CHAPTER 15 Meryl the Editrix

Truth is, there is no one that can do what I do.—Miranda Priestly

(The Devil Wears Prada, 2006)

Here’s how screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna described Miranda Priestly’s grand entrance in her script for The Devil Wears Prada: “We see more flashes of MIRANDA… $2,000 crocodile Manolos, Chanel jacket, perfect hair, fabulous Harry Winston earrings… [until] MIRANDA steps out of the elevator and for the first time we see her head-on. MIRANDA PRIESTLY, in all her glory. She is stunning, perfectly put together, a white Hermes scarf around her neck. MIRANDA’S look is so distinctive you can spot her a mile away. She is unlike any other beautiful woman, singularly MIRANDA.”

McKenna had observed Meryl hissing Miranda’s killer barbs at Anne Hathaway during rehearsals, but nothing could prepare her for the experience of watching the woman transform from Meryl Streep, down-to-earth movie star, to the world’s worst best-dressed boss. The makeover was vivid, chilling. McKenna, on set for the big reveal, reflexively threw her arm in front of director David Frankel as if to protect him.

Two years earlier, Paramount Pictures put Denzel, the hero, on the poster for The Manchurian Candidate, which earned Meryl high marks for her full-throttle foray into villainy. “She has the Hillary hair and the Karen Hughes attack-dog energy, but the charm, the inspiration, and the constant invention are her own,” wrote San Francisco Chronicle critic Mick LaSalle. “She gives us a senator who’s a monomaniac, a mad mommy and master politician rolled into one, a woman firing on so many levels that no one can keep up—someone who loves being evil as much as Streep loves acting.”

Manchurian grossed $66 million, ranking forty-fifth on the list of 2004’s multiplex moneymakers. Franchises reigned supreme, with sequels like Shrek 2, Spider-Man 2, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and The Bourne Supremacy collectively crossing the billion-dollar mark. Nobody ever asked Meryl, Where’s the sequel? Or, Can we merchandise this? Except for the fall, when the good stuff came out, there was nothing Meryl really wanted to see. She wished there was wider distribution in non-coastal cities for Americans to catch foreign films. At this rate, would theater owners reject Meryl movies—adult, literate, female focused—in favor of CGI superhero flicks where the women, maybe, get ten lines? Soon, movie stars would be replaced by special effects and skimpy plots in mainstream blockbuster bait intended to reach as broad an audience as possible. Tom Cruise, a Top 40 radio station playing the hits, adapted well to this new era, but Meryl marched to the beat of her own drum. She was a freestyle jazz musician. Look no further than her next three projects:

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004): an adaptation of Daniel Handler’s popular children’s novel about orphans escaping an evil guardian, Count Olaf (Jim Carrey), who attempts to murder them for their inheritance. The children briefly seek refuge with Aunt Josephine (Meryl), a neurotic Miss Havisham type who resides in a rickety home that teeters dangerously on the edge of a cliff. She’s afraid to cook hot food because the stove might burst into flames. She loves grammar and fears realtors. She fails to resist the charms of a swashbuckling fisherman (Olaf in disguise). Sadly, things don’t end well for Josephine, but it’s fun to watch Meryl and Carrey—two human shape-shifters—share the screen. “As actors, they instantly found each other like playmates in the sandbox,” said director Brad Silberling. “Meryl takes what she’s given and gives it back to her scene partner—a Meisner technique.”

Prime (2005): In this romantic comedy written and directed by Ben Younger, who was thirty-two years old at the time, Meryl plays an Upper West Side therapist named Lisa who discovers that her twenty-three-year-old son, David (Bryan Greenberg), is dating her thirty-seven-year-old divorced client, Rafi (Uma Thurman, who assumed the role after Sandra Bullock backed out thirteen days before shooting). Lisa approved of the age difference when she didn’t know Rafi was describing sex with David, but once she puts two and two together, her reaction is comedy-gold. “Trust me, that was harder for me than it was for you,” she tells Rafi of their therapy sessions. “Up until a few weeks ago I didn’t even know that my son had a penis.” Meryl was originally intrigued by the part when her agent told her Prime was about “an older woman and a much younger man.” Ooh! Then she learned Lisa was the “older” woman.

