Wendy and the Lost Boys

by Julie Salamon

  He recognized her ambition. In fact, Yglesias began to think that she was the most ambitious person he’d ever known, and he knew many people with large dreams, including himself. As they got to know each other better, Wendy frequently mentioned that her sister was a big shot at American Express and her brother was a prominent investment banker.

  “She would say she was in competition with them, and if she had any hopes of being acknowledged in her family, she would have to win a Pulitzer Prize, have a hit on Broadway, and even that wouldn’t be enough,” he said. “She would say it over and over again.”

  When Wendy said these things, they came out as comedy, not melodrama, but Yglesias saw the psychological implications. “She was climbing the highest mountain; she was going to top her brother and sister the only conceivable way she could,” he said.

  He was appalled—not at her ambition but at her glorification of Sandra and Bruce. “I didn’t think what her brother and sister had accomplished was anything compared to writing a good play,” he recalled telling her. “ ‘You’ve got to be kidding. Your brother and sister are nothing. They’re just part of this huge machine designed to make money. Somebody’s got to float to the top of it. They’re nobody!’ ”

  He made his point with brutal emphasis. “They’re nobody,” he repeatedly told her. “You’re an artist.”

  His feelings about her family were confirmed one night when she invited Bruce to join her, Yglesias, and Frank Rich at Elaine’s, the Upper East Side show-business hangout. Bruce’s awkward avoidance of the group was so profound, Yglesias said, “I thought he had Asperger’s syndrome.”

  Wendy met Yglesias for breakfast the next day and announced, “Bruce said you’re all idiots.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because we should right now—you, me, Chris Durang—we should form a corporation and sell shares in ourselves,” she explained. “Only a few of us are going to make it big, and whoever makes it big will just share all the money. If we buy shares now, we’ll make more money than we would individually. We’re idiots if we don’t incorporate.”

  That idea seemed far-fetched, but Yglesias was impressed by Wendy’s other strategies for developing her career. “We would discuss how the New York theater audience was largely Jewish, suburban, read the Times as though it was the Bible, so the more you were beloved and appeared in the paper, the more the audience would come and see your work,” he said. “The most important thing a writer can have is a loyal audience. A loyal audience makes you invulnerable; no matter what the world tries to do to you, you can survive. We talked about public appearances, writing for magazines, being in the Times as much as possible.”

  Wendy was a natural at self-promotion. By the time she was discussing Miami with Rafael Yglesias, her name had been in the New York Times eighty times—in reviews and articles about her plays or about theater. Even though Frank Rich couldn’t ethically review her plays, he could—and did—refer to her work when he wrote about trends in theater.

  Editors at the Times were aware that Wendy had the backing of Frank Rich, but she soon made her own friends at the paper. She went to lunch with editors and charmed them. “She was a delight to be with—funny and happy and smiling and relaxed and easy to get along with and knew so much about theater,” said Mervyn Rothstein, who was editing the theater section of Arts & Leisure in the Sunday New York Times. He assigned her stories and then provided her name to reporters looking for a quotable quip. Her glib wit soon made her a popular source.

  She became a frequent contributor. For the Times Magazine, she wrote a romantic satire about the courtship between upwardly mobile New Yorkers, and then a piece called “Body Minimal,” a whimsical diet plan. Her advice includes:

  “Rest in the midmorning. This can be accomplished at home by never getting out of bed. . . .”

  Wendy’s career as an essayist received a significant boost when Betsy Carter, an old friend of Bruce’s from the Michigan Daily, began a magazine called New York Woman. The target readership mirrored Wendy’s audience—educated, ambitious, well-off Baby Boomers.

  Carter came to New York after graduating from the University of Michigan and had a successful career in journalism, first at Newsweek and then at Esquire. In 1986 she left Esquire to begin a magazine for her contemporaries. She described the readers she imagined. “We shop, we daydream, we’re neurotic, we want to do everything,” she said. The cover of the first issue announced its intent: “Our Marvelous, Maddening Lives!”

