Wendy and the Lost Boys (36 page)

Even while William was involved, Wendy tested other options. She asked her friend Peter Schweitzer (not her former brother-in-law), a CBS news producer, if he would be a sperm donor. He had split up with Heather Watts, a ballerina with the New York City Ballet, after a long relationship and wasn’t dating anyone special. “I was very touched that Wendy would ask me,” he said. But after much reflection, he said no.

“I wanted to get married and have my own family, and I thought it would be a strange burden to put on a woman I would marry, to say I have this other child from another woman but it wasn’t a marriage, it was a sperm donation,” he said. “I remember thinking, ‘I will find my mate, I will find my partner and will have that family,’ and feared that Wendy would not.”

As it became clear in the summer of 1997 that Sandra was reaching her final days, Wendy decided to end the fertility treatments. Her fantasy of saving Sandra by becoming pregnant was not working. There was no miracle that would save her sister.

B
etsy Carter, Bruce’s old Michigan friend and Wendy’s longtime editor, had crossed paths with Sandra for years but had always been intimidated by her.

Their relationship changed when Carter was diagnosed with breast cancer, around the same time as Sandra’s recurrence.

“That will bond you!” Carter said.

“I think to both of us it was a surprise we became such good friends,” said Carter. “I’m not on anyone’s A-list. I don’t travel in those investmentbanker circles or any of those circles. We just liked each other.”

During the past year, the two of them had gone together every week to the 92nd Street Y for a Broadway musical sing-along class. Everyone sat at desks, holding song sheets, belting out the lyrics to old favorites like
Oklahoma!
and
My Fair Lady.

“We both had an insane love of Broadway musicals,” said Carter. But even in her weakened condition, Sandra maintained her strict standards. If the selection was something she didn’t approve of—like a number from
The Phantom of the Opera,
Sandra would put down her music and say, “I won’t sing that!”

On the morning of Christmas Eve 1997, it was Betsy Carter who telephoned Wendy and told her that Sandra’s doctor wanted to have her hospitalized. Despite Sandra’s worsening condition over the past months, the call came as a shock. She had always rebounded, defying doctors’ predictions.

Not this time. By evening Sandra was in a coma.

Georgette had been in New York the previous day, just before Sandra went into the hospital.

The sisters were alone for a few minutes. As Georgette remembered the scene, Sandra turned to her and said, “In looking at my life, I’m happy because I was a player. I’m proud of my life. I was a player.”

Georgette left as Wendy came in. Georgettte told Wendy what Sandra had said to her.

Wendy looked at Georgette strangely.

“Why did she say that to you?” Wendy asked. “I’ve been here all these days, and she says that to
you
to make you feel better.”

Jenifer understood her Aunt Georgette’s need to hear Sandra’s assurance that everything was okay. She was often the odd sister out, living in Vermont, often seeming more in tune with Lola than with her high-powered siblings, who didn’t always take her seriously. Though the portrayal of Gorgeous in
The Sisters Rosensweig
wasn’t altogether flattering (she was ditzy; her husband wasn’t able to support his family), Georgette was delighted to be part of it. She displayed a giant poster of the play in the living room at the Wilburton Inn.

Jenifer didn’t believe that her mother had told Georgette the truth but rather what Sandra thought Georgette wanted to hear.

“My mother didn’t have a peaceful death,” Jenifer said. “She struggled against it every minute.”

She and her sister had watched their mother’s valiant stubbornness in horror.

“The sin of pride is a big theme,” said Jenifer. “When my mother was dying, it broke my heart. She was on the phone with a colleague saying that after the Christmas break she wanted to talk to that person about corporate boards she’d been proposed for. I thought, ‘This is the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.” She understood her mother needed to believe she would recover and be able to return to work, but it was still excruciating.

For five nights she and Samantha slept in cots in Sandra’s hospital room. Finally, when Sandra was crying out in pain, Jenifer begged the nurses to give her mother morphine.

One of the nurses told the daughters to go home and to make sure their unconscious mother knew they were leaving.

Samantha and Jenifer left at 11:00 P.M. At 1:30 A.M., December 30, 1997, they received the call that Sandra had died. She was sixty years old.

