Wendy and the Lost Boys (10 page)

He told her about his adventures on the McCarthy campaign and the horrors of the Democratic Convention. It had all taken place only a month earlier but now seemed vague, like a page out of history, far removed from the pleasant feeling he was having just talking to Wendy on a sun-drenched afternoon in New York. She listened sympathetically. Then, laughing, she told him about her flirtation with the New Majority for Rockefeller, a group of liberal students who supported the presidential candidacy of Nelson Rockefeller, the New York governor considered a moderate Republican, hoping he would fend off the darker forces represented by Richard Nixon, the candidate who won.

She’d flown down to Miami for the convention with a friend and returned disappointed but wearing an amusing souvenir: a dress with Nelson Rockefeller’s picture on it. James envied her ability to find humor in the grave moment in which they were living.

She switched directions to walk with him. They continued up Fifth Avenue, talking and laughing their way into Central Park. How could he remain miserable, standing with a bright, engaging woman on Bethesda Terrace, overlooking the lake, a romantic prospect filled with ducks splashing and rowboats rocking. All of a sudden, it felt good to be home.

Wendy took James back to her parents’ apartment. She became the first woman he slept with; he wasn’t sure if the sexual initiation was reciprocal. (It doesn’t seem to have been. Wendy alluded to at least one previous sexual encounter.) He no longer was put off by her intensity. Now he liked it.

HOLYOKE CLASSMATES MARY JANE PATRONE AND
HARRIET SACHS CAME TO REPRESENT THE NEW WOMAN,
AND REMAINED WENDY’S FRIENDS FOR LIFE.

Five

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

1968-71

Mount Holyoke may have seemed
like a finishing school when Wendy entered as a freshman, but the administration was not oblivious to the revolution taking place outside. In 1967 a report written by the admissions director expressed concern about the continued relevance of women’s colleges. Applications had dropped at all the women’s schools, except Radcliffe. The director cited two troubling magazine articles, published in the summer of 1967, one in
Mademoiselle
and the other in
Seventeen.
According to the author of the
Mademoiselle
article, the director observed, “the cream is thinning out, the life-style on these campuses is puritanical and drudgery pervades Mondays through Fridays; the colleges do not prepare graduates for today’s world, students emerge exhausted and deflated, ambition is squelched.”

The
Seventeen
article concluded that the isolated women’s college “simply can’t do its job as effectively today as it did when it was founded back in the nineteenth century.” These articles were worrisome. “Both of these magazines are widely read by all teenage girls and they cannot help but have had some effect upon attitudes,” the director concluded.

During Wendy’s sophomore year, a new student handbook was drafted. When it was finished, in time for the freshman class entering in 1969, Gracious Living would no longer be mandatory but rather decided by students in each residence hall. Two new categories were added:

DRUGS: Mount Holyoke College cannot tolerate the use of narcotics or other drugs except under strict medical supervision. . . .

PARIETALS: Male guests may be received in the dormitories at any time during the open hours of the dormitories. . . .

B
y the middle of Wendy’s sophomore year, Mount Holyoke had become a different place. The smell of rebellion—and marijuana—was in the air. Undergraduate women took pains to say “fuck” whenever they could and to smoke weed as often as cigarettes. The Pill had opened the door to sexual freedom, but only for those over twenty-one; parental consent was required before a doctor could prescribe birth control to an unmarried “minor” woman. “Female matters” that had once been hidden became public and politicized. In 1969 a group of women in Boston began teaching a course that ultimately became
Our Bodies, Ourselves
, the landmark book that provided detailed information about birth control, venereal disease, lesbianism, childbirth, and menopause. Its calm, practical advice and graphic pictures became required reading. That same year Germaine Greer, the Australian academic and feminist writer, was working on the manuscript for
The Female Eunuch,
published in 1970, which argued that women were cut off from their own sexuality. Commentators often ignored Greer’s serious points, preferring to highlight the ideas loaded with shock value—urging women to taste their own menstrual blood, for example.