A Prairie Home Companion (2006): How do I say this without insulting the late Robert Altman? Unless you’re a fan of folksy radio shows that almost nobody listens to, then go right ahead and skip this movie. The saviors of Garrison Keillor’s dull, indulgent screenplay are Meryl and Lily Tomlin as the singing Johnson sisters and Lindsay Lohan as Meryl’s acerbic daughter who writes poems about suicide. Meryl called Lindsay a “great actress—a game and spirited girl.” Like she did with Greenberg, Meryl would improvise a little before a scene, warming up her young costar to get the performance she wanted. Said Lindsay, “She leads you into it.” Meryl was maternal toward Lindsay but worried the party-hopping paparazzi magnet was too ubiquitous for her own good.

Outside the Prairie set in St. Paul, Minnesota, Lohan’s fans congregated, seemingly unaware of the Streepgoddess—as Tony Kushner referred to her—in their midst. “Do you know who this is?” yelled Tomlin. The Mean Girls starlet enthusiastically swam in the celebrity fishbowl, paying the salaries of the Us Weekly masthead in the process. She loved being famous. Meryl disapproved. “There’s plenty of incredibly wonderful young actresses who have not chosen to be on the cover of everything,” she said. “But they’re not this other thing that’s seen at parties, which is—I don’t know what it is, I know it probably limits your ability to be imagined as a lot of different kinds of people.”

Lemony Snicket raked in $118 million, though it’s been lost to memory alongside Prime and Prairie, which made a total of $42 million. Meryl appeared destined for a fine late-stage career playing wacky aunts and mothers to Lindsay Lohan, Bryan Greenberg, and whoever graced People after selling photos of their triplets for a $6 million payday. Ironically, Meryl’s next alter ego, Miranda Priestly, was a cutthroat magazine-maker and Page Six regular. Occupation: editor in chief of Runway, the world’s most important fashion glossy. Miranda might consider making a pay-for-play deal with the Brangelina baby, but clothes ruled her covers. She lived and breathed her work, and she ate assistants for breakfast. If you proved that you could procure the unpublished manuscript of the latest Harry Potter book for her twins, then maybe, just maybe, she’d ease up on you. (Not likely.)

In May 2005, it was reported that Meryl had signed on to star in The Devil Wears Prada, with David Frankel (Miami Rhapsody) directing and Wendy Finerman (Forrest Gump) producing. Fox 2000, a division of 20th Century Fox, had been developing the comedy since 2003. That year, twenty-six-year-old Lauren Weisberger, a former assistant to Vogue editor Anna Wintour, then the most powerful and feared woman in the fashion industry, published her dishy roman à clef about a young woman, Andrea “Andy” Sachs, who lands a coveted position assisting Anna, I mean Miranda, at Runway. After coming to the conclusion that the demanding editrix is “an empty, shallow, bitter woman who has tons and tons of gorgeous clothes and not much else,” Andy tells Miranda to fuck off and promptly gets fired from a job that a million girls would kill to have. Her allegiance to friends and family proved stronger than the benefits of remaining tethered to Miranda, who had offered to reach out to the New Yorker—Andy’s dream employer—for the promising Brown graduate in the future. Still, what might happen if Andy mutated from a nice suburban girl into a dragon she no longer recognized: a mini-Miranda?

Weisberger stayed with Vogue only ten months before leaving to join Departures, a travel magazine. She wrote The Devil Wears Prada under the tutelage of respected writing teacher Charles Salzberg. The book sold to Doubleday within two weeks, netting Weisberger a $250,000 advance, and spent six months on the New York Times Best Seller list. It was ignored by the magazine empire Condé Nast, which owns Vogue, and savaged in the New York Times.

