Wendy and the Lost Boys (30 page)

The early phase of McNally’s affair with Wendy coincided with the premiere of
Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,
his play about a one-night stand between two lonely, middle-aged people. “You just don’t decide to fall in love with people out of the blue,” the woman tells the man. Later Wendy would tell people that
Frankie and Johnny
reminded her of her affair with McNally, even though he’d written it before they became involved.

He was shocked to discover, years after the fact, that she’d told anyone anything about their relationship. McNally had urged Wendy to allow them to be a public couple, but she had impressed on him the need for secrecy.

He honored Wendy’s request, while she assured him she never discussed their relationship with anyone. “She said, ‘I’m not going to tell any of my friends, and I don’t want you to,’ and I said fine,” he recalled.

He asked her, “What about André?”

She replied, “Oh, no, André must never know.”

Yet she told André, along with many others—close confidants as well as people with whom she was merely friendly, like Honor Moore, the writer who had interviewed her at the O’Neill.

André was disturbed when Wendy gave him the news. “I wasn’t frankly that interested in hearing about it,” he said. “Not because of jealousy, but I couldn’t quite gauge the nature of their relationship, except she indicated that it was sexual. I guess I couldn’t maybe deal with that, because he was gay and I was gay and I couldn’t have a sexual relationship with Wendy. It wasn’t that I was jealous of him. I just didn’t know what that was, she and Terrence. She certainly told a number of people.”

Wendy’s motives didn’t seem that mysterious to Honor Moore. “She was looking for someone,” she said.

That was true, but there were also larger forces at play. From Wendy’s perspective (and Terrence’s), the future no longer stretched out endlessly. She was repeatedly forced to contend with the prospect of mortality. Her onetime lover, the lyricist Ed Kleban, had died on December 28, 1987, from cancer of the mouth at age forty-eight. Six weeks later Wendy spoke at his memorial service, where she regaled the audience with stories of “Eddie’s” eccentricities and talked about his critical aspects and his kindness. “I knew him, and I loved him,” she said. “And I’ll never forget him.”

Far more frightening was the specter of AIDS, the plague mystifying the medical world and terrifying the gay population. For too many of Wendy’s friends and acquaintances, the Peter Pan syndrome would literally mean eternal youth, because they would die too young. The theater world was hit especially hard; by 1985 casualties were widespread enough for the disease to command the attention of artists. AIDS emerged onstage that year with
As Is
by William Hoffman and
The Normal Heart
by Larry Kramer.

In 1987, 5,216 new cases were reported in New York City and 9,756 deaths, including that of Michael Bennett, creator of
A Chorus Line.
Terrence lost a lover to the disease. Peter Evans, Gerry Gutierrez’s boyfriend, was sick. Harry Kondoleon, Wendy’s playwright friend, specialist in elegant lunches with poached pears, would soon be infected.

Within four years the death count in New York would more than triple. Wendy’s cousin Barry Kaufman, who had lived with her family when she was young, was another victim; when he died of AIDS, Morris and Lola didn’t tell anyone—including Wendy—because they were ashamed.

AIDS became not just a disease but a cultural indicator. In his review of
Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,
Frank Rich observed that even though McNally’s play is about a heterosexual couple and AIDS isn’t the subject, “it’s just possible that, in the process, he’s written the most serious play yet about intimacy in the age of AIDS.”

In
The Heidi Chronicles,
Wendy addresses the subject in a painful conversation between Heidi and her high-school crush, Peter Patrone, who is gay. When they are adults—she a well-known art historian, he a pediatrician—he responds to her existential angst with a bitter outburst:

“Okay, Heidi, I’d say about once a month now I gather in some church, meeting house, or concert hall with handsome men all my own age, and in the front row is usually a couple my parents’ age, the father’s in a suit and the mother’s tasteful, a pleasant face. And we listen for half an hour to testimonials, memories, amusing anecdotes about a son, a friend, a lover, also handsome, also usually my own age, whom none of us will see again. After the first, the fifth, or the fifteenth of these gatherings, a sadness like yours seems a luxury.”

