|
MERYL'S ROOM (INTERVIEW)
Magazine / Source: Mr. Showbiz, February 1997 |
Raising her children is more important than acting to
Meryl Streep--not that her career has suffered for it
IT isn't easy getting Meryl Streep on the phone. No, the ten-time Academy Award nominee (and two-time Oscar-winner) isn't on location in Africa or Australia. She's at home in Connecticut, and her four kids--all on Christmas vacation--are keeping her busier than any movie could. The role of devoted mother is the one that Streep finds most rewarding these days, so it's little wonder that she plays it convincingly in the TV movie . . . first do no harm, which airs Sunday, February 16, on ABC. Streep also executive-produced the drama, which marks her first appearance on the small screen since 1978's mini-series Holocaust.
In . . . first do no harm, Streep plays a defiant mother who challenges medical experts on the treatment of her severely epileptic child. The story is based on the experiences of a woman named Lori Reimuller, but it made it to TV because Streep's former neighbor, filmmaker Jim Abrahams (Airplane!, Naked Gun), had a son who suffered from the same condition and underwent the same treatment. Abrahams produced and directed . . . first do no harm, and he is a strong champion of the controversial ketogenic diet for epileptics.
When Mr. Showbiz finally caught up with Streep (she had to reschedule a couple of times) on a Saturday afternoon in January, it was obvious that she was at the eye of a maelstrom of young lives. Nevertheless, she maintained her good humor, and spoke articulately about epilepsy, her career, her Marvin's Room co-stars Robert De Niro and Diane Keaton, and her chaotic life as a working mother.
Mr. Showbiz: I'm glad we finally got to talk!
Meryl Streep: I had sort of a mini-breakdown last night. I took the girls to see One Fine Day, and the whole first hour is my life. My kids said, "Mom, you're groaning. You're breathing so hard." It was everything in that movie--not being able to meet every single thing I'm supposed to do, all the obligations.
You have to juggle a lot. I don't know how you do it.
Not very well, apparently. I also think I had [Christmas] holiday meltdown or something. I've been incapable of meeting any obligations for the past two weeks.
A lot of people are surprised to see you doing a TV movie. What drew you to . . . first do no harm?
I knew Jim Abrahams, his wife, and their family when we were living in California for a little while. I made three movies out there, and our kids were in school together. And their son, Charlie, developed epilepsy in his first year. I watched them negotiate the labyrinth of care for him, and I was witness to their frustrations and their anguish. They got swept into this whirlpool.
Charlie was not doing well at the end of the second year. They had access to all the best medical advice, the best conventional wisdom; and it was on the eve of brain surgery for him that Jim discovered the ketogenic diet in the library--very similar to what happened to this family [in the TV movie]. They flew to Johns Hopkins, which was the last place on earth that was still administering the diet.
Charlie didn't have the brain surgery?
No. He was having ninety seizures a day and was medicated, wearing a football helmet all the time because he had no motor control. So they went to Johns Hopkins, and what happened was just absolutely a miracle and dramatic and ultimately infuriating because the information about this diet exists. Most doctors know about it--but it's not something that's emphasized in medical education, in doctors' training--and it's debunked. He went from ninety seizures a day to none. And he's been free of seizures for, I guess, up to the present.
Jim sort of put his career on hold and started a foundation to get information about the diet out to the major pediatric neurological centers around the country. People started writing to him and then Dateline picked it up. So through that network of parents, who were just eating this information like starving people, he found this family whose story he dramatized. This is about a family who doesn't have access to all the best medical people on both coasts and in between--sort of at the other end of the economic scale, people at the mercy of the health-care system.
Is the diet special kinds of foods, or a combination of foods? Is it hard to get?
It's a lot of fat, meat, selected carbohydrates. So it's high in protein and fat. It has something to do with the body going into ketosis, which is like the fasting state. When they put children on this, they fast for two to five days. They don't feed them anything, and very often these kids are slight and frail to begin with. So that's kind of the hardest part. Then, when the body is more receptive, they slowly introduce certain foods, and the effects were dramatic in this case.
It was just shocking that it wasn't immediately presented to the family as an alternative, because there's a lot of talk now about complementary medicine and how it can be incorporated into the legitimate gains of twentieth-century medical technology.
But it doesn't work for everyone. With a third of the kids, their seizures completely go away. With another third, they're dramatically reduced. And for one-third of the kids, the diet has no effect at all on their seizures. But two-thirds are pretty good odds.
The diet can be used in adults, too?
Absolutely. Our movie is full of ketogenic success stories. A lot of the faces you see on-screen--there's a woman who did it in the twenties who's a grandmother now and has no seizures. They've known about it for a long time.
You're executive producer. So you were in it right from the beginning?
