Wendy and the Lost Boys (34 page)

Three years after Wendy began fertility treatments, the September 4, 1995, cover of
Newsweek
blared, “Infertility: High-Tech Science Fails 3 Out of 4 Infertile Couples. Has the Hype Outweighed the Hope?”

The article was a compendium of heartbreaking stories, medical fact and fancy, filled with intimidating initialisms: IUI (intrauterine insemination), IVF (in-vitro fertilization), GIFT (gamete intrafallopian transfer), ZIFT (zygote intrafallopian transfer).

In 1993 the American Society for Reproductive Medicine reported daunting statistics. Of 41,209 assisted-reproduction procedures reported by participating clinics, 8,741 had resulted in live births, a success rate of 21.2 percent.

“There’s nothing like sitting in a fertility doctor’s office looking at the photos of children they’ve nudged into creation and knowing you’re the negative statistic,” Wendy wrote. “It becomes an addictive, undermining dream.”

When her egg count dropped, her fertility doctor suggested she begin injecting Pergonal—a fertility drug—intramuscularly, to increase the volume.

“You know my sister has cancer,” she told him.

He replied, “Yes, of course I know that.”

She was blunt. “So is this Pergonal an insane thing to do?”

He said, “We have no data that proves that.”

She said sarcastically, “But eventually you will.”

Cancer is not among the side effects the pharmaceutical establishment associates with Pergonal. But Wendy’s concern would one day seem predictive of her eventual fate, despite the absence of any proven link.

Despite being terrified of needles, she began regular visits to a Park Avenue drugstore, where the pharmacist injected her in the rump.

The doctor gave her a catalog of sperm donors. She chose number 1147, whom she described as “an English graduate student, BS in behavioral sciences and Jewish by choice.”

She began taking notes for a memoir, encouraged by Sonny Mehta, editor-in-chief at Knopf, who had become a friend.

On August 14 she met Bruce for lunch at the Russian Tea Room. He was disappointed that the prestigious bar booth he wanted to sit at was occupied by Beverly Sills, the opera singer.

Wendy told him about 1147.

The lonely attempts at insemination were dispiriting. “On Thanksgiving morning I walked down Central Park West toward my sister’s annual family gathering,” she wrote. “Lines of fathers with children sitting on their shoulders dotted the street for the Macy’s parade. I began to get anxious. I was furious at myself, the women’s movement and the entire medical profession.”

She and Sandra became even closer, bonded further by mutual acts of subterfuge. Sandra was hiding her illness from her employers; Wendy was hiding her attempts at having a baby from the world.

She told some people, including Cathy Graham, André, and Peter Parnell, as well as her actress friend Caroline Aaron, who had also been undergoing fertility treatments.

One day in the fall of 1993, she visited Harry Kondoleon in the loft owned by the Grahams. He was weak, and his voice had begun to sound like the evil witch’s in
The Wizard of Oz.
“Everyone thought I would croak by now,” he told her as they ate the salami, mozzarella, and olives that Wendy had brought in from Dean & DeLuca.

He had written a novel,
Diary of a Lost Boy,
and was determined to be at his publication party in January. Brave insouciance was his style. The first time Wendy had visited him at St. Vincent’s Hospital, when she first found out he was ill, he’d asked her, “What do you think of the gown? It’s Yves Saint Vincent.”

He also asked her, “What’s new on the baby front?”

She told him she planned to proceed, despite the pain and the frustration.

“If I were you, I’d do it,” the dying man told her.

Later that day she thought, “I’m in a play costarring Harry, my sister, and 1147.” Then she reprimanded herself.

“I’m making everything too neat—life and death—Harry and 1147. I need to cool it.”

On October 29 she had another insemination procedure. That afternoon she attended an AIDS memorial service for Peter Schifter, who’d directed
When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth
at Yale.

“I feel like a short story of my own generation,” she wrote. “Single 43 year old woman has insemination in the morning, goes to AIDS service in the afternoon.”

She wondered if it had worked. Was she pregnant?

