Wendy and the Lost Boys

by Julie Salamon

  “In order to complete my writing, I have spent weeks guzzling coffee at Seattle’s Inn at the Market or sipping tea at Manhattan’s Upper East Side Lowell Hotel,” she wrote. “In other words, for me, from sea to shining sea there was no place that didn’t beat being home.”

  Playwrights Horizons hired four actors in New York to fly to Seattle for the ten-day workshop; the rest of the cast came from the Seattle Rep. Caroline Aaron was part of the New York group, cast as Susan Johnston, Heidi’s girlhood friend who becomes a high-powered television producer.

  Unlike some playwrights, who abhor the tedium of rehearsals, Wendy was there every day, eight hours a day, using the actors’ performances to inform revisions. She had a good ear for dialogue and music, often using popular songs to signal shifts in time. But her visual imagination was weak, so actually seeing the actors moving around the stage provided a valuable extra dimension during rewrites.

  Aaron was impressed by the collaboration between Sullivan and Wendy. The actors would read the play, holding scripts, while Sullivan watched and considered, then zoomed in on problems. His radar was fine-tuned for gaps in the text, where a visual cue or additional information was needed to ground the audience. In the original script, for example, the play began in 1965, at a high-school dance, with two sixteen-year-old girls onstage, played by women in their thirties. One of them is Heidi, the title character.

  Sullivan said to Wendy, “You can’t ask the audience to believe that these women are sixteen-year-old girls. The audience has to meet Heidi first, in the present, so they know who she is.”

  Wendy went to her hotel room and emerged two days later with a scene set in 1989, the play’s present. She put to use all those years of scrambling at school, the last-minute assembling of learned-sounding papers for demanding teachers. In her revision Heidi is giving a lecture, standing in front of a screen showing slides of paintings by two nineteenth-century women artists. The playwright establishes Heidi’s adult voice as she laments the obscurity of women painters throughout history and then links her scholarly exegesis to the original opening scene, now believable as Heidi’s implicit memory of a high-school dance.

  In subsequent months Wendy would further improve the scene. Heidi’s lecture becomes more sophisticated, and the transition to the high-school dance smoother and more poetic. Wendy’s process was similar in art and in life, impulsive yet planned, notable for a willingness to keep revising.

  Wendy recognized that she and Sullivan worked well together but found his matter-of-fact approach unnerving. He didn’t praise, and he didn’t criticize; he just pointed out what needed to be fixed. (Later, after The Heidi Chronicles had been pronounced a great success, André said to Sullivan, “Wendy asked me if you liked her play.” Sullivan was distressed and amused. “I’m sort of a truck driver about directing,” he said. “I just like to do the work. I don’t get into aggrandizing anything or anybody. I just like to keep on track, keep on the work, so sometimes the obvious isn’t stated.”)

  André saw the play onstage for the first time on April 6, 1988, having flown in from New York for the workshop production in front of Seattle Rep subscribers. The audience’s enthusiasm confirmed his belief that Wendy had written something exceptional.

  His feelings were shared by cast members. On the way back to New York, Caroline Aaron, the actress who’d played Susan, decided that she definitely wanted to audition again for the part, if the play moved forward. Not long after she returned to the city, however, she discovered that Playwrights Horizons was producing the play later that year and the major parts had already been cast—Joan Allen as Heidi and Ellen Parker as Susan.

  Aaron was upset. She believed that she’d done a fine job. She thought that she and Wendy had hit it off. They’d gone shopping together, discussed dating, and commiserated about dieting. Oh, well, she told herself, that’s show business.

  A couple of months later, she heard from Wendy by mail. The letter, Aaron said, “knocked me out.”

  Dearest Caroline;

  Oy Gavalt!! I’ve had a baguette, a Saga Blue Cheese, and a nice bag of Reese pieces [sic] before I sat down to write this note. I can’t tell you how difficult this is, or how very fond I am of you. I almost feel there’s no reason to really be writing this because I know I’ll see you soon and have a chance to explain in person. However, in truth, I’ve been away writing and now I’m taking my ten year old niece the chess champion to Rumania, so we might not have a chance to get together until August.

