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The late playwright Wendy Wasserstein was a woman of many facets – some even her closest friends weren’t aware of before her death from cancer in 2006, at 55. In 1996 she appeared as the guest caller "Linda" on the Frasier episode "Head Game". Sandra, who died at the age of 60 in 1997, was a highly-successful marketing executive. Wife of Morris W. Wasserstein and George Wasserstein. The playwright was single at the time and did not … Celebrated playwright and magnetic wit Wendy Wasserstein has been firmly rooted in New York’s cultural life since her childhood of Broadway matinees, but her appeal is universal. As the CEO of Lazard, he took the company public and forced the buy out of the old owners in a drive to remake the firm for the 21st century. Parmelee, E. (1969). This play, which is generally considered her best, won the Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award. The two years following her graduation would prove difficult, but were in certain respects critical to her future. However, by the 1970s, under the influence of the civil rights movement and Title VII merit hiring regardless of ethnic background was more in vogue. [3] "Her heroines—intelligent and successful but also riddled with self-doubt—sought enduring love a little ambivalently, but they did not always find it, and their hard-earned sense of self-worth was often shadowed by the frustrating knowledge that American women's lives continued to be measured by their success at capturing the right man. Both died suddenly and somewhat prematurely — Bruce in October 2009 at the age of 61 of a reported aneurism and Wendy at the age of 55 in January 2006 reportedly of lymphoma, but not before they had reached the pinnacle of their chosen professions — Bruce in finance and Wendy in the theater. He and Claude had three more children. Whereas Bruce and Wendy had attended Yeshiva of Flatbush in elementary school in Brooklyn, Morris and Lola sent Bruce to the McBurney School, a now defunct but well-regarded elite private school founded by the YMCA of New York. In a case of life imitating art she at the age of 49 by in vitro fertilization gave birth to a child, Lucy Jane, and thus in her 50s became a single mother of a young child. She married Morris Wasserstein, an inventor and businessman who died in 2003. She went through the fertikity treatments but would almost sabotage then by not following the doctors orders in regards to rest and taking care of herself. Associated With. She grew up in a close-knit, competitive New York Jewish family of high achievers (her brother Bruce became a Wall Street titan). [3] The news of Wasserstein's death was unexpected because her illness had not been widely publicized outside the theater community. She won the hearts of so many fans because her witty, wise, and poignant plays spoke for all Uncommon Women. In 1999, at age 48, Wasserstein had a daughter, Lucy Jane, born three month prematurely. [1][3] In 1990 she received an honoris causa Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Mount Holyoke College[6] and in 2002 she received an honoris causa degree from Bates College. In 2001, it was itself acquired by Dresdner Kleinwort for a reported price of $1.4 billion in stock. Wendy attended the Calhoun School, a well-known progressive nondenominational school on Manhattan’s West Side. with expertise in effectuating such transactions. Her wealthy and sophisticated grandparents on her mother’s side came from a Polish resort town. Frequently this was done through a “hostile” tender offer in which the shareholders of the target would be offered a price per share that usually represented a premium over the trading price to permit the acquirer to obtain control. The late 1960s and early 1970s, when Bruce and Wendy’s family lived on the Upper East Side and they attended college and graduate school, was a period of considerable social and economic upheaval. The acquirer would then frequently fire the company’s existing management and replace it with managers experienced in corporate restructuring who were loyal to the new owners. As a result, Bruce was able to obtain an entry level position with arguably the top gentile law firm in the city. Wasserstein, who was not married, never publicly identified her daughter's father. Your email address will not be published. Rack, L. (1981). Filed Under: Arts, History, New York City Tagged With: art, Economic History, Financial History, Manhattan, New York City, Theatre. Wendy Wasserstein was born in Brooklyn, New York on October 18, 1950, the youngest of four children. Bruce and Wendy Wasserstein, the archetypal New York children from the Upper East Side, would soon be major beneficiaries of this revival and — in their respective fields — leaders of it. Wendy Wasserstein, A Casebook. [13], She wrote the libretto for the opera Best Friends, based on Clare Boothe Luce's play The Women, but it was uncompleted when she died. In the early 1960s the Wassersteins moved their family from a large house on Avenue M and 23rd Street in Brooklyn to a rental apartment on Manhattan’s East Side at 150 East 77th Street. Critics hailed it as one of the first plays to focus primarily on middle-aged women; it won Wasserstein the William Inge Award for Distinguished Achievement in American Theatre. The first woman playwright to win a Tony Award, Wendy Wasserstein was a Broadway titan. Certainly Morris and Lola were immensely proud of both Bruce and Wendy’s professional accomplishments. At the end of the play she decides to have a baby without a husband. Wasserstein was determined to control her own narrative, seldom an easy task for any public figure. family to New Jersey in 1931, then moved to Brooklyn and the Upper East Side. [11], Wasserstein