Wendy and the Lost Boys (42 page)

The young cousins were not that close. The families got together mainly for holiday meals, and the adults dutifully attended one another’s social functions and celebrations. When it came time for Wendy to consider where Lucy should go to kindergarten, she was leaning toward Brearley, an all-girls school, rather than the coed school that Jack and Dash attended. Wendy explained to Emmy that Lucy was quieter than Bruce’s rambunctious little boys. She might thrive better in an all-girls school. Then, grinning, Wendy offered another reason for not sending Lucy Jane to be with her cousins. “That would be too many Wassersteins in one school,” she said.

A joke and not a joke. No doubt she didn’t want to give her mother extra fodder for comparisons. When Lucy was in preschool, maybe three years old, Lola asked her if she could read.

“No,” Lucy answered.

“Oh,” Lola replied. “The boys can,” referring to Dash and Jack.

Wendy seemed to shrug off Lola’s barbs, but—following Sandra’s example—she controlled her mother’s visits. She would have one of the older grandchildren pick up Lola at her apartment across town—most frequently Scoop, Bruce’s son, youngest of the older three children—and then meet them at the Café des Artistes. The restaurant’s glory had faded by then, but its old-school elegance appealed to Lola and Wendy. Most important to Wendy was location: It was near her apartment building. She always made sure to arrive at the restaurant first, to keep Lola from coming upstairs.

Life at 75 Central Park West was unconventional, but Wendy did her best to make it warm and inviting. Sarah Saltzberg had been a struggling young actress waiting tables when she got a job as weekend baby-sitter for Lucy Jane.

“I would come on Friday at noon when Emmy left and stay until Monday morning,” Saltzberg said. “I remember waking up Saturday morning, the first weekend I was there, and we were all in our pajamas, Wendy and Lucy and I. Wendy was making up a song for Lucy, and I was singing it, and I remember thinking, ‘God, this is so surreal. Here I am, twenty-seven years old, with this award-winning playwright in pajamas making up a song to her two-year-old daughter. This is so weird. Keep it together, Sarah.’ ”

Soon, though, she felt at home. “Wendy had this incredible ability to put everybody at ease, to not make you feel you were in the presence of this very talented playwright,” said Saltzberg. “She was warm and kooky and loving.” Many Friday nights Wendy put together her own version of a Sabbath dinner for Lucy Jane and whichever of her assistants was around.

“We were this weird hodgepodge of a family,” Saltzberg said. The meal, like the family, was nontraditional. Instead of chicken soup and matzo balls, the deliberately nonkosher menu consisted of pork strips and shrimp, ordered in from Shun Lee, the high-priced Chinese restaurant that was popular with Lincoln Center patrons and just a few blocks from Wendy’s home.

“This is our family,” Wendy told her assistants. “You can choose your family as well as having your family be your blood.”

Wendy was faithful to that ethos. She didn’t treat Saltzberg or the other assistants as if they were “the help” (though she complained to friends that she sometimes felt she was working for her assistants rather than vice versa). Wendy’s innermost circle contained prominent stars of the universe that Saltzberg aspired to be part of. When people like André Bishop, Terrence McNally, and James Lapine dropped by, Wendy introduced Saltzberg as an actress, though she was still mainly a waitress and sometimes a baby-sitter.

Saltzberg saw how differently other people treated their nannies when Wendy visited wealthy friends and brought Saltzberg along to take care of Lucy.

“We’d be in these perfect houses, and Wendy and her friends would eat at one table and the help would eat in another room or at another time,” she said. “It was never like that with her, ever. It was never this class line.”

Soon Saltzberg was initiated into Wendy’s School for Girls. In May 2002 the young actress performed in an improvisational show about spelling bees that she and some friends were putting on in a theater on the Lower East Side. She invited Wendy to come see the show.

“I was watching her, the whole time thinking, ‘Oh God, she hates it, she’s not laughing,’ ” Saltzberg said. But after the show, Wendy said she’d loved it. She told Saltzberg the play needed original music and put her in touch with Bill Finn. That was the genesis of the 2005 Broadway hit musical called
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,
starring Sarah Saltzberg, directed by James Lapine, music and lyrics by William Finn.

