Wendy and the Lost Boys (32 page)

I have always been someone who has trouble making decisions or moving on. But I just wanted you to know this transition is not happening easily. In fact, it remains quite painful and I am surprised. You see, Terrence, something did happen between us. And not to know that, even cherish it, is foolish and unkind.

I love you very much.

Wendy

T
errence never broke their vow of public discretion, and he did remain a loving friend. But, in addition to missing men, he was gripped by the grim reality overwhelming the gay community; his feelings were reflected in his work.

In 1990 he won an Emmy award for
André’s Mother,
a drama about a mother trying to cope with her son’s death from AIDS. He then returned to the stage with
Lips Together, Teeth Apart,
about two affluent couples who spend their Fourth of July weekend in the expensive beach house one of the women has just inherited from her brother, who recently died of AIDS.

Both couples are gay-friendly, enlightened types, or so they think, but none of them will enter the pool, fearing infection from its previous owner. In his review, Frank Rich said of the playwright’s frame of mind, “The bright wit that has always marked Mr. McNally’s writing and the wrenching sorrow that has lately invaded it are blended deftly throughout three concurrently funny and melancholy acts.”

As for André, his star had also risen, as though in alignment with Wendy’s.

On March 29, 1991, the board of the Lincoln Center Theater announced the appointment of a new director, forty-two-year-old André Bishop, who had been strongly supported by Bernard Gersten, executive producer, who would handle the business side of the company.

It all happened very fast.

“I disapproved of Lincoln Center and hated thrust stages and marble palaces and had nothing but disdain for Lincoln Center even though I was very impressed with what Gregory Mosher [his predecessor] and Bernie Gersten had done with relighting the theater,” said André. “But I thought this would never be for me.”

He didn’t seek the job but quickly accepted it. “I loved Playwrights Horizons with my heart and soul and never thought I would leave it,” he said. “But like Wendy I knew I couldn’t make the sentimental decision. I knew I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life at Playwrights Horizons. I was tormented about it, but I knew this was an opportunity for me and I had to take it. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life only working on new plays, and I wanted to work on something on a bigger scale.”

That September, Joseph Papp retired from the Public Theater because of illness; two months later he died. Assessing the career of “the last of the one-man shows,” Frank Rich wrote an impassioned essay about the importance of great producers, acknowledging that Papp was one of a kind.

“A producer must have the cunning of a master politician, the wiliness of a snake-oil salesman, the fanatical drive of a megalomaniac and, given the eternal precariousness of the New York theater, nerves of steel,” wrote Rich. “It doesn’t hurt, either, to have some taste and a consuming passion for the stage.”

Who would succeed Papp? Probably no one, Rich suggested, but there were two contenders. “While none of these producers has yet operated at Mr. Papp’s epic scale, Lynne Meadow, at the burgeoning Manhattan Theatre Club, and André Bishop, soon to move from Playwrights Horizons to Lincoln Center, are poised to expand their already important roles in a brighter economy,” he said.

In addition to moving uptown, to a far more political and demanding job, André fell in love.

Julia Judge, who had worked for the filmmaker Martin Scorsese for many years, was hired to be André’s assistant. After helping him make the transition from Playwrights Horizons, shortly after he arrived at Lincoln Center, Judge told André she wanted to leave; her father had just died, and she thought she might want to return to the movie world. That’s how Peter Manning arrived in André’s life; the twenty-three-year-old theater aspirant, then working at the Manhattan Theatre Club, heard about the opening.

Manning had cute Catholic-school-boy looks, Christopher Durang minus the devilish glint and the torment. He was apprehensive about meeting his prospective boss. In the nonprofit-theater world, André Bishop was a figure of intimidating proportions. “I interviewed with André, and we had this electrifying meeting, oh, my goodness!” Manning recalled. “It was about the job, but it was clear, immediately, something else was going on.”

Within a month of leaving Lincoln Center, Julia Judge returned. She had decided to remain as André’s right hand. André left Peter a message, telling him the job wasn’t available, and added, “Oh, let’s get together sometime.”

Peter was hired by the marketing department at Lincoln Center. For a year he and André pretended not to know each other at work while beginning a life together outside.

André didn’t tell Wendy, though she had confided in him about Terrence.

André tried to explain why he kept quiet. “I mean, I had little affairs before I met Peter Manning, but there was no one that got in the way of Wendy.”

