Customer Reviews

Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I loved this book because I'm a woman in her mid-fifties who grew up passionate about New York, about the arts and theatre in New York, and about the "uncommonly" brave, witty theatrical voice, spirit and personage that was Wendy Wasserstein. I loved it as a Jewish woman--a working mother--raised, like Ms. Wasserstein, by a driven, secretive mother in a family that included a developmentally disabled brother. And I loved it because it made sense of the intersection of politics, psychology, business, journalism, culture, sexuality and even medicine in post World War II America. Julie Salamon does a masterful job of making not just the life of Ms. Wasserstein, but also her family, friends and the world in which she lived, vibrant and accessible. In this unfortunate age of excessive "dumbed down" exposure to insignificant celebrities' ridiculous antics, how utterly refreshing and gratifying to read about one actually worthy of attention, and in such an intelligent, well-researched, expansively and sensitively written format.

The Wendy I knew, in her student days and throughout her amazing but too-short career, appears in all her rumpled, talented, giggling and ultra-loyal best in Ms. Salamon's well-researched and beautifully-written bio. But it's the insecure, self-doubting, loved-but-unloved, overwhelmingly secretive Wendy about whom I knew nothing - Nothing - whom I'm meeting in this clear-cut, frank yet compassionate, brilliant character study. Wendy's unbelievable family, her lifelong and career-long Best Friends (but no husband, or acknowledged father to her daughter), and the blue-ribbon assemblage of the late 20th-century American theatre's movers and shakers, stars, producers and playwrights, are all brought fully dimensionally to life in Ms. Salamon's easy-to-read but highly literate prose. No Pulitzer-and-Tony-Award Winner ever had a life filled with more highs and lows, nor hid it so well, nor was fortunate enough to have had that life warmly gathered into the understanding hands of an author of this calibre. Wendy complained through her plays that women had been lied to, that they could Not "have it all." But here in "Wendy and the Lost Boys," WE have the opportunity to "have it all," all about Wendy's sad and happy, always intriguing life.

- - - - - Jim Cavanaugh, Emeritus Professor of Theatre Arts, Mount Holyoke College

Ms. Wasserstein's multiple plays and essays were among the first to give voice to the generation who entered college wearing dresses and graduated wearing jeans; who were sent to college to marry lawyers and graduated to become lawyers. Against this backdrop of Wasserstein's art and times, Ms. Salamon portrays a complex individual, who was the product of a complicated and achieving family. This is a significant work--sure to be a beach blanket staple in affluent summer communities this month and certain to be required reading for college students who want to understand women's history and their mothers' lives.

As a fan of WW, I wanted to like this book, but I couldn't. Salamon was approached to do the biography --- Wendy wasn't a natural interest of hers and I felt it showed. I had a chance to tell Ms. Salamon during a reading that she gave that I wasn't sure if she even liked WW. She readily agreed there were times she did and times she didn't, and if I had to guess which she did more I would say didn't. The early pages of the book read perfunctorily at times. I thought the theme of "secrecy" was overdone, overall -- everybody keeps secrets and Wendy's seemed reasonable given the times and more, given her parents and their immigration to the US. And finally, I thought the illness was poorly explored (and that may have been partly due to medical privacy laws). At times it felt like Wendy was battling cancer and other, unnamed diseases. I was surprised to be reading and stumble onto a reference to leg braces -- they weren't introduced, they were just suddenly on her, and I've never heard of leg braces being used when cancer weakens. When she finally went to the Mayo, she received what Salamon made seem like a full diagnosis for the first time -- yet there were plenty of doctor appointments in NYC. Were the NY doctors unable to diagnose her? There were times that Salamon slanted the facts to fit her themes. Her treatment of Mount Holyoke was one of those times. If you believe Salamon, the college went from being a social/marriage prep school to a hotbed of politics in a short two years, and it's ridiculous to think such a transformation was possible or that such a prestigious school was populated by sheep waiting for the right husband, until the times suddenly flipped a switch and empowered them.

