Wendy Wasserstein in Neverland
When Wendy Wasserstein died in 2006 at the age of 55, the world lost a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright whose best works—the plays Isn’t It Romantic, The Heidi Chronicles and The Sisters Rosensweig, and the essay collection Shiksa Goddess—served up powerful, illuminating and often controversial representations of the lives and concerns of contemporary Jewish women. (Numerous writers have observed that her plays and autobiographical essays laid the groundwork for Sex and the City.) Her death was a shock to the theater community, and Broadway lights were dimmed in her honor. Even many of her close friends had not realized how seriously ill she had been with lymphoma. But then, Wendy was a keeper of many secrets.
Just how many secrets there were, and how extraordinarily compartmentalized Wendy Wasserstein’s complex life actually was, are at the heart of Julie Salamon’s readable, often poignant
biography. She was granted unrestricted access to private papers, letters and journals by Wasserstein’s family and literary executors. She also conducted nearly 300 interviews with family members, colleagues and the dozens of people who each believed they were Wendy Wasserstein’s “best friend.”
Her biography is a star-studded festival of theater lore interleaved with a nuanced portrait of a Jewish family that lived a spectacular version of the familiar 20th-century story, in which the children of immigrants thrive and succeed, even as they assimilate and trade aspects of their heritage for the traditions of mainstream American culture. The Wasserstein children made their marks during their forcefully demanding lives: Wendy’s sister Sandra (who provided inspiration for The Sisters Rosensweig) was a pioneering marketing executive who held powerful positions seldom occupied by women at General Foods, American Express and Citicorp, before her death of breast cancer in 1997 at age 60. Wendy’s brother Bruce, a titan of finance and investment banking, was known for engineering numerous hostile takeovers in the 1980s. He was the chairman and chief executive of the financial advisory and management firm Lazard when he died unexpectedly at age 61 in 2009.
Wendy Wasserstein “used humor as a dodge, intimacy as a smokescreen,” Salamon writes, describing how the pudgy, giggling, self-effacing playwright (dubbed “a vicious dumpling” by one of her friends) mined real-life experiences for her plays. Often she shocked the people she knew, who saw themselves unexpectedly represented with deadly precision on stage. She also invented and reconfigured many aspects of her life story for her personal essays.
“Through drama she told many truths,” Salamon writes. “She was covert as a spy, parceling out information to a host of confidants, allowing each of them to believe that he or she alone had access to the inner sanctum. Only later did they realize that Wasserstein had constructed her life as a giant game of Clue, full of hidden connections and compartmentalized players.”
Wendy was born in Brooklyn to Polish immigrants—Morris Wasserstein, a successful textile and ribbon manufacturer who was said to have invented velveteen (in fact, he held a patent for a lucrative velveteen manufacturing process) and the former Lola Schleifer, a colorful and difficult mother who took as many as four dance classes a day and often spent her days in a leotard, showing off her slender body. Wendy was the baby of the family. Like her older brother Bruce and two sisters, Sandra and Georgette, she attended Yeshiva of Flatbush, where she was cast as Queen Esther in the Purim play. Determined to distinguish himself, Morris drove a Jaguar, following his son Bruce’s advice not to be one of the “Cadillac Jews” of Brooklyn.
The family later moved to Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and Wendy attended Mount Holyoke College. As a Jewish girl from Brooklyn, she felt like an outsider among the mainly WASP students, “bright women who seemed desperate to land a husband.” These years would inspire her first significant play, Uncommon Women and Others. She was admitted to business school but attended the Yale School of Drama (she called it “The Yale School of Trauma”), where she met many of the people who would be her closest friends and colleagues for the rest of her life, from actor Christopher Durang and costume designer William Ivey Long to actress Meryl Streep and playwright Terrence McNally (a roster that reads like a short list of prominent theater consultants for use in case of an emergency).
Lola and Morris Wasserstein were, Salamon writes, “immigrants who’d had the brains and ambition to become what they believed they should be (successful Americans), not what they had been (Jewish outcasts). They took their children to see the Broadway musicals that celebrated these notions far more often than they took them to synagogue. They displayed no nostalgia for the past, only intense hunger for the future.”
Morris did not have a bar mitzvah (one story tells of a rabbi at his Lower East Side yeshiva hitting him, which made him switch to a public school), and the Wasserstein family didn’t belong to a synagogue. They gathered for Passover seders and celebrated Hanukkah with latkes and dreidl playing and trips to Ohrbach’s department store for gifts. Lola’s religious education was evidently minimal as well, though her father was a Hebrew school principal; at her son’s bar mitzvah, she was observed holding the Hebrew prayer book upside-down, and at her daughter Georgette’s wedding reception she served shrimp.
When Lola Wasserstein wasn’t playing the part of the classic Jewish mother—Wendy’s Pulitzer Prize for The Heidi Chronicles prompted Lola to ask, “Is that as good as a Tony?”—she was turning all the Jewish mother clichés as upside-down as the prayer book. Astonishingly undomestic, Lola never cleaned her house and didn’t care if it was dirty. She never, ever cooked. The family went to restaurants or ordered in for every meal, including for Passover and Thanksgiving.
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Lola’s complete lack of ordinary domesticity or maternal caretaking had its consequences. Wendy was known for her disheveled appearance, and was overweight for most of her life, starting in childhood. A friend said that Wendy “was one of the least domestic people I’ve ever met. 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.”
“Being Jewish was central to Wendy’s identity,” Salamon writes. “But religious beliefs eluded her. She rarely missed going to synagogue for the High Holidays but otherwise almost never attended services. She had internalized the mixed messages she had received as a child, being sent to yeshiva and then hearing Lola mock Jewish rituals at home. Lola’s motto was ‘God helps those who help themselves.’”
Lola badgered Wendy for years about marrying and producing grandchildren, but Wendy never married, though she would have liked to, and she called numerous men, many of them gay, “my husband.” She had several relationships with gay and bisexual men, and in her 40s she embarked on fertility treatments with William Ivey Long as the sperm donor, but they were not successful. She surprised almost everyone, including her closest friends, by having a baby, whose paternity she never identified, at age 48, when her health was already precarious.
There are many lost boys in the story of Wendy Wasserstein’s life, from the original lost boys of the J.M. Barrie play Peter Pan, which inspired her own name, to a mysterious secret brother, Abner Wasserstein, who was institutionalized and never mentioned, though Lola visited him regularly. Lola had another secret, too: that she had been married to Morris’s brother George, who died young. He, not Morris, was the father of her two oldest children. All families have secrets, but just as the Wasserstein children were exceptionally accomplished, so, too, were the Wasserstein family secrets exceptionally bizarre and extreme. Wendy and the Lost Boys is full of laughs and full of anguish. It might remind you of a Wendy Wasserstein play.
Katharine Weber is the author of five novels, most recently, True Confections, and a just-published memoir, The Memory of All That: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and My Family’s Legacy of Infidelities.
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