Wendy and the Lost Boys (39 page)

Their accounts agree on this: Almost a year after Sandra’s death, in the fall of 1998, Wendy was having lunch at the Café des Artistes when she ran into her first fertility doctor, who told her that technology had improved since she’d first visited him eight years earlier. The following spring Wendy watched him insert an egg-and-sperm combination into her uterus with a tube she described as “the width of a pipe cleaner.”

The next night she flew to Italy, where she had won a prestigious fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, with plans of writing a new play.

When she returned home, two weeks later, she discovered she was pregnant.

Shortly thereafter she called William Ivey Long, who hadn’t heard from her for several months, and gave him the news.

That’s where their stories diverge, with William’s account being the one verified by assistants and friends.

“Wendy told me the baby wasn’t mine and then hinted that it might be,” William said, though he realized there had been too much discussion of his faulty sperm for the latter to be likely. Still, he did what he thought he was supposed to do.

“We go to all the sonograms,” he said. “We see the baby move. I go to all those things.”

When Wendy was hospitalized right after Fay Francis’s funeral, she called William, who spent the night in her room, on a reclining chair. She made sure he was there for the birth—and then left him in the waiting room, allowing the director Gerry Gutierrez, one of her other “husbands,” into the delivery room. William felt relegated to the role of comic relief, the gay designer whose job was to prettify and delight. He felt betrayed by someone to whom he had revealed his most serious, adult, responsible self.

Perhaps he shouldn’t have been surprised. The stakes were much higher now, but Wendy’s selfishness was hardly without precedent. He had only to think of their Yale days, when Wendy sabotaged his opening-night production by leaving his costumes at the dry cleaners, to be reminded that in Wendy’s world Wendy always came first.

But nothing could have prepared him for this heartbreak. Once again he felt like a Lost Boy, the nickname Charles James had given him when William had studied at the master’s feet, all those years ago at the Hotel Chelsea. In his mind all his awards and accomplishments evaporated. He was nobody.

The day of Lucy Jane’s birth tested his resilience in a way he’d never been tested before or since. When the nurse escorted Gerry Gutierrez into the delivery room and William was left behind, he felt himself turn beet red in front of Bruce and Claude, who were there. Claude won his eternal affection when she gave his arm a sympathetic squeeze.

“It was the worst day of my life,” he said. “Even worse than when my parents died.”

The
New Yorker
article accentuated his feeling of humiliation. “She only talks about me decorating the room,” he said. “Boy, did I feel like a total faggot after that.”

In the hospital, along with Bruce, he dutifully visited Lucy Jane, cupping the tiny infant—tubes dangling out of her—in the palm of his hand. After a week Wendy told him to stop coming. “Now, William, they’re very confused about all these men visiting,” she told him. “I have to limit it to Bruce.” William was stunned.

After that, he didn’t see Lucy Jane again until she was eighteen months old. He couldn’t bear it. He sent her one of his signature cards, filled with confetti, but he needed to stay away for a while.

He wasn’t imagining the distance that he felt Wendy had put between them. During the years they’d tried to have a baby together, she’d expressed concern about having William become the father for the very reason she had wanted him to try. He might be
too
responsible and want
too much
control. “She wanted him to be in Lucy’s life but not tell her what to do,” said Angela Trento, her assistant. “She thought it would be better to keep it clean. It would be her child; no one else would have any rights.”

William never fully recovered from the blow to his ego, his feeling that Wendy had discarded him because he’d failed to help her reproduce. “I don’t feel defined by being gay. Michelangelo wasn’t a gay artist. I have never felt I am a gay designer,” he said. “But with Wendy I felt I was part of a big group of gay men, part of the people who had disappointed her. I kept thinking, ‘Why didn’t you go after straight men if we were going to fail you as a group?’ ”

Occasionally he wondered if Lucy was his child, believing there was a million-to-one chance. Then he let it go.

He had always known he wasn’t aware of everything else going on in Wendy’s life. As she had become more famous, she developed a spiraling circle of acquaintances. There were circles within circles, sometimes overlapping, sometimes not. The compartmentalization bothered William, who had known Wendy before she started dividing people into boxes—and who had reason to think he did have special status, personally and professionally.

He was left with his memories and receipts for medical procedures, eventually accumulating bills well into six figures for his share of the costs, which they had agreed to split. “I had probably the most intense relationship I ever had,” he said, adding wryly, “In my compartmentalized way.”

He felt she hadn’t taken their mutual efforts as seriously as he did. “I thought we were having a life while we were having it,” he said.

R
ebecca Brightman, Wendy’s primary obstetrician, specialized in high-risk pregnancies, in a practice she shared with two other physicians, Laurie Goldstein and Michele K. Silverstein.