This brilliant and moving book thrusts you into the creative process and zany life of a major theater icon who blasted her way through most of the glass ceilings in American theater using wit and an unerring ear for how women speak to their closest friends.

A gifted playwright who was the voice of so many struggling and juggling baby boom women, Wendy's own struggles as a daughter, sister and mother are among the most poignant aspects of this story. Having lived in Manhattan during Wendy's heyday and had the privilege of seeing many of her plays premiere at Playwrights Horizons, even the short-lived musical Miami, I was fascinated to hear about all her relationships with the leading theatrical lights of that era.

I really could not put this book down once I began. Now, I'm mourning her loss all over again, wondering what amazing plays she would have produced if she hadn't been cut down so young. This book really makes you contemplate the brevity of one's creative career, and how truly hard it is to make the kind of mark Wendy Wasserstein did. Now, I'm going to read some of the plays I didn't see, and read her essays.

Wendy Wasserstein surrounded herself with sycophants and a few loyal friends and family members. The sycophants are easy to spot because they seem to tread lightly while around Wendy. They are frozen out of Wendy's life for having the audacity to want to live their own lives and not pander to her whims, only to be drawn back into the fold when it's convenient for Wendy to have them near. Wendy comes across as the consummate controlling personality and the reader, who has never had the pleasure of knowing Wendy personally, is left thinking, "Why do these people put up with this crap?"

It was heartbreaking to learn about the years Wendy spent enduring fertility treatments in an effort to have a child. When she finally was blessed with a child, it seemed a surprise to her that "Motherhood" included actual parenting. The child was pawned off on nannies and assistants, spending no real quality time with Mommy except for some photo ops arranged with a few magazines. After all the years of yearning, it seemed attaining the dream was not all it was cracked up to be. Mind you, Wendy was beginning to suffer from the cancer that would eventually kill her and was not physically up to the task of taking care of the child.

This is another quibble I have with the book. A correlation was made between the fertility treatments and the cancer Wendy died from. It is possible there was a connection but it is equally possible there was simply a family predisposition since her elder sister also succumbed to cancer.

During a certain period in New York, Wendy was an important fixture and produced some interesting plays and other pieces, but to say she was a trailblazer for women of the Baby Boomer generation is disingenuous. Wendy did "talk the talk" but she did not "walk the walk" because, in the end, she surrendered to the old fashioned notion that a woman must have a child to be complete. Wendy was criticized for taking the easy way out in some of her plays, where the main character would give in to the precepts of society in the end, and Wendy was really no different from those characters she created: They seemed to be modern and compelling but in reality they were only dipping a toe into actual liberation.

"Wendy and the Lost Boys" is well researched and contains the essence of Wendy Wasserstein, but I don't feel like I know Wendy Wasserstein at all. The book made me want to see Wendy as a bubbly, happy, creative, and the center of a wide group of devoted friends. Instead I found Wendy to be manipulative and controlling. I couldn't wait for the book to end because I was quite weary of reading of this sad person.

This biography is a real page turner, beautifully written, and describes a life of exceptional highs and exceptional lows, a life lived privately, in public...

Julie Salamon's new biography of Wendy Wasserstein is a critical look at both Wasserstein's life and work. It is very well-written - as all books by Salamon are - but the woman who emerges on Salamon's pages still seems like an enigma. I'm not sure I "knew" Wendy Wasserstein any better after reading the book than before I read it. And that's not Salamon's fault; I think Wendy Wasserstein was so many things - each different to every person in her life - that I'm not sure there was full person there. That's not a criticism of Wasserstein, either, but rather a frank appraisal of the family she came from and the world she functioned in. Sometimes, she seemed to me to "observe" society through her writing rather than participating in it.

