Wendy and the Lost Boys (25 page)

She also didn’t like people to cross boundaries without her blessing. After she and Doug Altabef broke up, he sent André Bishop a script he’d written. Wendy was not pleased.

André was astonished by the number of friends Wendy seemed to have. If she wasn’t out with a classmate from elementary school, middle school, or college, she was at a party or having dinner with Chris Durang, or at the theater with Frank Rich, or at a Wasserstein relative’s child’s bar mitzvah.

It was the era of
Bright Lights, Big City,
the 1984 bestselling novel by Jay McInerney that came to epitomize Manhattan in the 1980s.
Bright Lights
portrayed the city as an unending hedonistic party of yuppies on the prowl, avoiding responsibility, seeking something elusive, snorting cocaine to help them find it.

The Culture of Indulgence was in full swing, and Wendy was in the middle of it, always game for a night on the town, though she preferred martinis and candy to drugs.

Her friendships took her to glitzy parties, but also to parts of New York that were unfamiliar to the pampered ribbon heiress, the delivery girl who took cabs instead of subways. Through Playwrights Horizons, Wendy met Harry Kondoleon, whose play
Christmas on Mars
was produced in 1983. Wendy was riveted by the play’s bright chatter and went to see it three or four times. She became fixated on a scene in the second act, when a mother says to her pregnant daughter, “Walk on me if you think it would help.”

The daughter, wearing pink bedroom slippers, steps on her mother’s back, using it as a treadmill.

Each time Wendy thought, “How did Harry know how much I want to walk on my mother?”

After noticing Wendy in the halls after one performance, Kondoleon invited her to his home in the East Village for lunch. The neighborhood was seedy. As Wendy walked past the Turkish-Russian bath across the street from his walk-up tenement building, she wondered if Harry could really live in a place like this.

After climbing three long flights of stairs, she was greeted at the top by an unexpected vision. There was Harry Kondoleon—a slight, beautiful, vaguely Victorian-looking young man—elegantly dressed, as if they were going to Rumplemeyer’s for ice cream with their grandmothers. He invited her in for the studiously formal meal he had prepared—chicken curry and poached pears served on perfect blue-and-white china.

She often returned for those poached-pear lunches and long conversations about theater and their love lives, or lack thereof. Kondoleon’s imagination overflowed, leading him to write plays and poetry—and to draw pictures and write fiction—that mingled camp and sentimentality, homosexual themes and fairy-tale innocence, acerbic wit and flatfooted shtick. He was another of Wendy’s friends who would be praised and then dismissed by Frank Rich.

“Are we eternally doomed to admire this man’s talent while fighting off boredom?” the critic asked in one review.

By the 1980s, as Boomers themselves were moving into their thirties, boredom had replaced people over thirty as the enemy. The age of adult-hood was pushed back still further, to some later date, no longer specified.

U
nlike many artists, who claim they don’t read their reviews, Wendy studied the criticism of
Isn’t It Romantic—
so much so that every time she sat down to write, she heard Walter Kerr say, “You aren’t really a playwright.” Finally Chris Durang told her, “You have to open the window, push Walter Kerr out, and close the window.” In the summer of 1983, Wendy and Gerry Gutierrez worked together to revise the script.

Wendy secluded herself in a place she rented in Bridgehampton—an apartment over a garage—the only way she could get work done. She liked working in small rooms with no telephones; another favorite spot was a little typing room at the New York Society Library in Manhattan on Seventy-ninth Street. Gerry visited her in Bridgehampton and told her to read the play to him, line by line, his routine with every playwright he worked with. “It’s the perfect time to look at anything swept under the rug,” he explained. Together they cut, added, and rearranged.

She managed to write at least seven new versions, paying particular attention to the portrait of the parents, which had been singled out by the critics as caricature. She softened Tasha (the Lola character), adding emotion and depth to the nudging and cajoling. To her complaints about her daughter, Tasha adds a wistful lament. “You know what’s sad?” she asks. “Not sad like a child is ill or something. But a little sad to me. My daughter never thinks I call because I miss her.”

