Wendy and the Lost Boys

by Julie Salamon

  “He couldn’t do anything,” Moss said fondly. “I’d say, ‘Paint that wall,’ and he couldn’t do that. ‘Build that,’ he couldn’t. André was just hanging around, hanging around. He was very smart, but he was helpless.”

  Moss recognized something in André that touched him, a love of theater that was primal. For André the connection had been made in 1954, not long before his sixth birthday. He’d been taken by a beloved aunt to his first live theater performance, the just-opened Broadway musical version of J. M. Barrie’s classic children’s story Peter Pan, starring Mary Martin. For the little boy, it was an awakening, his future revealed.

  He had wanted to go to acting school, not Harvard, but his mother insisted. He became the president of the Harvard Dramatic Club and was considered a promising actor, though he was painfully shy. Once he got onstage, he was fine, but making his way there was excruciating.

  At Playwrights Horizons, André found a solution to his dilemma. The peripatetic Moss had been asked to take over a five-hundred-seat theater in Queens, at the former site of the 1964–65 World’s Fair. Tickets were $2.50, and the shows were sold out. Playwrights Horizons Queens, as it was called, specialized in classics and revivals, not the new plays that Moss focused on in Manhattan.

  As Moss began to spend more and more time in Queens, not even he, with his relentless energy, could keep up with all the demands on him. André noticed that submissions were starting to pile up unread. One day he approached Moss while carrying a stack of large envelopes, filled with plays.

  “What are you doing?” Moss asked.

  “These are terrible,” André replied. “I’m sending them back.”

  This kind of editorial astringency was alien to Moss, who felt it was his duty to give aspiring writers a place to experiment, a generous philosophy that led to a wide range of productions, some interesting, some ghastly.

  At that moment André became the theater’s de facto literary manager.

  In making himself useful to Bob Moss, André was on his way to becoming an invaluable fixture at Play wrights Horizons and establishing the course of his career. Though their personalities and styles were in opposition—André was quiet and methodical, Moss gregarious and scattered—they shared a passion for theater and a workaholic drive. Moss was impressed by André’s judgment and the way he dealt with creative people: “He had no other activity, so he could call playwrights up and have them come and talk for hours if necessary. Word began to spread that at Playwrights Horizons you had someone who could listen to you, talk to you, care about you. That was crucial.”

  One of the plays that came across André’s desk, in his new capacity as literary manager, was Uncommon Women and Others by Wendy Wasserstein. He chose the play along with two others, the first productions that would be “his.”

  He had already met Wendy. Before she finished Yale, she had approached Moss about staging Montpelier Pa-zazz, the little musical she’d written at school. Moss put Pa-zazz on, not long after Wendy returned home. André wasn’t that impressed with the play, nor with her previous work, Any Woman Can’t, but he liked Wendy the instant he met her.

  When he read Uncommon Women, he saw real potential and began to think that the earlier works had just been the plays she needed to get out of her system. They agreed to expand the play, then a one-act, for a fall production and to do a workshop reading that spring.

  As Wendy prepared to move back to New York from New Haven, she felt particularly vulnerable, without prospects for either marriage or a dependable career.

  She had locked in the small production of Montpelier Pa-zazz, but then what? She had no job. Reviewing her rocky path at Yale, and where she stood upon graduation, it was hard not to compare herself with Christopher Durang. The Yale Rep’s production of The Idiots Karamazov—just after he graduated—received a favorable review from Mel Gussow, writing in the New York Times.

  A few months later, Chris’s Titanic played Off-Off-Broadway in New York. In his surreal telling of the legendary disaster, in a production starring Sigourney Weaver, the characters—a bunch of depressives—want the boat to sink, and it won’t. The play’s wacky stream of consciousness won Chris important notice in places that mattered. In the New Yorker, Edith Oliver wrote, “From the evidence presented, Mr. Durang is a spirited, original fellow.” Mel Gussow declared in the New York Times, “Mr. Durang has a ferocious comic talent.”

