CHAPTER 17

Meryl Masters the Art of French Cooking

Bon appetit!—Julia Child

(Julie & Julia, 2009)

Three out of four kids were out of the house. Meryl’s eldest, known professionally as Henry Wolfe, was a musician and actor living in LA, with credits ranging from big budget (The Good Shepherd) to experimental (Lying, The Wait). Like Meryl, Mamie balanced drama (Sally Adams in HBO’s John Adams miniseries) and comedy (her recurring character, the loopy-brilliant attorney Nancy Crozier, on CBS’s The Good Wife). In October 2009, Mamie would announce her engagement to actor Benjamin Walker, with whom she starred on Broadway in Les liaisons dangereuses. “My mom loves him!” she gushed. At twenty-two, Grace Gummer, who briefly appeared as a younger version of Meryl in 1993’s The House of the Spirits, had graduated from Vassar with degrees in art history and Italian. But acting was in her DNA. Grace would conquer stage and screen, including roles opposite Greta Gerwig in the indie gem Frances Ha and portraying Nora Ephron in the cult Amazon series Good Girls Revolt. Louisa, her youngest, would soon enroll at Vassar College. Victoria Edel went to high school in Brooklyn with Louisa, and both were involved in theater. Victoria remembers Meryl sewing a button on her costume. “And most iconically, one time my mom ran into this lady she knew who said, very rudely, ‘Ohh I didn’t know your kids were smart enough to go here,’ and Meryl said, loudly, ‘Wow, some people are so rude,’ or something like that.”

Meryl could finally exhale. She came across lighter, on camera and off.

“I think she’s very happy,” Nichols told Vanity Fair in 2010. “Anybody raising four children has worries, but they turned out so great, and you begin to relax a little bit. I think you’re seeing her freedom and her relief, to have brought four kids all the way through into hot careers of their own and happy love relationships. You still have them invisibly connected to you, but she’s free. At last you’re not thinking, ‘I have to run home,’ and things happen out of that freedom that are, if not new, deeper.”

Was Nichols referring to her pockets? Between June 2008 and June 2009, the month she turned sixty years old, Meryl had grown wealthier, with earnings of $24 million, ranking third on Forbes’ list of the best-paid actresses. Angelina Jolie, thirty-four, and Jennifer Aniston, forty, claimed the top spots, yet all three earned significantly less than their male counterparts. Harrison Ford pocketed $65 million to Angelina’s $27 million. Collectively, the top ten money-making actors made it rain $393 million during that period, compared with $183 million for actresses. Given those cringe-inducing statistics, it’s something of a miracle that Meryl had not been placed on a shelf in the grande dame cupboard with Julie Andrews.

MERYL’S BARNARD COLLEGE COMMENCEMENT

On May 17, 2010, Meryl addressed graduates of the private women’s liberal arts institution in Manhattan, dropping poignant pearls of wisdom and personal insights. A few of her best, and most revealing, quotes:

• “I gave a speech at Vassar twenty-seven years ago. It was a really big hit. Everybody loved it, really. Tom Brokaw said it was the very best commencement speech he had ever heard—and of course, I believed this. And, you know, it was much, much easier to construct than this one. It came out pretty easily because, back then, I knew so much! I was a new mother, I had [two] Academy Awards, and it was all coming together so nicely.… But now, I feel like I know about one-sixteenth of what that young woman knew. Things don’t seem as certain today.”

• “Women are better at acting than men. Why? Because we have to be. If successfully convincing someone bigger than you are of something he doesn’t want to know is a survival skill, this is how women have survived through the millennia. Pretending is not just play. Pretending is imagined possibility. Pretending, or acting, is a very valuable life skill and we all do it.”

• “I can assure you that awards have very little bearing on my own personal happiness, my own sense of well-being and purpose in the world. That comes from studying the world, feelingly, with empathy in my work.”

• “No matter what you see me or hear me saying when I’m on your TV, holding a statuette and spewing—that’s acting. Being a celebrity has taught me to hide. But being an actor has opened my soul.”

• “You know, you don’t have to be famous. You just have to make your mother and father proud of you, and you already have.”

As Meryl broke barriers for women of a certain age, she claimed no credit for her achievements. Instead, she gave props to the women in power pulling the strings. At an October 2009 event in Toronto, film critic Johanna Schneller asked whether she was actively choosing projects that were more fun. “I really don’t get a choice; I don’t produce my own movies. So, I’m sort of like the girl at the dance who waits to be asked,” she replied. “I think what you’re referring to is something that only happens now because there are more women in decision-making positions who are able to greenlight movies.” In another interview with the LA Times, she conjured the sad, faintly defeatist image of waiting for the phone to ring.

That said, Nora Ephron didn’t think her movie about Julia Child would have been made without Meryl’s participation. Nora had been in movie jail after directing the early-aughts flops Lucky Numbers, an off-brand black comedy, and a clever but critically savaged remake of Bewitched starring Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell. But Nora’s failures couldn’t erase her legacy as one of the most successful female filmmakers to get behind the camera. She was best known for directing the Tom Hanks–Meg Ryan romantic comedies Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, in addition to writing the sleeper hit When Harry Met Sally, which elevated the love genre to ubiquity during the 1990s and 2000s. Following Bewitched, Nora fired her agent and stepped away from movies to focus on writing plays.

