Wendy and the Lost Boys (13 page)

She began to take herself seriously, relying more confidently on the entertaining voice found in her letters and journals.

It didn’t happen overnight. The early experiments led one teacher—most likely Heller—to comment on one paper, “Character is left kind of thin—a habit you have—and without knowing her much better, we don’t have much. We’ve got the wit, we’ve got the discerning comments about people and behavior, but we don’t have any emotional depth. W.W., you’ve got to decide soon: either fiction or funny essays.”

The old maxim sank in: Write what you know. Wendy turned to the material she had used many times in late night gab sessions and letters to friends: The Family Wasserstein. In early fragments of plays and stories, she didn’t even bother to change the names. Her characters are named Brucey, Sandy, Georgette, Lola, Morris, Lyn, and Peter—but never Wendy.

L
ynne Killin Wasserstein, Bruce’s wife, enjoyed Wendy’s company and for a time considered Wendy her best friend. They commiserated with each other about mothers who tried to control their daughters’ weight. Like Wendy, Lynne was in awe of Lola, without having to directly bear the sting of her criticisms. Lynne admired the intense devotion to family that led Morris and Lola to return early from vacation when Georgette went into labor with her first child, so they could be in New Haven for the baby’s birth.

After Lynne and Bruce returned to New York from Cambridge, the couple moved into an apartment at Eighty-second Street and Second Avenue, just a few blocks from Morris and Lola’s. Bruce had toyed with the idea of becoming a small-town newspaper editor or practicing law in Alaska. Instead he accepted a position as a starting lawyer at the prestigious firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, the epitome of the old-boy network, the antithesis of Nader’s Raiders.

During Bruce’s flirtation with leftist politics, he demanded justice for all, but that didn’t mean he wanted his wife to become a feminist. When Lynne attended a couple of women’s-lib meetings in Cambridge, he threatened to divorce her. When he complained that she didn’t cook him enough steak—the way his mother did—Lynne bought steak.

Lynne and Bruce often double-dated with Wendy and James Kaplan, who had fallen back into a relationship when Wendy moved back to New York. James was in the city, in his first year at Columbia Law School. Bruce and James had much in common. Both had been involved in liberal politics; in the fall of 1972, James—dogged champion of lost causes—was campaigning for George McGovern, the Democratic candidate for president. Bruce was a law associate; James was in law school. Both had Ivy League credentials—between them Yale, Harvard, and Columbia.

As a Columbia student, James could buy tickets to plays for twenty-five cents each, so they were often at the theater. They prowled the city, having dinner at Umberto’s Clam House, where the mobster Joey Gallo was shot. They went to concerts and movies.

It often seemed to Lynne and James that the couple they were double-dating was Wendy and Bruce. Wendy made snide comments about Lynne to James, referring to her sister-in-law as Bruce’s cocker spaniel, because she was so docile. Wendy and Bruce were the soul mates, with their own references and secret jokes, their private way of looking at the world. Bruce often called Lynne “Wendy,” even when it was just the two of them alone together, Lynne and Bruce.

Bruce’s wife said she didn’t mind. “I loved Wendy,” she said. “I loved Morris, and I loved Lola. The attachment was very strong.”

Her feelings toward them never changed—even after Wendy’s appraisal of Lynne’s relationship with Bruce went public and changed the course of Lynne’s life.

E
ncouraged by her teachers at CCNY, Wendy decided to try earning money from her writing. A longtime fan of television soap operas, she got an assignment from a magazine to do an article about them. After she turned in the piece, before it was published, the magazine went out of business.

She applied for jobs as a copywriter at advertising agencies, with no luck. She sent stories and articles to
Redbook
magazine, the
New York Times,
and the
New Yorker—
all were returned with form rejection notes.

Discouraged with the prospects for a profitable writing career, she took the law boards again. Her new score was still mediocre, but she applied to law schools anyway to satisfy Lola. As before, she wasn’t accepted anywhere. She didn’t have a chance at Columbia or New York University. After she was rejected from Fordham Law, Lola suggested she lower her sights for a lesser school. Wendy couldn’t tolerate this idea, not with Bruce having gone to Harvard, Rita Wasserstein (Aunt Florence’s daughter) at NYU, and James at Columbia.