It wasn’t as though they had gone their separate ways after ending their flirtation with marriage. She’d brought him to visit the Grahams in Switzerland, where he took her on an excursion to his old boarding school. After
Heidi
they traveled to Los Angeles with Daniel Swee, the casting director at Playwrights Horizons (who followed André to Lincoln Center, along with many others). The three New Yorkers were all terrible drivers and terrified of negotiating the L.A. freeways. They stayed at a second-rate hotel in a two-room suite; Swee slept on the pullout couch in the living room, and Wendy and André shared the bed in the other room. They went together to visit Peter Evans, their actor friend (a boyfriend of Gerry Gutierrez) sick with AIDS. It was obvious to Swee that André and Wendy were not merely friends but the closest of companions.

When André began to realize that his relationship with Peter Manning was developing into something serious, he found himself in a terrible position for someone who avoided confrontation at almost any cost. “I wanted to eat my cake and have it, too,” he confessed. “I was afraid it would hurt Wendy or drive her away. I was so insecure about having a relationship with someone like Peter—or anyone. I was afraid it wasn’t solid yet, so in my typical way I did nothing.”

Inevitably, she found out about Peter and saw how serious the relationship was, long after many others knew.

Their friendship was strong enough to take yet another hit, but André didn’t forgive himself for hurting her again.

“Maybe some people say I behaved irresponsibly toward her, and I can see them saying that,” he said. “It wasn’t irresponsible behavior, it was a lack of taking my own contribution to her as seriously as she took it. It’s my lack of acknowledgment of the importance I have in her—in anybody’s—life.”

For obvious reasons Wendy did not warm to Peter Manning—she called him “that bitch” when she discussed him with her girlfriends. The dislike was reciprocal. “I had no idea what I was getting into with André,” he said. André had told him about his relationship with Wendy, including their discussions of marriage, but Peter hadn’t understood how tightly knit the two of them remained.

“I had no idea,” he said. “Wendy was mean to me from the start. She was cool and dismissive, not outwardly mean, but she was not psyched about my being there. My sense was that there were people who were not nice to me for a long time because they decided to side with Wendy in this thing.”

Wendy might have been everybody else’s friend, but she never became his. “I always saw the manipulative underside of Wendy,” he said. “She’d be funsy Wendy, and I would be sitting there and never be that comfortable.”

But he also understood that if he was to remain with André, Wendy was part of the package. So Peter tried to avoid her as much as possible, making appearances just often enough to keep things polite. “I showed up and got through it, but I was always uncomfortable,” he said. “I never had Wendy love like everyone else around her.”

As for Wendy, she was accustomed to realigning her relationships, and so she did—once again—with André. Their lives and careers would remain intertwined, though she was old enough to know that nothing stayed as it had been.

WENDY’S FRIENDSHIP WITH YALE PAL WILLIAM IVEY LONG DEEPENED AND GREW MORE COMPLICATED OVER THE YEARS.

Seventeen

THICKER THAN WATER

1990-93

At the end of The Heidi Chronicles,
Heidi adopts a baby and begins life as a single mother. In 1989 this was a radical decision. Single mothers still were thought of in terms of tainted clichés, either unlucky teenagers who got pregnant or divorced women whose spouses had left them to cope on their own.

The strongest critiques of the final scene came not from old-fashioned outraged moralists, however, but from feminists, disturbed by the play’s possible implications: that a woman without a child was unfulfilled, that a modern woman had to choose between career and family, that babies were commodities that could be bartered to satisfy the maternal (or other) longings of affluent women.

Betty Friedan, a founding mother of the modern women’s movement and a fan of Wendy’s work, told reporters that the adoption ruined an otherwise satisfying theater experience. “I’m happy she won the Pulitzer Prize, but I was disturbed by the play,” Friedan told reporters. “In depicting Heidi as troubled over career and family, Wendy Wasserstein inadvertently fed a media hype, a new feminine mystique about the either/or choices in a woman’s life.”

Helen Gurley Brown, another Wendy Wasserstein fan, also expressed dismay at the ending, which she felt ignored the hardships of being a single mother and depicted Heidi “as a victim in her personal life.”

Wendy was taken aback by the criticism but defended her character’s decision. “Am I saying all women should have babies?” she told a reporter. “No. I think Heidi made a choice. It is a really brave thing to do, and it is something I think about a lot. I meant it to seem powerful.”

She had her mother’s backing this time. Lola Wasserstein was all in favor of Heidi’s decision and hoped Wendy would follow the example set by the character she’d created. Wendy saved a handwritten note Lola sent her in the early 1990s; the details are obscure, but the message is clear:

Hi honey!

Thought you’d like to see this article about this girl in my dance class.
She
knows what she wants. I don’t want to push you though. And she’s not one of us anyway. Who else do we know from New Jersey?

Morris and I are here, where are you? We’re seeing Georgette now and The Doctor, but Daddy & I will be back at 11:30 to stay with you. If you spent the afternoon with people who weren’t your family, you must miss us by now.