“I have not really considered what I will tell this child about its father,” she wrote. “Maybe somewhere I’m hoping this won’t work. Maybe I’m hedging my bets.”

The procedure failed. Wendy’s doctor suggested she try a donor who could supply fresh sperm.

So began two collaborations with William Ivey Long, her old Yale friend, who had become one of the New York theater’s most prominent costume designers. With his impish smile and habit of sending congratulations cards filled with sparkling confetti, Long projected an image of fey giddiness. But appearances were deceiving: Long was a serious man with strong values tied to the old-fashioned virtues of hard work, loyalty, and responsibility. However outrageous the costumes he designed, he himself always wore the uniform of his proper southern upbringing: navy blazer, white shirt, striped tie, khakis, black lace-up shoes.

Their friendship had deepened over the years. As Wendy gained prominence, dashing around to speaking engagements, William often remembered their graduate-school days, when the two of them went to see the playwright Lillian Hellman receive an honorary degree at Yale. The auditorium was packed; they sat on the floor, soaking up Hellman’s words. Now Wendy was the one onstage imparting wisdom to the next generation.

He never forgot how helpful she’d been to him during his early days in New York, making him money selling his costumed dolls. His mentor, Charles James, had called him a “lost boy” in those days; Wendy’s friendship offered a little oasis of security in the Neverland of Manhattan.

Now his career had taken off; he was in constant demand. He became friendly with Kevin McKenzie, the new director of the American Ballet Theatre, who was planning a fresh production of
The Nutcracker
for his debut. McKenzie asked William if he would design the sets and costumes. William agreed and suggested he hire Wendy to write the libretto, reworking the story of Clara with a feminist twist.

McKenzie met with Wendy and agreed with her point of view. “The lesson learned by the girl in the ballet,” he told a reporter, “would be that beauty is on the inside.” William and Wendy collaborated for a year on the project, which ended badly for William, who dropped out because of internal ABT politics. Wendy remained on board; McKenzie’s
Nutcracker
made its New York premiere on May 20, 1994, with her libretto, McKenzie’s choreography, and sets and costumes by somebody else.

The second, far more profound, collaboration between Wendy and William Ivey Long would continue for years. This, too, would end badly—for him.

They were having lunch at the Colony Club, discussing
The Nutcracker.

Wendy told William she wanted a baby.

As he recalled the conversation, he replied, “I’ve been wanting a child
forever.
”

She said, “Do you want a child with me?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you want that responsibility?”

He laughed and, with characteristic insouciance, replied, “Well, George Washington, father of the country, who doesn’t want to be a father?”

They kept it light and breezy. He taped four quarters to an index card and mailed them to her, with a note: “From George Washington, father of the country, who else?”

The two of them spoke in terms that were saucy and irreverent, but they were utterly serious.

So it began.

Once again her real-life leading man—now William Ivey Long—was kept sub rosa, not even mentioned in her diary entries and given a diminished role in essays she later wrote about her procreative odyssey.

At first the methods were primitive. He became familiar with small rooms supplied with
Hustler
and
Screw
magazines, of little interest to the gay would-be father of Wendy’s child. They began taking limousines to New Jersey, where Wendy’s New York doctor had joined a reproductive practice. When questions were raised about the viability of William’s sperm, his was added to a mix with the sperm of the anonymous donor.

“I would go to this place, and it was spun into a batter that [they] had to keep warm,” Long recalled. “It was freezing cold, so I’d put it next to my heart and run down the street to the doctor’s office.” Wendy described receiving the mix via “a turkey baster.”

Long was frustrated by the notion of the cocktail mix. Who would be the father? He was confused as to what Wendy really wanted.

“This is no good,” he told Wendy. “How will we know?”

“We just want it to happen,” she told him.

“Don’t you want me to be part of it?” he replied.

She parried. “Do you want to be part of it?”

“Yes,” he said. “Do you want me?”

She assured him.

“Yes,” she said.

They tried various doctors, including the gay fertility specialist who questioned William’s suitability. “How do I know this other member of the couple is safe?” he asked.

