Then a classic Wasserstein reversal: from dramatic revelation to wry punch line in an instant.
“It’s not like I got knocked up,” she wrote. “Most forty-eight-year-old women don’t.”
She wrote about Sandra’s death—how she, Wendy, grieved and then reconciled herself to a life of childlessness, just as she became pregnant, when a last-ditch effort at in vitro fertilization took hold. Her due date was Christmas. At the end of August, she’d planned to take a trip to London but ended up going straight to Mount Sinai Hospital from Fay Francis’s funeral.
Wendy was hospitalized immediately and confined to bed rest; she was at risk for preeclampsia, a dangerous condition that could lead to liver and kidney failure. Pregnancy had not diminished her power of recall: Participants confirmed that the New Yorker piece contained conversations they’d had with Wendy almost verbatim.
Though she distracted herself by telling jokes, she understood the gravity of her situation. “Preeclampsia, I came to learn, is better known by the name toxemia,” she wrote. “It is most often diagnosed by protein in the patient’s urine, swelling of extremities, and hypertension. In a pregnant woman, the condition can lead to a seizure, and possibly a coma.”
Wendy wrote about calling Jane Rosenthal and telling her what was going on. Rosenthal, an experienced movie producer, knew how to get things done. She put in a call to William Ivey Long, who was in the middle of a dress rehearsal for Contact, about to become a hit musical. Rosenthal instructed him to “get up to Mount Sinai” and redecorate Wendy’s room. She might be in the hospital for a prolonged spell.
He obeyed. “At nine in the morning, William arrived with an armful of coordinated blue floral curtains, pillows and Monet posters,” Wendy wrote. “The room, formerly a beige netherworld, became the decorator showroom of the second floor.”
She described William as “my fertility confidant.” His more complicated relationship with her went unrecognized.
She called the Princeton theater department to say she wouldn’t be able to teach her scheduled playwriting course that fall.
Gerry Gutierrez showed up. “Your ex-husband is here,” a nurse informed Wendy.
At first, Wendy wrote, “I had no idea whom she could be talking about.”
The complications mounted.
A week before entering the hospital, Wendy had told Lola about the pregnancy, thinking she was far enough along to bring her mother into the loop.
But now, with the changed circumstances, Wendy was loath to reveal her whereabouts. She maintained an attitude toward her mother that was both defensive and protective.
“The last time my mother, Lola Wasserstein, had been in a hospital, she had watched her oldest daughter die of cancer,” she wrote. Wendy left a message on her mother’s machine, pretending that she had taken the planned trip to London, to visit Flora Fraser, a friend there.
“Hello, Mother, I’m still in England with Flora,” she said. “I’m having a wonderful time.”
Twelve days into her stay, there was bad news. Her blood platelets had dropped, and Wendy learned that Bruce and Claude had booked the delivery room across the hall from her for the following week. Their second child was due.
Four days later, at 12:45 P.M., on September 12, 1999, Wendy was wheeled into the operating room with her two obstetricians, two nurses, an anesthesiologist—all women, she observed—and Gutierrez. Less than two hours later, she had a baby via cesarean section, weighing 790 grams, or one pound twelve ounces.
Bruce showed up at the hospital and asked to see the baby. When asked for ID, he said, “I’m Bruce Wasserstein. I’m the baby’s father.”
The nurse said someone else had said he was the father, referring to Gerry Gutierrez.
“Yes,” said Bruce. “That’s right. Well, he’s the father and I’m the father.”
The drama became even more convoluted. On September 19, 1999, seven days later, Bruce and Claude’s second son—Dash Philippe Wasserstein—was born, in the same hospital, just before the first birthday of his brother, Jack Dumas Wasserstein. Bruce was the designated “father” of two newborns, with two separate mothers.
Wendy described the events as a Molière farce.
The “Nipple Nazis” invaded to teach her how to pump breast milk.
Lola showed up, uninvited, wearing black leather pants, a multicolored sweater, and a bright knit cap. Morris sat silently by.
