Wendy and the Lost Boys

by Julie Salamon

  But Wendy’s social schedule continued, even accelerated. There was always someone ready to venture with her into the social fray. It was as if she had decided, “This is my life.” She hadn’t completely given up on the idea of having a child, but at age forty-seven she was coming to terms with the idea that she might not. She kept moving at full throttle, not so different from Lola, dancing for hours on end. If she couldn’t have a significant other, she could have rooms full of people who cared about her.

  And if she couldn’t have children, she could find other ways to be connected to the future. By then Wendy had taught at New York University and Columbia and lectured at other schools. She became mentor as well as employer to her assistants; being hired by her meant automatic enrollment in “Wendy’s School for Girls.” In return for deciphering her handwriting and typing scripts, and trying to bring order to her household, the young women and men who worked for her received unstinting advice and help, as well as gifts and entertainment.

  At an earlier point in her life, Wendy had decided her friends were her family. Now, increasingly, her assistants filled the innermost circle. Ken Cassillo became Wendy’s go-to guy for Lola and Morris, who were still living in the same apartment they’d moved into thirty-five years earlier. They refused to have help, even though Morris was becoming more and more unstable. In that way, too, Wendy had become a classic Baby Boomer, taking care of elderly parents while taking care of (or trying to have) her own children.

  When Morris fell and couldn’t get up, or disappeared, as he had begun to do, Wendy called Cassillo and asked him to find her father. Sometimes the assistant would simply be a companion, taking Morris to the park or to a museum. As he grew more frail, Cassillo helped him take showers and go to the bathroom.

  Cassillo became fond of both Morris and Lola, though Wendy always complained about her mother. “Lola was crazy fun,” he said. “She was a bundle of energy, a whirling dervish, you didn’t know what was going to come your way when she started spinning. You would never think this tiny little lady would have so much energy. I’m not talking about the emotional stuff.”

  Wendy always said, “Oh, my poor father, how does he cope with living with my mom?” But Cassillo thought they were a great couple. “You got the sense that Morris loved Lola very much,” he said. “He and Lola definitely made us assistants feel part of something.”

  Wendy wanted young people in her life and remained close to her nieces and nephews. In 1998, through the Theatre Development Fund,17 she began to participate in a project designed to encourage love of theater in youngsters who otherwise wouldn’t have access to it. Together with Roy Harris—stage manager for her last three plays, beginning with Heidi— Wendy took eight public-high-school students to plays over the course of a year. After the performances, over pizza, she and Harrris dissected the shows with the students, who kept journals, for which they received high-school credit.

  The final play they went to that first year was An American Daughter. Wendy listened as the kids complained: too many characters, too many subplots, too hard to follow the story.

  “Boy, have I trained you well,” she said.

  The program came to be known as Open Doors. Wendy encouraged her friends to become mentors. The list would include André Bishop, William Finn, Stephen Graham, James Lapine, Alex Witchel, Frank Rich.

  “I am certain that I became a playwright because every Saturday my parents picked me up from the June Taylor School of Dance and brought me to a Broadway matinee,” she wrote in the New York Times, in an article about the Open Doors program. “Sadly, a New York adolescent’s life as a regular theatergoer is becoming the exception to the rule.”

  She hoped Open Doors might change that, at least a little. Over the next dozen years, 1,220 students would spend a year going to shows with the thirty-five theater professionals who’d signed up to be mentors. It was a gift for the mentors, too. Lapine called his participation in the program “one of the great joys of my life.”

  Wendy had begun to reconcile herself to life without a child. “For eight years I had believed that the greatest regret of my life would be that I was childless,” she wrote. “I realized now that I was finally willing to give that up.”

  But in early 1998, while she was having dinner with her agent, she learned a piece of news that many believed caused her to reconsider.

  Arlene Donovan of ICM had heard from a fellow agent that André Bishop and Peter Manning were about to adopt a child. She mentioned it to Wendy, assuming she knew; everyone was aware of how close she and André were to each other.

  “When she heard he was going to adopt that child, she paled,” said Donovan. “I thought she would collapse.”

