Mary

ON THE FIRST Saturday of November, the student body of Bernards High School gathered for a sacred rite. Homecoming: the ratification of a hard-fought teenage hierarchy. On a crisp green football field tucked behind a Methodist Church, the notoriously hopeless Bernards Mountaineers faced off against their rivals from Dunellen, a New Jersey borough not unlike their own. At halftime, the players cleared the field. Then it was time to crown the homecoming queen of 1966.

Everyone in school knew this year's winner, a blond, blue-eyed senior from 21 Old Fort Road. She was one of those girls who seemed to have it all together: smart, good-looking, with a boyfriend on the football team. They had seen her on the cheerleading squad. And in the choir. And in the school plays-she always got the lead. As the bow-tied student-council president escorted her onto the field, the eyes of Bernardsville fell on her limpid, peculiar face.

She was beautiful. Everyone knew it except her. Alabaster skin. High cheekbones that seemed chiseled like statuary. Hooded eyes, set slightly close. Hair the color of cornsilk. A nose so long and forked it was practically an event.

She wasn't nearly pretty enough to be a movie star, she thought. Movie stars were girlish or voluptuous or demure. They were Audrey Hepburn or Ann-Margret or Jane Fonda. Movie stars were pretty. And no matter how many boys had fallen over one another for her affections, she wasn't pretty, she told herself. Not with that nose.

Pauline Kael would put it this way: "Streep has the clear-eyed blond handsomeness of a Valkyrie-the slight extra length of her nose gives her face a distinction that takes her out of the pretty class into real beauty." No matter that Kael would become her most vocal critic. She was right: Meryl Streep wasn't pretty. She was something else. Something more interesting, or at least harder to categorize. When she arched an eyebrow or twisted a lip, she could be anyone: an aristocrat, a beggar, a lover, a clown. She could be Nordic or English or Slavic. For now, what she wanted to be was all-American.

Last year's homecoming queen, June Reeves, had returned from junior college to fulfill her final duty: placing a twinkling diadem on her successor's head. The newly crowned queen boarded a float bedecked with flowers, flanked by her homecoming court: Joann Bocchino, Ann Buonopane, Ann Miller, and Peggy Finn, all with flipped hair and corsages. As the float traversed the field, she waved to the crowd and smiled, flashing a white glove. She had worked hard to become the queen, primping and peroxiding and transforming herself into the person she was determined to be.

None of her subjects knew how miscast she felt. What they saw was a role she was playing, down to the last golden hair on her head. Even her giggle was a construction: she had practiced it, making it light and lithesome, the way the boys like. She wouldn't have called it acting, but that's what it was. With unwavering diligence, she had spent her high school years immersed in a role. Still, as good as she was at playing it, there would always be cracks in the façade. She didn't look like the women she saw in the magazines, not really. She had fooled these people, or most of them. The girls saw right through her.

Waving to the crowd, she stayed in character. It felt nice to be worshiped, but perhaps a little lonely. Up on that float, she was on her own plane, a few inches closer to the November sky than any of her supposed peers. If only June or Peggy or her best friend, Sue, could join her-but there was only one queen, and her job was to be the best. Perhaps for the first time, and certainly not for the last, Meryl Streep was learning that perfection could be a prison.

She was seventeen years old.

*

SHE WOULD SOON discover that transformation, not beauty, was her calling card. It had been with her from the beginning. Call it "the zone." Call it "church." It was a place she visited before she knew how to describe it, though she never really figured out how.

"I was six, placing my mother's half-slip over my head in preparation to play the Virgin Mary in our living room. As I swaddled my Betsy Wetsy doll, I felt quieted, holy, actually, and my transfigured face and very changed demeanor captured on Super-8 by my dad pulled my little brothers-Harry, four, playing Joseph, and Dana, two, a barnyard animal-into the trance. They were actually pulled into this little nativity scene by the intensity of my focus, in a way that my usual technique for getting them to do what I want, yelling at them, never ever would have achieved."