“We saw the baby,” Lola said. “She’s very little.”
Wendy ate orange Jell-O and didn’t reply.
“We thought you didn’t want to see us, but your father had an appointment here at Gerontology,” Lola said.
“Are you O.K., Dad?” Wendy asked.
“He’s fine,” Lola replied.
“Lola is my father’s official spokesperson,” Wendy commented.
Wendy softened. “Mother, I want you to go back to see the baby and tell her you’re her grandma,” she said, taking Lola’s hand. “I want you to pass your energy on to her. I want you to teach her how to survive!”
Lola dropped Wendy’s hand. “She’s my grandchild! Of course she’ll survive!”
“Later,” Wendy wrote, “my sister Georgette told me that when our mother first saw my baby and heard the details of my delivery she cried as inconsolably as she had when Sandra died.”
Wendy described visiting her doll-size daughter in the neonatal intensive-care unit, where the tiny premature babies wait to grow in Isolettes, lined up against walls decorated with a border of rabbits and teddy bears floating in hot-air balloons.
She hesitated to hold her daughter, who was so small and attached by wires to the incubator. “Lucy Jane was almost weightless,” Wendy wrote. “Her tiny legs dangled like a doll’s. Her diaper was the size of a cigarette pack. I opened my sweater and put her inside. Her face was the size of a small apple. She wore a tiny pink-and-blue-striped cap that made her look like Santa’s tiniest elf.”
Wendy explained why she’d named her Lucy. “When she waved to me from the sonogram I thought of her as Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, saying hello,” like in the Beatles song.18
Wendy was discharged from the hospital the day before Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, three weeks after she had entered. James Lapine and Heidi Ettinger took her home. But Lucy would be staying in the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) for a while, most likely until December 14, Wendy’s original due date.
It would be some time before Lucy Jane was out of danger. Wendy came to the hospital twice a day, bringing “ready-to-go bottles of home-pumped milk.” The baby received the milk through a tiny tube that released drops into her nose.
Lucy improved more quickly than expected, and just before Thanksgiving she was ready to go home.
The New York Times wrote a story.
“The Newest Wasserstein Creation Comes Home,” announced the headline.
The first few paragraphs capture the essence:
Say hello to Lucy Jane Wasserstein. Mother: Pulitzer-prize winning playwright, Wendy Wasserstein. Father: not yet announced. Born: Sept. 12, 1999, in Mount Sinai Hospital, New York. Weight: 790 grams, under 2 lbs. And what a production it was!
The director Gerald Gutierrez (“The Heiress,” “A Delicate Balance”) was in the delivery room. The costume designer William Ivey Long (“Crazy for You,” “Chicago,” “Guys and Dolls”) decorated the hospital room. Meryl Streep, Ms. Wasserstein’s friend from the Yale Drama School, sneaked in to see the baby, incognito. The writer James Lapine (“Passion,” “Sunday in the Park With George”) and the set designer Heidi Ettinger (“Big River,” “The Secret Garden”) brought mother and baby home.
“If you haven’t won a Tony, can you go?” Ms. Ettinger asked as she waited outside Mount Sinai’s intensive care unit for Lucy Jane to come out in her car seat for the cab ride to Ms. Wasserstein’s apartment on the Upper West Side.
The father would never be announced, because Wendy couldn’t decide what she was going to tell Lucy Jane about how
she came into being. “I don’t want Lucy to necessarily know about that,” she told her assistants, referring to the in-vitro fertilization process.
The complications Wendy wrote about were minor ripples compared with the tidal waves of feeling her pregnancy (and descriptions of it) stirred up among friends and family. “The article is the truth with a nice smile on it,” said Cindy Tolan, her assistant. “Without the complications of relationships, people being iced out, hurt.”
William Ivey Long was particularly devastated by Wendy’s decisions—personal and editorial—and with good reason. His version of Lucy Jane’s birth story, while overlapping with Wendy’s, provides valuable clues to her strategy for controlling her life’s narrative.
