Wendy and the Lost Boys

by Julie Salamon

  Wendy and Ilene read and wept over Marjorie’s fate—she wound up a Shirley after all. They were also torn. Would it be so bad to marry a doctor or a lawyer? But as they were asking the question, it was changing. Why shouldn’t they become doctors or lawyers?

  All the Wasserstein children felt pressure to succeed, but their mother made it clear her expectations were different for girls and boys. For Wendy’s thirteenth birthday, Lola gave her daughter one-on-one personal training at the Helena Rubinstein Charm School, where Wendy learned that she must never carry a schoolbag on her shoulders as well as the proper way to enter and exit a taxi (slide the derriere in first, out last). What Wendy wanted, however, was the present that Bruce had received for his bar mitzvah, Richard Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels, a travel guide to “the wonders of both the Orient and the Occident.” She stole the book and studied the possibilities it contained, ranging from “New York, City Extraordinary,” to “Blue Grotto, Cavern of Loveliness,” to the Taj Mahal and Timbuktu.

  In 1963, the year Wendy entered Calhoun, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, the manifesto that pronounced the exalted life of the American housewife a sham. Women made up about 33 percent of the workforce, but few held positions of power. There were two women senators in the U.S. Congress elected in 1960 and seventeen women in the 435-member House of Representatives.

  Wendy looked to the exceptions, like her sister Sandra, already married and divorced and back in New York after her London escapade. Sandra now worked at General Foods, not in some lowly position as a secretary or a telephone operator but as an account executive for Maxwell House coffee. That seemed much better than serving a husband coffee!

  Wendy also had another role model, this one larger than life and even more enchanting than Sandra: Doris Day, the pert blond actress adept at playing characters whose deceptive wholesomeness camouflaged ambition, brains, and a healthy sexual appetite. Doris Day movies were often fluffy romantic comedies, but the leading lady was portrayed as an interesting career woman—an interior decorator in Pillow Talk, an advertising executive in Lover Come Back, a journalism professor in Teacher’s Pet. Doris was nice but firm, smart, and feminine.

  As an adult, Wendy would reflect on how those movies influenced her. “Doris in her heyday was, despite her career-woman status, neither bitter nor desperate nor cold,” she wrote. “She was not a spinster who raged against her biological clock or cried herself to sleep because she was still on the shelf at twenty-five. Doris was a gal on the town, a metropolitan mensch with a rich, full life.”

  But Doris also made Wendy realize something about herself. “I never thought of myself as undesirable or unattractive, frankly, until I turned twelve and began watching all these movies in which none of the men ever fell in love with anybody who looked remotely like me,” she told an interviewer. “No one was ever Jewish, no one was hardly ever brunette.”

  At Calhoun, Wendy was just beginning her life as “gal on the town.” The big move came after her freshman year. Georgette had already left for college, and Bruce was entering the University of Michigan. Home, for Wendy, became something else entirely. Morris and Lola packed up their rambling house, meant for a passel of children, and moved to an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, trading their backyard for Central Park, quiet tree-lined streets for nonstop urban buzz.

  The Upper East Side carried the connotation of wealth and status; living there was a nice mark of achievement, but not nearly the end of the game for Lola and Morris. He was still a young man, in his early forties when they moved, not yet ready to clip coupons. Wasserstein Brothers continued to prosper. Wendy told her friends her father had invented velveteen; the actual product was more prosaic, crushed imitation velvet used for jeans. In 1968 Morris took out a patent on a better way to make ribbons, without the ends unraveling. The family’s real-estate holdings began to rival the ribbon and textile business. Lola and Morris’s travels expanded beyond Miami Beach to Europe and then the world.

