I read the opening scene with Prospero, when Miranda witnesses the shipwreck, and then a later scene when she meets and falls in love at first sight with the young prince Ferdinand—the only man she’s ever seen besides her father. Tapping into my own experience, I connected with Miranda’s childlike honesty, her intense love for her father, and her open heart. I felt I had been that girl many times, running with my arms wide-open toward love.
The audition seemed to go well, and they called Didi later to offer me the job without even having to do a callback. I was thrilled—I’d booked my first gig out of acting school, and it was Shakespeare. Three years before, Love’s Labour’s Lost had tripped me up and cost me a job. Now I was back with the Bard and feeling in my element, soon to be a working actress.
It was about four months away, so I kept working at the dining room during the day. Then, about a month before I was due to leave, I got a job playing an incompetent secretary on the soap opera All My Children. I didn’t have many lines, but worked for a few weeks—on TV, no less—and made some money.
One evening, after a taping of the show that had run late, I saw an actor, Charles Keating, in the lounge on my way out of the building. This dashing Englishman actor had been at the Guthrie Theater with my dad. When I was nine, I’d seen him play Mark Antony in a production of Julius Caesar in which he wore a macramé bikini bottom and leaped off a giant head of Caesar at the top of the show. He was simply spectacular and had taken my little-girl breath away. Looking at him maraud around the stage, feverishly spouting his lines, my nine-year-old self felt a warmth in her underwear that she’d only previously experienced when climbing the rope in gym class. I decided to go over to my first crush and say hello.
“Excuse me, Mr. Keating, I’m sure you don’t remember me, but you were at the Guthrie with my father, James Lawless. I saw you in Julius Caesar.”
He was twenty years older but still gorgeous, with thick, long white hair tied back in a ponytail, a distinguished mustache, and the darkest, deepest eyes.
“My dear, how wonderful to see you again! I remember your father very fondly. May I ask your name?”
“Wendy Lawless. I’m working on All My Children for a while before going off to do The Tempest.” I wanted him to know that I was a serious actress, hoping to follow in my father’s footsteps.
“Ah, Miranda.” He enveloped my hand in his, kissed it, and looked down into my eyes. “What a perfect part for you. She is so young, so innocent.”
“Um, yes,” I managed to peep. “Do you have any advice for me? It’s my first real job since getting out of acting school.”
Still holding my hand, he smiled radiantly. “You must remember that when Miranda sees Ferdinand for the first time, it’s as if she’s grown breasts.”
“Oh, I’ll remember that. Thank you.” I was feeling faint, along with the familiar damp-underpants sensation from when I was nine.
“Have a marvelous time, I must dash!” Charles squeezed my hand and was gone, out the door to Columbus Avenue. I just stood there for a moment, unable to move. All the way home on the subway, I felt a buzzy delight from being the recipient of his charms. It made me feel as if I was beginning to reach that world in which my father lived—as if I was making connections in that long lineage of roles and actors and stages. If a dark theater, any dark theater, made me feel at home, then working with and meeting other actors, especially of this grand, older generation, was like being part of “the family.”
• • •
Taking a taxi from the airport to my actor’s housing in Tucson, I was struck by the eerie beauty of the terrain. The mountains were blue and purple and topped in snow; the soil was pink and dotted with sage-green towering saguaros standing at attention across the desert. Palm trees swayed to and fro against the azure sky. The light was different, too—it was golden and lit up everything as if you were seeing it for the first time. Hummingbirds zipped through the air between flowers as big as your hand amid lush green grass. Everything seemed magnified and more alive. I didn’t expect the desert to be so vibrant, so full of life.
The actors in The Tempest were being put up in a condominium complex near the theater, so I could walk to work. The man who was playing my father, a Korean American actor named Randall Duk Kim, was so mindful and sweet that it was easy to work with him; he was so generous and giving in our scenes together. I had been nervous, as he was well-known in regional theater, but he instantly put me at ease, and I felt close to him almost at once. A lifelong and profoundly dedicated actor, he had founded his own Shakespeare company in Spring Green, Wisconsin—American Players—but was taking a break from his responsibilities there, telling me he just wanted to act and not be burdened with the day-to-day running of the place. He told me that eventually he wanted to return to Hawaii, where he’d been born, and open an orchid farm.
