Wendy and the Lost Boys (21 page)

By the time Ruth settled into her seat at the Phoenix, she was already frazzled. Like Mary Jane Patrone, she didn’t know what the play was about. Wendy hadn’t told her anything, and, living in Massachusetts, in those pre-Internet days, Ruth hadn’t seen the New York reviews.

Like Mary Jane, Ruth didn’t take long to feel recognition, then shock, then betrayal. Ruth wasn’t flamboyant or outrageous like the character Rita, but Rita’s confusion and insecurity were recognizably Ruth’s. She felt naked as she listened to Swoosie Kurtz say words Ruth had said in private to Wendy, never imagining that those conversations would become public. They’d told each other deep, dark things they didn’t tell other people—or hadn’t until now.

She would retain “a vivid and visceral memory of sitting in the darkened theater, feeling it was not nearly dark enough, and wanting to disappear altogether.”

After the play was over, Wendy introduced Ruth to Swoosie Kurtz, who thanked her for providing the life that had led to this huge break for the actress. Ruth appreciated her kindness but was overwhelmed by emotion and needed to get away from the suffocating mob scene in the theater. She left quickly, not knowing how this play was going to affect the friendship that had been so central to her for many years. She and Wendy didn’t see each other often, but their letters and telephone calls had had the intimate, dissecting quality of therapy sessions. Clearly, though, the same rules of confidentiality hadn’t applied.

Ruth knew that Wendy preferred to avoid conflicts, hoping they would go away. A couple of months before the play opened, they’d had a conversation about Doug Altabef. A month after she’d refused to live with him in Brooklyn, Wendy told Ruth, “I
think
I am breaking up with him.”

Wendy allowed Douglas to slip away, but she called Ruth to reconcile. “You have to look at this character, and she is written with much love,” Wendy said. She told Ruth she had received letters from young women who were inspired by the character of Rita, knowing that this would be important to Ruth.

Eventually Ruth came to a realization about her friend. “Wendy was a very driven person, and yet she was a very warm person,” she said. “Sometimes those things came into conflict.”

The correspondence between Ruth and Wendy dwindled over the next two years, and their phone calls became more infrequent. Ruth was married by then, renovating her house, gardening, baking, feeling depressed and bored. She wrote to Wendy:

Waiting in line in a dirty place with the paint chipping off the walls makes me feel like a junkie. Then they send me to a state job service where a nice old man told me I was a Mount Holyoke graduate and he didn’t have any jobs for me and never would have.

I have really been caught up in housewifery. Don’t get married! It’s not the housework, it’s the role that comes with the ring. . . .

Ruth tried to reach Wendy by telephone—unsuccessfully—for a long stretch of time. When they finally connected, Wendy spoke to her briefly and said she couldn’t talk, that she was meeting Meryl Streep for lunch. Ruth was wounded. She knew then that their friendship had run its course.

When she told another friend the story, the friend had only one thing to say:

“Wendy knows Meryl Streep! What’s she like?”

W
ithin the small world of Mount Holyoke, Wendy vaulted from obscurity to notoriety. The Spring 1978 edition of the
Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly
contained a friendly article about the alumna playwright, pegged to the PBS airing of her play. By the time the Summer 1978 edition appeared,
Uncommon Women and Others
had become available to Mount Holyoke graduates throughout the United States, via their television sets. The letters to the editor, which occupied almost a full page, gave the impression that not one of those who had watched Wendy’s play on PBS was happy with her portrayal of Mount Holyoke.

From Mary P. Smith Dillingham, ’16, of Bridgeport Connecticut: I sat through 90 minutes of disbelief that any graduate should so sully the name of her alma mater. I was shocked and angry. Does the author realize that she has antagonized other alumnae, probably not of her generation, but of the graduates who for so many years have raised money for the college, worked to inspire young women to select Mount Holyoke who in great numbers have gone on to make important contributions to society and the educational world? And I don’t mean by writing revolting plays.

From Helen Duff Conklin, ’22, of Washington, D.C.:

Is it possible that these self- and sex-obsessed, nasty talking and thinking characters are representatives of the new breed of uncommon women being educated at Mount Holyoke?

From Muriel W. Riker, ’29, Rockville Centre, New York:

She writes like an adolescent who has just discovered sex and wants the world to see how knowledgeable, experienced and sophisticated she and her friends were.

From Sylvia Smith Hawkins, ’33, West Redding, Connecticut:

It is my fervent hope that the uncommon women whom I saw on Theatre in America are so uncommon that there are no more of them—at least at Mount Holyoke.

From Susan Breitzke Dunn, ’60, Atlanta, Georgia:

We alumnae in Atlanta, who are making a special effort to recruit candidates for admission to Mount Holyoke, now really have our work cut out for us.