  Carter was a slender, attractive woman with a dazzling smile. She first met Wendy when Bruce’s little sister visited him at the University of Michigan; subsequently, at Wasserstein family gatherings, Carter became as frequent a guest as André.

  Shortly after she launched her new venture, Carter’s handsome, charming husband of seventeen years left her, after announcing that he was gay. “Suddenly I became this person,” she said. “Newly divorced, broke, dating like crazy.”

  Bruce Wasserstein was a true friend to Carter in that maddening, not-so-marvelous period. He began fixing her up with what seemed like every single investment banker and lawyer in New York. “If your husband leaves you because he’s gay, you need that,” she said. “Bruce was an excellent friend.”

  Carter had seen Wendy’s plays and knew she was funny and smart. So even though Wendy had never written a column for magazines, Carter invited her to become a regular contributor.

  She was an editor’s dream—a quick study who was eager to please. “I’d read it, say this works or this doesn’t, and she’d be back later in the day with a revision,” said Carter. “People can give you such a hard time, fights and screaming. She was nothing like that.”

  The essays came easily to Wendy. Her notebooks reveal the difference in effort for her between these journalistic observations and her plays. Drafts for the plays look as though they were written under wartime conditions: scrawled, desperate missives filled with cross-outs. The essays emerge in handwriting that is comparatively neat, in sizable chunks that correspond almost verbatim with the published works.

  Carter gave her a monthly column, called “The Meaning of Life.” In it Wendy wrote about her childhood, her travels, boyfriends, shopping, body hair, and—more than any other topic—her family.

  Insouciance was the hallmark of the Wendy character she created in her essays. But the more she began to reveal through her writing, the less her friends felt they knew her. “I felt always that she was not presenting her real self to me ninety-five percent of the time,” said Rafael Yglesias. “I was only getting glimpses from time to time.”

  He became aware of just how intricate her attitudes toward friendship were when Frank Rich began a trial separation from his wife. Rich told Yglesias about it—in strictest confidence. By then Rich had become known as the “Butcher of Broadway”; theater people were obsessed with him, and his marital difficulties would have been a tasty morsel for the tabloids.

  Wendy heard a rumor that Rich had moved out of his home and asked Yglesias if it was true. He lied. She heard the rumor a second time, and Yglesias lied again.

  A month or two later, the separation was made public. Yglesias and Wendy met for one of their breakfast/lunches.

  “You knew he moved out,” she said to him.

  He acknowledged and explained.

  Her voice dropped from high nervous register to deep serious tone. “You’re really a good friend of his,” she said, sounding puzzled.

  “We’re best friends, yeah,” Yglesias responded. “I thought you knew that.”

  She continued. “But you’re really, really friends.”

  “Yes,” he said. “But if you asked me to keep a secret like that, I would have kept it from Frank.”

  After that, their regular get-togethers stopped. They bumped into each other once in a while, and she was cordial, but it was clear to him that they were no longer friends.

  Perhaps she was hurt that Rich trusted Yglesias more than her. Or maybe she understood
, with finality, that her friendship with Rich would never develop further, even now that he was free. Like André’s, for different reasons, his affection would only go so far.

  Betrayal was on her mind as she began to work on the new play that André had commissioned. Much as she struggled to find her place in the world, she always seemed to come up against a barrier between her and fulfillment. Why, she wondered, did her expectations always seem out of alignment with reality?

  By June 1987 she had written the first act. That summer, and for much of the autumn, she lived in London, courtesy of a four-thousand-dollar writing grant, which also included a room in the Nell Gwynn House, a serviced luxury-apartment building. Its romantic link to history would have appealed to Wendy; Nell Gwynn was a celebrated British actress from the seventeenth century, best known for being the beloved mistress of Charles II.

  Away from her usual distractions, Wendy wrote in a way she never had before. The Heidi Chronicles flowed out of her the way the essays did, scene after scene. She fell back on some old tricks—pinning the names of friends and relatives onto characters, drawing on her memory bank for incidents and conversations. But her sociological observations and personal laments carried new weight.

