Wendy and the Lost Boys

by Julie Salamon

  Sandra’s home in Connecticut had been a refuge for Wendy when she was at Yale. Several times she called Sandra at midnight to ask if she could come to stay for the weekend, when the pressures at school became too much for her. She was a constant presence in the lives of Sandra’s daughters, Samantha and Jenifer, instilled in their earliest memories.

  Even before that, while she was at Mount Holyoke, she had come to relish the role of Aunt Wendy to Georgette’s daughters, Tajlei and Melissa, who were born while Wendy was still in college. On trips to New Haven to visit James Kaplan, Wendy had often stayed at Georgette’s house, amusing her nieces with her endless store of games, delighting them with marvelous gifts, like the little illustrated books she made for them.

  By the time Wendy resumed life in New York after Yale, Sandra had divorced Peter Schweitzer and moved back to the city. The two sisters began talking on the telephone almost every day, a routine that became a lifelong habit. They discussed everything: what shoes to wear, their weight, their mother, their careers, their dates or would-be dates. Wendy called these conversations “Opinions with Sandra Meyer.” Sandra had firm ideas about almost everything, and Wendy accepted her authority (bridling only when she disagreed with Sandra’s editorial comments on her work). Although Sandra took pains to keep Lola at bay, she, too, relied on her family. Often Lola and Morris would baby-sit for Jenifer and Samantha during her frequent business trips, but sometimes the job would be Wendy’s.

  If Sandra had a business dinner nearby, she would sometimes leave Jenifer alone with Samantha for a few hours, knowing that their building had a doorman. Jenifer remembered feeling terrified, worrying that someone was breaking into the apartment. Just as Wendy had called Sandra when she needed help at Yale, Jenifer called Aunt Wendy. “She would sit there for hours and talk to me, about how somebody couldn’t crawl up the side of the building,” said Jenifer. “She would totally take it seriously and have real conversations about it.”

  Even then Wendy approached life with a sense of urgency, and with good reason. Despite the outward image of unstoppable success, the Wassersteins suffered. The family Bible might have been the New York Times, but their story was rooted in the book of Job.

  While Wendy was enjoying the acclaim that greeted Uncommon Women, she watched Sandra fall deeply, madly in love. The object of her passion was Andrew G. Kershaw, chairman of Ogilvy & Mather, one of the world’s largest advertising agencies.

  Kershaw fulfilled Sandra’s strict demands. He was brilliant, dashing, larger than life, a Hungarian-born World War II marine commando, fearless businessman, and pugnacious debater. When they met, she was almost forty, twice divorced; he was fifteen years older and still married. While his divorce was pending, they made plans to marry and began to live together.

  They were smitten, necking in the backseats of cars like teenagers. On October 28, 1978, they were together at home in Pound Ridge, an affluent New York suburb, when he came in from the yard, where he’d been trimming tree limbs. Twenty minutes later Sandra found him dead of a heart attack.

  A few days after his death, she appeared, stricken but composed, at Alice Tully Hall, where twelve hundred people had gathered for a memorial service. Even when submerged in grief, Sandra maintained a surpassing ability to coolly appraise a situation.

  “If I do say so myself—Andrew would have been proud of me and the girls,” she recalled, writing about that day. “We looked exactly right: I was wearing a stunning, very classic black suit (bought the day before with my sister, Wendy), with a wine coloured silk shirt and one rope of pearls. The girls, with their very blond hair, dress-up clothes, and solemn manner, walked into the hall with me after almost everyone else was seated—escorted by one of Andrew’s partners. I’m sure we looked admirable. . . .

  “How Andrew would have laughed at Jock’s obvious inability to admire him—right to the end,” she said of the eulogy delivered by John “Jock” Elliott, chairman of Ogilvy & Mather’s worldwide operations. “If you really analyze the eulogy, Andrew was being credited with immense energy and the ability to work hard . . . not with the extraordinary qualities of mind and character that were really his. . . .”

  She revealed the complex mixture of qualities that made her such a grand and intimidating presence in Wendy’s life. “I loved him—really,” Sandra wrote. “And from me that’s saying a great deal. I’ve never loved any man, or even admired any man before. In fact, other than my children, my sisters and brother and in a way, my parents—I don’t suppose I have ever loved anyone. In fact, most people who know me would wonder if I was capable of loving.”