  The neighborhood was ritzy, the apartment less so; 150 East Seventy-seventh Street was a sixteen-story grayish white brick architectural nonentity. The building had been constructed just a few years earlier, and it provided the functional luxuries of a doorman and a lobby but little grace. They were right in the middle of the city hubbub, next to the Number 6 subway on the Lexington Avenue line. The three-bedroom apartment was spacious and airy, with French doors leading to a den, yet much smaller than the Brooklyn house. Wendy’s bedroom contained twin beds, one for Georgette when she came home from college. There was one glamorous note, a terrace off the living room with views of “New York, City Extraordinary,” as if taken from the pages of Richard Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels.

  Lola decorated the place with a mixture of domestic indifference and free-spirited impulse. She plunked down furniture they’d brought with them—a large sofa with huge tassels hanging over the edge, a footstool covered in a needlepoint canvas. One day, in a fit of artistic inspiration, she splatter-painted the kitchen floor, in homage to the abstract expressionist artist Jackson Pollock. On another occasion she strung lemons in the chandelier.

  Food preparation stopped altogether. Lola’s cupboards were noticeably bare. The deli downstairs provided morning coffee; takeout was readily available. But for special occasions, Morris and Lola returned to the “old country”—to Brooklyn. “They drove an hour to Cookys restaurant on Avenue M in Brooklyn to pick up Thanksgiving for 20 to go,” Wendy remembered. “My parents were smuggling cranberry sauce and potato kugel over inter-borough lines.”

  Freed from the burden of managing a big house and doing the laundry of many children, Lola devoted more and more time to her passion. After sending her girls to dance classes all those years, she now sent herself, sometimes taking as many as four classes a day. She began wearing leotards as streetwear and pared down further, becoming not just slim but a muscled reed.

  Wendy was now the only child at home, living in a vastly different location from where she grew up with her siblings. She and her parents had to adjust to a new family configuration while contending with “the city,” with all its promise and excitement—and its tension. These changes were plenty for an adolescent girl to absorb, but there was more. All that was happening in Wendy’s life was magnified by the gathering momentum of a dangerous, exhilarating decade.

  The sixties were roaring through New York, calling everything into question, creating a fabulous din of provocation and creativity. Civil rights, pop art, the Beatles, feminism, pacifism, and protest—the world was changing fast. Two months after Wendy began high school, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Nothing seemed safe.

  For Wendy, as for so many of her contemporaries, the Kennedy assassination was etched in memory. “I was on an escalator in B. Altman’s Department Store in New York City when I heard that President Kennedy had been shot,” she recalled. “I was on my way to my high school bazaar, and I remember watching other people on the escalator burst into tears and hold each other.”

  It was a pivotal moment, the line of demarcation between conformity and rebellion, stability and chaos. In the spirit of the times, Wendy balked at rules about what girls could wear to school, cut classes to shop at Bergdorf’s, and sneaked smokes in Riverside Park. She hung out with friends at Stark’s restaurant on Ninetieth Street and Broadway, a short walk from school, drinking cherry sodas and eating candy. She was frequently marked tardy.

  Still, Wendy was her parents’ daughter. She rebelled enough to be noticed and conformed enough to succeed. At Calhoun she helped put on plays, became editor of the Calhounder, the high-school newspaper, and wrote earnest term papers. She aimed to be original, signing her name “Wendee Wasserstein,” but sometimes she wanted to be part of the crowd, trying—with mixed success—to tame her unruly hair with rollers, hair spray, and headbands.

  “Wendy would always write her papers on time and turn them in, but on the way to school she’d run it through the gutter to make it mes
sy,” said one of her teachers. “Part of her was quite traditional, and part of her was Wendy, her own person.”

  The burgeoning notion of female power was reinforced at Calhoun, where the girls encountered only the occasional male teacher. The school had been founded at the turn of the twentieth century as the Jacobi School, to educate the “Our Crowd” girls, the daughters of New York’s wealthy, secular Jews. Few girls went to college, but Jacobi and then Calhoun graduates were expected to be “accomplished”; many of them did go on to have careers, in either professional or volunteer work.

