Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Part One - GROWING UP
One - THE FAMILY WASSERSTEIN
Two - A BROOKLYN CHILDHOOD
Three - A GIRL’S EDUCATION
Four - GRACIOUS LIVING
Five - GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Part Two - BECOMING A WRITER
Six - THE FUNNIEST GIRL IN NEW YORK
Seven - DRAMA QUEENS AND KINGS
Eight - A PLAY WRIGHT’S HORIZONS
Nine - TRYOUT TOWN, USA
Ten - THE EMERGENCE OF WENDY WASSERSTEIN
Eleven - ORPHANS’ CHRISTMAS
Part Three - ISN’T IT ROMANTIC
Twelve - DESIGN FOR LIVING
Thirteen - MIAMI
Fourteen - ROOMS OF HER OWN
Fifteen - THE HEIDI CHRONICLES
Part Four - DAYS OF AWE
Sixteen - WENDY WASSERSTEIN, INC.
Seventeen - THICKER THAN WATER
Eighteen - THE OBJECTS OF HER AFFECTION
Nineteen - FESTIVAL OF REGRETS
Twenty - THE BIRTH OF LUCY JANE
Part Five - WENDY’S LAST ACT
Twenty-one - THE NEW MILLENNIUM
Twenty-two - WELCOME TO MY RASH
Twenty-three - THE FINAL PRODUCTION
Twenty-four - LEGACY
Acknowledgements
ILLUSTRATION PERMISSIONS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY JULIE SALAMON
ALSO BY JULIE SALAMON
Hospital
Rambam’s Ladder
The Christmas Tree
Facing the Wind
The Net of Dreams
The Devil’s Candy
White Lies
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First published in 2011 by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Julie Salamon, 2011
All rights reserved
Letters of Wendy Wasserstein
Excerpt from “At the Ballet,” music by Marvin Hamlisch, lyrics by Edward Kleban.
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Photograph credits appear on page 433.
Title page photo by Joanna Eldridge Morrissey
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Salamon, Julie.
Wendy and the lost boys : the uncommon life of Wendy Wasserstein / Julie Salamon.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN : 978-1-101-51776-5
1. Wasserstein, Wendy. 2. Dramatists, American—20th century—Biography.
I. Title.
PS3573.A798Z87 2011
812’.54—dc22
[B]
2011014581
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FOR PATTI LYNN GREGORY
All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, “Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!” This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.
—from PETER PAN, by J. M. Barrie
PROLOGUE
When Wendy Wasserstein died on January 30, 2006, at age fifty-five, hers was a rare obituary considered important enough to make the front page of the New York Times. Her memorial service, held in the 1,060-seat Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center, packed the house. The overflow was siphoned into a theater across the street at the Juilliard School, where an additional five hundred fans joined the other mourners via video monitors.
Strangers wept and columnists eulogized. She was remembered as a significant playwright, but also as a quintessential New Yorker, the toast of the tough and glamorous metropolis. She had an uncanny ability to know almost every major player in theater, publishing, and politics, right up to the White House. Because she wrote about women and the subjects that concerned them, she was designated a feminist. But with Wasserstein everything, including politics, tended to be personal.
Friends often mentioned her two voices: the high, girlish, giggly one she generally used and the deep, authoritative tone that said she meant business. Likewise her work ranged from the frivolous to the profound; her trademark was humor laced with poignancy.
Wasserstein was noticed as a playwright whose work became worthy of the Pulitzer Prize, and she was the first woman to win an unshared Tony. But she became a celebrity by turning her life over to the public domain. In plays, autobiographical essays, and interviews, she opened her heart and her family album for the world to see. No personal detail seemed exempt from public consumption, including her decision to have a child at age forty-eight, as a single mother. In the New Yorker, in remarkable detail, she made the world privy to the difficult, miraculous birth of her daughter Lucy Jane, who weighed in at 790 grams, less than two pounds. The baby shower was recorded by a photographer and a reporter from the New York Times.
People she didn’t know would stop her on the street and greet her, not with starstruck awe but with familiarity. Women identified with her dilemmas, petty and grand: What shoes to buy? Was it possible to lose weight without exercising or eating less? What was the most romantic spot in New York? Why couldn’t she find a man who would want her? Was the problem her success? Could she create a family when she couldn’t always cope with the one she�
�d been born into? What did it mean to be a good person? Where was fulfillment?
