Georgette appeared rail thin and ethereal in her bridal gown. The wedding was a lavish affair at the Plaza Hotel, where Lola scandalized her more religious Schleifer relatives by serving shrimp. Wendy was reminded, looking at “Gorgeous,” of her own failings in the get-slim department. She was also concerned, wondering if Georgette hadn’t been cornered into making a wrong decision. Wendy discovered that the corollary to feeling superior and inferior was the unpleasant sensation of betraying a sister, whom she loved, by both mocking her choice yet in some ways envying her.
Her own ambitions had begun to take amorphous shape during her sojourn in the Manhattan private-school system. She turned her sights toward the Seven Sisters colleges, female counterparts of the Ivy League schools, which were then primarily all male, except for Cornell.
She applied to Michigan, but her heart was set on Mount Holyoke College, a world apart from Wendy’s cloistered Jewish world in New York.
While her grades were a mixed bag, her recommendations were stellar. “Best student in five years,” wrote her history teacher. “Quality of mind is exceptional. Thinking is imaginative and original. Is an intellectual rebel but does not as yet have the self-confidence to fight or argue for her conclusions.”
The headmistresses chimed in: “An excellent, critical independent logical thinker,” they wrote; “weaknesses stem from carelessness. Is gradually learning not to brush aside details. A born leader. Recommend enthusiastically.”
Before completing the application process, in the fall of 1966 Wendy won an essay-writing contest sponsored by the World Youth Forum, a program created after World War II by the New York Herald Tribune. The idea was to promote international understanding by introducing young people from around the world to one another. Wendy saw an additional benefit in the program: “my secret weapon for gaining admittance to the college of my choice.” The Herald Tribune folded in 1966, but WCBS-TV took over sponsorship of the program. The winners were scheduled to take a trip to Europe the following summer.
Wendy and other Youth Forum winners appeared on a local Saturday-afternoon television program called The World We Want, where students were asked questions like “How would you solve New York City’s problems?”
When the program was broadcast, her mother provided a ratings boost. Lola went to the television department at Bloomingdale’s and turned all the channels to The World We Want. That heady moment was quickly deflated: in April Wendy received a polite letter from the Mount Holyoke admissions office informing her that she was wait-listed.
The wait list was another stinging reminder that she might not be good enough. Calhoun hadn’t been her first choice of the Manhattan private schools. She didn’t get into Dalton, then a girls’ school, favored by prosperous secular Jews. She was too intimidated to apply to the highly regarded Brearley School, which she imagined as a Wasp enclave, filled with thin, blond, beautiful girls, floating effortlessly through life.
Once again her merit was called into question.
Wendy would be such a good student, if only her work were neater, less convoluted, better.
Wendy would be such a pretty girl, if only she would lose weight.
Wendy would be perfect, if only she were someone else.
The blow from being wait-listed at Mount Holyoke was offset—somewhat—by romance.
James Kaplan lived a few blocks from Wendy, in the Imperial House, a slightly fancier version of the Wassersteins’ white brick apartment building. Wendy’s Calhoun classmate Kathy Roskind lived in Imperial House, too. The two girls became diet buddies, being the not-slender daughters of mothers who were annoyingly skinny. Mrs. Roskind, who was five feet, two inches and weighed ninety pounds, frequently reminded the girls of the upwardly mobile Jewish mother’s motto: “You can never be too rich or too thin.”
Mrs. Roskind was a chain smoker with emphysema, who often stayed home. She enjoyed Wendy, who used to amuse her friend’s mother by singing the hit title song from the movie Georgy Girl. The lyrics—about a girl who appeared to be carefree but felt lonely inside—hit home.
Wendy wasn’t the only teenage girl to be infatuated with Georgy Girl, about a large, awkward young woman who yearns for love and ends up taking care of her beautiful roommate’s baby. The 1966 movie, though presented as a convoluted Cinderella story, tapped into feelings about deep issues: the nature of marriage, the lure of motherhood, the urge to be free, the desire to be loved for what you were.
