Wendy and the Lost Boys

by Julie Salamon

  Their motto was succinctly stated in Wall Street, Oliver Stone’s 1987 movie: “Greed is good.”

  As the Wasserstein siblings gained prominence, strangers wondered how the two could have emerged from the same gene pool: the warm, lovable playwright, trying to find a resonant message for her peers, and the ruthless banker, concerned with making himself and his business partners rich without apparent regard for the repercussions on the larger society.

  Their lives had diverged. Wendy lived in a series of sublets, while her brother moved from a ten-room Fifth Avenue apartment to one that had fifteen rooms (and six bathrooms, four fireplaces). She escaped to the Hamptons to write in an apartment over a garage; he bought a sixteen-acre beachfront estate, eventually becoming one of the biggest taxpayers in East Hampton, a community with a disproportionate allotment of millionaires and billionaires.

  Yet the siblings were as similar as they were different. They were smart and ambitious and had gargantuan personalities, hers projecting warmth and his, gruff superiority. Despite appearances Wendy was as guarded as Bruce, but she used selective revelation to deflect outside probing. They were drawn to fine things but were often unkempt. They struggled with their weight and shared a particular look; strong, expressive faces notable for character, not beauty. They gravitated to power and were fiercely loyal to people they cared about. But Wendy’s circle seemed to endlessly expand while Bruce’s affection was tightly controlled. He extended it lavishly to his immediate family and more modestly to a very select number of friends and relatives.

  Bruce was not happy with Wendy’s public disclosure of personal detail. He took Lola’s childhood lessons to heart and was intensely private about personal matters. In his business the control of information determined success or ruin; Masters of the Universe must be infallible. He found his sister’s plays to be too revelatory, too poignant, too Jewish. He felt she turned their parents into caricatures. He didn’t appreciate the inside joke in Isn’t It Romantic, when Tasha Blumberg refers to her non-Jewish daughter-in-law as “Christ.” His wife, Christine, looked stricken, when she first heard the line but took the poke in stride.

  Bruce was competitive by nature. Decades after he and Wendy had applied to the Ethical Culture School, he discovered his little sister’s diary entry: “For the first time I got a higher IQ score than Bruce!”

  Bruce was sixty years old when he learned what his then-eight-year-old sister had written.

  Almost a half century had passed, but his answer was instant. “That’s not true,” he said. “I know the test, I know the scores. . . . It’s not true.”

  Still, they were bonded by memories no one else shared, even if their versions of the past didn’t always jibe.

  “We were very, very close,” said Bruce, no elaboration.

  Elaboration was Wendy’s forte. “Sometimes I wonder whether many of my current friendships with men aren’t influenced by those years with him,” she wrote in a largely affectionate article. “Not that I’ve ever again latched onto anyone who wanted to carve a B onto my pajamas. But I derive great comfort from long-term friendships with men—brother figures actually. We don’t play emotional games with each other, and I don’t worry about whether they’ll ever call me again. Nonetheless, I still fall into the trap of thinking, ‘Oh, he’s brilliant, he’s smarter than I’ll ever be.’ And they no doubt get pleasure of a sort out of being around someone who feels this way.”

  The divergence of their paths bothered her. “We travel in orbits that rarely intersect, and in some ways we’ve become enigmas to each other,” she wrote. “There’s little I can say about my life that I think he will easily understand—I’m not making mega movie deals or marital deals, and I don’t have a game plan, a strategy. His secretary still places his calls to me; when he gets on the speakerphone he inevitably bellows ‘What’s new?’ And I can’t help wondering whether what I say has any relevance for him at all.”

  She might criticize him, but no one else should dare. While Wendy was in the New York University library, working on the screenplay of Isn’t It Romantic (never made into a movie), she diverted herself by thumbing through Powerplay. The bestselling memoir by Mary Cunningham, an attractive executive, described her rapid ascent at the Bendix Corporation and then her public humiliation after being accused of having an affair with her boss, the company chairman William Agee, whom she later married. A reference to Bruce prompted Wendy to write a huffy letter to Cunningham—not to proclaim sisterhood but to defend her brother, who had been hired by Bendix for a takeover play:

  I doubt very strongly that my brother ever said, “It must be nice to have a wife who does more than cook” and furthermore question the claim you influenced Bruce’s late awakening to feminism.

