Wendy and the Lost Boys (17 page)

Then Chris’s mother, who’d had breast cancer, was diagnosed with a recurrence and given a dire prognosis; the cancer had spread to her bones. Relatives were putting pressure on her only child to move back home. Wendy intervened and introduced him to her sister Sandra’s psychiatrist. While Chris didn’t find him helpful in most ways, the psychiatrist gave him one valuable piece of advice: Set clear boundaries with your mother’s relatives. (He didn’t know that the same advice was being dispensed to Sandra, who followed instructions to keep Lola on a tight leash, allowing her to call on Sunday mornings at a certain time.)

Wendy’s infatuation with Chris had developed into a true friendship that was familial, encompassing mundane matters, passing thrills, recurring annoyances, and issues of deepest concern.

Before Chris left for the O’Neill, he went to the Playwrights Horizons production of
Montpelier Pa-zazz.
Wendy downplayed its importance, just a ten-o’clock showing in the dregs of Forty-second Street. But she was excited. She invited her family and friends from her Amherst/Holyoke theater days and from Yale Drama.

Wendy introduced Chris to André Bishop, who was taking tickets at the door. Chris recognized André from Harvard, having seen him play the character Andrei in Chekhov’s
Three Sisters.
That bare-bones undergraduate production had received a rave review in the
Harvard Crimson
from Frank Rich, who became the
Crimson
’s editorial chairman and was now in New York, writing movie reviews for
Time
magazine.

James Lapine was there, too. He had met Wendy at Yale, and they became friends because he lived in New York and had a car. She bummed rides with him and called him “Tats,” her version of the Yiddish endearment
tateleh
[“little papa”].

He thought she was adorable, and always thought of her the way she looked the first time they drove to the city together.

“She had a pumpkin outfit on,” he said. “Pappagallo shoes and pumpkin tights and a pumpkin dress. I thought it was the chicest thing I’d ever seen.”

Lapine had been working as a graphic designer for the theater magazine at Yale when Brustein hired him to join the faculty and do design work for the theater. Theater hadn’t been Lapine’s interest; he wanted to be a film director. He was twenty-seven years old, trying to get his career going, but not certain which direction to go, frequently getting stoned to avoid thinking about it.

In retrospect it was a remarkable convergence. None of them knew it then, but all of them—Chris Durang, André Bishop, Frank Rich, William Ivey Long, James Lapine, Wendy Wasserstein—would become among the most prominent players in the New York theater scene. Their lives would intersect professionally and personally, with Wendy at the fulcrum of many connections. This was the beginning.

For a year or so after
Montpelier Pa-zazz,
Chris didn’t see much of Wendy. After the summer at the O’Neill, he decided to spend much of the fall in New Haven, where his boyfriend lived. He wrote a play,
The Vietnamization of New Jersey,
still subsidized by the CBS grant from Brustein. Then Chris was off to Los Angeles, for a production of
A History of the American Film,
which he had developed at the O’Neill.

But his accomplishments were shadowed by the guilt he felt at being away from his mother, who had endured two bad marriages and was now possibly dying. When he was in the New York area, he spent as much time as he could with her. While he and Wendy spoke frequently by telephone, this made for hit-or-miss contact in the days before cell phones. Their friendship wasn’t on hiatus, but there was a lull.

A
s Wendy’s Yale friends landed in New York, many of them discovered, as Christopher had, that the woman who couldn’t look you in the eye without giggling was a valuable resource. The impenetrable city was Wendy’s hometown, and she could waltz through it as blithely as (a chubby, Jewish) Holly Golightly—and, when necessary, as purposefully as Lola Wasserstein.

When Wendy returned to the city, William Ivey Long—her designer friend and confidant from Yale—had been living for a year at the Hotel Chelsea on Twenty-third Street. The old redbrick building had the kind of romantic history William liked. It was the place where Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan had lived, where Allen Ginsberg had philosophized, and where Dylan Thomas had died. The rent was only two hundred dollars a month, but that was a lot considering William’s income, which was nothing.

He had moved to the Hotel Chelsea specifically to meet Charles James, the legendary American couturier. One night, while watching Bruce Jenner win the gold medal for the decathlon in the 1976 Olympics, William came up with a plan.

“As no one would hire me to make costumes, I decided I would make them anyway, on dolls,” he said. “I slipped a note under Mr. James’s door that explained that I was having trouble re-creating the bodice on a doll of Marie de Médici I made, based on Rubens’s coronation portrait; would he help me? Minutes later, ding-a-ling. ‘Hello, this is Charles James’ . . . and from then on I cooked dinner, I walked the dog—Sputnik—I painted the bathroom, and I learned and learned and learned.”

Charles James was willing to teach William but not to pay him. He needed money, and Wendy knew that. When she saw William’s growing doll collection—odd, exquisitely dressed interpretations of historical figures, including a court jester—she told him, “I can sell them!” And she did, via a friend who ran an artisans’ gallery on Madison Avenue. The jesters were his most popular doll. She sold them for fifty dollars; he got twenty-five. As he saw it, eight dolls equaled one month’s rent. Another Yale pal, Paul Rudnick, and Wendy were the delivery people, carrying loads of clown dolls out of the Hotel Chelsea, popping them into the trunk of a taxi, and taking them up to Madison Avenue.

W
endy began dating Douglas Altabef, a good-looking man with wavy hair who fit Lola’s specifications—“nice Jewish boy,” student at Harvard Law.

They met through his brother, who had taken a summer program in high school with Wendy. Doug Altabef was familiar. He was born in the Bronx and when his family grew more prosperous moved to Long Island. He went to college at Columbia, then to Harvard. He was attracted to show business—took a year off to spend six months on the comedy-club circuit before deciding he was better suited for law school.

