Wendy and the Lost Boys (35 page)

“As election year arrived, and with it the prospect of both a political and generational turnover in American life, my journalistic focus widened,” he wrote in a farewell column called “Exit the Critic.” “I found myself more interested in writing about the world itself rather than just the theater’s version of that world.” Wendy had been with him and his wife, Alex, and their friend Michiko Kakutani
¹⁵
as he contemplated what his debut topic should be for the new op-ed column.

Many other friends had achieved prominent positions in the establishment. André was ensconced at Lincoln Center. Peter Parnell eventually moved to Los Angeles, where in 1999 he became a coproducer on
The West
Wing,
a television series that mesmerized the country with its insider view of a fictional White House.

Wendy’s inspiration for
An American Daughter
was “Nannygate,” the political mess that followed Bill Clinton’s nomination of Zoë Baird, a Washington lawyer, as attorney general. During her Senate confirmation hearings, the information emerged that she had hired illegal aliens for child care (and hadn’t paid Social Security taxes for their work). Baird eventually removed her name from consideration.

Wendy felt Baird was a scapegoat, like Hillary Clinton, who had recently been lambasted for admitting on national television that she didn’t want to stay home and bake cookies—and was next seen wearing a demure headband, holding her husband’s hand.

She filled file folders with news reports and commentary about Zoë Baird. She debriefed her well-placed media friends, people like Donald Graham, Walter Shapiro who wrote for
Time,
Charlie Rose, Peter Schweitzer of CBS. Mike Kinsley of
Slate
and the
New Republic
threw a party, specifically to introduce her to Washington types, part of her research.

With
An American Daughter,
she hoped to expand her range, but she was also seeking refuge from the daunting realities of life. “I wanted to organize the sadness, frustration, and truth of it into play form,” she wrote.

As she worked, her sister Sandra’s cancer was becoming more virulent.

Sandra had left Citicorp three years earlier, after her trip with Wendy to Poland, to take a less taxing position as a management consultant. But she never quit working, not even when she was sick enough to be hospitalized. When her hair fell out, she wore wigs and an attitude that dared anyone to mention her physical changes.

“She would work from the hospital and tell the nurses to get out when she was on conference calls,” said Samantha, the younger daughter. “She used to think that walking around with the wig, no one would notice. And given the guys she worked with, it’s entirely possible they didn’t. That’s not how they looked at her.”

Sandra didn’t hide her illness from her daughters, nor did she dwell on it. She kept her doctors’ appointments and went about her business.

“The denial was very, very strong,” said Samantha. “She found the entire thing a massive inconvenience. I think the general feeling was, if you don’t think about it or talk about it, everyone can get on with their lives.”

Sandra made it clear that she expected her daughters to follow her example regarding her illness.

“To the extent my mother would get personal about that stuff, she would tell us we were not under any circumstances to remember her as a sick person,” Samantha said. “That’s what she was afraid of. . . . Her focus was to not pay attention to it.”

“You absolutely can’t think of me this way,” Sandra instructed her daughters, and then changed the subject. “Let’s go to the theater.”

But there came a time when Sandra couldn’t avoid paying attention. While Wendy was working on the screenplay for
The Object of My Affection
and an early draft of
An American Daughter,
she received a call from Sandra, who was crying.

“They’ve found cancer in my brain,” she told her sister.

“When do you next see my husband?” Wendy asked. She always referred to Sandra’s oncologist as her husband, because it made Sandra laugh.

It worked. Sandra laughed.

She brought Wendy with her to an appointment with her oncologist, who took his patient’s sister aside. “I’ve never seen such a classic case of denial,” he told Wendy. “I would be surprised if your sister was around in six months.”

Sandra proved him wrong. In 1997, a year later, while Wendy was in Seattle, for a workshop production of
An American Daughter,
she received a call from Sandra.

“I’ve stumped the star,” Sandra said triumphantly. To her doctor’s amazement, Sandra’s cancer markers had improved. She was very much alive.

