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MOTHER MERYL
Magazine / Source: The Boston Globe, December 1996 |
Boldly, Meryl Streep hoists her feet onto the coffee table's edge. "Only
because it's not my living room," she says wryly, looking around her in case
there are stray children hiding under the couch. She's in Connecticut Mom mode,
this great Hollywood actress, and with her smart green blazer, pearl necklace
and sensible haircut, she does look like she's en route to a PTA gathering. Yes,
I'll say it: Today, in a hotel beside the Colorado River, Meryl Streep could be
an out-and-out Soccer Mom, preoccupied, minivan with kids waiting outside, an
undone load of laundry with her name on it at home. No Hollywood glamour items
on the list of errands.
Surprised? What does one expect of Meryl Streep, anyway? Since 1977, with her
debut in "Julia," public images of the actress have come from her movie roles,
and not through the celebrity and tabloid presses. It's easier to imagine Streep
as the fragile Sophie of "Sophie's Choice," or the brittle Lindy Chamberlain of
"A Cry in the Dark," than to imagine Streep as Streep, Mrs. Don Gummer as she
sometimes calls herself. "I don't go anywhere," she says half apologetically.
"You have to go to openings and be on E! entertainment, and I've never enjoyed
doing that. I don't even go to openings of my friends' movies, even though it's
supportive and lovely to do. It poses a problem marketing a movie, because they
want you out and about. So it's always a tug, it's always a battle with the
guilt-making machinery."
This month, Streep is conceding to the "guilt-making machinery" to promote
"Marvin's Room," a comic-dramatic piece about family estrangement and illness,
with Diane Keaton, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. The film, now playing
in New York and other markets and opening in Boston on Jan. 10, is a reminder of
Streep's rededication to serious acting after an awkward light period that began
with "She-Devil" in 1989 and culminated with the thriller "The River Wild" in
1994. She dislikes interviews - "I always feel like, who am I to pontificate,
barking on and on?" - but she has flown to Texas, leaving her four children at
their 89-acre estate in northwest Connecticut, to meet the press and bark. "My
problem as a stressed-out '90s mother and career person is that I don't have
time to think about what I think about," she says. "I operate by the seat of my
pants.
"And at home, my kids don't want to know what I think of anything! Certainly
not what I think of 'The State of the Movies,' or 'Women in Film.' " Streep adds
an exaggerated highfalutin tone to her last two phrases.
If there is an expectation of Meryl Streep the person, it is perhaps that she
'll be distant, professional, maybe even highfalutin. That she will be
"Streepian," the adjective invented to connote overly controlled technical
brilliance. After all, she's famous for creating "perfect" characters with
"flawless" accents in "quality" movies, and former New Yorker critic Pauline
Kael once called her "rather glacial." But in person, Streep is given to
punctuating her ideas with playful moments and gentle mimickry. Pouring herself
a glass of seltzer, which sits an inch from the tape recorder, Streep wonders
just how one would transcribe the sound of fizz. "Would it be blublublublub?"
she asks, making a noise remarkably similar to tiny bubbles. "And how is it
spelled? LB-LB-LB?"
During the course of the day, Streep repeatedly returns to the subject of her
role as mother. "I sacrifice for family, endlessly," she says. "Every single
decision I make about what material I do, what I'm putting out in the world, is
because of my children."
Despite her huge professional success, she says, she has always visualized
herself as a mother first. "I was never the kind of person who said, 'I'm going
to be an actress. And if I meet somebody and have a family, great.' I always,
always, since I was a little girl, wanted to have kids and a family. I just had
to wait 30 years to find somebody I liked enough." She found Don Gummer, a
sculptor, whom she married in 1978.
When choosing roles, she accepts those that enable her to be near her
children - Henry, 17, Mary Willa, 13, Grace, 10, and Louisa, 5. "How often do
you imagine I'm home? I'm home aaaaa-lot! I don't go on location anymore." For
"Marvin's Room," which filmed in Manhattan, she took a daily helicopter from
Connecticut. "I got very pissy at the end of the day," she says, "if people
weren't hustling their butts to finish their work so I could get in the
helicopter." De Niro, it turns out, was an offender. "Marvin's Room" is Streep's
third movie with De Niro, after "The Deer Hunter" and "Falling in Love." "Each
time, I learned from him," she says. "This time - he always does so many takes
and you think, 'C'mon, Bob, God. I was done on take 5, and I'm ready to go home.