William changed his life, beginning almost seven years of celibacy, to protect his sperm from disease.

As the years went by, the technology improved, but Wendy failed to conceive. William doubted her desire to have a child. “‘Why are you getting on a plane and flying to California to give a talk?’” he said he would ask her. “‘You should be going home to bed. You’re not giving it a real shot.’ From the first time, every single time, she shot herself in the foot. She would fly off somewhere, drive to Dartmouth. She would never go home and play earth mother. She never gave it a chance to take.”

Whenever he expressed his doubts—maybe she didn’t want him to father her child—she reassured him. “I want your brain,” she told him. “I want your DNA. I want your creativity. I want your values.”

He felt honored. “It builds you up in this huge way, if this brilliant friend of yours says, ‘I trust you.’ ”

So he resolved to stick with it, no matter how often Wendy disappeared.

THE SISTERS ROSENSWEIG
TOOK ON FRESH
POIGNANCY AS EVENTS IN THE
WASSERSTEIN FAMILY UNFOLDED.

Eighteen

THE OBJECTS OF HER AFFECTION

1993-98

In 1993, feeling the urge to nest,
Wendy began her adventures in real estate by selling her apartment at One Fifth Avenue for just under $390,000 and moving into a sublet on West Sixty-fourth Street. Thus began her search for the perfect place to raise her as-yet-imaginary child.

“She was the client from hell,” said James Foreman, real-estate broker and husband of Caroline Aaron, Wendy’s actress friend. “I adored her so much it didn’t matter,” he added.

“We would find an apartment she really liked,” he said. “Then she’d say, ‘I need to bring my husbands.’ ”

One by one they came to offer their opinions: Always André Bishop. Frequently Jane Rosenthal and Cathy Graham (“husbands” for these purposes). Occasionally William Ivey Long or Forrest Sawyer (the newsman was a favored squire for a period).

“We would always get to one friend who would say, ‘Wendy, you can’t live here,’ ” Foreman said. “And we would move on to the next apartment. After a while I started to think that was the purpose of the string of ‘husbands,’ to find the one who would tell her this one won’t work.”

He showed her at least two dozen apartments and then moved to California, after his wife joined the touring company of
The Sisters Rosensweig.

Wendy’s assistant, Ken Cassillo, took over the search; whenever Wendy received a call from her real-estate broker, she dispatched Kenny to be her scout. For two years he went to Connecticut, upstate New York, and throughout Manhattan looking at a variety of possibilities: farmhouses, East Side town houses, West Side lofts and studios. Something was always wrong.

Cassillo was bright and artistic, only in his twenties but an experienced assistant; he had worked for Jerome Robbins, the choreographer. His new job included office tasks, decorating, real-estate appraisal, and emotional support, like comforting his employer when her cat, Ginger, died.

He had helped Wendy’s previous assistant, Cindy Tolan, empty Wendy’s apartment at One Fifth. “When you say you were Wendy’s assistant, people have no idea,” Cassillo said as he described what he found on his first day of work.

“It was like a dorm room. There was just stuff everywhere,” he said. “There was no filing system, just bags and bags full of papers in garbage bags. That was the filing system. We had no idea how to keep track of things, so we put things in garbage bags.”

The garbage bags moved into the West Sixty-fourth sublet. While Wendy traveled, Cassillo began the daunting task of organizing Wendy’s papers.

“I would go to West Sixty-fourth and open up every single crumpled piece of paper and lay it on the sink and lay it on the bed, and that’s how the filing system started,” he said. “I didn’t know she was doing public speaking until I started going through the rubbish bags and I was finding checks for very large sums of money—ten thousand dollars. She didn’t cash them if they were from schools or something. She didn’t care about that. She’d speak to the school, bury the check in her purse, and then not cash the check.”

Wendy liked the luxurious surroundings in her sublet at 1 West Sixty-fourth Street, located near Central Park West. One of her neighbors was Madonna; another was Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the
New York Times,
and yet another was James Lapine, who lived on the floor above her with his wife and daughter. That was the year she and “Tats” became especially close; she always told him she thought of that sublet as “our year of living well.”