I enjoyed our talk at lunch. Charge me a dress, honey, it never hurts to look nice. Have to go play with my wonderful grandchildren; you should try to have a baby, you might like it.

Love, LOLA! See you at 11:30

I
t was often easier for people who weren’t Lola’s children to appreciate her. Her niece by marriage, Freda Robbins, daughter of Morris’s oldest brother, Israel, known as Herman, saw Lola’s drive as admirable. In 1968, when Robbins gave birth to her first child, Lola came to the hospital and defended her decision to nurse her baby at a time when breast-feeding was not encouraged. When Robbins, a math professor, was awarded her Ph.D. at age forty, the only person in the family who acknowledged the achievement was Lola, who sent her an azalea bush.

“Lola’s expectation of me was ‘Why not?’ ” Robbins said. “Very simple. That’s the most precious gift you can give anyone. I understand she could be difficult, but she wasn’t with me.”

Lola was more suited to being a grandmother than a mother. Her apartment was a playland; flourishes like hanging lemons from chandeliers, embarrassing to her children, delighted her grandchildren. At Lola’s it was okay to paint the brick tiles on the outdoor terrace—and cover yourself in paint, too.

She hadn’t become a soft, fuzzy granny. There were no home-baked cookies at Lola’s, and she could still embarrass with her shenanigans. Each grandchild had a mortifying memory: of enduring a time-share lecture in Florida just to get a free lunch; of being dragged by Lola to the front of the line at Radio City, pretending to be from Kansas, just as their parents had been; of being criticized for being too chubby.

In his sixties Morris continued to wear out ripple sole walking shoes,
¹³
and Lola kept dancing. The two of them traveled the world.

Age hadn’t tempered her sharp tongue either. “Lola knew seismically the things you were insecure about and [would] say them to you,” said Samantha, Sandra’s younger daughter. “The first thing she’d say when we came home from school: ‘Oh, you’ve blown up.’ ”

Melissa Levis, Georgette’s younger daughter, remembered being compared to her cousin, Sandra’s daughter Jenifer. “Jenifer has a boyfriend, do you have a boyfriend?” Lola would ask. “She got into an Ivy League, are you going to an Ivy League? Jenifer’s engaged, are you engaged?”

“It never stopped,” recalled Levis.

The grandchildren experienced the mixed message of superior-inferior. “We learned she would say these things only to us,” said Samantha. “To other people she would say how fabulous you were in every way.”

But they had the buffer of their own parents; their visits to Lola-land were circumscribed, placed into context. They remembered family gatherings as happy occasions.

“Really some of my fondest memories are Thanksgiving and Passover and birthdays and things where we all got together,” said Pamela, Bruce’s eldest. “We had a lot of fun. We sang show tunes at the table and joked around a lot.”

Wendy longed to be part of the generational transfer—as participant, not as observer. Privately, she had taken the first step toward fulfilling Lola’s wish. After
Heidi
opened, while still involved with Terrence McNally, Wendy visited the department of reproductive medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital. Apart from a tendency to “harvest uterine polyps” and her age (thirty-nine), she was declared a viable candidate for pregnancy.

A few months later, after McNally made it clear that he would not create a family with her, Wendy decided to proceed alone, as if the ending of
Heidi
had been a blueprint for her future. She told herself she would have a baby—as soon as she finished the play that was beginning to form in her mind.

“I decided to postpone the baby until there was a tangible father and the play was well on its feet,” she wrote.

In January 1991 she began sketching the scenes and characters that would become
The Sisters Rosensweig.
The idea had taken hold when she was in London, living in the Nell Gwynn apartment, working on
The Heidi Chronicles.

In keeping with her professed desire to create more order in her life, Wendy became determined to move away from the episodic approach that characterized her work. She wanted to write a play that respected conventional dramatic unities, one with more recognizable structure. She considered Chekhov to be the standard. “Chekhov tells us a story, makes us laugh, makes us cry, changes a world, and it all happens before us, live on stage,” she wrote.

She felt a personal connection to the great Russian playwright. Christopher Durang had suggested she read
Three Sisters
her first year at Yale. Wendy became obsessed with the play, seeing it as a leitmotif in her life.

She decided to write her own version of
Three Sisters,
drawing on her own sisters as a source. There would be no brothers. Wendy appeared to have taken the family vow of silence about Abner, at least for public consumption. While she had mentioned five Wasserstein siblings in early interviews, she now referred to four.

Her feelings about Bruce had become even more conflicted. His name recognition had grown with the publication in 1990 of
Barbarians at the Gate,
a bestselling account of the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco.

