Wendy and the Lost Boys (29 page)

Carter had seen Wendy’s plays and knew she was funny and smart. So even though Wendy had never written a column for magazines, Carter invited her to become a regular contributor.

She was an editor’s dream—a quick study who was eager to please. “I’d read it, say this works or this doesn’t, and she’d be back later in the day with a revision,” said Carter. “People can give you such a hard time, fights and screaming. She was nothing like that.”

The essays came easily to Wendy. Her notebooks reveal the difference in effort for her between these journalistic observations and her plays. Drafts for the plays look as though they were written under wartime conditions: scrawled, desperate missives filled with cross-outs. The essays emerge in handwriting that is comparatively neat, in sizable chunks that correspond almost verbatim with the published works.

Carter gave her a monthly column, called “The Meaning of Life.” In it Wendy wrote about her childhood, her travels, boyfriends, shopping, body hair, and—more than any other topic—her family.

Insouciance was the hallmark of the Wendy character she created in her essays. But the more she began to reveal through her writing, the less her friends felt they knew her. “I felt always that she was not presenting her real self to me ninety-five percent of the time,” said Rafael Yglesias. “I was only getting glimpses from time to time.”

He became aware of just how intricate her attitudes toward friendship were when Frank Rich began a trial separation from his wife. Rich told Yglesias about it—in strictest confidence. By then Rich had become known as the “Butcher of Broadway”; theater people were obsessed with him, and his marital difficulties would have been a tasty morsel for the tabloids.

Wendy heard a rumor that Rich had moved out of his home and asked Yglesias if it was true. He lied. She heard the rumor a second time, and Yglesias lied again.

A month or two later, the separation was made public. Yglesias and Wendy met for one of their breakfast/lunches.

“You knew he moved out,” she said to him.

He acknowledged and explained.

Her voice dropped from high nervous register to deep serious tone. “You’re really a good friend of his,” she said, sounding puzzled.

“We’re best friends, yeah,” Yglesias responded. “I thought you knew that.”

She continued. “But you’re really, really friends.”

“Yes,” he said. “But if you asked me to keep a secret like that, I would have kept it from Frank.”

After that, their regular get-togethers stopped. They bumped into each other once in a while, and she was cordial, but it was clear to him that they were no longer friends.

Perhaps she was hurt that Rich trusted Yglesias more than her. Or maybe she understood, with finality, that her friendship with Rich would never develop further, even now that he was free. Like André’s, for different reasons, his affection would only go so far.

Betrayal was on her mind as she began to work on the new play that André had commissioned. Much as she struggled to find her place in the world, she always seemed to come up against a barrier between her and fulfillment. Why, she wondered, did her expectations always seem out of alignment with reality?

By June 1987 she had written the first act. That summer, and for much of the autumn, she lived in London, courtesy of a four-thousand-dollar writing grant, which also included a room in the Nell Gwynn House, a serviced luxury-apartment building. Its romantic link to history would have appealed to Wendy; Nell Gwynn was a celebrated British actress from the seventeenth century, best known for being the beloved mistress of Charles II.

Away from her usual distractions, Wendy wrote in a way she never had before.
The Heidi Chronicles
flowed out of her the way the essays did, scene after scene. She fell back on some old tricks—pinning the names of friends and relatives onto characters, drawing on her memory bank for incidents and conversations. But her sociological observations and personal laments carried new weight.

Though her voice and concerns emanate from every character, for the first time a Wendy alter ego isn’t visibly part of the script. Heidi Holland, the main character, is a successful art historian, in her mid-thirties. She is neither Jewish nor overweight, but still there are important similarities between author and creation. Like Wendy, Heidi feels an essential sadness about where life has taken her. The women’s movement had raised consciousness and opened doors but left unanswered crucial questions about managing careers, family, relationships. Heidi laments:

“I’m sure the gray-haired fiction woman is having a bisexual relationship with a female dockworker and driving her husband crazy. I’m sure the hotshots have screwed a lot of thirty-five-year-old women, my classmates even, out of jobs, raises, and husbands. And I’m sure the mothers in the pressed blue jeans think women like me chose the wrong road. ‘Oh, it’s a pity they made such a mistake, that empty generation’. . .”

Heidi’s peers (and Wendy’s) had dropped the mantra of revolution and justice for all. During the eight-year presidency of Ronald Reagan, society had become more gentrified; the gap between rich and poor was wider than ever. In the play, Susie, the friend who takes Heidi to a woman’s consciousness-raising meeting when they’re in college, drops out of a Supreme Court clerkship to live in a women’s health and legal collective in Montana. She winds up a Hollywood producer.