When the sublet ran out, she still hadn’t found someplace she liked enough to buy. She took up residence at the Lowell Hotel, a small luxury hotel just across Central Park, on Sixty-third Street between Madison and Park.

“She loved the Lowell,” said Judith Thurman, a writer friend. “She was so happy.”

Thurman saw Wendy’s relationship with the Lowell as like that of a family, without the demands. “She had these friendly relationships without conflict or tension, because she paid them,” she said. “There was no reciprocity. The reciprocity was built into the bill at the end of the month. It was very freeing. It wasn’t work. Relationships in the Wasserstein family were a lot of work. She would also not have been a playwright without that family. There was a lot of drama. There was no drama with the concierge at the Lowell. She loved no ties, not having to give a shit about decorating, rooms made up every day. She ordered room service or went out to the restaurant. It was freedom.”

Judith Thurman felt she understood Wendy in ways other people might not. Thurman was a toothpick as an adult but she’d been a chubby child; she was also a Jewish girl from Queens who had made good in Manhattan. Now a contributor to the
New Yorker,
Thurman had won a National Book Award in 1983 for her biography of Isak Dinesen. More recently Thurman had Frenchified herself; she and Wendy met in 1993, right after Thurman had returned from Europe, where she’d spent a year researching a biography of Colette, the French novelist who became a feminist icon.

Wendy had a particular interest in Thurman, who was four years older and the single mother of a boy, then three and a half years old. They met for drinks at one of Wendy’s favorite New York spots, the Café des Artistes, off Central Park West.

She inquired about Thurman’s baby-making history, without revealing that she was taking fertility treatments.

Thurman told her story.

At age forty-one, the alarm went off. She realized she couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t at least try to have a child.

She thought, “Holy shit, I have to do this.”

She went to her gynecologist, who specified, “You have to do this
right away.
” The doctor explained, “Fertility declines, declines, declines, declines and at forty-one it goes like that.” The doctor’s hand mimicked an airplane crashing to the ground.

Thurman told Wendy she’d decided to get pregnant that year. She talked to various men friends, and some volunteered, but she worried they might want to be involved with her child, and that was not her plan. She wanted to be in charge. “I couldn’t start negotiating with a man about visitation and this and that,” she said.

She went to a sperm bank, so disturbing an experience that in describing it Thurman dropped her worldly veneer and reverted to being a girl from Queens.

“They’re
gonifs
,” she told Wendy.

A friend of Thurman’s had told her that the catalogs filled with glowing descriptions of sperm donors were fiction. “C’mon,” the friend said. “The guy who runs the sperm bank goes behind a screen and jerks off.”

Thurman was convinced enough to agree when the friend of a former lover volunteered to father her child. They spent a week together—not a romantic affair, but sex for the purposes of conception. It worked. Now she had a son, who lived with her, though he knew his father and had a relationship with him.

Wendy told Thurman she wanted a child. But, Thurman said, “She was very secretive about how she was going to go about it.”

I
n February 1996, Wendy purchased a 2,160-square-foot apartment that Cassillo had discovered at 75 Central Park West. The building was an elegant prewar structure. She thought the apartment, for which she paid $1.6 million, was “dingy and characterless,” but it had wonderful views and a fine address. She hired Patricia Seidman, who had been Judith Thurman’s architect, to renovate. As Wendy and Seidman discussed layout and design, it became clear to the architect that her forty-five-year-old client was planning a home for a family.

“She wanted a child—that was part of what she wanted her grown-up life to include—and she chose this apartment because it was a good place to raise a child,” Seidman said.

Wendy instructed Seidman to turn the neglected space into an apartment that was elegant and unconventional but comfortable. Details were vague. “She was one of the least domestic people I’ve ever met,” Seidman said. “She couldn’t cook, she couldn’t boil water, but she loved homey things. She was longing for a home but had no instincts on how to put it together for herself.”

