Wendy and the Lost Boys

by Julie Salamon

  Wendy implied that motherhood had anchored her, that she would no longer be the peripatetic traveler. But even as she gave the interview, she was preparing for the launch on May 1, 2001, of Shiksa Goddess, a collection of the essays she’d written over the past decade, culminating in the New Yorker article about the birth of Lucy Jane.

  The publicity tour was packed: She had national television appearances scheduled for The Today Show, The Rosie O’Donnell Show, Politically Incorrect, and Charlie Rose; a couple of dozen newspaper and radio interviews; plus a grueling travel schedule that included bookstore signings, readings, and local media in New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., New Jersey, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, and Vermont.

  Now, instead of traveling light and alone, as she had grown accustomed to doing, she often brought an entourage—Lucy Jane, her nanny, and sometimes an assistant. Wendy, whose energy had always seemed unflagging, was often noticeably fatigued.

  David Hollander, her former lawyer, had stopped practicing law a decade earlier and was living in San Francisco. Wendy called to let him know she would be in town in June to promote Shiksa Goddess. Her schedule was packed—arriving from Seattle at 1:00 P.M. on Thursday, June 14, for three days of readings and interviews for print, radio, and television. But she had one free evening—Saturday, June 16, her last night in San Francisco. Did he want to have dinner?

  They met at a restaurant, and Hollander saw immediately that she wouldn’t be able to make it through a meal. “She was just awfully sick,” he said. Though Wendy was overweight and had never been the embodiment of healthful living, Hollander was shocked at her haggard appearance.

  He had a drink, and she ordered a glass of seltzer. Then he said, “Let’s get you back to the hotel, you’re exhausted.”

  When they arrived, he went up to her room to say hello to Wendy’s daughter. “It was the whole traveling show of Lucy Jane and nanny and assistant,” he said. He stayed for a brief visit. As he left, he thought, “Wendy seemed very, very unwell.”

  Wendy had been experiencing a series of mysterious symptoms since giving birth. Not long before the book tour, she’d gone with Chris Durang to opening night of a revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. It was a rare night out for the old friends. Chris was worried as Wendy clutched his arm and complained of dizziness.

  He was struck by how much older she seemed. Two years earlier the two of them had posed for a New York Times photographer in front of the Juilliard School. They both appeared round-cheeked, youthful, and gleeful, not that different from how they’d looked at Yale, twenty years earlier. He didn’t know it at the time, but she had just become pregnant. He had moved far enough outside Wendy’s orbit to learn about the pregnancy only when she was in the hospital and about to give birth. The last-minute notification came via a call from an assistant. Later Chris learned he wasn’t alone in not knowing. Wendy told him she’d kept her pregnancy a secret because—at age forty-eight—she had valid reason to fear a miscarriage.

  He first met Lucy Jane when she was in the hospital, ensconced in an incubator in the neonatal intensive-care unit. He was moved by the sight of this tiny baby, so small, comfortably fitting into a grown-up’s hand. How could he not be touched? But Lucy’s presence didn’t fully register. He had missed the entire pregnancy, the time needed for a progression of emotion; he felt as though he’d missed the first two-thirds of a movie and arrived just in time for the end. He was still in a state of surprise and not sure what it all meant.

  He didn’t realize how dangerous it had been for Wendy until he learned the details—the ones Wendy chose to divulge—in the New Yorker. He was beginning to understand that “Complications,” the title of the article, had been both descriptive and proscriptive. Within a few months of Lucy’s arrival, Wendy told Chris she was having dizzy spells and didn’t feel safe picking up the baby because she was afraid she would fall over. She reported other disturbing ailments: For a period of time, she had to wear sunglasses constantly, because her eyes were so sensitive to light. She became quite thin but then regained what had become her normal heft, around two hundred pounds.

  After Wendy returned from the book tour, Chris stopped by to visit her and Lucy. He was shocked at the sight of his old friend. One side of her face had collapsed. She told him not to worry; it was Bell’s palsy, a complication from the pregnancy. That word, with its ominous implications, kept cropping up: “complication.”

  She resolved to take care of her health after the book tour was over, in between looking for nursery schools for Lucy Jane.

