Wendy and the Lost Boys (38 page)

“I almost fainted,” Drattell remembered
him
saying.

Regardless of who did or didn’t faint that evening, one thing was certain: Wendy finally had her baby.

WENDY, ALREADY SHOWING SIGNS OF ILLNESS,
BRINGING LUCY JANE HOME FROM THE HOSPITAL.

Twenty

THE BIRTH OF LUCY JANE

1999

“Years rolled on again, and Wendy had a daughter,”
wrote J. M. Barrie, toward the end of
Peter Pan.
“This ought not to be written in ink but in a golden splash. She was called Jane, and always had an odd inquiring look, as if from the moment she arrived on the mainland she wanted to ask questions. When she was old enough to ask them, they were mostly about Peter Pan.”

Lucy Jane Wasserstein’s arrival seemed no less a fairy tale, albeit a very modern one. Her mother was indisputably an unusual woman, so it was fitting that the birth of her daughter was out of the ordinary.

Wendy had kept her pregnancy a mystery and was even more secretive about who Lucy Jane’s father might be. There were people who knew about the pregnancy before Wendy went to the hospital, among them: Rhoda Brooks, Bruce and Claude, André, William Ivey Long, and Wendy’s assistants. They understood that certain boundaries were not to be crossed. “If you knew [she was pregnant] and you told, that was the end,” said Cindy Tolan, one of her assistants. “You could kiss your relationship with Wendy good-bye.”

Wendy had her own definition of privacy. She treated her life as source material and—a cynic might say—as a marketing tool, a way of keeping her audience hooked as they waited for the next installment of the Wendy Chronicles. She had learned the power of secrets from Lola and had become a master at controlling information, publicly and privately. She used self-exposure to draw people in and the illusion of secrecy to leverage relationships, to create a false sense of complicity, as she had with Terrence: demanding a vow of silence on his end but then sharing their “secret” with others.

These tactics help explain why Wendy felt compelled to make public her account of Lucy Jane’s arrival, which was published in the
New Yorker
five months after the baby’s birth. The aptly titled “Complications” is one of the playwright’s most memorable pieces of writing—both for the intimate story it tells and for crucial details it conceals.

The
New Yorker
was the ideal venue for Wendy. With its sterling reputation and vaunted fact-checking system, the magazine was regarded as the periodical world’s bastion of authenticity. The
New Yorker
had already played an important role in Wendy’s ongoing self-portrait. Four years earlier, when it had become evident that Sandra’s years might soon be measured in months, Wendy wrote an affectionate article about her sister in the magazine.

Published on February 26, 1996, “Don’t Tell Mother” is filled with amusing childhood stories and admiring anecdotes detailing Sandra’s youthful exploits in London and her subsequent climb up the corporate ladder. Her illness isn’t mentioned, giving an ironic subtext to the story’s cheerful tagline: “The stories my big sister would really rather I didn’t repeat.”

Sandra’s health was likewise omitted when Wendy herself became the subject of a
New Yorker
profile the following year, April 14, 1997, eight months before Sandra died. (Abner, too, was left out; Wendy is described as “the youngest of four children.”)

Now Wendy was determined to write the definitive, unassailable version of Lucy Jane’s birth, in the
New Yorker.
She constructed the story to convey authenticity, providing heart-wrenching and harrowing particulars that signified utmost revelation. But she omitted as many vital facts as she included, because she was also creating a legend.

The article begins with Wendy waking up at 5:00 A.M. on August 27, 1999, to write a eulogy for Fay Francis, André Bishop’s mother, dead at eighty-two. Wendy spoke at the memorial service at St. James Church. As she faced the crowd, she’d felt a tingling in her hand. “Looking out over the pews of the church,” she wrote, “I recognized theatre colleagues whom I had known for a quarter of a century. Over the years, we had all become part of one another’s family. Of course, as with most families, the majority of mine who had gathered at St. James that morning didn’t have the slightest idea what was going on in my life. On August 27, 1999, I was forty-eight years old and six months pregnant.”