During the show’s Off-Off-Broadway beginnings, as it became apparent that the quirky little musical might be going somewhere, questions arose: How should credit be assigned? Which actors should continue? What kind of collaboration agreement, if any, should they sign? Each decision had financial implications.

That’s when Sarah Saltzberg saw her boss transform from the funloving eccentric into a coolheaded businesswoman. “We were sitting in her office, and Lucy had gone to bed,” she said. “The lawyer had sent something to me, and I was reading it. Wendy went through it step by step and literally helped me write the letter: ‘Change this. Do that.’ It took about an hour, and I got so worked up and started saying, ‘I don’t want this to fall apart! I really want it to happen!’ ”

Wendy cut through the escalating hysteria. “Look, in any room with two people in it, one person has to be more neurotic than the other, and that person always has to be me,” she told Saltzberg, her voice deep. “Right now it’s you. You have to calm down.”

With that, she left the room. A few minutes later, she returned, holding a Prada handbag, which she had recently received as a gift. “If I give this to you, will that make you feel better?” she asked.

Saltzberg didn’t hesitate. “I said yes!”

T
he Campath treatments seemed to have done the job. Wendy regained strength, though the Bell’s palsy periodically recurred, twisting her features. She took Lucy to interviews for nursery schools and visited senior centers for Morris. After spending much of his life in silence, he had begun singing all the time. He usurped Lola’s place as family artist. “My father likes the crafts, so does Lucy,” Wendy wrote. “They both bring home their artwork.”

One day she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and noticed, sadly, “I can’t smile.”

On May 2, 2003, Wendy sent the outline for a novel to Victoria Wilson, her editor at Knopf. On June 17, 2003, with the endorsement of Sonny Mehta, Knopf publisher and Wendy’s friend, the playwright received an advance of half a million dollars for
Elements of Style
. Wendy had been telling her friends she wanted to write a roman à clef sending up the world of nouveau riche New York, the world she inhabited and obsessed about yet insisted wasn’t hers. But the accompanying handwritten note indicated she had something more serious, more personal in mind:

Dear Vicky—

Here are the two outlines I mentioned to you in December. One is for a novel,
Elements of Style, and the other for a memoir,
Two.

My father is declining rapidly and my entire family has gathered for the curtain call. The one thing that has kept me sane is the thought that I will write about my dad and all of them.

W
endy’s thinking had changed in the two years since she told an interviewer about a childhood memoir she’d owed her publisher for almost a decade. “I find myself unable to touch it,” she said. “Mostly because I don’t even know if I could reach that kind of depth.”

With the birth of her child and her father’s deteriorating health, Wendy wanted to assemble the pieces of her fractured family portrait. She returned to Rochester to see Abner, accompanying Morris and Lola, in a private jet arranged by Bruce. That trip would be Morris’s last visit with his stepson. Wendy watched in horror as her father urinated on the tarmac, realizing how disoriented he had become.

She didn’t discuss those visits but wrote about Morris via fiction. In
Elements of Style,
the novel she was working on, there are tender moments between Frankie Weissman, a middle-aged pediatrician, and her elderly father, Abraham, who has dementia.

In one scene Frankie brings her father, a “news junkie” like Morris, the morning papers. “She knew there was no possibility of his actually reading them, but sometimes he still liked to hold the paper as if it was a distant memory, like playing with blocks,” Wendy wrote. “In the past month, Abraham’s disease had rapidly accelerated. Not only had he forgotten how to speak or when to pee, he had also forgotten how to eat. Now he stared at food as if he didn’t know if it was a yo-yo or a turtle.”

On June 3, 2003, the Wasserstein family gathered for another memorial service, for Morris, their gentle patriarch, in the building on West Eighteenth Street that had housed the Wasserstein ribbon company. The loss was enormous. Morris had been a steadfast presence, ballast in a family often rocked by Lola’s whims and desires.

His elaborately staged memorial service, like Sandra’s, became yet another vehicle for Wendy’s construction of the Wasserstein legacy. She controlled every aspect of the production. When Melissa Levis, Georgette’s younger daughter, asked to perform a song she’d written about her grandparents, Wendy said no. “We weren’t allowed to speak,” said Melissa. “Wendy put on a show. She had Mary Testa [a well-known stage actress] sing. Cy Coleman played the piano. That was nice, but who cares? Grandpa would have wanted family.”

