Meryl Streep, Jersey Girl

A child of suburbia's rise to center stage

House of character: Meryl Streep’s childhood home in Bernardsville, NJ.

Diary of the Late Republic, #15

As some of you may know, I kinda fell sideways into a project about New Jersey—more specifically, a book about famous Americans (some of native to the Garden State, some not) who had decisive moments in their lives there. As part of the enterprise, I’ve been traveling the state a bit to get snapshots, literal and mental, of these pivotal places in the state.

One of my subjects is Meryl Streep, a true Jersey girl. (I’ve written about her before; she gets a chapter in my book Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions.) Streep spent the key years of her childhood in Bernardsville, essentially at the northwestern rim of the New York metropolitan area. I recently drove through town, and though it’s been sixty years since she graduated from high school there, the town’s essential character does not seem to have changed. Then as now, it’s an affluent enclave with a storybook character. My first instinct would be to compare it with a New England village, but then realized it’s closer in character to something out of Philadelphia’s Main Line—Bryn Mawr, maybe. Lots of brick and flagstone.

As she would be the first to say, Streep had an idyllic childhood by most standards. Interestingly, her acting talents did not loom large in a high school profile, where her singing—and her cheerleading—were at least as prominent. It turned out, of course, that Streep had Promethean talent, something whose unmistakable contours began to emerge at Vassar and became vertiginous at Yale Drama School. Great artists come from many places, but it seems clear that Bernardsville was a greenhouse for the seedling that was Meryl Streep. The sense of comfort and security she experienced here nurtured a gigantic imagination that would later allow her to inhabit characters like the homeless alcoholic of Ironweed or the passionately moralistic nun of Doubt with such riveting, humanizing clarity. (Who knew: even the heirs of the Presbyterians have got soul.)

Suburbia is sometimes dismissed as a cultural wasteland by cosmopolitan elites. But from small towns big things sometimes come.