Wendy and the Lost Boys

by Julie Salamon

  Albert was a close friend of Chris’s, along with another third year student, Sigourney Weaver, an aristocratic-looking (but messy) Stanford graduate, who shared their zany take on the world. The three made a visual impact separately and together: Sigourney was five feet, ten and a half inches and quite beautiful. Albert was large, and Chris was small. Albert and Chris often worked together, as writers and actors. Their first year Sigourney appeared in one of Chris’s early comedies about a dysfunctional family, Better Dead Than Sorry, cast as a young woman who was constantly having nervous breakdowns. Chris played her worried brother.

  The Idiots Karamazov, a joint creation of Chris and Albert’s, a spoof of Dostoyevsky, became a favorite student production of Bob Brustein. Meryl Streep, in the class after Chris’s, was cast as the wheelchair-bound “translatrix,” whirled around the stage by “Ernest Hemingway,” her mute lover. Streep, an ethereal blond beauty, was transformed into an old hag, complete with a wart on the end of her nose. This tour de force was the kind of boundary-stretching phenomenon that might leave ordinary mortals feeling perplexed, even as they laughed, but Brustein adored it, describing it in the loftiest of terms: “The Idiots Karamazov hammered away at the most beloved works and authors in literature, leaving Western culture in momentary ruins, like the detritus of a dead civilization.”

  Both Albert and Chris had large roles in a play the year Wendy arrived. Albert was annoyed to find her always sitting on the steps leading to the dressing room when he arrived for rehearsals. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “I’m waiting for Chris.”

  Five hours later, when Albert emerged, Wendy was still there, sitting on the steps, waiting for Chris.

  There was jealousy. Albert and Chris collaborated so frequently that they were referred to as “Chris ’n’ Albert.” Albert felt that he was being edged out by Wendy, a newcomer he didn’t quite trust.

  Albert didn’t exactly dislike Wendy, but he thought the first-year student was a little presumptuous, always hanging around them—make that Chris—all the time. Her devotion bothered Albert, because Chris was gay and Wendy knew it, yet she was behaving like a love-struck puppy.

  But was it so strange, given Chris’s charming personality and exalted place in the cloistered atmosphere at Yale Drama? Chris had become a superstar at Yale, as both an actor and a playwright. He was a pet of Brustein; the school’s dictatorial dean ruled his small empire as if it were the center of the universe. Brustein’s teaching philosophy mimicked the brutal distillation process his students would encounter in the real world of theater. Both brilliance and pettiness were fostered by this approach, which nurtured certain dispositions and threatened to destroy others. Brustein saw the drama school as an ancillary program to his passion, the Yale Repertory Theatre. His goal was to produce not academics but working professionals. Brustein had strong opinions—hated the work of Arthur Miller, loved Bertolt Brecht.

  He dismissed playwrights and actors who fell below his standard of “poetic consciousness,” which he associated with wild farce and dark surrealism. He expected his students to drive themselves to startling, unconventional dimensions; this pressure-cooker methodology produced some genius but even more anxiety and feelings of failure.

  Brustein became Wendy’s nemesis, a stand-in for Lola, always ready to point out her shortcomings. It wasn’t her imagination. “I thought she was a lightweight,” said Brustein. “She was witty and funny and a little sitcom-y. In my Puritan way, I was trying to push playwrights in more dangerous areas. What appealed about Chris Durang was his outrageousness. Wendy seemed more domestic and conventional.”

  The men running the school wanted women to look and behave a certain way. Sigourney Weaver was beautiful but didn’t fit Brustein’s design; she was criticized in evaluations for looking like an unmade bed. “I had raggedy hippie clothes,” she said. “Long, torn, ripped skirts. They saw me as a leading lady, and I thought of myself as a comedienne. When they were going after me about not having any talent, the whole thing was about how I dressed.”

  Only select women’s issues were considered interesting. “The men were very much in charge of defining women’s pain,” said Susan Blatt, a classmate who became Wendy’s closest girlfriend at Yale. “Rape, childbearing, child losing—this was women’s pain. Dick Gilman, for example, was especially enamored of a play in which a retarded teenage girl is impregnated by an old farmworker and has an onstage farm-table abortion. Wendy’s oeuvre just wasn’t on the radar screen.”