These were harsh times. Maybe through Wendy, McNally was seeking an alternative that seemed less dangerous: He was approaching fifty. Wendy told friends they’d discussed the possibility of having a child. Whatever his motives, as
The Heidi Chronicles
was being prepared for production, Terrence McNally became yet another Wasserstein secret that wasn’t a secret.

T
he frantic pace of Wendy’s life accelerated. In a period of just a few months, while writing
Heidi
(in London, New York, and Seattle)
,
she flew to Minnesota to give a speech at Carleton College, worked on
The Object of My Affection,
wrote columns for
New York Woman
as well as articles for the
New York Times
and other publications, began her romance with Terrence McNally, and zipped around the globe to fulfill work and family obligations—including chaperoning ten-year-old Pam Wasserstein (oldest of Bruce’s three children) to Romania to compete in a chess tournament. Being Wendy Wasserstein looked exhausting, leading friends to speculate—in retrospect—that she was trying to outrun death, as if she knew that her time on earth was limited.

On December 12, 1988,
The Heidi Chronicles
opened at Playwrights Horizons. As always, Wendy kept cutting the play during previews; the reaction of early audiences was mixed. By opening night, however, almost all reservations appeared to have vanished. André’s prediction came true:
Heidi
was received as an “American Important Play.”

Writing in the
New York Times,
Mel Gussow called the play “Wendy Wasserstein’s enlightening portrait of her generation.”

The
New Yorker
’s Mimi Kramer was loftier still, discussing how “the Chekhovian fabric of the dialogue—the degree to which characters’ ways of talking differ from one another or change over time—creates a Stanislavskian offstage life.”

Howard Kissel in the
Daily News
was more down-to-earth but no less impressed. “Wasserstein reproduces the inanities and glibness of the last 20 years with a shrewd eye and a perfect ear for the self-delusional,” he wrote. “This is not just a funny play, but a wise one.”

With a sold-out run propelled by A-plus reviews, André was able to move the play from his 150-seat theater to the 1,102-seat Plymouth, a Broadway theater owned by the all-powerful Shubert Organization. The play cost $175,000 to produce Off-Broadway; an estimated $800,000 to $850,000 at the Plymouth. There was a bidding war, including a strong entry by Rocco Landesman, head of Jujamcyn Theaters and then-husband of Yale friend Heidi Ettinger.

Explaining why he chose the Shubert Organization, André told a
Times
reporter, “Wendy and I both felt if we could go to Broadway and go firstclass, let’s do it. In ten years, who knows whether or not there will even be plays on Broadway.”

During Wendy’s lifetime Broadway had become an anachronism for American playwrights. Because of high costs, only a handful of plays were produced there a year, while big-budget musicals—led by imports from abroad, notably
Cats, Les Misérables,
and
The Phantom of the Opera
—were thriving. Within five years after
The Heidi Chronicles
opened at the Plymouth, even Neil Simon—possibly the richest, most successful playwright in the United States—chose to open his newest play Off-Broadway, because the costs of a Broadway production had become prohibitive.

Still, the first day Wendy walked into the Plymouth—not as a spectator but as a playwright about to be produced there—she was overwhelmed.

“I stared at the delicate gray and white rococo ceiling and wondered what John Barrymore, Laurette Taylor and even William Gillette, who opened in the theater in 1917, first thought when they gazed at it,” she wrote. “Bernard Jacobs of the Shubert Organization tells me the Plymouth is his shining jewel, the most beautiful theater in New York—maybe, he says, even in America. I think it is in the world.”

A
ndré was determined to push
Heidi
as far as it could go. He had even moved out of his apartment for two months so Dan Sullivan could live there during the run at Playwrights Horizons.

Once the reviews were in and the deal made for Broadway, André became obsessive about a Pulitzer Prize for Wendy. He knew she could be careless about page numbers, spelling, and grammar. Before they sent the play to the Pulitzer committee, he went through the entire manuscript, page by page, line by line, correcting everything.

She always said she assumed she wouldn’t win. “I’d never been someone who won prizes,” she told an interviewer (even though by then Wendy had won many prizes, including the Guggenheim and the Mary Lyon Award, the highest honor bestowed by the Mount Holyoke Alumnae Association).

