Wendy and the Lost Boys (15 page)

For the first time since she was eight years old, about to enter the Ethical Culture School, she made entries in a diary—actually a loose-leaf notebook, for just a handful of pages. In early December, three months into her first year, she wrote:

I have fantasies about Chris as if he were Number 1 in medical school and I dropped to number 9. I also fantasize about James. I want to be held. Maybe he’ll be meaner and my masochism will run out. I’d rather be number 9 in med school as long as they knew I was best friends or lovers, difficult in this case, with number 1.

I should tell Christopher. I won’t. For future readers, he’s very talented. I wish I were nicer or just better, more open. Do I want you to read this and think oh, she was so good and just look at what she thought of herself. Pity. I worry about becoming a bitter spinster or alcoholic.

Even then, with her youthful musings about crushes, Wendy was thinking about a larger audience. She subjected her diary to editorial scrutiny; her periodic journal entries were another way for her to synthesize her life on paper in order to analyze it.

But she wouldn’t risk her friendship with Chris. Having a frank conversation—at least about her feelings for him—would run counter to the essential core of her being. Wendy was self-protective. The high girlish pitch of her voice and her giggle were her armor against scrutiny. If she appeared not to take herself too seriously, she wouldn’t be a target for other ambitious people who might consider her a threat. Her capacity for making friends reflected her warmth and interest in people but also grew from enormous insecurity. She would go out of her way to befriend people who either intimidated or belittled her, engaging them in conversation, revealing her nervousness by tearing paper or unraveling the braided cords of her espadrilles.

Wendy’s open vulnerability kept Sigourney Weaver from getting too close. “There was something about Wendy I found very scary to me,” she said. “She was a more naked version of the vulnerability I felt. I wanted to take care of Wendy, to pull her hair back and give her some armor, and that seemed inappropriate, because I was a walking disaster. I resisted the impulse. We didn’t become good friends.”

Yet there were many others who became friends and putative friends, people Wendy felt she ought to please. “She had a lot of demands on her time, and a lot of it was with people she promised things to,” said Susan Blatt. “She would run from place to place, from conversation to conversation. You wished she had closed the door, said no to a lot of people, and just written and gotten by on her merit.”

Susan and Wendy met during their first days at Yale; Susan was in the criticism program and took many classes with the playwrights. One day she was sitting on a bench and Wendy came over to her and said, “What’s a nice Jewish girl like you doing in a place like this?”

Susan had an impressive résumé—she’d graduated from Princeton in the school’s first coed class. She also had a psychologist father who tormented her as Wendy’s mother tormented her.

Both of them reported receiving daily wake-up calls at 7:00 A.M.

“Are you married yet?” Lola would ask Wendy.

“You sound depressed!” Susan’s father would say to his sleepy daughter.

They became fast friends. There were few women at the drama school, and many of them were in the acting program, women who took pains to make themselves look good. Wendy wore shapeless dresses designed to hide her body and exhibit her shapely legs. “I’m beautiful from the knees down,” she told Susan, whose wardrobe was equally unflattering, consisting mainly of baggy jeans and T-shirts.

In New Haven, Wendy lived in York Towers, a high-rise building with a doorman, a place for timid old ladies, not the usual shabby student quarters like Susan’s cockroach-infested apartment. They ate almost every breakfast and lunch at Murray’s, a standard-issue luncheonette, next door to Superbooks, a shop that specialized in porn magazines and sex toys.

She and Susan often had sleepovers, brewing pots of tea and discussing their latest anguish, always wearing Lanz flannel nightgowns. (Wendy became so known for wearing these nightgowns that when their designer, Werner Scharff, died in 2006, the
New York Times
obituary quoted Wendy: “The entire dormitory, 130 strong in Lanz flannel nightgowns, caroled in the living room while our house mother distributed gingerbread cookies.”) They would reveal their concerns and dissect their foolishness. Sometimes after one of these sessions, Wendy called Susan and confessed that she’d called a man she found attractive and hung up the instant he answered. Susan wondered if Wendy was kept awake by demons from Lola, needling that constant refrain,
Are you married yet?