  For the summer of 1976, Chris had been accepted at the prestigious National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut. The stars seemed aligned in his favor.

  Successful as Christopher appeared to Wendy, he was feeling less than sanguine about his prospects. The positive reception for Titanic Off-Off Broadway led to an Off-Broadway production in May, which was trounced by critics, including the same Mel Gussow who had praised it the first time. On reevaluating Durang’s “ferocious comic talent,” Gussow decided, “There’s no ignoring the author’s clownish exuberance and malevolence.” The Village Voice devoted a full page, beginning with the headline “Durang Goes Down with His Ship,” noting that some people thought Durang was a major talent but the Voice critic didn’t see it, concluding that the play was “self-congratulatory, self-indulgent, numbingly unfunny, and unutterably, unutterably stupid.”

  Chris understood that such was life in the theater, but the personal nature of the reviews shocked him. His financial situation was precarious, a pressure Wendy didn’t have, thanks to the success of the Wasserstein brothers.

  Chris and Wendy’s friendship was built on the yin and yang of insecurity and ambition, and on a willingness to take care of each other as best they could. For all Wendy’s vulnerability, she always surprised Chris with her ability to get things done and her instincts for using connections to advantage. When his salary from The Idiots Karamazov ran out in the fall of 1975, Wendy helped arrange a job for him indexing a book about schizophrenia, coauthored by Susan Blatt’s father. When Chris moved to New York shortly after that, Wendy went with him to look for apartments, offering commentary on the safety and specialties of each neighborhood they visited.

  Then Chris’s mother, who’d had breast cancer, was diagnosed with a recurrence and given a dire prognosis; the cancer had spread to her bones. Relatives were putting pressure on her only child to move back home. Wendy intervened and introduced him to her sister Sandra’s psychiatrist. While Chris didn’t find him helpful in most ways, the psychiatrist gave him one valuable piece of advice: Set clear boundaries with your mother’s relatives. (He didn’t know that the same advice was being dispensed to Sandra, who followed instructions to keep Lola on a tight leash, allowing her to call on Sunday mornings at a certain time.)

  Wendy’s infatuation with Chris had developed into a true friendship that was familial, encompassing mundane matters, passing thrills, recurring annoyances, and issues of deepest concern.

  Before Chris left for the O’Neill, he went to the Playwrights Horizons production of Montpelier Pa-zazz. Wendy downplayed its importance, just a ten-o’clock showing in the dregs of Forty-second Street. But she was excited. She invited her family and friends from her Amherst/Holyoke theater days and from Yale Drama.

  Wendy introduced Chris to André Bishop, who was taking tickets at the door. Chris recognized André from Harvard, having seen him play the character Andrei in Chekhov’s Three Sisters. That bare-bones undergraduate production had received a rave review in the Harvard Crimson from Frank Rich, who became the Crimson’s editorial chairman and was now in New York, writing movie reviews for Time magazine.

  James Lapine was there, too. He had met Wendy at Yale, and they became friends because he lived in New York and had a car. She bummed rides with him and called him “Tats,” her version of the Yiddish endearment tateleh [“little papa”].

  He thought she was adorable, and always thought of her the way she looked the first time they drove to the city together.

  “She had a pumpkin outfit on,” he said. “Pa
ppagallo shoes and pumpkin tights and a pumpkin dress. I thought it was the chicest thing I’d ever seen.”

  Lapine had been working as a graphic designer for the theater magazine at Yale when Brustein hired him to join the faculty and do design work for the theater. Theater hadn’t been Lapine’s interest; he wanted to be a film director. He was twenty-seven years old, trying to get his career going, but not certain which direction to go, frequently getting stoned to avoid thinking about it.

  In retrospect it was a remarkable convergence. None of them knew it then, but all of them—Chris Durang, André Bishop, Frank Rich, William Ivey Long, James Lapine, Wendy Wasserstein—would become among the most prominent players in the New York theater scene. Their lives would intersect professionally and personally, with Wendy at the fulcrum of many connections. This was the beginning.

