Wendy and the Lost Boys (28 page)

Inevitably, there was a confrontation. One evening as they were having a drink at the West Bank Café, across the street from Playwrights Horizons on Forty-second Street, the conversation turned, as it often did in those days, to the subject of marriage and children.

When Wendy asked him directly if he was willing to try, André could have kicked himself for his answer. The only thing the erudite Harvard-educated producer and literary adviser could come up with was an utter cliché. “I don’t think you should put all your eggs in one basket,” he told her.

She didn’t record her reply, and André couldn’t remember it, or didn’t want to.

Their “breakup” was followed by heartbreak, a brief period of separation, awkward moments, tears. They didn’t see each other all the time anymore, nor did they talk as frequently as they once had. Resilience being a dominant Wasserstein family trait, Wendy then resumed her friendship with André, the same as it had been but different.

They continued to take trips together, although hard feelings lingered. On an excursion to the Berkshires, the two of them were supposed to meet at the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, at a time that turned out to be unpropitious: André was late. Wendy had a toothache.

While she waited, she wrote him an angry letter that made it clear she hadn’t taken their separation as a couple as easily as André had wanted to believe.

4:00 Red Lion Inn

André—

. . . It is 4:05 and I am placing a bet with myself that you will arrive at 4:30 or later.

Frankly this makes me furious! I have seldom to experience a meeting with you for which you are not at least twenty minutes late. Yes plays are important, deficits are important . . . but the consistency is irritating and insulting. . . .

. . . .I don’t know why I am so angry at this moment. Maybe it’s because I am angry at myself for letting you play such a large part in my life. You are at the moment my major attachment, who I call when I get a tooth extracted.

And though I know you love me very much, there is something wrong here. Or I’m feeling not enough coming back. Or I have invested too much.

André, I don’t want to marry you. I did two years ago, maybe six months ago. I don’t anymore and sometimes I think I would like to have children with you. I would like us to reproduce, I would like to bring them up at One Fifth near you. But that fantasy, too, fades. Has faded.

I am very sad about this. Not actually as sad as I was in January when Linda told me André told Rachel he’s seeing someone. It wasn’t jealousy. It was just the thought we don’t know each other very well. We’re not such great friends.

Sometimes I feel like a convenience for you. Someone to travel with, spend weekends and few demands or commitments. Because the ultimate answer is, Wendy I love you but I’m gay.

. . . André, I want to marry and have children. Or at least I want to feel some personal vitality or possibility. If I hide with you and you are not stopping me from pursuing others, I won’t.

I so wish you weren’t late. I so wish I wasn’t angry. . . .

Wendy

P.S. André, your family is your theatre. Your vitality is your productions and I believe liaisons not obsessive come easier for you. . . .

W
endy did not sit home pining alone. After she moved into One Fifth, her circle came to include Michiko Kakutani, now her neighbor. Kakutani, just a few years younger than Wendy, also had a Yale (undergraduate) degree and was a friend and colleague of Frank Rich. The two women already knew each other; in 1984, Kakutani interviewed Wendy for an article about the lessons the playwright had learned from the first production of
Isn’t It Romantic.
Kakutani seemed to empathize with the dilemmas Wendy had been writing about.

They treated One Fifth as a kind of upscale dorm for grown-ups, with the world of New York culture as their campus—though they tended to talk on the telephone more than anything else. André and Kakutani became friends; even Ginger the cat grew fond of her “Aunt Michi,” as Wendy referred to her on Ginger’s behalf.

After Kakutani became the
Times’
chief book critic, her judgments—acid or admiring—made her a favorite target in the publishing world. The small woman wrote with a critical swagger that drew the wrath of literary heavyweights such as Susan Sontag, Salman Rushdie, and Norman Mailer. With Wendy, Kakutani could be just a girlfriend, receiving silly messages on her answering machine from her “niece,” Ginger the cat. They could be serious or mischievous as they contemplated world affairs and romantic liaisons, handbags and handmade chocolates, celebrity gossip and personal sorrow. Wendy talked about people who had “nut-juice,” Kakutani explained, “by which she meant a heightened sense of the absurdities of life, an ability to see the humor in a painful situation, the ridiculousness beneath the solemn or pretentious. . . .” As with many of Wendy’s friendships, their relationship was known but somehow secretive, cozy, special.