' But he's dogged and just never satisfied." Affectionately, she imitates De
Niro's mumble: "Maybe I'll just do one more, OK?"
Streep says motherhood determines not only where but what she'll act. She's
acutely conscious of the effects of pop culture on children. "I don't have a
cynical point of view on the movie business," she says. "I feel that everything
signifies. Everything counts that we put out in my business. It all leaves an
imprint on kids who are way too young to be looking at the crap - the stuff -
that's out there. . . . Do I want them to page through Vogue and see the Nan
Goldin models and the heroin look? Or the Calvin Klein downtown porn thing? Is
that cool? That's not cool to me, I don't like it. . . .
"There are great roles for young women in films, but usually they are hookers
who get sodomized. And my kids want to see the thing that they perceive as tough
and edgy because edgy is the adjective of the day. All it means to me is
depressing. And as a parent you don't want to see your kids go to that. You want
them to embrace life and see the possibilities and the optimism. You just do."
She laughs. "I'm getting very much to be a curmudgeon in my old age! I'm mad
about everything!"
The two female leads in "Marvin's Room," which is based on a 1991 play by the
late Scott McPherson, are both juicy, and quite different. Selfless Bessie has
stayed at home in Florida to care for her aunt and her near-comatose father. The
younger Lee, a beautician, moved to Ohio to escape the suffering. Now that
Bessie has leukemia, Lee returns to Florida with her two sons to donate bone
marrow and reignite old battles. Streep initially signed on to play Bessie, but
changed to Lee as the project, which was produced by De Niro, got closer to
filming. "I had my choice, because" - she adopts a "na-na" tone - "I'm friends
with Bob."
Streep says she chose to play the less sympathetic sister because she's more
like Bessie: a caretaker. She has been reading "Born to Rebel" by Frank J.
Sulloway, which defines people in terms of birth order, and says her personality
was shaped by having two younger brothers. "Being the oldest, and being the only
girl, has defined a lot for me. I see it in my son, who is the oldest and has
three little sisters. They're allowed to be wild, and he's very responsible." In
the late 1970s, Streep's caretaking impulses became public when her boyfriend,
actor John Cazale, known as Fredo in "The Godfather," had cancer for two years
before he died. "It isn't so much that that drew me to the material. . . . I
wanted to be the person who ran away, because in my life I'm the person who
cares and fills all those spaces. I just wanted to do that other fantasy of
going the other way, I'm outta here."
She conditioned her participation in "Marvin's Room" on the casting of
Keaton, she says. "If I gave up this gorgeous part, I wanted it to be somebody
great. . . . And I wanted somebody I could feel like sisters with, because I
never had a sister. So I picked my sister." The reason Streep is conducting
interviews in Texas is to reunite with Keaton, who is here filming "Tennessee
Valley" with Sam Shepard. While Keaton and Streep were ships in the night on
Woody Allen's "Manhattan," they worked together intensively on "Marvin's Room,"
fleshing out their thorny sisterhood.
Keaton says she developed "kind of a crush" on Streep during the filming of
"Marvin's Room." "When you look in Meryl's face, you get lost in her eyes," she
says. "You get lost in her. And that's a great thing. I find her beautiful, and
I'm constantly looking at her."
One quality that distinguishes Streep's body of work is her willingness to
play flawed women like Lee in "Marvin's Room." She tends to choose characters
who are troubled in a complex way - preoccupied with their needs ("Kramer vs.
Kramer"), manipulative ("The French Lieutenant's Woman"), tragically romantic (
"Plenty"). She's willing to go there, as they say, while other actresses might
prefer more morally simplistic parts. Is acting ever so painful she can't do a
scene? "It's never that you can't. You don't want to. If you hit that wall, you
have to go into your room and say, 'Come on, this is why you're here, you've
gotta go to that place.' "
Although she's labeled as an actress in complete command of her performances,
she says her method involves complete abandonment. "It's not a question of
forcing anything, ever. It's a question of letting go. With the great ones I've
worked with, it's always a question of letting everything go, all the other
concerns, letting go of these people who are watching us right here, this wire,
letting go of everything except what you want in the scene." One of Streep's
makeup men once said, "There's no glycerin with Meryl. When she cries, she
cries."