Curiously, the Gray Lady assigned the review to Kate Betts, an ex-Vogue staffer with a clear agenda to punish an unknown writer for daring to storm the castle, so to speak. “Having worked at Vogue myself for eight years and having been mentored by Anna Wintour, I have to say Weisberger could have learned a few things in the year she sold her soul to the devil of fashion for $32,500,” sniped Betts. “She had a ringside seat at one of the great editorial franchises in a business that exerts an enormous influence over women, but she seems to have understood almost nothing about the isolation and pressure of the job her boss was doing, or what it might cost a person like Miranda Priestly to become a character like Miranda Priestly.”

All told, Weisberger had created an indelible antiheroine. Elizabeth Gabler, president of Fox 2000, and Carla Hacken, her VP, knew it early on, snapping up the movie rights from Weisberger for $600,000 before the writer even completed the first draft. The studio tapped Peter Hedges to adapt The Devil Wears Prada and, after he bowed out, punted it to three male screenwriters without success. Aline Brosh McKenna, who previously wrote the romantic comedy Laws of Attraction, was the last scribe to take on Miranda, and it was a match made in heaven—or Vogue’s shoe closet.

David Frankel was impressed. He’d rejected a script by another writer as a mean-spirited revenge tale absent likeable characters. In his view, the movie version should focus on a central theme: “the nature of excellence and the sacrifices that have to be made. I was a fan of Anna Wintour and Vogue magazine. For me the approach to developing the movie properly was to make Miranda Priestly the heroine, someone to be celebrated sympathetically rather than someone to be reviled. In my view of the world, we should be thrilled to have the people who are excellent at what they do, superior at their jobs. The fact that they are not always nice is irrelevant.”

McKenna got it. The New Jersey–born Harvard alumna was smart, funny, fashion-obsessed, and took Miranda seriously as a brilliant businesswoman. She also understood Andy’s ambition to break into journalism in New York. McKenna had been there and tried it to no avail. Once, Glamour spiked a story she cowrote as a freelancer. In 1991, she moved to Los Angeles to write TV and movies. Gabler and Frankel supported her in making Andy’s romantic life secondary to her relationship with Miranda. Unlike other movies targeting women, this passed the Bechdel test. Neither Andy nor Miranda’s lives revolved around men. Rather, Andy circled Miranda on tippy-toes, careful not to forget her overlord’s steak lunch (the ribeye, medium rare) from Smith & Wollensky. McKenna wrote a new ending that removed gratuitous subplots from Weisberger’s book in order to elevate Andy’s identity crisis: What kind of person do I want to become? She makes her decision while accompanying Miranda to Paris Fashion Week; instead of cursing her out, Andy walks away. Flash-forward to Andy’s interview at a shabby-chic newspaper that suits her high-minded sensibility: shockingly, Miranda has written a begrudging letter of recommendation. The rookie had earned her respect.

Meryl was Frankel’s first choice to play Miranda. “Whenever I said, ‘I’m thinking about doing this thing,’ everyone’s reaction was, ‘Oh, yesss!’ Sort of gleeful and venomous,” she said. “That interested me very much, the reaction.” During the screenwriting process, McKenna and Frankel entertained the possibility that Meryl might do the role. “So, if Meryl’s gonna play this, we don’t need a line here,” McKenna recalls saying. “If it’s someone else, we might need a line here, but if it’s Meryl, we don’t need a line here.” After receiving McKenna’s script, Meryl met with Frankel and agreed to step into Miranda’s Prada heels. McKenna was standing by Larchmont Boulevard when Frankel called to tell her the news. She plunked down on the curb and teared up. “I glimpsed the top of the mountain from there,” she says. “I just knew that having Meryl involved took the movie to a completely different place.”

Meryl understood she had a hit on her hands, but the salary gave her pause. “The offer was to my mind slightly, if not insulting, not perhaps reflective of my actual value to the project,” Meryl later told Variety’s Ramin Setoodeh. “There was my ‘goodbye moment,’ and then they doubled the offer. I was 55, and I had just learned, at a very late date, how to deal on my own behalf.” Perhaps taking a cue from Miranda, she negotiated higher pay. (While Gabler recalled paying Meryl “maybe $4 million,” Meryl’s Prada paycheck was also reported to be $5 million.) Fox pushed the green light.