Wendy also continued her habit of transforming get-togethers with friends into theatrical occasions. Monthly drinks at 5:00 P.M. at the Parker Meridien Hotel with Heidi Ettinger and Carole Rothman evolved into the “Red Meat Society,” dinners, focused on steak and red wine at different restaurants around the city. Ettinger—namesake of Wendy’s title character in
The Heidi Chronicles—
was a Yale classmate and was becoming a prominent set designer. (She was the first woman to graduate from the school’s set-design program; managing contruction crews had been considered too rugged a business for women.) She was married, at the time, to Rocco Landesman, a theater producer who knew Rothman from their hometown, St. Louis, Missouri. Rothman was André Bishop’s counterpart at Second Stage Theatre, one of the small nonprofit theaters that had sprung up in the Public Theater’s wake.

At the Red Meat Society, they talked some shop, but it was more of a treat to indulge in what they referred to as “girlie” matters, say, manicures or visits to spas like Canyon Ranch. “Girlie is both to Wendy and to me not a place we gravitate to naturally,” said Ettinger. “We created a girlie language because it created a certain comfort level or [filled] a certain missing blank. We were in professions that did not allow that at all. With each other we could do cutesy messages and funny voices and go shopping and have facials and do that part of our lives we really weren’t allowed to express in any other way. At the time we were women competing with a lot of men who were very serious.”

None of Wendy’s other friends were invited to take part in the monthly dinners. “Wendy kept people in certain boxes,” said Rothman. “Wendy, Heidi, and I were in one box, and [Heidi and I] didn’t know what was going on in the other boxes.”

One of those other boxes contained Rafael Yglesias, Frank Rich’s novelist friend and, besides Wendy, his other regular theater companion.

Yglesias lived a couple of blocks from One Fifth, at Tenth and University, and was married with one child (the first of two) when he and Wendy became close. Sometimes Wendy went to his apartment, to have take-in Chinese food with him and his family. His wife, Margaret Joskow, deputy art director at
Newsweek,
enjoyed Wendy’s company; the two women were both obsessed with Princess Diana and relaxed by watching (and mocking) beauty pageants. But usually Yglesias and Wendy met three or four times a week alone for lunch—breakfast for her—at a local deli. They discussed their work and complained about the unfair success of unworthy (in their opinion) colleagues. This subject could fill hours, so when Yglesias had lunch/breakfast with Wendy, he didn’t count on getting much writing done that day.

Yglesias, like Wendy, was a born-and-bred New Yorker, persuasive yet insecure, confident yet neurotic. He was imposing—tall and smart, with a cynical charm. Four years her junior, son of a Jewish mother and a Cuban father, he was both familiar and exotic. He managed to simultaneously rebel against and succumb to pressure to succeed—dropping out of prep school but then having his first novel published when he was seventeen. Like Wendy, he’d had an early success and now felt the pressure to follow up. Both of them had begun writing screenplays; hers included a script for
Isn’t It Romantic
that went nowhere. They exchanged gripes and gossip about Hollywood.

He recognized her ambition. In fact, Yglesias began to think that she was the most ambitious person he’d ever known, and he knew many people with large dreams, including himself. As they got to know each other better, Wendy frequently mentioned that her sister was a big shot at American Express and her brother was a prominent investment banker.

“She would say she was in competition with them, and if she had any hopes of being acknowledged in her family, she would have to win a Pulitzer Prize, have a hit on Broadway, and even that wouldn’t be enough,” he said. “She would say it over and over again.”

When Wendy said these things, they came out as comedy, not melodrama, but Yglesias saw the psychological implications. “She was climbing the highest mountain; she was going to top her brother and sister the only conceivable way she could,” he said.

