Wendy and the Lost Boys

by Julie Salamon

  Wendy was both moved and terrified, not quite knowing what to do when Fay, André’s mother, handed her an ornament and encouraged her to hang it.

  “I was seized with panic,” Wendy wrote. “How could I tell this woman that I’d never done this before? How could I explain to her that when I put the ornament on the tree, a flying ham, all the way from Flatbush, might come crashing through their Oxford window?”

  Muttering “Oy,” she took a deep breath and found an empty spot to hang the ornament, right in the center of the tree.

  “The house remained standing,” she noted gratefully. “The carols went on playing. No bushes spontaneously combusted and no flying hams pelted the window.”

  In subsequent years she and Fay became Christmas regulars—not in England but on Park Avenue in New York. Lunch at the Colony Club became an annual Christmas event for Fay, Wendy, and André. Every year Fay—wearing her customary gloves and Schlumberger brooch—presented Wendy with an elegant handbag. Every year Fay’s escort introduced Wendy to General MacArthur’s widow. Every year they ate plum pudding.

  Being embraced by André’s family gave Wendy entrée into the world that had seemed far out of reach when she was a student at Calhoun, envying the Brearley girls and their apparent ease. André’s elegance wasn’t learned, it was inbred. He had begun wearing Brooks Brothers in prep school; now Wendy accompanied him when he purchased his annual supply of fifteen oxford button-downs, the heavier weight.

  She regarded his fastidiousness with tender amusement. “Seized by a moment of wild-and-crazy abandon, he also purchased two striped Egyptian-cotton shirts without collar buttons,” she wrote. “Following this act of unrestrained depravity, poor André was troubled for at least three hours.”

  Whenever he needed a new suit, he asked Wendy to go shopping with him. Unlike Chris Durang, a reluctant shopper who liked thrift shops and bought his slacks at the Gap, André happily followed Wendy to Saks and Barneys. Wendy wanted to buck social convention, but she was comfortable in the class to which her family had climbed. Her feminism was not commingled with egalitarianism. She liked cabs, dry cleaners, doormen, and Bergdorf’s—though she would show up at parties wearing high-topped sneakers with a designer dress.

  After Wendy moved into One Fifth, she and André spent almost every weekend together and often went out to dinner during the week. Her day began with a call to him, to catch up on gossip or just to say hello. It was André who converted Wendy into being a cat lover. “He convinced me to drop my fears of becoming a L.S.W.W.C.—Lonely Single Woman With Cats—and replace them with the joy of having a warm, intelligent feline by the fire,” she wrote.

  André was besotted with his own Aristocat, an elegant feline named Pussers. He dragged Wendy to the ASPCA, where they visited the back room that Wendy called “kitty skid row.” André discouraged her from taking home the lumpy furball she was inclined toward. Wendy told André she wanted a hot-water bottle of a cat, one that considered cuddling a form of exercise.

  He ignored her and looked at the forlorn rejects imprisoned in their cages. He spotted a mature orange calico and asked the manager to release her. The cat strutted slowly out, with a regal lift to her tail. André picked her up and began to pat and tickle her head.

  “I think she’s the best cat,” he said, nuzzling her ears.

  When Wendy hesitated, André said, “I’m telling you, this is the best all-around cat. She’s older, she’s pretty, and we know she didn’t come from the street.”

  The ASPCA person noted Wendy’s anxiety and asked, “Are you sure you know how to take care of a pet?”

  André answered. “She does,” he said.

  Wendy named the cat Ginger Joy. She later wrote about that day, from the cat’s point of view. In an unpublished story, “A Happy Story” by Ginger Wasserstein, Ginger describes André: “He is my guardian angel, my knight in shining armor.” Wendy may have put the words in her kitty’s mouth, but the feelings were hers.

  André had become, quite simply, the love of Wendy’s life, though nothing else about their relationship was uncomplicated.