A
fter he graduated, Chris stayed in New Haven. Brustein decided to stage
The Idiots Karamazov
at the Yale Rep, in the fall of 1974, a major coup for a playwright starting his professional career. The following year Chris moved to New York but still returned every week to New Haven to teach a class; Brustein had chosen him to be the recipient of the same CBS fellowship that had brought Terrence McNally to campus.

Chris’s presence and endorsement became even more important to Wendy after a disastrous production of
Any Woman Can’t,
directed by one of her classmates.

The main actress was miscast; the funniest lines fell flat. Chris stopped watching the play and started focusing on Richard Gilman’s face. Gilman was pale, as if he were thinking, “Oh, my God, this is awful.” After the play Gilman was chilly to Wendy, as if saying to her, “I made a mistake letting you in. You wrote a bad play.”

Brustein didn’t bother to come. He didn’t see potential there.

As an actor and writer, Chris had been learning how important casting was, how tone could bring out the wit in a line or kill it. In the play the heroine makes a self-deprecating joke in a throwaway line about her Seven Sisters education, which has earned her a job as a dance-school instructor:

I’m a fucking Smith graduate. I was supposed to be different—happier than the others. I wouldn’t be a secretary, not me.

The actress played it as tragedy. Chris watched her trembling reading of “I’m a fucking Smith graduate” drain the humor from the line and make its author seem pathetic.

He made a point of talking to Wendy afterward. “My God, that production was awful,” he told her. “What a shame, the play is funny.” He wanted to have the same conversation with Gilman, but he didn’t.

Wendy joked about her teachers with her friends, but the coldness she sensed from Gilman and Brustein left her feeling at sea. “I am very unsure of myself,” she wrote in her journal. “I am not sure of my talent or making a living from it.”

W
endy was not alone in her insecurity at the institution she dubbed “the Yale School of Trauma.” Doubt was intrinsic to the profession she was pursuing, and Brustein fostered it. Sigourney Weaver never forgave him for ruining her fantasy of what drama school would be like. “I remember looking up at one point in my first year thinking, ‘This should be the most joyous place in the world,’” she said. “After years of wanting to do nothing but theater, we are at this place where we can argue about Chekhov in the corridors, and everyone is fucking miserable and at each other’s throats.”

Even Meryl Streep felt the pressure, and she was the school’s unparalleled darling, the only one Howard Stein could remember an admissions interviewer declaring, after he’d met her, “She’s going to be a star.” While she was at Yale, a new verb came into being, “to Streep it up,” meaning find your light, identify your moment, chew the scenery, activate the space.

Streep recalled:

The competition in the acting program was very wearing. I was always standing in competition with my friends for every play. And there was no nod to egalitarian casting. Since each student director or playwright was casting his or her senior project, they pretty much got to cast it with whomever they wanted. So some people got cast over and over and others didn’t get cast at all. It was unfair. It was the larger world writ small.

I got into a frenzy about this. It wasn’t that I wasn’t being cast. I was, over and over. But I felt guilty. I felt I was taking something from people I knew, my friends. I was on a scholarship and some people had paid a lot of money to be there.

Finally, I went to the dean, to Robert Brustein. I said: “I’m under too much pressure. I want to be released from some of these commitments.”

He said, “Well, you could go on academic probation.” Which was the first step to being kicked out.

So I went to see a psychiatrist at the school who said: “You know what? You’re going to graduate in 11 weeks and you’ll never be in competition with five women again. You’ll be competing with 5,000 women and it will be a relief. It will be better or worse, but it won’t be this.”

He was right. . . .

When they weren’t bemoaning their fates to their psychiatrists and one another, or smoldering from being slighted by Brustein, they had fun. The friendships and connections formed at Yale would continue, for many of them, throughout their lives.

William Ivey Long, who became an enduring friend of Wendy’s, was a year ahead of her, in Meryl Streep’s class. An impish type with a soft southern accent, William had arrived at Yale feeling out of his element after growing up in North Carolina and then attending the College of William & Mary in Virginia.

