CHAPTER 19

Meryl the Superhero

My decision stands, and I’m going to bed.—Katharine Graham

(The Post, 2017)

Long ago, in the January 1980 edition of Cue magazine, Meryl confessed, “Usually I think I can play anything. I have great faith in myself. If I felt that I wanted to go sing Norma at the Met my friends might say, ‘No, no. Not for you.’”

She was referring to Vincenzo Bellini’s 1831 opera, sung many times by Maria Callas post–World War II. It had been decades since Meryl took singing lessons with Estelle Liebling before deciding opera wasn’t her thing. But she clearly respected the endangered art form and the talented artists, such as Callas, who mastered it. She also admired the chutzpah of Florence Foster Jenkins, the wealthy New York socialite whose unlikely foray into soprano divadom turned her into a laughingstock.

“People may say I can’t sing, but no one can ever say I didn’t sing,” Florence declared of her critics. By popular demand, the seventy-six-year-old, who performed privately for decades, gave her first public concert at Carnegie Hall on October 25, 1944. The next morning, she opened newspapers to find blistering, ego-bruising reviews. The New York Post dubbed the performance “one of the weirdest mass jokes New York has ever seen.” Five days later, Florence suffered a heart attack. She held on for a month. Though an LA Times obituary claimed she died of a broken heart, Stephen Temperley, whose play about Florence’s life debuted on Broadway in 2005, argued that “she may have been shocked but I daresay had she lived she would’ve got over it.”

A prestige biopic of the chanteuse—who cornered the “so bad it’s good” market well before the cult crowd-pleaser The Room sold out midnight screenings—proved catnip to Meryl. Also onboard: director Stephen Frears (The Queen) and Hugh Grant as Florence’s dapper partner, St. Clair Bayfield. The shoot was set to begin May 2015 in London.

Ignoring Meryl’s Walt dis, Disney chose to prominently feature the vindictive Witch, not Johnny Depp’s pervy Wolf, on the promotional poster for Into the Woods. The dark, twisted musical, which cleverly deconstructs Brothers Grimm fairy tales, wrangled $128 million in North America and rave reviews for Meryl. “Streep is quite wonderful, delivering something far richer than her karaoke turn in the clunky Mamma Mia!… She reinvents this role from scratch, bringing powerful vocals, mischievous comedic instincts, bold physicality and raw feeling to the Witch,” wrote the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney in a backhanded compliment. Right on cue, she earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination, competing against Patricia Arquette (Boyhood), Emma Stone (Birdman), Keira Knightley (The Imitation Game) and Laura Dern (Wild).

And the winner was… Arquette, the no-nonsense single mom and unsung hero in Richard Linklater’s coming-of-age drama. I’ll never forget her speech on February 22, 2015. It was the beginning of something, even if Arquette chose her words poorly. After thanking colleagues and family, Arquette closed with a rousing declaration: “To every woman who gave birth to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights, it’s our time to have wage equality once and for all, and equal rights for women in the United States of America.” Arquette brought significant attention to gender inequality and the wage gap, although she undercut her message by overlooking the fact that gay people and people of color also battle pay discrimination. The camera panned to Meryl as she cheered from the audience. Her spirited reaction produced an instant classic go-to GIF to signify approval on Twitter threads.

Feminism was in the air, infiltrating actresses’ awards-show speeches in a bold, new way. A major studio actually decided to take Suffragette mainstream. Outrage brewed after hackers leaked Sony Pictures’ emails in December 2014, revealing that Jennifer Lawrence, a megastar, was making less money on American Hustle than male costars including Jeremy Renner.

On April 15, 2015, Hillary Clinton announced she was running for president. Her supporters were emboldened. If Hillary cracked the highest glass ceiling and wound up making history as the first woman to occupy the Oval Office, then women wouldn’t have to put up with bullshit anymore. On that note, a week after Hillary’s announcement, an anonymous Tumblr page, Shit People Say to Women Directors, landed online, sharing horror stories of Hollywood misogyny. “There was a cultural ennui where everyone was so used to the status quo that the notion of questioning it seemed almost, if I may say, unnecessary,” Cathy Schulman, president emerita of Women in Film Los Angeles, told me at the time. “And there was this kind of… acceptance of this unusual lack of parity given that we’re living in the year 2015.”

Meryl had been raising her voice since 1990. Now she was putting her anger into action. On April 19, news spread that she had funded an annual four-day script development lab for women screenwriters over forty in partnership with New York Women in Film and Television. The first year, established woman writers, directors, and producers descended upon a rustic upstate New York retreat to mentor a small group of winning applicants. Meryl laid low, careful not to disrupt the newbies, but her presence was felt.

Once more, she flew to Great Britain on location—this time inhabiting a shameless heiress with an unlimited supply of outrageous costumes and ornate tiaras. The Florence Foster Jenkins crew used Liverpool’s stately Drury Lane to replicate 1940s Central Park West. As for mimicking the off-key Florence, Meryl worked with a voice coach; she butchered “Queen of the Night” in multiple takes, at Frears’s request. “It was way, way more fun, but it was more terrifying,” said Meryl, who originally thought she would lip-sync to her own terrible recordings. “That made us very alive because it changed each time.”