  All right, I’m going to be very grown up and confront this all head on. Caroline, the part of Susan came down to be between you and Ellen Parker. Ellen did the reading at Playwrights previous to the Seattle showcase. I loved you in The Heidi Chronicles. You were not only the inspiration for my new favorite line, you became a trusted friend. Unlike you, I have difficulty really opening up to people and I consider you the new colleague and friend I made this year.

  Wendy went on to explain that she had a history with Ellen Parker, who had played in Uncommon Women and had a long association with Playwrights Horizons. In fact, Wendy confessed, she’d told André that she had written the role for Parker.

  After reading Wendy’s words, Caroline Aaron had no doubt that she and Wendy would become even better friends. In all the actress’s years in show business, no one had ever acknowledged that she might have feelings about not getting a part, much less written her a letter like that. “It was a lesson everybody in show business could learn,” she said. “Good manners go a long way. But even people in the mafia have better manners than in show business.”

  In Seattle, when she was hanging around with Caroline Aaron, Wendy had made allusions to a “Mr. Right” she was seeing—though he would turn out to be yet another Mr. Wrong.

  The previous October, just before her thirty-seventh birthday, about the time Wendy gave André the completed draft of The Heidi Chronicles, Terrence McNally—celebrated playwright, handsome chronicler of the contemporary gay experience—showed up one night at Wendy’s apartment with a proposition. He wanted her to consider becoming his mate.

  McNally was persuasive enough to convince Wendy to begin a romance with yet another charming man who was gay. There was one significant difference: This time the relationship was consummated, with serious thought of marriage and parenthood.

  Within two months they were sharing a stateroom on the QE2, en route to England; McNally had a speaking gig on the ship, so the trip was free. The voyage ended dramatically. They arrived in London on January 1, 1988, to news that McNally’s father had died back in Texas, where McNally had grown up. They spent the night at the Savoy, and then he flew to the States while Wendy stayed in London.

  For the next three years, they continued a fraught relationship.

  They shared a love of music and theater and had reciprocal wit, intellect and ambition. But they were fighting their natures. The sex didn’t work.

  They’d met at Yale, when McNally was teaching the playwriting seminar that Christopher Durang didn’t get into, which led Chris to the class where he met Wendy. McNally and Wendy reconnected several years later, after Uncommon Women, when CBS gave the Dramatists Guild a grant to encourage new playwrights. The Guild appointed a committee of playwrights to choose theaters to participate. McNally was the chair; Wendy was on the committee.

  For several months the group flew to different regional theaters to see plays. That’s when McNally, who was a decade older than Wendy, had a chance to spend time with her and they became friends. In early 1987 they were asked by editors at the New York Times to explain how a play moves from a producer’s office to the stage. They replied with a spoof called The Girl from Fargo, a one-act play overflowing with inside jokes and show-business minutiae, that was probably more fun to write than it is to read.

  McNally’s closest friends were not usually playwrights, but Wendy was different. “She had a very charismatic star quality,” he said.

  So did McNally. He’d become known as a debonai
r provocateur, with plays like The Ritz, a sex farce set in New York’s gay-bathhouse scene. He was an exotic species in New York, not for being gay, or a playwright, but for being from Corpus Christi, Texas. His voice was soft and southern, his eyes a startling blue. He reminded Wendy of “a faded Gary Cooper.” He’d had a fascinating life, including a long affair as protégé and lover of Edward Albee, the groundbreaking playwright.

  The early phase of McNally’s affair with Wendy coincided with the premiere of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, his play about a one-night stand between two lonely, middle-aged people. “You just don’t decide to fall in love with people out of the blue,” the woman tells the man. Later Wendy would tell people that Frankie and Johnny reminded her of her affair with McNally, even though he’d written it before they became involved.

  He was shocked to discover, years after the fact, that she’d told anyone anything about their relationship. McNally had urged Wendy to allow them to be a public couple, but she had impressed on him the need for secrecy.

  He honored Wendy’s request, while she assured him she never discussed their relationship with anyone. “She said, ‘I’m not going to tell any of my friends, and I don’t want you to,’ and I said fine,” he recalled.

