Wendy and the Lost Boys

by Julie Salamon

  However, Brustein was weak competition when it came to putting Wendy in her place.

  On March 30, 1989, the day it was announced that she’d won the Pulitzer, Wendy was home in her quilted bathrobe, surrounded by her old stuffed animals, writing a Mother’s Day essay about Lola for the New York Times.

  When the press agent for The Heidi Chronicles phoned and told her she’d won the Pulitzer, she said, “That’s not funny.”

  He told her to call her mother, and she did, not because she wanted to but because she thought, “This woman’s going to hear my name on the radio and think I died or something.”

  Lola’s response: “Is that as good as a Tony?”

  Wendy wasn’t in the mood. So she told Lola, “Why don’t you just call my brother and he’ll explain it to you.” Then she hung up the phone.

  (After Wendy won the Tony, she confessed that she, too, felt that the theater prize was more significant, from a pragmatic point of view. “Winning the Pulitzer was never a goal of mine, but it meant a great deal to me in terms of self-esteem,” she said. “Getting the Tony was quite different, because I knew that for the sake of the play and its commercial life that it was very important.”)

  Wendy lightened the Lola story when she wrote about winning the Pulitzer: “My sister telephones to say that not only has my mother called my aunts to inform them that I’ve won the Nobel Prize, but my cousins have already begun asking when I’m going to Stockholm.”

  Besides the Pulitzer, the Tony, and the Outer Critics Circle Award, The Heidi Chronicles won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, recognizing outstanding work by women play wrights, and the Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Award for “the best American play dealing with contemporary political, religious or social mores.”

  There was an outpouring of affirmation from friends and colleagues, none more meaningful than the letter she saved from George R. Hornig, managing director of Wasserstein, Perella & Co.

  Dear Wendy:

  By way of a note of congratulations on your Pulitzer prize, I thought I would share a little slice of Wasserstein Perella life. Last Friday morning I got a call from Bruce while I was working in our London office. Nothing particularly unusual in that—Bruce calls me all the time. The typical conversation begins “Hello George, what’s new?” followed by a litany of wrong decisions, problems created and otherwise substandard performance I have exhibited in my management of the Firm’s administration since his last phone call the prior evening. . . .

  Imagine my surprise and pleasure when the first words out of his mouth were an excited “Did you hear Wendy won the Pulitzer?” This should give you a good sense of the magnitude of your achievement. Your brother stepped out of character for a minute, and I smiled as I visualize him “kvelling” with family pride about his sister’s accomplishment. What happy news for you and what a nice time for me in that he was in such a good frame of mind that Friday morning’s litany was short enough to make me feel as if I did not actually miss the tour bus taking the other simians along the evolutionary trail. . . .

  Wendy was happy. “The phone started ringing off the hook, it was like the phone went up and started spinning around the room,” she said about winning the Pulitzer.

  That day, the doorman at One Fifth asked her if she was getting married, so many flowers were delivered for her.

  She went out for champagne with Bruce, Sandra, André, and Walter Shapiro, another friend of Bruce’s from the Michigan Daily days, who was now working for Time and had become a friend of Wendy’s. They met at The Four Seasons, the restaurant that had symbolized the apex of her city’s glamour from the moment it opened in 1959, when the New York Times critic wrote, “There has never been a restaurant better keyed to the tempo of Manhattan. . . . It is spectacular, modern, audacious.”

  From there she went to the Plymouth Theatre, where Joan Allen suggested she come onstage at the end of the performance.

  “No,” Wendy said, “I’m much too shy.”

  At intermission, in the lobby, she bumped into Edward Albee, fellow Pulitzer Prize–winner. He embraced her and asked her whether she was going to take a curtain call.

  When she shook her head and giggled, he said, “You never know when it is going to happen again.”

  Maybe she’d planned it all along, or maybe she needed Albee’s encouragement. But Wendy Wasserstein did appear onstage when the play was over and began to kiss every actor who stood there with her.