McKenna wore a black Harari kimono top to meet Meryl in the living room of her Manhattan townhome. It was raining outside, and McKenna hadn’t made a blowout appointment to smooth her frizzy hair. Should she pile it atop her head, or find a salon a.s.a.p.? “You know what? I don’t think she’s gonna care,” she told herself. McKenna, Frankel, and Wendy Finerman sat with Meryl for four hours while she gave notes on Prada the movie. “Meryl is what you want her to be,” she says. “She is one of the least disappointing show business people I’ve ever met. She’s incredibly smart in the way you want her to be. Listen, in person, she’s absolutely luminously gorgeous.” Her skin seemed lit from within. Regarding the notes: none was about Meryl wanting to show off or be the center of attention. What she wanted was to do and say less. To be the calm inside the storm. She identified several McKenna-penned lines she really liked, including “By all means, move at a glacial pace. You know how that thrills me.”

The remark, aimed at Andy, was dry, withering, and matter-of-fact, all qualities that helped Meryl locate her inner Miranda. Though the Prada team toned down the character’s meanness so as to not scare away a big movie star, Meryl said, “No, no. Give her more fangs.” She waved her hand at a page where McKenna had written a long monologue for the Runway high priestess to give when the fictional designer James Holt presents his less-than-stellar latest collection to her. “I don’t need to say all this,” she said. As a result, the scene was changed so Miranda simply pursed her lips—the most devastating reaction Holt can imagine.

From a Starbucks in LA, McKenna wrote new dialogue that Frankel sent to Meryl for feedback. Meryl thought McKenna could expand a speech in which Miranda schools Andy—who thinks fashion is irrelevant—on the importance of a blue sweater she’s wearing. It was several days before Meryl was to shoot the scene, which McKenna considered cutting. But Meryl wanted more. Said Frankel, “Write as much as you can about it. Write an aria for her.” Figuring that Miranda would know the different shades of blue, McKenna gave Meryl the option to choose among three specific hues: lapis, azure, and cerulean. She selected cerulean, a color similar to turquoise (and more fun to pronounce). McKenna fired off a monologue to Frankel, assuming they might not use the whole thing because it was so epic. Meryl uttered every syllable. A mic drop for the ages, Miranda’s lecture moves beyond humiliating a clueless employee. It helps skeptical moviegoers grasp high fashion’s trickle-down influence in under two minutes. Behold:

“This stuff”? Oh, OK. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select, I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean. And you’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets?

She goes on to say:

And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of “stuff.”

Meryl thought it was crucial to show Miranda in everyday work mode, whether it be picking the right cerulean belt to put on a Runway model or terrifying staffers at a meeting. (“Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking.”) Finerman compiled two large folders of information on first jobs, clothing designers, and Anna Wintour. To the producer’s surprise, she not only read the clippings—Meryl asked for more. She wasn’t interested in impersonating Wintour, nor did she want to meet the stylish Brit, who favored ladylike floral dresses, wearing sunglasses indoors, and never changing her immaculate chin-length haircut that Anna wannabes mostly failed to emulate. “Embedded” within Weisberger’s book, said Meryl, “is what the perceived deficits are of women in a leadership position. Chief among them is to expect women to be endlessly empathetic, a sense of employees’ discomfiture that she doesn’t give a shit, all the things that they would not ask of a male boss.… It interested me that Anna Wintour was expected to be smilier, nicer, sweeter… what we wish women to be is nicer.”

Leaving nice out of it, Meryl wondered, “Well, hell, what is her job? What does she have to do? What are her deadlines? What do we have very little time for, even though the dress and heels have to have the outward accoutrements of being appealing, womanly?”

Anne Hathaway pursued Andy Sachs with admirable gusto. Fox’s first choice, Rachel McAdams, breakout star of Mean Girls and The Notebook, repeatedly declined the part because she wanted to put the brakes on mainstream movie roles. The studio powers-that-be underestimated the size of Anne’s fan base coming from the wholesome teen fairytales The Princess Diaries and Ella Enchanted. Following a meeting with Carla Hacken, Anne wrote “Hire me” in the sand on Hacken’s desk Zen garden so the executive would see it. She didn’t have to audition. Frankel liked her, and so did McKenna, who said the then-twenty-two-year-old “gets across that sense of a super-smart books/art person, which is a difficult thing to fake. She nailed the smugness, that slight you feel when you come out of the school world which was your oyster because you got A’s in college.”