  He asked her, “What about André?”

  She replied, “Oh, no, André must never know.”

  Yet she told André, along with many others—close confidants as well as people with whom she was merely friendly, like Honor Moore, the writer who had interviewed her at the O’Neill.

  André was disturbed when Wendy gave him the news. “I wasn’t frankly that interested in hearing about it,” he said. “Not because of jealousy, but I couldn’t quite gauge the nature of their relationship, except she indicated that it was sexual. I guess I couldn’t maybe deal with that, because he was gay and I was gay and I couldn’t have a sexual relationship with Wendy. It wasn’t that I was jealous of him. I just didn’t know what that was, she and Terrence. She certainly told a number of people.”

  Wendy’s motives didn’t seem that mysterious to Honor Moore. “She was looking for someone,” she said.

  That was true, but there were also larger forces at play. From Wendy’s perspective (and Terrence’s), the future no longer stretched out endlessly. She was repeatedly forced to contend with the prospect of mortality. Her onetime lover, the lyricist Ed Kleban, had died on December 28, 1987, from cancer of the mouth at age forty-eight. Six weeks later Wendy spoke at his memorial service, where she regaled the audience with stories of “Eddie’s” eccentricities and talked about his critical aspects and his kindness. “I knew him, and I loved him,” she said. “And I’ll never forget him.”

  Far more frightening was the specter of AIDS, the plague mystifying the medical world and terrifying the gay population. For too many of Wendy’s friends and acquaintances, the Peter Pan syndrome would literally mean eternal youth, because they would die too young. The theater world was hit especially hard; by 1985 casualties were widespread enough for the disease to command the attention of artists. AIDS emerged onstage that year with As Is by William Hoffman and The Normal Heart by Larry Kramer.

  In 1987, 5,216 new cases were reported in New York City and 9,756 deaths, including that of Michael Bennett, creator of A Chorus Line. Terrence lost a lover to the disease. Peter Evans, Gerry Gutierrez’s boyfriend, was sick. Harry Kondoleon, Wendy’s playwright friend, specialist in elegant lunches with poached pears, would soon be infected.

  Within four years the death count in New York would more than triple. Wendy’s cousin Barry Kaufman, who had lived with her family when she was young, was another victim; when he died of AIDS, Morris and Lola didn’t tell anyone—including Wendy—because they were ashamed.

  AIDS became not just a disease but a cultural indicator. In his review of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, Frank Rich observed that even though McNally’s play is about a heterosexual couple and AIDS isn’t the subject, “it’s just possible that, in the process, he’s written the most serious play yet about intimacy in the age of AIDS.”

  In The Heidi Chronicles, Wendy addresses the subject in a painful conversation between Heidi and her high-school crush, Peter Patrone, who is gay. When they are adults—she a well-known art historian, he a pediatrician—he responds to her existential angst with a bitter outburst:

  “Okay, Heidi, I’d say about once a month now I gather in some church, meeting house, or concert hall with handsome men all my own age, and in the front row is usually a couple my parents’ age, the father’s in a suit and the mother’s tasteful, a pleasant face. And we listen for half an hour to testimonials, memories, amusing anecdotes about a son, a friend, a lover, also handsome, also usually my own age, whom none of us will see again. After the first, the fifth, or the fifteenth of these gatherings, a sadness like yours seems a luxury.”

  These were harsh times. Maybe through Wendy, McNally was seeking an alternative that seemed less dangerous: He was approaching fifty. Wendy told friends they’d discussed the possibility of having a child. Whatever his motives, as The Heidi Chronicles was being prepared for production, Terrence McNally became yet another Wasserstein secret that wasn’t a secret.

  The frantic pace of Wendy’s life accelerated. In a period of just a few months, while writing Heidi (in London, New York, and Seattle), she flew to Minnesota to give a speech at Carleton College, worked on The Object of My Affection, wrote columns for New York Woman as well as articles for the New York Times and other publications, began her romance with Terrence McNally, and zipped around the globe to fulfill work and family obligations—including chaperoning ten-year-old Pam Wasserstein (oldest of Bruce’s three children) to Romania to compete in a chess tournament. Being Wendy Wasserstein looked exhausting, leading friends to speculate—in retrospect—that she was trying to outrun death, as if she knew that her time on earth was limited.

