Wendy and the Lost Boys (44 page)

She had practical reasons for accepting the fellowship, too. She wrote Susan Wright, director of the endowment, “I also have a play that will be at Lincoln Center the following season about a professor at a small New England College. Perhaps we could do a reading and I can talk about it afterwards.”

Susan Wright was Dartmouth’s first lady, not just because she was married to the president but because she had worked at the college for thirty years as a student adviser. She’d been looking forward to meeting Wendy, with whom she felt a kinship. Susan was born in 1946, just four years before Wendy, and graduated from Vassar as part of the last all-women class. She felt that
The Heidi Chronicles
was her story.

On March 29 Wendy arrived at Montgomery House on Occom Pond, where she would be staying. She brought along an animated entourage of young people: Michael Barakiva, her assistant who had directed the one-acts in Washington, was going to help with auditions and direct the student readings of
Third;
Lucy Jane; and Sarah Saltzberg, on a break from rehearsals for
Spelling Bee,
which was about to open on Broadway. Wendy remained a terrible driver, so Sarah had driven the “Ginger Mobile,” the ancient Toyota Camry named in memory of Wendy’s cat.

Upon seeing Wendy, Susan almost froze. The play wright’s friendly e-mail notes hadn’t given warning: Her physical appearance was distressing, almost freakish—puffy face, eyes unable to focus, mouth askew, the look of a stroke victim.

Wendy immediately put her hostess at ease, telling jokes, making Wright feel as though nothing could be more exciting for the playwright than to be at Dartmouth, talking to
her.
She invited Wright to sit in on auditions for the student production of
Third,
where Wendy came to life, offering adamant opinions on casting.

Wendy returned alone a month later. Her three days were packed: meetings with students who’d won a Dartmouth play competition, interviews with the student and local newspapers, rehearsals at night for
Third,
the performance, the cast party, answering questions from a classroom full of English majors. On April 27, at 5:00 P.M., she delivered the centerpiece of the Montgomery Fellow program, a public lecture open to students and the community. The five-hundred-seat Hopkins Center was full.

With her talk, titled “My Life in the Theater,” and her easy informality, she sparked an immediate connection with the audience that transcended her disfigurement. She inspired the students with her own experiences and reassured them that she’d had no idea where she was going when she graduated from college. “She told them you don’t open the
New York Times
with an ad saying ‘Playwright wanted: fifty thousand dollars a year,’” said Peter Hackett, head of the theater department. “It was particularly pertinent to Dartmouth students.”

The reading of
Third
the next day went well. “Wendy talked about what a great opportunity it was for her to hear it,” Hackett remembered. “It was the first time she heard it after she made significant changes, when it changed from a one-act to full length. She took notes. She was really working on it, using this reading to make more revisions.”

He looked forward to seeing her when she returned at the end of May, when she was scheduled to speak at the school’s annual Arts Awards ceremony and to mentor student playwrights.

O
n May 2 Wendy attended the Broadway opening of
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.
Sarah Saltzberg’s diploma from Wendy’s School for Girls was a starring role in a Broadway play. The Cinderella story behind
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
was incorporated into the play’s public relations. Theater people love a good fairy tale, and this one had actually happened.

Harry Haun, a columnist for
Playbill
and a fixture on the theater beat, described how an Off-Off-Broadway play, originally called
C-R-E-P-U-S-C-U-L-E,
about spelling-bee competitions, with audience participation, had become a Broadway musical, directed by James Lapine, with music composed by William Finn. Both men were Tony winners, and, more significantly, both were friends of Wendy Wasserstein. Haun wrote:

She tends to shrug off her miracle-working. “I had a great nanny,” she says. [Yes, Wendy. Overtipping is one thing, but this is ridiculous.] She is obviously pleased it came to pass. Now she can get on with a play of her own—
Third,
which is to lead off the season at Lincoln Center this fall.

On Friday May 20, Wendy flew to Toronto with Lucy Jane to spend a couple of days with Harriet Sachs and Mary Jane Patrone, two of the Mount Holyoke friends memorialized in
Uncommon Women and Others.
Each in her way had become emblematic of their generation. Mary Jane was a high-ranking newspaper executive. Harriet was the founding partner of one of the first all-female law firms in Ontario and in 1998 was appointed to the Superior Court of Justice of Ontario. Mary Jane didn’t marry until she was in her forties, to a widower with two young children. Harriet was with the same man she began living with in 1976, a lawyer, and they had two grown children—an old-fashioned family configuration except that they’d never married. Their daughter, however, would rebel, wanting a formal marriage—to a woman.