  The school’s character changed significantly after World War II, when Elizabeth Parmelee and Beatrice Cosmey became headmistresses. These no-nonsense women were there when Wendy arrived, a Mutt-and-Jeff combination, one tall and skinny, the other a little fireplug, overseeing their young ladies in a time of revolution. Miss Parmelee and Miss Cosmey put college prep front and center. Some quaint customs continued, however, like the annual mother-daughter luncheon and fashion show, a fund-raiser for the school, held at elegant hotels like the Plaza, the Waldorf-Astoria, and the Pierre.

  Miss Parmelee and Miss Cosmey became foils for exuberant young women and fine material for a comic writer looking back on those years. “You couldn’t wear skirts that were an inch above your knees,” Wendy recalled. “I can’t tell you how many times Miss Parmelee and Miss Cosmey, our Headmistresses at the time, sent me home to change at eight-thirty in the morning. One time, I returned to the school wearing a longer skirt and bedroom slippers.”

  The Calhounder was a proper school newspaper, dutifully reporting the results of class elections, sports tournaments, and mixers with boys’ schools (“a bevy of beauties welcomed the twenty-nine boys with great charm . . .”).

  By Wendy’s senior year, however, the paper had begun to reflect the times, ever so gently. “Where the Protests Stop . . . and Peace Begins” was the headline on an article about the U.S. war in Vietnam, urging students to send aid to the Vietnamese people. In that same issue, a play was reviewed called O the Times They Are A-Changing, an allegorical spoof of the conflict between youth and the older generation. The play was directed by a Miss Lesser, and the cast included Wendy Wasserstein, as part of “The Ditty Bop Set.”

  Ann-Ellen Lesser was a secretary, assistant to the headmistress, not long out of college, who began teaching philosophy as an extracurricular subject, her credential being that she had majored in philosophy in college. When the head of drama left, Miss Lesser was asked to take that over, too. It was a small school with limited resources; Wendy’s class had twenty-two girls in it.

  The girls liked Miss Lesser. They thought she was hip, with appropriately “intellectual” looks—short pixie hair, dark-rimmed glasses. She encouraged them to experiment. It was the 1960s, after all. They did lots of theater of the absurd. “Existentialism was in,” she recalled. They took scenes from short stories, put them to music, and performed an antiwar piece.

  “This was an all-girls’ school,” she said. “You either did the one or two bad plays that were all women characters or you do other stuff and bother some boys from McBurney to help out and watch them get destroyed by our teenage girls.”

  As an adult, speaking at the dedication of a new performing-arts center at Calhoun in 2004, Wendy talked about Miss Lesser’s productions:

  One year, she had an idea to put on a play in our auditorium, which was at that time the Jewish Community Center on West Eighty-ninth Street. The play she chose was Günter Grass’s The Wicked Cooks. Günter Grass, for those of you who don’t know, had two major claims to fame. The first was that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. The second was that he had an all-girl high-school production of the absurdist play The Wicked Cooks.

  My parents were in Europe during our rehearsal period, and my big sister Sandy, who was an executive at General Foods, came to stay with me. At night I would rehearse my lines with her, and she would make her Maxwell House account-executive buddies listen to it and ask them if it made any sense to them. There would be a stunned look on their faces, and they would ask me, “Why isn’t your school doing Annie?”

  The day of the performance arrived, and the proud parent body sat in the theater as we came out onstage with giant chefs’ hats and aprons and began reciting lines in unison, like, “The moon is a potato / The star is a tomato / And everywhere are cooks / In all the halls and nooks.” I distinctly remember seeing jaws dropping and a hushed silence, and at the end a burst of parental applause for the completely incomprehensible event.

  Miss Lesser was amused by Wendy’s account, which became part of the school’s lore, eventually appearing on the Calhoun Web site, but Miss Lesser had a correction. After pointing out that the Wicked Cooks production was the handiwork of the previous drama adviser, she observed that Sandy’s Maxwell House colleagues couldn’t have asked why the students didn’t do Annie instead of Wicked Cooks.

  Annie didn’t premiere until 1977, a decade after Wendy graduated from Calhoun.

