Meryl Streep is an icon. She holds the record for the most Academy Award nominations, and
she’s still acting at 72. Add to that her four-decade-long marriage and four loving
kids, and, upon first glance, it may seem like she’s lived the perfect life. Of course,
just because Meryl has enjoyed an awful lot of success in her career doesn’t mean that
things have always gone her way in her personal life. Instead, when Streep’s career was
still taking off, she suffered a terrible loss, which could have easily derailed her
career, as well as her personal life.
In 1978, a young Meryl Streep was on the verge of becoming the most outstanding actor of
her generation. Tragically, she was also about to lose the love of her life.
Michael Schulman, who wrote one of her biographies, said that her life was so wildly eventful
and dramatic at the time. It was instrumental in shaping who she was as a person and an
actor. Meryl Streep found her first true love early
in life. At 27, she was a young woman in the New York theatre world, who met 41-year-old
actor John Cazale when they both landed roles in the New York Shakespeare Festival production.
Their connection was instant. At the time, Cazale was regarded as a rare
talent in demand among the great directors of the era. He was Fredo in The Godfather
and The Godfather Part II. He was only in five movies, all of them would be nominated
for Best Picture, and three would win. “One of the things I loved about the casting
of John Cazale,” said director Sidney Lumet, “was that he had a tremendous sadness about
him. I don’t know where it came from. But my God, it’s there — every shot
of him.” And then there were his unusual looks, so
perfect for the misfits of the 1970s cinema. Streep fell for him instantly. He was equally
knocked out. In looks and manner, he was utterly foreign
to the young Meryl. He wasn’t like anybody she’d ever met, and John was equally smitten.
It was the specificity of him, his sort of humanity and his curiosity about people, his
compassion, that drove her in more than anything. Of the two, Cazale was the famous one, but
they were still starving artists. He would take Streep to dinner in Little Italy, where
restaurant owners, awed to have Fredo in the room, insisted they eat for free.
The romance moved pretty fast, and they were soon living happily together in Cazale’s
Tribeca loft. The lovebirds were the envy of the New York theatre world.
Suddenly he fell ill. He had been feeling bad enough to miss performances. Within days,
they were sitting in the doctor’s office. The diagnosis: terminal lung cancer. It had
spread throughout his body. John fell silent. For a moment, so did Meryl.
But she was never one to give up, and certainly not one to succumb to despair. She looked
up and said, “So, where should we go to dinner?”
Cazale dropped out of his play immediately. Streep was starring in the musical, and her
cast mates saw no sign of her anxiety or grief. “She had a kind of tough love about it,”
actor Christopher Lloyd said. “She didn’t let him malinger.”
A devastated Streep never left his side, becoming a prime example of what love looks like. The
couple tried to keep the severity of his condition between them. Even Cazale’s brother, Stephen,
didn’t realize how bad it was until one day after the three of them had lunch, John
stopped on the sidewalk and spat up blood. Al Pacino took him to radiation treatments,
sitting in the waiting room, hoping it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. Cazale himself insisted
he’d get better, and when he fought to go back to work, Streep took a part she loathed
so that she could be with him. She was just “the girl” in the movie — “essentially
a man’s view of a woman,” Streep said. She’s extremely passive, she’s very quiet,
she’s someone who’s constantly vulnerable. In short, she was everything Streep was not.
But the film was The Deer Hunter, and the filmmakers fought to cast Cazale, even as
the production company insisted he’d be fired. The insurance costs would be outrageous,
and no one wanted to back a film with a terminally ill star.
The director Michael Cimino said later that he was told that unless he got rid of John,
they would shut down the picture. “It was awful. I spent hours on the phone, yelling
and screaming and fighting.” The story Streep would later tell: De Niro
covered Cazale’s insurance costs, which the actor has never confirmed or denied, but
later said, “I wanted him to be in it.” All Streep wanted to do was quit working and
be with her love, but they were still struggling with medical bills. So the actor had to choose
between spending more time with her dying boyfriend and paying the bills, so he would
actually live longer. How devastating! Reluctantly, she took a lead role in the miniseries
Holocaust, solely for the money. It was filmed in Austria, and Cazale was too weak to go.
Streep never complained, but quietly she agonized. “The material was unrelentingly grim,”
Meryl later said. They shot on location at an actual concentration camp, which she found
profoundly disturbing, especially in such a hard time.