  Chris let Wendy know by their second or third coffee date that he was in a relationship—with a man—and had been for several years. Having made full disclosure, he preferred not to see the obvious. Wendy had a huge crush on him. He combined all the virtues she was looking for in a man. He was smart, funny, ambitious, wayward. He always took pains to compliment her. When they went to a thrift shop and she modeled a clingy evening gown with a marabou collar, he told her she looked “really glamorous”—and meant it—so different from Lola’s horrified reaction when Wendy wore the dress to a family function.

  Chris wasn’t in love with Wendy, but he loved her. As an only child, he was fascinated by her stories of the Family Wasserstein. They amused themselves for hours swapping funny stories about their eccentric families. When he first heard Wendy’s anecdotes about Lola pressuring her to marry a doctor or a lawyer, he laughed appreciatively, thinking these were mere comedy routines. But as he got to know Wendy better, he was troubled by the implicit and sometimes explicit message: “If you don’t have children and continue the line, your life is meaningless.”

  Chris’s family was repressed and often angry, but he hadn’t been belittled by his parents. He had special antennae for adults whose behavior might disturb children. The first time he met Lola—during Wendy’s first year at Yale—she was dressed as Patty Hearst (for no apparent reason; it wasn’t Halloween), the publishing heiress who was kidnapped by political radicals in 1974.

  Though Chris had heard many Lola stories by then, he was still taken aback by the sight of the skinny middle-aged woman, wearing a trench coat, waving a toy pistol and saying, “Guess who I am!”

  He understood that it was a joke and thought it was funny, but then he wondered what this exhibition was all about. Coming from a household of alcoholics, he was accustomed to unexpected outbursts and unexplained silences, but it was Wendy’s turn to be taken aback when he seemed surprised by Lola’s behavior. “If someone is crazy and no one talks about it, you cannot know the truth of something,” he said. “The reality testing is off. You don’t know what normal is.”

  He felt protective toward Wendy, and she trusted him. She told him, “I feel like I’m a car that doesn’t have bumpers.” But with Chris she felt safe— strong enough to cut the final thread connecting her to James Kaplan, completing the process that had begun with the Playwrights Horizons production of Any Woman Can’t. When she learned that James had begun to date someone else, Wendy toyed with the thought of telling Chris her true feelings for him. She also wondered what was wrong with her, tossing aside a viable romantic candidate like James and choosing instead to yearn for an impossible relationship.

  For the first time since she was eight years old, about to enter the Ethical Culture School, she made entries in a diary—actually a loose-leaf notebook, for just a handful of pages. In early December, three months into her first year, she wrote:

  I have fantasies about Chris as if he were Number 1 in medical school and I dropped to number 9. I also fantasize about James. I want to be held. Maybe he’ll be meaner and my masochism will run out. I’d rather be number 9 in med school as long as they knew I was best friends or lovers, difficult in this case, with number 1.

  I should tell Christopher. I won’t. For future readers, he’s very talented. I wish I were nicer or just better, more open. Do I want you to read this and think oh, she was so good and just look at what she thought of herself. Pity. I worry about becoming a bitter spinster or alcoholic.
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br />   Even then, with her youthful musings about crushes, Wendy was thinking about a larger audience. She subjected her diary to editorial scrutiny; her periodic journal entries were another way for her to synthesize her life on paper in order to analyze it.

  But she wouldn’t risk her friendship with Chris. Having a frank conversation—at least about her feelings for him—would run counter to the essential core of her being. Wendy was self-protective. The high girlish pitch of her voice and her giggle were her armor against scrutiny. If she appeared not to take herself too seriously, she wouldn’t be a target for other ambitious people who might consider her a threat. Her capacity for making friends reflected her warmth and interest in people but also grew from enormous insecurity. She would go out of her way to befriend people who either intimidated or belittled her, engaging them in conversation, revealing her nervousness by tearing paper or unraveling the braided cords of her espadrilles.

