Wendy and The Lost Boys by Julie Salamon

More Than You Ever Wanted To Know About Wendy Wasserstein. 4 Stars Wendy Wasserstein was a Pulitzer Prize winning Jewish female playwrite who was also a tragic figure. Ms. Wasserstein sought but never found a soul mate and husband who both loved her and that she could love and respect. Wendy wanted an alpha male. In some ways she was an alpha female. However, she was unattractive, overweight and slovenly. Sadly without physical attraction alpha males were not likely to seek her out for romance. Wendy had a poor self image of her physical traits courtesy of her often cruelly critical mother. Two men did want to marry Wendy, but they were not the alpha males she sought and she turned them down. She tries to rationalize especially with her Pulitzer winning play, The Heidi Chronicles, that her success was too intimidating for similarly high powered males. They did not wish to share the spotlight. She regularly chose men who were unavailable in that they were married like Frank Rich or they were gay. Often those men told her how much they loved her and bemoaned the fact that they could not have a deep romantic relationship with her. They really didn’t want that kind of relationship with her and they used the situations as excuses. Wendy’s similarly successful sister Sandra had two marriages and two daughters. Sandra was a high powered executive in Fortune 500 companies who died of cancer in her 50’s. She was not beautiful nor was she slender. She was average looking and of normal weight. However, she pulled herself together well and was sufficiently attractive to attract two alpha males. Her brother Bruce was homely, but he was very rich from his own investment banker accomplishments. He was an alpha-male despite his looks and attracted four alpha female wives. Wendy believed that had Frank Rich been unattached, he would have made a good mate for her. He often stated he loved her without qualifying that love as brotherly. Frank Rich was the Times drama critic. Wendy believed he loved her in a romantic way but would not betray his wife or at least that is how it seemed in the book. However, when he later divorced and had no interest in a romantic relationship with her, Wendy must have been seriously disappointed. One can only imagine how she felt when he remarried. She and some of her gay male friends toyed with marrying and creating a family even while giving up a satisfying sexual relationship. Cole Porter married but he kept his dalliances with his male friends. His wife was aware of them and had agreed to a marriage with these sorts of compromises. Other Hollywood and Broadway types entered into similar relationships so that publically they could stay in the closet before and during this era. However, Wendy could have done more to help herself. She lived in a city with a plethora of stylists, plastic surgeons, weight loss gurus, hair dressers and make- up artists, and she had the money to hire them. She did not even have one especially bad feature like an out sized nose. Yet she threw in the towel appearing at rehearsals unwashed, uncombed and in her pajamas. These destructive actions did nothing but hurt her further. Additionally, these were signs that she was seriously depressed. It is unclear from the biography whether or not she sought and obtained good quality psychotherapy, but she could have used it. She was also cruel to her friends. Her friends would confide in her. She would invite them to a production of one of her plays where she would parade their inner most thoughts and weaknesses before the public. She did this without warning and had no qualms about perpetrating these betrayals. Her popularity arose from the ground breaking subjects of her plays. She wrote about feminism and the fact that women were now successful in previously male dominated professions. She wrote about AIDS when no one before her had. Today her plays would be dated, but then they were riotously funny and eye opening at the time. Much was made of her secretiveness and compartmentalizing of her friends and relationships. I didn’t find it all that strange nor did I find her that secretive. Celebrities of which she was one are often circumspect about their private lives for fear of seeing it plastered on page 6 of the local paper. However, her own family was secretive. That is how she was raised. Finally, Wendy who wanted a child became pregnant at 48 with fertility treatments and artificial insemination. Sadly, shortly after her child was born she was diagnosed with cancer and she died when her daughter Lucy Jane was 8 years old. Some have suggested that her fertility treatments probably triggered the cancer. The book goes to great pains to deny this, but the hormone treatments must have set fire to whatever cancer cells were lurking latently in Wendy’s body. For years she waited for the right man and the right time in her career to become pregnant. When it appeared that time was running out and she would never find a suitable mate, she took the plunge herself. The identity of Lucy Jane’s father was never revealed. Many who knew of her and bought the book did so hoping to learn the man’s name. They were sadly disappointed. It is possible that the author knew the man’s name but sought to keep it private out of respect for Wendy and her small orphaned daughter. It was the right thing to do. The identity of the father would have made no difference in the book’s portrayal of its subject. Had Wendy become pregnant in her 30’s which she could have done financially, it is possible she could have become pregnant without the fertility treatments. However, she waited too long. It is not easy to become pregnant at 48. Had she become pregnant without all the late in age fertility treatments she probably would have avoided suffering from cancer so young. The New York Times gave a kind though not enthusiastic review of this biography. Surely, book review authors are intimidated when writing reviews of someone who might in the future be responsible for the author’s biography. One should keep this in mind when reading reviews of biographies of other professional writers. I did not find this book a chore to read. However, it was way more about Wendy than I ever wanted to know. Had this not been a book club selection, I would not have read it. It was at least 100 pages too long.