Wendy and the Lost Boys (6 page)

Mitch couldn’t relate to the girls and couldn’t stand Bruce. “He wasn’t a nice kid,” he said. “Bruce believed that he knew it all and that he was king.”

For Georgette, who was in junior high school, having the older boys in the house was exciting. She didn’t reveal to her friends the fact that they were cousins, pretending that Barry was her boyfriend, a ruse she could pull off because they attended different schools.

Mitch lasted only a year. Already a college student, he felt he was old enough to stay out late. When he did, Lola locked the screen door so he couldn’t get into the house. He simply took the door off the hinges, which infuriated her.

Mitch left abruptly, without telling Lola, and went to live with his father’s cousins. He didn’t speak to Lola and Morris again for six years.

For Wendy the cousins were just another addition to a lively collection of people who were older than she was. Her friend Gaya was impressed when she came to visit. “She lived in a big, beautiful corner house with cool older siblings,” Gaya said. “There were a lot of cool people around.”

None was cooler than Sandy, on the rare occasions she came home to visit. After separating from her husband at twenty-one and leaving for London, she returned to Brooklyn only twice during the five years she lived abroad. In England she began a career in advertising, reinventing herself along the way. When she came home, she was transformed into a thinner, crisper version of herself. She was more tailored, more elegant, more British.

Sandy was now neat and precise, in direct contradiction to Lola’s chaotic housekeeping. Unlike her mother, who avoided the kitchen as much as she could, Sandy had become a gourmet cook. She knew how to make mysterious French dishes like cassoulet.

She told the family she was now to be referred to as Sandra, not Sandy.

Wendy was dazzled.

On one of Sandra’s visits home, when Wendy was in third grade, Lola told Sandra to pick her little sister up after her dance lessons in Manhattan. She wanted the girls to reacquaint themselves with each other. Her suggestion: Howard Johnson’s for grilled-cheese sandwiches followed by Radio City for the Rockettes and a Doris Day movie.

As an adult, Wendy wrote about that afternoon with great fondness:

My phantom neo-British sister in her gray flannel suit arrived at the dancing school, immediately warned me, “Don’t tell Mother,” and hustled me off to the House of Chan for spareribs and shrimp with lobster sauce. Neither dish was on the rabbi’s recommended dietary list at the yeshiva. I was terrified that a burning bush or two stone tablets would come hurtling through the House of Chan’s window. But I was with my glamorous big sister, who everyone told me was so brilliant, so I cleaned my plate.

After lunch, we skipped Radio City; Sandra had no interest in the Rockettes or Doris Day. We went to the Sutton Theatre on East Fifty-seventh Street, which seemed to me the ultimate in style: they served demitasse in the lobby. The feature film was
Expresso Bongo,
starring Laurence Harvey as Cliff Richard’s tawdry musical agent. All I remember is a number in a strip joint with girls dancing in minikilts and no tops. I knew that in whatever Doris Day movie we were meant to be going to she would be wearing a top.

I never told my mother, but I loved everything about that afternoon.

T
he following summer Lola decided to take Bruce and Wendy out of Yeshivah of Flatbush. Wendy was contented there, but Bruce hated it. He said he felt uncomfortable because the other children came from families that were more religiously observant than his. More likely he was upset because he’d been demoted from the A track. “You were graded on your Hebrew, and we didn’t know any of the prayers from home. We didn’t know it from services because we never went,” said Georgette. “We didn’t know that Bruce had terrible eyesight and never saw the dots that indicate vowels. He went into the not-smart class, and his pride was very hurt.”

Figuring he had learned enough to begin preparations for his bar mitzvah, Lola began to look at other schools, including Ethical Culture, where Georgette was about to begin her final year. Georgette had decided that for high school she wanted to go to Midwood, the local public school. She was already mapping a strategy to remove herself from the pressure to be extraordinary.