In his second year, he was doing his first major production, sets and costumes for a production of
Twelfth Night.
William was hysterical and nervous; Ming Cho Lee, a prominent set designer and professor at the school, was coming to see the play. There had been three dress rehearsals; everything seemed ready.

Wendy and Stephen Graham—the son of
Washington Post
publisher Katharine Graham—were working as wardrobe staff. On the day of opening night, Wendy and Stephen were supposed to wash the costumes. Instead of doing it themselves, they decided to drop them off at the dry cleaners and went out to dinner. By the time they’d finished, the dry cleaners was closed. William Ivey Long had his opening night without any costumes. The red set he had contrived to make a bold statement now looked stark, out of place.

The eminent Ming Cho Lee dryly commented, “Well, everyone has to get their red set out of their system.”

Ming Cho Lee became his mentor—and William’s friendship with Wendy survived this rocky beginning, though it wouldn’t be the last time Wendy betrayed him.

William went on to design two of Wendy’s productions at Yale:
Montpelier Pa-zazz,
a farce about popular versus unpopular kids, and
When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth,
a goofy satire she wrote with Christopher Durang, which featured a musical production number called “Welfare Mothers on Parade.”

She and William became confidants. He regaled her with his Tennessee Williams–style stories from the South, and she responded with Catskillsstyle routines about Lola and Morris. William had a sister, Laura, who was disabled; Wendy was intensely curious about Laura, who’d been sent to Duke University for a week of analysis by doctors there. The doctors told his parents his sister should be institutionalized. They ignored this advice.

Wendy peppered William with questions. “She would ask, ‘How do you become handicapped? How do you become retarded? What is it based on?’” said William. She didn’t say it directly, but he imagined she was trying to understand why his “damaged” sister remained at home while her brother had been banished.

“We talked about it, and I don’t think I had the right answers she wanted,” he said. “I wasn’t hysterical enough about it, so she stopped talking about it ultimately.”

But his attitudes toward family made a deep impression. Wendy developed a special trust in William that was evident at Yale and manifested itself more significantly in subsequent years.

One day William told Wendy how when he was in first grade his mother had found out that her father had been married before. That was Wendy’s cue to tell him a family secret she’d just learned from her sister Sandra, one that disturbed her far more than the secrecy surrounding Abner and left her wondering, who was her family?

D
uring Wendy’s second year at Yale, Lola called to tell her that Sandra was divorcing Peter Schweitzer. “Be a good sister,” Lola said, and offered to send her daughters to Maine Chance, Elizabeth Arden’s luxury spa in Arizona, which catered to movie stars and other “ladies of fortune,” as Wendy called them.

“Don’t you think my professors might notice if I’m gone a week and come back tanned and ten pounds lighter?” Wendy asked.

“Sandra needs a rest,” Lola insisted. “What is more important?”

Wendy acquiesced but resented her mother’s implication that what she was doing wasn’t important. She wondered if Lola would have been quite so eager for her to cut classes for a full-body massage if she had been studying heart surgery or torts and contracts.

It wasn’t that Wendy didn’t love Sandra. She adored her. “If my father invented Velveteen, then Sandra sent Tang to the moon,” Wendy wrote, in notes for an unfinished memoir. “At some point in my mind both facts were true.”

At age twenty-four, Wendy still regarded her thirty-seven-year-old sister as a supreme being, just as she had as a little girl in Brooklyn when Sandra popped in from England. “Sandra had dinner with men in suits,” wrote Wendy. “Sandra ordered cheese for dessert. Sandra was the world’s leading authority on sex, career counseling and men. Sandra’s weaknesses never occurred to me since my job as ‘good sister’ was never to see them.”

The sisters arrived at the spa and soon found themselves naked in a whirlpool with Clark Gable’s widow, Kay. Wendy described the ensuing scene in a notebook:

“Jenifer is the only one with daddy’s eyes,” I said, referring to Sandra’s six year old daughter.

“What?” Sandra moved her head around while our sisterly flesh bobbed in the water.

“Jenifer is the only one of us who has dad’s hazel eyes. All the rest of us have muddy brown.”