Rounding out the cast: newcomer Emily Blunt as Miranda’s most senior assistant, Emily, who charmed Frankel with her irreverent humor and clipped British accent, and Stanley Tucci as Nigel, the second-in-command whose snark is worse than his bite. The Tooch, a character actor with a long list of film credits (Big Night, Road to Perdition, Maid in Manhattan), joined Prada several weeks into the New York shoot unfolding in the fall of 2005. Barney’s creative director Simon Doonan and E! fashion correspondent Robert Verdi auditioned for Nigel, as did BBC personality Graham Norton. (Doonan complained that Tucci, who is straight, was given the part of a gay man.) “I felt like I met every actor in New York,” Frankel says. “I met a lot of non-actors… famous literati in town. I thought maybe they can act. I was trying to give the role some more authenticity. But in the end, we just needed a great actor. The minute I met Stanley, all right, genius.”

When the company assembled for the table read, Blunt heard Meryl—wearing a madras blazer and khaki pants, her hair in a ponytail—laugh throatily. Then, roughly ten minutes later, Miranda showed up. “I think we all had an idea of what Miranda would sound like,” said Anne. “It was a strident, bossy, barking voice. So when Meryl opened her mouth and basically whispered, everybody in the room drew a collective gasp. It was so unexpected and so brilliant.”

“When I was growing up, I was a huge fan of Don Rickles, as was my father,” says Prada screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna. “I love insult comedians, and I always have, and it always makes me laugh. And Miranda Priestly is an A-plus insult comedian. Like, if you asked me right now to write 10 pages of dialogue in Miranda’s voice, I could.” Just a few of Miranda’s most vicious lines:

“Details of your incompetence do not interest me.”

“Is there some reason that my coffee isn’t here? Has she died or something?”

“I said to myself, go ahead. Take a chance. Hire the smart, fat girl.”

“By all means, move at a glacial pace. You know how that thrills me.”

“Also, I need to see all the things that Nigel has pulled for Gwyneth’s second cover try. I wonder if she’s lost any of that weight yet.”

“Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking.”

There to observe, Elizabeth Gabler noticed Meryl, in character, serving Anne looks that read “You little dimwit.” For Miranda, Meryl used men as models; there weren’t enough women in power to mimic. “The voice I got from Clint Eastwood,” she explained. “He never, ever, ever raises his voice and everyone has to lean in to listen, and he is automatically the most powerful person in the room. But he is not funny. That I stole from Mike Nichols. The way the cruelest cutting remark, if it is delivered with a tiny self-amused curlicue of irony, is the most effective instruction, the most memorable correction, because everyone laughs, even the target. The walk, I’m afraid, is mine.”

At the end of the read-through, they released all the actors except Meryl and Anne. An exec asked Meryl, “Do you have notes for Aline?… She’ll do whatever you want.” Turning to McKenna, Meryl said, “I have nothing but praise for you, darling.” McKenna thought this was Meryl’s way of letting the studio know that she wanted to keep the writer around. Anne, following Meryl’s lead, had no notes.

During a second table read, Meryl looked at McKenna before changing a line in the climactic scene when Miranda and Andy are being driven to a Paris fashion show. Instead of proclaiming, “Everybody wants to be me,” she said, “Everybody wants to be us.” She explained to McKenna that Miranda doesn’t care about anyone wanting to be like her. She cares about people aspiring to be like them—the magazine, and what it represents.

Meryl and Roy collaborated on Miranda’s distinctive white wig with dark roots at the back, drawing from silver-haired septuagenarian model Carmen Dell’Orefice and elegant French politician Christine Lagarde. Costume designer Patricia Field, who created Carrie Bradshaw’s trendsetting Sex and the City look, loved the idea. The studio? Not so much. Execs worried Meryl would look old, but seeing the wig in person changed minds; Meryl glowed. And thanks to Roy and Field, Miranda had A Look. All iconic fashion editors needed one.