Lynn Redgrave would become known in subsequent years as the spokesperson for the Weight Watchers diet plan. In 1966 she became, for girls like Wendy and Kathy, a rebuttal to Twiggy, the anorexic, doe-eyed teenage supermodel who made starvation a fashion statement. With Twiggy as the ideal, the pressure to lose weight was frequently disproportionate to the weight there was to lose. Photographs of Wendy and Kathy in the Inkspot, the Calhoun yearbook, show attractive girls who are not slim but certainly not fat. (Wendy’s weight fluctuated, but in high school she often weighed around 130 pounds, on a five-foot-six-inch frame.) Wendy appears open yet guarded; she has a way of looking at the camera while seeming to look away.
Their mothers sent the girls to the same Fifth Avenue diet doctor, whose seven-dollars-a-visit charge included amphetamines for weight control. The rainbow-colored pills made Wendy nervous, so she threw hers away. She and Kathy went directly from the doctor’s office to the drugstore, where they would buy (and consume) three candy bars each and vow to start their diets the next day.
Wendy pretended to be insouciant, but there was no way to feel good about Lola’s constant pressure to lose weight. When they walked down the street together, Lola—wearing a dance leotard underneath her fur coat—would wave at the crowds passing by and say to Wendy, “They are all looking at you and thinking, ‘Look at that fat girl.’ ”
Wendy noticed James Kaplan and asked Kathy to introduce her to him. Kathy was apprehensive. She was very aware of Jimmy Kaplan but was certain he was not at all aware of her existence. He was nice-looking, smart, Jewish, and extremely well credentialed: he went to Horace Mann, one of the city’s most exclusive prep schools for boys. The fetching ribbon around this attractive package: Jimmy Kaplan had already been accepted to Yale.
Kathy worked up the courage to call him, to tell him she had a friend he should go out with. As Jimmy, who preferred James, remembered it, Kathy made certain to let him know that her friend had been dating someone and that she had broken up with him, not vice versa.
James agreed to meet Wendy. He wasn’t quite smitten, but he liked her. Not a beauty, he thought, but she had a cute freckle face. He liked her intelligence and sensitivity and even her insecurity, which made him feel protective. They began to date.
The boys at Horace Mann were said to believe that the girls at Calhoun were “easy,” but in 1967 it was unusual for high-school girls to “go all the way.” Fear of unwanted pregnancy was a large concern; abortion wouldn’t be legal in New York for another three years and nationwide until 1973. But that didn’t stop sex and romance from being a primary extracurricular activity for teenagers—at the very least as a major topic of conversation.
Wendy pursued James, or so he felt. “She was making a play for me,” he said. “She could be aggressive when she wanted things.”
He liked her well enough to invite her to the Horace Mann senior prom, and to make out with her, but he didn’t want to be exclusive. There was another girl he was dating at the time, whom he was more interested in, but that girl was less interested in him.
He was bothered by Wendy’s tendency to put on weight, and he told her so. In subsequent decades he recalled his rude frankness ruefully; by then he was a middle-aged man, eighty pounds heavier than he’d been in high school. He regretted calling her a “fat Polack,” a teenage boy’s cruel term of endearment.
As he saw their relationship that spring, it was an enjoyable interlude before they both left home. They experimented with sex within the zone of safety, meaning no intercourse. They went to movies and
had long talks but apparently didn’t communicate as well as they might have.
“I saw her as someone I’d gone out with several times,” said James. “The prom, I guess, to her indicated something of a commitment.”
Both of them had plans to go abroad that summer. Wendy was leaving for the World Youth Forum trip, to represent American teenagers, an idea she took seriously but also found amusing.
James was heading for Turkey, to be part of the Experiment in International Living, another idealistic program meant “to foster peace through understanding, communication, and cooperation.” Young people were dispersed to other countries, to immerse themselves in foreign cultures for a few weeks, a process that included living with local families.
