Wendy and the Lost Boys

by Julie Salamon

  Her publisher ignored her offering. The book jacket carries a photo taken a few years earlier, showing a mischievous Wendy. She is sitting with one hand hidden in her cloud of curly hair, the other cradling her chin. She is smiling, girlish, her eyes full of light, the Wendy everybody loved.

  The third week of August, Wendy and Lucy Jane visited Flora Fraser on Nantucket. Flora’s life had improved considerably since she and Wendy had met a decade earlier, when Wendy considered taking up residence in London. Back then Flora was in a funk. Her mother was Lady Antonia Fraser, celebrated writer; her stepfather was Harold Pinter, renowned playwright. Flora, at the time, was the divorced mother of a four-year-old child, living in a gloomy basement apartment in an unfashionable part of town, unable to finish a biography she was working on.

  As a lark the two women agreed to exchange lives and write about it. The articles weren’t published, but they became friends. Subsequently Flora finished the biography and married Peter Soros, nephew of the billionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros. They had two sons.

  The Nantucket get-together had become a summer tradition. Wendy and Lucy Jane planned to stay with Flora and her family and then continue their island vacation with Stephen and Cathy Graham. That year the routine seemed to be the same as always, except that Wendy couldn’t decide when to make the trip. Finally she arrived at Nantucket on the ferry with Lucy and Sarah Saltzberg, who was on a short break from Spelling Bee.

  “We did the usual things,” Flora said. “We had a dinner for her at our house, and we went to the beach club in Nantucket, which she loved.”

  Wendy told Flora she and Lucy had spent a pleasant few days with Claude and the boys in the Hamptons earlier that summer. Wendy said she felt more comfortable with Claude than she had in the past. They’d talked about child rearing, about schools. Claude was a good mother, Flora remembered Wendy saying.

  But the summer would be clouded by a rift between Wendy and the Grahams—though the Grahams wouldn’t know they’d had a falling-out until later.

  As Wendy got sicker, she became less able—or less willing—to mask her mixed feelings about a great many people, and she began to create quarrels out of tiny perceived slights. Resentments that had been simmering for years—fairly or unfairly—began to erupt. The Nantucket incident itself seems inconsequential, but Wendy repeated it so often to so many friends that it acquired momentum, like a factoid spinning across cable news. In the weeks before the visit to Flora and the Grahams, Wendy had been occupied with making changes to Third, finalizing details on Elements of Style, dealing with her illness, making time for Lucy. She kept changing the date for her Nantucket visit. This was of consequence in a milieu where social arrangements were handled with the kind of nervous attention usually reserved for matters involving delicate international diplomacy. Chance was not a welcome guest at the table.

  And neither, for one evening, was Wendy.

  The Grahams already had houseguests—parents of one of their children’s school friends—the weekend Wendy finally settled on. But they urged her to come anyway.

  Then came the snafu. A few weeks before Wendy changed the date, Daisy Soros, Flora’s Hungarian mother-in-law, had invited the Grahams for dinner on August 23. She told them it was fine for them to bring their houseguests. But when August 23 rolled around, Wendy was also at the Grahams’.

  As Stephen Graham remembered it, he called Daisy Soros and asked if he could bring Wendy, too, and Daisy said, “I can’t, I don’t have any room at my table.”

  When he told Wendy, she told him not to worry. “Oh, my God, I’ve seen a lot of Daisy,” she said.

  Stephen didn’t want to “bag out” of Daisy’s dinner at the last minute, since she had accommodated his other houseguests, and Wendy didn’t seem to think it was a big deal. He knew she’d just spent time with the Soros family.

  He arranged for their cook to make dinner for Wendy, Lucy Jane, and Sarah, and he checked with Wendy one last time. “Here’s our cook, we have to go to this Daisy Soros dinner, I hope that’s okay,” he said.

  She replied, “That’s fine, it’s fine, we’ll be fine.”

  Wendy spent the next day at the library working and then excused herself from dinner with the Grahams, saying she had another obligation. The next day she left, and all was well, or so they thought.

  Cathy Graham called Wendy a few weeks later, in October, asking her to write a college recommendation for their secretary’s daughter.

