Wendy and the Lost Boys

by Julie Salamon

  Wendy peppered William with questions. “She would ask, ‘How do you become handicapped? How do you become retarded? What is it based on?’” said William. She didn’t say it directly, but he imagined she was trying to understand why his “damaged” sister remained at home while her brother had been banished.

  “We talked about it, and I don’t think I had the right answers she wanted,” he said. “I wasn’t hysterical enough about it, so she stopped talking about it ultimately.”

  But his attitudes toward family made a deep impression. Wendy developed a special trust in William that was evident at Yale and manifested itself more significantly in subsequent years.

  One day William told Wendy how when he was in first grade his mother had found out that her father had been married before. That was Wendy’s cue to tell him a family secret she’d just learned from her sister Sandra, one that disturbed her far more than the secrecy surrounding Abner and left her wondering, who was her family?

  During Wendy’s second year at Yale, Lola called to tell her that Sandra was divorcing Peter Schweitzer. “Be a good sister,” Lola said, and offered to send her daughters to Maine Chance, Elizabeth Arden’s luxury spa in Arizona, which catered to movie stars and other “ladies of fortune,” as Wendy called them.

  “Don’t you think my professors might notice if I’m gone a week and come back tanned and ten pounds lighter?” Wendy asked.

  “Sandra needs a rest,” Lola insisted. “What is more important?”

  Wendy acquiesced but resented her mother’s implication that what she was doing wasn’t important. She wondered if Lola would have been quite so eager for her to cut classes for a full-body massage if she had been studying heart surgery or torts and contracts.

  It wasn’t that Wendy didn’t love Sandra. She adored her. “If my father invented Velveteen, then Sandra sent Tang to the moon,” Wendy wrote, in notes for an unfinished memoir. “At some point in my mind both facts were true.”

  At age twenty-four, Wendy still regarded her thirty-seven-year-old sister as a supreme being, just as she had as a little girl in Brooklyn when Sandra popped in from England. “Sandra had dinner with men in suits,” wrote Wendy. “Sandra ordered cheese for dessert. Sandra was the world’s leading authority on sex, career counseling and men. Sandra’s weaknesses never occurred to me since my job as ‘good sister’ was never to see them.”

  The sisters arrived at the spa and soon found themselves naked in a whirlpool with Clark Gable’s widow, Kay. Wendy described the ensuing scene in a notebook:

  “Jenifer is the only one with daddy’s eyes,” I said, referring to Sandra’s six year old daughter.

  “What?” Sandra moved her head around while our sisterly flesh bobbed in the water.

  “Jenifer is the only one of us who has dad’s hazel eyes. All the rest of us have muddy brown.”

  One of the other specialties of my “good sister” entertainment act has always been self-denigrating humor.

  “Hmm?” Sandra stared at me. I couldn’t tell if I was boring her with the obvious or if she felt this was an inappropriate topic in front of the nude Mrs. Gable.

  Here was my chance for a punch line.

  “What’s the matter? You have a different father than I do?”

  “Of course I do,” she added matter of factly and shifted her weight.

  “What?” I hadn’t anticipated this kind of information as part of my sisterly spa obligation.

  “My father is George Wasserstein and so is Abner’s. He died when I was seven. I thought you knew that.”

  “No,” I giggled. I have a terrible habit of giggling when I’m nervous as if to say this really isn’t important, I’m not upset, please don’t notice me.

  “No. They never told me. And I promise you Bruce doesn’t know this, nor does Georgette.”

  Sandra hardly ever giggles.

  “That’s ridiculous. She has to know it. She’s named for my father George.”

  “Well, she’s never told me about it.”

  I giggled again.

  And that was the end of the discussion.

  Even this unsettling revelation, scribbled as an impromptu notation, is written with stage directions and comic awareness. Wendy sees the absurdity of the scene: Two sisters share an intensely personal moment, but it takes place in a hot tub, nude, in the presence of a movie star’s wife. She continues:

  I can’t remember if Kay got out of the hot tub first or after me and Sandra. But later that night I apologized to my sister for making such a big deal out of the incident in the hot tub. I have a reputation in my family for being “emotional” and “emotional” is synonymous with high strung. The best thing would be not to dwell on the fact that my older sister was suddenly my cousin. The best thing would be never to ask my mother about George because his dying must have upset her enough to begin with. The best thing would be not to figure out who really invented Velveteen.