  Once again the person Wendy felt closest to had betrayed her. Why hadn’t André told her? He knew—from experience, not telling her about Peter—that she would be furious.

  Peter Manning wanted children. Unlike André, with his unhappy childhood memories, Peter remembered his suburban upbringing as a happy one. His father was a lawyer and his mother a teacher; he had four siblings. In his mind, families included children. When he and André had been together a year or two, Peter brought up the subject. The moment was so intense that he remembered exactly where the conversation took place—they were standing by the Northern Dispensary, once a clinic for the poor (Edgar Allan Poe was treated there) on Waverly Place in the Village.

  Peter asked, “Do you want children?”

  André didn’t hesitate. “No,” he said.

  Then he added, “Wendy wanted to have children, and I said, ‘No, it’s too crazy.’ ”

  Peter heard the finality in André’s voice. “Well, I love this guy,” he thought. “I’ll just be a terrific uncle.”

  But he couldn’t help himself. He raised the question again—and again.

  “It took Peter Manning about three years to persuade me, at least, to come around to it,” said André.

  His resistance had been fortified by his fear of telling Wendy. He’d set up housekeeping with Peter, and loved him, but André and Wendy remained enmeshed with each other. On opening night of An American Daughter, he wrote her two notes, representing their public and private bonds, one from him and Bernie Gersten on behalf of Lincoln Center and one from just him.

  André’s note accompanied his customary gift, a bottle of perfume by Guerlain, because it was considered the best, choosing L’Heure Bleue, one of the romantic classics, the bottle’s stopper designed by Baccarat in the shape of a hollowed-out heart.

  Dear Wendy—

  Some people smell nice; some write wonderful plays. You fit in both categories. Just as this may become your signature scent, so may An American Daughter become your signature play. Equal parts clove and carnation. Equal parts wit and emotion—skillfully, seamlessly blended into a perfect all enveloping whole.

  So much for my writing skill . . .

  A million thanks and love forever on opening night.

  André

  Unable to think of a way to tell her about the adoption, he simply waited.

  “Wendy and I had a history of I didn’t want to have children and I didn’t want to have children,” he said. “I should have just told her directly and suffered the consequences. I figured I’d tell her when I really decided to do it. I just kept putting it off.”

  Wendy wasn’t the only one André kept in the dark. He hadn’t told his mother that he was living with Peter, much less let her know she was about to become a grandmother. “Like everything else, I put it off, put it off, thinking, ‘She’s old, she won’t live that long, she’ll never know,’ ” said André. “I didn’t want to tell her because I thought it would unhinge her. The baby part. The Peter part she must have suspected. She wasn’t that naïve.”

  Finally James Lapine, whose own daughter was thirteen by then, told André he had to tell his mother, who was in poor health. “You have to settle your score with her,” he said. “You’ll never forgive yourself if you don’t come clean in a way and
have some sort of mutual understanding.”

  A month before Peter and André brought their newborn daughter home, André followed Lapine’s instructions. He went to see his mother. “I told her that I was gay,” he said, “that I had this loving relationship and we were adopting a girl—next month.”

  She was a little unhinged, as André thought she would be—and then she wasn’t. “I wish you’d had your daughter ten years earlier,” Felice “Fay” Harriman Francis told her fifty-year-old son.

  In 1998 Wendy began working on the libretto for an opera trilogy called Central Park, jointly commissioned by Glimmerglass Opera, New York City Opera, and Thirteen/WNET’s Great Performances series. Three composers and three playwrights (Terrence McNally, A. R. Gurney, and Wendy) were to provide visions of the park’s meaning. When Deborah Drattell, the new composer-in-residence for the New York City Opera, heard who the playwrights were, she asked to be paired with Wendy. She had guessed, correctly, that they would like each other.

  Wendy confessed to Drattell that she didn’t know anything about opera, couldn’t distinguish a mezzo from a soprano. The playwright offered two ideas for her part of the trilogy. One of them recalled the night in 1969 when crowds had gathered before giant screens in the park to watch Neil Armstrong step on the moon. Drattell chose the other scenario, called “Festival of Regrets,” Wendy’s interpretation of a Jewish ritual called tashlich.