  Passion was the overriding theme. “I’ve lost my man and I feel I’ve lost my life,” Sandra confessed.

  Small wonder that Wendy often found herself in emotional turmoil and unable to deal with mundane reality. In her family, relationships were writ large or erased. Her sister’s doomed, no-holds-barred love for Andrew Kershaw set an impossibly high standard for romance. Yet even at this moment of supreme loss, Sandra—whom Wendy trusted more than anyone—joined the family’s unspoken conspiracy of silence about Abner, their absent brother. As Sandra spoke about people she loved, she chose to delete him from memory (“my sisters and brother”).

  Wendy’s inability to forget was both a blessing and a curse. Memory fueled her work, but her family’s past nagged at her. She was haunted by Abner and what he represented. Her older siblings had known him, had witnessed his seizures and been frightened by his behavior. None of them questioned their parents’ decision to send him away. For Wendy, Abner became mythic, a symbol of what might happen to children who didn’t meet Lola’s standards. They could be banished. Wendy could never shake that empty feeling, the sense that love, like life, was precarious—parents abandon their children, husbands and lovers die, and sisters are left to wonder, are they their brother’s keeper?

  She never stopped wondering about the figure long missing from Wasserstein family portraits. When Uncommon Women and Others was published in book form, she dedicated it “To my brothers, Abner and Bruce.” Was this a rebuke to Lola and Morris, for separating Abner from his family, or was the dedication simply an expression of Wendy’s urge for fairness, or a bit of both? If she was going to pay homage to the brother she adored, she would also acknowledge the brother she never knew.

  Abner was not a ghost. He had become a man. When Wendy turned thirty, he was forty. He was easily recognizable as a Wasserstein; he had the same broad features as Bruce and Wendy and a thicket of dark, curly hair, just like his younger sister’s.

  His had been a long, lonely journey. After he was too old to remain at the Devereux School, Morris and Lola moved him to a state-run institution in upstate New York, for people who suffered from epileptic seizures. Even the best of these institutions were grim places, known as human warehouses. In the 1970s, spurred by the civil-rights movement, there was legal and political momentum to deinstitutionalize mentally ill people and move them into smaller halfway houses that were—theoretically—more humane. Abner lived in one of these for a few years, in Rochester, New York; when it closed, he moved into a group home in Penfield, a Rochester suburb with a utopian motto: “A Town of Planned Progress.”

  Eleanor and Ray Newell met Abner at the Downtown United Presbyterian Church in 1978, shortly after he began attending the church’s monthly Joy Class meetings for developmentally disabled adults. During regular services the Joy Class met in the church assembly room for informal prayer and discussion. The Newells were volunteers who helped lead the talks, encouraging the participants to go to the microphone and read stories and poems they’d written.

  When it was Abner’s turn to speak, everyone settled in for the long haul. It took him several minutes to collect his thoughts, which he delivered with awkward precision, punctuated by numerous pauses. As Eleanor Newell—a high-school math teacher—listened to his painstaking stories, she realized that Abner’s ability to reason far surpassed his speaking skills. “Abner often would use a mike and g
ive us his ideas,” she said. “It might be a long, tedious wait until he had something to say, but it was always something worth waiting for. He thinks things through and analyzes things and makes observations that are well thought through.”

  When the Newells learned that Abner’s sister was a writer who was becoming known, they began collecting newspaper clippings about her for their friend. He watched “The Sorrows of Gin” on television. Unlike the critic at the New York Times, Abner was deeply impressed by the show.

  There is a record, however imperfect, of his reaction. The Newells and other volunteers began writing down what Abner had to say. Eleanor saved his poems and articles, which represented Abner’s thoughts as dictated and transcribed, perhaps edited and embellished, by the various people who recorded his halting words. There is no way to authenticate the accuracy of these typed documents, word for word, but they offer insight into what was on Abner’s mind.

  After he saw “The Sorrows of Gin,” he dictated a review of the show in which he expressed his anger at being separated from his family:

  In the world today, instead of putting people away (like the handicapped) let them show how they can help when they are helped.