  In a ten-week period that fall Wendy—who turned fifty-one years old on October 18, 2001—went to seventeen medical examinations with at least eight different physicians, including an ear, nose, and throat specialist, two neurologists, and a naturopath. She endured a CAT scan, an MRI, spinal taps, blood workups, and a painful test that involved zapping her with electrical currents. Her niece Samantha Schweitzer accompanied her sometimes; on other occasions she took along Rhoda Brooks or her assistant, Angela Trento.

  At various points she told friends she had Bell’s palsy and that it might be related to Guillain-Barré syndrome, a debilitating disorder that results in a weakened nervous system and possible paralysis.19 She said she had labyrinthitis and a retinal occlusion. She said no one was sure what she had. A “top” neurologist told her that her case was “very interesting,” meaning he was stymied. Then he asked her if she could arrange house seats for him at a popular play.

  The first of these appointments took place on September 10, 2001. The next day the World Trade Center was destroyed by a terrorist attack, leaving in its wake a changed metropolis. The brash hedonism of the late twentieth century gave way to a tentative atmosphere of deadly fear and panic. Wendy couldn’t ignore the symbolic connection between the assault on the city she loved and the alarming forces wreaking havoc on her physical being.

  As always, she steadied herself by transforming experience into art. She wouldn’t be defeated by the unseen enemy—she would write about it. On September 16 her byline appeared in the New York Times, under the heading “The Fragile City.” In a deft 1,100-word essay, she invokes a loss of innocence, capturing a pervasive sense of uncertainty even as she praises the heroism of her fellow New Yorkers.

  The article opens with Wendy’s memory of two planes colliding near the Brooklyn Ethical Culture School in 1960. She had been certain “evil Communists” must be bombing Brooklyn.

  “Don’t worry,” her father told her when she got home. “Nothing like that can happen here. This is America.”

  She continued. “It wasn’t just that this was America,” she wrote. “This was New York. For my father, and for others, it was, and still is, a city of open opportunities. But I never imagined that the opportunities would include diabolical mass destruction.”

  Yet Wendy wasn’t prepared to succumb to weakness. “It’s very difficult to think of New York or New Yorkers as vulnerable,” she wrote. “We are neurotic, oversensitive, aggressive, compassionate, ironic and tough, but not vulnerable. We can take care of ourselves, thank you very much.”

  Like most parents living in New York that day, she wondered what the future would hold for her child. She made it clear: She wanted her legacy to be one of hope.

  Lucy Jane’s second birthday was the day after the attacks. Wendy canceled her party, but she did take Lucy Jane to vote in the mayoral primary the morning of September 11, before the election was postponed. “She may not remember that day when she is older,” Wendy wrote, “but if she does, I hope she recalls going to vote, not the horror in Lower Manhattan.”

  She wanted Lucy Jane to understand that she was a New Yorker and a Wasserstein; resilience was ingrained in her fiber.

  WENDY WROTE MUCH OF THIRD, HER FINAL PLAY, AT THE MACDOWELL COLONY.

  Twenty-two

  WELCOME TO MY RASH

  2002-04

  In late 2001 Wendy’s friend Bill Finn felt compelled to intervene. Disturbed by h
er illness and concerned she wasn’t dealing with it seriously enough, Finn referred her to his internist, Richard Meyer, who was also an oncologist, specializing in leukemia, lymphoma, and other blood disorders. Meyer found evidence of T-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), a rare form of the disease. However, Wendy’s neurological symptoms—the recurrence of Bell’s palsy, the problems with balance, the eye condition—were unusual.

  Meyer sent Wendy to Kanti Rai, internationally renowned expert in CLL, chief of the department of hematology-oncology at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Great Neck, New York. Wendy immediately liked this charming white-haired doctor, born in Jodhpur, India, married to a Jewish woman, of whom he would say mischievously, “If anything, I’m more Jewish than my wife.”

  After examining Wendy, Rai was stymied. In all his experience, he hadn’t seen Wendy’s kind of neurological abnormality connected to the T-cell CLL. However, because her condition was deteriorating and the neurologists she had seen couldn’t explain why, he decided to treat the leukemia part of her problem. “In my mind it makes sense to treat what is treatable and see what happens,” he told Wendy. “If the leukemia is successfully treated and in that course the neurological findings are improved, then it obviously is related. If it does not improve, we haven’t lost anything, because at least we have the leukemia part treated.”