  The tashlich ceremony takes place on the first or second day of Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the Jewish calendar year. Rosh Hashanah begins a ten-day period of repentance, known as the High Holidays or Days of Awe, which culminate on Yom Kippur, a day of fasting and atonement for sins committed the previous year. Tashlich is a visual representation of the casting away of sins; Jews take bread to a body of water and toss in crumbs that symbolize the misdeeds and evil thoughts being thrown away.

  Wendy had been struck by the ritual’s symbolic meaning one day when she was walking through Central Park during the High Holidays. She saw a group gathered at the Boat Pond by Belvedere Fountain on Seventy-second Street, not far from where she first made out with James Kaplan decades earlier. “As I watched each crumb land and be carried by the faint current,” she wrote, “I thought of the generations who had come to the park to release their years of regrets.”

  She had written about tashlich before. In An American Daughter, a middle-aged woman who has been trying unsuccessfully to have a child watches a group of men praying by the banks of the Potomac. The woman describes watching the men tossing “their breadcrumbs of secret sorrow” into the river with her “familiar distance and disdain.” Then she finds herself shredding a muffin she’d been eating, and joining the ceremony. “I wanted this God, this Yaveh, to know me,” she says.

  Festival of Regrets became Wendy’s piece of the Central Park trilogy. The world premiere took place on July 25, 1999, at the Glimmerglass Opera, a lovely summer musical festival held in a theater situated on a former farm in central New York, eight miles from Cooperstown, about a four-hour drive northwest of New York City. Rhoda Brooks accompanied her much of the time and remembered Glimmerglass as a pleasurable experience for Wendy.

  Alex Ross, music reviewer for the New Yorker, enjoyed the piece and described Wendy’s contribution as “a lot of decent Woody Allenish jokes about plastic surgery, Starbucks, the Dalton School, and so on.”

  Ross liked Drattell’s plaintive score and appreciated the piece’s “witty, brittle look at mostly Jewish New Yorkers.” The characters include a divorced couple, who independently end up at the Bethesda Fountain during the High Holidays. As the play ends, it appears the couple might reconcile—or not. “That uncertainty gives the comedy a hazy, melancholy tinge,” wrote Ross.

  Wendy made the trip to Cooperstown at least twice, during rehearsals and during the opera’s four-week run, which ended August 21, 1999. Terrence McNally drove her back to Manhattan on a day that was boiling hot and sunny. His car was air-conditioned, but it was a long trip and the heat seeped in. Wendy seemed miserable. She had gained back all the weight she’d lost and then some.

  “She had on a lot of voluminous clothes,” said Terrence. “I kept thinking, ‘Aren’t you hot? It’s summer.’ She was all in black. I thought she was embarrassed by her weight. It never occurred to me that she might be pregnant.”

  Three weeks later, on Sunday, September 12, Terrence was scheduled to go to a party in Brooklyn, where Deborah Drattell lived with her husband and four young children. Drattell had invited everyone who worked on Central Park to celebrate the opera’s success.

  Not long before he left for Brooklyn, Terrence received a call from Wendy, who was supposed to be at the party.

  She sounded exhausted. He couldn’t quite grasp what she was saying.

  “I don’t want you to read it in the paper,” she said. “I had a baby, premature, it’s pretty tense, no visitors.”

  He was still stunned when he arrived at Drattell’s home.

  “I assumed Wendy called you to say she had a baby this morning,” was his greeting to them.

  “Deborah fainted,” he said. “I never saw anyone faint in real life. That’s my memory.”

  Drattell’s memory differed.

  “I did not faint,” she said, but added, “Maybe I looked like I was about to!”

  As she recalled, there was a story in the New York Post that day, on Page Six, the gossip column, saying Wendy was in the hospital, pregnant.

  Terrence McNally walked in and said, “I was reading the New York Post, and there’s a story about Wendy in the hospital, but she called and said she just had the baby!”