Yet for Wendy the most significant event that year came outside the political realm. Wendy’s friend Ruth Karl insisted that they take a drama class together at Smith College.

Ruth thought of Wendy as a complete original, unlike anyone else she’d met at Holyoke. One day when they were listening to the record album of the Cole Porter musical
Anything Goes,
Wendy figured out the choreography to a tap-dance number just from the sound of the taps. Most women on campus were stamped from the same fashion mold: long straight hair parted in the middle, jeans and a loose blouse or sweater. Wendy showed up wearing a black dress and black tights and a big shawl.

She was reluctant to take the drama course at first; she was a history major—how did this fit into the picture? It didn’t seem serious. Ruth convinced her it would be worthwhile.

They were not an obvious match as friends. Ruth looked like a magazine cover girl, one of Wendy’s “shiksa goddesses”—honey-blond hair, high cheekbones, and a heart-shaped face, with a demure expression that belied a gleefully foul mouth. She liked to provoke. Ruth was the one in their group who followed Germaine Greer’s advice and tasted her own menstrual blood. She was a scholarship student who’d grown up in a Philadelphia suburb as part of a family she felt didn’t have many worthwhile expectations of her.

Ruth found they could talk endlessly about everything, including and especially sex (Ruth’s specialty, not Wendy’s). Wendy was terrified of becoming pregnant. She was worried about James, who was freaking out about the war—about politics, about her, about everything. She was angry at him for dating other women, even though they hadn’t exactly committed to each other.

Ruth recognized Wendy’s affection for James but heard much more about her family. That bond seemed far deeper. Ruth had the sense that boyfriends weren’t all that important to Wendy. “They were just something you were supposed to have,” she said. “Family was important.”

This was alien to Ruth. “I tended to throw my life away for a man,” she said. “I was brought up to believe that was what you were supposed to do.”

They enrolled in the course at Smith as part of the then-four-college consortium—Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst that allowed students to take courses at one another’s campuses, so long as the same course wasn’t offered at a student’s home base. A free bus connected the colleges, scattered in the Pioneer Valley region, but it was sporadic, so the students often hitchhiked.

Ruth and Wendy made up names for themselves when they thumbed rides, finding this game hilarious, too. Wendy always chose a blatantly non-Jewish name and pretended she was from the Midwest, saying things like, “We call soda ‘pop’ where I come from.”

At Smith, Ruth and Wendy took playwriting with Leonard Berkman, a professor in his first year there, having arrived with a freshly minted doctoral degree from Yale School of Drama. Wendy found Berkman to be warm and familiar, a quirky Brooklyn Jew who showed up in class with a ponytail, a peace-symbol necklace, and high-top Converse sneakers in a variety of colors.

Although Wendy had performed and worked backstage on many school productions, it wasn’t until Berkman’s class that she began to grasp the mechanics involved in writing a play. For the first time, she was forced to think about how her words would translate into action. Wendy’s debut effort for the class was called
Velveteen Goes to Taco Bell,
about a girl who goes to a Taco Bell drive-in restaurant in California, gets torpedoed by five hundred burritos, and then eats her way out.

The professor explained that no actor would be willing or able to do that every night.

He recognized an intriguing, unexpected impertinence beneath Wendy’s shy exterior. For a playwriting exercise, she turned in a scene that involved women doing battle by throwing bloody Kotex at one another. “She shivered to share with the class,” he said, “and finally I did encourage her to do it because it was so incredibly bold and wonderful and new.”

Lightning didn’t strike for either professor or pupil. Berkman didn’t predict future stardom for Wendy, but he believed that something important happened for her in his class: “She found what she had to say could be said.”

Wendy agreed. After years of academic stress, she reconnected with the pleasure in learning she’d had as a child at Ethical Culture. “This was the first time I realized that a person could get credit in life for what they liked to do,” she said of Berkman’s class. That realization would become more potent over time.