  He acknowledged that there was a chance things could get worse. “We are shooting in the dark,” he told her.

  In February 2002, Wendy began treatments with Campath, a monoclonal antibody, administered via an intravenous drip. She made the drive from Manhattan to Great Neck—which could be anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour and a half, depending on traffic—in a town car paid for by her brother Bruce. As with earlier medical appointments, she trusted Angela Trento to come along, and occasionally Rhoda Brooks.

  During this period, while she was undergoing the Campath treatments, Wendy took two-and-a-half year-old Lucy Jane to see Carnival, starring Anne Hathaway, a young actress who had just finished her freshman year at Vassar and had already become a star, for her role in the Disney fantasy film The Princess Diaries. Wendy had adapted the musical for the Encores concert series at City Center.

  Shortly after the play opened, on February 8, 2002, Wendy visited a neurologist, who told her she’d gotten a decent review from Ben Brantley in the Times.

  “Really?” she responded.

  “Now you say it,” he told her. One of her symptoms was difficulty pronouncing the letter B. The name of the critic she had come to despise was a perfect test.

  In her notes for a memoir, Wendy wrote, “It takes me a minute to prepare.”

  “Mmmmmm Ben,” she said. “Mmmmmm Brantley.”

  “I can’t believe his name has become a vocal exercise,” she observed, appreciating the irony.

  She likewise tried to find humor in the Campath treatments, a more challenging task. Named for the Cambridge University Department of Pathology, the treatments had a tony British pedigree that appealed to Wendy. But Campath involved a miserable process that could take several hours each visit. She experienced her share of the possible side effects listed on the Campath Web site: fever, chills, nausea, rash, dyspnea, cytopenias (neutropenia, lymphopenia, thrombocytopenia, anemia), and infections (CMV viremia, CMV infection, other infections). Also: vomiting, abdominal pain, insomnia and anxiety.

  Chained to an IV drip in a well-lit cubicle in a modern cancer ward, Wendy escaped through writing. She brought along a spiral notebook and a soft-tipped pen; her grim predicament emerged as a bleak comedy. Welcome to My Rash—a one-act play with two characters—is essentially a long dialogue between a well-known writer, “Flora Berman,” a leukemia patient, and her doctor, “Kipling Varajan.” Wendy describes Kipling as “sixty-five, a demure Indian man, in a white coat. . . . Though serious, he has a bit of a twinkle.”

  Wendy told Kanti Rai that she had written a play with a character based on him, but he never saw it performed. Later, when he finally read Welcome to My Rash, he realized how extraordinary her powers of recall were. Many of their conversations were there on the page, only slightly fictionalized.

  The character Flora Berman tells her doctor about a mysterious rash she had when she was in school; Wendy had experienced a similar outbreak when she was at the Yale Drama School. A physician she’d consulted there told her she might be allergic to her menstrual cycle; her condition was so rare that she became the subject of a dermatology conference at Yale–New Haven Hospital.

  In the play Flora tells her doctor, “I broke out in question marks between my legs because I was so ambivalent about my entire gender. I single-handedly redefined feminine self-loathing.”

  Dr. Rai experienced an equally rare phenomenon with Wendy, one that occurred with perhaps a half dozen patients in more than forty years of medical practice. “The doctor-patient thing faded away, and trust and friendship developed,” he said. After the treatments were over, Wendy took three-year-old Lucy Jane to Great Neck to have dinner with the doctor and his wife.

  Usually he tried to avoid such relationships. “I have learned over the decades of my professional life to be on guard,” he said. “I cannot afford to get personally involved, not because I don’t like the person but because it will be injurious to my ability to remain objective.”

  Wendy told very few people—not including Lola—about the treatments. One day, however, she called Betsy Ross, her Madison Avenue fashion maven, to pick her up at the hospital in Great Neck. She knew that Ross was trustworthy. As style adviser to rich and prominent women, being circumspect was part of her business.

  “Wendy knew I was a little in shock when I went in there,” said Ross. “I never asked her questions and told her I wouldn’t tell a soul, but I had been in enough chemo wards to know what it was.”

