“No one has put into their children what I put into you, and this is the thank-you I get?” Lola said. “Who knows? Maybe I didn’t do the right thing. Maybe I shouldn’t have been there. You know, if I was your age—if I had been born when you were born—I could have been a dancer or a designer. I wouldn’t have wasted my life putting it all into you!”
Wendy couldn’t remember any more of the conversation, except that Lola’s hands were shaking, that she was crying, and that she grabbed her bag and slammed the door, yelling as she left, “I have to go kick-kick. I have to work you out of my system!”
It’s fair to say that in the fall of 1971, after Wendy returned from California, things were not going well. Despite her persistent self-doubt and her inability to be svelte, she had always felt she held a charmed spot in the family, the delightful child who entertained everyone else. Now she had a new role—the loser. What did she have to show for her Seven Sisters education? No prospects for a job and no husband on the horizon—or not one she wanted.
Look at her siblings! Sandy was remarried, to a man named Peter Schweitzer, who had been a fellow executive at General Foods and had movie-star looks, a Robert Redford type. She continued to rise through the corporate ranks. Wendy always said her sister had invented Tang, the powdered fruit drink the astronauts took to the moon. Actually, she’d managed the brand, less sexy but important enough, a breakthrough job for a woman. Sandy had accomplished all that and had a baby girl, Jenifer, born Thanksgiving weekend, 1969. Her second child, Samantha, was born in 1972, also during the holidays. Each time Sandy returned to work two weeks after giving birth. She subverted her company’s mandatory pregnancy leave by renting a hotel room across from General Foods headquarters and installing her secretary there, so she could keep working.
Georgette and Albert were still living in New Haven, where Georgette had provided Lola and Morris with two granddaughters, Tajlei and Melissa.
Bruce, only three years older than Wendy, already had a joint degree from Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School. While he was still in law school, he coedited a book with Mark J. Green, known as a top lieutenant in Nader’s Raiders, the collection of disciples who flocked to Washington, D.C., to work for Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate. Bruce himself had worked for Nader one summer while he was at Harvard.
The Green-Wasserstein collaboration, called With Justice for Some: An Indictment of the Law by Young Advocates, is an idealistic collection of thirteen essays by law students and recent law graduates, manuscript typed by Bruce’s wife, Lynne. In a passionate editors’ note, Green and Wasserstein discuss their aim: “The chapters of this book probe the failures of contemporary law, offer proposals for change, and describe some victims—blacks, women, students, servicemen, consumers, the poor.”
By the time Wendy returned from college, Bruce had changed course, moving away from worry about institutional injustices toward his future in mergers and acquisitions. He won a fellowship to study law and economics at Cambridge University and spent a year abroad with Lynne. After that he assured Lynne he would be ready to start a family. He wanted no fewer than five children—a dynasty, like the Rothschilds.
No wonder Wendy felt like taking to bed.
“I know I have to leave here,” she wrote to Ruth Karl. “The dust on the piano was shaped into ‘Wendy get married’ when I woke up this morning.”
The family got together frequently. Outsiders (and the children’s spouses fell into this category) were treated warmly but were aware that they would never be part of the inner circle. “I felt absolutely welcomed into the family,” said Peter Schweitzer, Sandra’s second husband. “But it was very difficult. You’re in a room where you’re almost constantly competing. They’re all high achievers, highly intelligent. There wasn’t a lot of goofing around playing touch football. You always had to be at your intellectual best. It can be tiring.”
None of the children were exempt from Lola’s sharp appraisals, although Wendy couldn’t help but notice that she was often criticized for flaws that went unnoticed in Bruce. Like Wendy, Bruce was overweight and sloppy, and he had the same flat feet as his younger sister. In his case these attributes—along with his poor eyesight—became pluses, exempting him from the draft. In Wendy’s case . . . blechhh.