  Let me tell you a little about the women in my brother’s life. I am a playwright, my play Uncommon Women has been performed at over 1,000 colleges and my play Isn’t It Romantic is running in its 8th month off Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theater. My sister Sandra Meyer is president of the communications division of American Express. My sister-in-law Chris Wasserstein is a psychotherapist . . . and my mother is a dancer who at age 65 still dances at least 5 hours a day. Furthermore, none of the above women cook, except my sister who can make an extraordinary cassoulet.

  Bruce has never, in fact, been around a wife who only cooks (and if he were, what an extraordinary cook she would be!). Because Bruce, in a very exceptional way, has always supported the women around him. . . .

  Miami began after Wendy told her ex-boyfriend, Ed Kleban, that she was interested in writing a musical. The story would be inspired by the Wasserstein family’s Miami Beach vacations in the 1950s. Kleban recommended a songwriting team, Jack Feldman and Bruce Sussman, fresh off their success with the 1978 Barry Manilow hit disco song “Copacabana.”

  Wendy and the songwriters understood one another. “We grew up in a similar world and all had the same Miami experience,” said Sussman. He was from a middle-class neighborhood in Queens; Feldman’s family had made it to the more affluent Five Towns of Long Island. As Wendy talked about her childhood winter vacations, Sussman was flooded with memories from his own childhood, when his family used to drive to Florida from New York over the Christmas school break.

  It was easy to mock the pretensions of the Miami Beach crowd—the women dripping jewelry, the men dripping sweat, all of them broiling themselves mercilessly to acquire the souvenir tans that signified they were rich enough to vacation in Florida. But Wendy and her collaborators remembered how glamorous it seemed to them as children, a giddy interlude—let’s rumba!—in lives preoccupied with work, a break from the perpetual climb toward elusive aims.

  “The holidays were a time for the family to catch Harry Belafonte, build sand castles on the beach, avoid jellyfish, and dance with Dad under the stars to a Latin combo,” Wendy recalled.

  They traded anecdotes from their youth. Sussman had a younger sister who always complained that he was the prince, just as Wendy complained about Bruce. One day Wendy burst into tears and told her collaborators about Abner. “She just talked about how difficult it was, the choice the family made,” Sussman said. “She just sobbed.”

  For a couple of years, while Wendy worked on Isn’t It Romantic, the three of them met sporadically. Wendy became fascinated by a comedian named Belle Barth, a transplanted New Yorker who became a Miami Beach character, known as the raunchiest female comic of her day (live recordings of her acts were released as record albums, including the titles If I Embarrass You Tell Your Friends and I Don’t Mean to Be Vulgar, But It’s Profitable). Wendy saw dirty-mouthed, rule-bending Barth as a pioneer in her field and good material for a musical. She began to see the comic’s story as a way to revisit her own childhood, by having a close-knit, ambitious New York family confront the larger world represented by Barth and Miami Beach itself.

  Gerry Gutierrez joined the project after the Playwrights Horizons’ version of Isn’t It Romantic became a hit; both he and Wendy wanted to
work together again, and both were eager to do a musical. They’d survived a disappointing experience with a CBS comedy series, a failed summer replacement show called The Comedy Zone. Wendy was one of the writers; Gutierrez had been fired as director halfway through taping. Their shared misery made them even closer than they had grown during the Los Angeles run of Isn’t It Romantic, when they were together so much that Gutierrez joked, “We might as well be married.” Whenever he called Wendy, he greeted her with a lyric from Fiddler on the Roof:

  Do you love me?

  She would sing back:

  I’m your wife!

  André was ready to produce their new work and scheduled a workshop production of Miami for the end of 1985. With a deadline now looming, Wendy’s sporadic meetings with the songwriters intensified to a regular schedule, usually five times a week.

