Wendy and the Lost Boys (46 page)

In her business, Rosenthal was accustomed to dealing with hysteria. “The intern doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” she said firmly. “I’ll be there in five minutes.”

She and Jeremy Strong remained with Wendy until Rhoda Brooks arrived, to spend the night in the room. Rhoda didn’t want to; she hadn’t yet recuperated from her mother’s death a few months earlier. But she couldn’t say no to Wendy.

Both she and Jane Rosenthal broached the subject of talking to Lucy. “I’m not like that,” Wendy snapped.

But Emmy the nanny said that Wendy tried to tell Lucy something that evening. “I need to explain a few things to you,” Wendy said, but Lucy was her mother’s daughter. “I don’t want to hear it,” she said. Emmy believed that even though Lucy was only six, she understood.

That night, at home, Emmy lay in bed next to Lucy as she went to sleep.

“My mom is going to die,” Emmy heard Lucy say.

Emmy replied carefully. “Doctors are going to give her medicine. We’re going to see how it works. You don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“I know,” Lucy said. “My mom is going to die.”

Emmy wanted to reassure her but didn’t know how.

The following morning, November 23, Claude, Wendy’s sister-in-law, came with Sandra’s daughter Samantha to see Wendy before the port was put in place. Bruce wasn’t there; he was sick, with bronchitis, possibly pneumonia.

Wendy told Claude that she’d been thinking about who should care for Lucy if things went badly. A few years earlier, Wendy had designated her niece Pam, Bruce and Chris’s daughter, as Lucy’s legal guardian and Sandra’s daughter Samantha as backup, thinking of a far-off time—maybe never—not seriously considering the responsibility attached.

But now, she told Claude, she realized that her nieces were young single women, not ready to take care of someone else’s child. Lucy needed a mother and father, Wendy said. She asked Claude if she and Bruce would raise Lucy if Wendy was no longer there.

Claude didn’t know what to say. For years Wendy had kept the family at bay, not disclosing details of her illness. Like her friends, family members knew that if they probed too deeply, they would be shut out. With the call from the Mayo Clinic, the wall had broken. The family swooped in, trying to comprehend the situation and take control of it.

Claude’s first reaction was to reassure Wendy. “It’s going to be fine!” she said. “The treatment is going to work.”

The previous summer, when Wendy visited Claude and Bruce in the Hamptons, Claude sensed that Wendy might be testing her, with those probing conversations about their children. “I felt she must be worried about being a mommy and how long she’ll be a mommy and what will happen if she doesn’t get healthier,” Claude said.

Claude told a friend she believed that she and Bruce would end up with Lucy, but she didn’t think it would happen this soon. Her own mother had survived cancer several times; the doctor treating Wendy at Sloan-Kettering had saved a friend of Claude’s. Until now Claude hadn’t imagined Wendy actually dying.

She realized what Wendy needed to hear. “Of course we’ll take Lucy,” she said. “Of course.”

Even then she didn’t believe she would be asked to fulfill her promise immediately.

“I was hoping for the best,” she said, “that she would be well and the treatment would work and maybe she’ll be in remission and have five years or ten years—that’s a big chunk of a child’s growth.”

Later that morning Wendy was with Rhoda, waiting for the port to be inserted. A nurse came in and asked Wendy if she had a health-care proxy. There was a form at home that designated Bruce and Pam. But the nurse advised having another proxy available at the hospital. “You should,” she said ominously, “when you are having a procedure.”

Wendy looked at Rhoda, who prayed that her friend wouldn’t ask her.

She didn’t have to worry. Wendy told the nurse that her proxy was Bruce.

At the end it was as it had been at the beginning: family first.

W
endy didn’t outswim the sharks. When the chemicals entered her brain, her vital signs began failing fast.

Bruce came to the hospital and behaved like a man accustomed to getting his way. Rhoda remembered, “He walked in that place with the loudest voice, shouting, ‘I’m in charge! I don’t care what it takes! I’ll keep her alive!’ ”

Bruce brushed past Wendy’s friends who were visiting. They were struck by his insensitivity.

Claude as well as Bruce’s children saw a man beset by grief.