Later, Amy Pascal, cochair at Sony Pictures, recruited super-foodie Nora to direct and adapt Julie Powell’s bestselling memoir Julie & Julia. Remember blogs? Back when blogs were exciting and new, thirty-year-old Powell—a disillusioned office secretary—cooked up the Julie/Julia Project, giving herself one year to re-create all 524 recipes from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Her ambitious efforts paid off. The blog attracted a cult following as well as the attention of a publisher, Little, Brown and Company, culminating in her 2005 ode to the culinary queen. Nora wasn’t sure she could stretch Julie’s story into a two-hour movie, but then Pascal suggested combining Julie’s and Julia’s stories into a parallel structure. That’s brilliant, Nora thought.

Around this time, Meryl ran into Nora at a funeral and asked what she was up to, recalls Julie & Julia producer Larry Mark. Nora’s response: “Funny you should ask.”

Meryl and Amy Adams officially joined the cast in November 2007, one month before going full-on nun to shoot Doubt in New York. They fit the mentor-mentee dynamic perfectly on both films. Amy, thirty-three, was a seasoned actor who considered quitting before her breakthrough role in the 2005 indie drama Junebug. Despite her experience, she projected an everygirl innocence that counterbalanced Meryl’s worldliness. If the two were wines, Amy would be a bubbly prosecco and Meryl a rich, complex cabernet.

Julie & Julia is about women gourmands reinventing themselves. At fifty-one, Julia debuted her groundbreaking cooking show, The French Chef, in 1963. She was an atypical TV star, taller than average with a high-pitched, singsong voice. A human sunbeam, she exuded joie de vivre and popularized excellence in the form of fine cuisine that tickled taste buds over bland American recipes defining mediocrity. Viewers found Julia irresistible, and, thanks to her, roasting a chicken seemed less intimidating. Above all, the movie pays rare tribute to a happy marriage. Paul Child worshipped Julia and watched proudly as her dreams came true.

“What’s liberating about these characters,” mused Meryl, “is that there’s this huge throbbing love between two people who don’t look like our normal package of lovers. It made it more real and intimate because somehow those concerns were thrown away. If you’ve been married for a long time you love without looking. I don’t assess how my husband looks every single day and think, Is he cute enough or whatever? And I sure hope he doesn’t do it to me!”

She suggested Stanley Tucci to play Paul. The two shared history and an easy rapport. They genuinely liked each other. Beyond that, Stanley knew his way around the kitchen, so he would certainly appreciate Julia’s contributions to society. (Yes, I own The Tucci Cookbook. Try the lasagna made with polenta and gorgonzola cheese.)

Meryl called herself a “horrible cook,” but she was her own worst critic. “I made a soufflé and Meryl showed me a better way to separate the eggs,” Carrie Fisher once said. David Frankel remembered her “baking for everyone” on set. For Julia, she mostly learned how to use cooking equipment (“You need a very good pan”) and useful tips such as the best way to remove the smell from your fingers after chopping garlic and onion (“dip your hands in salt and then rinse them in cool water”).

Nora, Meryl, and Tucci.

Nora told Meryl, “You’re not really Julia Child, you’re Julie’s idea of Julia Child.” That insight freed her to harness Julia’s boundless joy rather than do a clinical impersonation. It was the perfect moment for Meryl to honor her late mother, Mary, “who was sort of that person in my life,” she said. “She was someone who turned the lights on when she came into a room. I have a much more reserved side. But I’ve always wanted to be more like her, so playing Julia gave me the chance.”

Meryl studied old tapes of the chef before the shoot. Mimicking her mannerisms? Doable. But Julia was six foot two, which Meryl couldn’t fake. Still, she had to be six foot two. The crew used camera angles, risers, and high heels to pull off the optical illusion. She bubbled with giddiness—like Julia, or Mary Wilkinson Streep—en route from her trailer to the set in the morning. “She finds acting this wonderful adventure. It’s never an assignment. It’s never a gig,” says Larry Mark. “In a way, it’s similar to Spielberg. He seems to have this childlike exuberance about directing.”

The critics melted like butter on a very good pan. “By now this actress has exhausted every superlative that exists and to suggest that she has outdone herself is only to say that she’s done it again,” wrote A. O. Scott.

Her performance goes beyond physical imitation, though she has the rounded shoulders and the fluting voice down perfectly. Often when gifted actors impersonate real, familiar people, they overshadow the originals, so that, for example, you can’t think of Ray Charles without seeing Jamie Foxx, or Truman Capote without envisioning Philip Seymour Hoffman. But Ms. Streep’s incarnation of Julia Child has the opposite effect, making the real Julia, who died in 2004, more vivid, more alive, than ever.