Right from the beginning, and there was a lot of talk about making a feature, but we all thought that it would be better if it was seen by a lot of people [laughs]; and you can't count on that in this movie climate. So we took it to TV. It's the populist medium, where we get out what we're trying to say to the most people.
How do you relate to the character you play? The production notes call her "fiercely determined."
Yeah, she's forced to be. But basically she's somebody who is going along in her life, the way we all do, happily, and then reality flips--and that's when you find the measure of your character, in adversity: what happens when it all goes bad. So, she's probably somebody who believes in everything that her doctors tell her--and that they are telling her the whole truth and nothing but the truth--but her faith is shaken along this journey. And then she realizes, as we all do, that you're in charge of your own destiny and of your child's health, and that there are a lot of answers out there, but that it's always going to be up to you to sift through them.
I saw you once with a couple of your kids in Santa Monica. You were getting out of a station wagon--
Disheveled.
Just a normal situation--a mother and her children. You have four kids?
Yes. I have four kids and their friends over. Nobody tells you that when you have four kids, you really have eight to ten because everybody has a friend over. And they're all out of school on this endless Christmas vacation. My friend is going to have a party on the sixth, and we're all going to go over and get snockered because--oh, my God!
Do you base your career decisions around your children?
In every way, every way. What a project's about, what it's going to leave in its wake, what it contributes to the world the next day, and the next day and the next day. If I'm proud for them to see it. Where it's shooting, how long, whether it's in another country. There are a lot of things I can't do anymore that I used to do when they were little and I could pick them up and go. They're not as amenable to abandoning all their stuff.
Like traveling to some location?
I'm fascinated that you didn't start acting until college. How did all that talent go unnoticed before that? Did you keep it under wraps? Did you act in high school?
Yes, I acted in high school. I did musicals. That's all they had in my high school, and I acted in college. I was a drama major in college, but I didn't think of it [sighs]--things have changed in the last twenty years. Now everybody wants to be an actor, or lots of kids that are very highly educated do. But back in the olden days, when I was in school, acting didn't seem like a serious thing to do. It seemed self-indulgent.
What did you want to do?
I don't know. Save the world in some way. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I wanted to be an interpreter at the U.N. for years. I had an ear for languages and a facility in that way, but I didn't pursue it. I got into a play in my freshman year and loved it and kept doing that. But then when I graduated from college in l97l, I went off with a backpack to Europe. Those were the days when people did things like that. I didn't feel the need to decide what it was that I was going to be.
When I came back, I worked in a theatre up in Vermont for a year but then got impatient with the level of work and wanted to improve, so I applied to the Yale drama school and got a scholarship and went there for three years. When I got out, I got a job right away and started paying back my student loans--and that's where we are now.
You're all paid back!
All paid back.
How do you keep such sensitivity, vulnerability to turn out the performances you do--against the backdrop of showbiz? It's such a hard business.
Yeah, it's a hard business to be in. [Laughs.] That's why people get out after a certain point. I think it's very hard. Increasing fame isolates you from all your tools. It isolates you from everybody else so that you don't have the same kinds of interactions with people that you used to--inadvertent, sort of spontaneous things, where you learn emotionally how to be.
And that affects your acting.
That affects your acting. I'm sure it does. And you have to be really strong to turn your attention and emotions back to the work. And the business is hard on older women, really ridiculous.
Have you felt that yet?
Oh, of course. Yeah, sure. But that's the way of the world, too, I gather.
I've heard you're shy and shrewd. Is that right?
Shrewd! [Laughs maniacally.] That would be good. No, I wish I were.
Are you shy?
I don't like to get up and talk in front of people. So probably I'm shy about that, but I'm not shy about other things--acting.
It's funny to hear you say you don't like to get up to talk in front of people.
You know, like giving a speech. I don't like to be publicly scrutinized. I don't like to show off in a fancy dress. I don't have the stuff to do that: glamour!
Physically, you do.
It's a weak point. Back on the list of things I wish I could change. My mother says, "Why don't you just enjoy this! Anybody would give their right arm to be at the Academy Awards, and all that stuff!" But I always view it as a little bit of a trial. I like being home.
During the Academy Awards?
Yeah, I do. I love watching the Academy Awards.
Better than being in the audience?
Yes.
How important to you is winning another Oscar?
I feel like I've been very lucky. I've won two of them, and I don't anticipate that I'll ever get another one. [Laughs.] I'm very happy with that. I'm very happy with my life so far.
You don't anticipate getting another Oscar?
No, I don't think, ever.
Why?
They have to spread those around now, in my opinion. I'm sort of like the rerun at the Oscars: "Oh, her again!" [Laughs.]
What's happened to your self-esteem?
My self-esteem is healthy, but I think I have a very accurate assessment of how people feel about all that stuff and that they quite feel that I've been honored enough and that it's time for somebody else. I don't think that demonstrates low self-esteem. I think it demonstrates a keen understanding of how things go.