Donald Trump, a former reality TV host with a history of appalling behavior toward women, would have bullied Florence to death. He entered the presidential race June 16, eventually becoming the Republican nominee. His dark, divisive campaign broke norms. With unhinged glee, Trump maliciously attacked immigrants, journalists, and war hero John McCain, among countless other targets. Of GOP candidate Carly Fiorina, he said, “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?!”

Trump’s goal was to strengthen his power by sowing discord. At rallies, his racism encouraged white supremacists to spew hatred and threaten violence toward the Other. He led them in chants of “Lock Her Up,” “Build That Wall,” and “All Lives Matter.” What a clown. But what did you expect from the racist who spread a hoax about President Obama’s birth certificate?

Thank goodness Hillary was going to win. Soon, Trump would retire to Mar-a-Lago, and things could go back to normal. For now, Meryl was stumping for Hillary at the Democratic National Convention.

“What does it take to be the first female anything?” she declared, wearing a flag-print dress to deliver her July 26 speech. “It takes grit and it takes grace.… Hillary Clinton has taken some fire over 40 years of her fight for families and children. How does she do it? That’s what I want to know.”

As Mamie and Grace clapped from the stands, Meryl predicted that Hillary “will be our first woman president! And she will be a great president!”

The next month, Paramount—aiming to position both Meryl and Florence for Oscars—released the movie stateside, echoing the Julie & Julia strategy: arrive early to the crowded awards-circuit party, drop the mic, and build an aura of inevitability around Meryl’s nomination. “I hope the movie does some decent business, because it’s a nice movie, with some great performances and a resonant chord of melancholy running throughout,” wrote Vanity Fair critic Richard Lawson, noting its lackluster sales in the UK and France. “It’s yet another of Streep’s increasingly same-y grande dame roles, sure, but she plays this one a little more subtly than she did, say, Margaret Thatcher.”

In a flashback to the 1980s, Meryl’s serial disguises had begun to irritate movie critics who wanted to see the master technician tone down the flamboyance and get real. Florence, argued Sheri Linden in the Hollywood Reporter, is “a signed, sealed and delivered tribute that doesn’t want to dig too deep or give much room to character aspects that are unflattering or disturbing. It’s Streep’s dexterity that lets in the shadows and light. There’s something both touching and freeing in watching a performer known for her technical rigor hit the wrong notes with such gusto. Her ability to convey self-importance, vulnerability, yearning, and delusion in a single tortured melody is exhilarating. It makes you wish she’d bring that fluency to something in a minor or more intimate key, a story that strips away the bells and whistles.”

Florence bowed October 27 after two months and $27 million. Twelve days later, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States.

Oh, shit.

Steven Spielberg felt a sense of urgency. The filmmaker had been immersed in preproduction on a passion project, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, but put it on hold after blowing through a thrilling script written by Liz Hannah about Washington Post publisher Katharine “Kay” Graham’s brave decision to defy President Richard Nixon. In 1971, Graham risked the newspaper’s future when she went against the grain and published the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret government study on the hugely unpopular Vietnam War. Whistleblowing military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked the classified documents to the New York Times, which reported excerpts from the study. The president fired back with a court order. Ben Bradlee, the Post’s swashbuckling editor, lobbied Graham to pick up where the Times left off. After hesitating, she finally pushed the button, instigating other media to follow her lead.

“There was an undeniable relevance to what happened in 1971 with the Nixon administration trying to stop the free press from printing a story which was not flattering to him or his administration, and all the obvious parallels with today,” Spielberg recalled. On March 3, 2017, he called Amy Pascal, who was producing The Post, and said he wanted to direct it immediately with Meryl as Graham and Tom Hanks as Bradlee. By May 30, Spielberg—gathering the troops and going to war against the Trump administration—had begun principal photography in New York. He had never assembled a movie faster.

Meryl and Tom earned equal paychecks, according to Spielberg. The director didn’t know Meryl well, although the two were close to Carrie Fisher. Like Tom, Meryl had a strong moral center that filtered through the characters she played on screen. She was not afraid to criticize the president-elect in front of millions of viewers at January’s Golden Globes, two weeks before Trump’s apocalyptic inauguration ceremony where he vowed, chillingly, to end “American carnage.” While accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award, she admonished Trump for mocking disabled reporter Serge Kovaleski on the campaign trail and invited people to join her in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists.

“This instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing,” she warned. “Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.”

In closing, she referenced Carrie: “As my friend, the dear departed Princess Leia, said to me once, take your broken heart, make it into art.”

The room burst into applause. Conservative pundits watching remotely seized the opportunity to smear a truth-telling actor as another out-of-touch Hollywood liberal whose politics further antagonize Trump’s followers. Inevitably, the thin-skinned Trump lashed out on Twitter. “Meryl Streep, one of the most overrated actresses in Hollywood, doesn’t know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes. She is a Hillary flunky who lost big,” he tweeted, denying he had ridiculed Kovaleski.