also wrote the books to two musicals. The Wendy Wasserstein Papers, 1954–2006, are available to researchers at the Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections. When Wendy died, her daughter was adopted by Bruce, and when he died, in 2009, his ex-wife Claude Becker became her guardian. Follow the New York Almanack each day via E-mail, RSS, Twitter or Facebook updates. Wasserstein’s father was a textile manufacturer. Miami, written in collaboration with Jack Feldman and Bruce Sussman, was presented at Playwrights Horizons in 1985–1986, and starred among others, Marcia Lewis, Phyllis Newman, Jane Krakowski, and Fisher Stevens. In the early 1990s he divorced Chris Parot, his second wife and the mother of his three children, and then married Claude Becker, a film producer 20 years younger than he was. Thus Bruce Wasserstein became one of the few figures from the takeover boom of the 1980s to survive intact into the 21st century. Word around town was that Chao was fine with his decision to adopt Wendy Wasserstein’s daughter, Lucy Jane, and have her come live at 927 Fifth after Wendy’s death. In addition to her daughter, Ms. Wasserstein is survived by her mother, Lola Wasserstein; her … Probably the high point in this series was “The Heidi Chronicles,” first performed in 1989, about Heidi Holland, a 40-year-old art professor and strong follower of the women’s movement who finds that despite her significant professional success, she is somewhat stranded socially and emotionally. As he was involved in more and more major deals, his reputation as one of the premiere — if not the premier — experts in this area grew, and increasingly more business came to him and Perella. The characters, including Holly Kaplan, the daughter of a Jewish New York textile manufacturer, were thinly disguised descriptions of Wendy and her best friends from college five years after graduation. Wonderful article–detailed, flows well, and gets at the core of these fascinating siblings’ lives! Even more importantly, it soon became clear that he had the ideal personality and the ideal analytical mind for such work. She died of lymphoma in January 2006, leaving her seven-year-old daughter to be adopted by Bruce. Wasserstein was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, the daughter of Morris Wasserstein, a wealthy textile executive, and his wife, Lola (née Liska) Schleifer, who moved to the United States from Poland when her father was accused of being a spy. The family also included two older sisters: Sandra and Georgette. “Uncommon Women” was a play about a reunion of a group of Mount Holyoke graduates. in creative writing from City College of New York in 1973,[1] and an M.F.A. The clan included playwright Wendy Wasserstein, banker Bruce Wasserstein, business executive Sandra Meyer and Abner Wasserstein, an advocate for the disabled. After reading some of her work, Heller told her that she had the potential to be a great writer and encouraged her to pursue a writing career. In depicting Heidi as troubled over career and family, Wendy Wasserstein inadvertently fed a media hype, a new feminine mystique about the either/or choices in a woman's life. He then divorced Claude and reportedly had an affair with a Columbia student with whom he had an additional child, and then in January 2009 married 28-year-old Angela Chao, the daughter of a prominent Chinese shipping magnate, nine months before his sudden death in October 2009. In addition to her daughter, Wasserstein was survived by her mother and three siblings—Abner Wasserstein, businessman Bruce Wasserstein (died in 2009) and Wilburton Inn owner Georgette Wasserstein Levis (died in 2014).[3]. Bruce and Wendy Wasserstein were born in Brooklyn in 1948 and 1950 to Morris and Lola Wasserstein. "%0D %0D %0D the book though says she was somewhat ambivilent about having a child. Wendy was never able to marry and have the nuclear family that she was taught to crave. Her family lived in Brooklyn until she was 12 and then moved to Manhattan. She was an Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. Rather than following her siblings to the University of Michigan, Wendy attended Mount Holyoke College and graduated in 1971. Series 13:Audiovisual Materials, 1954-2006 "[3] In a conversation with novelist A. M. Homes, Wasserstein said that these heroines are the starting points for her plays: "I write from character, so it begins with people talking, which is why I like writing plays."[10]. When Morris was Bruce’s age, a firm like Cravath would likely not have hired a Jewish boy like Bruce, who would have been consigned to the family textile business or strictly Jewish law firms. and a full version of the play was produced in 1977 Off-Broadway with Glenn Close, Jill Eikenberry, and Swoosie Kurtz playing the lead roles. Lola Wasserstein reportedly inspired some of her daughter's characters. [3], Her maternal grandfather was Simon Schleifer, a yeshiva teacher in Włocławek, Poland, who moved to Paterson, New Jersey and became a high school principal. Wendy Wasserstein (October 18, 1950 – January 30, 2006) was an American playwright. The play was subsequently produced for PBS with Meryl Streep replacing Close. In 1988, he and Perella would leave First Boston to establish their own firm, Wasserstein Perella & Co. Young Bruce Wasserstein, who had been trained in law at Harvard Law School and Cravath Swaine & Moore, in business at Harvard Business School and by Morris Wasserstein at home, and in press relations on the Michigan Daily, had the ideal background for this kind of work. Born in Brooklyn on October 18, 1950, to Morris and Lola (Schleifer) Wasserstein, Wendy was the youngest of four children, of whom one was a son. Family Life. [4], A graduate of the Calhoun School (she attended from 1963 