We did the play in Tucson for three weeks, then performed it in Phoenix for three more. Doing the play in Phoenix was very different—it was an older audience, and I could hear them riffling for their car keys toward the end of the show and see them starting to make for the exit doors during the curtain call to make it home to see The Tonight Show or the eleven o’clock news. Still, the company had fun going to a Japanese shabu place Randall had found, and we also had a private tour of Taliesin West because he knew the widow of Frank Lloyd Wright, who was a patron of his theater in Spring Green. My pal Patricia came to visit, and Daddy popped down to see the show, too.
My first acting experience out of school had been mostly positive, and I had avoided any romantic entanglements, for a change. Perhaps I was turning a corner, taking my first steps toward being a grown-up.
I got on the plane and returned to New York. Didi picked me up at the airport and eyed me up and down. She didn’t have to say anything; all that fabulous Mexican food had fattened me up a bit—I was going to have to lose a few pounds.
My old friend Nina Franco, who had directed me in Spring Awakening, was back in town, having gotten her graduate degree from NYU. She called me, and we went to dinner to catch up. She filled me in on her three years at NYU; I told her I was just back in town after doing The Tempest in Arizona and was now on the dole looking for more acting work. Surprisingly, there was no weirdness between us—even though the last time I’d seen her she was wearing bandages over sixty stitches from the notorious arm-through-the-glass-door incident. Perhaps because we’d known each other on and off for ten years at various stages of our lives, our friendship just plugged itself back in when we saw each other.
“Come back to my place, I’ll make popcorn.”
I didn’t have anywhere to be, so I shrugged. “Okay.”
We walked over to her flat on Ninety-eighth Street just off Broadway. The large, dark place had been broken up into bedrooms that her roommate, who owned the apartment, rented out. Nina clanged around in the kitchen, and I heard the popping corn kernels pinging around in a pot on the stove.
I was standing in the small, sparsely furnished living room just outside the kitchen when I heard the front door slam. A handsome man, about my age, with dark hair and a mole on his cheek entered the room. He looked like a young Robert De Niro, the good-looking one from The Godfather: Part II.
Nina came in with a bowl of popcorn and introduced me. “Wendy, this is Stewart. This is his apartment.”
We nodded at each other. He had a shy smile and tended to look off to the side, as if he were embarrassed about something. It was cute and made him seem sweet and self-effacing.
“Wendy lives a few blocks away on Ninety-seventh.” Nina eyed me, clearly seeing an inkling of chemistry between us. My face felt red and warm.
“Oh, my cousin Dave Ott lives over there. At 210 between West End and Riverside.” He put his massive messenger bag down on a chair.
“You’re kidding me, right?” It was just another crazy example of how small a place such as New York could be. “Jen
ny’s my best friend! We met at BU.”
“Wow. Will you say hello to her and Dave? I haven’t seen them in a while.”
“Sure.”
He got my number from Nina and called me the next day, so we met for coffee and exchanged stories. He wanted to be a screenwriter, but his day job was delivering oversized Italian sandwiches from a white van he drove around the city. Like me, he’d had an unhappy childhood—his parents split up when he was young. His mom was eccentric and now lived in a trailer park in Florida. His dad was a charismatic ne’er-do-well who never seemed to have had a real job.
Stewart listened with great interest to the saga of my insane childhood: the batty, narcissistic mother; the ghost father who’d chosen not to come to my rescue; the patched-up relationship with my sister, which at times resembled a broken vase stuck back together with sticky tape. His eyes narrowed with intensity as I cataloged all my strife and my various stabs to sort it all out. He held my hand and said he understood, which made me feel safe and cared for. We were alike in many ways—we’d lacked traditional parenting to say the least, we were both in the arts, and we had experienced the same proximity to money without having any ourselves.