That was six. This was nine:

"I remember taking my mother's eyebrow pencil and carefully drawing lines all over my face, replicating the wrinkles that I had memorized on the face of my grandmother, whom I adored. I made my mother take my picture, and I look at it now, of course, I look like myself now and my grandmother then. But I do really remember, in my bones, how it was possible on that day to feel her age. I stooped, I felt weighted down, but cheerful, you know. I felt like her."

The Virgin Mary was a natural first role: Meryl came from a long line of women named Mary. Her mother was Mary Wolf Wilkinson, whose mother was Mary Agnes, shortened to Mamie. When Mary Wolf's first daughter was born, in Summit, New Jersey, on June 22, 1949, she named the baby Mary Louise. But three Marys in one family was a lot, and before Mary Louise had learned to speak her name, her mother had taken to calling her Meryl.

She knew little of her ancestors growing up. Her mother's side was Quaker stock, stretching back to the Revolutionary War. There were stories of someone getting hanged in Philadelphia for horse thievery. One grandmother busted up bars during the Temperance movement. Her grandfather Harry Rockafellow Wilkinson, known as "Harry Pop" to his grandchildren, was a joker and a gesticulator. When Meryl was little, her maternal grandparents still said "thee" and "thou."

Mary Wolf had a wide, warm face and a bright humor inherited from her father; years later, playing Julia Child, Meryl would draw on her mother's immense "joie de vivre." She was born in 1915, in Brooklyn. During World War II, she worked as an art director at Bell Labs, and later studied at the Art Students League in New York. Like most of her peers, Mary gave up her wartime work to be a full-time wife and mother: the kind of woman Betty Friedan wanted to galvanize with the 1963 publication of The Feminine Mystique. But Mary didn't suffer from the malaise Friedan observed in so many housewives, perhaps because she never abandoned her artistic pursuits. While she raised the kids, she worked in a studio on the back porch as a commercial artist, drawing illustrations for local publications and businesses. Had she been part of her daughter's generation, she might have gone out and had a career. As it was, she kept her finger in the pie, and the extra income didn't hurt.

Meryl's paternal side had none of the same ebullience. "Streep" was a German name, though for many years she thought it was Dutch. Her father, Harry Streep, Jr., was an only child. (Harrys and Henrys were as plentiful in her family as Marys.) Nicknamed "Buddy," he was born in Newark in 1910 and went to Brown on a scholarship. After a year, the Depression hit and he was forced to leave. For three decades, he worked in the personnel department of Merck & Co. The job was mostly hiring and firing. Meryl noticed some melancholy in her father, possibly inherited from his mother, Helena, who had been institutionalized for clinical depression. Helena's husband, Harry William Streep, was a traveling salesman who left her alone with their son much of the time. As an older man, Meryl's father would watch his grandson, Henry Wolfe Gummer, in a high school production of Death of a Salesman and weep, saying, "That was my dad."

When Meryl visited her paternal grandparents' apartment, she could sense a pervading sadness. The shades were drawn so as to let in only a sliver of light-nothing like the warm Wilkinson house. Her grandmother reused absolutely everything. She would save pieces of tinfoil and wrap them into a ball, which she kept under the sink as it grew larger and larger, to Meryl's fascination.

In the postwar glow, a bright, suburban American dream was within reach for families like the Streeps. They moved around central New Jersey as the family got bigger, first to Basking Ridge and then to Bernardsville. After Meryl, there was Harry Streep III, nicknamed "Third." Then there was another boy, Dana, a skinny jokester with freckles. Meryl's parents would bring her to her brothers' Little League games, but she was just as rambunctious and athletic as they were, maybe more so.

In Bernardsville, they lived on a tree-lined street on top of a small hill, just a short walk from the public high school. The town sat on New Jersey's "wealth belt," about forty-five miles west of New York City. In 1872, a new railroad line had transformed it from a tranquil collection of cottages to a bedroom community for affluent New Yorkers, who built summer homes far away from the city din. The tonier among them erected mansions on Bernardsville Mountain. The "mountain people," as some below called them, sent their children to boarding schools and trotted around on horses. In later years, they included Aristotle and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who kept a ten-acre Bernardsville estate.

The railroad bisected the rest of the town: middle-class Protestants on one...