The three Mount Holyoke classmates, separated by years and geography, lived very different lives but always stayed close, mainly by phone.

Mary Jane described her “girlfriend calls” with Wendy: “Most of the time when she called or I called, it was, ‘I have to talk to you,’ me saying, ‘This guy just broke my heart, I just got a promotion, my mother is sick.’ I would get similar calls: ‘They are going to do my play. They are not going to do my play. I’m thinking this way about this person. I have feelings that aren’t being reciprocated. Can you believe my mother is doing this!’ And sometimes she’d call and say, ‘I’m going on book tour to California, you want to come?’ ”

They showed up for each other’s events. “As you get older, that’s a rarer commodity than you think,” said Harriet. “If I had a big thirtieth birthday, a big fortieth-birthday party, my kid had a bat mitzvah, my kid was born, she came.”

Harriet was sworn in as superior court justice in January 1998, during a serious Canadian snowstorm. “Because I didn’t have a wedding, this was the most important event in my life,” she recalled. “In this huge courtroom packed full of people, all I could think of was the icy weather. I just remember looking around that courtroom looking to see if Mary Jane and Wendy were there—because otherwise it would be as if my family wasn’t there. When I saw them, I could relax and enjoy myself.”

In the spring of 2005, Harriet really needed her friends. Clay, her lifelong partner and father of her children, was recovering from heart surgery. Her other best woman friend, the closest friendship she’d formed after Mount Holyoke, had just died.

Wendy and Lucy Jane arrived early Friday May 20 without a nanny. Both Harriet and Mary Jane were shocked at their friend’s physical condition. Wendy could barely walk. Yet she had insisted on coming alone with Lucy so that Mary Jane and Harriet could get to know her. Wendy wasn’t accustomed to traveling by herself with her daughter and seemed nonplussed by the enormous effort required to take care of an active five-year-old, especially from a fifty-four-year-old woman in poor health. Everything was difficult for her: bathing Lucy, reading her a story, getting her to go to bed.

But Wendy wasn’t content to just hang out with her friends. She insisted on an excursion. They took a long walk to a park, then drove to an animal farm, which entailed more walking. That evening, as they cooked dinner at home, Wendy lay down on the floor of the kitchen. “I’m just really, really tired,” she said.

More than once Wendy said to her friends, “You need to see Lucy more.” Mary Jane felt slightly scolded but then set the feeling aside.

It was a horrible and wonderful visit. Harriet was already in rough shape when they arrived, shaken by her friend’s death and worrying about Clay. Then, during the weekend, while trying to absorb the added concern of seeing Wendy so debilitated, Harriet learned that one of her daughter’s best friends had died in an accident.

“There was so much pain in my house, but what I remember from all of it is that we were so happy to be together,” Harriet said. “We cooked and talked and were so happy to be together even though we were in so much pain.”

Wendy and Lucy Jane left Toronto early Sunday morning, May 22, so Wendy could attend the funeral of Rhoda Brooks’s mother.

When they left, Harriet was struck by a terrifying thought: “Wendy is dying.”

She immediately erased the thought.

“No,” she said to herself. “No. You just think everyone is dying.” Yet she continued to worry. Over the summer she and Mary Jane called several times, asking to visit. Wendy’s response was always the same: The time wasn’t right. When they insisted, she said, “Come for
Third.
” They agreed they would get together in October, when the play opened.

D
espite the tiring weekend in Canada, Wendy didn’t slow down. When Rhoda saw Wendy at her mother’s funeral, she thought Wendy didn’t look well and told her not to go to the cemetery after the funeral, but she insisted.

The next evening Wendy took part in a fund-raiser for the 92nd Street Y, a tribute to Cy Coleman. The legendary Broadway composer had died the previous November, at age seventy-five, leaving behind a four year-old-child who attended the Y’s nursery school with Lucy Jane. One of Coleman’s last works was the music, written with lyricist David Zippel, for Wendy’s play
Pamela’s First Musical,
which hadn’t been produced yet.

