Wendy Wasserstein and Generosity
Wendy Wasserstein was a generous person. This I know not because I’ve seen her plays (I haven’t), not because I’ve seen her speak (I didn’t), not because I knew her (I knew her not at all). In fact, I seem to have missed every opportunity to get to know Ms. Wasserstein or her work until yesterday, when her obituaries were published. But when I was in college, a friend in the year ahead of me did know her. He organized events such as his class’s Senior Symposium and brought to Dartmouth people like the marine biologist Sylvia Earle and Wendy Wasserstein. “Wendy Wasserstein is great,” he told me. “Whatever you want, she’s there.” She was friendly and didn’t turn down invitations and was generous with her time.
I remembered that when she died, and was pleased to learn that she was always like that, with everyone. Today, the New York Times’s Op-Ed page editor Gail Collins remembered her friend:
“The first time I met her, she was rushing to a speaking engagement at a small library in a faraway section of Brooklyn. I assumed that either this was the historic spot where she had learned to read or that she was related to the librarian. But no, it was simply a place that had the moxie to ask a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright to come and do its event.”
And later:
“Wendy was a charter member of the company of nice women, a river of accommodating humanity that flows through Manhattan just as it flows through Des Moines and Oneonta, N.Y., organizing library fund-raisers, running day care centers, ordering prescriptions for elderly parents, buying all the birthday presents and giving career counseling to the nephew of a very remote acquaintance who is trying to decide between making it big on Broadway and dentistry.”
So I missed out. Wendy Wasserstein is one of those people whom I wished I could have met, or, especially, whose work I wish I’d known well enough to let her know how much I liked it. The same thing happened with the poet Kenneth Koch, who died on the 4th of July in 2002. A friend of mine who knew Mr. Koch said that he was a big man, kind and generous, with a great sense of humor. He was hilarious “like Woody Allen, but happier,” is, I think, how he described him. Luckily, I’m familiar with his work and am enthusiastic about it; unfortunately, I never told him. To miss out on a person, and to learn how much you’ve missed, is a source of great disappointment. But that contains a lesson, too, about taking—and making—opportunities.
I’m happy to report that I’ve had one of those opportunities. Just as Ms. Wasserstein described hers as a “nice, middle-class Jewish family” in Brooklyn, Grace Paley described hers as a “nice, socialist Jewish family” in the Bronx. Now more than 80 years old, Ms. Paley lives in a little country place on the Vermont-New Hampshire border. She is a poet, writer, and activist (for example, she helped put a stop to Robert Moses’s plans to put superhighways through Washington Square Park in her Greenwich Village neighborhood). When my friend Cleopatra introduced us at a reception, Ms. Paley counseled me to eat my vegetables (there were a lot uneaten on the table). When I saw her again a couple of years later in San Francisco, we talked for a few minutes after her reading. She thoughtfully asked me some questions and listened patiently to my answers even as a bunch of old women hovered impatiently around us. Would she remember me now? Doubtful. But I’m glad I got to meet her and share my enthusiasm for her work.
Does it mean something that all three of these people—Ms. Wasserstein, Mr. Koch, and Ms. Paley—are New Yorkers? That they are famous? Or even that they’re all Jewish? Probably not. Not more than that they are all creative, and all generous. And there are a lot of people like them, all over. Which is good to remember once in a while.
Caught part of today’s episdoe of Charlie Rose. In it, four friends of Wendy Wasserstein came on to talk about her. The warmth with which they remembered her reinforced how special she was. The four guests were film producer Jane Rosenthal, playwright Chris Durang, Lincoln Center and Playwrights Horizon art director André Bishop, and the NYT’s Frank Rich. All of them looked like they were on the verge of tears. Rich was unusually quiet, and even Charlie Rose managed to wade through his self-involved haze (he actually admitted that his guests knew her longer and better than he did) and spoke eloquently of Wasserstein, his voice cracking a little bit.