  They spent summer weekends in his house in East Hampton, a modest place notable for its previous owner, Alger Hiss, the diplomat and government lawyer accused of being a Soviet spy during the Cold War. When André won grants to go to London to see theater and meet people, Wendy went along. They sailed together on the Queen Mary and traveled to Maine. They were intimate, holding hands and often sharing a bed but not sex.

  André had a calming affect on her. When she was frazzled by having too many things to do, or jumped to weird conclusions, or worried about things not worth worrying about, he told her, “That’s totally insane.” That particular phrase became an inside joke, but it was also reassuring.

  Discussing Wendy with his therapist, André came to understand that he was drawn to her because of his mother, toward whom he felt both love and anger. “She really didn’t bring me up very well,” he said. “She wasn’t careless or cruel, she didn’t not provide for me. She just wasn’t that interested. She wanted her new husbands, and I shut her out. She wasn’t the warmest, most sympathetic person in the world unless you really dug down. Wendy was kind and generous. I always gravitate toward warm, caring women, the mothers I never had, the sisters I never had.”

  When marriage entered conversations between him and Wendy, André was interested, even though he was openly gay—with one major exception. He hadn’t discussed his sexual preference with his mother. Her prejudices and fears ran deep, and André preferred to avoid confrontation.

  Fay let him know she would be pleased to have Wendy as a daughterin-law. Her endorsement wasn’t the main reason he seriously considered marriage, but it lent weight to the idea.

  “Wendy always tried to say, ‘Oh, let’s get married, let’s have children,’ and be sort of lovey-dovey,” said André. “I think she thought, ‘At some point he’ll marry me and we’ll have a strange but happy relationship.’ I thought it, too. Seriously. I had nothing else in my life. It wasn’t like I had all these boyfriends and then there was good old Wendy. It wasn’t like that. She was the primary relationship in my life for a number of years . . .

  “I deeply loved her,” he said. “Probably in my life she was the closest person ever to me.”

  There would come a time when he wouldn’t be able to clearly remember the details of those carefree days of wandering around Greenwich Village without a destination, having dinner at two in the morning. He never forgot, however, why Wendy was so important to him. “I was always mopey and unhappy, or anxious, and Wendy was very, very sympathetic,” he said. “We were helping each other grow up.”

  The idea of marriage between him and Wendy, which seemed improbable to others who knew them, seemed fairly straightforward to him. “I thought about marrying Wendy because I loved Wendy,” he said. “There was no real mystery.”

  Wendy performed many functions thought of as “wifely.” Not just shopping and providing companionship and encouragement, but setting the social agenda. “I was very clear all the time about what I wanted to do in theater but very unclear about everything else,” said André. “I was insecure and uncertain and shy.” Wendy cleared the path, plunging in, making introductions. “I had someone to go places with, and it was wonderful,” he said.

  He saw many reasons for them to be together. “I cared deeply about her success, because I believed deeply in her as a writer,” he said. “We had wonderful times together. We had a lot of friends together. She made no demands on me. She was sympathetic and cozy, and I was also there for her. We were very, very compatible. Stranger marriages have happened.”

  To a later generation, raised on open discussion and increasing acceptance of gay rights and same-sex marriage, this romance might seem quite peculiar (or not). Certainly in the eighties, everything was up for grabs. More and more people were coming out of the closet, but just as many remained inside. Gay men and women had historically married straight partners, for pr
opriety’s sake; both Wendy and André knew people with secret lives. Old customs die hard.

  In early 1987, infatuated with André, Wendy began mapping out a screenplay for The Object of My Affection, a novel by Stephen McCauley about the relationship between a gay man and his best friend, an eccentric young woman. Wendy worked on the project, on and off, for years. The story—encapsulated by McCauley in a poignant reflection by the main character, the gay man—must have struck home:

  There isn’t much to say about my relationship with Nina except that we loved each other and took care of each other and behaved a little like best friends, a little like brother and sister, and a little like very young and very tentative lovers. I suppose the best way to describe our friendship is as a long and unconsummated courtship between two people who have no expectations. Sometimes when we came home late from dancing or a double feature, there was an awkward moment of hesitation as we said good night and each went off to our separate rooms, but that was only sometimes. I think we both valued our friendship too much to make any overtures at exploring the murky and vague desire we felt for each other. I think we were threatened and excited when we were mistaken for a couple by the neighbors. . . .