The play covers the trajectory of Wendy’s generation, moving back and forth in time between 1965, when Heidi is in high school, and 1989, when she is approaching middle age, contemplating what she has become and how she should proceed.

She questions her choices and wonders if she has been misled by the promises of the feminist movement.

“I don’t blame any of us,” Heidi says. “We’re all concerned, intelligent, good women.” She pauses. “It’s just that I feel stranded. And I thought the whole point was that we wouldn’t feel stranded. I thought the point was that we were all in this together.”

Later an old friend reminds her of the plot of her namesake
Heidi,
Johanna Spyri’s classic novel about a Swiss orphan raised by her stern but loving grandfather.

“Did you know that the first section is Heidi’s year of travel and learning, and the second is Heidi uses what she knows?” the friend says. “How will you use what you know, Heidi?”

Like Wendy, Heidi has a host of women friends, but her primary relationships are with men: One is Peter Patrone (carrying her old friend Mary Jane’s surname), a pediatrician, who shares many characteristics with Chris Durang and André Bishop. Heidi loves him, but he is gay. The other romantic interest, also inaccessible, is Scoop Rosenbaum (who has the same name as her brother Bruce’s younger son). He is a smart, competitive journalist, with traces of Frank Rich and a heavy dose of Bruce. Once idealistic, he is now a cynical publishing mogul who owns a publication called
Boomer
magazine (which resembles Betsy Carter’s
New York Woman
) and assigns a grade to everything—politicians, cookies, women.

He explains to Heidi why he chose to marry his wife (whom he cheats on), rather than her. “She’s the best that I can do,” he says. “Is she an A-plus like you? No. But I don’t want to come home to an A-plus. A-minus maybe. But not A-plus.”

Just before Wendy’s thirty-seventh birthday, October 18, 1987, she felt that the play was ready for André’s evaluation. Back in New York from London, she gave him
The Heidi Chronicles.
He was nervous as he began reading, sitting on his sofa in the apartment on Waverly Place. The disappointment of
Miami
was still fresh, and the puncturing of their romantic bubble had put a terrible strain on their friendship.

He wanted to like the play, but what if he didn’t?

Relief came quickly. He saw that something profound had been unleashed in Wendy. The wit was there, but sharpened by a new willingness to let hurt and despair stand naked, not always protected by humor. “It was a beautifully written play,” he said. “Of all her plays, just in terms of grace of writing,
The Heidi Chronicles
is beyond all the others.”

He saw enormous potential. “It was funny and touching and serious, it had all the elements of a sort of American Important Play, at least within the New York theater world,” he said. “I just knew this was going to be her breakthrough to the really major leagues.”

André couldn’t—or wouldn’t—marry Wendy, but he resolved to do everything in his power to make sure
Heidi
got the attention he felt it deserved. That he could, and would, do.

LOLA TOLD PEOPLE WENDY WON THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR
THE HEIDI CHRONICLES,
BUT THE PULITZER WAS ENOUGH
TO MAKE WENDY VERY HAPPY.

Fifteen

THE HEIDI CHRONICLES

1988-89

André quickly arranged a reading
at Playwrights Horizons, with Joan Allen in the Heidi role. Allen was tall and bony, a midwestern blond beauty who had earned her acting credentials at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, a repertory company that took a boot-camp approach, five plays per season. She had been working in New York for four years, first appearing in
And a Nightingale Sang,
winning the Clarence Derwent Award for “the most promising male and female actors on the metropolitan scene” of the 1983–84 season. Most recently she had made a splash on Broadway in
Burn This,
starring opposite John Malkovich; the play was still running when she auditioned for
Heidi.

Wendy was six years older than Allen, but the actress connected to the play, especially the line Heidi delivers when she goes to a rap group and someone asks her, “Are you a feminist?” And she says, “No, I’m a humanist.”

Allen immediately grasped the main challenge, if she decided to take the part. “Heidi was someone who watched, something I could relate to, being more of a watcher myself,” she said. “With us watchers, there’s a lot going on underneath that isn’t shared with other people. Wendy really, really understood that.”

Wendy often made this connection with actresses, who were unaccustomed to working on plays written by women. They were drawn to this friendly, empathetic playwright who came to rehearsals and showed such respect for their craft.

André wanted Jerry Zaks to direct
Heidi;
Zaks had been having success after success—Christopher Durang’s
Marriage of Bette & Boo
and a revival of John Guare’s
House of Blue Leaves,
for which Zaks won a Tony. After Zaks declined, André suggested they workshop the play in Seattle rather than New York. Too many opinions had gone into the making—and unmaking—of
Miami.
Just as it had been useful for Wendy to seclude herself in London to write
Heidi,
André and Wendy agreed it would be good to develop the play, with actors, out of earshot of her New York friends, whose opinions she would invariably seek.