  The order of things as she knew them had been profoundly disturbed. Whatever distress Lola caused her, Wendy had, until that moment in the hot tub, chosen to accept the family mythology as presented to her by her parents. Now she was beginning to see them as mere mortals, with vulnerabilities and concerns she hadn’t considered.

  She had been aware of George’s existence—vaguely—but knowing he was the father of her older siblings raised the specter of Lola’s individuality, apart from her position as Wendy’s mother or as an outlandish character in a comedy sketch. It also forced Wendy to consider Lola’s sexuality, something she didn’t like to think about.

  Wendy didn’t discuss her own sex life much with her friends, beyond confiding her terror of becoming pregnant (she believed that her family was unusually fertile.) When she told Chris about Sandy and Espresso Bongo, she didn’t yet describe the story with delight but rather embarrassment. The movie’s nudity had upset her, she told Chris, and so had the shrimp lunch! Though she was intimate with James Kaplan and others after him, her writing reveals discomfort with the subject of sex.

  In Uncommon Women and Others, the Holly character, based on Wendy, talks about sex:

  Holly: . . . I hate being mounted.

  Rita: Holly, pumpkin, life doesn’t really offer that many pleasures that you can go around avoiding the obvious ones.

  Holly: What kind of pleasure? There’s someone on top of you sweating and pushing and you’re lying there pretending this is wonderful. That’s not wonderful. That’s masochistic.

  Wendy seemed to take pains to make herself unattractive at times. She wore her clothes until they were unwearable and then shoved them under the bed or stuffed them in the closet. She was often oblivious to basic hygiene. Sometimes she forgot to wear a sanitary pad when she had her period and then walked around with stains on her dress. Uncomfortable with her body, she rarely undressed in front of anyone. She told Susan Blatt that sometimes she worried she might become what was then a sad but common figure on the streets of New York City—a homeless “shopping bag lady.”

  In later years Wendy talked about “a personal undertow” that began when she was in graduate school. It may or may not have been connected to the revelation in the hot tub. But it was during this period that people began speaking about the sadness they saw in Wendy, underneath the bubbly exterior.

  Everything seemed in flux. Her personal history had been abruptly rearranged. The confidence she’d acquired at City College from the endorsement of Israel Horovitz—and, more important, Joseph Heller—was being chipped away at Yale.

  Even so, despite the cool reception from Brustein and Gilman, Wendy was acquiring a constituency at the school beyond Christopher and her other friends. Alan MacVey was in the directing program, one year behind Wendy. Not long after he arrived, he wrote music for When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth, Wendy’s collaboration with Chris Durang. Later that year Wendy began showing MacVey scenes she was working on for a play based on her experiences at Mount Holyoke.

  These scenes were the beginning of Uncommon Women and Ot
hers, about young women who became friends at a Seven Sisters college during the tumultuous changes of the late 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. MacVey was assigned by Richard Gilman, head of the playwriting program, to direct the play in a workshop production. MacVey liked the writing and responded to the humor and warmth. He also felt honored to be privy to the secret world of women; there were no male characters.

  The themes of the play felt relevant to MacVey. What were highly educated women supposed to do with their diplomas? Could they reconcile careers and family? What was the nature of friendships between women?

  MacVey’s concerns about the play didn’t have to do with the writing or content but with structure and momentum. There was no plot, just a series of scenes, some poignant and some amusing. How did he make the jokes feel organic instead of merely jokes? Wendy had a habit of moving back and forth from the present to the past without figuring out theatrically how to make the shift. When he pointed this out, she quickly understood and “invented” Mrs. Plumm—conjuring up Camilla Peach, her housemother from Mount Holyoke—as a way to connect one scene to the next.