D
uring Wendy’s sophomore year, several of the all-male and all-female colleges decided to experiment with trial periods of coeducation. Wendy, eager for a change, was accepted into the program at all-male Amherst. That spring, at a meeting for the women going there, she sat next to Mary Jane Patrone, a classmate she’d first met in 1837 Hall.

Mary Jane had gone to a Catholic girls’ school for her entire education before Holyoke. Wendy’s vaudevillian New York humor perplexed her. For example, Wendy always greeted her by saying, with a grin, “Your father is the dean of Northwestern Law School, right?”

Mary Jane’s father wasn’t an academic or a lawyer, though she was from Glenview, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. “Who is this person who would say that?” Mary Jane wondered. She was too shy to correct Wendy, so she just giggled and kept quiet.

After thirteen years of nuns, irreverence didn’t come naturally to Mary Jane. Through Wendy, she came to understand that you could be irreverent without being obnoxious.

They ended up together by default. Mary Jane’s two best friends were taking a year abroad in Greece that year, and she didn’t know any of the other women going to Amherst. Ruth Karl, Wendy’s friend, couldn’t do the program because she was on scholarship.

As the representative from Amherst went over various procedural matters, it dawned on Wendy and Mary Jane that all the women were going to be stuck in an old, funky freshman dorm.

“We’re going to be juniors,” she said to Mary Jane. “We’re grown-ups. Why don’t we say we don’t think we should live there?”

They complained, and when they arrived at Amherst in the fall, they were assigned to Stone, a dorm much nicer than the one they’d originally been assigned to, divided into little suites, some all female and some all male. Mary Jane suspected that Wendy cared less about the integrated aspect and more about the improvement in living quarters. Wendy liked creature comforts.

The so-called Exchange Program was an odd, timid experiment. At Amherst twenty-three women were brought in for one semester to test the coeducational waters in a sea of 1,208 undergraduate men. The women felt like specimens in a jar. Mary Jane in particular attracted attention. She had long dark hair, intense eyes, and obvious sexual potential lurking beneath her blushing shyness—“an incredible hottie,” a male classmate remembered.

Mary Jane felt under siege. Entering the dining hall, where the ratio of men to women was about 50 to 1, brought back the worst possible memories of high school, of being excluded from every clique. Only here it was worse. Instead of dealing with the snits of adolescent girls, something she knew how to do, she had to contend with legions of sex-starved college men accustomed to an all-male environment. She used to ask Wendy to make incursions into the cafeteria—enemy terrain—to grab peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and bring them back to their room for dinner, rather than face the leering crowd.

Male professors made rude jokes. Wendy’s history professor bemoaned having to teach young women who would end up hanging their education on the clothesline. Mary Jane’s psychology professor asked her repeatedly, “Which finishing school are you from? I can’t remember.”

When she received the highest grade on an exam, he gave her a backhanded apology in front of the class. “Mary Jane is a sterling example that intelligence might not in fact be sex-based,” he said.

Mary Jane began dating one of the coolest guys on campus, a drummer from Montpelier, Vermont, who was aggressively eccentric in his dress and demeanor. He wore hot pink slacks. Wendy felt envious and acted disdainful, as though she wondered why this guy from the middle of nowhere was trying to be so hip. She dubbed the young man Montpelier Pa-zazz. He would have an offstage cameo role in
Uncommon Women,
where he would be referred to as Pink Pants.

Pink Pants also became the title character in
Montpelier Pa-zazz,
one of Wendy’s earliest plays.

Mary Jane became Dottie, “the most popular girl in the class,” who sits on her bed wearing a thin undershirt and bikini underpants. Her best friend, Bunny—the Wendy character—“enters in layers of clothing, work shirt, turtleneck sweater, kilt rolled around her waist because it is too tight.”

Bunny says to Dottie, “With a girl like you around, Dottie, a girl like me doesn’t stand a chance.”

The line reflects Wendy’s experience at Amherst. Men panted when they met Mary Jane; they liked to talk and have a laugh with Wendy.