  Wendy’s open vulnerability kept Sigourney Weaver from getting too close. “There was something about Wendy I found very scary to me,” she said. “She was a more naked version of the vulnerability I felt. I wanted to take care of Wendy, to pull her hair back and give her some armor, and that seemed inappropriate, because I was a walking disaster. I resisted the impulse. We didn’t become good friends.”

  Yet there were many others who became friends and putative friends, people Wendy felt she ought to please. “She had a lot of demands on her time, and a lot of it was with people she promised things to,” said Susan Blatt. “She would run from place to place, from conversation to conversation. You wished she had closed the door, said no to a lot of people, and just written and gotten by on her merit.”

  Susan and Wendy met during their first days at Yale; Susan was in the criticism program and took many classes with the playwrights. One day she was sitting on a bench and Wendy came over to her and said, “What’s a nice Jewish girl like you doing in a place like this?”

  Susan had an impressive résumé—she’d graduated from Princeton in the school’s first coed class. She also had a psychologist father who tormented her as Wendy’s mother tormented her.

  Both of them reported receiving daily wake-up calls at 7:00 A.M.

  “Are you married yet?” Lola would ask Wendy.

  “You sound depressed!” Susan’s father would say to his sleepy daughter.

  They became fast friends. There were few women at the drama school, and many of them were in the acting program, women who took pains to make themselves look good. Wendy wore shapeless dresses designed to hide her body and exhibit her shapely legs. “I’m beautiful from the knees down,” she told Susan, whose wardrobe was equally unflattering, consisting mainly of baggy jeans and T-shirts.

  In New Haven, Wendy lived in York Towers, a high-rise building with a doorman, a place for timid old ladies, not the usual shabby student quarters like Susan’s cockroach-infested apartment. They ate almost every breakfast and lunch at Murray’s, a standard-issue luncheonette, next door to Superbooks, a shop that specialized in porn magazines and sex toys.

  She and Susan often had sleepovers, brewing pots of tea and discussing their latest anguish, always wearing Lanz flannel nightgowns. (Wendy became so known for wearing these nightgowns that when their designer, Werner Scharff, died in 2006, the New York Times obituary quoted Wendy: “The entire dormitory, 130 strong in Lanz flannel nightgowns, caroled in the living room while our house mother distributed gingerbread cookies.”) They would reveal their concerns and dissect their foolishness. Sometimes after one of these sessions, Wendy called Susan and confessed that she’d called a man she found attractive and hung up the instant he answered. Susan wondered if Wendy was kept awake by demons from Lola, needling that constant refrain, Are you married yet?

  After he graduated, Chris stayed in New Haven. Brustein decided to stage The Idiots Karamazov at the Yale Rep, in the fall of 1974, a major coup for a playwright starting his professional career. The following year Chris moved to New York but still returned every week to New Haven to teach a class; Brustein had chosen him to be the recipient of the same CBS fellowship that had brought Terrence McNally to campus.

  Chris’s presence and endorsement became even more important to Wendy after a disastrous production of Any Woman Can’t, directed by one of her classmates.

  The main actress was miscast; the funniest lines fell flat. Chris stopped watching the play and started focusing on Richard Gilman’s face. Gilman was pale, as if he were thinking, “Oh, my God, this is awful.” After the play Gilman was chilly to Wendy, as if saying to her, “I made a mistake letting you in. You wrote a bad play.”

  Brustein didn’t bother to come. He didn’t see potential there.

  As an actor and writer, Chris had been learning how important casting was, how tone could bring out the wit in a line or kill it. In the play the heroine makes a self-deprecating joke in a throwaway line about her Seven Sisters education, which has earned her a job as a dance-school instructor:

  I’m a fucking Smith graduate. I was supposed to be different—happier than the others. I wouldn’t be a secretary, not me.

  The actress played it as tragedy. Chris watched her trembling reading of “I’m a fucking Smith graduate” drain the humor from the line and make its author seem pathetic.

  He made a point of talking to Wendy afterward. “My God, that production was awful,” he told her. “What a shame, the play is funny.” He wanted to have the same conversation with Gilman, but he didn’t.