He was appalled—not at her ambition but at her glorification of Sandra and Bruce. “I didn’t think what her brother and sister had accomplished was anything compared to writing a good play,” he recalled telling her. “ ‘You’ve got to be kidding. Your brother and sister are nothing. They’re just part of this huge machine designed to make money. Somebody’s got to float to the top of it. They’re nobody!’ ”

He made his point with brutal emphasis. “They’re nobody,” he repeatedly told her. “You’re an artist.”

His feelings about her family were confirmed one night when she invited Bruce to join her, Yglesias, and Frank Rich at Elaine’s, the Upper East Side show-business hangout. Bruce’s awkward avoidance of the group was so profound, Yglesias said, “I thought he had Asperger’s syndrome.”

Wendy met Yglesias for breakfast the next day and announced, “Bruce said you’re all idiots.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because we should right now—you, me, Chris Durang—we should form a corporation and sell shares in ourselves,” she explained. “Only a few of us are going to make it big, and whoever makes it big will just share all the money. If we buy shares now, we’ll make more money than we would individually. We’re idiots if we don’t incorporate.”

That idea seemed far-fetched, but Yglesias was impressed by Wendy’s other strategies for developing her career. “We would discuss how the New York theater audience was largely Jewish, suburban, read the
Times
as though it was the Bible, so the more you were beloved and appeared in the paper, the more the audience would come and see your work,” he said. “The most important thing a writer can have is a loyal audience. A loyal audience makes you invulnerable; no matter what the world tries to do to you, you can survive. We talked about public appearances, writing for magazines, being in the
Times
as much as possible.”

Wendy was a natural at self-promotion. By the time she was discussing
Miami
with Rafael Yglesias, her name had been in the
New York Times
eighty times—in reviews and articles about her plays or about theater. Even though Frank Rich couldn’t ethically review her plays, he could—and did—refer to her work when he wrote about trends in theater.

Editors at the
Times
were aware that Wendy had the backing of Frank Rich, but she soon made her own friends at the paper. She went to lunch with editors and charmed them. “She was a delight to be with—funny and happy and smiling and relaxed and easy to get along with and knew so much about theater,” said Mervyn Rothstein, who was editing the theater section of Arts & Leisure in the Sunday
New York Times.
He assigned her stories and then provided her name to reporters looking for a quotable quip. Her glib wit soon made her a popular source.

She became a frequent contributor. For the
Times Magazine,
she wrote a romantic satire about the courtship between upwardly mobile New Yorkers, and then a piece called “Body Minimal,” a whimsical diet plan. Her advice includes:

“Rest in the midmorning. This can be accomplished at home by never getting out of bed. . . .”

Wendy’s career as an essayist received a significant boost when Betsy Carter, an old friend of Bruce’s from the
Michigan Daily,
began a magazine called
New York Woman.
The target readership mirrored Wendy’s audience—educated, ambitious, well-off Baby Boomers.

Carter came to New York after graduating from the University of Michigan and had a successful career in journalism, first at
Newsweek
and then at
Esquire.
In 1986 she left
Esquire
to begin a magazine for her contemporaries. She described the readers she imagined. “We shop, we daydream, we’re neurotic, we want to do everything,” she said. The cover of the first issue announced its intent: “Our Marvelous, Maddening Lives!”

Carter was a slender, attractive woman with a dazzling smile. She first met Wendy when Bruce’s little sister visited him at the University of Michigan; subsequently, at Wasserstein family gatherings, Carter became as frequent a guest as André.

Shortly after she launched her new venture, Carter’s handsome, charming husband of seventeen years left her, after announcing that he was gay. “Suddenly I became this person,” she said. “Newly divorced, broke, dating like crazy.”

Bruce Wasserstein was a true friend to Carter in that maddening, not-so-marvelous period. He began fixing her up with what seemed like every single investment banker and lawyer in New York. “If your husband leaves you because he’s gay, you need that,” she said. “Bruce was an excellent friend.”