“I just wanted to blend in,” she said. “I saw TV shows, and I wanted us to be all American.” At fifteen she wrote in her diary, “Today was a very remorseful day. I have decided when I grow up I want to live in clean country air. I hate New York in the summer. It’s hot and humid and takes all the pep out of me.”

Wendy was never much of a journal keeper, but the summer after her third and last year at Yeshivah of Flatbush she was encouraged by Georgette to start a diary. Georgette gave her younger sister her own half-used diary, a vinyl-covered notebook decorated with the picture of a scantily dressed Indian maiden, hair done in a ponytail, a child peeping over her shoulder.

For several weeks, as she was about to turn nine years old, Wendy dutifully contributed entries, a brief but animated record of her concerns. The diary (which she often wrote as “Dairy”) reveals intelligence, a developing theatrical sensibility, and the poor spelling that might have been related to her difficulties with reading.

Apart from recording her daily activities—going to camp, being annoyed by Bruce, shopping with Lola, swimming, taking dance lessons, playing tennis—she offered brief reviews of the many plays she saw with her family.

Blue Denim
was “horrible,” while
Once Upon a Mattress
was “very good.”
Porgy and Bess,
on the other hand, “wasn’t so good.”

She was bent on self-improvement. “Dear Diary,” she wrote one day. “Forgive me for all the days that I spell your name wrong. But I just can’t spell.”

She became convinced that her ballet teacher had a crush on her. “He always tells me to come up front and to be first on line,” she wrote. “He always stares at me, too, after dancing.”

The big news that summer came with the results of the IQ tests she and Bruce took. “I have a higher IQ than Bruce for the first time in my life,” she noted.

The Yeshivah of Flatbush had done its work well. Both Wendy and Bruce were placed a grade ahead when they entered Ethical Culture that fall, he in eighth grade and she in fifth.

Wendy had been pleased by her interview there. “They said I’m the spitting image of Georgette,” she wrote in her diary. “They will give me a foundation of a lot of languages. They have a T.V.” Wendy went to bed the night before she started school at Ethical Culture excited but scared. She worried that her teacher would be an old grouch and she wouldn’t have friends. But on arrival her fears about not making friends were dispelled. Almost immediately, she became “blood sisters” with Susan Gordis, who remained a lifelong friend.

At Yeshivah of Flatbush, students marched to the beat of intellectual advancement, bent on securing a spot in the A track. At Ethical Culture, students did creative dance in science class, had mandatory woodworking, and instead of report cards received lengthy written analyses of their progress, almost always encouraging. Most of the students were Jewish, and they had to endure weekly ethics instruction, but the school’s religion was secular spirituality.

Children who lived far from the school were picked up in limousines.

On birthdays the children received red pencils inscribed, “Ethical Culture wishes you a happy birthday.”

Wendy entered this cozy, cosseted world and was happy.

“Today was the first day of school.” She wrote in her diary. “I made friends already. Blood sisters. I like Miss Lucky. The work wasn’t hard. The car over is nice. Today we had shop. Love, Wendy.”

Wendy’s favorite class was interpretive dance with Adele Janovsky. She encouraged the children to dance the myth of Persephone with bright scarves in Prospect Park and used choreography to illustrate the difference between suspension bridges and swinging bridges. Mrs. Janovsky instructed her students, “Enunciate from the diaphragm” and “Dance to the colors,” as they beat out “red” and “yellow” on a tambourine.

This gentle atmosphere was too rarefied for Bruce. He dismissed his one year at Ethical as a non-event. “It wasn’t too rigorous an academic institution,” he said.

He felt his education began when he entered the McBurney School, a college preparatory school for boys run by the YMCA, in Manhattan. Its graduates included J. D. Salinger, the celebrated author of
Catcher in the Rye
and
Franny and Zooey
. But another McBurney graduate would capture Bruce’s imagination: Felix Rohatyn, the financier who became the legendary managing director of Lazard Frères, the most powerful and most secretive of the old Wall Street investment firms. One day Bruce would take Rohatyn’s place there.

