotly anticipated adaptation of Robert James Waller’s bestseller The Bridges of Madison County, which enjoyed effusive praise from Oprah Winfrey even if the coastal literati savaged it as “porn for yuppie women” and “mass dressed up as class.” Eastwood would both direct and star as soulful National Geographic photographer Robert Kincaid, who romances lonely Italian war bride Francesca Johnson (Meryl) while on assignment shooting Iowa’s covered bridges. Jessica Lange, Anjelica Huston, and Cher were among the American actresses vying to play Francesca, but how many could recreate the character’s exotic accent? Carrie Fisher gave Meryl’s phone number to Eastwood. “He growled, ‘I hear you didn’t like the book,’” Meryl remembered. “Pause. I said, ‘No, no! It’s just that I wasn’t destroyed by it, like everyone else.’” Eastwood replied, “Read the script. It’s good.”

Screenwriter Richard LaGravenese had eliminated Waller’s purple prose and shifted focus from Kincaid to Francesca. Meryl cried. Then she said yes, turning down Robert Redford’s offer to star with him in Crisis in the Hot Zone after Jodie Foster dropped out. Redford bolted the project thereafter.

During the Bridges casting process, LaGravenese, who wrote the 1991 Robin Williams drama The Fisher King, “had heard little ideas of other actresses that were younger, and I remember saying to them, ‘You are going to alienate every woman who read this book. Because if she’s in her thirties, that’s not the same point as a woman who’s in her forties who has been married for over 20 years. It’s a completely different character.’”

At the time, Eastwood was sixty-four years old and Meryl two decades his junior. But even so, Warner Bros. “felt I was too old to play this character,” Meryl recalled. “And so Clint made—I gather—a case for me, which I was glad about.”

The Bridges of Madison County was a coup for Meryl, offering proof that The River Wild pushed her in the right direction at a pivotal crossroads. Meryl’s last major hit was Out of Africa in 1985. Afterward, she veered off course. Intriguing, Oscar-bait material like The Remains of the Day, Thelma & Louise, and Evita passed her by. “She went from being a great classical actress to playing parts in Hollywood that others could have done,” said Sophie’s Choice director Alan J. Pakula. “Sometimes they put her into a picture and it’s like having this huge motor on this tiny car.”

Meryl, a secretly shrewd businesswoman, seemed ready to level up. In 1994, she hired a new publicity firm, PMK, and cleared her post-Bridges schedule for the crime drama Before and After with Liam Neeson. Positive word for The River Wild contributed to a salary bump somewhere in the ballpark of $4 to $5 million on the Eastwood production, which also inked a deal to pay Meryl a percentage of the box-office gross. Though stars such as Meg Ryan and Demi Moore had made similar back-end deals, this marked new territory for Meryl.

While Bridges began production in Winterset, Iowa, Meryl—hair dyed Francesca’s chestnut brown—took a break to grace the Los Angeles premiere of The River Wild, planting her hands in cement outside Mann’s Chinese Theatre. A laughing Kevin Bacon, there to witness the event, held her back as she jokingly attempted to smear him with the goopy residue. The movie was a modest success, collecting $94 million worldwide on a $45 million budget; Speed, by comparison, netted $350 million, establishing Keanu as the industry’s go-to tough guy with a sensitive streak.

When I was thirteen years old and totally obsessed with pop culture, my mother took me to see The River Wild at the theater. The first time I watched Meryl on screen felt like a low-key surprise—taut and exciting, with none of the fanfare that accompanied a male-driven spectacle. I distinctly remember feeling confused by the rare instance of a woman action star. Where film critics counted plot holes, I spotted a new role model who pushed through obstacles with dignity and swagger. That year, Winona Ryder’s Little Women remake blew my mind. It subverted the typical boy’s coming-of-age journey to showcase Winona as adventurous girl-hero Jo March, who rejects a proposal of marriage from a dashing neighbor, Laurie (peak Christian Bale), in order to follow her dreams. These films still resonate today. (In 2019, Greta Gerwig remade Little Women, with Meryl playing the cantankerous Aunt March to Saoirse Ronan’s Jo.) To quote actress-activist Geena Davis: “If she can see it, she can be it.”

Like Jo, who tried living the writer’s life in New York City only to be pulled back to Orchard House, Meryl returned home to Connecticut. “I hate being there,” she said of LA. “I really require a great deal of privacy. I don’t like to be out and dressed up and seen.” In an anonymous quote to the New York Times, a “prominent director” (undoubtedly Manhattan based, like Alan J. Pakula or Mike Nichols), observed, “You have to keep a distance from there. You’ve got to stay aloof from the agents and lawyers and gossip. I honestly believe she was looking at career survival and saying to herself, ‘Maybe I should join the mainstream more, so I’ll listen to my agents.’ But she appeared in too much dumb stuff. She listened to voices other than her own.”