Et cetera.

The
Quarterly
responded with a carefully worded defense:

Editor’s Note: The television production of
Uncommon Women and Others
was filmed in the PBS studios in Hartford. The exterior scenes were taken on the campus of Trinity College. Mount Holyoke, which has no control over the use of its name in literary forms, did not sponsor or endorse the play. While it was distasteful to many viewers, including many connected with the College, there are many others who regard it as an excellently-written play, touching concerns with which young people today are dealing. Among those who admire the play are those who deplore the language. The editors feel that Wendy Wasserstein’s success as a young playwright is worthy of coverage in the magazine. Her play was selected for production from among 800 plays submitted to the Eugene O’Neill National Playwriters [sic] Conference and has had, with only reservations here and there, excellent reviews in
MS, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time and New York
magazines.

T
his intramural controversy over Wendy Wasserstein and
Uncommon Women and Others
continued for more than a year. The
Quarterly
received an outpouring of opinion—pro and con—from several generations of Mount Holyoke graduates. The play became the vehicle for them to vent, defend, question, and contemplate their feelings about what it means to be an educated woman.

“I am not just a ‘student’ nor just a ‘career-woman,’ and I resent being reduced to just those aspects of my womanhood,” wrote Nancy Robertson,’78. “In my life there is a tension between my need for a career and my need for friends and family. Precisely this complexity in a woman’s life is what Wasserstein’s play addresses.”

In other words, if the old rules no longer apply, what does?

With her funny little Off-Broadway play, Wendy Wasserstein had hit a nerve located smack in the center of the zeitgeist, landing with special force on the subregion occupied by privileged, ambitious, educated American women born after World War II.

She expressed the often-unspoken, conflicted desires of her peers. Many women like Wendy rebelled against social constraints but were driven toward conventional notions of success. They wanted power and respect—and had begun filling newsrooms, law schools, management-training programs, and medical schools in significant numbers. But they still measured themselves by how much they weighed, what they saw in the mirror, and whether or not they were married.

Wendy recognized the inherent tension for women who wanted professional achievement and a family. She resented feeling forced to make choices that men hadn’t been obliged to make, because they had wives to take care of their children. The characters in
Uncommon Women
keep postponing the age by which they will be “pretty fucking amazing,” because the goal seems both impossible to define and unattainable.

“I keep a list of options,” says Holly, the Wendy character, at the end of the play. “Just from today’s lunch, there’s law, insurance, marry Leonard Woolf, have a baby, birdwatch in Bolivia. A myriad of openings.”

Lest Wendy become complacent, now that her play had been acknowledged, Lola was there to remind her of her shortcomings. Wendy might have been reviewed favorably in the
Times—
the clipping was placed on Lola’s wall of pride—but she remained single, plump, and childless.

There were many more ways to succeed—and even more ways to fail.

AS WENDY BECAME THE SOCIAL NEXUS FOR HER GROUP, SHE CREATED
“ORPHANS’ CHRISTMAS,” FOR FRIENDS WHO NEEDED SOMEWHERE TO GO AT
THE HOLIDAYS. [L TO R ANDRÉ BISHOP, WENDY WASSERSTEIN, STEPHEN GRAHAM]

Eleven

ORPHANS’ CHRISTMAS

1978-79

Following the success of Uncommon Women,
Wendy found her way to the epicenter of the overlapping circles of young aspirants milling around New York trying to break into show business.

Wendy and her contemporaries—many of them from Yale—were emerging into the spotlight as a cohesive force in the theater (and film and television), forming a loosely connected Baby Boom sensibility. They were preoccupied with questions of personal identity and a desire to shake up the post–World War II conformity that had defined their childhoods. They were the first generation of playwrights to grow up watching television, which influenced their language and sense of timing.

It was a heady time, tempered by jolts of show-business reality. After her success at the O’Neill, Wendy was signed by a William Morris agent, who immediately relegated handling the novice writer to an assistant, and so Wendy was inducted into the weird ways of show business. Some of the early meetings were so strange that she wondered whether the agent had an inkling of what her work was about.

One meeting was to discuss a film adaptation of
The Total Woman,
Marabel Morgan’s 1974 book for Christian wives that became a huge bestseller, its essential message being that women could keep their marriages happy by catering to their men. Wendy and Chris Durang read parts of the book together, howling at various passages, like the one advising women to greet their husbands at the door wrapped in clear plastic wrap and nothing else. The two friends tried to imagine the logic that had led the agent and publisher to match Wendy with this book. They decided that the business people must have seen “Woman” in one title and “Women” in the other and concluded, “Aha! A meeting!”