  Wendy joked about her teachers with her friends, but the coldness she sensed from Gilman and Brustein left her feeling at sea. “I am very unsure of myself,” she wrote in her journal. “I am not sure of my talent or making a living from it.”

  Wendy was not alone in her insecurity at the institution she dubbed “the Yale School of Trauma.” Doubt was intrinsic to the profession she was pursuing, and Brustein fostered it. Sigourney Weaver never forgave him for ruining her fantasy of what drama school would be like. “I remember looking up at one point in my first year thinking, ‘This should be the most joyous place in the world,’” she said. “After years of wanting to do nothing but theater, we are at this place where we can argue about Chekhov in the corridors, and everyone is fucking miserable and at each other’s throats.”

  Even Meryl Streep felt the pressure, and she was the school’s unparalleled darling, the only one Howard Stein could remember an admissions interviewer declaring, after he’d met her, “She’s going to be a star.” While she was at Yale, a new verb came into being, “to Streep it up,” meaning find your light, identify your moment, chew the scenery, activate the space.

  Streep recalled:

  The competition in the acting program was very wearing. I was always standing in competition with my friends for every play. And there was no nod to egalitarian casting. Since each student director or playwright was casting his or her senior project, they pretty much got to cast it with whomever they wanted. So some people got cast over and over and others didn’t get cast at all. It was unfair. It was the larger world writ small.

  I got into a frenzy about this. It wasn’t that I wasn’t being cast. I was, over and over. But I felt guilty. I felt I was taking something from people I knew, my friends. I was on a scholarship and some people had paid a lot of money to be there.

  Finally, I went to the dean, to Robert Brustein. I said: “I’m under too much pressure. I want to be released from some of these commitments.”

  He said, “Well, you could go on academic probation.” Which was the first step to being kicked out.

  So I went to see a psychiatrist at the school who said: “You know what? You’re going to graduate in 11 weeks and you’ll never be in competition with five women again. You’ll be competing with 5,000 women and it will be a relief. It will be better or worse, but it won’t be this.”

  He was right. . . .

  When they weren’t bemoaning their fates to their psychiatrists and one another, or smoldering from being slighted
by Brustein, they had fun. The friendships and connections formed at Yale would continue, for many of them, throughout their lives.

  William Ivey Long, who became an enduring friend of Wendy’s, was a year ahead of her, in Meryl Streep’s class. An impish type with a soft southern accent, William had arrived at Yale feeling out of his element after growing up in North Carolina and then attending the College of William & Mary in Virginia.

  In his second year, he was doing his first major production, sets and costumes for a production of Twelfth Night. William was hysterical and nervous; Ming Cho Lee, a prominent set designer and professor at the school, was coming to see the play. There had been three dress rehearsals; everything seemed ready.

  Wendy and Stephen Graham—the son of Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham—were working as wardrobe staff. On the day of opening night, Wendy and Stephen were supposed to wash the costumes. Instead of doing it themselves, they decided to drop them off at the dry cleaners and went out to dinner. By the time they’d finished, the dry cleaners was closed. William Ivey Long had his opening night without any costumes. The red set he had contrived to make a bold statement now looked stark, out of place.

  The eminent Ming Cho Lee dryly commented, “Well, everyone has to get their red set out of their system.”

  Ming Cho Lee became his mentor—and William’s friendship with Wendy survived this rocky beginning, though it wouldn’t be the last time Wendy betrayed him.

  William went on to design two of Wendy’s productions at Yale: Montpelier Pa-zazz, a farce about popular versus unpopular kids, and When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth, a goofy satire she wrote with Christopher Durang, which featured a musical production number called “Welfare Mothers on Parade.”

  She and William became confidants. He regaled her with his Tennessee Williams–style stories from the South, and she responded with Catskillsstyle routines about Lola and Morris. William had a sister, Laura, who was disabled; Wendy was intensely curious about Laura, who’d been sent to Duke University for a week of analysis by doctors there. The doctors told his parents his sister should be institutionalized. They ignored this advice.