A reproductive endocrinologist referred Wendy. “When he said Wendy Wasserstein, my heart skipped a beat,” said Brightman, who was in her late thirties. “I had gone with my mom to see all her plays. I was such a big fan.”

Brightman enjoyed the crazy intensity of her work and often thought she should be taking notes for a sitcom or a soap opera. But as Wendy’s blood pressure began to escalate that summer, Brightman was more concerned than she might normally have been. It had been a terrible year. One of her partners had gotten married and left the practice a few months earlier, so three doctors were managing the caseload of four. Brightman had two young children; the older one had broken his leg that winter and was in a body cast for two months. She’d been orchestrating two nannies, phone calls home, while dealing with more patients than usual.

That summer was the nadir of her career. One patient developed inexplicable high fevers but then delivered safely. But another woman became extremely ill after a very complicated delivery and then died.

“You never forget losing a patient,” said Brightman, who never lost another. “One of the things that attracted us to this profession is that patients are healthy for the most part, for the most part it’s a happy field. This was really tough.”

Shortly afterward Brightman took a vacation with her family. Because of Wendy’s blood pressure, Brightman called into the office just to check in.

“With any patient it would have been stressful,” she said. “The fact it was Wendy made it even more stressful.”

Laurie Goldstein told her, “You’re not going to believe this. We have another problem. Wendy’s having issues with her blood pressure, and she’s now in the hospital.”

Brightman remembered the old saying, “Bad luck comes in threes.” She was scared.

But then, to her relief, everything turned out well for Wendy and Lucy Jane—so far as producing a healthy baby.

Brightman wasn’t overly concerned that during her pregnancy Wendy developed Bell’s palsy, a form of paralysis that causes one side of the face to droop. For unexplained reasons, pregnant women were more prone to Bell’s palsy than the rest of the population, but the condition was almost always temporary. For Wendy, however, it became a recurrent condition. Her smile was never the same.

Yet she said she’d never been so happy. “Complications” ends as Wendy and Lucy Jane return home from the hospital. They watched an episode of
I Love Lucy
on television, right after a midnight feeding.

It happened to be the episode where Lucy gives birth to little Ricky. Her husband is doing his act at the Club Tropicana and ends up rushing to the maternity ward in his voodoo costume.

When Ricky Ricardo began to sing, Wendy wrote, Lucy Jane Wasserstein started to cry.

“She had seen a lot of things in the NICU, but she wasn’t accustomed to bellowing Cuban men in feathers,” wrote Wendy. “I held her close—all ten pounds of her—and told her not to be frightened. Then I looked down at her double chin and her round baby cheeks. ‘I love Lucy, too,’ I told her. ‘And we’re home.’ ”

Part Five

WENDY’S LAST ACT

2000-06

KEN CASSILLO (HOLDING LUCY JANE) BECAME PART OF “WENDY’S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS.”

Twenty-one

THE NEW MILLENNIUM

2000-01

In May 1999,
just after Wendy became pregnant, another monumental event occurred, another crucial plot point the writer would choose to delete from the narrative of her life. She was in Rochester, New York, as part of the Rochester Arts & Lectures series; it was an honor to be asked. Rochester might have been far from the center of Wendy’s universe (Manhattan), but the series had drawn significant intellectual luminaries, including Saul Bellow, Maya Angelou, and Isabel Allende.

Shortly before Wendy’s appearance, Susan Herman, one of the series’ producers, received a telephone call from a social worker in a local group home for people with disabilities. “Abner Wasserstein is Wendy’s brother, and he wants to come to the lecture,” she said.

Herman called Wendy’s booking agent to ask if he knew about this brother. “Absolutely not,” he said. “She has one brother, Bruce, an investment banker.”

When Wendy arrived, Herman told her about the call regarding a man who said he was her brother Abner.

“Her face was blank,” Herman said. “There was nothing on her face. There was no further discussion. She wasn’t inviting discussion.”

The lecture was sold out to an audience of eight hundred people. That evening, standing before a podium onstage, Wendy noticed a man in a wheelchair, in the aisle, about ten feet from the stage. He was around sixty years old, accompanied by an aide. He appeared to be agitated.

The speech went well. “If she was bothered at all, she didn’t show it,” said Herman. “She was very composed during the entire lecture, and then the Q&A was very lively and fun.”

After the lecture Abner came to the reception and approached his sister, his wheelchair pushed by his companion.

They stopped in front of Wendy, who was mingling with guests, near Susan Herman. Abner handed Wendy a copy of a book to autograph and said, haltingly, “I’m your brother Abner.”