They believed they knew her well enough to ask about her daughter, her diets, her siblings, her boyfriends, her mother—and to tell her about theirs.
Yet after she was gone, what stunned those closest to her was how much they didn’t know. What was the nature of her relationships with the numerous men, gay and straight, she called her “husbands” or “crushes”? Why had almost no one known she was pregnant, and who was Lucy Jane’s father? If so many people were her best friends, why did none of them realize how gravely ill she was until the very end? Why did some of her obituaries say there were four Wasserstein siblings, while others said there were five?
Through drama she told many truths. In personal essays, drawn from her life, she freely reconfigured events, as though she were writing fiction. She was as covert as a spy, parceling out information to a host of confidants, allowing each of them to believe that he or she alone had access to the inner sanctum. Only later did they realize that Wasserstein had constructed her life as a giant game of Clue, full of hidden connections and compartmentalized players. She used humor as a dodge, intimacy as a smoke screen.
Such reinvention was the stuff of theater. But Wasserstein learned the tactic long before she began writing plays. Her parents, Lola and Morris Wasserstein, were immigrants who’d had the brains and ambition to become what they believed they should be (successful Americans), not what they had been (Jewish outcasts). They took their children to see the Broadway musicals that celebrated these notions far more often than they took them to synagogue. They displayed no nostalgia for the past, only intense hunger for the future.
Wendy Joy Wasserstein was born on October 18, 1950, in the thick of the Baby Boom, the postwar procreative binge that seemed like a collective impulse to replace what had been lost. Only five years had passed since the end of the twentieth century’s second world war; 50 million lives had been extinguished. The Wassersteins were caught up in generational momentum, the postwar conviction that humankind’s best chance was to look ahead, to shut the door on the past, to produce a new world—or at the very least to reproduce. They would defy death with life.
Wasserstein became the quintessential Baby Boomer, part of the generation captivated and characterized by Peter Pan, the brave, charming, petulant, and wistful boy (often played onstage by a woman) who would never grow up. She was one among the many babies named for Peter’s beloved friend Wendy Darling, the girl who couldn’t avoid her fate, that of becoming an adult. Peter’s Wendy understood that her duties were to stay at home and tend to marriage and motherhood, while boys went out into the world to fight pirates and men became bankers. But Wendy Wasserstein came of age when women were supposed to do it all.
Her story tracks a period of momentous change in women’s lives and personal relationships. The nuclear family, defined by the Census Bureau as a heterosexual married couple with children under eighteen, made up 45 percent of all U.S. households in 1960, when Wasserstein was ten years old. By 2000, when she was the fifty-year-old single mother of a toddler, that traditional configuration had fallen to 23.5 percent of all households. Marriage was no longer a prerequisite for having children, and those children might even have parents who were gay.
Call it fate, demographic probability, or simply the kind of thing that would make Wasserstein laugh that famous high-pitched giggle, even as she spun the facts into another bittersweet, funny-serious story of a modern woman’s search for her place in the world. She was part of an American generation convinced of its supremacy and an immigrant family whose children were expected to do it—whatever it was—better than anyone else. Her destiny was set the instant she emerged from Lola’s womb.
A friend often told her, “You were born into great material.”
Or, as Wasserstein herself would say, “Funny is a very complicated issue.”
Part One
GROWING UP
1950-71
THE BROOKLYN YEARS:
LOLA, GEORGETTE, BRUCE, AND WENDY.
One
THE FAMILY WASSERSTEIN
Let other, weaker families dwell on their sorrows. That was the unspoken philosophy in the Wasserstein household.
Wendy would joke that when family members died, it was said, “They went to Europe.” More intricate heartaches were ignored.
Secrecy pervaded the household, though the family would deny that anything was hidden. “It’s not that there were secrets. Things were just not talked about, never mentioned,” said Bruce Wasserstein, Wendy’s brother. “It was what my parents wished.”
The family produced überachievers. Wendy became the first woman playwright to win a Tony award and the Pulitzer Prize while also achieving commercial success on Broadway. Sandra Wasserstein Meyer, the eldest, became a high-ranking corporate executive at a time when the best job available to most women in Fortune 500 companies was boss’s secretary. Their brother Bruce became a billionaire superstar of the investment banking world.