“She needed us to leave,” said Jenifer. “I believe she could not have her children in the room and let go. But she was fighting. Her body was done. Her kidneys weren’t functioning, her liver wasn’t functioning, her body was done. It was not a graceful death.”

Her daughters invited the family to a private service on Main Beach in East Hampton, on New Year’s Eve 1997. Georgette wasn’t there.

She had asked Sandra’s daughters to postpone the ceremony a day. New Year’s Eve was the inn’s biggest night; they had no manager, and there was no way to make it back to Vermont in time.

The funeral took place as planned. Georgette sent one of her sons to represent her; afterward she felt guilty and wished she’d gone herself.

Wendy was angry. When she eventually wrote about Sandra’s last days,
¹⁶
Georgette’s name didn’t appear.

The entire family gathered on January 19, 1998, for another memorial service for Sandra at Lincoln Center, produced by Wendy and André, directed by Gerry Gutierrez.

Lola seemed tiny, frail, cloaked in black, old, nothing like her usual self, the eighty-year-old wonder who delighted strangers with her high kicks. Morris, always quiet, seemed to be somewhere else. Later the family came to understand that he was in the early stages of dementia.

Lola’s survival instincts didn’t make room for death. During Sandra’s last days, Lola’s mean streak emerged in full force. In the hospital hallway, Wendy walked over to comfort her mother.

Lola responded bitterly. “It’s a waste of a life,” she said. “What a waste of a life. She never had grandchildren.”

Jenifer and Samantha were standing right there.

Rhoda Brooks, a friend of Wendy’s, felt compelled to say something, no matter how awkward she felt doing so. “You know your grandmother doesn’t mean that.”

Wendy presided over Sandra’s memorial, regaling the mourners with stories of her glamorous big sister. She recalled being scandalized and enthralled, as a second-grader at Yeshivah of Flatbush, when Sandra took her into Manhattan for a risqué movie followed by spareribs and shrimp with lobster sauce at the House of Chan.

Wendy remembered Sandra advising their nephew Scoop on what books to read.

“She was the most sympathetic and sophisticated person I could even dream of,” Wendy said. “There has been no major decision I made without Sandra and no major success or self-doubt and hurt without Sandra.”

Jenifer was the last to speak.

“Someone once told me Sam and I are very lucky and unlucky,” she said, “. . . to have had such a person as a mother and to have lost her.”

Jenifer told the friends and relatives who’d gathered not to worry about her and Samantha. Their mother, she said, had taught them very well.

“We tried to listen—although there was a lot of information,” she said. “If each of us has half of her strength and her will and intelligence and wit, we will be fine.”

Sandra’s memorial took place in the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, the same theater where the
The Sisters Rosensweig
had premiered four years earlier. That had been a glorious night for the Family Wasserstein, as they’d been designated in
New York
magazine. Now, despite the life-affirming anecdotes and bright production numbers (a Mozart aria, a Broadway show tune), grief replaced glory.

PLAYWRIGHT TERRENCE McNALLY BECAME ANOTHER SECRET THAT WASN’T A SECRET.

Nineteen

FESTIVAL OF REGRETS

1998-99

Being Jewish was central to Wendy’s identity,
but religious belief eluded her. She rarely missed going to synagogue for the High Holidays but otherwise almost never attended services. She had internalized the mixed messages she’d received as a child, being sent to yeshiva and then hearing Lola mock Jewish ritual at home. Lola’s motto was “God helps those who help themselves.”

Sandra’s death left a vast void. “I had come to believe not only that God didn’t help those who helped themselves, but also that he couldn’t care less,” Wendy wrote. The emptiness she felt seemed less likely to be filled by a baby with each passing year. Wendy was now closer to fifty than to forty. When Lola had been this age, she was soon to become a grandmother.

Work offered no comfort: Wendy felt that her career as a dramatist had stalled.
The Object of My Affection
opened and closed in the spring of 1998, leaving neither shame nor acclaim in its wake. The movie generated a lot of publicity, thanks to its topical subject matter and its well-known lead actors. The
Variety
reviewer produced a fair summary: “A very vanilla romantic tale . . . , ‘The Object of My Affection’ tries to mix the messy realities of mismatched relationships with the structural neatness of a musical-comedy view of the world, with mild, occasionally diverting results.”

