Wendy and the Lost Boys

by Julie Salamon

  Wendy had been distraught when her daughter came home upset because someone at school had asked her who her father was.

  The straightforward option—of simply telling Lucy Jane the truth, most of which had been published in the New Yorker—didn’t seem viable to Wendy, not yet. Instead she tried to think of a plausible story and told her friend Rhoda that she might just say Lucy’s father was Gerry Gutierrez. Wendy had been considering this choice for a long time. She’d invited Gutierrez into the delivery room, not William Ivey Long, to lay the groundwork. After Gutierrez died, the idea became even more appealing.

  Wendy dedicated Elements of Style to her deceased friend, with canny wording that was a kind of subterfuge.

  For Gerald Gutierrez

  —more than a director

  For gossips who wondered, “more than a director” could be taken as yet another clue, that Gutierrez was Lucy’s father. But Wendy had begun calling her friend “more than a director” years before Lucy Jane was born. He’d been her escort at a family function where Wendy’s Aunt Florence asked her, “Is he more than a director to you?” After that, Gutierrez often signed notes to Wendy, “More Than a Director” or just “MTD.”

  Now, without having resolved what to tell Lucy, Wendy was at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, waiting to receive a massive dose of chemotherapy, direct to her brain, where the cancer had spread. The procedure was scheduled for November 23, the day before Thanksgiving.

  She had entered that hospital netherworld, where thousands of dollars are spent to prolong life yet the prospect of death must be acknowledged. A doctor told her she was “swimming between sharks,” meaning that the treatment could be just as dangerous as the cancer.

  The moment had arrived for her to consider subjects she’d avoided. How did she want Lucy Jane to learn the details of her birth? Who should be Wendy’s health proxy—the person designated to make medical decisions—should she become unconscious? Who did she want to take care of her daughter if the treatment failed?

  Wendy’s behavior at this fearful juncture was not all that unusual. Like a great many intelligent, successful people—including those wealthy enough to afford the special hotel suites at the country’s premier cancer hospital—she refused to believe she wouldn’t outswim the sharks. She behaved as though it were predetermined that the treatment would succeed, just as Sandra had been in denial on her deathbed, making business calls until the very end. Lola’s lessons had not been lost on her children.

  Wendy followed her usual pattern. She tried to rewrite the scenario. Weak as she was, she proceeded as if her hospital stay were an inconvenient disruption that she could work around. She called Victoria Wilson, her editor at Knopf, to tell her she was in the hospital but assured her that an assistant was reviewing the galleys for Elements of Style, scheduled for publication that spring.

  She called Lola to explain why she wouldn’t be at Bruce’s house for Thanksgiving. “I’m at Dartmouth,” she lied. “I’ve met a man.” She knew she didn’t have to worry about Bruce spilling her secret; in matters of family health, he was the staunchest defender of privacy.

  Wendy made it clear to the people who knew: No one was to be told that she was in the hospital unless she gave her approval.

  She returned telephone messages that had piled up while she was at the Mayo Clinic.

  Rafael Yglesias had called, asking why she’d missed the dinner date they’d scheduled. Wendy had gotten back in touch with him after his wife died of cancer, eighteen months earlier, and they resumed the friendship that had ended almost twenty years before. Now when he received an e-mail from her assistant, not Wendy, saying they would have to reschedule, Yglesias felt that something must be seriously wrong. A day or two later, his phone rang.

  He didn’t pick up on time, but when he saw the caller ID number, he felt a chill. The call had come from the room his wife had occupied at Sloan-Kettering before she died. He checked his messages and heard a familiar voice.

  “Hi, Rafael,” said Wendy in a cheerful tone, without revealing her whereabouts. “I’ve got some girls I think you should meet.” She continued a stream of bright patter and then said good-bye. The message didn’t click off immediately; Yglesias heard Wendy hand the telephone to someone to hang up, and then say, wearily, “That’s done. I’m exhausted.”