“He just couldn’t stand to see her like that,” said Pam, who loved her father and always defended him.

Claude felt his suffering, though she understood the harsh reactions Bruce provoked in people. She had lived with him for a long time by then.

“He suffered,” she said. “Other people couldn’t understand his vulnerability.”

She didn’t blame Lola—not entirely. “It has to be a mix of everything,” she said, speaking of her husband and his siblings. “Genetics and environment and circumstances, all of it is in there. It’s all a mix. They’re just a little extreme in the humanity of it. We’re all out there trying, and we all fall, but they’re falling harder. They’re trying harder and getting further, but they’re also falling harder.”

Bruce dreaded the hospital and kept his visits short. He visited Lucy Jane alone, in Wendy’s apartment. He read her nursery stories, as he had for all his children when they were young, the way Sandra had read to him and Wendy back in Brooklyn.

Wendy’s illness came close to crushing Lola. After visiting Wendy in the hospital, she told a relative, “People think I’m blessed with my kids, but I’m cursed.”

For six weeks Wendy drifted between life and death, occasionally rousing to greet one of the many friends and relatives who came to see her. One day she came to consciousness and saw Jane Rosenthal and André at her bedside. To Jane she offered a shopping joke, about handbags, a familiar Wendy tactic, using wit to beat back sadness.

But she held out no false gaiety to André, her champion, who had given her so much happiness but also caused her much pain.

“Oh, André, please don’t make me write any more plays,” she said.

Even when desperately ill and barely conscious, Wendy knew how to reach her audience.

On January 30, 2006, she died, at age fifty-five.

The following day the news was reported on the front page of the
New York Times.
James Kaplan, her old boyfriend, was shocked but then thought of something that would amuse Wendy. “I thought, my God, when I knew her, if she’d known she would be on the front page of the
New York Times
when she died, she’d have come back to life!”

The lights of Broadway were dimmed in her honor.

A palpable sense of bereavement reverberated among the New York intelligentsia and well beyond, to the friends and strangers for whom Wendy Wasserstein had become a friendly touchstone. She didn’t preach from above but invited her public to join her perplexed, witty contemplation of the rapidly changing, confusing times in which they lived. Her characters moved in tandem with Baby Boomers as they aged, helping them—women in particular—sort out the shifting definitions and demands placed on their generation.

She addressed the conflicting goals of youthful ambition in
Uncommon Women and Others
and the changing relations between men and women in
Isn’t It Romantic.
With
The Heidi Chronicles,
she captured an essential dilemma: how political movements can thwart individual desire for personal fulfillment. In
Miami
and
The Sisters Rosensweig,
she grappled with the powerful pull of family, even for those children seeking a wider world. She looked to larger issues of responsibility and power in
An American Daughter
and
Old Money.
Her final plays,
Welcome to My Rash
and
Third,
dealt with aging, the breakdown of body and beliefs, questions of legacy.

Casting herself as the amiable outsider who could deliver tough messages with humor and warmth, she reinforced these dramatic themes through her essays and public appearances, her work with Open Doors, and her friendships. In doing so she became a cultural phenomenon while giving the impression that she was an unassuming part of the crowd.

In the week following her death, the
New York Times
ran five separate articles about Wendy, including an affectionate column by Gail Collins, the editorial-page editor, first woman to have held the job at the
Times.
Newspapers around the country ran articles and personal assessments, and in the
New Yorker,
Paul Rudnick remembered his Yale friend in a “Talk of the Town” piece.

Even critics who didn’t like her work felt compelled to weigh in.

“I didn’t think much of any of Wasserstein’s plays, and I dreaded having to say so in print, since she was an exceedingly nice lady,” wrote Terry Teachout, the
Wall Street Journal
’s drama critic, in his blog.

But most of the commentary carried the ache of personal loss. “She was observing life as we were living it,” said Linda Winer,
Newsday
’s theater critic, on National Public Radio. “And I’m finding it just very, very difficult to process the idea that there aren’t going to be any more Wendy Wasserstein plays.”