Stewart and I drifted into a relationship, seeing each other a few times a week and on the weekends. In the beginning he seemed to have a gentleness that shone out of his brown eyes; he looked at me as if he loved me. I believed that I had finally found someone who would help me make the leap to the world of grown-ups; that we’d be a real, committed couple and cherish each other. Plus, I’d be joining Jenny’s family by being with him.
Then, just as with my relationships with Michael and Graham, it all drastically changed. Suddenly, he turned the tables on me and went from being my sweet boyfriend to my nemesis, full of angry criticisms of me. Why wasn’t I confronting my past? Why wasn’t I going to Al-Anon meetings because my mother was clearly a drunk? He bullied me into calling my mother—it was the first time I’d spoken to her in six years. Feeling as if I were going to vomit, I listened to the phone ring while he stood there watching me.
“Hello, Mother.” There was a pause while I listened to her smoke. “It’s Wendy.”
“Oh, it’s you. You no longer have the right to address me as Mother. You will call me Georgann.”
“Okay, Georgann.” Just hearing her voice on the phone made me ill. Her palpable hatred and vitriol made me want to curl up in a closet in the dark. “How are you?”
“How am I? I don’t hear from you in six years, and you call me up out of the blue to ask me how I am?” Her tone started to become more shrill, becoming slightly louder and even more nasty. I couldn’t speak. I was trembling, my hands sweaty from gripping the receiver so hard. “Well, I’ll tell you how I am. I have cancer!”
With that, she hung up the phone.
I crawled into my bed and wept. After all this time, she could still reduce me to a quivering mess.
Stewart sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing my back. “See? You did it. You can’t let her have all that power over you.”
Over the next few weeks, he continued to funnel his frustration over his own childhood disappointments, his stalled writing career, and his resentment toward Jews (didn’t I realize they ran Hollywood?) into acting out a drill-sergeant routine on my psyche. I started hearing that old sound in my head, the voices of boyfriends past.
Didi never liked him; she thought he was a loser. “He delivers sandwiches for a living! I mean, come on!” she’d snort.
Reeling from what I perceived as a crushing betrayal and an epic—and repetitive—mistake on my part, I felt that I was back in free fall. Once again I had chosen a man who belittled me the way my mother did. I sank into a monumental depression. Unable to eat, sleep, or stop crying, I frantically called my old Boston shrink, Dr. Keylor, who kindly listened to me, then told me to take care of myself and that unfortunately she didn’t know anyone in the city. So I called the only other therapist I could think of—Jenny’s mom and Stewart’s aunt, Phyllis.
She listened patiently while I blubbered into the phone about, well, everything. Why hadn’t I been able to resolve my issues with my mother? Why did I continue to find guys who treated me badly and didn’t value my worth? What was wrong with me?
There was a slight pause before she spoke. I blew my nose noisily.
“Well, I think you need to spend some time really mourning the fact that you didn’t have a mother. I mean, really feel sad about it.”
“Okay.” I sniffed.
“Then I think you have to ask yourself a question.”
I waited.
“What would happen if you decided to grow up?”
Her words stopped me. I looked into the mirror on my bedroom wall. Tears streaming down my face, I looked so small, so crumpled. Who was that girl?
Phyllis gave me the name of a shrink in Manhattan, Elaine Livingston, whom she’d met at a conference in California. “I only spoke to her for twenty minutes, but she seemed great.”
“Thanks, Phyl.”
“Hang in there, kiddo. Lots of love. And call Elaine.”
Elaine Livingston’s office was in London Terrace, an elegant prewar block of apartment buildings in Chelsea on Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth Streets between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. From her first-floor window, she had a lovely view into the courtyard garden. Somehow the hush of this cocoon-like room, with soft, dusky lighting and trembling, leafy trees outside, made it easier for me to pour out my feelings. I felt secure, hidden, safe.
She dug right in. “So, why are you here?”