  Cathy was shocked when Wendy angrily said, “No!” She told Cathy she was quite upset about what had happened that summer. Cathy was beside herself and met with Wendy to apologize. Wendy seemed to accept Cathy’s apology and then talked about her new play.

  When Cathy told Stephen that Wendy had blown up at her, he thought, “Oh, shit, I must call her up.”

  They went for drinks at Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle. He apologized profusely, all the while thinking, “It’s a little uncharacteristic for her to take so to heart what was maybe a bit insensitive but not the sort of thing one would take to heart or Wendy would take to heart. But she did take it to heart, for whatever reason.”

  After they talked, he said, “I sort of felt the air had been cleared, but I don’t know if it had been cleared or not.”

  Later people would look back and analyze events, looking for signs and portents. They saw her physical deterioration not as a final breakdown but as another relapse that would lead to another recovery. Why shouldn’t they? They were taking their cues from Wendy, who staged elaborate scenarios to keep up the illusion that she could not be stopped. When she was no longer able to walk without a walker or a wheelchair, she continued to come to rehearsals for Third every day, even laborious tech rehearsals.

  She allowed a trusted few to help her—the assistants and certain friends: Rhoda Brooks was a constant, and so were James Lapine and Jane Rosenthal. But she kept her family at bay; work was her excuse to be scarce. Rosenthal, who lived nearby, stopped by often to have a meal. Daniel Swee, the casting director at Lincoln Center, helped her get from the car that drove her the few blocks from home into the theater. Emmy brought Lucy to meet her at rehearsals and for dinner breaks. They hired a nurse to dress and bathe Wendy when Emmy could no longer hoist her from her bed.

  In the theater Wendy’s illness became the elephant in the room. No one commented on her early arrivals to rehearsal, so she could be seated when the cast came in. André talked to her nearly every day during rehearsal, but not about her illness. As she appeared to weaken, however, he and others began urging her to go to the Mayo Clinic for a diagnosis.

  On October 18, Wendy’s birthday, André stopped by the Café des Artistes, where she was having a small celebration. He’d developed an ulcer that fall and now had a cold and wasn’t feeling well. “That room was a bit small and somber, and the gathering was a bit forced-jollity kind of thing,” he recalled. He gave Wendy a gift but left early, afraid of passing along his germs to her, she was so frail.

  Wendy was angry. “He was sitting on a stool and didn’t want to kiss her because he had a cold, and he couldn’t go to her rehearsal. She was so mad, she’s like, ‘He’s got a cold, look at me!’” said Jane Rosenthal, who was there. “She wanted André’s attention desperately for those rehearsals on Third and didn’t really get what she needed. But it may have been what she needed might never have been enough from him. It would never be enough, because of their history.”

  The play opened the following week, on October 24, 2005. Wendy wanted the premiere party for Third to be splendid, which meant that no one, especially Lola, should know how sick she was.

  The logistics were left to Jeremy Strong, a young actor who had worked for Wendy for two years. He had become the assistant Wendy depended on most. A month earlier he’d helped her fulfill Lucy’s wish to have her sixth-birthday party at Mars 2112, a popular restaurant designed to look like outer space, where the waiters were disguised as aliens. They called ahead to make sure Wendy wouldn’t
have to walk far.

  They arrived to find that the elevator was out of order, and they had to detour via an underground passage that was almost a block long. Strong watched Wendy trudge through that seemingly endless corridor, in obvious pain, without complaint, unwilling to miss Lucy’s party.

  Strong and Wendy now devised a plan to get her across Lincoln Center from the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater to Avery Fisher Hall for the reception. Instead of a dreaded wheelchair, Wendy would sit on an office desk chair with wheels. Strong could push her through the underground passages connecting the theaters.

  Jane Rosenthal was in charge of makeup and hair. She bought Wendy a long skirt by Catherine Malandrino, a stylish touch that also covered up her leg braces.

  Lola made a special effort to negotiate her way through the crowd to tell Wendy how wonderful she thought the play was. But Wendy kept her distance, even when Rhoda urged her to talk to her mother. Wendy was afraid of Lola’s power to detect weakness; she might see through her daughter’s façade.