Wendy was ambivalent. Determined not to be rejected from law school yet again, she tested two options, as though asking fate to decide which road she should take. Should she follow her father, brother, and sister into the business world? Or should she pursue the gift that was unique to her, even though it was unlikely to lead to financial security? She applied to both Yale School of Drama and Columbia Business School.

James sympathized with Wendy’s struggle to find herself and tried to be there for her throughout this difficult period. He thought they were growing closer, although when he raised the subject of getting an apartment together in Brooklyn, she wasn’t interested.

Their families—including Bruce and Lynne—thought they might get married.

Wendy was wary of James’s mother. She saw Muriel as a generation ahead of Lola in terms of aspiration and status. Muriel had sent her daughters to Dalton, which had rejected Wendy. Wendy told James that she thought his mother saw her as a schlumpy girl from Brooklyn and not appropriate for her son.

One night James came home after a date with Wendy and woke his parents up. He was shaken. “I don’t know what to do,” he told them. “I was in the living room waiting for Wendy when her father came out and said, ‘Well, Jamey, you’ve been going with Wendy for a while, how about marrying her?’ ”

James had been so startled he said to Morris, “Maybe you should ask Wendy what she has to say.”

Wendy later apologized for her father. “He’s half in the Old World,” she said. But she didn’t seem concerned that James hadn’t taken Morris up on his offer.

James might not have been ready to commit to marriage, but he was disappointed in Wendy’s calm reaction, which he took as a sign of indifference. “My sense was that she really wasn’t that interested, or she would have been more upset about the whole thing,” he said.

Wendy had begun to live two lives. There was the pudgy “loser”—failed law-school applicant, noncommittal girlfriend, unemployed part-time student, unsuccessful freelance writer. And there was the emerging artist, gaining control of her craft as she reconstructed the people who loved her—and who sometimes drove her crazy—into characters whose behavior she could dictate.

The subject that began to occupy her writing most intensely was Bruce’s marriage to Lynne. Wendy didn’t criticize her brother aloud, but she didn’t approve of his attitude and behavior toward his wife. She was also jealous, aware that Lynne provided a sexual connection with which Wendy could not compete—so she belittled it.

She felt Lynne had trivialized herself by her willingness to be Bruce’s sex object and helpmate rather than have a career of her own. She considered Lynne’s interest in collecting gemstones and making jewelry a hobby, and a lame one at that, though Lynne took her craft seriously.

Wendy was refining her methodology, becoming more comfortable with the process of fictionalization. In a short story called “A Solid Gold Blender,” she worked the same familial territory but produced a far more polished result. The wild humor is corralled. She is starting to see the importance of timing.

The story is about a super-brilliant young man named Mark, described thusly:

Even though he had gained forty pounds to out-weigh the draft, Mark had basically been on his mother’s good side ever since he had advance-placed into Yale Law, Economics, and Architecture at nineteen. A truck driver eating Twinkies is a fat truck driver. A genius eating Twinkies is still a genius.

Lynne of Larchmont, Bruce’s wife, is cast as Greta of Greenwich, “debutante-in-law,” Mark’s wife.

In the past, coming to her mother-in-law’s had always given her a headache, and she came equipped with Librium. But today she brought her Rock Rascal polishing machine and was content to concentrate on polishing her booty from a month’s rock hounding in Wales. While the counter-culture went to Woodstock, Greta went to rock fairs in Cardiff.

Whenever Greta tries to have a serious conversation with Mark, he condescends: “Princess, hush. Play with your rocks.”

Joyce, the Wendy character, is at loose ends:

Joyce deliberated how to fill the time til “Saturday Night at the Movies.” She hadn’t read in months. Months, how many “As the World Turns” had passed? Did Jesse have her baby? She resolved the day’s possibilities. Today I will try not to think about myself, and not to run into my mother. Today I will go to the museum. No, too intellectual. A movie? Takes too long. A store? Too crowded. An employment agency? Can’t handle it. An apartment agency? No job. A friend? Too parasitic, too many questions, too much dope, too flagellating. Go to Charles.