Elaine was a tiny, fine-boned brunette in her mid-to-late thirties with fiercely intelligent eyes and a warm, caring voice that bordered on the maternal. I liked her right away. She sat back in a comfy chair that almost enveloped her petite frame with a yellow legal pad poised on her knee and listened intensely as I spewed all my problems and concerns out like so many hair balls: my apparently superpower-level ability to find critical guys, the feelings of worthlessness and sadness that threatened to incapacitate me, and my toxic relationship with Georgann. Elaine jotted notes down on the pad, looking up at intervals to smile or give me a look of concern. I sat on a couch across from her, surrounded by piles of balled-up, damp tissues.
She nodded and leaned in toward me. “Let me explain a little about the way I work. I practice something called brief therapy with clients. It focuses on the present and the future. Your past is important, of course, to help me understand where you’re coming from, but it’s more important to identify the problem and what behaviors are sort of holding up your ability to change or reframe the situation. Does that make sense?”
“Kinda,” I croaked. I had been crying so hard and talking so much, my nose was completely stuffed up, and I felt as if I couldn’t breathe.
“Next week, I think we should discuss your personal relationships and why you gravitate toward men who don’t nurture and accept you.”
“Okay.” I sobbed, trying not to gag on my own saliva.
“See you next week, Wendy.”
“Bye. Thanks.” I hobbled out the door and home.
After a few sessions with Elaine, I broke up with Stewart, which I hadn’t formally done; I was too afraid of confronting him with my true emotions—that he made me feel weak and preyed upon. She had suggested taking time off from the relationship so I could figure out what I thought I should do, and I agreed.
“The great thing is, you don’t have to decide now.” She shrugged and gave me a sly smile.
I met Stewart one evening later on the steps of Ninety-seventh Street.
“But why?” He clearly had no idea.
“Because I deserve better.” I had thought about this moment for a while; I’d rehearsed it in my mind and now knew it was the truth.
“What do you mean?” He looked at me as if I were speaking Swahili.
“I c
an do better than you, Stewart. Good-bye.” I turned on my heel and strode up the steps into the building.
Fuck that, I thought as I walked away from him. A rush of adrenaline pulsed through me from the power of doing the right thing for myself—from choosing what Wendy wanted over what some guy wanted.
I smiled to myself as I punched the button for the elevator.
chapter twelve
GROW UP
My roommate Dave was off in San Francisco for the summer, working at Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse in Berkeley, and Molly had followed him out there, so Dave had rented their room and the small one by the kitchen out. Feeling uncomfortable living with strangers and not wanting to run into Stewart, who lived only a few blocks away, I went to visit Pete and Jenny at their new home in Albany—she was four and a half months pregnant, and Pete was doing his medical residency. She and I went trolling the town for baby clothes that weren’t ugly, which in 1988 wasn’t easy. We cooked and hung out, talked and listened to records—Bonnie Raitt, Dwight Yoakam, Ry Cooder, or the Supremes. Somehow Jenny, a lifelong WASPy New Yorker, had always dreamed of being a Motown backup singer or Dolly Parton. It was great to be together, to reconnect with that part of my found family. But it was not the same. Jenny and Pete had grown up. Albany was a town for grown-ups. I was unemployed and just learning how not to have a bad relationship—clearly just a visitor to the real world.
Back in New York, I camped out at Didi’s place during the week, sleeping in the bunk bed above Ali or on the puffy couch in the living room. I kept my stuff in my room at Ninety-seventh Street but stopped in as little as possible to avoid running into Stewart. Sometimes on weekends I tagged along with Didi and Ali to a little guesthouse Didi rented with her mother behind a mansion in East Hampton. We’d roller-skate along the flat, winding roads past the grand houses of the truly wealthy; the constant whirring of lawn mowers accompanied the dragging clack of our skates. I still had my skates from playing Cherubino, and Didi was the only person I knew who fearlessly roller-skated to work in Armani on the sidewalks of Manhattan. And here we were—back in the Hamptons together for the first time since the crazy food-fight summer twenty years ago, when I was a towheaded little girl and she a caustic, cigarette-smoking teenager.
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