In a later generation, participation in such programs would become more common. In 1967 not many teenagers, even from upper-middle-class families, traveled abroad on their own. For Wendy the fact that she and James had chosen similar ways to spend their summer demonstrated a commonality of spirit and purpose. Besides, he was the perfect specimen to bring home to Lola: a bright, Yale-bound Jewish boy with prospects—and she had caught him without being thin. They had similar backgrounds—fathers in the textile business, mothers with artistic urges (his mother was a sculptor). Wendy believed she wanted a family; Jimmy Kaplan was a viable candidate, if and when she decided to marry.
For James their summer plans simply provided a fortuitous opportunity to bring a casual relationship to an end.
They both managed to be wrong.
The summer of 1967 was hot and hateful. Dozens of American cities—including Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Newark—erupted in violence, called “riots” or “uprisings,” depending on one’s perspective. Three years earlier Congress had passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964; people living in inner-city slums failed to see racial progress. Martin Luther King Jr. preached nonviolence, but the street wanted action, not words. The system, springboard to success for the Wasserstein family, oppressed the black community, descendants of slaves, the immigrants who had made the journey against their will.
The American heartbreak spread around the world. America, slayer of Hitler, defender of freedom, had become the racist imperialist, mired in the Vietnam War.
White children whose families had prospered in the United States began reassessing. Was everything they’d been taught an illusion?
Summer of hate, “Summer of Love.” Tens of thousands of young people converged on Haight-Ashbury, the “hippie” section of San Francisco, for a giant be-in. The counterculture rebellion was on, celebrating LSD, free love, universal harmony, tie-dye, and youth. The national media acted as public-relations operative, setting in place the mythology of a generation.
For Wendy, it was Summer Abroad with the World Youth Forum, whose participants were hardly rebels. If anything, this group of earnest, open-minded young Americans provided good public relations toward Europeans growing more and more disillusioned with U.S. foreign policy. The trip was grueling and exhilarating, densely scheduled with meetings and activities.
They toured factories and strolled through gardens in Germany, visited salt mines and got drunk at a folk festival in Austria. They ate Sabbath dinner with Jews in Nuremberg, after attending a service, not in a synagogue but a small room on the ground floor of an apartment house. Behind the Iron Curtain, in Yugoslavia, they met contemporaries in a youth work camp and interviewed the editor-in-chief of the Vjesnik newspaper agency in Zagreb. They missed a scheduled lecture at the Institute for the History of the Workers’ Movement, but did meet with labor leaders at a factory that manufactured radios and televisions, to discuss the self-management of Yugoslavian workers. They saw La Bohème in Venice, where they also ate lunch with an Italian countess, who was an avid environmentalist. Their photograph appeared in a German newspaper. They were introduced to mayors and other politicians everywhere they went.
Wendy made an important connection on the trip. Abigail J. Stewart of Staten Island, another World Youth Forum winner, was attending Mount Holyoke College that fall. When Abby and Wendy discovered they were both going there—Wendy had been taken off the waiting list before graduation—they became fast friends.
“That trip was a very big experience for most of us,” said Abby, speaking as the adult she became, a professor of psychology and women’s studies. “None of us had experienced that kind of independence, in terms of being served wine and making decisions of where to go and what to do. There was the freedom, dealing with other languages and cultures and each other. . . . We saw ourselves as the intelligentsia. That was all our self-construction, but we were very involved in our self-construction.”
Before they made their farewells, she and Wendy agreed to write to Mount Holyoke, to ask if they could be roommates. They got along well, and neither of them knew anyone else at Holyoke. The age of the computerized roommate match hadn’t yet arrived. They wouldn’t know if their request had been granted until they arrived on campus a few weeks later.
THE 1960S SEEMED TO HAVE BYPASSED MOUNT HOLYOKE, OR SO IT SEEMED TO WENDY WHEN SHE ARRIVED IN THE FALL OF 1967.
Four
GRACIOUS LIVING
1967-68
The four-year period that encompassed Wendy’s years as a student at Mount Holyoke College, 1967 to 1971, would be remembered by a generation as a transformative period when attitudes seemed to change overnight.
From Wendy’s vantage point—South Hadley, Massachusetts, autumn 1967—it seemed that overnight was taking forever.