Wendy was heartened by the news. The thought of losing Sandra terrified her. Her big sister remained Wendy’s polestar, a valued mother figure, who balanced high standards with encouragement, ambition with realism, hauteur with discernible love.

“In many ways my mother was very much the anti-Lola and intentionally so,” said Samantha Schweitzer. “She chose an opposite path. She moved to London instead of staying in New York. She often talked about how messy her parents’ house was. When she got to college, she said, ‘I am never living that way again.’ She wanted things to be tidy and clean and efficient. She contained Lola, talking to her on Sunday mornings. It was a very tightly controlled, organized life.”

Sandra’s illness had an obvious effect on Wendy. Meryl Streep, playing the lead during the Seattle workshop, observed a noticeable change in the playwright’s behavior. The celebrated actress had never understood why Wendy, one of the few writers to comment lucidly on the failures of the women’s movement, consistently deferred in conversation to men and talked in a baby voice. Why was Wendy so often girlie and giddy, as though apologizing for her rigorous judgment? In Seattle, Streep saw a Wendy she hadn’t met before.

“Her voice dropped two octaves . . . she was unequivocal in her certainty of what she wanted any given moment to convey, who spoke without all the furbelows and giggles of the social Wendy that I knew,” said Streep. “And it was thrilling to be in the room with her.”

Streep was even more impressed as she watched Wendy in action. She sat in the front row, next to Dan Sullivan, furiously writing and taking notes during the performances, then bringing back ruthlessly edited pages from her hotel the next day.

“It was formidable, and serious, and exacting work,” the actress said, with evident admiration.

The admiration was mutual. Wendy had ranked Meryl number eight on her list of “Perfect Women Who Are Bearable.”

“She’ll never pass you a poison apple,” Wendy wrote. “Meryl just goes about her business.”

Wendy was disappointed when Streep declined to sign on for the Broadway production of
An American Daughter
the following year, even though the lead role was played by Kate Nelligan, a celebrated theater actress. Nelligan called Wendy into her dressing room on opening night.

“Did you know this play would change your life?” Nelligan asked. “Now you will be taken seriously as a playwright.”

Nelligan was a far better performer than prognosticator. With few exceptions, the play was taken apart by critics.

Most crushing was the slap from the
New York Times. “
Themes (big themes), relationships (deep and confusing ones), plot complications (of the melodramatic variety) are piled to the toppling point, most of them never satisfactorily defined,” wrote Ben Brantley, who had succeeded Frank Rich as chief critic. “Neither Dan Sullivan’s chipper, keep-it-moving direction nor Ms. Wasserstein’s justly famed ear for dialogue and bonedeep sense of craft can conceal the feeling that she doesn’t know entirely where she’s heading or how to get there.”

Lloyd Rose of the
Washington Post,
hadn’t warmed to
The Sisters Rosensweig
and liked this play less. “No doubt about it, Wendy Wasserstein is cute,” was the reviewer’s hope-crushing opening line. “In her latest play ‘An American Daughter,’ which opened last night on Broadway, she comes up with one charming witticism after another. . . . Wasserstein even comes up with a companion cliché for soccer moms: ‘fast-food dads.’ These are beguilingly clever remarks. If only there were a play to go with them.”

Wendy had no time to absorb the resounding rejection. She felt as though she had little control over anything—neither the large questions she’d attempted to grapple with onstage nor her sister’s life-and-death struggle. On April 15, 1997, two days after the play’s opening, Wendy flew to Paris with Sandra and her daughters, to gather with Bruce’s family and Lola and Morris for a Passover dinner at the Ritz. Sandra was frail and needed support to climb stairs.

That August, Wendy accompanied Sandra to London, to celebrate her sister’s sixtieth birthday with an old friend of Sandra’s from her London days.

By November the cancer had advanced to Sandra’s liver. She refused to stop treatment, asking for more chemotherapy, continuing to work.

Jenifer, recently married, was torn between her job, her new husband, and her mother. Samantha took a semester away from graduate school to be home.

Nick Hytner had begun filming
The Object of My Affection,
with a cast that promised to bring the movie a lot of attention: Jennifer Aniston, who had become internationally famous as a star of
Friends,
the NBC television series, and Paul Rudd, who had become a teenage heartthrob after his performance in the 1995 film
Clueless.