The previous spring Wendy had been talking to David Rimmer about their post-graduation plans. They’d met at Amherst, where they both were involved in theater. He was shaggy-haired and lanky, with off-center, almost-handsome good looks. After Kent State, and the subsequent eruptions on campus, Rimmer had contacted local high schools and community colleges in the area. He offered to produce some of their Amherst plays about Vietnam and racism and other political issues. Wendy became part of the traveling consciousness-raising dramatic troupe, working as a crew member.
They became even closer friends senior year, when Rimmer directed the Peter Pan that Wendy had choreographed.
With graduation weighing on them, the two sat around with a group of friends wondering what they were going to do the following year. Rimmer mentioned a possibility. One of the political plays he’d taken on the road at Amherst was written by Israel Horovitz, a playwright whose work had been making a stir in New York. He’d won several prizes, including an Obie Award for The Indian Wants the Bronx, which starred an impressive emerging young actor, Al Pacino, also awarded an Obie for his performance. Rimmer had gotten to know Horovitz, who liked the student director’s moxie and took him under his wing. Horovitz was teaching a playwriting workshop at City College in New York in the fall, part of a new master’s program in creative writing. He told Rimmer he should sign up.
Rimmer didn’t have an agenda beyond “why not?” When Wendy told him she was going to apply to law school, he said, “I’ve got this playwriting workshop thing with Israel. You want to join me?”
It was an easy decision. She, too, had nothing else to do.
Things were looser then. The English department at City College had just announced the creative-writing program in April, five months before it was to begin. Besides Horovitz’s drama course, the teachers included Gwendolyn Brooks, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, and Joseph Heller, whose 1961 novel Catch-22 had become a cultural phenomenon, its wild black humor and antiwar attitude resonating with the Vietnam generation. Only twenty students were to be admitted.
New York City, 1971, was Fear City, dirty and dangerous. The crime rate had been soaring throughout the 1960s; 1,823 murders were committed the year Wendy came home, up from 548 in 1963. Racial and generational tensions were high. Two years earlier Mario Puzo’s bestselling novel The Godfather elevated the Mafia to mythic status, with its romantic/realistic rendering of the illicit world of drugs and racketeering. Though the story was set in the 1940s and ’50s, the book’s cynical vision of capitalism and crime meshed with the country’s general sense of unease.
As the war in Vietnam dragged on, grit and disillusion had become the cultural norms, in politics and in art. The top-secret Department of Defense documents that became known as the “Pentagon Papers”—which detailed U.S. involvement in Vietnam since 1945—were leaked to the press by Daniel Ellsberg that summer. In November David Rabe’s Sticks and Bones opened at the Public Theater, about a soldier’s return from Vietnam and his family’s inability to comprehend what their blinded son has gone through or who he has become. The play was a sequel to Rabe’s The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, the brutal portrait of a young American soldier in Vietnam, written from Rabe’s experience. The Oscar for Best Picture that year went to The French Connection, William Friedkin’s streetwise, nerve-racking action movie about cops and narcotics smugglers
For the new college graduate, New York could be exciting or dispiriting, depending on the day, but in either case it was not the same place Wendy had left behind. Both she and her city had gone through sobering changes. She’d been a girl when she left; now she was supposed to be an adult, or on the way to becoming one.
Through David Rimmer, Wendy
had grown somewhat friendly with Israel Horovitz. In addition to taking his playwriting seminar, a couple of times she baby-sat for his three children (one of whom was Adam Horovitz, who later became Ad-Rock, of the band the Beastie Boys). Rimmer had been living at the Horovitz house but then had a falling-out with the playwright, who was in the middle of a grim divorce—and living up to his reputation as a moody character given to tantrums. Rimmer ended up leaving New York a few months into the playwriting program.
In Joseph Heller, Wendy found a kindred spirit. She met him a decade after the publication of Catch-22. By then Heller had been declared a genius and Catch-22 was acknowledged as a landmark work. There had been much critical revisionism since the original mixed reviews that had praised Heller’s ingenuity and questioned his craftsmanship, like the verdict issued by the New York Times Book Review: “Joseph Heller . . . is like a brilliant painter who decides to throw all the ideas in his sketchbooks onto one canvas, relying on their charm and shock to compensate for the lack of design.”