Although the $35 million ode to haute couture offered designers the best publicity money couldn’t buy, not everyone leaped at the opportunity to dress Meryl Streep. They feared offending Wintour, who could make—and break—careers. Finerman and Valentino Garavani had a personal relationship from when the sartorial star lent clothes to the 1998 Julia Roberts dramedy Stepmom, which Finerman produced. Valentino, who outfitted Miranda in that glam black gown for the gala at the Met, took a risk by agreeing to a cameo where he greets the doyenne backstage at a faux fashion show. In the process, he opened the door to get other VIPs on board. Heidi Klum, host of the cult reality competition Project Runway, appeared alongside Valentino, and supermodel Gisele played a larger role as one of Miranda’s underlings after McKenna approached her on a flight that was delayed to offer a part in the movie. Gisele’s agent “tensed up,” recalls McKenna, so “I just kept saying the words ‘Meryl Streep,’ over and over again, because I thought that would make them know that it was a real thing and it was safe.” Sold, Gisele said, “OK, I don’t want to play myself, and I want to play a bitch.”

Field, restricted by a meager $100,000 budget, called upon her fashionista friends for help. She thought of Anne as a “Chanel girl” as opposed to a “Versace” girl. The French fashion house, overseen by Karl Lagerfeld, provided Andy’s jaw-dropping makeover ensemble: the black skirt suit and thigh-high boots that made Emily and Miranda do double takes. Andy also wore Dolce and Gabbana and Calvin Klein. For Meryl, Field sourced timeless separates from Donna Karan’s 1987 archives and Michael Vollbracht for Bill Blass; these pieces wouldn’t be instantly recognizable, thereby rendering Miranda a bold original impervious to trends. Or animal rights activists’ red paint. The costumer called upon a local Russian furrier with a New York showroom to lend fur coats that Miranda could fling at Andy’s desk.

In Field’s estimate, some one hundred designers loaned clothing worth a whopping $1 million—that was more than Anne’s Prada salary. Many were on edge. What would Anna think?

Meryl couldn’t believe that one handbag cost $12,000. She preferred Andy’s “tragic blue sweater and her scruples about all of it.” But when Miranda stepped out of the elevator in a black coat and gray bag, both by Prada, the ferocity was real. The transformation startled McKenna and Frankel. At a group meeting on the first day of shooting, some studio people were overstepping with opinions on what Meryl should wear. “I don’t make my decision by committee,” Wendy Finerman recalled her saying. She deferred to the producer. “Wendy, which earrings should I wear?” “Wendy, which belt should I wear?” “Wendy, you can stay.”

She purposely kept Anne and Emily at a distance, telling Anne that her frostiness wasn’t personal. “She was always Meryl in rehearsals—warm smile, nicknames, hugs, ‘what’s going on?’” said Anne. “But once she was Miranda, she didn’t care about those things, because Miranda didn’t care about those things.”

Meryl would never use the word “starlet” to describe Anne, said Frankel, “but it was just sort of ‘Yeah, we’re both starring in a movie, and you might even have a bigger part than me, but we’re not equals.’”

Anne was nervous to film opposite Meryl in a scene where they get out of a car. To get the shot, the two had to circle the block, take after take. She forced herself to seize the day and talk to Meryl but felt pressure to impress her cultured costar rather than attempt a normal conversation.

“Meryl, have you ever heard the Nick Drake album Pink Moon?… I can bring you a copy if you want?”

That would be lovely, Annie.

“Meryl, by any chance, have you read the Jeffrey Eugenides book?”

No, I haven’t.

“Meryl, by any chance did you see The Daily Show with Jon Stewart last night? He’s just so brilliant. I think he’s saving America.”

Meryl said nothing. The silence panicked Anne, who sought the woman’s approval. Finally, Meryl responded: “No, I don’t think Jon Stewart is going to save America. I think Stephen Colbert is.”