  An example of “putting people away” happens in families. Parents who leave their children each day, ignoring them and refusing to show them love, cannot expect to receive any respect from those children. Caring parents will stay at home with their family more often, paying attention to their children and learning what those children are like. They must realize how delicate and important children’s feelings are. . . .

  Whether a child is handicapped or normal, his feelings are hurt when he is left alone. A true friend would not do this—he would help a person try to make him understand what’s happening. Parents—and others—should look into themselves first before they turn away from a child or a handicapped person who has been “brought down.” It might be their own treatment that was the cause. (Most parents do not see that; they see only the child’s fault, and yet they themselves are tearing the child apart, hurting him more and more each time he is left alone.)

  Lola and Morris visited Abner two or three times a year. During those visits they kept him informed on what his siblings were doing and how the family was growing. He wanted to be connected, even from a distance. Sometimes he called Morris at the office. That’s how Jenifer, Sandra’s daughter, learned that he existed. At age thirteen she was working at her grandfather’s business during a school break, when a man called. “Can I talk to my father?” he asked.

  His niece had no idea who he was. They talked past each other for a few minutes. When Jenifer explained that she was Sandra’s daughter, the man on the other end was equally baffled. Then an aide took the phone from Abner. Jenifer immediately called her mother, who filled the canyon-size gap in Jenifer’s family history.

  When Georgette’s younger daughter, Melissa, was eight years old, Abner sent her a gold stickpin inscribed with her name. She told her mother she wanted to send her uncle a thank-you letter.

  “Don’t,” Georgette said. “It upsets him.” She had encouraged her children to write to Abner until she’d received a letter from a social worker telling them to stop. The letters agitated him, making him aware of what he was missing, she was told, and the awareness sometimes triggered a seizure.

  Georgette didn’t question the social worker’s instruction, nor did she discuss Abner with either of her sisters or Bruce. Lola sometimes gave Georgette a report, returning from Rochester either in good spirits because Abner said he had a girl friend or depressed because he’d had a seizure.

  There was a recurrent theme. “Abner wanted to come home to the family, but the family wasn’t there,” said Georgette. “What house? What family?”

  The lives of the other Wasserstein children had continued. The Brooklyn home Abner longed for was part of their past. His brother and sisters were adults, with concerns far removed from the isolated world he inhabited. For Abner, however, time had stood still. He was a middle-aged man equipped with the mind and heart of an inquisitive youngster, understanding that a larger life was passing him by but powerless to do anything about it. His lot was to feel, forever, the pain of a lost boy.

  Part Three

  ISN’T IT ROMANTIC

  1980-89

  ANDRÉ, WENDY, AND GERRY DURING THEIR

  NOËL COWARD VACATION IN JAMAICA.

  Twelve

  DESIGN FOR LIVING

  1980-83

  For years there was only one photograph Wendy Wasserstein felt worthy of a Tiffany frame—a snapshot, taken at sunset on a Jamaica beach, at Firefly, the Caribbean home of Noël Coward. Wendy is sitting on a bench between two handsome young men, their arms intertwined. She is wearing a flowing Laura Ashley dress and looks tan and happy, face lit with a huge smile, kicking her feet (clad in red espadrilles) in the air.

  It is the summer of 1982. To her right is André Bishop, smiling shyly at the camera, rosy-cheeked, wearing deck shoes and white slacks and a light T-shirt. To her left, Gerald Gutierrez, a rising young director and a new friend of Wendy’s, strikes a theatrical pose.

  In memory the vacation became mythic, the moment that bonded the three of them for life. “In the theater one always forms instant families, but the next family forms with the very next rehearsal of the very next show,” Wendy wrote. “However, in Jamaica, Gerry, André and I became one another’s permanent artistic heart and home. During those nights . . . we formed with one another the opinions—and in the theater all you have is your opinions—which would always count, which would always matter.”

  The three friends were about to collaborate on a project. The following year Playwrights Horizons was going to produce a new version of Isn’t It Romantic, Wendy’s play about a clever, overweight Jewish girl trying to break from her parents and find her own path. André was now in charge of Playwrights Horizons; a year earlier Bob Moss had officially handed the mantle of artistic director to his protégé. Gerry Gutierrez, who had just had a hit at the theater, was going to direct. (In May 1982 Gutierrez directed Geniuses by Jonathan Reynolds, which was well reviewed and then ran for a year.)