He contacted Daniel Sullivan, who was artistic director of the Seattle Repertory Theatre. Born in Colorado, Sullivan had grown up in San Francisco but had worked as an actor and a director in New York for years before moving to Seattle. Sullivan had a reputation as a strong, intelligent director with an impressive track record. He worked on
I’m Not Rappaport
in Seattle and then moved with it to Broadway, where the play won the Tony for Best Play in 1986, under Sullivan’s direction.

After they talked, André believed that Sullivan could help Wendy clarify her play’s many transitions.
The Heidi Chronicles
has thirteen scenes, spread across twenty-four years, each taking place in a different location, in time periods that don’t follow chronological order.

Sullivan was familiar with Wendy’s work; he had seen
Isn’t It Romantic
at Playwrights Horizons. He’d enjoyed the play but had felt that it was light, a boulevard comedy. He found
Heidi
to be far more ambitious. “I liked the structure of the piece, slices of someone’s life, and you have to infer huge swaths of a life which are in the interstices,” he said. “I liked Wendy’s pugnaciousness about the women’s movement at a time when it wasn’t very popular to be pugnacious about it.”

Sullivan noticed how invested André was in this play and this playwright.

“André had an extremely propriety relationship with Wendy, more so than I’ve seen with any other writer,” he said. “Protective. It was an extremely brotherly relationship, I found. A tremendous amount of love between them, I felt, and I think André felt extremely responsible to protect her. He wasn’t intrusive, but more present, more watchful, more mother-henning the thing.”

By late March 1988, Wendy was in Seattle, comfortably ensconced in the Inn at the Market, with views overlooking Elliott Bay. The hotel lay secluded behind an ivy-covered courtyard, right next to funky, atmospheric Pike Place Market, with its picturesque fishmongers and fruit sellers. Wendy loved hotels, their promise of romance, the absence of demands; they became a favorite place to work.

“In order to complete my writing, I have spent weeks guzzling coffee at Seattle’s Inn at the Market or sipping tea at Manhattan’s Upper East Side Lowell Hotel,” she wrote. “In other words, for me, from sea to shining sea there was no place that didn’t beat being home.”

Playwrights Horizons hired four actors in New York to fly to Seattle for the ten-day workshop; the rest of the cast came from the Seattle Rep. Caroline Aaron was part of the New York group, cast as Susan Johnston, Heidi’s girlhood friend who becomes a high-powered television producer.

Unlike some playwrights, who abhor the tedium of rehearsals, Wendy was there every day, eight hours a day, using the actors’ performances to inform revisions. She had a good ear for dialogue and music, often using popular songs to signal shifts in time. But her visual imagination was weak, so actually seeing the actors moving around the stage provided a valuable extra dimension during rewrites.

Aaron was impressed by the collaboration between Sullivan and Wendy. The actors would read the play, holding scripts, while Sullivan watched and considered, then zoomed in on problems. His radar was fine-tuned for gaps in the text, where a visual cue or additional information was needed to ground the audience. In the original script, for example, the play began in 1965, at a high-school dance, with two sixteen-year-old girls onstage, played by women in their thirties. One of them is Heidi, the title character.

Sullivan said to Wendy, “You can’t ask the audience to believe that these women are sixteen-year-old girls. The audience has to meet Heidi first, in the present, so they know who she is.”

Wendy went to her hotel room and emerged two days later with a scene set in 1989, the play’s present. She put to use all those years of scrambling at school, the last-minute assembling of learned-sounding papers for demanding teachers. In her revision Heidi is giving a lecture, standing in front of a screen showing slides of paintings by two nineteenth-century women artists. The playwright establishes Heidi’s adult voice as she laments the obscurity of women painters throughout history and then links her scholarly exegesis to the original opening scene, now believable as Heidi’s implicit
memory
of a high-school dance.

In subsequent months Wendy would further improve the scene. Heidi’s lecture becomes more sophisticated, and the transition to the high-school dance smoother and more poetic. Wendy’s process was similar in art and in life, impulsive yet planned, notable for a willingness to keep revising.

Wendy recognized that she and Sullivan worked well together but found his matter-of-fact approach unnerving. He didn’t praise, and he didn’t criticize; he just pointed out what needed to be fixed. (Later, after
The Heidi Chronicles
had been pronounced a great success, André said to Sullivan, “Wendy asked me if you liked her play.” Sullivan was distressed and amused. “I’m sort of a truck driver about directing,” he said. “I just like to do the work. I don’t get into aggrandizing anything or anybody. I just like to keep on track, keep on the work, so sometimes the obvious isn’t stated.”)