  At first Feldman found the playwright’s work habits annoying. “She would come in late to a meeting with notes and dialogue scrawled in a spiral notebook, that she had written on the bus, on her way over,” he said. “It seemed like she hadn’t really given a lot of thought to what we were going to deal with that day.” Over time he realized that her sloppiness was a front for her insecurity. “This was a way of saying, ‘Well, if it isn’t good, it’s because I really didn’t have time to work on it,’ ” he said. “She was so sweet and personable and heymish [Yiddish for cozy, snug] that it was very hard to—and this may have been more deliberate than I knew at the time—it was very hard to reprimand her or get angry. But it could be frustrating.”

  The collaboration grew strained as the months dragged on and it became evident that the songwriters and the playwright had different interests. Sussman and Feldman were enthusiastic about Belle Barth, who Wendy fictionalized as Kitty Katz. They could hang a show on Katz and the pretensions of the nouveau riche New Yorkers who flocked to Miami Beach. The overdone hotels and their overeager patrons were ripe for satire.

  Wendy didn’t disagree. She loved the untamed impropriety of old-time show-business characters. But her real passion lay in developing the relationship between Jonathan and Cathy Maidman, the children who represented her and Bruce.

  As the songwriters argued for more Catskills humor and broad comedy, Gerry Gutierrez pressed her to probe the darker vein of her family story. Wendy tried, writing and revising scenes and dialogue designed to reveal the pressures beneath the surface of the happy family: The mother can’t enjoy her vacation until she hears whether her son has been accepted to Harvard. The son can’t wait to fulfill the larger destiny he sees for himself. “I know I won’t grow up to be like Daddy,” Jonathan says. “He’s a very good man, but he’s not going to change the world.” The daughter wants to be loved. The father just wants them all to relax and have a good time.

  But Wendy wouldn’t break the Wasserstein family’s unspoken pact of silence, not even behind the shield of fiction. In Miami, Cathy Maidman, speaking for Wendy, explains, “My mother told me never to tell our family secrets.” The play avoids conflict, culminating in a warm reconciliation between brother and sister in a heartfelt scene that reflected Wendy’s yearning but didn’t solve essential structural and thematic problems.

  The reaction at readings was discouraging. Some of their Jewish friends were offended, thinking their ode to bad taste was mean-spirited and possibly anti-Semitic. Others thought the musical was funny but disjointed. Others agreed with Stephen Sondheim, who had come to one of the readings at Sussman’s invitation. “The tail is wagging the dog,” he told the songwriter. In his opinion they should focus on the raunchy nightclub singer and cut back or eliminate the rest.

  Dissecting a failed play is like analyzing a failed marriage. Everyone has a point of view; no one has a satisfactory answer. But one thing became clear: As time wore on, everyone besides Wendy ran out of steam. She continued to write furiously, bringing in new scenes and revisions every day. But the songwriters didn’t keep pace, and the director seemed to have checked out. Feldman and Sussman had been counting on Gutierrez to do what he’d done with so many other shows, including Isn’t It Romantic—to dazzle with stage design, pacing, whatever it took to set a piece spinning.

  But he couldn’t do it. Unable to find a way to make Miami work, ashamed of failing Wendy, Gutierrez fell into one of his periodic funks. “It was always a roller coaster with him, part of the ‘contract’ when doing his shows,” said Scott Lehrer, the sound designer. “He was an absolutely brilliant but difficult human being. This was a show that was not jelling for him, and he had a hard time dealing with that.”

  For the entire month of January 1986, Playwrights Horizons presented Miami as a musical-in-progress, a workshop that was closed to the press. The entire run was sold out, partly because of the popularity of Isn’t It Romantic and also because Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George had been tested at Playwrights exactly that way and had gone on to become an esteemed artistic triumph on Broadway.

  It was clear, by the end of the run, that Miami wasn’t going to follow in the footsteps of Sunday in the Park with George. On the final night, Ira Weitzman, director of musical theater at Playwrights Horizons, tried to inject a celebratory note into the subdued cast party. He brought in a flamingo he’d designed out of chopped liver, an homage to the outlandish culinary touches that had prevailed at the Miami hotels of Wendy’s youth. Weitzman knew that it was a futile gesture. While musicals could find their spark just when it seemed everyone was exhausted, that wasn’t likely to happen this time.

  “If your energy has been spent leading up to that point, a show can flounder,” he said. “That’s what I remember about Miami.”