  On Sunday, November 20, Gwen Feder, mother of one of Lucy Jane’s nursery-school friends, left a message to ask about Thanksgiving. For the past couple of years, she and her daughters had brought croissants and doughnuts to Wendy’s apartment and watched the parade with her and Lucy Jane. Wendy called back and breezily said she was in the hospital, that they’d figured out what was wrong, but she wouldn’t be home by Thanksgiving. She encouraged Feder to take her daughters, with croissants, to 75 Central Park West anyway. Lucy Jane would be expecting them, with Rhoda and Emmy.

  Wendy didn’t want Lucy Jane to think that anything would change. On Thanksgiving, Lucy Jane would watch the parade from their living-room window, with Gwen Feder and her daughters, eating croissants and doughnuts. She would have dinner at her Uncle Bruce’s house, as usual.

  James Lapine saw that Wendy was ignoring the big picture and followed her lead. He simply nodded as she told him she probably wouldn’t be able to handle the tightly scheduled book tour that Knopf had planned for Elements of Style. She definitely wouldn’t be able to make a speaking engagement scheduled for December.

  “I figure it’ll be six months,” she told him. “I’ll just have to get through this, and I may not be able to walk, but I’ll be back.”

  He couldn’t see how she would survive, but he found himself becoming convinced. “I wanted to believe that she was right,” he said.

  On Tuesday, November 22, the day before a chemotherapy port was scheduled to be inserted in Wendy’s head, Jane Rosenthal received a telephone call. Rosenthal was already in a lousy mood. It was pouring rain. A movie she was producing was in a crisis. She heard Wendy shriek, “There was an intern here, and he said I’m going to die!”

  In her business, Rosenthal was accustomed to dealing with hysteria. “The intern doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” she said firmly. “I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  She and Jeremy Strong remained with Wendy until Rhoda Brooks arrived, to spend the night in the room. Rhoda didn’t want to; she hadn’t yet recuperated from her mother’s death a few months earlier. But she couldn’t say no to Wendy.

  Both she and Jane Rosenthal broached the subject of talking to Lucy. “I’m not like that,” Wendy snapped.

  But Emmy the nanny said that Wendy tried to tell Lucy something that evening. “I need to explain a few things to you,” Wendy said, but Lucy was her mother’s daughter. “I don’t want to hear it,” she said. Emmy believed that even though Lucy was only six, she understood.

  That night, at home, Emmy lay in bed next to Lucy as she went to sleep.

  “My mom is going to die,” Emmy heard Lucy say.

  Emmy replied carefully. “Doctors are going to give her medicine. We’re going to see how it works. You don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  “I know,” Lucy said. “My mom is going to die.”

  Emmy wanted to reassure her but didn’t know how.

  The following morning, November 23, Claude, Wendy’s sister-in-law, came with Sandra’s daughter Samantha to see Wendy before the port was put in place. Bruce wasn’t there; he was sick, with bronchitis, possibly pneumonia.

  Wendy told Claude that she’d been thinking about who should care for Lucy if things went badly. A few years earlier, Wendy had designated her niece Pam, Bruce and Chris’s daughter, as Lucy’s legal guardian and Sandra’s daughter Samantha as backup, thinking of a far-off time—maybe never—not seriously considering the responsibility attached.

  But now, she told Claude, she realized that her nieces were young single women, not ready to take care of someone else’s child. Lucy needed a mother and father, Wendy said. She asked Claude if she and Bruce would raise L
ucy if Wendy was no longer there.

  Claude didn’t know what to say. For years Wendy had kept the family at bay, not disclosing details of her illness. Like her friends, family members knew that if they probed too deeply, they would be shut out. With the call from the Mayo Clinic, the wall had broken. The family swooped in, trying to comprehend the situation and take control of it.

  Claude’s first reaction was to reassure Wendy. “It’s going to be fine!” she said. “The treatment is going to work.”

  The previous summer, when Wendy visited Claude and Bruce in the Hamptons, Claude sensed that Wendy might be testing her, with those probing conversations about their children. “I felt she must be worried about being a mommy and how long she’ll be a mommy and what will happen if she doesn’t get healthier,” Claude said.