Marvin's Room is your third film with Robert De Niro--you did The Deer Hunter and Falling in Love together. Is he fun to work with?
Very fun. He's a taskmaster, a perfectionist. He wants to do another take [laughs], just one more. And I have my eye on the clocking, thinking, I've gotta get home because all hell's breaking loose back there. But we meld--we play quite well together.
I understand you didn't want to make Marvin's Room unless Diane Keaton [who has been nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her role] could be in it with you. Was she a friend?
No, I had met her once, but I just always admired her from afar and loved her work. Originally I was going to do what became her part, in the film's first incarnation five years ago. Bob [De Niro] was still producing it then, before Scott Rudin. Anjelica Huston was going to play my part, but we both got cold feet because this would have been the director's first film, and it would be really, really tricky with this material, because it treads a very fine line between pathos and comedy, and I felt it needed somebody more deft.
So it went away for awhile and Scott came in with Bob, and they brought it to Jerry Zaks and came back to me; and I said I'd love to do it, but I don't want to play that part anymore. I want to play the bad sister because I had done a lot of dutiful mothers and good women. I wanted to play the irresponsible one, and I immediately thought of Diane. And now I know I can have a career as a casting person! I felt like her face was just--it's the one I saw in this film. I didn't know that she was lobbying for the part. So we were coming at it from two different points of destiny. I said that I wouldn't do it unless she did it, not even knowing that they gave her a script--or would. And she was trying to get it.
Do you have any desire to be a director?
Not now. I would like to do it some day. But it takes two years and twenty-four hours of the day, and I can't do that now. I think the hardest job in the world, except for president of the U.S. or mayor of New York, is probably being a director, because everybody looks to you for answers. You have to really be on top of your game in every way.
What's a typical day for you?
There isn't such a thing because it just changes all the time, depending on what the demands are. Over the Christmas vacation, it's pretty hectic around here--to keep everybody occupied.
What's your key strength?
Well, it's clearly not organization! I'm not ever able to carry through completely, but I do try! [Laughs.]
Is there anything you'd like to change about yourself?
Yes, I would like to streamline. I'd like to be able to delegate a little bit better in my life, which I don't seem able to do.
Why not?
Because I just want to do it myself! Because then I know where everything is. I can't let go of any area in my life. I also don't use a computer. I handwrite my notes, and it takes longer. My husband says, "You should have four piles. This is a form letter for that, this is another one for something else. Everybody does it." But I just am constitutionally unable to do that. [Laughs.] So as a result, I have an eleven-week-high pile of mail. I get to it, but it takes a long time.
You have an assistant, though.
I have an assistant, but I won't let her do anything. [Laughs.]
What do you do to kick back and relax?
I have yet to find out [Laughs.] My husband and I went away for a week to Puerto Rico. That was fun. I read when I can. But I don't really relax.
What kind of kid were you?
I was the oldest daughter--the only daughter. I have two younger brothers. I was the responsible one, and the one in charge. And I've kept to that profile.
Apparently. You don't like to delegate.
I like to delegate. I just can't do it. I don't know how to do that. Part of it is I don't think it's good to delegate so much--especially anything that relates to your kids. It's not that great to have four different people in charge: "Did you make a dentist appointment? Well, what did he say that last time they took the thing off?" There's just one person who knows what's in the refrigerator. You know what I mean? It's tricky.
What was the roughest time for you?
Oh, I don't know. I can't even say. I've made movies whose shoots have gone less well than others and things that have been tedious, which is death for an actress. I didn't enjoy making Death Becomes Her even though Goldie [Hawn] is a great friend and [Robert] Zemekis is a wonderful filmmaker. It was just tedious and so mechanized; the process was boring and long. I always felt trapped in a situation that I shouldn't have been asked to be in. It felt more like typing than acting.
Were you happy with the end results?
I loved the script and what it was about, but it was the process that I didn't like. A lot of computer-generated images. It was a very mechanical way I had to move, and I had to stand still and wear a blue suit so that my head could be taken off. It was boring.
What about She-Devil?
I liked what it was about--it was based on a spectacular British series--but it didn't come out the way I had hoped. The director, Susan Seidelman, wasn't feeling well during the shoot, and that had an effect on all of us. We were a little adrift.
What's been your favorite role?
I have a bunch of favorites. I really loved playing Francesca in Bridges of Madison County, and I loved doing Postcards From the Edge, partly because it was a friend of mine who wrote it--Carrie Fisher--and it was a great shoot. And I loved making Out of Africa, and I loved the character I played in Ironweed, and A Cry in the Dark and Sophie's Choice. And Silkwood I liked doing.
And Kramer vs. Kramer?
I loved doing that. But we're going back l50 years ago.
Would you like to do another movie, like Postcards, in which you sing?
If it came up. I don't know.
More comedies?
I don't know. I have no prescribed plan. I'm planless.