W
endy’s warmest childhood memories were associated with the family’s annual pilgrimages by train, and then plane, to Miami Beach during Christmas vacation. The Wassersteins were part of the annual southern migration of prosperous New York Jews, who stayed in marbled extravaganzas like the Fontainebleau or the Deauville, or lesser hotels, the Art Deco gems with pretentious airs, like the Sans Souci or the Casablanca.

Lola dragged her mink coat along—so what if it was seventy-five degrees outside? The family heard Harry Belafonte sing at the Eden Roc, they built sand castles on the beach, and they danced poolside to the music of Latin combos.

Every year, according to Wendy, her mother reenacted a comic routine that added a new dimension to Lola’s pushiness. In this scenario her mother’s unwillingness to be overlooked was acceptable, enlisted in the cause of social justice:

In the 1950s Arthur Godfrey owned what was rumored to be an anti-Semitic hotel in Miami Beach—a glaring and odious anomaly, almost a contradiction in terms. The Kenilworth was billed as a retreat for those who preferred to be with people from “your own background and taste.” Every year my mother would take my brother and me to the front desk at The Kenilworth and ask for directions to “the Cohen Bar Mitzvah.” And every year she would be admonished, “Madame, there is no Cohen Bar Mitzvah here.”

Twenty-five years later, when Wendy had begun to make her mark as a playwright, she tried to capture her feelings about her childhood years in a musical comedy called
Miami.
Significantly, she set the play in 1959, as John F. Kennedy, then a young senator from Massachusetts, was running for president of the United States. During the crucial penultimate scene, a campaign slogan appears in skywriting: KENNEDY FOR PRESIDENT, LEADERSHIP FOR THE FUTURE.

Just as that era represented, for the Baby Boom generation, the last convincing pretense of national innocence,
Miami
for Wendy evokes a memory of childhood pleasures and angst, when family togetherness meant everything.

The play reveals intense longing for a connection that was bound to change, if not disappear. Most striking is the bond between two main characters, a twelve-year-old named Cathy and Jonathan, the sixteen-year-old brother she worships. Cathy and Jonathan are stand-ins for Wendy and Bruce.

At the end of the play, Jonathan tells Cathy: “What really matters to Mom and Dad is bringing your family to Miami every year whether you had a good season or a bad season. But what matters to me is going to be very different from that. I know I won’t grow up to be like Daddy. He’s a very good man, but he’s not going to change the world.”

The sister responds, “I probably won’t be like Mommy, either. I mean, I want to have babies and a husband like Mommy. But I’m funnier than Mommy. I want to be Lucille Ball, too.”

While developing the character of Cathy, the playwright scribbled notes that offer insight into how she regarded herself at age twelve:

Massively uncomfortable with herself, especially physically, ” Wendy wrote. “She sees herself as grotesquely overweight but in reality she is plump. Not a cheerleader type, not unattractive. Very self-conscious. Her clothing conceals rather than reveals. She is not pathetic. She is liked, terrifically bright. She feels a need to please therefore she is funny, charming and overly sensitive to other people’s need.

Despite this recollection of adolescent self-doubt, Wendy didn’t intend to leave the impression that she’d had a miserable childhood. A poignant sentimentality suffuses
Miami,
particularly in the final scenes.

Toward the end, after the brother threatens to disrupt the family vacation but then reconciles, he tenderly asks his sister, “Did you enjoy your vacation?”

After acknowledging that the weather hadn’t been great and that their hotel’s nouveau riche pretensions were silly, she responds, “All in all, I had a lovely time.”

Despite this warm gloss, Lola’s children emerged from childhood carrying the indelible imprint of their mother’s Darwinian ethos. “If you’re smart, you take a leap and go first,” the brother explains to his sister in
Miami.
“If you’re stupid, you wait and look around and you’re moving with a herd of cattle. And if you’re slow, you get left behind.”

WENDY WAS ONLY TWELVE WHEN SHE STARTED HIGH SCHOOL.