  Claude told a friend she believed that she and Bruce would end up with Lucy, but she didn’t think it would happen this soon. Her own mother had survived cancer several times; the doctor treating Wendy at Sloan-Kettering had saved a friend of Claude’s. Until now Claude hadn’t imagined Wendy actually dying.

  She realized what Wendy needed to hear. “Of course we’ll take Lucy,” she said. “Of course.”

  Even then she didn’t believe she would be asked to fulfill her promise immediately.

  “I was hoping for the best,” she said, “that she would be well and the treatment would work and maybe she’ll be in remission and have five years or ten years—that’s a big chunk of a child’s growth.”

  Later that morning Wendy was with Rhoda, waiting for the port to be inserted. A nurse came in and asked Wendy if she had a health-care proxy. There was a form at home that designated Bruce and Pam. But the nurse advised having another proxy available at the hospital. “You should,” she said ominously, “when you are having a procedure.”

  Wendy looked at Rhoda, who prayed that her friend wouldn’t ask her.

  She didn’t have to worry. Wendy told the nurse that her proxy was Bruce.

  At the end it was as it had been at the beginning: family first.

  Wendy didn’t outswim the sharks. When the chemicals entered her brain, her vital signs began failing fast.

  Bruce came to the hospital and behaved like a man accustomed to getting his way. Rhoda remembered, “He walked in that place with the loudest voice, shouting, ‘I’m in charge! I don’t care what it takes! I’ll keep her alive!’ ”

  Bruce brushed past Wendy’s friends who were visiting. They were struck by his insensitivity.

  Claude as well as Bruce’s children saw a man beset by grief.

  “He just couldn’t stand to see her like that,” said Pam, who loved her father and always defended him.

  Claude felt his suffering, though she understood the harsh reactions Bruce provoked in people. She had lived with him for a long time by then.

  “He suffered,” she said. “Other people couldn’t understand his vulnerability.”

  She didn’t blame Lola—not entirely. “It has to be a mix of everything,” she said, speaking of her husband and his siblings. “Genetics and environment and circumstances, all of it is in there. It’s all a mix. They’re just a little extreme in the humanity of it. We’re all out there trying, and we all fall, but they’re falling harder. They’re trying harder and getting further, but they’re also falling harder.”

  Bruce dreaded the hospital and kept his visits short. He visited Lucy Jane alone, in Wendy’s apartment. He read her nursery stories, as he had for all his children when they were young, the way Sandra had read to him and Wendy back in Brooklyn.

  Wendy’s illness came close to crushing Lola. After visiting Wendy in the hospital, she told a relative, “People think I’m blessed with my kids, but I’m cursed.”

  For six weeks Wendy drifted between life and death, occasionally rousing to greet one of the many friends and relatives who came to see her. One day she came to consciousness and saw Jane Rosenthal and André at her bedside. To Jane she offered a shopping joke, about handbags, a familiar Wendy tactic, using wit to beat back sadness.

  But she held out no false gaiety to André, her champion, who had given her so much happiness but also caused her much pain.

  “Oh, André, please don’t make me write any more plays,” she said.

  Even when desperately ill and barely conscious, Wendy knew how to reach her audience.

  On January 30, 2006, she died, at age fifty-five.

  The following day the news was reported on the front page of the New York Times. James Kaplan, her old boyfriend, was shocked but then thought of something that would amuse Wendy. “I thought, my God, when I knew her, if she’d known she would be on the front page of the New York Times when she died, she’d have come back to life!”

  The lights of Broadway were dimmed in her honor.

  A palpable sense of bereavement reverberated among the New York intelligentsia and well beyond, to the friends and strangers for whom Wendy Wasserstein had become a friendly touchstone. She didn’t preach from above but invited her public to join her perplexed, witty contemplation of the rapidly changing, confusing times in which they lived. Her characters moved in tandem with Baby Boomers as they aged, helping them—women in particular—sort out the shifting definitions and demands placed on their generation.