She’d spent 2½ months in Austria, longer than she’d been told, separated from her
beloved, each day another lost forever. Meryl was going crazy. John was sick, and she wanted
to be with him. When she finally got back to New York, Cazale
was worse than she’d ever seen him. And when it became clear he didn’t have much
time left, she took five months off from work, so they could spend as much time together
as possible, even moving into the hospital during his final days.
For five months, the couple disappeared. His cancer had spread to the bones, and he was
increasingly weak. She went with him to every doctor’s appointment, every radiation treatment,
and never betrayed a lack of hope. “She was always a strong-willed, persistent,
hopeful person, and I think she just applied all her spirit and strength to taking care
of him,” Schulman says. Speaking about her devotion, some viewed it
as too extreme, and for others, she embodied the most prominent pillar of true love: selflessness.
Streep later said that the time they had together, retreating into their cocoon, gave her a weird
sort of protection. She was so close that she didn’t notice the deterioration.
She confided in very few people and wrote to her old drama teacher at Yale about her
actual emotional state. “My beau is terribly ill,” Streep wrote. “I am worried all
the time and pretending to be cheery all the time, which is more exhausting mentally physically
emotionally than any work I’ve ever done.” In early March 1978, John entered a caring
facility, and Meryl never left his side. Then, on March 12, at 3 a.m., Cazale’s doctor
told Streep, “He’s gone.” Meryl wasn’t ready to hear it, much less
believe it. What happened next, by some accounts, was the culmination of all the tenacious hope
Meryl had kept alive for the past ten months. She pounded on his chest, sobbing, and for
a brief, alarming moment, John opened his eyes. “It’s all right, Meryl,” he said
weakly. “It’s all right.” Then he closed his eyes and died. Streep’s first call was
to Cazale’s brother, Stephen. She sobbed throughout. “I tried,” she told him.
The tragic loss weighed on her heavily. But that year, Streep had success upon success.
She won an Emmy for Holocaust, an Oscar nomination for The Deer Hunter, starred in a career-making
role in Kramer vs Kramer — which won her the Academy Award — and was cast in Shakespeare
in the Park’s The Taming of the Shrew. She had become a STAR.
But John’s death, and her own suffering, had transformed her as a person and an actor.
For all her later accomplishments — 19 Academy Award nominations and three wins — her friends
and fellow actors most admire Streep for her devotion to Cazale, for the strength of character
such a young woman showed. “When I saw that girl there with him like
that, I thought, ‘There’s nothing like that.’ I mean, that’s it for me. As great
as she is in her work, that’s what I think of when I think of her.” Al Pacino said.
A few months after her partner’s death, Streep was kicked out of the apartment they
had shared. Faced with the difficult task of packing up his belongings, she called on
her brother for help. He, in turn, brought along a friend, sculptor Don Gummer, to lend
a hand. As fate would have it, Streep ended up subletting
Gummer’s apartment since he was supposed to be in Pakistan for an extended holiday.
The two began exchanging letters, then a motorcycle accident cut his plans short, bringing him
home sooner than planned. While holding her two-year relationship with
Cazale close to her heart, Streep didn’t allow its tragic end to stop her from moving
forward, both in life and in love. Just six months later, in September 1978, the actor
and the sculptor said, “I do.” The wedding raised plenty of eyebrows, even
straining Meryl’s relationship with her mother, but no one could stop them from following
their hearts. Four decades of marital bliss and four kids
later, Meryl and Don are a rarity in Hollywood. They’re as happy as ever and have managed
to keep an incredibly low profile, even moving to a secluded estate in Connecticut back in
1985. The few times that the Oscar winner has spoken
about her private life, however, she’s made it clear that one of the biggest keys to their
long-lasting romance has been the fact that they’re equals. Their relationship has never
been a competition, and Don has never tried to outshine his wife’s first love or career.
He couldn’t be more supportive. In addition to being her date to countless premieres and
award ceremonies, Gummer helped his wife’s career blossom by always being there for her.
As Streep once said, “I couldn’t even dream of being a mother and making movies
without Don.” That’s because he was always happy to look after their kids so that she
could be on set. In a rare moment in 2012, Streep revealed
just how important Gummer has been in all aspects of her life, as she gushed about her
husband while accepting the Best Actress Oscar for her role in The Iron Lady.
As Meryl has shown the world, finding love again is not a matter of forgetting what came
before. Instead, it’s about celebrating that memory without allowing it to delay your
growth, whether professional or personal.
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