She switched agents, moving to International Creative Management, where eventually she was represented by Arlene Donovan, who worked closely with Sam Cohn, a powerhouse agent in movies and theater.

Wendy Wasserstein was becoming known as part of the New York vibe. The Phoenix commissioned an original play, the development of which would preoccupy her for the next three years. WNET asked her to adapt a John Cheever story about suburban despair called “The Sorrows of Gin” for public television. Within two years she began work on
The Refugee,
a television adaptation of a book. She and Christopher Durang were hired to write
House of Husbands,
a movie based on a
New Yorker
short story by Charles McGrath.
⁶
Jane Rosenthal, a hotshot young television producer at CBS, hired Wendy and Peter Parnell to write a pilot for a comedy. The show wasn’t produced, but Wendy and Jane became friends.

As the projects accumulated, Wendy had to stop prospecting and start writing. Most pressing was “The Sorrows of Gin,” the only one of the non-theater projects that had developed into a firm commitment. As always, she found that the best way for her to work was to remove herself from her apartment and the lure of the telephone and the refrigerator. The Yale Club Library became her refuge of choice—and even there she managed to distract herself, by writing a letter (on lined yellow legal paper) to her friend Aimee Garn, a document that provides insight into Wendy’s work habits:

I am sitting in the Yale Club Library having completed Town and Country and People Magazine where John Houseman is referred to as John Paper Chase Houseman
⁷
and I’m waiting for the Cheever story to start writing itself.

Keep telling myself if only I could write an outline for a movie or sit still for 15 minutes then there could be a future of second homes and peacefulness instead of back at the Yale Club.

Her lack of enthusiasm for the project was duly noted. The
Times
reviewer dismissed her adaptation of “The Sorrows of Gin,” which aired on October 24, 1979. “The Cheever subtlety is lost in a torrent of obvious references,” he wrote. “Wendy Wasserstein’s script and Jack Hofsiss’s directing keep emitting traces of contempt for the characters.” The few kind words are reserved for the cast, which included Sigourney Weaver, the only time she worked with her fellow Yale graduate.

As Wendy’s career progressed, albeit with setbacks, the Yale group of her era was making itself known in the entertainment world. When Sigourney Weaver was filming “The Sorrows of Gin,” she and Chris Durang were reworking
Das Lusitania Songspiel,
a musical spoof of Brecht and Weill, which they had written and performed together earlier. The play became a cult hit Off-Broadway in the 1979–80 season and won both of them Drama Desk Award nominations for Best Performer in a Musical. Christopher had already been nominated for a Tony in 1978, for
A History of the American Film,
which had been his O’Neill summer project two years earlier.

That year Meryl Streep received her first Oscar nomination (for Best Supporting Actress in
The Deer Hunter
); she won the following year, as Best Supporting Actress in
Kramer vs. Kramer.
Also in 1978, after working as an apprentice for Charles James for three years, William Ivey Long launched his career with the costumes he designed for his first Broadway show,
The Inspector General
. Stephen Graham had gone through substance-abuse rehabilitation after being kicked out of the drama school. Now he was in New York, making a place for himself in the theater world with Stephen Graham Productions. In 1979 he joined the expanding universe of nonprofit theater and established the New York Theatre Workshop in the East Village.

As she had at the O’Neill, Wendy became a hub of social connections for her friends and acquaintances. It was in this period that she became friendly with Frank Rich, then still at
Time
magazine reviewing movies and television. He was soon to become the chief theater critic of the
New York Times,
the most powerful person in the New York theater universe.

Chris Durang began to understand that Wendy had an uncanny gift for mixing business and pleasure. She was a born networker. “Wendy would go to all these parties and then say, ‘Oh, I got a sitcom deal.’ And I’d say, ‘How did you get a sitcom deal?’ She’d say, ‘Oh, I met So-and-So at this party.’ ” Christopher was uncomfortable at parties, but he was ambitious and so would ask Wendy to bring him along.

Soon he began to get script jobs. “I don’t know if I literally got jobs from these parties, but all of a sudden I knew all these people,” he said.

After
Uncommon Women,
Wendy began inviting friends at loose ends to her apartment for what became her annual “Orphans’ Christmas for the Jews” (being Jewish was not a requirement, and sometimes Orphans’ Christmas took place Thanksgiving weekend). Yale friends like Stephen Graham and James Lapine were part of the group, and so were André Bishop and Aimee Garn, honorary inductee into the theater world. With these informal gatherings, Wendy began creating a family of her own, made up of her contemporaries, people in flux, who were—like her—scrambling to make their way in the world.