Wendy and her theater friends recounted Morris’s extraordinary life, from his humble beginnings as an immigrant boy to successful businessman, doting husband, proud father, and beloved grandfather. Jeffrey Rosen, Bruce’s business partner, read contributions from members of the family, including a touching thought from Scoop, Bruce’s nineteen-year-old son, which summed up the overriding sentiment.

“I think he was the best man I ever had the pleasure to know,” Rosen read on Scoop’s behalf. “I guess what I’ll take from him is an understanding of what really matters in life. As long as he was with his family, he was a happy man.”

Wendy had already paid her respects publicly, in the May 23
New York Times
article about Central Park where she’d discussed sledding with Lucy Jane.

“Having spent almost half a century in the Park, more than anything now, I am reminded of the people with whom I have walked there,” she wrote. “I would sometimes accompany my father, Morris Wasserstein, as he walked every morning to work through the park. He entered on 76th Street and sauntered along the East Side path till he stopped at the George Delacorte Musical Clock at the entrance of the children’s zoo. Before continuing to his ribbon factory downtown, he would stop and watch as the clock chimed a new hour, and a bear with a tambourine, a hippopotamus with violin, a goat with pan pipes, a kangaroo and offspring playing horns, and a penguin with a drum circled the base of the clock.”

His nurse took him to the park the day before he went into a coma.

“She told me he smiled as he watched the children playing,” Wendy wrote. “That would be his last outing. He passed away, four days later. I think of him, a real New Yorker in the park, happy with the life he made in the city he lived in.”

Wendy flew to Rochester with Lola to tell Abner that Morris wouldn’t be coming to see him anymore. “It was very hard for Abner to hear this man who had been an important part of his life had died,” said Eleanor Newell, Abner’s friend from the Joy Club. “He talked about how his dad dealt with Macy’s and Gimbels, and how he knew all about fabric and yard goods. He had a lot of fond memories of his dad.”

Abner talked with friends about seeing his mother and sister when his father died.

“I know the visit from Wendy and her mother was a very good one,” Newell reported. “So it ended up they became a brother and sister, for a moment at least.”

A
ndré Bishop knew that Wendy was ill and that she was busy with Lucy and the sadness surrounding Morris’s decline and death. He was aware that she was working on a novel as well as on various screenplays and articles. She had even talked about giving up writing and going into politics. But for him the theater was what mattered. Despite their bruised history and their new, separate lives as parents, he never stopped considering himself Wendy’s collaborator. He wanted to see her get back to writing plays, to recover from the
Old Money
fiasco.

André had been put on the defensive by critics like the
New Yorker
’s John Lahr, who’d questioned his judgment in producing
Old Money.
After praising André for his loyalty to authors, Lahr dryly commented that “with producing as with parenting, leniency is not always the best policy.”

André understood the criticism but remained unapologetic for his decision. “People said, ‘Ah, they just did it because André’s friends with Wendy,’ and it’s true,” he said. “You can’t plan a season doing plays for writers just to get it out of their system, or your theater will go down the tubes. But you can do that for a few writers. She was by no means at the end of her talent.”

Wendy had two one-act plays in development—
Welcome to My Rash
and
Psyche in Love,
a light romantic retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche. She had been invited by the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., to participate in a festival of new plays in October 2002. Ari Roth, artistic director of Theater J in Washington, attended and offered a production at his theater. He encouraged Wendy to develop the plays further at another festival for new works, taking place at the Kennedy Center the summer of 2003. After that, in early 2004, Theater J would present them in a workshop production.

André hoped one of those one-acts could become a full-length play he could produce. In March 2003 he arranged a reading at Lincoln Center for Dan Sullivan, followed by another reading of
Pamela’s First Musical,
a stage adaptation of her children’s book that Wendy was working on with Cy Coleman. Dan Sullivan dismissed
Psyche
right away but thought
Welcome to My Rash
was interesting. He and André agreed to revisit the new work after the Washington workshops.