André saw the play onstage for the first time on April 6, 1988, having flown in from New York for the workshop production in front of Seattle Rep subscribers. The audience’s enthusiasm confirmed his belief that Wendy had written something exceptional.

His feelings were shared by cast members. On the way back to New York, Caroline Aaron, the actress who’d played Susan, decided that she definitely wanted to audition again for the part, if the play moved forward. Not long after she returned to the city, however, she discovered that Playwrights Horizons was producing the play later that year and the major parts had already been cast—Joan Allen as Heidi and Ellen Parker as Susan.

Aaron was upset. She believed that she’d done a fine job. She thought that she and Wendy had hit it off. They’d gone shopping together, discussed dating, and commiserated about dieting. Oh, well, she told herself, that’s show business.

A couple of months later, she heard from Wendy by mail. The letter, Aaron said, “knocked me out.”

Dearest Caroline;

Oy Gavalt!! I’ve had a baguette, a Saga Blue Cheese, and a nice bag of Reese pieces
[sic]
before I sat down to write this note. I can’t tell you how difficult this is, or how very fond I am of you. I almost feel there’s no reason to really be writing this because I know I’ll see you soon and have a chance to explain in person. However, in truth, I’ve been away writing and now I’m taking my ten year old niece the chess champion to Rumania, so we might not have a chance to get together until August.

All right, I’m going to be very grown up and confront this all head on. Caroline, the part of Susan came down to be between you and Ellen Parker. Ellen did the reading at Playwrights previous to the Seattle showcase. I
loved
you in The Heidi Chronicles. You were not only the inspiration for my new favorite line, you became a trusted friend. Unlike you, I have difficulty really opening up to people and I consider you the new colleague and friend I made this year.

Wendy went on to explain that she had a history with Ellen Parker, who had played in
Uncommon Women
and had a long association with Playwrights Horizons. In fact, Wendy confessed, she’d told André that she had written the role for Parker.

After reading Wendy’s words, Caroline Aaron had no doubt that she and Wendy would become even better friends. In all the actress’s years in show business, no one had ever acknowledged that she might have feelings about not getting a part, much less written her a letter like that. “It was a lesson everybody in show business could learn,” she said. “Good manners go a long way. But even people in the mafia have better manners than in show business.”

I
n Seattle, when she was hanging around with Caroline Aaron, Wendy had made allusions to a “Mr. Right” she was seeing—though he would turn out to be yet another Mr. Wrong.

The previous October, just before her thirty-seventh birthday, about the time Wendy gave André the completed draft of
The Heidi Chronicles,
Terrence McNally—celebrated playwright, handsome chronicler of the contemporary gay experience—showed up one night at Wendy’s apartment with a proposition. He wanted her to consider becoming his mate.

McNally was persuasive enough to convince Wendy to begin a romance with yet another charming man who was gay. There was one significant difference: This time the relationship was consummated, with serious thought of marriage and parenthood.

Within two months they were sharing a stateroom on the
QE2,
en route to England; McNally had a speaking gig on the ship, so the trip was free. The voyage ended dramatically. They arrived in London on January 1, 1988, to news that McNally’s father had died back in Texas, where McNally had grown up. They spent the night at the Savoy, and then he flew to the States while Wendy stayed in London.

For the next three years, they continued a fraught relationship.

They shared a love of music and theater and had reciprocal wit, intellect and ambition. But they were fighting their natures. The sex didn’t work.

They’d met at Yale, when McNally was teaching the playwriting seminar that Christopher Durang didn’t get into, which led Chris to the class where he met Wendy. McNally and Wendy reconnected several years later, after
Uncommon Women,
when CBS gave the Dramatists Guild a grant to encourage new playwrights. The Guild appointed a committee of playwrights to choose theaters to participate. McNally was the chair; Wendy was on the committee.

For several months the group flew to different regional theaters to see plays. That’s when McNally, who was a decade older than Wendy, had a chance to spend time with her and they became friends. In early 1987 they were asked by editors at the
New York Times
to explain how a play moves from a producer’s office to the stage. They replied with a spoof called
The Girl from Fargo,
a one-act play overflowing with inside jokes and show-business minutiae, that was probably more fun to write than it is to read.

McNally’s closest friends were not usually playwrights, but Wendy was different. “She had a very charismatic star quality,” he said.

So did McNally. He’d become known as a debonair provocateur, with plays like
The Ritz,
a sex farce set in New York’s gay-bathhouse scene. He was an exotic species in New York, not for being gay, or a playwright, but for being from Corpus Christi, Texas. His voice was soft and southern, his eyes a startling blue. He reminded Wendy of “a faded Gary Cooper.” He’d had a fascinating life, including a long affair as protégé and lover of Edward Albee, the groundbreaking playwright.