With Gerry’s guidance Wendy gave more of a narrative arc to Janie, the main character. In the original production she ended as she had begun: indecisive, rebellious, but complacent. Wendy couldn’t decide whether to let Janie marry the doctor she was dating; at one point she found Peter Riegert—the actor playing him—so attractive she changed the script to have the couple reunite at the end, then changed it again. Now, in the rewrite, Wendy felt secure enough to give Janie a mind of her own. When she decides to reject her boyfriend, she knows why she’s doing it. She would rather be alone than live a life that compromises her ideals. The curtain closes on Janie alone, dancing to the nostalgic strains of “Isn’t It Romantic?” the 1930s standard by Rodgers & Hart.

Despite this emboldened statement at the end of her play, Wendy’s ambivalence about her own destiny remained intact. “There’s as much of me in Harriet [the character based on Aimee Garn] as there is in Janie,” she told an interviewer. “When Harriet says I want to get on with my life, have a family and children—I understand that. It is time to move on: I mean the other day I got the Mount Holyoke alumnae magazine and for my class there was a list of 10 people who had had their second child, and at the end of the list it said, ‘Wendy Wasserstein won a Guggenheim.’ It does make you think.”

The new version of the play opened at Playwrights Horizons on December 16, 1983. Reviewers approved of the changes. In the
New Yorker,
Edith Oliver commended the playwright.
Isn’t It Romantic,
she wrote, was no longer “listless” but now had “momentum and a sense of purpose.” Susan Bolotin, writing in
Vogue,
liked “the honesty with which Wasserstein treats her characters.” In the
New York Times
, Mel Gussow praised the “new, improved version,” his only significant reservation being “there are still too many scene changes.” Walter Kerr’s review was written with almost fatherly pride, commending the playwright for taking his advice and transforming her flawed work into a play well done.

Not all the critics were enthralled, especially those looking for a political statement. In the
Village Voice
and the
Nation,
reviewers compared the play to a television sitcom. The
Nation
reviewer went further, seeing in the play “ugly reverse bigotry” perpetuating an “old racial myth” that establishes Jews as “warm and emotional” and Wasps as “cold fish.”

Her most valued review came privately, from Frank Rich.

Dear Wendy,

It was impossible to tell you at La Rousse how overwhelmed I was by your play. Partially because of the circumstances—but just as much because of the strong feelings the play aroused. Indeed comparisons between the old Isn’t It Romantic? and the new are ludicrous—for it seems to me that the cuts, narrative changes and so on (the improved carpentry of the play) are beside the point. What’s really important about the new version is that you said honestly and exactly what you wanted to say—and said it so eloquently that the play hit home to me in a way it never had before. Which is to say that I now really understood what Janie wants—and who she is—and what Marty wants—and who he is. And in that conflict you’ve hit on something fundamental about the choices we all make. I found it devastating—just as I did the conflict between Janie and Harriet, which crystallized and moved me in a more forceful way than it did before. I really think “Isn’t It Romantic?” (excuse me for adding the question mark—I’ll stop) will speak to everyone, or at least everyone sensitive, quite apart from their feelings about nouvelle cuisine.

I know it isn’t easy for you to be my friend, given the odd paths of our respective careers. I value your friendship so much I cannot tell you. I hope you know that I love you, and it was killing me to have to contemplate all the gloomy faces (yours excepted and possibly Herbert Levine’s) as Mel’s review came in. His piece was by no means bad, objectively speaking—save for his shortchanging Gerry—but I do know that, as low [an] opinion as I have of my own work, I could have done better. I wish I could have. But I guess what the whole scene brought home to me is how silly my job is—whether it’s executed by Mel, me, whoever—and how unfortunate it is that our theater lives or dies by a single article in a newspaper. It’s ridiculous, and a critic’s words should have nothing to do with an artist like Gerry’s self-esteem. (But I know that is easier said than put into practice.)

Still, that’s another subject—which I must start to deal with in my own way. The point of this letter is to say how proud I am of you, how much in awe I am of your talent, how much I treasure being your friend.

