Shortly before Wendy’s appearance, Susan Herman, one of the series’ producers, received a telephone call from a social worker in a local group home for people with disabilities. “Abner Wasserstein is Wendy’s brother, and he wants to come to the lecture,” she said.
Herman called Wendy’s booking agent to ask if he knew about this brother. “Absolutely not,” he said. “She has one brother, Bruce, an investment banker.”
When Wendy arrived, Herman told her about the call regarding a man who said he was her brother Abner.
“Her face was blank,” Herman said. “There was nothing on her face. There was no further discussion. She wasn’t inviting discussion.”
The lecture was sold out to an audience of eight hundred people. That evening, standing before a podium onstage, Wendy noticed a man in a wheelchair, in the aisle, about ten feet from the stage. He was around sixty years old, accompanied by an aide. He appeared to be agitated.
The speech went well. “If she was bothered at all, she didn’t show it,” said Herman. “She was very composed during the entire lecture, and then the Q&A was very lively and fun.”
After the lecture Abner came to the reception and approached his sister, his wheelchair pushed by his companion.
They stopped in front of Wendy, who was mingling with guests, near Susan Herman. Abner handed Wendy a copy of a book to autograph and said, haltingly, “I’m your brother Abner.”
Wendy didn’t know what to think or how to react. For her entire life, by then almost a half century, she believed that her brother must be unable to function, the only way she could explain his isolation from the family. She had rebelled against the family’s code of silence, incurring Bruce’s sharp disapproval when she included Abner’s name in the dedication for Uncommon Women and Others. Eventually she conformed and stopped mentioning her brother, having been convinced that Abner might somehow be harmed if people knew he had a famous sister and brother.
Now the brother she didn’t know was directly in front of her, clearly not in a vegetative state, upending a lifetime’s worth of supposition, including her feeling that she had been Abner’s champion. “Why doesn’t anybody come to see me?” he asked. “Why am I stuck in this home?”
The ambush came at a vulnerable time for Wendy. She had just become pregnant, a secret she was hiding from the world. Instead of feeling compassion for her long-lost brother, she was frightened by his hostility. The thought of confronting Lola about the reality of Abner sent her into a tailspin. She just wanted to get away.
But none of that was obvious to onlookers that evening. “She shook his hand and was very kind to him,” Herman said. “It was just a brief meeting.”
Wendy was still shaken when she returned home and told Rhoda Brooks about the encounter. “She felt exposed and didn’t know how to handle it, she didn’t know what to do,” said Rhoda, who had become one of Wendy’s closest confidantes. “He was very angry and directed it all at her.”
Abner tried to become closer, but Wendy distanced herself. She begged Rhoda to respond to his e-mails. “I pretended I was her secretary, and I wrote to him that Wendy was traveling a lot and was terribly sorry she couldn’t stay in touch as frequently as she’d like,” Rhoda said. “I told him I’ve known Wendy for years and had heard all about him. He never responded.”
Now Wendy had become complicit in the family’s decision to keep Abner at arm’s length, but she felt she had no choice. Did she and Lola talk about the pain of separation? Was Wendy able to forgive Lola for banishing her son, now that she had experienced him firsthand? Or did Abner’s fury seem a reasonable response to a sister who had felt Lola’s rejection in other ways? Perhaps she decided to save the analysis for later, when she wrote the memoir she kept promising her editors at Knopf.
Bruce was not interested in discussing the matter of their missing brother. He paid for a private plane to take his parents to visit Abner, but his attention was consumed by other matters.
In September 2000 Dresdner Bank agreed to buy Wasserstein, Perella & Company for $1.56 billion—$1.37 billion in stock and an additional $190 million set aside to retain Wasserstein, Perella’s top executives. Nearly half the proceeds of the sale went to Bruce.