Wendy didn’t know what to think or how to react. For her entire life, by then almost a half century, she believed that her brother must be unable to function, the only way she could explain his isolation from the family. She had rebelled against the family’s code of silence, incurring Bruce’s sharp disapproval when she included Abner’s name in the dedication for
Uncommon Women and Others.
Eventually she conformed and stopped mentioning her brother, having been convinced that Abner might somehow be harmed if people knew he had a famous sister and brother.

Now the brother she didn’t know was directly in front of her, clearly not in a vegetative state, upending a lifetime’s worth of supposition, including her feeling that she had been Abner’s champion. “Why doesn’t anybody come to see me?” he asked. “Why am I stuck in this home?”

The ambush came at a vulnerable time for Wendy. She had just become pregnant, a secret she was hiding from the world. Instead of feeling compassion for her long-lost brother, she was frightened by his hostility. The thought of confronting Lola about the reality of Abner sent her into a tailspin. She just wanted to get away.

But none of that was obvious to onlookers that evening. “She shook his hand and was very kind to him,” Herman said. “It was just a brief meeting.”

Wendy was still shaken when she returned home and told Rhoda Brooks about the encounter. “She felt exposed and didn’t know how to handle it, she didn’t know what to do,” said Rhoda, who had become one of Wendy’s closest confidantes. “He was very angry and directed it all at her.”

Abner tried to become closer, but Wendy distanced herself. She begged Rhoda to respond to his e-mails. “I pretended I was her secretary, and I wrote to him that Wendy was traveling a lot and was terribly sorry she couldn’t stay in touch as frequently as she’d like,” Rhoda said. “I told him I’ve known Wendy for years and had heard all about him. He never responded.”

Now Wendy had become complicit in the family’s decision to keep Abner at arm’s length, but she felt she had no choice. Did she and Lola talk about the pain of separation? Was Wendy able to forgive Lola for banishing her son, now that she had experienced him firsthand? Or did Abner’s fury seem a reasonable response to a sister who had felt Lola’s rejection in other ways? Perhaps she decided to save the analysis for later, when she wrote the memoir she kept promising her editors at Knopf.

Bruce was not interested in discussing the matter of their missing brother. He paid for a private plane to take his parents to visit Abner, but his attention was consumed by other matters.

In September 2000 Dresdner Bank agreed to buy Wasserstein, Perella & Company for $1.56 billion—$1.37 billion in stock and an additional $190 million set aside to retain Wasserstein, Perella’s top executives. Nearly half the proceeds of the sale went to Bruce.

Wendy also didn’t have the time or emotional capacity for Abner. Her health hadn’t rebounded from pregnancy; her once-limitless energy drained quickly, and she often felt weak and unbalanced. Despite this unfamiliar feeling of exhaustion, and the demands of an infant, she resumed work on a play she’d begun before Lucy Jane was born, returning to a subject she had tried to write about before: her brother Bruce. Her vehicle this time was
Old Money,
a commentary on the connection between the wealthy industrialists who helped create New York society in the 1890s and the mergers-and-acquisitions tycoons of the 1990s who were their descendants. Now older and far more experienced than she’d been when she wrote
Miami,
fifteen years earlier, she was no longer intent on capturing the nostalgia of her childhood but was trying to understand the excesses of the world her brother occupied—a stratosphere she claimed to disdain but couldn’t resist.

The main character is a seventeen-year-old boy named Ovid Walpole Bernstein, who appears to be based on Bruce’s older son (Wendy dedicated the published version of the play to her nephew, Ben Churchill Wasserstein). The play opens on the occasion of the annual summer party thrown by Ovid’s father. It takes place in their Manhattan mansion, which was built almost a century earlier by a robber baron who’d made his money in coal mining.

Wendy had written most of the play at the American Academy in Rome, while she was pregnant, and then set it aside to give birth to Lucy Jane. Just as Sandra had barely skipped a beat at work when she delivered her babies, Wendy was determined not to let motherhood interfere with her writing. In the fall of 1999, while Lucy Jane was still in the hospital, Wendy gave the play to André. He wasn’t sure if its complex structure could work; the drama moves back and forth in time, with the same actors playing the contemporary characters and their Victorian counterparts. But then he and Wendy talked about how it might be staged. She told him how, after Sandra died, she’d spent a great deal of time at her beloved New York City Ballet, where Sandra had first taken her as a child. After watching a performance of
Vienna Waltzes,
Wendy believed she saw a way to structure the play, as a dance, melding past and present.

André was willing to be convinced. He began to see the potential for something haunting and evocative and sent the play to Dan Sullivan, who was directing a show in San Diego.

Sullivan politely demurred. He recognized undercurrents of bitterness in the play that weren’t explained by the dramatic action. “I was just a little worried,” he said. “I think the entire play was an act of revenge. I think it was. When I read the play, I sort of recognized that. I wasn’t sure if that kind of anger is a reason to do a play.”