  The audience gave a standing ovation.

  Wendy took her bow.

  Part Four

  DAYS OF AWE

  1990-99

  AFTER HEIDI, WENDY WAS ALWAYS OUT ON THE TOWN.

  HERE SHE IS WITH CHRIS DURANG, CELEBRATING THE OPENING OF

  HIS PLAY SEX AND LONGING IN 1996.

  Sixteen

  WENDY WASSERSTEIN, INC.

  1990-92

  Wendy’s peripatetic tendencies were now jet-propelled by the force of the Pulitzer Prize—plus a Tony, a Broadway hit, (it ran there for 622 performances after ninety-nine performances at Playwrights Horizons) and a continuing stream of recognition. She was writing a Heidi screenplay; the show was being produced in many U.S. cities and in Australia, thanks in part to the increasing recognition of the Wasserstein brand.

  “Wasserstein, a Name That Sells” was the title of the “On Stage, and Off” column in the New York Times, a gossipy theater column written by Alex Witchel, about to become Frank Rich’s second wife.

  “Any producer will tell you that the only way a show can make money is with a star,” Witchel wrote. But Heidi had toured with lesser-known actors, she reported, and, “Much to the producers’ delight the name Wendy Wasserstein sells plenty. James Walsh, a co-producer, says that . . . next to Neil Simon, Ms. Wasserstein . . . is now the only other playwright in the country who can sell tickets.”

  André began to refer to her as “Wendy Wasserstein, Inc.”

  The Guggenheim Foundation asked her to evaluate applicants. She became a regular on The Charlie Rose Show. Though she didn’t cook, she was a “celebrity chef” for a March of Dimes gala. She became a sought-after guest at the fanciest dinner parties but also was willing to speak at the Hillel at Amherst College. She was invited to speak at the Key West Literary Seminar. The prestigious publisher Alfred A. Knopf brought out her essays in a collection called Bachelor Girls. (Sales were modest but respectable: 9,200 in hardcover and 11,500 in paperback.) Mount Holyoke bestowed an honorary degree, almost a decade after a smart public-relations person at the college sent a memo to the administration, with Wendy’s Isn’t It Romantic reviews attached:

  Enclosed is a batch of clippings on Wendy Wasserstein, Mount Holyoke Class of 1971, who seems to be regarded as the most promising playwright in the country.

  I think we ought to consider her for an honorary degree because if we don’t somebody else will very quickly and it seems we should take advantage of our connection early in the game.

  Wendy understood that celebrity was a commodity, and she quickly parlayed hers into a source of income. On February 1, 1990, she signed with Royce Carlton, a top-of-the-line speakers’ bureau, representing literary heavyweights like Susan Sontag and Edward Albee. The Pulitzer Prize made her highly marketable; she began earning ten to twelve thousand dollars per speaking engagement.

  “The fact she was a woman was very helpful,” said Lucy Lepage, who founded the agency with her husband, Carlton Sedgeley. “Think about 1990, 1991. There were a handful of famous women, they were just getting their stride. A lot of colleges and universities were looking to bring women in specifically, and minorities. The fact she had won the Pulitzer and the Tony—and was a woman—put it all together. And she had the persona.”

  Demand for Wendy was greatest on college campuses and with Jewish groups. Lepage grew fond of her client and liked to tell a story that represented Wendy’s appeal. She had returned to New York from an event for the Jewish Federation in Atlanta, Georgia, and reported in to Lepage.

  Af
ter the event was over, there was time to kill, so the women organizers took Wendy to their favorite mall. They went shopping, and then she flew home.

  “You know, Lucy,” she said to Lepage, “I bet they would never have asked Susan Sontag to go shopping with them.”

  “You’re right,” Lepage responded. “They would never have asked Susan Sontag. These women see you as their daughter, their sister, or their personal friend.”

  Wendy complained about having to fly off to “speak to the Jews,” but she loved it. She turned her speaking gigs into a party and invited her friends to come along.

