Wendy and the Lost Boys (37 page)

But Wendy’s social schedule continued, even accelerated. There was always someone ready to venture with her into the social fray. It was as if she had decided, “This is my life.” She hadn’t completely given up on the idea of having a child, but at age forty-seven she was coming to terms with the idea that she might not. She kept moving at full throttle, not so different from Lola, dancing for hours on end. If she couldn’t have a significant other, she could have rooms full of people who cared about her.

And if she couldn’t have children, she could find other ways to be connected to the future. By then Wendy had taught at New York University and Columbia and lectured at other schools. She became mentor as well as employer to her assistants; being hired by her meant automatic enrollment in “Wendy’s School for Girls.” In return for deciphering her handwriting and typing scripts, and trying to bring order to her household, the young women and men who worked for her received unstinting advice and help, as well as gifts and entertainment.

At an earlier point in her life, Wendy had decided her friends were her family. Now, increasingly, her assistants filled the innermost circle. Ken Cassillo became Wendy’s go-to guy for Lola and Morris, who were still living in the same apartment they’d moved into thirty-five years earlier. They refused to have help, even though Morris was becoming more and more unstable. In that way, too, Wendy had become a classic Baby Boomer, taking care of elderly parents while taking care of (or trying to have) her own children.

When Morris fell and couldn’t get up, or disappeared, as he had begun to do, Wendy called Cassillo and asked him to find her father. Sometimes the assistant would simply be a companion, taking Morris to the park or to a museum. As he grew more frail, Cassillo helped him take showers and go to the bathroom.

Cassillo became fond of both Morris and Lola, though Wendy always complained about her mother. “Lola was crazy fun,” he said. “She was a bundle of energy, a whirling dervish, you didn’t know what was going to come your way when she started spinning. You would never think this tiny little lady would have so much energy. I’m not talking about the emotional stuff.”

Wendy always said, “Oh, my poor father, how does he cope with living with my mom?” But Cassillo thought they were a great couple. “You got the sense that Morris loved Lola very much,” he said. “He and Lola definitely made us assistants feel part of something.”

Wendy wanted young people in her life and remained close to her nieces and nephews. In 1998, through the Theatre Development Fund,
¹⁷
she began to participate in a project designed to encourage love of theater in youngsters who otherwise wouldn’t have access to it. Together with Roy Harris—stage manager for her last three plays, beginning with
Heidi—
Wendy took eight public-high-school students to plays over the course of a year. After the performances, over pizza, she and Harrris dissected the shows with the students, who kept journals, for which they received high-school credit.

The final play they went to that first year was
An American Daughter.
Wendy listened as the kids complained: too many characters, too many subplots, too hard to follow the story.

“Boy, have I trained you well,” she said.

The program came to be known as Open Doors. Wendy encouraged her friends to become mentors. The list would include André Bishop, William Finn, Stephen Graham, James Lapine, Alex Witchel, Frank Rich.

“I am certain that I became a playwright because every Saturday my parents picked me up from the June Taylor School of Dance and brought me to a Broadway matinee,” she wrote in the
New York Times,
in an article about the Open Doors program. “Sadly, a New York adolescent’s life as a regular theatergoer is becoming the exception to the rule.”

She hoped Open Doors might change that, at least a little. Over the next dozen years, 1,220 students would spend a year going to shows with the thirty-five theater professionals who’d signed up to be mentors. It was a gift for the mentors, too. Lapine called his participation in the program “one of the great joys of my life.”

W
endy had begun to reconcile herself to life without a child. “For eight years I had believed that the greatest regret of my life would be that I was childless,” she wrote. “I realized now that I was finally willing to give that up.”

But in early 1998, while she was having dinner with her agent, she learned a piece of news that many believed caused her to reconsider.

Arlene Donovan of ICM had heard from a fellow agent that André Bishop and Peter Manning were about to adopt a child. She mentioned it to Wendy, assuming she knew; everyone was aware of how close she and André were to each other.

“When she heard he was going to adopt that child, she paled,” said Donovan. “I thought she would collapse.”