Nick Hytner, the director, was disillusioned by the experience. He had been drawn to the project because he liked how the McCauley novel dealt with the love between a gay man, named George, and his roommate, Nina, the straight woman he loves. When Nina becomes pregnant (via her boyfriend), she and George, her soul mate, consider the possibility of raising the child together. The novel ends on a wistful note, acknowledging that there could be no truly happy resolution to their relationship.

Hytner wanted to remain faithful to the novel. But after testing the movie with audiences, the studio decided that the ending was too downbeat and forced an unconvincing feel-good denouement that Hytner deplored. In the version that was released, the woman has the baby alone, she and George find “suitable” partners, and they all happily participate in the child’s upbringing, along with the baby’s father.

For Hytner this neatly packaged resolution watered down a poignant truth about an intimate relationship between a gay man and a straight woman. In his words: “The original, melancholic ending said these two are nuts about each other, and they can’t be together, and that’s always going to be an unresolved pain in their lives.”

For Wendy the movie was yet another sign that response to her dramatic work had noticeably cooled. She was unable to shake off the sour reaction to
An American Daughter,
which she saw as a rejection of her attempt to become a serious voice in the political arena. She directed her anger at First Lady Hillary Clinton. In an impassioned article in the
New York Times,
Wendy asked what had happened to the “idealistic, forthright Hillary” whose 1969 Wellesley College commencement address summed up the hopes of her generation in a bold declaration: “We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living.”

Wendy wasn’t a friend of the Clintons, but she’d been a guest at the White House—once escorted by Bill Finn, once by Nick Hytner, and another time by André. She had admired them. They had arrived at the White House as a revolutionary couple—the His and Hers Presidency—with revolutionary plans. No reading to kindergartners for Hillary. She was put in charge of overhauling the country’s health-care system. That failed, and then her marriage floundered. The First Lady was no longer a model of the new woman, but a far more familiar species—Loyal Wife, in the kitchen baking cookies when she wasn’t standing by her disgraced husband, seducer of a White House intern.

It seemed no one could talk about anything besides the Monica Lewinsky affair, which had sidelined subjects of national and international import. “Now, the impressive personal qualities—idealism, strength, and poise under pressure—that [Hillary] once directed toward influencing social policy are being used to maintain domestic tranquillity,” Wendy wrote.

Wendy’s outburst reflected, among other emotions, her vacillating feelings toward her brother Bruce, now married for the third time. On July 25, 1998, less than a month before the article was published, Wendy took Nick Hytner to a fund-raiser for the Clintons thrown by Bruce and his new wife, Claude; admission was twenty-five thousand dollars a couple (the fee was waived for Wendy and Nick). Claude Becker Wasserstein was tall, elegant, and impossibly good-looking, her bloodline part French, part Jewish. She was an actual raven-haired beauty, like a character from a potboiler novel. This striking combination of attributes made her an easy target for her brilliant but lumpy sister-in-law, who had spent a lifetime regarding Bruce variously with admiration and disappointment, adoration and anger. But Claude was also bright, gracious, and charming, making her impossible for Wendy to hate (but also difficult to fully love).

BRUCE WITH CLAUDE BECKER WASSERSTEIN, HIS THIRD WIFE.

Two years earlier Wendy had hinted at her feelings about her latest sister-in-law in a diary she wrote for
Slate,
the online journal edited by her friend Mike Kinsley.

“Thinking of canceling breakfast with my mother tomorrow,” Wendy had written on October 2, 1996. “She’s very eager to tell me my brother’s third wife is his best wife. I think I need to work.”

Claude had been a producer for CBS News; she won an Emmy in 1992 for investigative journalism. With her seemingly flawless physical being, combined with a sympathetic intelligence and innate sense of style, she represented a crucial way in which Wendy and Bruce had grown apart. Claude seemed comfortable in Bruce’s world in a way Wendy never believed she could be.

They eventually had homes in London, Manhattan, Paris, and East Hampton, and property in Santa Barbara. The family had celebrated Sandra’s last Passover supper in Paris, because Claude and Bruce were also throwing a wedding party for themselves there.