  The first read-through with her fellow writers didn’t go well. One of the men dismissed it, saying, “I just can’t get into all this chick stuff.”

  Wendy kept plugging away. By her senior year, she expanded Uncommon Women until it was seventy minutes long, and it was shown in the school’s experimental theater. The audiences at the half dozen performances were receptive, laughing in the right places.

  Yet her pleasure in this response was diminished by Brustein’s refusal to comment one way or the other. She correctly interpreted his silence as a rejection of her work. “We were almost ideological in our antirealistic view,” he said. “She was not touching on things that went deeper than the sociological.”

  The accumulation of slights and condescension culminated on graduation day. The Wasserstein family descended on New Haven in full force to celebrate Wendy’s achievement. They watched as one after another of her classmates received awards, many of them being called back for recognition a second and third time.

  They waited for Wendy’s turn, but it never came.

  Georgette ached for her younger sister. “I was embarrassed for her that there were all these awards, and very few people in her class, and they doubled up on some of them yet she got nothing.”

  Wendy made light of the snub, but it stung. That summer, back in New York but about to return to New Haven to move out of her apartment, she wrote to Ruth Karl:

  Here I am chez Lola, a graduate of Mount Holyoke, City College and Yale and considering a career in Frozen Yogurt. Has frozen yogurt come to the provinces yet? If not, please let me know. Nothing much is new. I guess I am moving out of New Haven next week, though I can’t really say where I am moving to. The last month at Yale was horrible. I felt creeping mediocrity coupled with my new personality bears a strong resemblance to Shelly [sic] Winters in the “Poseidon Adventure.”

  On graduation day playwrighting awards went to 2 women playwrights; not me. Well, that was all right. I felt it was like Amherst College agreeing to accept women after we had left. Speaking of careers, I find myself in the position of having to find work. Oh, the hob globlin[sic] of little minds! Why didn’t I marry Andy Rosenthal when he was young, Jewish and boring? I am still looking into various writing jobs, but I think I still giggle too much to be taken seriously. Also, Ruthie, in truth I don’t think I’m that good, and I guess after these years of educational pursuits I’m far more critical.

  In 1981 Robert Brustein’s memoir of his years as dean at the Yale School of Drama was published. Called Making Scenes, the book makes several references to Christopher Durang, Albert Innaurato, Meryl Streep, and Sigourney Weaver. No mention is made of Wendy Wasserstein.

  THE SEEDY STRETCH OF 42ND STREET THAT BECAME HOME TO PLAYWRIGHTS HORIZONS IN 1975.

  Eight

  A PLAY WRIGHT’S HORIZONS

  1976-77

  Wendy graduated from Yale in the spring of 1976, a few months after the infamous headline appeared on the front page of New York City’s Daily News: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” President Gerald Ford didn’t use those exact words as he declined to have the federal government rescue New York from looming economic collapse. But the headline writer succinctly captured the dread provoked by the presidential rebuff—which, some believed, helped him lose the presidential election later that year. (It also forced New York to address its profligate management and begin to repair its abysmal financial system.)

  It was the year of Taxi Driver, film director Martin Scorsese’s mesmerizing pulpy nightmare, with New York portrayed as urban hell, streets paved with prostitutes and pimps. The revitalization4 of Forty-second Street was fifteen years away. In 1976 the bright lights of the Great White Way were sickly neon; the bustling show-business world of Oscar Hammerstein, Florenz Ziegfeld, and Billy Minsky had been overrun by sleaze. The grand theaters had fallen into disrepair. Porn, drugs, prostitution, and rats prevailed at the “Crossroads of the World.”

  This was the decidedly unglamorous setting for the resumption of Wendy’s embryonic theater career in New York, courtesy of Bob Moss.