Maybe she understood, consciously or unconsciously, that the persona she had cultivated—shy, ingratiating, underdog Wendy—was part of her success as well as her protection from failure.

Perhaps she still felt the humiliation of her graduation from the Yale School of Drama, sitting in her chair as everyone else collected prizes. Even now Robert Brustein wasn’t ready to dispense unmitigated praise, much less an A-plus. Writing in the
New Republic
on April 17, 1989, Brustein acknowledged the playwright’s improvement, her “wry, self-deprecating humor,” while putting down her previous work. “
The Heidi Chronicles
is not yet the work of a mature playwright,” he wrote, “but it is a giant step beyond the cute dating games and Jewish mother jokes of
Isn’t It Romantic.
”

However, Brustein was weak competition when it came to putting Wendy in her place.

On March 30, 1989, the day it was announced that she’d won the Pulitzer, Wendy was home in her quilted bathrobe, surrounded by her old stuffed animals, writing a Mother’s Day essay about Lola for the
New York Times
.

When the press agent for
The Heidi Chronicles
phoned and told her she’d won the Pulitzer, she said, “That’s not funny.”

He told her to call her mother, and she did, not because she wanted to but because she thought, “This woman’s going to hear my name on the radio and think I died or something.”

Lola’s response: “Is that as good as a Tony?”

Wendy wasn’t in the mood. So she told Lola, “Why don’t you just call my brother and he’ll explain it to you.” Then she hung up the phone.

(After Wendy won the Tony, she confessed that she, too, felt that the theater prize was more significant, from a pragmatic point of view. “Winning the Pulitzer was never a goal of mine, but it meant a great deal to me in terms of self-esteem,” she said. “Getting the Tony was quite different, because I knew that for the sake of the play and its commercial life that it was very important.”)

Wendy lightened the Lola story when she wrote about winning the Pulitzer: “My sister telephones to say that not only has my mother called my aunts to inform them that I’ve won the Nobel Prize, but my cousins have already begun asking when I’m going to Stockholm.”

Besides the Pulitzer, the Tony, and the Outer Critics Circle Award,
The Heidi Chronicles
won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, recognizing outstanding work by women play wrights, and the Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Award for “the best American play dealing with contemporary political, religious or social mores.”

There was an outpouring of affirmation from friends and colleagues, none more meaningful than the letter she saved from George R. Hornig, managing director of Wasserstein, Perella & Co.

Dear Wendy:

By way of a note of congratulations on your Pulitzer prize, I thought I would share a little slice of Wasserstein Perella life. Last Friday morning I got a call from Bruce while I was working in our London office. Nothing particularly unusual in that—Bruce calls me all the time. The typical conversation begins “Hello George, what’s new?” followed by a litany of wrong decisions, problems created and otherwise substandard performance I have exhibited in my management of the Firm’s administration since his last phone call the prior evening. . . .

Imagine my surprise and pleasure when the first words out of his mouth were an excited “Did you hear Wendy won the Pulitzer?” This should give you a good sense of the magnitude of your achievement. Your brother stepped out of character for a minute, and I smiled as I visualize him “kvelling” with family pride about his sister’s accomplishment. What happy news for you and what a nice time for me in that he was in such a good frame of mind that Friday morning’s litany was short enough to make me feel as if I did not actually miss the tour bus taking the other simians along the evolutionary trail. . . .

W
endy was happy. “The phone started ringing off the hook, it was like the phone went up and started spinning around the room,” she said about winning the Pulitzer.

That day, the doorman at One Fifth asked her if she was getting married, so many flowers were delivered for her.

She went out for champagne with Bruce, Sandra, André, and Walter Shapiro, another friend of Bruce’s from the
Michigan Daily
days, who was now working for
Time
and had become a friend of Wendy’s. They met at The Four Seasons, the restaurant that had symbolized the apex of her city’s glamour from the moment it opened in 1959, when the
New York Times
critic wrote, “There has never been a restaurant better keyed to the tempo of Manhattan. . . . It is spectacular, modern, audacious.”