Streep's immersion in dramatic acting, which led to a number of indelible
performances in the 1980s, notably in "Sophie's Choice," "Silkwood" and
"Ironweed," may also have felt claustrophobic. She began experimenting with
comedy in 1989 with "She-Devil," and followed that with "Postcards from the
Edge," "Defending Your Life" and "Death Becomes Her." The critics accused her of
dumbing down to broaden her audience appeal. "In my opinion," Streep says, "
'Death Becomes Her' and 'She-Devil' were failed attempts. They weren't dark
enough. But they both came out of the same impetus behind 'First Wives Club.' It
wasn't just, 'Oh, she's shifting gears to be more commercial,' which is thetake.
. . .
"Anyway, I think I'm funny, even in my tragic movies. So that's the only
thing to do, is to try to weasel it in wherever you go."
It was around the time she was making comedies that Streep moved her family
to Los Angeles, buying a house in Brentwood. It was a practical move, she says,
since she was filming there and wanted her kids to have stability. But after
five years the family returned to Connecticut. "I feel like I live where I live,
I'm very connected to certain vistas, and I need that," she says. "I need the
pond and the Appalachian Trail and certain things that are immutable.
"And I'm not aware of being 'Meryl Streep' there. In LA, I was 'Meryl Streep'
all the time. It's so driven by the industry, and how you look. There was always
the feeling that I should clean up before dropping the kids off. People would
look at me, and I'd realize I looked like hell and probably wouldn't get work
next time, so I better clean up, better work out, better get that blackhead
removed. I couldn't deal with it."
She continues to have trouble with Hollywood, in terms of its wham-bam
marketing approach to intelligent adult (read: Meryl Streep) movies. "I can't
get to every movie that opens each weekend. Sd also the movie industry is
content to lose an enormous audience, they're content to lose them."
When she's lucky enough to visit a movie theater in Connecticut, she often
goes unnoticed. "Usually it's winter there, so you can do a lot with mufflers. I
go in with my disguise, my entourage of kids."
She has led a charmed acting life. After graduating from Vassar, she won a
scholarship to Yale Drama School, where she attracted the attention of New York
producers. After Yale, she landed at the New York Shakespeare Festival, and by
1977 she had a role in the movie "Julia." A year later she was featured in "The
Deer Hunter," which brought her her first Oscar nomination, and in TV's
"Holocaust," which brought her an Emmy. She then embarked on a series of
prestigious movies that made her the most desirable actress of the 1980s. All
told, she's been nominated for 10 Oscars, and won twice, for "Kramer vs. Kramer"
and "Sophie's Choice."
What could possibly motivate Streep as she enters her third decade in the
movies? She sits back, and pauses for a long moment. "I look for the thing that
I got from it from the beginning. Because that's the thing that intoxicates me.
It's what you get when you come upon a phrase in a poem that just goes through
you. How to describe that is really hard. It's some recognition of the truth of
life in that phrase or in that image or in that encounter. You feel it in
pivotal moments in your life: when someone is born, when you fall in love, when
someone dies, when someone tells a great joke and you haven't laughed in a week
and you just howl. The top flies off of your head. That's what you look for. And
that's what happens in acting all the time, in moments. Surrounding that is a
lot of police work, a lot of walking the beat and drudgery, but every once in a
while, your adrenaline goes up. That's the addictive thing.
"The experience of the psuedo-life that is acting is something that I'm
really attracted to. Partly because it's so absurd! It's the exercise of
something that doesn't really matter in anybody's life. You can't, in a
cause-and-effect way, point at where this is going to change someone's life. And
yet, things do change people's lives. Certain films, certain music, certain
books. And I know how I need that in my life, beyond the meat and potatoes of
life and keeping everyody healthy and getting outside a lot, and all those
things of living which are great.
"I need the other dimension, that people deliver to you, that artists deliver
to you."
Copyright 1994 Globe Newspaper Company
Many thanks to Gaelle for submitting this article