Born into an upwardly mobile Jewish family, Wendy was surrounded by the secrets many families hold. "Polite people" didn't discuss the fractures that death and divorce and mental illness often bring to a family. There were many secrets in her family, most she didn't know til she reached adulthood. Hers was a family where the children excelled in both school and business. Her brother Bruce and her sister Sandra were both business successes, while Wendy - the youngest - found herself adrift in the 1960's college life at Mt Holyoke and the years after. She was the "creative" Wasserstein, and, in her own way, found herself as famous as brother Bruce. She wrote timely plays about the women in her world, both at a macro-level about the women of her generation and at a micro-level about the women in her immediate family.

But if Wendy Wasserstein found respect and friendship through her writing, she also seemed not to have a lot of personal self-confidence. Not the sleek, beautiful "golden girl" she thought she saw around her, her relationship with men tended to be with gay men. Are they the "Lost Boys" of the title? Perhaps so but most of them were loyal and loving to Wendy, but disappointing her in the end by not being totally available to her. Wendy dearly wanted a child and tried throughout her 40's to conceive. A final, last-ditch effort resulted in her only pregnancy when she was 48. Her lovely daughter, Lucy Jane, was loved by Wendy. Unfortunately, Wendy's early death when Lucy Jane was 6 years old, deprived her of her mother (Lucy Jane's father was never identified). She went to live with her uncle Bruce and his family, but Bruce died a few years later.

Julie Salamon's writing is excellent. Two of her best books are "Net of Dreams", a book about her parents' experiences during the Holocaust and eventual settling in the United States and "The Devil's Candy", flat-out the best book about movie making I've ever read. I wish I liked this book a little better; I'd have given it five stars instead of four.

Wendy and I were together for six weeks when she was 16, since I led her trip to Europe and have always been very fond of her (as well as the 20 others of us less famous)! Through Julie Salamon's devoted research and effective presentation, I know and understand Wendy so much better. In our few personal interactions in her adulthood and celebrity, she was both helpful and still shy with her former "leader" who was not a celebrity. As the book reveals, that same "adorable" and vulnerable woman knew effectively how to promote herself, including to invent some better realities or eliminate those that frightened her, like brother Abner. (Previously I was confused as to how she could write putting herself where she wasn't during our trip to Europe. Now I see it was her personal "writer's license"!) As with her high voice and giggle, she could throw up a childlike protective shield.

Reading, I had times wishing she would have freed herself to more maturity and wisdom, eliminating personal insecurities. We all can judge others for faults that we have ourselves. Thus her well expressed pain at how Terrence McNally ended an important aspect of their relationship strikes the reader who has learned of the inconsiderate ways in which Wendy pained others when she cut ties without acknowledgement or explanation.

Since Wendy's accomplishments, pride and celebrity were based upon her writing, Salamon's life chronology tied to the plays and related people and events is appropriate. The relation to the times and women's roles are the context that may be of more interest to readers of future generations for whom the name "Wendy Wasserstein" or the titles of her plays are not familiar echos. Indeed, her name has a ring that encouraged and still rings for her New York oriented fans, both Jewish and non-Jewish.

For those not necessarily theater or celebrity focused, there is much to consider about family dynamics, the impacts of a narcissistic mother, insecurities when unconditional love is absent (or cruelly camouflaged), the tolls of secrets as opposed to respect for privacy. Fond of Wendy, I wish that she had freed herself from some things earlier, but she might well not agree. Her craft, so important to her, may not have been so acute. She was clearly appreciated by many, even those perplexed by her! I find Julie Salamon's biography extremely well researched, well written, rigorous and honest, never cheap. Truly a chronicle of Wendy.

I was not intimately familiar with Wendy Wasserstein's work, but I am an enormous fan of good storytelling; and this bio does not disappoint in that arena. Julie Salamon bring the Wasserstein family, and its many quirks and relative hardships, to vivid life; and since luckily stumbling upon it in a book store (yes, a real brick and mortar book store. another miracle), I have not been able to put it down. Page after page is filled with great writing, interesting facts and insights, clever turns of phrase and, again, peerless storytelling. You do not have to know anything about Wendy's work to succumb to this book's charms, but whatever you do, PLEASE succumb to this book's charms.