Three

A GIRL’S EDUCATION

1963-67

In the fall of 1963,
Wendy entered the all-female Calhoun School in Manhattan, a consequential change, not just of schools but of expectations and attitudes. The students at Calhoun seemed quite sophisticated to the sheltered girl, commuting from Brooklyn, beginning high school young, a month before her thirteenth birthday.

Her sweet, accommodating nature helped her to adapt. Just as she had at Ethical Culture and before that at Yeshivah of Flatbush, she easily made friends. Ilene Goldsmith was one of them, attracted to Wendy’s warmth and sense of fun. Early into that first school year, Morris and Lola picked Ilene and Wendy up at Calhoun in the cinnamon-colored Jaguar. (The Jaguar was no longer an embarrassment, now that Wendy was enrolled in a fancy girls’ school.) They drove home to Brooklyn, the trip to the outer borough an adventure for Ilene, raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Even the car ride was festive; the backseat was filled with ribbons from Morris’s factory. When they arrived at the big house on Avenue N, the girls went upstairs to Wendy’s room, shut the door, put on dancing shoes, and spent the afternoon trying to work out the steps to Prokofiev’s
Romeo and Juliet.
Ilene never topped five feet, two inches; Wendy had long, slender legs but was fleshy. Both girls took classes for years and—despite the physical improbability—dreamed of being ballerinas.

Lola periodically poked her head in to ask the girls if they wanted something to eat. She also advised them that if they wanted to be dancers, they would have to marry someone who could take care of them.

Getting married was something they thought about, even in ninth grade. Ilene and Wendy had long discussions about
Marjorie Morningstar
and whether the book’s ending was positive or depressing. Marjorie Morgenstern, who gives herself the fanciful stage name “Morningstar,” is the heroine of Herman Wouk’s bestselling novel, a soap opera–worthy tale about a beautiful young Jewish woman torn between rejecting and respecting her parents’ values. Published in 1955 and made into a movie starring Natalie Wood and Gene Kelly in 1958, the story of Marjorie’s plight continued to capture an essential dilemma for ambitious girls, including high-school freshmen like Wendy and Ilene. They identified with Marjorie, the daughter of immigrant parents moving up the social scale, and her fantasies of becoming an actress. Wendy and Ilene wanted to be dancers, or
something
worthy of their talents. Like Marjorie, they were determined not to “grow up” and become “Shirleys,” Wouk’s designation for pampered princesses preordained to be suburban housewives.

Wendy and Ilene read and wept over Marjorie’s fate—she wound up a Shirley after all. They were also torn. Would it be so bad to marry a doctor or a lawyer? But as they were asking the question, it was changing. Why shouldn’t they
become
doctors or lawyers?

All the Wasserstein children felt pressure to succeed, but their mother made it clear her expectations were different for girls and boys. For Wendy’s thirteenth birthday, Lola gave her daughter one-on-one personal training at the Helena Rubinstein Charm School, where Wendy learned that she must never carry a schoolbag on her shoulders as well as the proper way to enter and exit a taxi (slide the derriere in first, out last). What Wendy wanted, however, was the present that Bruce had received for his bar mitzvah,
Richard Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels,
a travel guide to “the wonders of both the Orient and the Occident.” She stole the book and studied the possibilities it contained, ranging from “New York, City Extraordinary,” to “Blue Grotto, Cavern of Loveliness,” to the Taj Mahal and Timbuktu.

In 1963, the year Wendy entered Calhoun, Betty Friedan published
The Feminine Mystique,
the manifesto that pronounced the exalted life of the American housewife a sham. Women made up about 33 percent of the workforce, but few held positions of power. There were two women senators in the U.S. Congress elected in 1960 and seventeen women in the 435-member House of Representatives.

Wendy looked to the exceptions, like her sister Sandra, already married and divorced and back in New York after her London escapade. Sandra now worked at General Foods, not in some lowly position as a secretary or a telephone operator but as an account executive for Maxwell House coffee. That seemed much better than serving a husband coffee!