Her memorial service, held at Lincoln Center on March 13, 2006, was covered as a news event in the
New York Times.
The reporter described the mourners as “scores of Broadway’s biggest stars and backstage players, many of whom counted Ms. Wasserstein—whose social calendar might include everything from nights at the opera to days at the mall—as an old, and close, friend.”

Many luminaries spoke or performed: playwrights Terrence McNally, William Finn, and Christopher Durang; actors Meryl Streep, Joan Allen, and Swoosie Kurtz; and directors Daniel Sullivan, André Bishop, and James Lapine. But the room was also filled with the nonfamous, old friends from every part of Wendy’s life, and fans who knew her only through her writing.

In subsequent months friends from different spheres began to talk—and to discover that each of them knew a slightly different version of Wendy. They discovered how well she had deflected scrutiny with the flattering mirror she placed in front of them.

“How could the most public artist in New York keep so much locked up?” Frank Rich wrote at the end of 2006, in the
Times
’s year-end roundup of well-known people who had died that year. “I don’t think I was the only friend who felt I had somehow failed to see Wendy whole. And who wondered if I had let her down in some profound way. I grieve as much for the Wendy I didn’t know as the Wendy I did.”

W
endy Wasserstein’s plays were predictive, as though she were mapping her future.
Uncommon Women and Others
ends with large youthful dreams, of being “pretty fucking amazing.”
Isn’t It Romantic
concludes after Janie Blumberg, Wasserstein’s heroine, decides not to conform to the conventional demands of society, represented by her boyfriend and her parents; in the final scene, Janie is dancing alone. Heidi of
The Heidi Chronicles
seeks release from her existential angst by becoming a single mother. In
Third,
the last Wasserstein play, the playwright incorporated themes from
King Lear—
Lear, who has to suffer the anguish of watching his youngest and most beloved daughter die.

Lola outlived Wendy, but not for long. Eighteen months after her youngest daughter’s death, Lola attended her granddaughter Samantha’s wedding, which took place in Claude and Bruce’s home in the Hamptons. Lola bought a new dress and discussed her makeup with Georgette. She had hurt her foot and couldn’t dance at the party, but she stomped her cane to the beat of the music.

The following Friday, June 15, 2007, Melissa Levis, Georgette’s younger daughter, took Lola to the doctor for a checkup. She received a clean bill of health.

The next day Melissa—who lived nearby—received a telephone call from Lola’s doorman. Someone had reported that Lola’s door was open and her mail was scattered on the floor outside her apartment. Melissa found her grandmother undressed, on the floor by her bed, curled up as though taking a nap.

Georgette felt that her mother’s death began the day Wendy died. “My mother died of a broken heart,” she said.

The postscript to Wendy’s life contained strange twists of fate and unexpected reconciliations, the kind she might have written.

Georgette, having become Abner’s guardian, reunited with her brother after more than fifty years and began to see him a few times a year. The familial embrace of the long-lost brother and uncle extended to the next generations. Three years after Wendy died, Abner came to New York with a group from Rochester to watch a Yankees game. An aide took him to a restaurant on the Upper East Side to meet members of his family who had been strangers—Bruce’s daughter, Pam, and Georgette’s daughters, Tajlei and Melissa, along with Tajlei’s son, Theo. Within two years, Abner died at age seventy.

As for Lucy Jane, she went to live with Bruce and Claude, whom she called Mommy and Daddy. Claude oversaw the delicate transition, trying to respect Wendy’s wishes while doing what she felt was best for Lucy. She fired Emmy, Lucy’s nanny, and then tried to manage the many friends of Wendy who wanted to be close to her daughter.

Claude knew that some were upset by the limits she placed on visits, but she couldn’t worry about the adults. “I had a house afire,” she said. “I was putting out fires. You prioritize. Triage. I was doing what was best for this little girl. I’m sure they’ve had a big adjustment. I know they’ve had their issues. But at the end of the day, that’s not what Wendy picked. At the end of the day, she picked me and my values. She picked me and Bruce. We were a family.”

They were a family and then they weren’t. In December 2008, Bruce and Claude divorced. A month later he remarried. Eight months after that, Bruce Wasserstein died at age sixty-one of heart failure; the exact cause was kept private, in keeping with his lifelong practice.