Then a classic Wasserstein reversal: from dramatic revelation to wry punch line in an instant.

“It’s not like I got knocked up,” she wrote. “Most forty-eight-year-old women don’t.”

She wrote about Sandra’s death—how she, Wendy, grieved and then reconciled herself to a life of childlessness, just as she became pregnant, when a last-ditch effort at in vitro fertilization took hold. Her due date was Christmas. At the end of August, she’d planned to take a trip to London but ended up going straight to Mount Sinai Hospital from Fay Francis’s funeral.

Wendy was hospitalized immediately and confined to bed rest; she was at risk for preeclampsia, a dangerous condition that could lead to liver and kidney failure. Pregnancy had not diminished her power of recall: Participants confirmed that the
New Yorker
piece contained conversations they’d had with Wendy almost verbatim.

Though she distracted herself by telling jokes, she understood the gravity of her situation. “Preeclampsia, I came to learn, is better known by the name toxemia,” she wrote. “It is most often diagnosed by protein in the patient’s urine, swelling of extremities, and hypertension. In a pregnant woman, the condition can lead to a seizure, and possibly a coma.”

Wendy wrote about calling Jane Rosenthal and telling her what was going on. Rosenthal, an experienced movie producer, knew how to get things done. She put in a call to William Ivey Long, who was in the middle of a dress rehearsal for
Contact,
about to become a hit musical. Rosenthal instructed him to “get up to Mount Sinai” and redecorate Wendy’s room. She might be in the hospital for a prolonged spell.

He obeyed. “At nine in the morning, William arrived with an armful of coordinated blue floral curtains, pillows and Monet posters,” Wendy wrote. “The room, formerly a beige netherworld, became the decorator showroom of the second floor.”

She described William as “my fertility confidant.” His more complicated relationship with her went unrecognized.

She called the Princeton theater department to say she wouldn’t be able to teach her scheduled playwriting course that fall.

Gerry Gutierrez showed up. “Your ex-husband is here,” a nurse informed Wendy.

At first, Wendy wrote, “I had no idea whom she could be talking about.”

The complications mounted.

A week before entering the hospital, Wendy had told Lola about the pregnancy, thinking she was far enough along to bring her mother into the loop.

But now, with the changed circumstances, Wendy was loath to reveal her whereabouts. She maintained an attitude toward her mother that was both defensive and protective.

“The last time my mother, Lola Wasserstein, had been in a hospital, she had watched her oldest daughter die of cancer,” she wrote. Wendy left a message on her mother’s machine, pretending that she had taken the planned trip to London, to visit Flora Fraser, a friend there.

“Hello, Mother, I’m still in England with Flora,” she said. “I’m having a wonderful time.”

Twelve days into her stay, there was bad news. Her blood platelets had dropped, and Wendy learned that Bruce and Claude had booked the delivery room across the hall from her for the following week. Their second child was due.

Four days later, at 12:45 P.M., on September 12, 1999, Wendy was wheeled into the operating room with her two obstetricians, two nurses, an anesthesiologist—all women, she observed—and Gutierrez. Less than two hours later, she had a baby via cesarean section, weighing 790 grams, or one pound twelve ounces.

Bruce showed up at the hospital and asked to see the baby. When asked for ID, he said, “I’m Bruce Wasserstein. I’m the baby’s father.”

The nurse said someone else had said he was the father, referring to Gerry Gutierrez.

“Yes,” said Bruce. “That’s right. Well, he’s the father and I’m the father.”

The drama became even more convoluted. On September 19, 1999, seven days later, Bruce and Claude’s second son—Dash Philippe Wasserstein—was born, in the same hospital, just before the first birthday of his brother, Jack Dumas Wasserstein. Bruce was the designated “father” of two newborns, with two separate mothers.

Wendy described the events as a Molière farce.

The “Nipple Nazis” invaded to teach her how to pump breast milk.

Lola showed up, uninvited, wearing black leather pants, a multicolored sweater, and a bright knit cap. Morris sat silently by.