  Before Mary Jane Patrone turned forty, Wendy called her and invited her to go around the world—in seven days.

  “Oh, Mary Jane, this will be so great,” she said. “There will be buckets of caviar.”

  Wendy had been commissioned to be a speaker on a cruise ship circumnavigating the globe, with passengers who were mostly in their seventies. “The buckets of caviar were more like buckets of prunes!” recalled Mary Jane, who had long since forgiven Wendy for Uncommon Women.

  Mary Jane was unmarried and had risen through the executive ranks at the Boston Globe, where she became the first woman on the masthead. (Her mother wasn’t impressed. When she learned that a friend of Mary Jane’s had gone to medical school ten years out of college, she sighed and told her daughter, a senior vice president by then, “I always hoped that you would have had a profession.”)

  The cruise lasted three months, but Wendy’s gig was for a week; she was one of several speakers the company flew in and out to keep the passengers entertained. “The only thing that fit in her schedule was to fly to Singapore, and then we spent four days on the Indian Ocean, with one stop in Malaysia and one stop in Bombay. Then we got on a plane and flew back to Boston and New York. Seven days.”

  Mary Jane remembered the trip as a blur of laughter.

  Many others had similar memories of impromptu adventures. Jane Rosenthal—Wendy’s producer friend who went on to become Robert De Niro’s business partner and, eventually, cofounder of the Tribeca Film Festival—remembered picking up her telephone and hearing Wendy’s voice, giggling:

  “Janie, I’m going to call Travel & Leisure and get an assignment to go to a health spa. Wanna go?”

  She began to move in the city’s wealthy social strata, becoming friends with people like Mario Buatta, the designer known as the “Prince of Chintz.” During this period Stephen Graham and his wife, Cathy, became an increasingly important part of Wendy’s life, a bridge between her theater friends and the café society that now embraced her. Stephen and Wendy had been friends since Yale, but he never felt like a true intimate. “In the end I accepted her as this phenomenon,” he said. “We spoke about a lot of things, but if conversational sharing is a bull’s-eye with ten rings, probably we didn’t get to the inner two rings. Because although she talked about herself, there were things she didn’t reveal.”

  Stephen had always kept slightly aloof from Wendy, even when they were students at Yale. This reflected his natural reserve, but also his desire to make clear his lack of romantic interest. (He wasn’t being self-important—she did have a crush on him.) Once he became involved with Cathy, in the mid-1980s, he felt more relaxed around Wendy. “I didn’t have to think about the possibly mythical specter of getting romantically involved in some way,” he said.

  A few years younger than Wendy, Cathy was her physical opposite: slight, pretty, well toned. They shared a personal sweetness and an appreciation of silliness that belied their ambitions. Cathy moved to New York after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design and worked for a while as a commercial illustrator. After her marriage she continued to draw, but her busy social life with Stephen (and later their children) became her most considered work of art. No detail in their East Side town house was left to happenstance; each flower arrangement had to have a motif, approved by Cathy. The quest for perfection was directed most stringently at herself. In the bathroom of her elegant, spacious artist’s studio, a couple of doors down the street from the town house, she kept a large basket of weights of varying sizes, a yoga mat, and a huge scale.

  The Grahams paid large sums to make their parties memorably insouciant. For Cathy’s fortieth birthday, everyone wore long blond Barbie wigs (in honor of Cathy’s infatuation with Barbie dolls) and ate at tables covered in chiffon, the whole thing arranged by Robert Isabell, deemed by Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue, “the king of the event world.”

  The Grahams appeared to live a fabulous New York fantasy life, but they were also steadfast friends who graciously invited guests to the homes they owned or rented in Italy, Nantucket, Connecticut, or Switzerland. They were public philanthropists but also privately generous. Harry Kondoleon was another friend they had in common with Wendy. When he became so sick with AIDS that he couldn’t manage the stairs to his walk-up apartment, the Grahams let him live rent-free in Cathy’s SoHo loft, at Crosby and Grand, a huge, light-filled space with giant windows—and an elevator.