According to Angel De Angelis, a hairstylist on The Devil Wears Prada, Anne would arrive to “work late, in front of Meryl. How could you do that to Meryl? She’s such a professional.” Then again, “she was young and she was dating this guy who would go out at night.… Meryl was great. She was just very patient with her, and let her know in her very Meryl way that you got to know your lines.” Anne, says De Angelis, “got better by the end.” The actress was twenty-one when Italian real estate developer Raffaello Follieri swept her off her feet. Follieri accompanied Anne to red carpet events and showed her a jet-set, luxury lifestyle that included yacht vacations on the Mediterranean. They were celebrity magazine fixtures. But unbeknownst to Anne, Follieri was defrauding investors out of millions of dollars. She dumped him nearly three years later, in June 2008, shortly before he was arrested and charged with wire fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy. He pleaded guilty and served four and a half years in prison before being deported to Italy in 2012.

“The days were long,” Frankel said. “Annie was very emotional. She was living with a guy who was a felon and embezzler. He didn’t want her to be working at all; he hated that she worked nights. She was always fragile when we shot late.”

Anne was also experiencing health problems related to a cyst. Although others suggested she lose weight for Prada, Meryl advised her not to listen. Anne had gained ten pounds following a surgery, and, when she went to her first costume fitting, “couture didn’t fit,” she recalled. “So then I had to lose the 10 pounds again. Yeah, there were tears.” (Anne’s ordeal lent a nugget of truth to Blunt’s one-liner, “I’m just one stomach flu away from my goal weight.”)

Meryl, meanwhile, dropped seven pounds during the shoot. “It killed me,” she said. Her costars were a fun-loving crew, Tucci and Blunt especially, and Meryl—who loved to joke around and be social—was feeling the strain of self-imposed isolation. She attributed the weight loss to anxiety. “There was a lot of anxiety in this character,” she said. “Everybody says: ‘Was it fun to play a villain?’ No. It was not fun to be in this person’s body, it just wasn’t at all. So, maybe I took the pressures that she felt, too much to heart. But I felt that was in the plot. I read the script and I read that there was pressure to replace her in her job as editor. And I know how replaceable middle-aged women are in our society and I felt that and so it wasn’t enjoyable to be her. It was hard work dressing like that too, I felt like I was wearing or putting on underwater gear. I guess a normal woman would find it extremely enjoyable to wear those clothes. For me, I didn’t enjoy it. It felt like a straitjacket.”

Meryl went makeup-free for the scene where Miranda tearfully lets down her guard and informs Andy that her husband has filed for divorce. Predicting tabloid schadenfreude, she says, “Rupert Murdoch should cut me a check for all the papers I sell for him. Anyway, I don’t really care what anybody writes about me. But my girls… it’s just so unfair to the girls.”

Throughout her fleeting moment of vulnerability, Miranda keeps it callous. By all means, move at a glacial pace. Andy, apparently suffering from Stockholm syndrome, shrugs off the insult. Though Meryl steered clear of Anne off camera, her doe-eyed costar became very close friends to Blunt. “They would gird each other’s loins for dealing with Meryl,” says Frankel. “They really carried each other along.”

Whereas Anne played the straight man, Blunt got to flaunt her masterful comic timing. McKenna added an extra scene at the end when Andy calls Emily to say she’s sending over designer hand-me-downs from Paris. Emily sounds stern and high-strung over the phone, but the audience sees her eyes well up with emotion.

After Blunt wrapped her role, Meryl—ditching Miranda’s wig and the Prada for a puffy jacket—ran out of her trailer to say goodbye. “You were so great!” she exclaimed. Blunt started to weep for real. She hadn’t realized how much Meryl’s praise would mean to her.

The Devil Wears Prada did more than give Meryl her grandest success in decades. It broadened her appeal as an actress while enhancing the mystique of Streep. Was Meryl as ferocious and uncompromising as Miranda? Did she eat ingenues for breakfast? Amy Adams would soon find out on the set of Doubt.

CHAPTER 15

Meryl the Editrix

MIRANDA THE INSULT COMIC

ZAC POSEN ON WHAT PRADA GETS RIGHT ABOUT THE FASHION INDUSTRY

INTERMISSION