  In Wendy’s mind the evening was a success. She felt that the subterfuge had worked, and she had the chance to celebrate with the people she held dear. Even Kanti Rai, her oncologist, came to the party.

  But Wendy’s charade wasn’t as successful as she thought. The day after the party, Lola called Georgette, who asked her mother how Wendy looked. Lola’s response concerned Georgette.

  “When Wendy was a child, I could tell she was sick because her eyes didn’t look right,” Lola said. “Her eyes didn’t look right.”

  The reviews for Third the following day were mixed but overall positive, with special nods to Wendy’s wit, to Dan Sullivan’s thoughtful direction, to Dianne Wiest’s warm performance. Even Ben Brantley was touched. “Third exhales a gentle breath of autumn, a rueful awareness of death and of seasons past, that makes it impossible to dismiss it as a quick-sketch comedy of political manners,” he wrote. “A gracious air of both apology and forgiveness pervades its attitude to its characters.” The public reaction was less equivocal: The run was sold out before previews began.

  In November, Robert Brustein went to see the play. He was overcome. “I was finally willing to concede that Wendy was a major American playwright,” he said. Before he began writing his review for the New Republic, he sent Wendy an e-mail.

  Just got out of your play. Your very best—brave, complicated, clarifying, illuminating, and very very moving (Doreen cried all the way home). You alone in your generation have bitten off this very important subject, and handled it in the most balanced manner, avoiding both moral correctness and political correctness in favor of a courageous capacity to live with doubts and ambiguities. Very Keatsian. Warm congratulations. You should feel very proud. Hope you are well and enjoying your grand success. Much love, Bob

  He was surprised when she didn’t write back promptly. She usually did. Two weeks later he received an apology. “I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to respond, I have been away,” she wrote. “I was so touched by your email and am very grateful for your words.”

  Not long after that, having heard rumors that Wendy was ill, Brustein called Chris Durang and learned the ominous meaning hidden in Wendy’s words “I have been away.”

  LUCY JANE WITH JACK AND DASH, HER COUSINS AND HER BROTHERS.

  Twenty-four

  LEGACY

  2005-06

  Lucy Jane began kindergarten that fall of 2005, at the Brearley School, all-girl citadel of academic excellence and social privilege, fulfilling her mother’s longtime dream. Wendy had been obsessed with getting Lucy Jane into the school, although she would pretend she didn’t care. Heidi Ettinger remembered talking to her about it. “On one level it was really important to her that she had a place in that world,” said Ettinger. “And then she would always talk horribly about the Brearley moms and their drivers, the whole scene.”

  For James Lapine, Brearley would forever be associated with Wendy’s last days. She asked him to accompany her to the school’s Open Day, on November 8, 2005. By then her fragility had become almost as breathtaking as her resolve to ignore it.

  The morning of Open Day, Lapine met Wendy at her apartment and they took a town car to Brearley. Lucy had already left for school with Emmy. Wendy felt faint and insisted on stopping at a Starbucks for a Frappuccino. When they arrived at the school, Lapine helped Wendy into the wheelchair they’d brought along, and they went inside. Lucy saw them and ran over to her mother. “Lucy was starting to climb all over her, but she was in such agony she just kept trying to get Lucy off of her,” Lapine recalled. That shocked him. Wendy never wanted Lucy Jane to think that anything was wrong.

  “It was a hideous day,” Lapine recalled. “Hideous. Awful. I remember out of that fog getting her home and into bed, she was just in such pain. We couldn’t get her into bed. She had a nurse, but the nurse couldn’t do it. I get chills when I think about it. It was just being with someone who was in agonizing pain trying to be there for her daughter. That was the day I realized she was dying.”

  He left Wendy’s building in a daze. He was walking south on Central Park West when he bumped into Frank Rich at the entrance to the subway station at Seventy-second street. Lapine didn’t know him very well. During the years Rich was a theater critic, he avoided getting close to many theater people. But they’d seen each other many times at social gatherings, and Lapine knew that Rich and Wendy had been close. He just blurted it.

  “Wendy’s dying.”