Once again the person Wendy felt closest to had betrayed her. Why hadn’t André told her? He knew—from experience, not telling her about Peter—that she would be furious.

Peter Manning wanted children. Unlike André, with his unhappy childhood memories, Peter remembered his suburban upbringing as a happy one. His father was a lawyer and his mother a teacher; he had four siblings. In his mind, families included children. When he and André had been together a year or two, Peter brought up the subject. The moment was so intense that he remembered exactly where the conversation took place—they were standing by the Northern Dispensary, once a clinic for the poor (Edgar Allan Poe was treated there) on Waverly Place in the Village.

Peter asked, “Do you want children?”

André didn’t hesitate. “No,” he said.

Then he added, “Wendy wanted to have children, and I said, ‘No, it’s too crazy.’ ”

Peter heard the finality in André’s voice. “Well, I love this guy,” he thought. “I’ll just be a terrific uncle.”

But he couldn’t help himself. He raised the question again—and again.

“It took Peter Manning about three years to persuade me, at least, to come around to it,” said André.

His resistance had been fortified by his fear of telling Wendy. He’d set up housekeeping with Peter, and loved him, but André and Wendy remained enmeshed with each other. On opening night of
An American Daughter,
he wrote her two notes, representing their public and private bonds, one from him and Bernie Gersten on behalf of Lincoln Center and one from just him.

André’s note accompanied his customary gift, a bottle of perfume by Guerlain, because it was considered the best, choosing L’Heure Bleue, one of the romantic classics, the bottle’s stopper designed by Baccarat in the shape of a hollowed-out heart.

Dear Wendy—

Some people smell nice; some write wonderful plays. You fit in both categories. Just as this may become your signature scent, so may An American Daughter become your signature play. Equal parts clove and carnation. Equal parts wit and emotion—skillfully, seamlessly blended into a perfect all enveloping whole.

So much for my writing skill . . .

A million thanks and love forever on opening night.

André

Unable to think of a way to tell her about the adoption, he simply waited.

“Wendy and I had a history of I didn’t want to have children and I didn’t want to have children,” he said. “I should have just told her directly and suffered the consequences. I figured I’d tell her when I really decided to do it. I just kept putting it off.”

Wendy wasn’t the only one André kept in the dark. He hadn’t told his mother that he was living with Peter, much less let her know she was about to become a grandmother. “Like everything else, I put it off, put it off, thinking, ‘She’s old, she won’t live that long, she’ll never know,’ ” said André. “I didn’t want to tell her because I thought it would unhinge her. The baby part. The Peter part she must have suspected. She wasn’t that naïve.”

Finally James Lapine, whose own daughter was thirteen by then, told André he had to tell his mother, who was in poor health. “You have to settle your score with her,” he said. “You’ll never forgive yourself if you don’t come clean in a way and have some sort of mutual understanding.”

A month before Peter and André brought their newborn daughter home, André followed Lapine’s instructions. He went to see his mother. “I told her that I was gay,” he said, “that I had this loving relationship and we were adopting a girl—next month.”

She
was
a little unhinged, as André thought she would be—and then she wasn’t. “I wish you’d had your daughter ten years earlier,” Felice “Fay” Harriman Francis told her fifty-year-old son.

I
n 1998 Wendy began working on the libretto for an opera trilogy called
Central Park,
jointly commissioned by Glimmerglass Opera, New York City Opera, and Thirteen/WNET’s
Great Performances
series. Three composers and three playwrights (Terrence McNally, A. R. Gurney, and Wendy) were to provide visions of the park’s meaning. When Deborah Drattell, the new composer-in-residence for the New York City Opera, heard who the playwrights were, she asked to be paired with Wendy. She had guessed, correctly, that they would like each other.

Wendy confessed to Drattell that she didn’t know anything about opera, couldn’t distinguish a mezzo from a soprano. The playwright offered two ideas for her part of the trilogy. One of them recalled the night in 1969 when crowds had gathered before giant screens in the park to watch Neil Armstrong step on the moon. Drattell chose the other scenario, called “Festival of Regrets,” Wendy’s interpretation of a Jewish ritual called
tashlich.