  Wendy began pushing André for answers about their future, leading him to a realization. She wanted children, and he firmly believed he couldn’t do that. “I didn’t think I would be a good father,” he said. “I had such an awful, remote family life that I was afraid of inflicting whatever I had inherited, or learned, on a child.”

  André was gay and a worldly man of the theater, but in many ways he was conventional, with old-fashioned ideas of what a marriage should be. He realized that he and Wendy were too young—still in their thirties—to commit to a life without sex, and an “arrangement” seemed too cold-blooded.

  Inevitably, there was a confrontation. One evening as they were having a drink at the West Bank Café, across the street from Playwrights Horizons on Forty-second Street, the conversation turned, as it often did in those days, to the subject of marriage and children.

  When Wendy asked him directly if he was willing to try, André could have kicked himself for his answer. The only thing the erudite Harvard-educated producer and literary adviser could come up with was an utter cliché. “I don’t think you should put all your eggs in one basket,” he told her.

  She didn’t record her reply, and André couldn’t remember it, or didn’t want to.

  Their “breakup” was followed by heartbreak, a brief period of separation, awkward moments, tears. They didn’t see each other all the time anymore, nor did they talk as frequently as they once had. Resilience being a dominant Wasserstein family trait, Wendy then resumed her friendship with André, the same as it had been but different.

  They continued to take trips together, although hard feelings lingered. On an excursion to the Berkshires, the two of them were supposed to meet at the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, at a time that turned out to be unpropitious: André was late. Wendy had a toothache.

  While she waited, she wrote him an angry letter that made it clear she hadn’t taken their separation as a couple as easily as André had wanted to believe.

  4:00 Red Lion Inn

  André—

  . . . It is 4:05 and I am placing a bet with myself that you will arrive at 4:30 or later.

  Frankly this makes me furious! I have seldom to experience a meeting with you for which you are not at least twenty minutes late. Yes plays are important, deficits are important . . . but the consistency is irritating and insulting. . . .

  . . . .I don’t know why I am so angry at this moment. Maybe it’s because I am angry at myself for letting you play such a large part in my life. You are at the moment my major attachment, who I call when I get a tooth extracted.

  And though I know you love me very much, there is something wrong here. Or I’m feeling not enough coming back. Or I have invested too much.

  André, I don’t want to marry you. I did two years ago, maybe six months ago. I don’t anymore and sometimes I think I would like to have children with you. I would like us to reproduce, I would like to bring them up at One Fifth near you. But that fantasy, too, fades. Has faded.

  I am very sad about this. Not actually as sad as I was in January when Linda told me André told Rachel he’s seeing someone. It wasn’t jealousy. It was just the thought we don’t know each other very well. We’re not such great friends.

  Sometimes I feel like a convenience for you. Someone to travel with, spend weekends and few demands or commitments. Because the ultimate answer is, Wendy I love you but I’m gay.

  . . . André, I want to marry and have children. Or at least I want to feel some personal vitality or possibility. If I hide with you and you are not stopping me from pursuing others, I won’t.

  I so wish you weren’t late. I so wish I wasn’t angry. . . .

  Wendy

  P.S. André, your family is your theatre. Your vitality is your productions and I believe liaisons not obsessive come easier for you. . . .

  Wendy did not sit home pining alone. After she moved into One Fifth, her circle came to include Michiko Kakutani, now her neighbor. Kakutani, just a few years younger than Wendy, also had a Yale (undergraduate) degree and was a friend and colleague of Frank Rich. The two women already knew each other; in 1984, Kakutani interviewed Wendy for an article about the lessons the playwright had learned from the first production of Isn’t It Romantic. Kakutani seemed to empathize with the dilemmas Wendy had been writing about.