Heller was another Brooklyn Jew who believed that comedy—the nuttier the better—was the way to cope with distress (as well as monumental issues, like the irrational cruelty existing in man and nature). He grasped the flashes of brilliance lurking in Wendy’s writing, even though her early sketches were haphazard and occasionally incoherent.
After reading several of her papers, he told her, “Wendy this is fabulous, you’ve got a real talent here. You should stay with this.”
Heller gave Wendy something more important, perhaps, than any single lesson he might have imparted in class or perceptive comment he might have scribbled on a paper. He made her feel that she had something special to offer. This endorsement was a powerful antidote to the sense of failure that weighed on her, a load exaggerated by her having graduated without distinction and being home without any apparent goal in mind.
In future years Wendy would tell variations on an anecdote that indicated how much Heller’s approval meant to her. The story, in all its incarnations, also showed how adept she became at turning a memory—real, imagined, or embellished—into an amusing scene with a sly or outrageous punch line that simultaneously promoted and diminished herself:
Version One: Joseph Heller took her to some sort of party and introduced her as “the funniest girl in New York,” and Wendy promptly threw up.1
Version Two: She was having lunch with Joseph Heller at a fancy restaurant. Someone stopped by the table, and Heller introduced his student. “This is Wendy Wasserstein, the funniest girl in New York.” She responded by throwing up.2
Version Three: She was with a friend who introduced her to the novelistJoseph Heller as a brilliantly funny writer. She responded to his request, “Say something funny, Wendy,” by barfing on his coat.3
The classes with Horovitz and Heller awakened something profound in Wendy. At City College she began to work on the approach that would become her signature—mingling memory, observation, reality, and fiction. The “Cuisinart method,” Bruce called it. “She had perfect-pitch memory for conversations, but then she’d put them in the Cuisinart and they’d come out in random ways,” he said. “So if you knew all these things, they’d come out having nothing to do with the particular fact lines.”
She began to take herself seriously, relying more confidently on the entertaining voice found in her letters and journals.
It didn’t happen overnight. The early experiments led one teacher—most likely Heller—to comment on one paper, “Character is left kind of thin—a habit you have—and without knowing her much better, we don’t have much. We’ve got the wit, we’ve got the discerning comments about people and behavior, but we don’t have any emotional depth. W.W., you’ve got to decide soon: either fiction or funny essays.”
The old maxim sank in: Write what you know. Wendy turned to the material she had used many times in late night gab sessions and letters to friends: The Family Wasserstein. In early fragments of plays and stories, she didn’t even bother to change the names. Her characters are named Brucey, Sandy, Georgette, Lola, Morris, Lyn, and Peter—but never Wendy.
Lynne Killin Wasserstein, Bruce’s wife, enjoyed Wendy’s company and for a time considered Wendy her best friend. They commiserated with each other about mothers who tried to control their daughters’ weight. Like Wendy, Lynne was in awe of Lola, without having to directly bear the sting of her criticisms. Lynne admired the intense devotion to family that led Morris and Lola to return early from vacation when Georgette went into labor with her first child, so they could be in New Haven for the baby’s birth.
After Lynne and Bruce returned to New York from Cambridge, the couple moved into an apartment at Eighty-second Street and Second Avenue, just a few blocks from Morris and Lola’s. Bruce had toyed with the idea of becoming a small-town newspaper editor or practicing law in Alaska. Instead he accepted a position as a starting lawyer at the prestigious firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, the epitome of the old-boy network, the antithesis of Nader’s Raiders.
During Bruce’s flirtation with leftist politics, he demanded justice for all, but that didn’t mean he wanted his wife to become a feminist. When Lynne attended a couple of women’s-lib meetings in Cambridge, he threatened to divorce her. When he complained that she didn’t cook him enough steak—the way his mother did—Lynne bought steak.