They weren’t oblivious to the harsh realities of adulthood, just eager to keep them at bay. Wendy and her friends turned themselves into Christmas trees, hanging “ornaments” cut out of cardboard boxes around their necks. “It was really infantile,” said Lapine. “We had a great time, gave each other presents.”

During this period, between 1978 and 1979, Wendy dated Edward Kleban, lyricist for
A Chorus Line,
which would hold the record for many years as the longest-running musical on Broadway
.
The show had a fairy-tale success story: It began as a downtown workshop production, opened at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1975, and a year later moved to Broadway, winning nine Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize. The songs in
A Chorus Line
spoke directly to the fragile longings of youth and everything else that was significant to Wendy—above all the yearning and hopefulness that made the theater a repository of disappointments and dreams.

Wendy was infatuated, unable to resist the man who wrote lyrics she felt spoke directly to her, such as:

Different is nice, but it sure isn’t “pretty.”

Pretty is what it’s about.

I never met anyone who was “different.”

Who couldn’t figure that out.

Kleban kept out of the spotlight, preferring to have attention directed at Marvin Hamlisch, his musical collaborator, and Michael Bennett,
Chorus Line
’s director and choreographer. Kleban had a reputation for being funny, charming, and romantic—as well as a hypochondriac and a neurotic hothead. He called himself a “quackster,” referring to his tendency to emit critical comments, which he called “quacks.” When he went to the theater, he had to sit by the aisle (he was claustrophobic) and then leave before curtain call so he wouldn’t bump into a critic. But he was also generous to young writers and composers. He was a gifted teacher, a rousing success (
Chorus Line
) en route to becoming a one-show wonder (he never wrote anything that memorable again).

I
n the fall of 1978, Aimee Garn, who often felt like an outsider in Wendy’s theater crowd, worked up the courage to throw a party for Wendy’s twenty-eighth birthday. She invited all Wendy’s friends, including Chris Durang and Albert Innaurato, as well as the Orphans’ Christmas group. On October 21 everyone gathered at Aimee’s apartment, where they waited for Wendy and Ed Kleban to arrive.

Two hours later they were still waiting. Aimee felt humiliated, berating herself for organizing the party, concerned that she’d been presumptuous, thinking she was part of the inner circle. Then Wendy arrived—alone—in a state of agitation. She immediately whisked all the women into the bedroom to tell them about Eddie Kleban’s latest “quacks”—how he badgered her to diet and insulted her in bed, assuring them that she was definitely breaking up with him this time (she didn’t—not yet).

When Wendy apologized to Aimee—by letter—she recalled the lie she’d told Lola in second grade, at the Flatbush yeshiva, about the wonderful play she was starring in—the play that didn’t exist. She told Aimee about Lola showing up at the school and being told there was no second-grade play, and how Lola had protected Wendy by saying, “It must be one of my other children.” Wendy recounted how embarrassed she’d felt as a child, her unwillingness to accept the consequences of her own actions.

She connected the story to Aimee’s party. “I cannot think of that night at your house without a similar embarrassment,” she wrote. “For myself because I would never want to hurt you or have the trust we have dissolved. Sometimes I feel guilty because I rely on you so much and maybe I think that doesn’t give you space to find a different sort of life than mine. What if you went to Milan? Or married some vivacious count? Maybe I would feel stranded.”

She continued in this vein and then revealed a crucial aspect of their friendship—perhaps of all her friendships. “The thought that I rely on you so much, that you are my family, makes me think for your sake to give you distance,” she wrote. “But then I think that would be an enormous loss.”

For Wendy, loyalty was a paramount virtue; she had difficulty separating from anyone she once held dear.
⁸
True friendship required the intensity of emotion she equated with familial love. “A person has only so many close friends,” she would write in
The Heidi Chronicles.
“And in our lives, our friends are our families.” This was a philosophical break from her parents, who regarded family as paramount, an inviolable enclave.

Yet Wendy never overcame the powerful force of family expectations. At an age when her contemporaries were declaring their independence, she remained stuck in childhood struggles for approval. Even as she created an alternative family of friends, her parents and siblings remained the standard-bearers for success. They continued to influence, unnerve, exasperate—and to comfort her.

After the playwright Terrence McNally became a close friend of Wendy’s, he observed, “A lot of people in theater came to New York to get away from family,” he said. “but if your family lives in New York and you want to live in New York, you can’t escape very far.”

Wendy hadn’t made much effort to distance herself. Throughout Yale, and before that at Mount Holyoke and Amherst, whenever Wendy took part in a play—as actor, choreographer, or playwright—a Wasserstein contingent would almost always be in the audience, applauding vigorously. Lola may have needled Wendy mercilessly about being single, but she and Morris rarely missed a performance.