Their accounts agree on this: Almost a year after Sandra’s death, in the fall of 1998, Wendy was having lunch at the Café des Artistes when she ran into her first fertility doctor, who told her that technology had improved since she’d first visited him eight years earlier. The following spring Wendy watched him insert an egg-and-sperm combination into her uterus with a tube she described as “the width of a pipe cleaner.”
The next night she flew to Italy, where she had won a prestigious fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, with plans of writing a new play.
When she returned home, two weeks later, she discovered she was pregnant.
Shortly thereafter she called William Ivey Long, who hadn’t heard from her for several months, and gave him the news.
That’s where their stories diverge, with William’s account being the one verified by assistants and friends.
“Wendy told me the baby wasn’t mine and then hinted that it might be,” William said, though he realized there had been too much discussion of his faulty sperm for the latter to be likely. Still, he did what he thought he was supposed to do.
“We go to all the sonograms,” he said. “We see the baby move. I go to all those things.”
When Wendy was hospitalized right after Fay Francis’s funeral, she called William, who spent the night in her room, on a reclining chair. She made sure he was there for the birth—and then left him in the waiting room, allowing the director Gerry Gutierrez, one of her other “husbands,” into the delivery room. William felt relegated to the role of comic relief, the gay designer whose job was to prettify and delight. He felt betrayed by someone to whom he had revealed his most serious, adult, responsible self.
Perhaps he shouldn’t have been surprised. The stakes were much higher now, but Wendy’s selfishness was hardly without precedent. He had only to think of their Yale days, when Wendy sabotaged his opening-night production by leaving his costumes at the dry cleaners, to be reminded that in Wendy’s world Wendy always came first.
But nothing could have prepared him for this heartbreak. Once again he felt like a Lost Boy, the nickname Charles James had given him when William had studied at the master’s feet, all those years ago at the Hotel Chelsea. In his mind all his awards and accomplishments evaporated. He was nobody.
The day of Lucy Jane’s birth tested his resilience in a way he’d never been tested before or since. When the nurse escorted Gerry Gutierrez into the delivery room and William was left behind, he felt himself turn beet red in front of Bruce and Claude, who were there. Claude won his eternal affection when she gave his arm a sympathetic squeeze.
“It was the worst day of my life,” he said. “Even worse than when my parents died.”
The New Yorker article accentuated his feeling of humiliation. “She only talks about me decorating the room,” he said. “Boy, did I feel like a total faggot after that.”
In the hospital, along with Bruce, he dutifully visited Lucy Jane, cupping the tiny infant—tubes dangling out of her—in the palm of his hand. After a week Wendy told him to stop coming. “Now, William, they’re very confused about all these men visiting,” she told him. “I have to limit it to Bruce.” William was stunned.
After that, he didn’t see Lucy Jane again until she was eighteen months old. He couldn’t bear it. He sent her one of his signature cards, filled with confetti, but he needed to stay away for a while.
He wasn’t imagining the distance that he felt Wendy had put between them. During the years they’d tried to have a baby together, she’d expressed concern about having William become the father for the very reason she had wanted him to try. He might be too responsible and want too much control. “She wanted him to be in Lucy’s life but not tell her what to do,” said Angela Trento, her assistant. “She thought it would be better to keep it clean. It would be her child; no one else would have any rights.”
William never fully recovered from the blow to his ego, his feeling that Wendy had discarded him because he’d failed to help her reproduce. “I don’t feel defined by being gay. Michelangelo wasn’t a gay artist. I have never felt I am a gay designer,” he said. “But with Wendy I felt I was part of a big group of gay men, part of the people who had disappointed her. I kept thinking, ‘Why didn’t you go after straight men if we were going to fail you as a group?’ ”
Occasionally he wondered if Lucy was his child, believing there was a million-to-one chance. Then he let it go.
He had always known he wasn’t aware of everything else going on in Wendy’s life. As she had become more famous, she developed a spiraling circle of acquaintances. There were circles within circles, sometimes overlapping, sometimes not. The compartmentalization bothered William, who had known Wendy before she started dividing people into boxes—and who had reason to think he did have special status, personally and professionally.