  She addressed the conflicting goals of youthful ambition in Uncommon Women and Others and the changing relations between men and women in Isn’t It Romantic. With The Heidi Chronicles, she captured an essential dilemma: how political movements can thwart individual desire for personal fulfillment. In Miami and The Sisters Rosensweig, she grappled with the powerful pull of family, even for those children seeking a wider world. She looked to larger issues of responsibility and power in An American Daughter and Old Money. Her final plays, Welcome to My Rash and Third, dealt with aging, the breakdown of body and beliefs, questions of legacy.

  Casting herself as the amiable outsider who could deliver tough messages with humor and warmth, she reinforced these dramatic themes through her essays and public appearances, her work with Open Doors, and her friendships. In doing so she became a cultural phenomenon while giving the impression that she was an unassuming part of the crowd.

  In the week following her death, the New York Times ran five separate articles about Wendy, including an affectionate column by Gail Collins, the editorial-page editor, first woman to have held the job at the Times. Newspapers around the country ran articles and personal assessments, and in the New Yorker, Paul Rudnick remembered his Yale friend in a “Talk of the Town” piece.

  Even critics who didn’t like her work felt compelled to weigh in.

  “I didn’t think much of any of Wasserstein’s plays, and I dreaded having to say so in print, since she was an exceedingly nice lady,” wrote Terry Teachout, the Wall Street Journal’s drama critic, in his blog.

  But most of the commentary carried the ache of personal loss. “She was observing life as we were living it,” said Linda Winer, Newsday’s theater critic, on National Public Radio. “And I’m finding it just very, very difficult to process the idea that there aren’t going to be any more Wendy Wasserstein plays.”

  Her memorial service, held at Lincoln Center on March 13, 2006, was covered as a news event in the New York Times. The reporter described the mourners as “scores of Broadway’s biggest stars and backstage players, many of whom counted Ms. Wasserstein—whose social calendar might include everything from nights at the opera to days at the mall—as an old, and close, friend.”

  Many luminaries spoke or performed: playwrights Terrence McNally, William Finn, and Christopher Durang; actors Meryl Streep, Joan Allen, and Swoosie Kurtz; and directors Daniel Sullivan, André Bishop, and James Lapine. But the room was also filled with the nonfamous, old friends from every part of Wendy’s life, and fans who knew her only through her writing.

  In subsequent months friends from different spheres began to talk—and to discover that each of them knew a slightly different version of Wendy. They discovere
d how well she had deflected scrutiny with the flattering mirror she placed in front of them.

  “How could the most public artist in New York keep so much locked up?” Frank Rich wrote at the end of 2006, in the Times’s year-end roundup of well-known people who had died that year. “I don’t think I was the only friend who felt I had somehow failed to see Wendy whole. And who wondered if I had let her down in some profound way. I grieve as much for the Wendy I didn’t know as the Wendy I did.”

  Wendy Wasserstein’s plays were predictive, as though she were mapping her future. Uncommon Women and Others ends with large youthful dreams, of being “pretty fucking amazing.” Isn’t It Romantic concludes after Janie Blumberg, Wasserstein’s heroine, decides not to conform to the conventional demands of society, represented by her boyfriend and her parents; in the final scene, Janie is dancing alone. Heidi of The Heidi Chronicles seeks release from her existential angst by becoming a single mother. In Third, the last Wasserstein play, the playwright incorporated themes from King Lear—Lear, who has to suffer the anguish of watching his youngest and most beloved daughter die.

  Lola outlived Wendy, but not for long. Eighteen months after her youngest daughter’s death, Lola attended her granddaughter Samantha’s wedding, which took place in Claude and Bruce’s home in the Hamptons. Lola bought a new dress and discussed her makeup with Georgette. She had hurt her foot and couldn’t dance at the party, but she stomped her cane to the beat of the music.

  The following Friday, June 15, 2007, Melissa Levis, Georgette’s younger daughter, took Lola to the doctor for a checkup. She received a clean bill of health.

  The next day Melissa—who lived nearby—received a telephone call from Lola’s doorman. Someone had reported that Lola’s door was open and her mail was scattered on the floor outside her apartment. Melissa found her grandmother undressed, on the floor by her bed, curled up as though taking a nap.