Wendy also didn’t have the time or emotional capacity for Abner. Her health hadn’t rebounded from pregnancy; her once-limitless energy drained quickly, and she often felt weak and unbalanced. Despite this unfamiliar feeling of exhaustion, and the demands of an infant, she resumed work on a play she’d begun before Lucy Jane was born, returning to a subject she had tried to write about before: her brother Bruce. Her vehicle this time was Old Money, a commentary on the connection between the wealthy industrialists who helped create New York society in the 1890s and the mergers-and-acquisitions tycoons of the 1990s who were their descendants. Now older and far more experienced than she’d been when she wrote Miami, fifteen years earlier, she was no longer intent on capturing the nostalgia of her childhood but was trying to understand the excesses of the world her brother occupied—a stratosphere she claimed to disdain but couldn’t resist.
The main character is a seventeen-year-old boy named Ovid Walpole Bernstein, who appears to be based on Bruce’s older son (Wendy dedicated the published version of the play to her nephew, Ben Churchill Wasserstein). The play opens on the occasion of the annual summer party thrown by Ovid’s father. It takes place in their Manhattan mansion, which was built almost a century earlier by a robber baron who’d made his money in coal mining.
Wendy had written most of the play at the American Academy in Rome, while she was pregnant, and then set it aside to give birth to Lucy Jane. Just as Sandra had barely skipped a beat at work when she delivered her babies, Wendy was determined not to let motherhood interfere with her writing. In the fall of 1999, while Lucy Jane was still in the hospital, Wendy gave the play to André. He wasn’t sure if its complex structure could work; the drama moves back and forth in time, with the same actors playing the contemporary characters and their Victorian counterparts. But then he and Wendy talked about how it might be staged. She told him how, after Sandra died, she’d spent a great deal of time at her beloved New York City Ballet, where Sandra had first taken her as a child. After watching a performance of Vienna Waltzes, Wendy believed she saw a way to structure the play, as a dance, melding past and present.
André was willing to be convinced. He began to see the potential for something haunting and evocative and sent the play to Dan Sullivan, who was directing a show in San Diego.
Sullivan politely demurred. He recognized undercurrents of bitterness in the play that weren’t explained by the dramatic action. “I was just a little worried,” he said. “I think the entire play was an act of revenge. I think it was. When I read the play, I sort of recognized that. I wasn’t sure if that kind of anger is a reason to do a play.”
Undeterred, André proceeded with a New York production. The idea for Old Money had occurred to Wendy a few years earlier. She was at a dinner party she thought had “all the trappings of a new gilded age.”
She described the table setting:
“There were a bowl of three dozen roses bunched so closely in a ponytail that each petal skimmed another; amusing jelly beans in silver thimbles; and pomegranates worthy of a Dutch still life masterfully dotting the tablecloth, as if after the meal we could all play croquet.”
One of the dinner guests was Harvey Weinstein, the corpulent cofounder of Miramax Films, known as a brilliant producer and a potty-mouthed bully. The subject of female playwrights came up. Weinstein mentioned a handful of those he admired, a list that didn’t include Wendy, who was sitting right there.
Weinstein had become a symbol of Wendy’s ongoing irritation with Hollywood. She’d had some success there: The Heidi Chronicles became a television movie, starring Jamie Lee Curtis, and so did An American Daughter, with Christine Lahti. There was The Object of My Affection. She earned nice money writing scripts that were never produced. But like many playwrights before he
r, Wendy found more frustration than satisfaction in her foray into television and movies. The money was good, but every dollar earned took a cut of one’s self-worth.
Though she’d traveled to Los Angeles many times over the years, she never felt at home there. Revenge did indeed seem to be her initial inspiration for Old Money. Her Harvey Weinstein character is a vulgar Hollywood producer named Sid Nercessian, summed up by the way he describes the horrors of vacationing in Nantucket:
“There’s no fucking food!” he says. “Every meal is corn and lobster buried in sand! Why do they do that? These people are not fucking whalers. They’re Jews!”
Despite his complaints he has just bought two adjoining properties, on which he plans to build a thirty-six-room summer home, in violation of the island’s more modest architectural integrity.