By then Wendy had resumed work on
The Object of My Affection.
The movie was finally about to be produced, almost a decade after Wendy had begun adapting the Stephen McCauley novel, about the romantic friendship between a gay man and his best friend, a single woman who becomes pregnant but doesn’t want to marry the man she’s dating.

Though
The Heidi Chronicles
had been made into a television movie starring Jamie Lee Curtis in 1995, this was Wendy’s first feature film to be produced.

She was most excited about working with Nicholas Hytner, the film’s director. She had met him three years earlier when, at thirty-seven, he was already a luminary of the London theater. Known for his riveting productions of Shakespeare, he had exuberant ambitions; he’d already branched out into opera and film. Wendy met him through André, who had convinced Hytner to bring his brilliantly staged
Carousel
from the National Theatre in London to Lincoln Center. Hytner came to New York to meet with André, not long after
The Sisters Rosensweig
opened at Lincoln Center.

Hytner was enchanted by Wendy.

“I don’t make firm friends very easily, like a lot of Brits,” said Hytner. “I’m very happy to meet people and pleased to see them, but to make firm friends doesn’t happen that easy, that quickly, but we were firm friends very quickly.”

In turn she was dazzled by Hytner, who was smart, charming, sophisticated, handsome, British—and Jewish.

“I think I want to have an affair with Nick,” she wrote in her diary.

He accompanied her to the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington a few months after they met and was her date that night at the president’s reception: He kept a photograph of the two of them standing with Bill and Hillary Clinton in front of the Christmas tree at the White House.

Soon they were chatting endlessly on the telephone, carrying on funny, fake conversations where each of them pretended to be the other’s mother, alternately criticizing and bragging about their children.

Not long after they met, he became involved with a man in New York, whom he introduced to Wendy. It didn’t occur to Hytner that Wendy’s interest in him might be romantic.

“She would talk to me a huge amount on her crush—more than a crush, she was in love with André—but she was never in love with me,” Hytner said, though she would refer to him as one of her “husbands.”

Now that Hytner had signed on to direct
The Object of My Affection,
they had more reason to spend time with each other. Filming was set to begin in the fall of 1997.

A
s always, she was busy.

She continued to write essays for the
New York Times
and women’s magazines, as well as for Betsy Carter, who settled at
Harper’s Bazaar
after
New York Woman
ceased publication, and then moved to a magazine called
New Woman
. These essays became a kind of public—carefully self-censored—diary, as well as clever promotion of her work, tending to appear more frequently when she had a play opening somewhere.

In 1995 Wendy added a significant venue for her journalism, when an editor from the
New Yorker
took her to lunch at the Royalton Hotel and asked if she would like to write for the country’s premier literary magazine. For Wendy this was the pinnacle. What was she if not the consummate New Yorker? The magazine became a prized venue for the personal accounts that might have been first drafts for the memoir she was planning to write.

Besides this journalistic output, in 1996 she published
Pamela’s First Musical,
an illustrated children’s book in which an Auntie Mame type introduces her niece to Broadway musicals. She dedicated the book to her niece Pamela, Bruce’s oldest child, who was then a senior at Dalton.

That same spring Wendy also began working on
An American Daughter,
her first overtly political play.

Despite its popularity with Wendy’s constituency, and commercial success as it toured the United States,
The Sisters Rosensweig
hadn’t been taken as seriously as she’d hoped. Bob Brustein called the play “a step backward” from
The Heidi Chronicles.
“Wisecracks come too easily to her,” he told a reporter. The play flopped in London.

Wendy had grown tired of the question that critics kept asking: “When will you show us your dark side?” She wanted to achieve the gravitas she felt continued to elude her, despite all the accolades she’d accumulated.

With the arrival of the Clintons in the White House, her generation was undeniably in charge. Her peers were no longer the up-and-comers but rather the ones who had arrived. Frank Rich left his job as the country’s most powerful theater critic in 1994 to write an opinion-page column about culture and politics for the
Times.
The theater was thriving, in better shape than it had been when he began reviewing thirteen years earlier, but it seemed too narrow.