  Though her voice and concerns emanate from every character, for the first time a Wendy alter ego isn’t visibly part of the script. Heidi Holland, the main character, is a successful art historian, in her mid-thirties. She is neither Jewish nor overweight, but still there are important similarities between author and creation. Like Wendy, Heidi feels an essential sadness about where life has taken her. The women’s movement had raised consciousness and opened doors but left unanswered crucial questions about managing careers, family, relationships. Heidi laments:

  “I’m sure the gray-haired fiction woman is having a bisexual relationship with a female dockworker and driving her husband crazy. I’m sure the hotshots have screwed a lot of thirty-five-year-old women, my classmates even, out of jobs, raises, and husbands. And I’m sure the mothers in the pressed blue jeans think women like me chose the wrong road. ‘Oh, it’s a pity they made such a mistake, that empty generation’. . .”

  Heidi’s peers (and Wendy’s) had dropped the mantra of revolution and justice for all. During the eight-year presidency of Ronald Reagan, society had become more gentrified; the gap between rich and poor was wider than ever. In the play, Susie, the friend who takes Heidi to a woman’s consciousness-raising meeting when they’re in college, drops out of a Supreme Court clerkship to live in a women’s health and legal collective in Montana. She winds up a Hollywood producer.

  The play covers the trajectory of Wendy’s generation, moving back and forth in time between 1965, when Heidi is in high school, and 1989, when she is approaching middle age, contemplating what she has become and how she should proceed.

  She questions her choices and wonders if she has been misled by the promises of the feminist movement.

  “I don’t blame any of us,” Heidi says. “We’re all concerned, intelligent, good women.” She pauses. “It’s just that I feel stranded. And I thought the whole point was that we wouldn’t feel stranded. I thought the point was that we were all in this together.”

  Later an old friend reminds her of the plot of her namesake Heidi, Johanna Spyri’s classic novel about a Swiss orphan raised by her stern but loving grandfather.

  “Did you know that the first section is Heidi’s year of travel and learning, and the second is Heidi uses what she knows?” the friend says. “How will you use what you know, Heidi?”

  Like Wendy, Heidi has a host of women friends, but her primary relationships are with men: One is Peter Patrone (carrying her old friend Mary Jane’s surname), a pediatrician, who shares many characteristics with Chris Durang and André Bishop. Heidi loves him, but he is gay. The other romantic interest, also inaccessible, is Scoop Rosenbaum (who has the same name as her brother Bruce’s younger son). He is a smart, competitive journalist, with traces of Frank Rich and a heavy dose of Bruce. Once idealistic, he is now a cynical publishing mogul who owns a publication called Boomer magazine (which resembles Betsy Carter’s New York Woman) and assigns a grade to everything—politicians, cookies, women.

  He explains to Heidi why he chose to marry his wife (whom he cheats on), rather than her. “She’s the best that I can do,” he says. “Is she an A-plus like you? No. But I don’t want to come home to an A-plus. A-minus maybe. But not A-plus.”

  Just before Wendy’s thirty-seventh birthday, October 18, 1987, she felt that the play was ready for André’s evaluation. Back in New York from London, she gave him The Heidi Chronicles. He was nervous as he began reading, sitting on his sofa in the apartment on Waverly Place. The disappointment of Miami was still fresh, and the puncturing of their romantic bubble had put a terrible strain on their friendship.

  He wanted to like the play, but what if he didn’t?

  Relief came quickly. He saw that something profound had been unleashed in Wendy. The wit was there, but sharpened by a new willingness to let hurt and despair stand naked, not always protected by humor. “It was a beautifully written play,” he said. “Of all her plays, just in terms of grace of writing, The Heidi Chronicles is beyond all the others.”

  He saw enormous potential. “It was funny and touching and serious, it had all the elements of a sort of American Important Play, at least within the New York theater world,” he said. “I just knew this was going to be her breakthrough to the really major leagues.”