Frank

I
sn’t It Romantic
found a large audience at Playwrights Horizons—and substantially altered Wendy’s financial status. Up until then her biggest paycheck had been for
House of Husbands;
she and Chris divided the twenty-five thousand dollars between them. Otherwise she had earned relatively small, sporadic sums of money. Her advance for
Isn’t It Romantic
was twenty-five hundred dollars. Then Playwrights Horizons moved the play to the 299-seat Lucille Lortel Theatre in Greenwich Village, where it ran for 733 performances. The play was picked up by theaters in Los Angeles and San Diego; there was interest from Hollywood in a screenplay. Betty Friedan asked her to write a TV miniseries dramatization based on her books, beginning with
The Feminine Mystique
(that didn’t happen). Suddenly Wendy was making a sizable income from royalties, between $2,000 and $3,000 a week for almost two years, just from the Lortel. She could stop depending on Morris for money.

Her success also benefited the bottom line at Playwrights Horizons, where ticket prices were low—ranging from $9 to $14 in its two theaters, compared with $45 for a Broadway show. Admissions covered only 25 percent of the operating expenses, with the rest coming from grants and donors. Salaries were meager. André Bishop earned about $30,000 a year. Actors were paid a smidgen above minimum Equity rates.

The organization maintained financial health by keeping control over its productions instead of licensing plays to the highest bidder. When successful plays, like
Isn’t It Romantic
moved to other houses for commercial runs, rather than licensing plays to other producers, Playwrights Horizons put up the money and then kept the profits, a strategy that allowed the production budget to increase almost fivefold between 1980 and 1983, to $3.5 million.

André made sure Wendy understood how much he valued her, in every way. “You have that rare quality of making people happy in your life as well as through your work,” he wrote to her on December 15, 1983, the night
Isn’t It Romantic
opened. “I want you to know, once again, how deeply I love
and
admire you and hope we have many more plays and vacations together as we stagger on through this crazy life—Thank you. Love André.”

He and Wendy had already begun spending more time together, sometimes to go over rewrites, often just to giggle and gossip over martinis. Wendy forced André to be more spontaneous. “She was just up for anything,” he said. “Let’s drive to the beach tonight! Great! We did all that.”

The steady companionship they fell into felt natural. André had had boyfriends but hadn’t been able to sustain a relationship. He told himself he had enough friends to satisfy him, and besides, he was preoccupied with Playwrights Horizons. An admitted workaholic, he found it easier to concentrate on plays than to think about why he was alone.

Wendy was looking for an idealized love and hadn’t found it. Or, rather, she kept finding it and then was disappointed when Prince Charming jumped off his steed and revealed himself to be distressingly human. Or he was gay. Or he was married to someone else. She had been in therapy for years, with at least three different therapists, and still hadn’t determined why she always chose impossible men.

André, like her, was a romantic, willing to overlook practical concerns such as sexual compatibility. Most important, André believed in her, the way Chris Durang always had. Just as Chris had been a powerful presence at Yale, André was becoming part of the New York theater elite, and Wendy always gravitated toward power. It wasn’t as though she were trading Chris in—she and Chris remained close, but after their screenplay,
House of Husbands,
failed to make it past development, they didn’t have a reason to see each other as regularly. Chris had a boyfriend—the same one, now living in Washington, D.C.—and was often out of town on weekends.

André was becoming the person Wendy turned to when she felt impending doom, regardless of the hour. One night, after she had moved into a co-op apartment that Bruce owned on Eighty-second Street, near the East River, she called André in hysterics, telling him she was sure someone was trying to break in through a window. Without hesitation André told her to come to his apartment, in Greenwich Village. She arrived at Waverly Place, her hair a tousled mass of curls, wearing her nightgown under the mink coat her father had given her
,
clutching her passport, terrified but laughing—an endearing, ridiculous figure, full of warmth and love and life.

André made her laugh even more. “You look like you’re fleeing from the Cossacks,” he said.

André had never had a friend like that, who touched him so deeply and made him feel that he truly mattered to someone.