Charles, modeled on Jamey Kaplan, is the reliable young man Harriet (the mother) wants Joyce to marry, who refers to his girlfriend as “Blimp-child.”

This unpublished story contains many themes that Wendy frequently revisited, all revolving around the relationships between spouses, friends, lovers, siblings, parents, and children.

Alone in her childhood room, Joyce reflects, in a telling moment:

There was nowhere to go and she didn’t really want to leave. She never wanted to marry Charles, she just thought he’d be good to be divorced from—responsible payments. In fact, she never loved or trusted anyone outside the family. At least they were unique, at least they loved her.

W
hile Wendy was at CCNY reworking the characters and ideas in “A Solid Gold Blender” into the form of a play, Robert Moss was in the early stages of creating Playwrights Horizons, the nonprofit theater that would become Wendy’s theatrical home. In doing so, Moss was changing the landscape of New York theater.

It was the era of Joseph Papp, who had become an establishment unto himself as the political climate shifted, and social mores were changing. The counterculture was going mainstream. Papp had become a dominating force in the noncommercial theater, creating the New York Shakespeare Festival, offering free productions in Central Park. At his Public Theater in Greenwich Village, he championed new playwrights and actors and was one of the first producers to put black actors and other minorities into Shakespearean roles. Then he became a Broadway impresario, when he moved the rock musical
Hair
uptown from the Public, where it would become one of Broadway’s longest-running shows.

This was the theater world in which Bob Moss came of age. In 1963 he began work as a production stage manager of the Phoenix Theatre, an inventive repertory house. Radiating effusive innocence, he was a nonstop worker and a nonstop booster of theater. His enthusiasm and charm could transform the most devout pessimist into an optimist.

In 1970 Edward Albee asked Moss to run the Playwrights Unit, the theater Albee had established with the profits from his first full-length play,
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The Playwrights Unit offered writers an alternative to Broadway, where the financial stakes were high and led to creative decisions that weren’t necessarily based on artistic considerations. At the Unit money didn’t matter, because there wasn’t any.

Audiences came to see works in progress by new playwrights, some destined for obscurity, others for fame. Among those in the latter category were Sam Shepard, Adrienne Kennedy, Lanford Wilson, and John Guare. Moss introduced every play, explaining that the work shouldn’t be judged as a finished product and that the audience reaction was part of the process. “I wasn’t apologizing,” he said, “just trying to set a lens through which people could look at the plays.”

In the spring of 1971, Albee decided to close the Playwrights Unit. A few weeks later, Moss got a call from Louise Roberts, who had been the director of the June Taylor dance school—where Wendy and Georgette had taken dance lessons as a girl.

Roberts had become director of the Clark Center for the Performing Arts, a not-for-profit dance company that was housed in the YWCA branch at Fifty-first Street and Eighth Avenue—the same building where Alvin Ailey started his dance troupe in the 1960s.

Roberts called Moss to say she had an unused room on the second floor that was too small for dance class—about fifteen feet by thirty. She thought it might work as a writing studio for playwrights. “Nothing will come of that,” Moss heard himself saying. “Why don’t you just give me the room?”

She agreed. That kind of gee-whiz showbiz moment became far less possible in subsequent years, when even Off-Broadway productions required a substantial investment. “I suddenly had real estate, secretarial, janitorial, Con Ed,” said Moss. “The only thing I didn’t have was money. You didn’t need money in those days.”

Almost immediately Moss started putting on plays, getting by with rudimentary lighting, makeshift costumes and props, dressing rooms jerryrigged from janitors’ closets by a stairwell. The shows were barely one step up from a rehearsed reading, but they gave playwrights the valuable opportunity to see their work staged and to gauge audience response.

The new theater was named Playwrights Horizons. Moss had taken the mailing list from Playwrights Unit before it closed, a valuable asset. The audience responded: Within six months they were packing the tiny house with seventy people a night. Moss was inundated with plays. At first he scheduled thirty plays a year; each ran for twelve performances. He added a second show at 10:00 P.M. for one-acts and plays he didn’t think were as strong; these ran for five performances. Ted Danson, Tommy Lee Jones, and Stockard Channing were among the young actors who showed up on the bill at the Clark Center.