He was immediately attracted to Wendy. He liked her sweet smile and the self-effacing way she carried herself, with her head slightly bent. They soon were dating with the kind of regularity that might lead to a serious commitment. They met each other’s family, they commuted between Boston and New York while Doug was in school, they traveled together to Canada to visit Wendy’s college friend Harriet and to Connecticut where both of Wendy’s sisters were living.

Yet she was dissatisfied. Without discussing it much, she was obsessing about her career, working on a play and applying for writing jobs at various places, including
Sesame Street
. In another letter to “My Dearest Ruthie” she confided:

I started seeing a psychiatrist. . . . Lola decided that I was indeed disturbed and needed help. Actually, she’s been very understanding recently. I don’t know if this all brings back a maternal purpose to her, or she just doesn’t like to see her youngest of such a proud litter eating dumplings at 10:30 on First Avenue. The shrink is very relaxing. He told me that I didn’t have a strong drive for failure but was rather terrified. The thing that’s wrong with Erica Jong is she’s only scared of flying. Baby, that ain’t shit! As you know there’s food, beaches, sex, buses, going outside, staying inside, writing suicide letters, cutting hair, having sex, not having sex. . . .

Well, anyway, I hope this man can help me a little, or I marry Douglass
[sic]
. Actually, I really hope I marry Douglass
[sic]
. For some good reasons, I think I could like him for an extended amount of time . . . and for some bad reasons, I want all this to be settled. . . .

The days are sort of the same. I spend them waiting for Sesame Street to call me and avoiding calling Douglass
[sic]
. It really is nice being obsessed with something besides Christopher. That really was quite a coup.

Doug Altabef admitted he didn’t take her work all that seriously, because she didn’t seem to.

“She was dismissive of it,” he said. “Denigrating of it. ‘I don’t know if it’s going to go anywhere,’ she said. It was private to her, and I didn’t try to intrude on it.”

He called her “Monkey.”

“She liked that,” he said. “She loved that.”

At least that’s what he thought.

Later he would see himself re-created in one of Wendy’s plays,
Isn’t It Romantic.
He was recast as Marty, a medical student, whose girlfriend, Janie, is a writer trying to get a job working for
Sesame Street.
She has an eccentric mother who dances and pesters Janie about getting married, and a sweet father who doesn’t say much.

Janie discusses Marty with Harriet, her girlfriend:

Harriet:
He’s sweet.

Janie:
He’s very sweet. Sometimes I look at Marty and think he’s such a nice young man, I must be a nice young girl.

Harriet:
You are.

Janie:
I never meant to become one. Last week, when we were driving up from yet another Sterling Taverne opening on the Island, I had my head in his lap and he stroked my hair and called me Monkey. And at first I thought, Janie Jill Blumberg, you’ve been accepted; not even on the waiting list. So he calls you Monkey. You’d prefer what? Angel? Sweetheart?

Harriet:
Beauty?

Janie:
And I thought, It’s settled, fine, thank God. . . . And it was just as we were approaching Syosset that I thought, I can’t breathe in this car, and I promised myself that in a month from now I would not be traveling home from the Island in this car with Marty. And as soon as I thought this, and honestly almost pushed open the car door, I found myself kissing his hand and saying, “Marty, I love you.” I don’t know.

I
sn’t It Romantic
reveals Wendy’s fundamental insecurity, her belief that someone could love her only in default mode, as a backup plan. When Marty meets Janie, she is with her attractive friend Harriet, whom Marty describes as “a beautiful girl.” He says to Janie:

I remember you. I saw you and Harriet together in Cambridge all the time. You always looked more attainable. Frightened to death, but attainable. I’m not attracted to cold people anymore. Who needs that kind of trouble?

Janie replies with a joke. From the outset she distrusts Marty’s motives, unable to believe he is truly interested in her. When she begins to believe that he might want to marry her, she worries that she will be stifled by him. Echoing Wendy’s recurrent theme, Janie wonders who she is and what she wants.

I like my work. I may have stumbled into something I actually care about. And right now I don’t want to do it part-time and pretend that it’s real when it would actually be a hobby. But I want a life too. Honey, my mother takes my father skating every Saturday. . . . I’m their daughter. I want that too.

A
t age twenty-six, Wendy found herself in the odd position of being a grown-up in some ways but still a child, dependent on Morris for money, unattached, uncertain about her career.

But things were about to change.

She was preparing for the workshop production of
Uncommon Women,
and she had a job in theater—sort of. Nancy Quinn (sister of Pat Quinn, a Yale friend) hired her as an assistant for the National Playwrights Conference at the O’Neill Center; her primary responsibility was delivering scripts to the members of the selection committee. She quickly acquired a reputation for being fun to have around and for her habit of sweetly accepting subway fare and then taking cabs to her destination. While she was working there, Wendy submitted
Uncommon Women
for consideration at the O’Neill.

Meanwhile she and André began spending a lot of time together, discussing ideas for the workshop production of
Uncommon Women
at Playwrights Horizons, scheduled for March, and how to expand the play for full-blown presentation in the fall. During this period André began to see that Wendy took her craft far more seriously than appearances would suggest. “She would often appear quite disheveled and wear her nightgown to rehearsals and that kind of thing,” he said. “She was funny but also hardworking.” She always brought a college-ruled spiral-bound notebook (or a yellow legal pad, or the back of a calendar) to meetings, scribbling notes in her loopy handwriting.

The main characters had evolved since the Yale production of the play, three years earlier. They still bore strong resemblances to Wendy’s friends from Mount Holyoke but benefited from the intervention of time. Wendy presented the women as they were when they were in college, and as they had become six years after the fact. Experience had added depth to the characters and resonance to her writing.