Wendy and the Lost Boys (40 page)

Ben Brantley, the
Times
critic who had become Wendy’s latest nemesis, zeroed in on the playwright’s vulnerable spot. “Few things betray social insecurity as pointedly as name-dropping,” he wrote after the play opened on December 7, 2000. “Certainly, it is common conversational currency among the real-life breeds of lions and climbers who inspired this latest effort from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of ‘The Heidi Chronicles.’ ”

He continued: “Letting the shorthand of others’ celebrity do their talking for them, such souls inevitably come across as just a little desperate,” the critic wrote. “So, unfortunately, does Ms. Wasserstein’s play.”

After deriding
Old Money
for its “slapdash” quality and sketchy characterizations, the critic praised one moment, when the female artist confesses how much she despises the Hollywood producer, even as she wants to be included on his list “of all-American greats.”

Brantley finds this push-pull a redeeming moment of truth. “Yet what about the artists who find themselves drawn, despite themselves, to this shiny, hard core of people to whom they don’t really belong?” he asks. “This would seem to be the territory Ms. Wasserstein is feeling out in the character of Saulina. The dizzying spirit of conflict therein has a fascination that for just a moment gives ‘Old Money’ an awakening sting.”

B
rantley identified an ongoing conflict for Wendy. She had learned all those name brands she dropped by shopping for them; despite her messy presentation, she liked designer clothes and to eat in expensive restaurants. She knew that Frédéric Fekkai was an exclusive hair salon because she’d had her hair done there. She had written essays on getting the perfect manicure.

Her household had grown, and so had her expenses. In addition to her and Lucy, and the costs associated with her fine address on Central Park West, she supported a nanny, weekend baby-sitters, and two assistants—occasionally more when she had special projects. She rented a studio apartment that didn’t have a telephone, a place to write without distraction.

When she bought the apartment at 75 Central Park West, she listed her base annual income as $125,258. Certainly that amount had increased substantially by the time Lucy was born; she was earning as much as $100,000 a year just from speaking engagements. But she felt compelled to drum up more work from Hollywood, where writers could score big paychecks writing scripts that would end up on shelves.

In 2000 she made a deal to write a pilot script based on
The Sisters Rosensweig
for $60,000. She signed a deal to do two rewrites on a movie script for $450,000, also in 2000, and made deals totaling $250,000 in 2001. Every six weeks or so, she was off to a speaking engagement; her fee increased to $15,000 a gig.

But no matter how much she earned, and knowing that her share of the sizable Wasserstein Brothers fortune lay in reserve, she felt financial pressure, much of it self-induced.

“Ultimately she worried about money all the time,” said Angela Trento, who managed her books. “She had enough money, she lived a good life, but nothing like her brother.”

Their closeness rose and ebbed, but the sibling rivalry remained a constant. In 1998, as Wendy was feeling stung by the rejection of
An American Daughter,
Bruce was enjoying the success of his bestselling book called
Big Deal: The Battle for the Control of America’s Leading Corporations,
which was reissued in 2000.

They were wary of each other’s worlds, but intrigued. Bruce’s peculiar bluntness could be offensive. Terrence McNally never forgot the way he expressed his brotherly support for Wendy the year
The Sisters Rosensweig
lost the Tony. The prize for Best Play went to Tony Kushner for
Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,
while the Best Musical award was given to
Kiss of the Spider Woman,
whose main character is a gay window dresser (Terrence collaborated on the script).

Terrence heard Bruce go up to Wendy and say, “What have they got against normal people?”

That “normal” galled Terrence, but he didn’t expect Wendy to confront Bruce. She might talk angrily about her brother behind his back, but she would never fight with him. Terrence believed that no one stood up to Bruce. His wealth was intimidating, his manner perplexing. “I just found him inscrutable,” said Terrence.

Still, for Wendy, the importance of family connection was even stronger, now that Lucy Jane was in the picture. Wendy wanted her daughter to be part of the Wasserstein clan, even as she was configuring a new kind of nuclear family. Motherhood was not the panacea she had anticipated, as she discovered the consuming reality of having a child. Like every mother, Wendy had to develop a different way of being, at an age where she was accustomed to charting her own course. “I had my child so late because my focus and energy was on those plays,” she told an interviewer. “I couldn’t do both. I would not have been able to do it until this age, and I don’t even know if I can now.”

Lucy Jane didn’t have a father, but she was surrounded by loving adults—nannies, Wendy’s assistants, family and friends, including a large contingent of people who each believed he or she was—each one—her only godfather or godmother. For her first birthday, she received many carefully chosen gifts accompanied by thoughtful notes, like the one that came with a beanbag Shakespeare doll:

Dear Goddaughter, This silly little beanbag doll represents the greatest playwright who ever lived. Your mother and I follow humbly in his footsteps. Some people would even say he was one of the greatest people who ever lived. I am one of them. I’m not sure about your mom. But Shakespeare sets an example of truth, simplicity and contributing to the general well being of our planet that we can all aspire to. Anyway, that is my wish for you today, Lucy Jane. Your loving godfather Terrence.

“My life has changed completely,” Wendy told an interviewer shortly after Lucy was one year old. “I’m someone who really couldn’t wait to be on an airplane.”

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.”