Lynne and Bruce often double-dated with Wendy and James Kaplan, who had fallen back into a relationship when Wendy moved back to New York. James was in the city, in his first year at Columbia Law School. Bruce and James had much in common. Both had been involved in liberal politics; in the fall of 1972, James—dogged champion of lost causes—was campaigning for George McGovern, the Democratic candidate for president. Bruce was a law associate; James was in law school. Both had Ivy League credentials—between them Yale, Harvard, and Columbia.
As a Columbia student, James could buy tickets to plays for twenty-five cents each, so they were often at the theater. They prowled the city, having dinner at Umberto’s Clam House, where the mobster Joey Gallo was shot. They went to concerts and movies.
It often seemed to Lynne and James that the couple they were double-dating was Wendy and Bruce. Wendy made snide comments about Lynne to James, referring to her sister-in-law as Bruce’s cocker spaniel, because she was so docile. Wendy and Bruce were the soul mates, with their own references and secret jokes, their private way of looking at the world. Bruce often called Lynne “Wendy,” even when it was just the two of them alone together, Lynne and Bruce.
Bruce’s wife said she didn’t mind. “I loved Wendy,” she said. “I loved Morris, and I loved Lola. The attachment was very strong.”
Her feelings toward them never changed—even after Wendy’s appraisal of Lynne’s relationship with Bruce went public and changed the course of Lynne’s life.
Encouraged by her teachers at CCNY, Wendy decided to try earning money from her writing. A longtime fan of television soap operas, she got an assignment from a magazine to do an article about them. After she turned in the piece, before it was published, the magazine went out of business.
She applied for jobs as a copywriter at advertising agencies, with no luck. She sent stories and articles to Redbook magazine, the New York Times, and the New Yorker—all were returned with form rejection notes.
Discouraged with the prospects for a profitable writing career, she took the law boards again. Her new score was still mediocre, but she applied to law schools anyway to satisfy Lola. As before, she wasn’t accepted anywhere. She didn’t have a chance at Columbia or New York University. After she was rejected from Fordham Law, Lola suggested she lower her sights for a lesser school. Wendy couldn’t tolerate this idea, not with Bruce having gone to Harvard, Rita Wasserstein (Aunt Florence’s daughter) at NYU, and James at Columbia.
Wendy was ambivalent. Determined not to be rejected from law school yet again, she tested two options, as though asking fate to decide which road she should take. Should she follow her father, brother, and siste
r into the business world? Or should she pursue the gift that was unique to her, even though it was unlikely to lead to financial security? She applied to both Yale School of Drama and Columbia Business School.
James sympathized with Wendy’s struggle to find herself and tried to be there for her throughout this difficult period. He thought they were growing closer, although when he raised the subject of getting an apartment together in Brooklyn, she wasn’t interested.
Their families—including Bruce and Lynne—thought they might get married.
Wendy was wary of James’s mother. She saw Muriel as a generation ahead of Lola in terms of aspiration and status. Muriel had sent her daughters to Dalton, which had rejected Wendy. Wendy told James that she thought his mother saw her as a schlumpy girl from Brooklyn and not appropriate for her son.
One night James came home after a date with Wendy and woke his parents up. He was shaken. “I don’t know what to do,” he told them. “I was in the living room waiting for Wendy when her father came out and said, ‘Well, Jamey, you’ve been going with Wendy for a while, how about marrying her?’ ”
James had been so startled he said to Morris, “Maybe you should ask Wendy what she has to say.”
Wendy later apologized for her father. “He’s half in the Old World,” she said. But she didn’t seem concerned that James hadn’t taken Morris up on his offer.
James might not have been ready to commit to marriage, but he was disappointed in Wendy’s calm reaction, which he took as a sign of indifference. “My sense was that she really wasn’t that interested, or she would have been more upset about the whole thing,” he said.
Wendy and the Lost Boys Page 11