  Two years earlier, in the spring of Wendy’s first year at Yale, Moss’s fledgling Playwrights Horizons had almost died. Moss was told that the YMCA branch at Eighth Avenue and Fifty-first Street, where Playwrights Horizons began and where Any Woman Can’t was performed, was being closed for financial reasons. Moss was devastated. The feisty little theater he’d built on charm and adrenaline had become a respectable enterprise. At the time he heard the Y was being shut down, he had already raised forty thousand dollars for the 1974–75 season, with substantial funding from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), the Edward John Noble Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

  Now he had money but no real estate. In the fall of 1974, his grants in jeopardy, he rode his bicycle all over the city looking for a performing space. His program officer at NYSCA told him in December that his grant money would be rescinded if he didn’t find a home for Playwrights Horizons, immediately. He had one day to come up with a theater.

  Nothing motivated Moss more than a crisis. He held his nose and headed for Forty-second Street, an area he generally avoided because it was so disgusting. At the time a landlord named Irving Maidman owned a large chunk of the street. Maidman had been evicting deadbeat porn tenants, hoping to rent to legitimate theater groups. Not many were interested. The block between Ninth and Tenth avenues was particularly grim. Massage parlors and strip joints were tucked between abandoned buildings. The sidewalks were in disrepair, littered with trash and rubble from crumbling structures.

  To Moss the scene resembled Berlin just after World War II. In his history of the area, Ghosts of 42nd Street, Anthony Bianco described Moss’s encounter with the 400 block:

  Winos, derelicts, and even the occasional Gypsy family coexisted here with prostitutes, drug dealers , and their customers.

  From the middle of the street, Moss spied a FOR RENT sign on 422. He was appalled by his first look inside the building, which basically was a garbage dump enclosed by walls. But beneath the mounds of refuse Moss could make out the ghostly outlines of the 150-seat Midway Theater. Maidman sweetened the deal by packaging 422 with an office floor at 440 West 42nd Street for a total rent of $1,400 a month.

  Moss took possession on January 1, 1975, and announced that the first performance of the season would take place on February 1. The building was small—two stories, twenty-three feet wide—but the task ahead was huge, a total gut job and renovation, all to be done within a month.

  He turned for help to his friends—not a plumber or a carpenter among them, but plenty of actors and playwrights. He handed them hammers and nails and told them to improvise.

  On opening night the heating system malfunctioned, so the audience sat shivering, but they were there. The hardy theatergoers whom Moss had been cultivating at the YMCA weren’t deterred by the a
ura of danger on Forty-second Street. In fact, the seediness may have been part of the allure.

  Within a year of steady attendance, Moss rented additional space from Maidman and formed a not-for-profit corporation called the 42nd Street Gang. His ambitions coincided with the hopes of the 42nd Street Development Corporation, a new nonprofit organization whose mission was described by one official as undoing “four decades of accumulated, renewal-resistant blight.”

  There was momentum throughout the city to rescue and refurbish. In 1975 Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had joined the Municipal Art Society’s campaign to save Grand Central Station from the wrecking ball—a crusade that coincided with Bob Moss’s, on the opposite end of the street. Moss kept a photograph of the elegant former First Lady smiling at him—lean, shaggy, bearded, wearing a T-shirt and a grin—in front of Playwrights Horizons.

  Moss acquired the lease to a building that had been a bank’s headquarters and had become a strip club. He recognized the public-relations potential. As soon as he signed the lease, he sent a press release inviting reporters to the replacement of the LIVE BURLESK marquee with the Playwrights Horizons banner.

  It worked. There was coverage on local television and in the New York Times, the Daily News and the Village Voice, under the headline “Will Bob Moss Become the Next Joe Papp?”

  The previous fall Bob Moss had been introduced to a patrician, well-spoken young man with round cheeks, a dimpled chin, a mop of sand-colored hair, and a reserved manner. André Bishop would become a leading figure in New York theater, and one of the most important people in Wendy Wasserstein’s life. In 1975, however, when he met Moss, he was floundering around New York, trying to be an actor but mainly waiting on tables and working as a French translator. André was twenty-six years old and a Harvard graduate, but he needed direction; Bob Moss was good at putting people to work—especially those willing to work for no money. André answered telephones, sharpened pencils, cleaned bathrooms—whatever Moss asked him to do, though he wasn’t very good at any of it.