  Wendy was tired but insisted they have lunch at the Miracle Mile, a deluxe shopping center in Manhasset, near the hospital. It was Madison Avenue in the burbs, with Gucci, Hermès, Carolina Herrera, Cartier, and Tiffany among the vendors. “We went into a restaurant, and people recognized her, which happened everywhere we went in New York, especially in the theater district,” said Ross, “but I was sort of surprised out there in some random restaurant.”

  Wendy was amused as people came over and told her, “You wrote that book for me! That’s me! You and I are so much alike!”

  Wendy whispered to Ross, after a blond, Waspy woman stopped by, “Don’t you see the similarities? Oh, yes, we are so much alike.”

  In June 2002, three months after the treatments concluded, Wendy returned to Great Neck for a checkup. Her symptoms had improved. She flew to California a few days later, where Jill Eikenberry interviewed her onstage at the Jewish Community Center in Marin County. The Bell’s palsy hadn’t cleared up entirely; her face was still distorted. Eikenberry was impressed by Wendy’s willingness to appear in public, acknowledging her imperfection in front of an audience. It reminded Eikenberry of how she felt about Wendy when the actress first read for the part of Kate in Uncommon Women and Others more than twenty years earlier.

  “She was clearly looking kind of odd and yet was so able to be out in front of people and talking about it in a way that made people feel comfortable,” said Eikenberry. “That’s a big thing to offer to a room full of women who had thought a lot about what they’re wearing today, how they look. It says it’s okay, whoever you are, it’s okay. It was a big deal for me, because that was never my way. I always had to put myself together and look fabulous, look like you’re in control all the time.”

  At home Wendy had assembled a team to manage the somewhat-controlled chaos of her life. When Lucy Jane was a year old, Wendy hired Emmy Casamassino to be her nanny. Emmy was Italian-American, an energetic, grandmotherly type, though not much older than Wendy. Emmy ruled the household, having stepped into the void created by Wendy’s meager domestic skills and insecurity as a mother. Wendy relied on Emmy, even as she complained to her friends that Emmy held too much swa
y over Lucy, who adored her. “I believe Lucy loves Emmy more,” she jotted in a notebook.

  But Emmy was reliable and honest and didn’t drink like the proper English governess who had previously taken care of Lucy. Emmy was also able to tolerate Wendy’s frenetic existence, which was more than other nannies who had come and gone before her managed to do. Wendy occasionally interviewed possible replacements without Emmy’s knowledge but ultimately was too intimidated to get rid of her. She saw how Emmy loved Lucy.

  Emmy was not stamped from the Hamptons/Upper Fifth Avenue/ Central Park West nanny mold. She was not a British or an Irish governess, nor a hip young au pair; she was pure outer borough, Brooklyn bred, living on Staten Island, a family friend of Wendy’s assistant, Angela Trento. Emmy generally subscribed to the same philosophy as Angela’s Italian-American mother, who believed that children couldn’t be overindulged or overprotected. She didn’t rush toilet training and allowed Lucy Jane to drink from a baby bottle as long as she liked. She wasn’t concerned that Lucy ate nothing but “white food,” preferring her pasta plain with no sauce and refusing all vegetables. Emmy believed, from experience, that Lucy would eventually grow out of her baby ways—and she wasn’t interested in opinions to the contrary.

  Emmy was one warmhearted component of Lucy’s out-of-the-ordinary childhood. Also unusual were Lucy’s playmates, many of whom were Wendy’s friends, including a large contingent of theater people. These adults were fanciful and perhaps childlike, though not children. Lucy didn’t have a father, but she had a slew of godfathers and godmothers. “Wendy’s life was like a fantasy,” recalled Rhoda Brooks. “It was incredible. She and Lucy would go to Bergdorf’s and get their hair cut, and they would give it to Lucy free and Wendy free.”

  Wendy believed that Lucy was happy. She rode the tricycle Rhoda bought her and went sledding in Central Park, usually with baby-sitters but at least once with her mother, who captured the moment for posterity in the pages of the New York Times. In the article Wendy gave Lucy Jane’s sled the emblematic name of “Rosebud,” after the sled in Citizen Kane that symbolizes childhood happiness.