  “I almost fainted,” Drattell remembered him saying.

  Regardless of who did or didn’t faint that evening, one thing was certain: Wendy finally had her baby.

  WENDY, ALREADY SHOWING SIGNS OF ILLNESS,

  BRINGING LUCY JANE HOME FROM THE HOSPITAL.

  Twenty

  THE BIRTH OF LUCY JANE

  1999

  “Years rolled on again, and Wendy had a daughter,” wrote J. M. Barrie, toward the end of Peter Pan. “This ought not to be written in ink but in a golden splash. She was called Jane, and always had an odd inquiring look, as if from the moment she arrived on the mainland she wanted to ask questions. When she was old enough to ask them, they were mostly about Peter Pan.”

  Lucy Jane Wasserstein’s arrival seemed no less a fairy tale, albeit a very modern one. Her mother was indisputably an unusual woman, so it was fitting that the birth of her daughter was out of the ordinary.

  Wendy had kept her pregnancy a mystery and was even more secretive about who Lucy Jane’s father might be. There were people who knew about the pregnancy before Wendy went to the hospital, among them: Rhoda Brooks, Bruce and Claude, André, William Ivey Long, and Wendy’s assistants. They understood that certain boundaries were not to be crossed. “If you knew [she was pregnant] and you told, that was the end,” said Cindy Tolan, one of her assistants. “You could kiss your relationship with Wendy good-bye.”

  Wendy had her own definition of privacy. She treated her life as source material and—a cynic might say—as a marketing tool, a way of keeping her audience hooked as they waited for the next installment of the Wendy Chronicles. She had learned the power of secrets from Lola and had become a master at controlling information, publicly and privately. She used self-exposure to draw people in and the illusion of secrecy to leverage relationships, to create a false sense of complicity, as she had with Terrence: demanding a vow of silence on his end but then sharing their “secret” with others.

  These tactics help explain why Wendy felt compelled to make public her account of Lucy Jane’s arrival, which was published in the New Yorker five months after the baby’s birth. The aptly titled “Complications” is one of the playwright’s most memorable pieces of writing—both for the intimate story it tells and for crucial details it conceals.

  The New Yorker was the ideal venue for Wendy. With its sterling reputation and vau
nted fact-checking system, the magazine was regarded as the periodical world’s bastion of authenticity. The New Yorker had already played an important role in Wendy’s ongoing self-portrait. Four years earlier, when it had become evident that Sandra’s years might soon be measured in months, Wendy wrote an affectionate article about her sister in the magazine.

  Published on February 26, 1996, “Don’t Tell Mother” is filled with amusing childhood stories and admiring anecdotes detailing Sandra’s youthful exploits in London and her subsequent climb up the corporate ladder. Her illness isn’t mentioned, giving an ironic subtext to the story’s cheerful tagline: “The stories my big sister would really rather I didn’t repeat.”

  Sandra’s health was likewise omitted when Wendy herself became the subject of a New Yorker profile the following year, April 14, 1997, eight months before Sandra died. (Abner, too, was left out; Wendy is described as “the youngest of four children.”)

  Now Wendy was determined to write the definitive, unassailable version of Lucy Jane’s birth, in the New Yorker. She constructed the story to convey authenticity, providing heart-wrenching and harrowing particulars that signified utmost revelation. But she omitted as many vital facts as she included, because she was also creating a legend.

  The article begins with Wendy waking up at 5:00 A.M. on August 27, 1999, to write a eulogy for Fay Francis, André Bishop’s mother, dead at eighty-two. Wendy spoke at the memorial service at St. James Church. As she faced the crowd, she’d felt a tingling in her hand. “Looking out over the pews of the church,” she wrote, “I recognized theatre colleagues whom I had known for a quarter of a century. Over the years, we had all become part of one another’s family. Of course, as with most families, the majority of mine who had gathered at St. James that morning didn’t have the slightest idea what was going on in my life. On August 27, 1999, I was forty-eight years old and six months pregnant.”