In this chronicle of breathtaking greed, Bruce was described as “arguably Wall Street’s most brilliant takeover tactician.” People paid him large sums of money just to keep him out of the game. “Better to hire the roly-poly deal maker and lock him in a closet than allow him to run loose and perhaps assemble a competing bidding group,” the authors wrote.

Yet even his detractors acknowledged that Bruce put his family above all; he was devoted to his wife and children. Wendy had come to admire Chris Wasserstein as a mother and to adore the three children she had with Bruce. In public, brother and sister displayed their friendly, bantering attitude toward each other.

“Wendy likes to think of herself as sort of an Auntie Mame, and she’s saving my children from their lives dominated by the stuffed shirts from Wall Street,” Bruce told an interviewer.

To friends Wendy complained about her brother. But Michael Kinsley—editor of the
New Republic
and founding editor of the online journal
Slate—
who had become close to Wendy, recognized how much she relied on Bruce.

“To talk to her you would think she and Bruce were totally alienated, but then you would find out she had been on the phone with him three or four times in the past few days,” he said. “I think they were quite close, though she would claim not. It was a shtick.”

Kinsley had been invited to Passover seders at Bruce’s home and saw a warmer side as Bruce played the part of paterfamilias. The baton had passed. Thanksgiving at Sandy’s, Passover at Bruce’s. Lola and Morris were now guests in their children’s homes.

But in 1991 Bruce and Chris announced they were separating. Wendy was annoyed to see how easily her parents seemed to accept the end of Bruce’s marriage. “Don’t be angry at him,” Morris said. “It’s an occupational hazard. It’s not his fault.”

Wendy wasn’t as forgiving—she was bothered by the attractive women who were able to overlook Bruce’s awkwardness and lack of physical beauty, and actively disliked one woman he dated, an art dealer Wendy referred to as the “Scheming Adventuress.”

But the grown-up Bruce wasn’t something she was prepared to deal with dramatically—not yet.

Secluding herself in a small writing room in the New York Society Library, she thought about her family and the enormous aspiration that had vaulted her and her siblings into realms Lola and Morris couldn’t have imagined. She jotted notes, recalling names and incidents from the Brooklyn years.

Though Wendy had tried, after graduate school, to stop relating the plays of Chekhov to her life, feeling she was being childish, she couldn’t stop noticing how his themes applied to the Wassersteins. “
The Cherry Orchard,
a play about the demise of a family, a lifestyle, a class, is hilarious, yet painfully sad,” she wrote. “In Chekhov, the comic and the tragic are not separated. They are melded into one spirit.”

That was the synthesis she was trying to achieve, even though the chaotic momentum of her life often left her little time to think. That’s why she escaped to write, even though her apartment at One Fifth was plenty spacious for a woman and her cat.

With
The Sisters Rosensweig
she hoped to address, directly, her lifelong search for identity. In the summer of 1991, Wendy spent an extended stretch of time in Bridgehampton working on her play about three sisters. The eldest, a barely disguised Sandra Meyer, by then working at Citicorp, is Sara Goode, fifty-four, a high-powered banker and New York Jewish expatriate, divorced and living in London. Like Sandra, Sara cooks delicacies such as cassoulet. Like Sandra, Sara has recovered from “female trouble”; at age forty-seven, Sandra had been diagnosed with breast cancer, was successfully treated, and went on to become a top-ranking executive at one of the world’s largest banking companies.

The youngest is Pfeni (formerly Penny) Rosensweig, forty, peripatetic world traveler and writer, never married, involved in a three-year affair with a world-renowned director and bisexual. The middle sister is Gorgeous Teitelbaum, a suburban housewife with an outsize personality. She was inspired in part by Wendy’s sister Georgette—the real Gorgeous—but was more outrageous, like Lola.

The occasion for their reunion is Sara’s birthday. Other guests include Pfeni’s bisexual lover; Sara’s hypersophisticated teenage daughter and her working-class boyfriend; and Mervyn Kant, a New York Jewish widower, who romances Sara.

The play is filled with bright chatter that covers much territory, ranging from Eastern European politics to Manolo Blahnik shoes. Sara invokes Shakespeare; Gorgeous laments her imitation Louis Vuitton. Pfeni, most often, is on the sidelines, ceding the play’s strongest moments to her sisters, although Wendy used the play to describe her breakup with Terrence.

“I love you,” Pfeni’s boyfriend, Geoffrey, says to her. “I will always love you. But the truth is, I miss men.”

The Sisters Rosensweig
is Wendy’s most deliberately Jewish play, beginning with the title. Daniel Sullivan, who would direct, felt the play was her way of trying to understand the path her life had taken. “The idea of coming home and a sense of rootlessness was a reason she wrote the play,” he said. “Jewishness became a very important thing in it, because that was part of home to her. She had grown very far from that, and it was something she wanted to look at.”