He was left with his memories and receipts for medical procedures, eventually accumulating bills well into six figures for his share of the costs, which they had agreed to split. “I had probably the most intense relationship I ever had,” he said, adding wryly, “In my compartmentalized way.”
He felt she hadn’t taken their mutual efforts as seriously as he did. “I thought we were having a life while we were having it,” he said.
Rebecca Brightman, Wendy’s primary obstetrician, specialized in high-risk pregnancies, in a practice she shared with two other physicians, Laurie Goldstein and Michele K. Silverstein.
A reproductive endocrinologist referred Wendy. “When he said Wendy Wasserstein, my heart skipped a beat,” said Brightman, who was in her late thirties. “I had gone with my mom to see all her plays. I was such a big fan.”
Brightman enjoyed the crazy intensity of her work and often thought she should be taking notes for a sitcom or a soap opera. But as Wendy’s blood pressure began to escalate that summer, Brightman was more concerned than she might normally have been. It had been a terrible year. One of her partners had gotten married and left the practice a few months earlier, so three doctors were managing the caseload of four. Brightman had two young children; the older one had broken his leg that winter and was in a body cast for two months. She’d been orchestrating two nannies, phone calls home, while dealing with more patients than usual.
That summer was the nadir of her career. One patient developed inexplicable high fevers but then delivered safely. But another woman became extremely ill after a very complicated delivery and then died.
“You never forget losing a patient,” said Brightman, who never lost another. “One of the things that attracted us to this profession is that patients are healthy for the most part, for the most part it’s a happy field. This was really tough.”
Shortly afterward Brightman took a vacation with her family. Because of Wendy’s blood pressure, Brightman called into the office just to check in.
“With any patient it would have been stressful,” she said. “The fact it was Wendy made it even more stressful.”
Laurie Goldstein told her, “You’re not going to believe this. We have another problem. Wendy’s having issues with her blood pressure, and she’s now in the hospital.”
Brightman remembered the old saying, “Bad luck comes in threes.” She was scared.
But then, to her relief, eve
rything turned out well for Wendy and Lucy Jane—so far as producing a healthy baby.
Brightman wasn’t overly concerned that during her pregnancy Wendy developed Bell’s palsy, a form of paralysis that causes one side of the face to droop. For unexplained reasons, pregnant women were more prone to Bell’s palsy than the rest of the population, but the condition was almost always temporary. For Wendy, however, it became a recurrent condition. Her smile was never the same.
Yet she said she’d never been so happy. “Complications” ends as Wendy and Lucy Jane return home from the hospital. They watched an episode of I Love Lucy on television, right after a midnight feeding.
It happened to be the episode where Lucy gives birth to little Ricky. Her husband is doing his act at the Club Tropicana and ends up rushing to the maternity ward in his voodoo costume.
When Ricky Ricardo began to sing, Wendy wrote, Lucy Jane Wasserstein started to cry.
“She had seen a lot of things in the NICU, but she wasn’t accustomed to bellowing Cuban men in feathers,” wrote Wendy. “I held her close—all ten pounds of her—and told her not to be frightened. Then I looked down at her double chin and her round baby cheeks. ‘I love Lucy, too,’ I told her. ‘And we’re home.’ ”
Part Five
WENDY’S LAST ACT
2000-06
KEN CASSILLO (HOLDING LUCY JANE) BECAME PART OF “WENDY’S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS.”
Twenty-one
THE NEW MILLENNIUM
2000-01
In May 1999, just after Wendy became pregnant, another monumental event occurred, another crucial plot point the writer would choose to delete from the narrative of her life. She was in Rochester, New York, as part of the Rochester Arts & Lectures series; it was an honor to be asked. Rochester might have been far from the center of Wendy’s universe (Manhattan), but the series had drawn significant intellectual luminaries, including Saul Bellow, Maya Angelou, and Isabel Allende.
Wendy and the Lost Boys Page 34