Wendy also had another role model, this one larger than life and even more enchanting than Sandra: Doris Day, the pert blond actress adept at playing characters whose deceptive wholesomeness camouflaged ambition, brains, and a healthy sexual appetite. Doris Day movies were often fluffy romantic comedies, but the leading lady was portrayed as an interesting career woman—an interior decorator in
Pillow Talk,
an advertising executive in
Lover Come Back,
a journalism professor in
Teacher’s Pet.
Doris was nice but firm, smart,
and
feminine.

As an adult, Wendy would reflect on how those movies influenced her. “Doris in her heyday was, despite her career-woman status, neither bitter nor desperate nor cold,” she wrote. “She was not a spinster who raged against her biological clock or cried herself to sleep because she was still on the shelf at twenty-five. Doris was a gal on the town, a metropolitan
mensch
with a rich, full life.”

But Doris also made Wendy realize something about herself. “I never thought of myself as undesirable or unattractive, frankly, until I turned twelve and began watching all these movies in which none of the men ever fell in love with anybody who looked remotely like me,” she told an interviewer. “No one was ever Jewish, no one was hardly ever brunette.”

At Calhoun, Wendy was just beginning her life as “gal on the town.” The big move came after her freshman year. Georgette had already left for college, and Bruce was entering the University of Michigan. Home, for Wendy, became something else entirely. Morris and Lola packed up their rambling house, meant for a passel of children, and moved to an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, trading their backyard for Central Park, quiet tree-lined streets for nonstop urban buzz.

The Upper East Side carried the connotation of wealth and status; living there was a nice mark of achievement, but not nearly the end of the game for Lola and Morris. He was still a young man, in his early forties when they moved, not yet ready to clip coupons. Wasserstein Brothers continued to prosper. Wendy told her friends her father had invented velveteen; the actual product was more prosaic, crushed imitation velvet used for jeans. In 1968 Morris took out a patent on a better way to make ribbons, without the ends unraveling. The family’s real-estate holdings began to rival the ribbon and textile business. Lola and Morris’s travels expanded beyond Miami Beach to Europe and then the world.

The neighborhood was ritzy, the apartment less so; 150 East Seventy-seventh Street was a sixteen-story grayish white brick architectural nonentity. The building had been constructed just a few years earlier, and it provided the functional luxuries of a doorman and a lobby but little grace. They were right in the middle of the city hubbub, next to the Number 6 subway on the Lexington Avenue line. The three-bedroom apartment was spacious and airy, with French doors leading to a den, yet much smaller than the Brooklyn house. Wendy’s bedroom contained twin beds, one for Georgette when she came home from college. There was one glamorous note, a terrace off the living room with views of “New York, City Extraordinary,” as if taken from the pages of
Richard Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels.

Lola decorated the place with a mixture of domestic indifference and free-spirited impulse. She plunked down furniture they’d brought with them—a large sofa with huge tassels hanging over the edge, a footstool covered in a needlepoint canvas. One day, in a fit of artistic inspiration, she splatter-painted the kitchen floor, in homage to the abstract expressionist artist Jackson Pollock. On another occasion she strung lemons in the chandelier.

Food preparation stopped altogether. Lola’s cupboards were noticeably bare. The deli downstairs provided morning coffee; takeout was readily available. But for special occasions, Morris and Lola returned to the “old country”—to Brooklyn. “They drove an hour to Cookys restaurant on Avenue M in Brooklyn to pick up Thanksgiving for 20 to go,” Wendy remembered. “My parents were smuggling cranberry sauce and potato kugel over inter-borough lines.”

Freed from the burden of managing a big house and doing the laundry of many children, Lola devoted more and more time to her passion. After sending her girls to dance classes all those years, she now sent herself, sometimes taking as many as four classes a day. She began wearing leotards as streetwear and pared down further, becoming not just slim but a muscled reed.