November 6, 1994: Meryl makes her debut on the wildly popular animated series, voicing Reverend Timothy Lovejoy’s daughter, Jessica, in an episode called “Bart’s Girlfriend.” Her character, even more wicked than Bart, frames him for the crime of stealing collection money from church. (The cash is later discovered underneath her bed.) When Meryl came in to record, Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart, was too scared to request her autograph. But, as it happened, Meryl asked for Cartwright’s signature. Her kids, like most all children of the ’90s, were huge Bart fans.

At forty-five, Meryl was bucking convention while her peers threw in the towel or took what they could get. Jane Fonda abruptly announced her retirement in the early 1990s. Sally Field, forty-seven, had gone from Tom Hanks’s love interest (Punchline) to his mother (Forrest Gump) in the span of six years. Jessica Lange would all but disappear until producer Ryan Murphy cast her comeback in his American Horror Story series in 2011.

Meryl dismissed the idea that her choices were part of some calculated strategy. “I don’t have a game plan for any of it,” she said. “An actor is always dependent on what comes around.… I never aimed for the big hit. I don’t have the machine to do that. I’m pretty aware of what I look like. I don’t look like Sharon Stone, and I’m not built like her.” Years later, she would insist to NPR’s Terry Gross that she continued to work into middle age partly because sex appeal “wasn’t the first thing about me.”

The irony was that Meryl’s Bridges performance unearths a profound sensuality not yet seen in her work. It flows from her pores, dripping like sweat on a humid August night. Farmer Richard Johnson, kind but dull, hardly seems to notice or appreciate the Sophia Loren thing his wife has going on. But Robert Kincaid does.

Kincaid meets Francesca in 1965 while asking for directions to Roseman Bridge, a deceptively ordinary structure with a rustic beauty that others might overlook. Kincaid deems the bridge good enough for National Geographic; his photograph of it later makes the cover. After Francesca’s husband and children leave town to enter a prize steer at the Illinois State Fair, Kincaid enters the scene, showing Francesca what she’s been missing all these years. Their torrid four-day romance blossoms organically over wistful moonlight walks and long, philosophical dinner-table conversations during which they reveal themselves to one another.

Francesca confesses that Iowa isn’t “what I dreamed of as a girl.” She’d quit a rewarding job as a teacher because Richard preferred her to stay at home. Unlike her family, with whom she hardly speaks at dinner, Kincaid shows real interest in hearing what she has to say. He tells stories about traveling to far-flung countries she would never visit. He makes her belly-laugh. He even helps in the kitchen! “Men cook,” he informs a flustered Francesca. Sensing that she’s insecure about being a midwestern housewife, he reassures her, “You’re anything but a simple woman.”

Clint and Meryl.

Without uttering a word, Meryl vividly conveys Francesca’s sexual awakening. The moment she encounters the warm, understated Kincaid, her eyes flicker with attraction and curiosity. She touches her mouth, smooths her dress. She is startled when his arm accidentally brushes her leg in the car en route to the bridge. Kincaid’s presence heightens her senses; she often seems on edge, as though consumed by thoughts of touching him. After their first dinner together, she sits alone on the porch reading a book of poetry. Suddenly, she opens her nightgown and flashes the pitch-black sky. In a later scene, she soaks in a tub where Kincaid previously showered, lingering with wordless ecstasy upon the beads of Robert—excuse me, water—that drip from the shower head. “Almost everything about Robert Kincaid had begun to seem erotic to me,” she declares in voice-over narration.

“In the first half, she managed to portray the balance of being both settled into a life and her dissatisfaction and yearning for something else,” LaGravenese said of Meryl. “And then, in the second half, she managed this incredible balance of the attraction and the yearning for him and the conflict that that created.”

Sex is inevitable, but, unfortunately for both, it’s more than physical: The two are in love. Kincaid asks Francesca to run away with him. She’s even packed her bags, but, ultimately, she can’t go through with it. Francesca’s moral obligation to her kids outweighs destroying their lives to be happy with the love of hers. “This kind of certainty comes but just once in a lifetime,” says Kincaid, walking out the door. (He is prone to make poetic statements. OK, fine, here’s my favorite: “The old dreams were good dreams; they didn’t work out, but glad I had them.”)