  In February 1992 they threw a spectacular party for Kondoleon’s thirty-seventh birthday, upstairs at La Grenouille, in the elegant private dining room that was once the studio of Parisian-born artist Bernard Lamotte, whose paintings were hung throughout the restaurant. The room was suffused in a pink glow. The lighting lent an exquisite theatricality to the huge bouquets of fresh flowers that filled the room, one of La Grenouille’s signature touches—in retrospect a melancholy abundance of beauty. The frail guest of honor fainted from dehydration before everyone sat down to dinner and was carried out by stretcher, taken by ambulance to St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village.

  The kindness of the Grahams was indisputable, and they made no pretense. They were who they were. Yet none of Wendy’s friends more pointedly aroused that intrinsic conflict, her feeling of superior-inferior, than the Grahams.

  They became a source of material. When Wendy began writing her novel Elements of Style, a decade after winning the Pulitzer, she told friends that she had loosely modeled a wealthy East Side couple on the Grahams. In the novel, Wendy describes the man as someone stuck in the shadow of a powerful father who was “both his social calling card and the source of his underlying insecurity.” His wife is “stretched to the max” with “grooming, running and redecorating” her two homes, her children, and her husband. “Even with a personal assistant, a calligrapher, a dog walker, two housekeepers, a driver, and a cook, she still honestly felt she couldn’t get everything done,” wrote Wendy. “Or, more important, she couldn’t get anything done right.”

  It was hard to gauge Wendy’s feelings about the Grahams. She seemed to envy the life their wealth purchased, while disapproving of it and enjoying being part of it.

  Where were the loves of her life? What had happened to Terrence and André as Wendy’s orbit became more far-flung?

  In September of 1990, Terrence called Wendy at her hotel in Los Angeles, where she was meeting with producers about a movie deal. The romantic part of their relationship was over, he told her.

  His timing was terrible. She was turning forty. The Heidi Chronicles had just closed, after an eighteen-month run on Broadway,

  Wendy pretended to understand. She told him she believed he loved her and she knew that his decision was meant to allow them to move on. “I wanted things, a home, children, that you could not give me,” she said. “Furthermore, there is a question of sexuality, and yes, we both do deserve to have complete and fulfilling sexual lives.”

  But she was angry and wrote him a letter describing her feelings:

  What angers me is the cruelty in the way in which you handled the situation. You told me you didn’t want to sleep with me anymore while I was alone in a hotel room the day after my play closed. You then arranged not to see me the entire week I was in L.A. so that I could feel the wound and the loneliness as deeply as possible.

  And now we speak everyday. “Hi, honey, how are you?” “How did your play go?” “Dominic’s her
e for the opening.” “André’s coming next week.” Oh, please!

  You see, Terrence, what happened in the course of our time together is that I did fall in love with you. Which I can deal with, and I can recover from, and I can push down further until it hardly erupts. But you should know that you can not arrive at a person’s apartment, involve them in your life, and when it is the right time for you simply turn the switch off. Well, frankly, of course you can, but there are consequences at least to that person.

  Maybe in some way I am being unfair. . . . I as much as you never really tried to go “public.” I don’t really know what I want right now. I can tell you what you want. You want to work, and you should, and you want someone who will sort of take care of you when you desire being taken care of and will not be demanding when you don’t. As for myself, I am frankly unclear about children since I don’t know if I can offer them a real home life and I may, at this time in my life, be too selfish.

  Actually, what I learned from my time with you is that I would like a real marriage. Not legal, perhaps, but at least to be involved in the life of a man who I respect and love and makes me laugh. . . .

  I have always been someone who has trouble making decisions or moving on. But I just wanted you to know this transition is not happening easily. In fact, it remains quite painful and I am surprised. You see, Terrence, something did happen between us. And not to know that, even cherish it, is foolish and unkind.

  I love you very much.