  André couldn’t—or wouldn’t—marry Wendy, but he resolved to do everything in his power to make sure Heidi got the attention he felt it deserved. That he could, and would, do.

  LOLA TOLD PEOPLE WENDY WON THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR

  THE HEIDI CHRONICLES, BUT THE PULITZER WAS ENOUGH

  TO MAKE WENDY VERY HAPPY.

  Fifteen

  THE HEIDI CHRONICLES

  1988-89

  André quickly arranged a reading at Playwrights Horizons, with Joan Allen in the Heidi role. Allen was tall and bony, a midwestern blond beauty who had earned her acting credentials at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, a repertory company that took a boot-camp approach, five plays per season. She had been working in New York for four years, first appearing in And a Nightingale Sang, winning the Clarence Derwent Award for “the most promising male and female actors on the metropolitan scene” of the 1983–84 season. Most recently she had made a splash on Broadway in Burn This, starring opposite John Malkovich; the play was still running when she auditioned for Heidi.

  Wendy was six years older than Allen, but the actress connected to the play, especially the line Heidi delivers when she goes to a rap group and someone asks her, “Are you a feminist?” And she says, “No, I’m a humanist.”

  Allen immediately grasped the main challenge, if she decided to take the part. “Heidi was someone who watched, something I could relate to, being more of a watcher myself,” she said. “With us watchers, there’s a lot going on underneath that isn’t shared with other people. Wendy really, really understood that.”

  Wendy often made this connection with actresses, who were unaccustomed to working on plays written by women. They were drawn to this friendly, empathetic playwright who came to rehearsals and showed such respect for their craft.

  André wanted Jerry Zaks to direct Heidi; Zaks had been having success after success—Christopher Durang’s Marriage of Bette & Boo and a revival of John Guare’s House of Blue Leaves, for which Zaks won a Tony. After Zaks declined, André suggested they workshop the play in Seattle rather than New York. Too many opinions had gone into the making—and unmaking—of Miami. Just as it had been useful for Wendy to seclude herself in London to write Heidi, André and Wendy agreed it would be good to develop the play, with actors, out of earshot of her New York friends, whose opinions she would invariably seek.

  He contacted Daniel Sullivan, who was artistic director of the Seattle Repertory Theatre. Born in Colorado, Sullivan had grown up in San Francisco but had w
orked as an actor and a director in New York for years before moving to Seattle. Sullivan had a reputation as a strong, intelligent director with an impressive track record. He worked on I’m Not Rappaport in Seattle and then moved with it to Broadway, where the play won the Tony for Best Play in 1986, under Sullivan’s direction.

  After they talked, André believed that Sullivan could help Wendy clarify her play’s many transitions. The Heidi Chronicles has thirteen scenes, spread across twenty-four years, each taking place in a different location, in time periods that don’t follow chronological order.

  Sullivan was familiar with Wendy’s work; he had seen Isn’t It Romantic at Playwrights Horizons. He’d enjoyed the play but had felt that it was light, a boulevard comedy. He found Heidi to be far more ambitious. “I liked the structure of the piece, slices of someone’s life, and you have to infer huge swaths of a life which are in the interstices,” he said. “I liked Wendy’s pugnaciousness about the women’s movement at a time when it wasn’t very popular to be pugnacious about it.”

  Sullivan noticed how invested André was in this play and this playwright.

  “André had an extremely propriety relationship with Wendy, more so than I’ve seen with any other writer,” he said. “Protective. It was an extremely brotherly relationship, I found. A tremendous amount of love between them, I felt, and I think André felt extremely responsible to protect her. He wasn’t intrusive, but more present, more watchful, more mother-henning the thing.”

  By late March 1988, Wendy was in Seattle, comfortably ensconced in the Inn at the Market, with views overlooking Elliott Bay. The hotel lay secluded behind an ivy-covered courtyard, right next to funky, atmospheric Pike Place Market, with its picturesque fishmongers and fruit sellers. Wendy loved hotels, their promise of romance, the absence of demands; they became a favorite place to work.