A few days pass. It’s pouring rain. Francesca sits in the truck, waiting for Richard to come out of the store, and spots Kincaid, completely drenched, across the street. She forces a smile; he looks pained. Seconds later, Richard is driving behind Kincaid, and Francesca—tears streaming down her face—watches her lover remove the cross necklace she gave him and wrap it around the rearview mirror. They’re at an intersection. The light turns green. Kincaid loiters too long, waiting for Francesca to hop inside. With her palm gripping the door handle, she’s ready to make a move. Eastwood stretches the will-she-or-won’t-she tension for maximum impact, focusing his camera squarely on Meryl as she chickens out, crying uncontrollably (along with the audience).

In the script, “people are just talking to each other. But then, in the end, the thing people most remember is a visual thing,” Meryl said. “It’s that hand on the handle. And him in the rain. And her looking out and the traffic lights and the missed opportunity. And I think it has to do with the fact that people don’t like to be told what to feel in a movie. They like to have it ambush them and feel it and… they can only do that when there’s no talking. And so they have to scream at the screen, ‘Open the door!’”

Deep down, we know the bittersweet truth. “Her characterization tells you why she’s never gonna leave: She was rooted,” explained Meryl, who took inspiration from two Italian women—actress Anna Magnani as well as a childhood neighbor and Italian war bride from Puglia who married an American GI and moved to New Jersey. The Bridges of Madison County is a love story about female sacrifice—namely the choice between familial responsibility and the desire to start a new life. Meryl and Eastwood grounded the drama in naturalism. It was a symbiosis of two artists who understand the importance of restraint—when to pull back, and when to push it.

“Clint shot it like a foreign film almost,” said LaGravenese. “He wasn’t afraid of the silences. He wasn’t afraid of letting the camera just sit and let the performances take over. It was almost like a French film to me.”

Eastwood, who won his first Best Director Oscar the year before for Unforgiven, didn’t spend much time talking to Meryl until they started shooting Bridges. He thought their scenes, filmed in continuity, would benefit from the natural awkwardness between strangers and the growing intimacy that developed as they got to know each other. Eastwood’s decisive way of working was new to Meryl. After Meryl’s first take, he used footage of her rehearsal in the scene. She turned to a group that included cinematographer Jack Green, asking, “Is this how it always is?” About three days later, she said to Green, “I love this way of shooting. This is so much fun! I don’t have to work up to anything. I can start at the top. I can start right at the highest note.”

And, once she cried on cue, it was hard to stop. “No amount of ice could possibly get Meryl’s eyes down,” Roy Helland told New York Times Magazine. “They were so filled with fluid. There’s no glycerin with Meryl. When she cries, she cries.” Green would wipe away tears when he thought nobody was looking and witness Eastwood do the same. Helland wore a hearing aid because Eastwood was so quiet. Instead of yelling “Action!” he would say, “Well, when you’re ready, start.”

As Meryl saw it, she and the former Dirty Harry star “came from very different genres in film, so there’s that attraction of opposites. That helps the magic potion.” Eastwood, as vocally conservative as Meryl is liberal, viewed Kincaid and Francesca as outsiders, and perhaps he shared that in common with Meryl, another industry veteran who lived outside Los Angeles and against whom Pauline Kael, thankfully retired, had harbored a personal vendetta. He set out to befriend Meryl on set. In between takes, the two danced together and had fun.

“It was instant,” remembered Bridges producer Kathleen Kennedy. “Clint and Meryl were what you always look for in a romance. They had that chemistry on film. You just instantly believed that these two people were deeply in love with one another.”

Of course, it was all make-believe. But The Bridges of Madison County’s overwhelmingly female fan base considered the Streep-Clintwood rendezvous as real as love at first sight. Meryl accomplished what Robert James Waller did: she gave hope to the hopeless romantics among us. Simultaneously, like a confession told to Betty Friedan for her 1963 game changer The Feminine Mystique, Meryl set a match to the myth of the contented midcentury housewife, illuminating the inner turmoil of a woman unfulfilled by motherhood and housework. Francesca, like so many other silent housewives of the era, would never self-actualize beyond her expected domestic duties. Meryl’s quietly rebellious performance spoke personally to contemporary women still living the lie that happiness was to be found solely in the home. It was a signal fire for restless souls debating whether to do something different. Meryl, who was rooted but self-actualized, would keep telling their stories.

And because she was drawn to characters who, like she did, resisted conformity in ways that inspired, it was only fitting for Meryl to swoop in and save the day to play the offbeat violin teacher Roberta Guaspari—a role once meant for Madonna.

CHAPTER 11

Meryl the Romantic

MERYL’S SIMPSONS EPISODE

INTERMISSION