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 As the first blog entry got exhausted. My second book |
| The summer of 1976 in New York City. Central Park's Delacorte Theater, where Shakespeare comes alive under the stars for free. Two actors meet during rehearsals for "Measure for Measure." She was Meryl Streep, twenty-seven years old, fresh from Yale Drama School with a master's degree and boundless ambition. He was John Cazale, forty-one, already a legend in theater circles and increasingly recognized in film. He'd just finished playing Fredo Corleone—the tragic, weak-minded brother in "The Godfather" films. On stage, she played Isabella, a virtuous nun. He played Angelo, a corrupt judge who lusts after her. Off stage, something electric happened between them. "He wasn't like anybody I'd ever met," Streep would later say. "It was the specificity of him, and his sort of humanity and his curiosity about people, his compassion." For Cazale, the feeling was mutual and immediate. Actor Marvin Starkman noticed it instantly: "Once he was in that play, the only thing he talked about was her." Their romance bloomed quickly. Within weeks, they'd moved into a loft together on Franklin Street in Lower Manhattan's Tribeca neighborhood. Fellow actors noticed Streep's constantly chapped lips—evidence of their intense physical connection. They laughed together constantly, challenged each other artistically, and found in each other what every artist dreams of: someone who truly understood. By all accounts, Cazale was one of the finest actors of his generation. His decade on New York stages had earned him rave reviews and devoted admirers. He'd befriended Al Pacino while working as a messenger at Standard Oil, and the two became inseparable—acting partners who brought out the best in each other. When Cazale landed the role of Fredo Corleone, he was thrilled to work alongside his idol, Marlon Brando. His performance was so compelling, so heartbreakingly vulnerable, that Francis Ford Coppola brought him back for the sequel. He also cast Cazale in "The Conversation." Sidney Lumet hired him for "Dog Day Afternoon," which earned Cazale a Golden Globe nomination. Every single film John Cazale appeared in was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Every single one. It's a record that remains unmatched in Hollywood history. But to those who knew him, Cazale was more than his resume. He was thoughtful, sensitive, emotionally intelligent. Village Voice critic Ross Wetzston wrote that Cazale "may be the finest actor in America today." Pacino would later say, "All I wanted to do was work with John for the rest of my life. He was my acting partner." In early 1977, Cazale returned to the stage for what should have been a triumphant Broadway debut—the title role in "Agamemnon" at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater. He performed only once. The first preview, on April 29, 1977. After the performance, something was wrong. Cazale felt ill—worse than he'd felt before. Director Joseph Papp, worried about his friend, arranged an emergency doctor's appointment. Cazale, Streep, and Papp sat together as the diagnosis was delivered: late-stage metastatic lung cancer. Terminal. He was forty-one years old. For a moment, everyone fell silent. The world had just ended. Then Streep looked up. "So, where should we go to dinner?" It wasn't denial. It was defiance. A refusal to let the disease steal even one more moment of joy than it had to. What followed was ten months of extraordinary devotion. Streep could have walked away. Their relationship was still relatively new. No one would have blamed a young actress with a promising career for protecting herself from the coming devastation. She stayed. "I've hardly ever seen a person so devoted to someone who is falling away like John was," Pacino later said. "To see her in that act of love for this man was overwhelming." Cazale was determined to keep acting. Despite the terminal diagnosis, despite the cancer metastasizing to his bones, he accepted a role in Michael Cimino's "The Deer Hunter" alongside Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, and John Savage. Streep signed on too—not because she loved the role (she thought the female character was "essentially a man's view of a woman"), but because she loved Cazale. She wanted to be near him for whatever time remained. There was a problem. The studio's insurance company wouldn't cover Cazale. Too high risk. His participation in the film was in jeopardy. The cast and crew rallied. Cimino rearranged the entire shooting schedule so Cazale could film all his scenes first, before he became too weak. De Niro—who had worked with Cazale on "The Godfather Part II"—quietly stepped in to cover the insurance costs himself. He wanted Cazale in the film. More than that, he wanted to give his friend this final gift: the chance to do what he loved. Between takes, Streep was constantly at Cazale's side. She learned his medication schedule. She went to every radiation appointment, every chemotherapy session. She kept working—she had to, partly to pay his mounting medical bills—but every moment away from him felt like abandonment. In late 1977, she accepted a role in the television miniseries "Holocaust," which required two months of filming in Austria. She hated being away. "I was going crazy," she later said. "John was sick, and I wanted to be with him." When she returned, Cazale was noticeably worse. They withdrew from the public eye. For five months, it was just the two of them in their Tribeca loft. No work. No performances. Just time together as the snow fell on Manhattan, as Cazale grew weaker, as Streep held onto hope with a tenacity that amazed everyone who witnessed it. She stayed with him through the pain, through the fear, through the gradual diminishment of a brilliant man. On March 12, 1978, in a hospital room, John Cazale took his last breath. Meryl Streep was holding his hand. According to one account—perhaps apocryphal, but widely reported—when a doctor told Streep that Cazale was gone, she refused to believe it. She pounded on his chest, sobbing, calling him back. And then, for one brief, impossible moment, John opened his eyes. "It's all right, Meryl," he said weakly. "It's all right." Then he closed his eyes for the last time. He was forty-two years old. Streep was devastated. Friends said they'd never seen someone so completely shattered. She fled to Canada to stay with a friend, trying to process the loss. When she returned to New York, she discovered she was being evicted from the loft she'd shared with Cazale. She had nowhere to go and was too grief-stricken to care. Her brother Harry came to help her pack up Cazale's belongings. He brought along a friend—a sculptor named Don Gummer, whom Streep had met a few times but barely knew. Gummer offered to store her boxes at his studio. He was about to leave the country and offered her his loft while he was gone. As she stayed in this kind stranger's apartment, she began to think about him. They started writing letters. Six months after Cazale's death, Meryl Streep and Don Gummer were married in her parents' garden. "I was going to die if I didn't have something to hold onto," she later explained. She was pregnant within a year. "This baby is an affirmative commitment in pretty desperate times," she told People magazine. "The Deer Hunter" was released posthumously in December 1978. It was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won five, including Best Picture. Streep received her first Oscar nomination for the role she'd only taken to stay close to the man she loved. Looking back, those who knew Cazale still speak of him with reverence. Israel Horovitz, his close friend and collaborator, wrote in his eulogy: "John Cazale happens once in a lifetime. He was an invention, a small perfection." Pacino, asked decades later about actors who didn't get enough credit, said without hesitation: "John Cazale, in general, was one of the great actors of our time—that time, any time." Every film Cazale made has been preserved in the U.S. National Film Registry. There's a theater named after him in New York—the McGinn/Cazale Theatre at 76th and Broadway, dedicated in 1984. But perhaps his greatest legacy isn't captured in any performance, any award, or any tribute. It's the story of a love so deep that a young actress risked her own emerging career to stand beside a dying man. A love so powerful that it convinced a hardened New York crew to fight for one more role, one more performance, one more chance for a brilliant actor to do what he was born to do. Meryl Streep went on to become arguably the greatest actress of her generation, with a record twenty-one Oscar nominations and three wins. She raised four children and remained married to Don Gummer for forty-five years. But she never forgot her first great love—the man who made everything mean something |
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