She and Abby Stewart arrived at Mount Holyoke primed for experience, pumped by their summer adventures abroad, invigorated by the larger events that had turned the evening news into a nightly drama filled with war, riots, and sexual revolution.
It didn’t take them long to realize they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They didn’t find the all-female intellectual citadel they had anticipated, and certainly not a campus fomenting radical thought. Instead they encountered a hothouse of girlieness, stuck in the 1950s, filled with bright women who seemed desperate to land a husband. In class it was sometimes hard to pay attention to the professor because of all the knitting needles clicking, as girls made sweaters for their boyfriends. Seniors didn’t obsess about graduate school much; most were far more concerned about whether they would be leaving Holyoke with engagement rings on their fingers.
On their first day of school, the entering freshman heard this piece of advice when they gathered in the gymnasium: “This is where you can take sports, and you might want to think about golf and tennis, games you can play that would be good for your husband’s business.”
They were assigned Big Sisters to counsel them, as well as Elves, anonymous sprites who would leave the occasional gift for them, small tokens like candy.
Wendy and Abby were taken aback, though they shouldn’t have been. The freshman handbook for the Class of 1971 offered incoming students a guide to the rules and customs that Mount Holyoke “girls” were meant to respect. Nothing epitomized the mind-set better than the section on “Gracious Living”:
On Wednesday evening and Sunday noon, the scene is set. . . . For these two meals, girls dress up more than usual and wear stockings and heels. “Gracious” provides a break in the everyday routine—gives you a chance to discard those Levi’s and sweatshirts in favor of a paisley hostess skirt or a knit suit. Dinner is by candlelight, and coffee is served in the living room afterwards.
In addition, there were instructions on how much to eat, what to wear, how to behave, and whom to date.
MEALS: . . . Some are so adept at this that they soon gain the proverbial “freshman ten” pounds and find that that new silver lamé mini-dress is a bit too skimpy after all.
ATTIRE: Robes and curler caps may be worn to breakfast. Skirts are required for dinner with the exception of Sunday supper.
DORM LIFE: . . . The Work Chairman . . . coordinates and assigns the “chores” each student is expected to do once a week. The jobs are small and easily
performed: helping out with the dishwashing at one meal, or sitting bells, which involves being on hand at the front desk to answer the telephone and receive callers. . . .
DATING: During the week the Mount Holyoke world is books and classes, coffee at the C.I., bridge when you should be studying, and staying up all night talking to the girl down the hall. It’s a girl’s world where no one really cares if you don’t have time to set your hair. Come Friday, however, it’s a different scene. The social whirl begins as suitcases are snapped shut and girls take off for Amherst, Williams, Wesleyan, Yale, Dartmouth, Princeton, Harvard, Brown, Trinity, Cornell and Colgate among others. At the same time boys begin arriving from these places for mixers and parties. From Friday to Sunday, it’s a man’s world.
Advance warning or not, Wendy and Abby felt gypped.
Wendy had been drawn to the school’s pedigree as one of the Seven Sisters. Abby had succumbed to the romance of Emily Dickinson, who’d been a student there.
Both of them had been seduced by Mount Holyoke’s picture-postcard New England campus, located in the tiny town of South Hadley, tucked in the hills of western Massachusetts, part of the lush Connecticut River Valley. They’d heard the history, of how the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary was started in 1837 by Mary Lyon, a remarkable schoolteacher who’d crusaded to make higher education available to women. It was crucial, she felt, that the curriculum be as rigorous as those in men’s colleges, and available to women of all backgrounds.
The fantasies they had conjured didn’t include Gracious Living and being handed cloth napkins with instructions to fold them at the end of each meal and tuck them into an assigned cubbyhole.
They lived in 1837 Hall, the dormitory named for the year of the college’s founding. Despite its historic name, the dorm was another disappointment, a boxy modern rectangle, overlooking the Lower Lake. Soon everything that had lured them became suffocating. With its old-fashioned brick architecture, nestled in a landscape of lovely wooded paths and secluded ponds, the college was a portrait of rural civility that quickly felt too snug, too staid.
Wendy and the Lost Boys Page 7