Their showcase was Cranberry Dune, the Hamptons estate where the Democratic fund-raiser was held. The oceanfront property was located on a road called Further Lane, in an enclave of rich and famous neighbors. Nick Hytner arrived dressed to meet a president—in suit and tie—only to discover that in the Hamptons the more expensive the benefit, the more casual the clothing. All the investment bankers knew that grubby chic was the dress code. Hytner took off his necktie and declared the evening “brilliant.”

Wendy was dismissive of Bruce’s wealthy domain, even though she, too, had grown accustomed to slipping her feet into Manolo Blahnik shoes. Through Stephen Graham she’d become friendly with his mother, publishing mogul Katharine Graham, and developed a crush on his brother Donald, who succeeded his mother as chairman of the Washington Post Company. She became close to Clifford Ross, whose father was a Wall Street financier and philanthropist and whose aunt was Helen Frankenthaler, a prominent artist who was married for several years to Robert Motherwell. Betsy Ross, Clifford’s wife, had a Madison Avenue shop that catered to wealthy women. Wendy liked to hang out there to eavesdrop and then take Ross out for lunch, amusing her with verbatim recapitulations of overheard conversations.

In her
Slate
diary, Wendy wrote, “Sat in a friend’s dress shop on Madison Avenue for an hour in the afternoon and watched women try on two-thousand-dollar dresses. I have no idea why I am so riveted by this. I tell myself it’s character studies for my next play. I am fascinated by the insularity of the rich. I am appalled by their entitlement.”

Appalled, perhaps, but also desirous. In late 1997 she finally moved into her new apartment on Central Park West (and wrote about the renovation for
Architectural Digest
). She had many friends in the neighborhood. James Lapine and Michiko Kakutani had moved nearby. Jane Rosenthal lived within a few blocks. André now lived and worked uptown; Lincoln Center was just blocks away.

Chris Durang continued to teach at Juilliard, a short walk from 75 Central Park West, Wendy’s new address, even though he’d moved from Manhattan to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, with his partner, John Augustine. Chris longed for trees and grass—and had been worn down by a succession of ho-hum reviews in the
New York Times
from Frank Rich. Chris and John lived with their dog, Chief, in a stone farmhouse on the top of a hill, surrounded by sweeping countryside vistas. Bucks County was only a couple of hours by bus from the city, but a large psychic distance from his old life in the city.

Settled into the new apartment, Wendy shook off the bitterness that had been creeping in. After one of her expeditions to Duke University’s diet center, she became thin—actually thin, not just less heavy. She began doing her hair and dressing well. She hinted that she was seeing someone but never introduced that “someone” to anyone. There were dates with a doctor from Mount Sinai, but nothing evolved.

Angela Trento had taken over from Ken Cassillo as Wendy’s assistant in early 1998. “She looked great,” said Trento. “She had great legs. She’d wear these short skirts and great high-heeled pumps.”

PEOPLE OFTEN ASKED IF WENDY AND HER FRIEND RHODA WERE SISTERS.

Trento was much younger than Wendy, but she felt like the adult as she watched her boss going out on the town every night.

“She was out every night,” Trento said. “She always had some event, being honored at, or speaking at, or at somebody’s play. Her whole night was planned.”

The relentless socializing wore out some of her friends, among them Rhoda Brooks, who wasn’t from the theater world, even though she’d met Wendy through Bill Finn, the composer. Trained as a physician, Rhoda ran her own marketing company, and she felt she provided a respite from Wendy’s high-profile existence. While they operated in completely different spheres, they found common ground as intelligent, successful Jewish women who hadn’t married. People remarked that they looked as if they could have been sisters.

“At first I adored being at something where the prince of Monaco would be there, but then I preferred just being with Wendy and didn’t like doing all those other things,” said Rhoda. “You’re at another institutional dinner with people who don’t care about you.”

John Lee Beatty, the set designer, could remember the moment of realization for him. He and Wendy were sharing a cab home from some event, and she said, “Oh, I’m going over to the East Side to this party with So-and-So, you want to go?’ ”

He started to say yes and then changed his mind. “I think I want to go home instead, you know?” he replied. “Is that okay?”

She said, “Yeah,” but Beatty noticed that she had a funny look on her face, a look that told Beatty their friendship had shifted just a bit. “In your relationship with Wendy, there’s a moment where you decide not to be the sidekick that goes to the party on the East Side or another restaurant for another dinner to meet yet another crowd of people,” he said.