Wendy was now the only child at home, living in a vastly different location from where she grew up with her siblings. She and her parents had to adjust to a new family configuration while contending with “the city,” with all its promise and excitement—and its tension. These changes were plenty for an adolescent girl to absorb, but there was more. All that was happening in Wendy’s life was magnified by the gathering momentum of a dangerous, exhilarating decade.

The sixties were roaring through New York, calling everything into question, creating a fabulous din of provocation and creativity. Civil rights, pop art, the Beatles, feminism, pacifism, and protest—the world was changing fast. Two months after Wendy began high school, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Nothing seemed safe.

For Wendy, as for so many of her contemporaries, the Kennedy assassination was etched in memory. “I was on an escalator in B. Altman’s Department Store in New York City when I heard that President Kennedy had been shot,” she recalled. “I was on my way to my high school bazaar, and I remember watching other people on the escalator burst into tears and hold each other.”

It was a pivotal moment, the line of demarcation between conformity and rebellion, stability and chaos. In the spirit of the times, Wendy balked at rules about what girls could wear to school, cut classes to shop at Bergdorf’s, and sneaked smokes in Riverside Park. She hung out with friends at Stark’s restaurant on Ninetieth Street and Broadway, a short walk from school, drinking cherry sodas and eating candy. She was frequently marked tardy.

Still, Wendy was her parents’ daughter. She rebelled enough to be noticed and conformed enough to succeed. At Calhoun she helped put on plays, became editor of the
Calhounder,
the high-school newspaper, and wrote earnest term papers. She aimed to be original, signing her name “Wendee Wasserstein,” but sometimes she wanted to be part of the crowd, trying—with mixed success—to tame her unruly hair with rollers, hair spray, and headbands.

“Wendy would always write her papers on time and turn them in, but on the way to school she’d run it through the gutter to make it messy,” said one of her teachers. “Part of her was quite traditional, and part of her was Wendy, her own person.”

The burgeoning notion of female power was reinforced at Calhoun, where the girls encountered only the occasional male teacher. The school had been founded at the turn of the twentieth century as the Jacobi School, to educate the “Our Crowd” girls, the daughters of New York’s wealthy, secular Jews. Few girls went to college, but Jacobi and then Calhoun graduates were expected to be “accomplished”; many of them did go on to have careers, in either professional or volunteer work.

The school’s character changed significantly after World War II, when Elizabeth Parmelee and Beatrice Cosmey became headmistresses. These no-nonsense women were there when Wendy arrived, a Mutt-and-Jeff combination, one tall and skinny, the other a little fireplug, overseeing their young ladies in a time of revolution. Miss Parmelee and Miss Cosmey put college prep front and center. Some quaint customs continued, however, like the annual mother-daughter luncheon and fashion show, a fund-raiser for the school, held at elegant hotels like the Plaza, the Waldorf-Astoria, and the Pierre.

Miss Parmelee and Miss Cosmey became foils for exuberant young women and fine material for a comic writer looking back on those years. “You couldn’t wear skirts that were an inch above your knees,” Wendy recalled. “I can’t tell you how many times Miss Parmelee and Miss Cosmey, our Headmistresses at the time, sent me home to change at eight-thirty in the morning. One time, I returned to the school wearing a longer skirt and bedroom slippers.”

The
Calhounder
was a proper school newspaper, dutifully reporting the results of class elections, sports tournaments, and mixers with boys’ schools (“a bevy of beauties welcomed the twenty-nine boys with great charm . . .”).

By Wendy’s senior year, however, the paper had begun to reflect the times, ever so gently. “Where the Protests Stop . . . and Peace Begins” was the headline on an article about the U.S. war in Vietnam, urging students to send aid to the Vietnamese people. In that same issue, a play was reviewed called
O the Times They Are A-Changing,
an allegorical spoof of the conflict between youth and the older generation. The play was directed by a Miss Lesser, and the cast included Wendy Wasserstein, as part of “The Ditty Bop Set.”