The Wendy character in Old Money is Saulina Webb, Ovid’s aunt, a fifty-four-year-old noted sculptor, who is feeling that her time may be past, depressed because a recent piece in the New Yorker called her type of feminist art “dated and retro.” In a nod to her old foe Robert Brustein, Wendy makes the author of the fictional article the dean of the Yale School of Art.
She uses the profane Weinstein-like producer to express her dismay over the crassness of Bruce’s money world. But toward the Bruce stand-in—Ovid’s father, Jeffrey Bernstein—her scolding is gentler, more disappointed than disgusted.
“Your father is a master at playing the world to his advantage,” Saulina, the feminist sculptor, tells her nephew Ovid, and then she invokes his father’s lost idealism.
“When your dad and I were in college, this house would have been the last place he’d imagine himself living in,” she says. “It was his idea for us to teach together in that Head Start program. In those days your dad would have ripped this party to shreds.”
Saulina expresses Wendy’s disapproval, yet the playwright herself was a frequent guest at parties exactly like that. Mark Brokaw, the play’s director, accompanied her to one of them, on a research trip to Cranberry Dune, where Bruce and Claude were throwing their annual summer party. When they arrived at the Hamptons estate, Brokaw was struck by the magnificent vista—the green lawn sloping downward, dune disappearing into the ocean, tables loaded with luscious delicacies, children dotting the painterly landscape as though placed by an artist’s hand. Brokaw—a graduate of the Yale Drama School—had long ago left the farm where he grew up outside Aledo, Illinois, but he felt like a gangly rube who had wandered onto the set of The Great Gatsby.
Wendy led him inside to a wing of the house with an all-glass front, offering a window onto the scene. They sank into large, comfortable chairs and put their feet up on ottomans. Wendy began pointing out who was who, some recognizable to Brokaw—like Caroline Kennedy—most not.
In both Old Money and the novel she soon began working on, Elements of Style, the Wendy character is an idealist trying to survive in a world populated by people obsessed by money and status. Saulina is an artist; Frankie Weissman, the protagonist in Elements of Style, is a pediatrician, who divides her practice between the very rich and the very poor. Yet in real life, though Wendy maintained long-standing friendships, she gravitated toward the world of privilege. Lucy Jane was less than a year old when Wendy began worrying about whether she would get into Brearley or not. Even now she was haunted by the old specter of superior-inferior.
Mark Brokaw felt Old Money had a larger meaning for Wendy.
“She was writing a play about children,” he said. “Not about having a child, but what do you pass on? What do you struggle to leave behind? What is important? She was looking at two different centuries, and what power was, moving from money and class to the culture of celebrity.”
Perhaps because she didn’t know exactly where she stood on these questions, Old Money is diffuse. Both Wendy and Brokaw recognized the problems that had to be overcome in a densely populated drama, with many shifts in time and point of view. Where was the center of the drama? They never solved these critical issues, which ended up swamping the enterprise.
Ben Brantley, the Times critic who had become Wendy’s latest nemesis, zeroed in on the playwright’s vulnerable spot. “Few things betray social insecurity as pointedly as name-dropping,” he wrote after the play opened on December 7, 2000. “Certainly, it is common conversational currency among the real-life breeds of lions and climbers who inspired this latest effort from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of ‘The Heidi Chronicles.’ ”
He continued: “Letting the shorthand of others’ celebrity do their talking for them, such souls inevitably come across as just a little desperate,” the critic wrote. “So, unfortunately, does Ms. Wasserstein’s play.”
After deriding Old Money for its “slapdash” quality and sketchy characterizations, the critic praised one moment, when the female artist confesses how much she despises the Hollywood producer, even as she wants to be included on his list “of all-American greats.”
Brantley finds this push-pull a redeeming moment of truth. “Yet what about the artists who find themselves drawn, despite themselves, to this shiny, hard core of people to whom they don’t really belong?” he asks. “This would seem to be the territory Ms. Wasserstein is feeling out in the character of Saulina. The dizzying spirit of conflict therein has a fascination that for just a moment gives ‘Old Money’ an awakening sting.”