Even Georgette Wasserstein Levis, the middle daughter who checked out of the race early—married young, had babies, moved to Vermont—ultimately became the successful owner of a large country inn, the Wilburton.
The Wasserstein children held Morris, their sweet father, in special regard as the source of comfort, quiet wisdom, and unconditional love. Morris and Lola were said to be the perfect couple, though it was also said their marital bliss was helped by the fact that Morris was practically deaf, his hearing damaged by illness when he was a boy. When he needed peace and quiet, he just turned down his hearing aid.
A decent, hardworking man, Morris Wasserstein had brains, foresight, and ambition, but not the fierce personality that produces titans or playwrights.
For the mythmaking ingredient, look to Lola.
She was of minuscule size but a powerhouse contender among legendary heavyweights, Jewish-mother division. Lola was the lightning rod, credited or blamed for her children’s drive, their idiosyncrasies, their outsize successes and peculiar flaws.
Lola stories were legion. Perhaps most emblematic were those told after Wendy won the Pulitzer Prize. Lola was said to have responded in at least two ways:
“I’d be just as happy if she’d marry a lawyer.”
“Did you hear? Wendy won the Nobel Prize?”
Either way, the clear message was that the Pulitzer wasn’t quite good enough.
On the other hand, anything her children did was de facto the best. Lola decorated the walls of her apartment with lacquered collages of Wendy’s press clippings and Playbills, as well as articles about her other children. Their framed diplomas, school photos, and prizes were on display. Lola said her chest was so puffed out from pride that she needed a bigger bra.
That particular paradox—of being better than everyone else but not good enough—would become a recurrent theme in Wendy’s life and in her work. In The Heidi Chronicles, the superior-inferior concurrence emerges when Heidi Holland, the heroine, is invited to speak at the all-girl prep school she’d attended. Heidi—by then a well-known art historian—has a meltdown as she enumerates the ways she feels that women of her generation have failed one another.
Discussing all the women she meets in her gym’s locker room, she erupts into a fantasy about what she’d like to say to them. “I’m sorry I don’t want you to find out I’m worthless,” she says. “And superior.”
The problem may have been that Lola never explained what would happen to the child who couldn’t produce achievements that could be quantified and displayed. Would he—would she—still be worthy of love?
On January 4, 1993, New York magazine ran a lengthy article by Phoebe Hoban called “The Family Wasserstein” in conjunction with the opening of The Sisters Rosensweig, Wendy’s homage to her two older sisters, Georgette and Sandra. Hoban interviewed Lola and Morris, Wendy’s parents, at a hotel restaurant.
Lola offered the journalist her philosophy of life. “I’ve always taught my childre
n that they have to be a person in their own right. I have this expression, ‘I am.’ This is to have the confidence in yourself, that what you are, nobody can take away. No matter what you do, just feel confident.”
Their daughter Sandra reinforced the family’s inflated version of its history.
“That Polish resort town in The Sisters Rosensweig is really where my grandparents had their villa with tennis courts and their own pastry chef,” Sandra said. “They were very sophisticated and had a lot of money.”
Sandra was fifty-five years old at the time, a senior officer for corporate affairs at Citibank. More than her younger siblings, she had always known that some truths were woven into her mother’s confabulations and that others were hidden in stories that weren’t told. In the spring of 1993, a few months after the New York magazine article was published, Citibank sponsored a concert tour of the New York Philharmonic. One of the stops was Warsaw. Sandra invited Wendy, then forty-two, to join her for what Wendy would call “a sisterly tour of our mother’s Polish girlhood.”
They set out to debunk the myths Lola had bequeathed them. Wendy recorded their findings. “Growing up, I always loved the stories about my mother’s childhood,” she wrote. “Lola’s Poland was different from anybody else’s mother’s Poland. My schoolmates had grandfathers who were peddlers in Lodz, but my mother’s family had a summer villa in a spa resort called Ciechocinek. My mother’s family was the intelligentsia. At least according to my mother.”
“Frankly, I always placed the truth of the summer villa right alongside my mother’s sworn testimony to me in eighth grade that grown women would pay thousands of dollars for hair like mine, especially when it divided into thousands of damaged, frizzy split ends,” Wendy wrote. “It might have been more than a slight exaggeration, but it was certainly comforting.”
Wendy and the Lost Boys Page 1