  He told Rich about the morning at Brearley and how Wendy wouldn’t let Lucy Jane touch her. Rich couldn’t fully comprehend what Lapine was saying. The newspaper columnist was on his way to a business lunch and was running late. He said he would call Lapine when he returned to the office.

  “I was in a state of shock,” said Rich. “As soon as I got off the subway, I called my wife and then went through the motions of having lunch with someone.”

  Wendy had given him Third to read a few months earlier and asked him for comments. The motif of death running through the play hadn’t escaped him, but when he discussed it with his wife, Alex Witchel, they agreed that Wendy was writing about her father, or Sandra.

  Rich had tried to get together with Wendy throughout the summer, but she’d always been busy, he assumed with rehearsals.

  “Come to opening night,” she’d told him.

  He did. As he and Witchel walked downstairs to the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, André intercepted them.

  “You’ll be very, very shocked by Wendy’s condition,” he told them. “She’s in a wheelchair. We’re disguising it.”

  Rich watched Wendy at the party, holding court while seated on the rolling office chair, but looking terribly frail. He realized that her health was worse than he’d been led to believe. As he watched the play, he began to put two and two together.

  He remembered wanting to call her and ask, “What the fuck is going on?”

  Instead he got in touch with André, who was no help. “I don’t know what the hell is going on,” he told Rich.

  So when Rich heard James Lapine say, “Wendy’s dying,” he felt shocked but not surprised.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” he recalled, and then added, “It all made sense.”

  Later that day Wendy flew to Rochester, Minnesota, to the Mayo Clinic, in a private plane leased by Bruce. She was accompanied by an aide and Jeremy Strong, who brought a friend in case he needed help lifting Wendy. For the four days they were in Minnesota, the twenty-seven-year-old actor found himself in charge of his employer’s medical care. Confronted with a dizzying onslaught of information, stunned by emotion, he operated by rote, taking notes, checking in by telephone with his mother, who was a nurse in Massachusetts.

  On November 12 he wrote in his notebook, “Disseminated T-Cell Leukemia/Lymphoma. Neurovascular selection by Lymphoma. Blood vessels in CNS/Spinal Cord/Facial Nerve. T-Cell Clonal malignancy. Need aggressive Lymphoma treatment. Methotrexate Lymphoma therapy. Aggressive T-Cell Regimen. Says
need to go to Sloan-Kettering right away. Have to tell W.”

  That’s when the family stepped in. Bruce’s wife, Claude, spoke to the Mayo Clinic physicians and arranged for Wendy to be admitted to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, one of the country’s best cancer hospitals. On November 13 Wendy moved into a room in the hospital’s VIP unit on the nineteenth floor, which had fourteen luxury suites, done up like an expensive hotel, marble tiles in the bathroom.

  Those days became a surreal blur for Jeremy Strong, except for one moment, embedded in his memory with unyielding clarity. He recorded it in his journal:

  Lucy running in through door, “Mommy!!”

  In Elements of Style, published three months after Wendy’s death, a somewhat mysterious character named Jil Taillou dies in a terrorist attack on New York. A friend of Frankie Weissman, the doctor heroine, Jil is an art dealer and a socialite who speaks with a vaguely foreign accent. Jil has left instructions with his attorney to invite friends to his apartment and to have each take a memento. At the party Frankie realizes Jil had lived a life of lies. He had no daughter, as he’d told her, but he did have a male partner of ten years’ standing, whose existence he had not revealed. He was not Jil Taillou, Hungarian bon vivant, but Julius Taittenbaum, a Jew from Brooklyn, another secret.

  “Frankie wasn’t angry at Jil for camouflaging his life,” Wendy wrote. “She just wished he’d known it was all so unnecessary.”

  Yet as she was reviewing the manuscript containing those words, Wendy was still trying to camouflage her own life, but with less and less success. She was losing her ability to maintain her separate spheres of friendship and confidences as illness broke down the walls of secrecy she had so carefully built. She remained determined to keep Lucy Jane from discovering her origins, even though Lucy was raised at a time, and in a social class, where it was becoming less and less unusual for children to have been conceived with help from science.