  “It’s still a great story, but there is a bit of poetic license,” said Miss Lesser.

  Wendy had the most interesting mind of any student I ever had, ” said Ann-Ellen Lesser. “There’s smart, which is what comes up on the IQ test. And then there’s intelligence that has the element of imagination in it. Wendy had real intelligence, imagination, the ability to see beyond what was in front of her.”

  Yet during her years at Calhoun, no one was predicting a Pulitzer Prize for Wendy Wasserstein. Of more immediate concern: would her grades improve enough to get her into a good college?

  School records report tardiness twelve times in a single semester one year. Her math grades hovered between C-plus and B-minus, and she consistently received C’s in French and D’s in gym.

  The curriculum was rigorous and the teachers demanding. They were quick to point out weaknesses—a slapdash quality to her work—even in subjects where she excelled, like history and English. “Wendy’s knowledge of history is extensive,” wrote a teacher in her midterm report junior year. “The mechanics of her writing are poor—a fact which belies the intelligence of her thinking.”

  To escalate her prospects for college, she was encouraged to take summer courses at elite boarding schools. The programs were known to be exacting, and, Wendy understood, it wouldn’t hurt to have names like Exeter and Andover on her application. She’d been learning the importance of name brands and always made sure to note that she took lessons at June Taylor’s School of Dance, not just any studio. (Taylor’s choreography featured Rockettes’-style high kicks; her dancers were regular performers on The Jackie Gleason Show, a popular TV variety program in the 1950s and ’60s.)

  After sophomore year she attended the summer program at the Phillips Academy, Andover, in Massachusetts, where she succumbed to the lure of the New England countryside and the school’s exalted aura. That encounter began a lifelong infatuation with charming academic campuses situated in rarefied settings.

  She returned from Andover to Calhoun a better student but not good enough for the headmistresses, Cosmey and Parmelee. Midway through her junior year, they offered this guarded evaluation: “Wendy has produced a good report. We are especially glad to note that she is passing physical education. Comments should be studied carefully, for Wendy needs now to take giant steps in academic growth, to begin to prepare for greater challenges next year and in college.”

  The following summer she returned to New England for another summer program, this time at the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where she was challenged by unsparing faculty. She took serious subjects—economics, philosophy, music appreciation—and wrote dull, lengthy papers in longhand. “Wendy, you have written over four thousand words when the assignment called for fifteen hundred,” wrote a testy professor. “You have too much bulk here—repetitious passages, excessively long quotations, redundancies, and superfluous sections. A good rewriting of the entire essay could reduce it by half without losing any essential materia
l. I appreciate your industry and sincerity in this enterprise, but I urge you to be more efficient by being precise and concise.”

  Regular grade—B-minus.

  Grade due to penalty for lateness—C-plus.

  Despite the grueling assessments and the repeated grade reductions for sloppiness and turning her papers in late, she produced remarkable work for a fifteen-year-old. Her papers demonstrate great effort and a complex intellect; she struggled to grasp conventional wisdom and then put her own stamp on it. In a paper analyzing the work of George Bernard Shaw, she wrote a snappy opening line that could be seen as a guidepost for a future writer of provocative plays: “The saint does not bring peace on earth and good will among men. The saint, rather, makes the world uncomfortable to live in.”

  When Wendy applied to college, she had begun to think that the University of Michigan, which both Sandy and Bruce attended, wasn’t for her. She didn’t want to follow Georgette’s path either. Her middle sister had traveled in Europe after graduating from Hood College, then a small girls’ school in Maryland, and was back in New York, taking classes at the New School. In the fall of Wendy’s senior year, Georgette followed Marjorie Morningstar’s example. Marjorie had succumbed to a Jewish lawyer; Georgette married a Jewish doctor. Albert Levis didn’t exactly conform to the cliché; he was born in Greece, was studying clinical psychiatry at Yale, and exhibited an eccentric intelligence. Wendy didn’t find him dull, just weird.