“We saw the baby,” Lola said. “She’s very little.”

Wendy ate orange Jell-O and didn’t reply.

“We thought you didn’t want to see us, but your father had an appointment here at Gerontology,” Lola said.

“Are you O.K., Dad?” Wendy asked.

“He’s fine,” Lola replied.

“Lola is my father’s official spokesperson,” Wendy commented.

Wendy softened. “Mother, I want you to go back to see the baby and tell her you’re her grandma,” she said, taking Lola’s hand. “I want you to pass your energy on to her. I want you to teach her how to survive!”

Lola dropped Wendy’s hand. “She’s my grandchild! Of course she’ll survive!”

“Later,” Wendy wrote, “my sister Georgette told me that when our mother first saw my baby and heard the details of my delivery she cried as inconsolably as she had when Sandra died.”

Wendy described visiting her doll-size daughter in the neonatal intensive-care unit, where the tiny premature babies wait to grow in Isolettes, lined up against walls decorated with a border of rabbits and teddy bears floating in hot-air balloons.

She hesitated to hold her daughter, who was so small and attached by wires to the incubator. “Lucy Jane was almost weightless,” Wendy wrote. “Her tiny legs dangled like a doll’s. Her diaper was the size of a cigarette pack. I opened my sweater and put her inside. Her face was the size of a small apple. She wore a tiny pink-and-blue-striped cap that made her look like Santa’s tiniest elf.”

Wendy explained why she’d named her Lucy. “When she waved to me from the sonogram I thought of her as Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, saying hello,” like in the Beatles song.
¹⁸

Wendy was discharged from the hospital the day before Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, three weeks after she had entered. James Lapine and Heidi Ettinger took her home. But Lucy would be staying in the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) for a while, most likely until December 14, Wendy’s original due date.

It would be some time before Lucy Jane was out of danger. Wendy came to the hospital twice a day, bringing “ready-to-go bottles of home-pumped milk.” The baby received the milk through a tiny tube that released drops into her nose.

Lucy improved more quickly than expected, and just before Thanksgiving she was ready to go home.

The
New York Times
wrote a story.

“The Newest Wasserstein Creation Comes Home,” announced the headline.

The first few paragraphs capture the essence:

Say hello to Lucy Jane Wasserstein. Mother: Pulitzer-prize winning playwright, Wendy Wasserstein. Father: not yet announced. Born: Sept. 12, 1999, in Mount Sinai Hospital, New York. Weight: 790 grams, under 2 lbs. And what a production it was!

The director Gerald Gutierrez (“The Heiress,” “A Delicate Balance”) was in the delivery room. The costume designer William Ivey Long (“Crazy for You,” “Chicago,” “Guys and Dolls”) decorated the hospital room. Meryl Streep, Ms. Wasserstein’s friend from the Yale Drama School, sneaked in to see the baby, incognito. The writer James Lapine (“Passion,” “Sunday in the Park With George”) and the set designer Heidi Ettinger (“Big River,” “The Secret Garden”) brought mother and baby home.

“If you haven’t won a Tony, can you go?” Ms. Ettinger asked as she waited outside Mount Sinai’s intensive care unit for Lucy Jane to come out in her car seat for the cab ride to Ms. Wasserstein’s apartment on the Upper West Side.

T
he father would never be announced, because Wendy couldn’t decide what she was going to tell Lucy Jane about how she came into being. “I don’t want Lucy to necessarily know about that,” she told her assistants, referring to the in-vitro fertilization process.

The complications Wendy wrote about were minor ripples compared with the tidal waves of feeling her pregnancy (and descriptions of it) stirred up among friends and family. “The article is the truth with a nice smile on it,” said Cindy Tolan, her assistant. “Without the complications of relationships, people being iced out, hurt.”

William Ivey Long was particularly devastated by Wendy’s decisions—personal and editorial—and with good reason. His version of Lucy Jane’s birth story, while overlapping with Wendy’s, provides valuable clues to her strategy for controlling her life’s narrative.