Brantley identified an ongoing conflict for Wendy. She had learned all those name brands she dropped by shopping for them; despite her messy presentation, she liked designer clothes and to eat in expensive restaurants. She knew that Frédéric Fekkai was an exclusive hair salon because she’d had her hair done there. She had written essays on getting the perfect manicure.
Her household had grown, and so had her expenses. In addition to her and Lucy, and the costs associated with her fine address on Central Park West, she supported a nanny, weekend baby-sitters, and two assistants—occasionally more when she had special projects. She rented a studio apartment that didn’t have a telephone, a place to write without distraction.
When she bought the apartment at 75 Central Park West, she listed her base annual income as $125,258. Certainly that amount had increased substantially by the time Lucy was born; she was earning as much as $100,000 a year just from speaking engagements. But she felt compelled to drum up more work from Hollywood, where writers could score big paychecks writing scripts that would end up on shelves.
In 2000 she made a deal to write a pilot script based on The Sisters Rosensweig for $60,000. She signed a deal to do two rewrites on a movie script for $450,000, also in 2000, and made deals totaling $250,000 in 2001. Every six weeks or so, she was off to a speaking engagement; her fee increased to $15,000 a gig.
But no matter how much she earned, and knowing that her share of the sizable Wasserstein Brothers fortune lay in reserve, she felt financial pressure, much of it self-induced.
“Ultimately she worried about money all the time,” said Angela Trento, who managed her books. “She had enough money, she lived a good life, but nothing like her brother.”
Their closeness rose and ebbed, but the sibling rivalry remained a constant. In 1998, as Wendy was feeling stung by the rejection of An American Daughter, Bruce was enjoying the success of his bestselling book called Big Deal: The Battle for the Control of America’s Leading Corporations, which was reissued in 2000.
They were wary of each other’s worlds, but intrigued. Bruce’s peculiar bluntness could be offensive. Terrence McNally never forgot the way he expressed his brotherly support for Wendy the year The Sisters Rosensweig lost the Tony. The prize for Best Play went to Tony Kushner for Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, while the Best Musical award was given to Kiss of the Spider Woman, whose main character is a gay window dresser (Terrence collaborated on the script).
Terrence heard Bruce go up to Wendy and say, “What have they got against normal people?”
That “normal” galled Terrence, but he didn’t expect Wendy to
confront Bruce. She might talk angrily about her brother behind his back, but she would never fight with him. Terrence believed that no one stood up to Bruce. His wealth was intimidating, his manner perplexing. “I just found him inscrutable,” said Terrence.
Still, for Wendy, the importance of family connection was even stronger, now that Lucy Jane was in the picture. Wendy wanted her daughter to be part of the Wasserstein clan, even as she was configuring a new kind of nuclear family. Motherhood was not the panacea she had anticipated, as she discovered the consuming reality of having a child. Like every mother, Wendy had to develop a different way of being, at an age where she was accustomed to charting her own course. “I had my child so late because my focus and energy was on those plays,” she told an interviewer. “I couldn’t do both. I would not have been able to do it until this age, and I don’t even know if I can now.”
Lucy Jane didn’t have a father, but she was surrounded by loving adults—nannies, Wendy’s assistants, family and friends, including a large contingent of people who each believed he or she was—each one—her only godfather or godmother. For her first birthday, she received many carefully chosen gifts accompanied by thoughtful notes, like the one that came with a beanbag Shakespeare doll:
Dear Goddaughter, This silly little beanbag doll represents the greatest playwright who ever lived. Your mother and I follow humbly in his footsteps. Some people would even say he was one of the greatest people who ever lived. I am one of them. I’m not sure about your mom. But Shakespeare sets an example of truth, simplicity and contributing to the general well being of our planet that we can all aspire to. Anyway, that is my wish for you today, Lucy Jane. Your loving godfather Terrence.
“My life has changed completely,” Wendy told an interviewer shortly after Lucy was one year old. “I’m someone who really couldn’t wait to be on an airplane.”
Wendy and the Lost Boys Page 35