  Subsequently André, Gerry, Wendy, and the songwriting team met at a restaurant in Chelsea, to contemplate the various pieces of advice they’d received. They emerged from lunch with a vague plan on how to move forward. But the momentum, already flagging, stopped altogether when lawyers and agents weighed in. The project died.

  Wendy was deeply disappointed. “I guess I do have some pain about Miami,” she wrote to André two months later. “But that’s not the real pain. I guess it’s that in some way I feel that Gerry and Jack and Bruce [Sussman] didn’t come through for me, and I, therefore, couldn’t come through for my play or for the theatre. It’s a frustration.”

  Wendy never worked with Gerry Gutierrez again, though they remained close friends. Bruce Sussman and Jack Feldman remained a team a while longer, and then they, too, went their separate ways. As for André, he blamed himself. “I wasn’t really the captain of the ship,” he said. “The problem was that nobody was the captain of the ship.”

  After four years of effort, and a brief run as a Playwrights Horizons workshop production, Miami was put into storage, where it remained.

  Its failure continued to nag at Wendy. At thirty-five she remained in flux. “I feel that things are changing, or rather, I haven’t decided how they would change,” she wrote to André. Miami’s unsatisfactory denouement represented her feelings about Bruce, family, heritage, ambition, the future. For her, she said, “it seems unfinished business.”

  WENDY AND HER PRODUCERS ACCEPTING THE TONY FOR THE HEIDI

  CHRONICLES, WHICH ANDRÉ [SECOND FROM RIGHT] KNEW, THE MOMENT

  HE READ IT, WOULD BE AN “AMERICAN IMPORTANT PLAY.”

  Fourteen

  ROOMS OF HER OWN

  1986-87

  On June 2, 1986, Newsweek magazine terrified the women of Wendy’s generation. The cover story—headline, “The Marriage Crunch”—informed readers that for female college graduates still unmarried at thirty, the chances of finding a husband were one in five. At age thirty-five their chances were almost nil, 5 percent.12

  By then Lola Wasserstein had nine grandchildren, each offering a fresh opportunity to remind her youngest (still-unmarried) daughter, “Your sister-in-law is pregnant, and that means more to me than a million dollars or any play.”

  The pressure came from every quarter. While the Wassersteins proliferated, Wendy’s friends
and acquaintances had also begun coupling and were beginning to have children. That summer Chris Durang had a small part in a movie (The Secret of My Success), where he met a young actor named John Augustine; they became lifelong partners. Sigourney Weaver was married. James Lapine had married and in 1985 had a daughter with Sarah Kernochan, a versatile woman who wrote, produced, and directed films and was an accomplished musician as well. Meryl Streep gave birth to her third child that year (there would be a fourth).

  Wendy took steps toward acknowledging her independence, or spinsterhood, depending which generation was talking. In 1985, at age thirty-five, she finally got her driver’s license and bought a car. After years of rentals and sublets, she moved into a home she owned, an airy sixth-floor apartment at One Fifth Avenue, an Art Deco tower just north of Washington Square, an enviable address for anyone and perfect for her: Greenwich Village, to satisfy her bohemian urges, but definitely not a walk-up. One Fifth bespoke elegance and accomplishment. It was a doorman building equipped with uptown perquisites, including a grand, wood-paneled lobby and the bragging rights that came with neighbors like Brian De Palma and Paul Mazursky, celebrated filmmakers, and Michiko Kakutani, book critic for the New York Times.

  Perhaps the most attractive feature was proximity to André Bishop, who lived on Waverly Place, a short walk away.

  During Miami the producer and the playwright had begun spending even more time together. André appeared frequently in Wasserstein family photos. He and Wendy had traveled to Oxford, England, to meet his half brother, who was studying to be an Anglican theologian. There Wendy experienced her first traditional Christmas celebration—nothing like previous Christmases spent at Miami Beach nightclubs, or watching the Radio City Rockettes, or her Orphans’ Christmas in New York. Before she left for England, she consulted friends about what gifts to bring and what to wear. During Yuletide at Oxford, Wendy ate lobster Newburg and drank champagne, according to André’s family custom, listened to medieval carols, and then everyone gathered to trim the tree with tinsel and lights.