  On December 12, 1988, The Heidi Chronicles opened at Playwrights Horizons. As always, Wendy kept cutting the play during previews; the reaction of early audiences was mixed. By opening night, however, almost all reservations appeared to have vanished. André’s prediction came true: Heidi was received as an “American Important Play.”

  Writing in the New York Times, Mel Gussow called the play “Wendy Wasserstein’s enlightening portrait of her generation.”

  The New Yorker’s Mimi Kramer was loftier still, discussing how “the Chekhovian fabric of the dialogue—the degree to which characters’ ways of talking differ from one another or change over time—creates a Stanislavskian offstage life.”

  Howard Kissel in the Daily News was more down-to-earth but no less impressed. “Wasserstein reproduces the inanities and glibness of the last 20 years with a shrewd eye and a perfect ear for the self-delusional,” he wrote. “This is not just a funny play, but a wise one.”

  With a sold-out run propelled by A-plus reviews, André was able to move the play from his 150-seat theater to the 1,102-seat Plymouth, a Broadway theater owned by the all-powerful Shubert Organization. The play cost $175,000 to produce Off-Broadway; an estimated $800,000 to $850,000 at the Plymouth. There was a bidding war, including a strong entry by Rocco Landesman, head of Jujamcyn Theaters and then-husband of Yale friend Heidi Ettinger.

  Explaining why he chose the Shubert Organization, André told a Times reporter, “Wendy and I both felt if we could go to Broadway and go firstclass, let’s do it. In ten years, who knows whether or not there will even be plays on Broadway.”

  During Wendy’s lifetime Broadway had become an anachronism for American playwrights. Because of high costs, only a handful of plays were produced there a year, while big-budget musicals—led by imports from abroad, notably Cats, Les Misérables, and The Phantom of the Opera—were thriving. Within five years after The Heidi Chronicles opened at the Plymouth, even Neil Simon—possibly the richest, most successful playwright in the United States—chose to open his newest play Off-Broadway, because the costs of a Broadway production had become prohib
itive.

  Still, the first day Wendy walked into the Plymouth—not as a spectator but as a playwright about to be produced there—she was overwhelmed.

  “I stared at the delicate gray and white rococo ceiling and wondered what John Barrymore, Laurette Taylor and even William Gillette, who opened in the theater in 1917, first thought when they gazed at it,” she wrote. “Bernard Jacobs of the Shubert Organization tells me the Plymouth is his shining jewel, the most beautiful theater in New York—maybe, he says, even in America. I think it is in the world.”

  André was determined to push Heidi as far as it could go. He had even moved out of his apartment for two months so Dan Sullivan could live there during the run at Playwrights Horizons.

  Once the reviews were in and the deal made for Broadway, André became obsessive about a Pulitzer Prize for Wendy. He knew she could be careless about page numbers, spelling, and grammar. Before they sent the play to the Pulitzer committee, he went through the entire manuscript, page by page, line by line, correcting everything.

  She always said she assumed she wouldn’t win. “I’d never been someone who won prizes,” she told an interviewer (even though by then Wendy had won many prizes, including the Guggenheim and the Mary Lyon Award, the highest honor bestowed by the Mount Holyoke Alumnae Association).

  Maybe she understood, consciously or unconsciously, that the persona she had cultivated—shy, ingratiating, underdog Wendy—was part of her success as well as her protection from failure.

  Perhaps she still felt the humiliation of her graduation from the Yale School of Drama, sitting in her chair as everyone else collected prizes. Even now Robert Brustein wasn’t ready to dispense unmitigated praise, much less an A-plus. Writing in the New Republic on April 17, 1989, Brustein acknowledged the playwright’s improvement, her “wry, self-deprecating humor,” while putting down her previous work. “The Heidi Chronicles is not yet the work of a mature playwright,” he wrote, “but it is a giant step beyond the cute dating games and Jewish mother jokes of Isn’t It Romantic.”