  For a year or so after Montpelier Pa-zazz, Chris didn’t see much of Wendy. After the summer at the O’Neill, he decided to spend much of the fall in New Haven, where his boyfriend lived. He wrote a play, The Vietnamization of New Jersey, still subsidized by the CBS grant from Brustein. Then Chris was off to Los Angeles, for a production of A History of the American Film, which he had developed at the O’Neill.

  But his accomplishments were shadowed by the guilt he felt at being away from his mother, who had endured two bad marriages and was now possibly dying. When he was in the New York area, he spent as much time as he could with her. While he and Wendy spoke frequently by telephone, this made for hit-or-miss contact in the days before cell phones. Their friendship wasn’t on hiatus, but there was a lull.

  As Wendy’s Yale friends landed in New York, many of them discovered, as Christopher had, that the woman who couldn’t look you in the eye without giggling was a valuable resource. The impenetrable city was Wendy’s hometown, and she could waltz through it as blithely as (a chubby, Jewish) Holly Golightly—and, when necessary, as purposefully as Lola Wasserstein.

  When Wendy returned to the city, William Ivey Long—her designer friend and confidant from Yale—had been living for a year at the Hotel Chelsea on Twenty-third Street. The old redbrick building had the kind of romantic history William liked. It was the place where Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan had lived, where Allen Ginsberg had philosophized, and where Dylan Thomas had died. The rent was only two hundred dollars a month, but that was a lot considering William’s income, which was nothing.

  He had moved to the Hotel Chelsea specifically to meet Charles James, the legendary American couturier. One night, while watching Bruce Jenner win the gold medal for the decathlon in the 1976 Olympics, William came up with a plan.

  “As no one would hire me to make costumes, I decided I would make them anyway, on dolls,” he said. “I slipped a note under Mr. James’s door that explained that I was having trouble re-creating the bodice on a doll of Marie de Médici I made, based on Rubens’s coronation portrait; would he help me? Minutes later, ding-a-ling. ‘Hello, this is Charles James’ . . . and from then on I cooked dinner, I walked the dog—Sputnik—I painted the bathroom, and I learned and learned and learned.”

  Charles James was willing to teach William but not to pay him. He needed money, and Wendy knew that. When she saw William’s growing doll collection—odd, exquisitely dressed interpretations of historical figures, including a court jester—she told him, “I can sell them!” And she did, via a friend who ran an artisans’ gallery on Madison Avenue. The jesters were his most popular doll. She sold them for fifty dollars; he got twenty-five. As he saw it, eight dolls equaled one month’s rent. Another Yale pal, Paul Rudnick, and Wendy were the delivery people, carrying loads of clown dolls out of the Hotel Chelsea, popping them into the trunk of a taxi, and taking them up to Madison Avenue.

  Wendy began dating Douglas Altabef, a good-looking man with wavy hair who fit Lola’s specifications—“nice Jewish boy,” student at Harvard Law.

  They met through his brother, who had taken a summer program in high school with Wendy. Doug Altabef was familiar. He was born in the Bronx and when his family grew more prosperous moved to Long Island. He went to college at Columbia, then to Harvard. He was attracted to show business—took a year off to spend six months on the comedy-club circuit before deciding he was better suited for law school.

  He was immediately attracted to Wendy. He liked her sweet smile and the self-effacing way she carried herself, with her head slightly bent. They soon were dating with the kind of regularity that might lead to a serious commitment. They met each other’s family, they commuted between Boston and New York while Doug was in school, they traveled together to Canada to visit Wendy’s college friend Harriet and to Connecticut where both of Wendy’s sisters were living.

  Yet she was dissatisfied. Without discussing it much, she was obsessing about her career, working on a play and applying for writing jobs at various places, including Sesame Street. In another letter to “My Dearest Ruthie” she confided:

  I started seeing a psychiatrist. . . . Lola decided that I was indeed disturbed and needed help. Actually, she’s been very understanding recently. I don’t know if this all brings back a maternal purpose to her, or she just doesn’t like to see her youngest of such a proud litter eating dumplings at 10:30 on First Avenue. The shrink is very relaxing. He told me that I didn’t have a strong drive for failure but was rather terrified. The thing that’s wrong with Erica Jong is she’s only scared of flying. Baby, that ain’t shit! As you know there’s food, beaches, sex, buses, going outside, staying inside, writing suicide letters, cutting hair, having sex, not having sex. . . .