But of course he had. Kovaleski has arthrogryposis, impairing the movement of his arms. He happened to write a story Trump didn’t like, which made him a target. “You’ve got to see this guy,” Trump told supporters at a South Carolina rally, shaking his arms in an impression of the journalist.

Meryl’s fans and allies rallied to her defense. According to documentarian Ken Burns, she “said if she ended up in the East River I would know whodunit. But they’re too scared of her to do anything, especially when she reminds us constantly when the emperors of the world have no clothes.” Jimmy Kimmel, hosting the 2017 Academy Awards, joked, “From her mediocre early work in The Deer Hunter and Out of Africa, to her underwhelming performances in Kramer vs. Kramer and Sophie’s Choice, Meryl Streep has phoned it in for more than 50 films over the course of her lackluster career. This is Meryl’s 20th Oscar nomination, made even more amazing considering the fact that she wasn’t even in a movie this year—we just wrote her name down out of habit.”

On October 5, 2017, the New York Times published damning reports of sexual harassment against Harvey Weinstein, expanding the #MeToo movement founded by activist Tarana Burke in 2006. For decades, Harvey, an aggressive dealmaker and Oscar campaigner, had leveraged his power to harass and abuse women, including the actresses who starred in his films. Gwyneth Paltrow was twenty-two years old when he appointed her to star in the Miramax adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma, an exciting role that would lead to an Academy Award nomination. She told the Times that, before filming began, Weinstein requested she visit his hotel room at the Peninsula Beverly Hills, where he placed his hands on her and proposed they go into the bedroom for massages. She declined. After Paltrow’s then-boyfriend, Brad Pitt, had words with Weinstein, telling the producer, “If you ever make her feel uncomfortable again, I’ll kill you,” Weinstein warned Paltrow to keep quiet about his advances. “I was a kid, I was signed up, I was petrified,” she later said, recalling, “I thought he was going to fire me.”

Meryl, seemingly sheltered by her own power, said she had no idea this was happening. “I don’t know where Harvey lives, nor has he ever been to my home,” she stated that December, defending herself from accusations of complicity. “I have never in my life been invited to his hotel room.” She’d been to his office just one time to meet with Wes Craven about Music of the Heart in 1998. Abusers like Weinstein are adept at lying and covering their tracks; that includes hiding behavior from a respected icon such as Meryl. “I don’t think she’d have stood for it,” says Carl Franklin, her One True Thing director. “She’s been fighting the fight for a long time.”

What does it take to be the first female anything? It takes grit and it takes grace. Kay Graham’s husband, Philip, inherited the Post from her father. After Philip’s suicide, the Washington socialite took over the company in 1963, becoming the first woman publisher of a prominent American newspaper. She confronted sexism and her own self-doubt and insecurities to preside over a journalistic golden age that peaked in the Post’s hard-nosed coverage of the Watergate scandal that brought down Nixon.

It was Graham’s handling of the Pentagon Papers that marked a major turning point in her life and career. It showed the world, and Graham herself, that she had what it took to lead. Meryl honored her memory with a subtle, nuanced performance that effectively portrayed the interior life of a woman learning to feel comfortable with her power. It’s a struggle to which many women can relate. Spielberg and Tom, newly minted members of the elite, humbling “I’ve worked with Meryl club,” marveled at her wizardry, as did critics catching early screenings of The Post, which Spielberg, a magician in his own right, managed to turn around for a December release. On the Internet, the extraordinary caftan that Meryl wore in the movie—costume designer Ann Roth sourced the shimmering gold fabric in New Jersey—ignited a torrent of tributes online.

Like almost everything she did, The Post was a manifestation of Meryl’s civic duty. That included skewering ignorant fools. On June 6, 2016, David Hare, who wrote Plenty and The Hours, witnessed his favorite Meryl characterization in recent years at a Public Theater gala in Central Park. She emerged onstage looking grotesque in an ill-fitting suit with loads of padding underneath and orange makeup smeared across her face to sing “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” from Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate, with Christine Baranski. In the classic musical, the song is a duet between gangsters bragging about how quoting the Bard works wonders on women. Sample lyric: “If she says your behavior is heinous / kick her right in the Coriolanus / Brush up your Shakespeare / And they’ll all kow-tow.”

“It was authentic genius, which made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck,” Hare recalls. “I wish Brecht could have been present because she was doing exactly what he wanted from an actor—she was both totally inside the part, inside the ridiculous idea of Trump singing Cole Porter, but at the same time standing beside her own performance, and commenting on it, as if to say ‘Isn’t this the stupidest thing you ever saw in your life?’ It was anarchy incarnate, but under the tightest possible technical control—like seeing Laurence Olivier play Archie Rice.”

Meryl treated theater as a sacred playground to experiment and entertain, give voice to the voiceless, and lampoon depraved would-be tyrants. This time, she went for laughs, missing the preshow dinner to get ready backstage, where she pinned her own hair into a golden bouffant. She was born to be bold. She was born to be brave. She was born to be a light in the darkness.