The
tashlich
ceremony takes place on the first or second day of Rosh Hashanah
,
the beginning of the Jewish calendar year. Rosh Hashanah begins a ten-day period of repentance, known as the High Holidays or Days of Awe, which culminate on Yom Kippur
,
a day of fasting and atonement for sins committed the previous year.
Tashlich
is a visual representation of the casting away of sins; Jews take bread to a body of water and toss in crumbs that symbolize the misdeeds and evil thoughts being thrown away.

Wendy had been struck by the ritual’s symbolic meaning one day when she was walking through Central Park during the High Holidays. She saw a group gathered at the Boat Pond by Belvedere Fountain on Seventy-second Street, not far from where she first made out with James Kaplan decades earlier. “As I watched each crumb land and be carried by the faint current,” she wrote, “I thought of the generations who had come to the park to release their years of regrets.”

She had written about
tashlich
before. In
An American Daughter,
a middle-aged woman who has been trying unsuccessfully to have a child watches a group of men praying by the banks of the Potomac. The woman describes watching the men tossing “their breadcrumbs of secret sorrow” into the river with her “familiar distance and disdain.” Then she finds herself shredding a muffin she’d been eating, and joining the ceremony. “I wanted this God, this Yaveh, to know me,” she says.

Festival of Regrets
became Wendy’s piece of the Central Park trilogy. The world premiere took place on July 25, 1999, at the Glimmerglass Opera, a lovely summer musical festival held in a theater situated on a former farm in central New York, eight miles from Cooperstown, about a four-hour drive northwest of New York City. Rhoda Brooks accompanied her much of the time and remembered Glimmerglass as a pleasurable experience for Wendy.

Alex Ross, music reviewer for the
New Yorker,
enjoyed the piece and described Wendy’s contribution as “a lot of decent Woody Allenish jokes about plastic surgery, Starbucks, the Dalton School, and so on.”

Ross liked Drattell’s plaintive score and appreciated the piece’s “witty, brittle look at mostly Jewish New Yorkers.” The characters include a divorced couple, who independently end up at the Bethesda Fountain during the High Holidays. As the play ends, it appears the couple might reconcile—or not. “That uncertainty gives the comedy a hazy, melancholy tinge,” wrote Ross.

Wendy made the trip to Cooperstown at least twice, during rehearsals and during the opera’s four-week run, which ended August 21, 1999. Terrence McNally drove her back to Manhattan on a day that was boiling hot and sunny. His car was air-conditioned, but it was a long trip and the heat seeped in. Wendy seemed miserable. She had gained back all the weight she’d lost and then some.

“She had on a lot of voluminous clothes,” said Terrence. “I kept thinking, ‘Aren’t you hot? It’s summer.’ She was all in black. I thought she was embarrassed by her weight. It never occurred to me that she might be pregnant.”

Three weeks later, on Sunday, September 12, Terrence was scheduled to go to a party in Brooklyn, where Deborah Drattell lived with her husband and four young children. Drattell had invited everyone who worked on
Central Park
to celebrate the opera’s success.

Not long before he left for Brooklyn, Terrence received a call from Wendy, who was supposed to be at the party.

She sounded exhausted. He couldn’t quite grasp what she was saying.

“I don’t want you to read it in the paper,” she said. “I had a baby, premature, it’s pretty tense, no visitors.”

He was still stunned when he arrived at Drattell’s home.

“I assumed Wendy called you to say she had a baby this morning,” was his greeting to them.

“Deborah fainted,” he said. “I never saw anyone faint in real life. That’s my memory.”

Drattell’s memory differed.

“I did not faint,” she said, but added, “Maybe I looked like I was about to!”

As she recalled, there was a story in the
New York Post
that day, on Page Six, the gossip column, saying Wendy was in the hospital, pregnant.

Terrence McNally walked in and said, “I was reading the
New York Post,
and there’s a story about Wendy in the hospital, but she called and said she just had the baby!”