  Well, anyway, I hope this man can help me a little, or I marry Douglass[sic]. Actually, I really hope I marry Douglass[sic]. For some good reasons, I think I could like him for an extended amount of time . . . and for some bad reasons, I want all this to be settled. . . .

  The days are sort of the same. I spend them waiting for Sesame Street to call me and avoiding calling Douglass [sic]. It really is nice being obsessed with something besides Christopher. That really was quite a coup.

  Doug Altabef admitted he didn’t take her work all that seriously, because she didn’t seem to.

  “She was dismissive of it,” he said. “Denigrating of it. ‘I don’t know if it’s going to go anywhere,’ she said. It was private to her, and I didn’t try to intrude on it.”

  He called her “Monkey.”

  “She liked that,” he said. “She loved that.”

  At least that’s what he thought.

  Later he would see himself re-created in one of Wendy’s plays, Isn’t It Romantic. He was recast as Marty, a medical student, whose girlfriend, Janie, is a writer trying to get a job working for Sesame Street. She has an eccentric mother who dances and pesters Janie about getting married, and a sweet father who doesn’t say much.

  Janie discusses Marty with Harriet, her girlfriend:

  Harriet: He’s sweet.

  Janie: He’s very sweet. Sometimes I look at Marty and think he’s such a nice young man, I must be a nice young girl.

  Harriet: You are.

  Janie: I never meant to become one. Last week, when we were driving up from yet another Sterling Taverne opening on the Island, I had my head in his lap and he stroked my hair and called me Monkey. And at first I thought, Janie Jill Blumberg, you’ve been accepted; not even on the waiting list. So he calls you Monkey. You’d prefer what? Angel? Sweetheart?

  Harriet: Beauty?

  Janie: And I thought, It’s settled, fine, thank God. . . . And it was just as we were approaching Syosset that I thought, I can’t breathe in this car, and I promised myself that in a month from now I would not be traveling home from the Island in this car with Marty. And as soon as I thought this, and honestly almost pushed open the car door, I found myself kissing his hand and saying, “Marty, I love you.” I don’t know.

  Isn’t It Romantic reveals Wendy’s fundamental insecurity, her belief that someone could love her only in default mode, as a backup plan. When Marty meets Janie, she is with her attracti
ve friend Harriet, whom Marty describes as “a beautiful girl.” He says to Janie:

  I remember you. I saw you and Harriet together in Cambridge all the time. You always looked more attainable. Frightened to death, but attainable. I’m not attracted to cold people anymore. Who needs that kind of trouble?

  Janie replies with a joke. From the outset she distrusts Marty’s motives, unable to believe he is truly interested in her. When she begins to believe that he might want to marry her, she worries that she will be stifled by him. Echoing Wendy’s recurrent theme, Janie wonders who she is and what she wants.

  I like my work. I may have stumbled into something I actually care about. And right now I don’t want to do it part-time and pretend that it’s real when it would actually be a hobby. But I want a life too. Honey, my mother takes my father skating every Saturday. . . . I’m their daughter. I want that too.

  At age twenty-six, Wendy found herself in the odd position of being a grown-up in some ways but still a child, dependent on Morris for money, unattached, uncertain about her career.

  But things were about to change.

  She was preparing for the workshop production of Uncommon Women, and she had a job in theater—sort of. Nancy Quinn (sister of Pat Quinn, a Yale friend) hired her as an assistant for the National Playwrights Conference at the O’Neill Center; her primary responsibility was delivering scripts to the members of the selection committee. She quickly acquired a reputation for being fun to have around and for her habit of sweetly accepting subway fare and then taking cabs to her destination. While she was working there, Wendy submitted Uncommon Women for consideration at the O’Neill.