Undeterred, André proceeded with a New York production. The idea for
Old Money
had occurred to Wendy a few years earlier. She was at a dinner party she thought had “all the trappings of a new gilded age.”

She described the table setting:

“There were a bowl of three dozen roses bunched so closely in a ponytail that each petal skimmed another; amusing jelly beans in silver thimbles; and pomegranates worthy of a Dutch still life masterfully dotting the tablecloth, as if after the meal we could all play croquet.”

One of the dinner guests was Harvey Weinstein, the corpulent cofounder of Miramax Films, known as a brilliant producer and a potty-mouthed bully. The subject of female playwrights came up. Weinstein mentioned a handful of those he admired, a list that didn’t include Wendy, who was sitting right there.

Weinstein had become a symbol of Wendy’s ongoing irritation with Hollywood. She’d had some success there:
The Heidi Chronicles
became a television movie, starring Jamie Lee Curtis, and so did
An American Daughter,
with Christine Lahti. There was
The Object of My Affection.
She earned nice money writing scripts that were never produced. But like many playwrights before her, Wendy found more frustration than satisfaction in her foray into television and movies. The money was good, but every dollar earned took a cut of one’s self-worth.

Though she’d traveled to Los Angeles many times over the years, she never felt at home there. Revenge did indeed seem to be her initial inspiration for
Old Money.
Her Harvey Weinstein character is a vulgar Hollywood producer named Sid Nercessian, summed up by the way he describes the horrors of vacationing in Nantucket:

“There’s no fucking food!” he says. “Every meal is corn and lobster buried in sand! Why do they do that? These people are not fucking whalers. They’re Jews!”

Despite his complaints he has just bought two adjoining properties, on which he plans to build a thirty-six-room summer home, in violation of the island’s more modest architectural integrity.

The Wendy character in
Old Money
is Saulina Webb, Ovid’s aunt, a fifty-four-year-old noted sculptor, who is feeling that her time may be past, depressed because a recent piece in the
New Yorker
called her type of feminist art “dated and retro.” In a nod to her old foe Robert Brustein, Wendy makes the author of the fictional article the dean of the Yale School of Art.

She uses the profane Weinstein-like producer to express her dismay over the crassness of Bruce’s money world. But toward the Bruce stand-in—Ovid’s father, Jeffrey Bernstein—her scolding is gentler, more disappointed than disgusted.

“Your father is a master at playing the world to his advantage,” Saulina, the feminist sculptor, tells her nephew Ovid, and then she invokes his father’s lost idealism.

“When your dad and I were in college, this house would have been the last place he’d imagine himself living in,” she says. “It was his idea for us to teach together in that Head Start program. In those days your dad would have ripped this party to shreds.”

Saulina expresses Wendy’s disapproval, yet the playwright herself was a frequent guest at parties exactly like that. Mark Brokaw, the play’s director, accompanied her to one of them, on a research trip to Cranberry Dune, where Bruce and Claude were throwing their annual summer party. When they arrived at the Hamptons estate, Brokaw was struck by the magnificent vista—the green lawn sloping downward, dune disappearing into the ocean, tables loaded with luscious delicacies, children dotting the painterly landscape as though placed by an artist’s hand. Brokaw—a graduate of the Yale Drama School—had long ago left the farm where he grew up outside Aledo, Illinois, but he felt like a gangly rube who had wandered onto the set of
The Great Gatsby.

Wendy led him inside to a wing of the house with an all-glass front, offering a window onto the scene. They sank into large, comfortable chairs and put their feet up on ottomans. Wendy began pointing out who was who, some recognizable to Brokaw—like Caroline Kennedy—most not.

In both
Old Money
and the novel she soon began working on,
Elements of Style,
the Wendy character is an idealist trying to survive in a world populated by people obsessed by money and status. Saulina is an artist; Frankie Weissman, the protagonist in
Elements of Style,
is a pediatrician, who divides her practice between the very rich and the very poor. Yet in real life, though Wendy maintained long-standing friendships, she gravitated toward the world of privilege. Lucy Jane was less than a year old when Wendy began worrying about whether she would get into Brearley or not. Even now she was haunted by the old specter of superior-inferior.

Mark Brokaw felt
Old Money
had a larger meaning for Wendy.

“She was writing a play about children,” he said. “Not about having a child, but what do you pass on? What do you struggle to leave behind? What is important? She was looking at two different centuries, and what power was, moving from money and class to the culture of celebrity.”

Perhaps because she didn’t know exactly where she stood on these questions,
Old Money
is diffuse. Both Wendy and Brokaw recognized the problems that had to be overcome in a densely populated drama, with many shifts in time and point of view. Where was the center of the drama? They never solved these critical issues, which ended up swamping the enterprise.