  They were all in their early thirties and unattached. Both men were gay. Wendy called their three-week trip to Jamaica their Design for Living holiday, a nod to the Noël Coward play about three people “diametrically opposed to ordinary social conventions”—Otto, the painter; Leo, the playwright; and Gilda, the golden girl they both loved.

  Later she gently mocked her own romantic vision. “None of us really opposed social conventions,” Wendy wrote of her budding relationships with André and Gerry. But their friendship was emblematic of the new social order. Just twenty years earlier, 25 percent of women between the ages of twenty and twenty-four were single, compared with 50 percent in 1980. As women delayed marriage, they created more intimate connections with friends, male and female.

  They rented a villa, equipped with a pool, a kitchen, three bedrooms, and two maids, called Mrs. Henry and Julia. The housekeepers did not seem to approve of their guests and their high-spirited enthusiasm for one another.

  Every night Mrs. Henry and Julia prepared specialties like callaloo and saltfish, local dishes that went unappreciated by their guests. As Wendy wrote, “André is allergic to fish, I prefer candy, and Gerry is a vegetarian.” They stayed up all night drinking beer and eating saltines covered with Velveeta cheese spread, arguing about the theater.

  They paid homage to the playwright at his gravesite overlooking the ocean, by smoking cigarettes and drinking the dry gin martinis they’d brought in a thermos and calling one another “darling” as they imagined Sir Noël would if he were there. The sun and booze made Gutierrez extra buoyant. He quoted Leo, from Coward’s Design for Living: “The actual facts are so simple,” he said to André and Wendy. “I love you. You love me. You love Otto. Otto loves you. There now! Start to unravel from there.” Someone snapped their picture.

  Gerry Gutierrez, enchanting and vo
latile, reminded Wendy of the parts of Lola she liked, the lively, funny, unpredictable parts, the go-go without the meanness. (She hadn’t seen his moody side yet, the impatience that expressed itself in emotional outbursts, the demons that sent him into hiding.) André was sensible and sweet, glad to go along for the ride, reserved, supportive—reminiscent, perhaps, of Morris.

  They swapped stories about their families. Gerry’s father was a police detective. Gerry had grown up in Brooklyn and attended Midwood High, the same school as Georgette, and received training in classical piano at Juilliard in Manhattan. After attending the State University of New York, he returned to Juilliard, where he studied drama with John Houseman, first as an actor but then finding his calling as a director. His mother worked as the office manager for Elizabeth Holtzman, a prominent New York politician, but—like Lola—Obdulia (called Julie) Gutierrez was a dancer; flamenco was her specialty.

  Wendy and Gerry were familiar to each other. They were Brooklyn-born children from ethnic families to whom they remained attached. The two of them were captivated by tales of André as a child, a rarefied creature, descended from the world of Edith Wharton. As he traced his DNA back just a generation or two, they felt directly connected to the gilded society found in Noël Coward’s plays.

  André patiently explained his complicated background. His mother, born Felice Rosen, was the child of New York Wasp royalty (her mother was Mary Bishop Harriman) and a wealthy immigrant Jew (Felix Rosen). Mary Bishop Harriman Rosen left Felix and their daughter to marry Pierre Lecomte du Noüy, a distinguished French philosopher and scientist, with whom she lived in France.

  Felice remained with her father in New York, raised by governesses and attending a private school where girls named Rosen were not made to feel welcome. She rid herself of her Jewish-defining surname as quickly as she could, by marrying a southern Protestant named Hobson. They had a son, George, and then divorced. Felice next married a Russian émigré, André V. Smolianinoff. They named their son André Bishop Smolianinoff. They divorced; Felice remarried again. She then deposited young André, age seven, in a Swiss boarding school, less than a year after his father died, at age forty-five. She enrolled her son as André S. Bishop, sparing him the potential for insult embedded in the foreign, unpronounceable Smolianinoff (even his father had jokingly referred to himself as “André Smiling On and Off”).