  They treated One Fifth as a kind of upscale dorm for grown-ups, with the world of New York culture as their campus—though they tended to talk on the telephone more than anything else. André and Kakutani became friends; even Ginger the cat grew fond of her “Aunt Michi,” as Wendy referred to her on Ginger’s behalf.

  After Kakutani became the Times’ chief book critic, her judgments—acid or admiring—made her a favorite target in the publishing world. The small woman wrote with a critical swagger that drew the wrath of literary heavyweights such as Susan Sontag, Salman Rushdie, and Norman Mailer. With Wendy, Kakutani could be just a girlfriend, receiving silly messages on her answering machine from her “niece,” Ginger the cat. They could be serious or mischievous as they contemplated world affairs and romantic liaisons, handbags and handmade chocolates, celebrity gossip and personal sorrow. Wendy talked about people who had “nut-juice,” Kakutani explained, “by which she meant a heightened sense of the absurdities of life, an ability to see the humor in a painful situation, the ridiculousness beneath the solemn or pretentious. . . .” As with many of Wendy’s friendships, their relationship was known but somehow secretive, cozy, special.

  Wendy also continued her habit of transforming get-togethers with friends into theatrical occasions. Monthly drinks at 5:00 P.M. at the Parker Meridien Hotel with Heidi Ettinger and Carole Rothman evolved into the “Red Meat Society,” dinners, focused on steak and red wine at different restaurants around the city. Ettinger—namesake of Wendy’s title character in The Heidi Chronicles—was a Yale classmate and was becoming a prominent set designer. (She was the first woman to graduate from the school’s set-design program; managing contruction crews had been considered too rugged a business for women.) She was married, at the time, to Rocco Landesman, a theater producer who knew Rothman from their hometown, St. Louis, Missouri. Rothman was André Bishop’s counterpart at Second Stage Theatre, one of the small nonprofit theaters that had sprung up in the Public Theater’s wake.

  At the Red Meat Society, they talked some shop, but it was more of a treat to indulge in what they referred to as “girlie” matters, say, manicures or visits to spas like Canyon Ranch. “Girlie is both to Wendy and to me not a place we gravitate to naturally,” said Ettinger. “We created a girlie language because it created a certain comfort level or [filled] a certain missing blank. We were in professions that did not allow that at all. With each other we could do cutesy messages and funny voices and go shopping and have facials and do th
at part of our lives we really weren’t allowed to express in any other way. At the time we were women competing with a lot of men who were very serious.”

  None of Wendy’s other friends were invited to take part in the monthly dinners. “Wendy kept people in certain boxes,” said Rothman. “Wendy, Heidi, and I were in one box, and [Heidi and I] didn’t know what was going on in the other boxes.”

  One of those other boxes contained Rafael Yglesias, Frank Rich’s novelist friend and, besides Wendy, his other regular theater companion.

  Yglesias lived a couple of blocks from One Fifth, at Tenth and University, and was married with one child (the first of two) when he and Wendy became close. Sometimes Wendy went to his apartment, to have take-in Chinese food with him and his family. His wife, Margaret Joskow, deputy art director at Newsweek, enjoyed Wendy’s company; the two women were both obsessed with Princess Diana and relaxed by watching (and mocking) beauty pageants. But usually Yglesias and Wendy met three or four times a week alone for lunch—breakfast for her—at a local deli. They discussed their work and complained about the unfair success of unworthy (in their opinion) colleagues. This subject could fill hours, so when Yglesias had lunch/breakfast with Wendy, he didn’t count on getting much writing done that day.

  Yglesias, like Wendy, was a born-and-bred New Yorker, persuasive yet insecure, confident yet neurotic. He was imposing—tall and smart, with a cynical charm. Four years her junior, son of a Jewish mother and a Cuban father, he was both familiar and exotic. He managed to simultaneously rebel against and succumb to pressure to succeed—dropping out of prep school but then having his first novel published when he was seventeen. Like Wendy, he’d had an early success and now felt the pressure to follow up. Both of them had begun writing screenplays; hers included a script for Isn’t It Romantic that went nowhere. They exchanged gripes and gossip about Hollywood.