The day after the Cy Coleman tribute, Wendy returned to Dartmouth. Susan Wright saw a noticeable change in just a month. “In May she seemed seriously ill,” she said. “I was shocked at the difference. In April it was an effort, but the big difference was from April to May.”

Nevertheless Wendy fulfilled her obligations, appearing at the school’s Arts Awards ceremony and the student play competition and attending the dinner afterward. When Susan Wright dropped her at the airport, Wendy said, “I’ll see you this summer,” at which time she was to teach a course at Dartmouth’s summer school, called Finding Your Voice as a Playwright.

Later her friends asked themselves and one another: Why didn’t she take care of herself? Why did she take all those fertility medications? Wasn’t that the reason she was sick—though not a single one of Wendy’s doctors agreed there was a connection.

Why didn’t she tell anyone how sick she was? Did she know she was dying? A collective sense of guilt and jealousy would set in, as friends looked back and realized that Wendy’s gift had been to hold a mirror up to them, allowing them to see themselves in a flattering light, distracting them from looking too deeply at her. They wondered: Whom did she tell? Was there a more trusted group, an innermost core of the
very
best friends from which they were excluded?

Wendy tried to keep up her usual frantic pace. On June 1 she threw a book party at her apartment for Peter Parnell and his partner, Justin Richardson, a psychiatrist—the match made by Wendy and Jenny Lyn Bader, playwright and former assistant. The two men had written a children’s book called
And Tango Makes Three,
about a same-sex penguin family (based on a true story). On June 2 she spoke at the graduating ceremony for Open Doors, the mentoring program for high-school students that she had started. “I can say unequivocally, this is the best thing I’ve ever done,” she told them. This speech, too, was captured on video. Wendy’s features had more or less resumed normal position; she wore an attractive black dress; her hair was “done.”

It would be easy to think she was feeling better, but in fact she would soon be finding it even harder to function. The turning point came shortly after the Open Doors speech. She had taken Lucy to Chelsea Piers for a good-bye bowling date with a friend from nursery school who was moving to Connecticut. Wendy fell. After that, she used a cane.

On June 14 Heidi Ettinger, the set designer, was being honored by the League of Professional Theatre Women. Ettinger had asked Wendy to introduce her at the luncheon. “We didn’t hear and didn’t hear and didn’t hear. She said she was in Rome, but she was not, then she said she was in Rome but too ill—a whole series of things,” said Ettinger. Then, the day of the award, “Wendy sent this lovely, moving introduction which somebody read,” Ettinger said.

On June 20 another cancellation: Wendy called Susan Wright at the Montgomery Endowment. “She said she hoped I and the theater department would understand, but her doctor told her she couldn’t come because there was an inflammation,” Wright recalled. “Then she called back and said not to tell the students this, not to tell anyone.”

On June 29 Wendy met Dan Sullivan at Lincoln Center for a reading of
Third
with Dianne Wiest, Jason Ritter, and other cast members. After the reading Sullivan told Wendy there was one crucial matter that had to be dealt with before rehearsals began at the end of August. Wendy had added a character with breast cancer, who is said to be a close friend of Laurie Jameson, the feminist college professor. Sullivan didn’t understand something. If the women are such good friends, why does Nancy become so furious when Laurie offers to help her?

The scene didn’t make sense to Sullivan. “The anger of Nancy about the invasion of privacy when it’s your best friend seemed to me sort of odd and perhaps not something an audience would understand,” he said. “That ultimately began to converge with Wendy’s life in some way, because it was extremely important to her. Nancy was a surrogate for Wendy. But when I was grappling with that at the beginning, I didn’t know the circumstances of Wendy’s illness.”

Most of their subsequent discussions about the play returned to the issue of motivation. As Wendy grew noticeably sicker, Sullivan found himself talking about Nancy the character when he was trying to talk about Wendy. “It was very clear this was not something she wanted to discuss,” he said. “Indirectly, as I would talk about Nancy, I would also be talking about her. I would say, ‘I don’t know why she is so angry when all this person is trying to do is to help.’ I would have to tread very delicately, because my own feelings were wrapped up in it. She would not really respond. She would take it under advisement. Her fundamental obsession with privacy was something she was expecting an audience to simply accept.”