For Samantha’s twenty-fifth birthday celebration, Hytner and Wendy arranged for Rudd to show up at the restaurant for dessert. The young woman had just found out that her mother’s cancer had spread to her liver and pancreas. The surprise visit from Rudd gave her momentary respite from the overwhelming sadness.

T
hroughout all this, Wendy had been actively pursuing her quest to have a baby, confiding in very few people.

The only family member to know was Sandra, who insisted on taking Wendy to surgery for polyps, even though Sandra had pins in her hips by then and had no feeling in her hands, due to a neuropathy that developed from chemotherapy. Sandra’s stoicism reinforced Wendy’s feeling of helplessness, and led her to agonize over the choices she’d made.

“I thought of Sandra valiantly going to work each day in her wigs and never mentioning her ongoing struggle,” she wrote. “Comparatively, I felt spoiled and ridiculous. I was convinced that every photo of a baby in the doctor’s office was a plot to negate my generation’s sense of worth. Every fertility failure a reminder that for every door you’ve opened there’ll be one slammed right in your face. I was now weeping uncontrollably. I couldn’t tell if it was the endless injections, the disappointments, or the fear that any buoyant hopefulness I harbored was now completely dissipated.”

Ken Cassillo took care of the paperwork until he was succeeded by Angela Trento. Cathy Graham provided the names of fertility specialists and adoption lawyers. Cassillo went with Wendy to visit a lawyer who specialized in adoptions from Eastern Europe, because she thought they would share similar roots. That line of inquiry ended when news reports raised concerns about health issues suffered by Eastern European babies whose birth mothers had been exposed to nuclear fallout.

For much of her prospecting in the surreal, experimental world of fertility treatment, she had one steady, silent partner: William Ivey Long.

He experienced the humiliation of having a “lady doctor” tell him he had low-quality sperm. In layman’s terms, his sperm was blunt and couldn’t penetrate the egg. He and Wendy fondly referred to his sperm as “helmet heads.”

They learned about intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), which isolated sperm and directly injected it into a woman’s egg to create a fertilized embryo. “I paid for all these treatments to help the little losers in,” said William.

They tried fertilizing Wendy’s eggs and then tried with eggs they purchased through the fertility doctor. They made batches of fertilized eggs to be frozen, some with William’s sperm and some from an anonymous donor. They chose him together, after reading descriptions in the catalog at the fertility doctor’s office.

They visited cancer specialists together, armed with Sandra’s medical history, to see if it would be safe for Wendy to become pregnant. William comforted Wendy when she became pregnant but then miscarried, several times, the fertilized eggs failing to implant.

He flew with her to Boca Raton to meet an adoption lawyer and to California to meet a possible surrogate mother. They talked about the little girl—or boy—they might create, though Wendy made it clear the baby would be hers to raise, while assuring William he would be involved. He accompanied her to the drugstore on Central Park West, where the pharmacist would give her injections meant to increase her egg production.

And then it stopped. Wendy told him she wasn’t going to try anymore. “I’m sorry, William, it’s not working,” she told him. “I know you wanted this as much as I did.”

There were no more calls for visits to doctors, no more appointments with lawyers or possible surrogate mothers, no more speculation on the men who lay behind the numbers in the fertility catalogs. When William didn’t hear from Wendy for a while, he didn’t think much of it. Both of them were exhausted by years of failure. They were both busy, on the road following the demands of their careers. It had always been like that. The arduous pursuit of motherhood, which for many women becomes a full-time preoccupation, was something Wendy seemed to fit into her schedule.

William didn’t know that Wendy was deliberately avoiding him. He didn’t realize that he had inadvertently insulted her when he’d mentioned that a Yale classmate had also asked him to donate sperm. Wendy encouraged him to try but then told another friend she was angry at him. Ultimately, he didn’t even make the donation.

Later, he said, he felt that Wendy was just looking for an excuse, a way out. She wanted her baby to be hers and no one else’s.