Several months after Meryl wrapped Julia, she was in negotiations to topline the romantic comedy It’s Complicated, about a middle-aged divorcée in a love triangle with two suitors. Nancy Meyers, Meryl’s third woman director in two years, wrote the character of Jane Adler for Meryl. “Even though I’d never met her, I never thought of anybody else, and when I would think about her in the part it made me more brave as a writer, because I could imagine her doing these things. It would really push me into a great place,” recalled Meyers, who wrote and directed the upscale dreams The Holiday and Something’s Gotta Give, the latter pairing Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton to the tune of $125 million.

Honestly, it seemed as if Meyers spent her entire production budgets on luxurious locations and home decor for rich white ladies, from a drool-worthy Hamptons beach escape in Something’s Gotta Give to Jane’s serene Santa Barbara sanctuary (actual venue: upstate New York). It’s a wonder she didn’t cast Ina “Barefoot Contessa” Garten and her lucky devil of a spouse, Jeffrey. Instead she turned to Meryl, who responded well to the screenplay. (According to the LA Times, she was now commanding a salary in the ballpark of $7 to $8 million.) With the most important asset in place, Meyers installed Alec Baldwin as Jane’s swaggering ex-husband, Jake, who tries to win her back, and Steve Martin as Adam, the gallant architect remodeling her cozy kitchen. Jane, a successful baker, is a fantasy woman not unlike the Food Network’s Garten: if you crack her inner circle, she’ll serve you an open-faced croque monsieur at midnight while wearing an elegant blouse in a tasteful neutral color. More importantly, she knew how to let loose. Meryl’s best scenes are her sexiest: flirting it up with Alec at a fancy hotel bar or dissolving into hysterics while she and Steve smoke pot on a date.

Through Meyers’s lens, Meryl shattered the sexless, grandmotherly image that long defined women of a certain age in the movies. Jake left Jane, with whom he had three children, to remarry the much-younger Agness, a stern, judgmental marketing executive played by an amusingly brittle Lake Bell, not yet thirty. On Lake’s first day reporting to It’s Complicated, she was to film the party scene where Agness gets wise to Jake’s unresolved feelings for Jane, at whom he gazes adoringly while she’s high as a kite and having the time of her life with Adam. Why did he ever leave this lovely creature?

Meanwhile, Agness brings down the vibe. “I didn’t get it together,” Lake recalls. “I was, like, way too excited. I was just like amateur hour shenanigans. Just all over the place. So Nancy had to pull me aside and be like, ‘What’s going on?’ And she’s like, ‘Yeah, so get it together and stop wooing, fawning over them all.’” Finally, she affected Agness’s bored demeanor in a way that puts Jane’s warmth in movingly bold relief. For Jake, it’s too little too late. He blew it. Karma is a bespectacled architect.

Lake found Meryl disarmingly kind, and that was intimidating in its own way. She witnessed Meryl going off-book to improvise weed euphoria, which made her feel comfortable riffing during rehearsals. The script supervisor warned Lake not to try improvising dialogue (a no-no on a Nancy Meyers movie), to which Lake responded that she was following Meryl’s lead. Script supervisor: I’ll give Meryl a note. Lake: No. Fine. She wasn’t improvising. It’s fine. Inside her head, Lake panicked: “Oh my God, I accidentally just told on Meryl.”

It’s Complicated, which cost $85 million to make, premiered on Christmas 2009, grossing $113 million over fourteen weeks. The summer before, Julie & Julia, made for $40 million, accumulated $94 million in domestic ticket sales during roughly the same length of time. While Avatar reigned supreme ($749 million), Meryl offered a grounding alternative to James Cameron’s 3-D sci-fi epic, which featured her Yale classmate Sigourney Weaver. When the Oscars rolled around in March 2010, Meryl snagged her sixteenth nomination (for Julia), losing Best Actress to The Blind Side dynamo Sandra Bullock. “I’m just really happy to be here. I am,” she said on the red carpet, looking the best she’s ever looked in a low-cut ivory Chris March gown. Meryl’s plus-one: brother Harry.

Later that night, she partied at the Governors Ball with Harry and her agent, CAA’s Kevin Huvane. Surprising a CNN reporter, she actually stopped for an on-camera interview. She was feeling good. She burst into a rendition of “Sixteen Candles” (the number of her Academy Award nods). “That’s how much I had to drink,” she joked. In response to a question about being “simply the best,” she laughed, saying, “I don’t think there is such a thing as the best. I really don’t. I didn’t think there was such a thing in high school because the Most Likely to Succeed wasn’t me.”

In the ensuing months, news leaked to the press that Sony had picked up a mother-daughter comedy called Mommy & Me, costarring Meryl and Tina Fey. Stanley Tucci was to direct. Then word broke that Meryl was attached to star alongside Bullock and Oprah in another comedy, this one staged behind the scenes at a home-shopping cable channel. These movies never got past the development process. Meryl’s next film, The Iron Lady, had been fast-tracked. It was most definitely not a comedy. She would go incognito as Margaret Thatcher, the controversial former prime minister of the United Kingdom. Love her or loathe her, Thatcher wasn’t afraid to be hated.