to 1967),[5] Wasserstein earned a B.A. The authorized biography of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein. Masland, R.L. In 2007 she was featured in the film Making Trouble, a tribute to female Jewish comedians, produced by the Jewish Women's Archive. After working with him on several transactions, Perella hired him to work with him at First Boston at twice the salary he was making at Cravath. She graduated from Mount Holyoke with a degree in history in 1971, studied creative writing at City College, and earned a masters degree in fine arts in 1976 from the Yale School of Drama where she studied playwriting. in fine arts from the Yale School of Drama in 1976. [14], Wasserstein gave birth to a daughter in 1999[15] when she was 48 years old. But that was only the beginning. Every four or five years thereafter until her death in 2006, Wendy would have a new play produced about a woman her age and the trials and tribulations of her life at that time. Bruce Wasserstein, the financier and corporate takeover adviser, and his sister Wendy Wasserstein, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and author, were among the most accomplished and famous New Yorkers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. At the time Cravath was representing First Boston Corporation, an investment bank that had just hired Joseph Perella to head up an investment advisory service to do mergers. Wendy Wasserstein died … Wasserstein commented that her parents allowed her to go to Yale only because they were certain she would meet an eligible lawyer there, get married, and lead a conventional life as a wife and mother. However, with low stock prices and an inflation-induced appreciation in the value of corporate assets, the conditions were ripe for a wave of corporate acquisitions and mergers that would cause a significant revival of Wall Street and the economy of New York City. Previously most acquisitions were friendly, involved an exchange of stock and were handled by a company’s existing corporate advisers. Although with the rise in stock prices, the volume of mergers may not have been as robust as in the 1980s, the firm did a solid business. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. At the time Bruce joined Cravath, Wall Street, like the rest of New York’s economy, was in the doldrums. She received the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1989 for her play The Heidi Chronicles. (1976) The advantages of being dyslexic. in history from Mount Holyoke College in 1971, an M.A. After a purported falling out with Dresdner, Bruce was invited in 2002 to become the CEO of Lazard Freres, when Felix Rohayton and other leaders of that advisory firm thought the firm needed one of the “Great Men” of Wall Street to survive and continue into the next generation. Their daughter Sandra W. Meyer, a prominent marketing executive, died in 1998. [16][17], Wasserstein was hospitalized with lymphoma in December 2005 and died at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center on January 30, 2006 at the age of 55. Her father was a textile manufacturer, her mother an amateur dancer. Wendy's brother Bruce raised Lucy Jane until he died in 2009. These efforts were invariably resisted by the existing corporate management, who frequently heretofore had felt invulnerable to attack. She was the first female product manager for General Foods, the first female head of marketing for American Express and the first female head of corporate communications for Citibank. Steven Engelhart Retiring From Adirondack Architectural Heritage, African American History At The National Archives, The Unpleasant Side of Life With Horses in Cities. 26: 10-18. While at Yale, she co-wrote a musical with fellow student Christopher Durang, When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth.[1]. Wasserstein is described as an author of women's identity crises. In addition, she wrote the screenplay for the 1998 film The Object of My Affection, which starred Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd. However, this professional success was not without a significant cost in terms of their personal lives. In her compelling, revealing and insightful new biography "Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein" (Penguin Press; $29.95), Julie Salamon explores this gifted and complex woman, whose works mirrored the concerns of many women of her generation (Salamon will appear at Elliott Bay Book Co. on Sept. 19). Wendy's oldest siblings, Sandra and Abner, were actually her half-siblings/cousins, offspring of her mother's first husband, George Wasserstein, who died … Both Bruce and Wendy Wasserstein were in a most profound sense children of New York City in the late 20th century. It was subsequently completed by Christopher Durang, set by Deborah Drattell, and is in development with Lauren Flanigan.[when?]. [citation needed] The night after she died, Broadway's lights were dimmed in her honor. Her mother, an amateur dancer, grew up in Poland and moved to the United States when her father was suspected of being a spy. But the low stock prices did open up a significant opportunity. They were native New Yorkers who lived there all their lives, and their upbringing both in Brooklyn and Manhattan undoubtedly contributed significantly to their later successes. Required fields are marked *. At the time, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) under the then changed economic and regulatory environment, was in a sense a new field in which very few had experience. An entrepreneur could, through borrowings or otherwise, acquire the stock of a target company fairly cheaply for cash, sell unnecessary appreciated assets to repay the debt and then restructure the rest of the corporation’s business to operate more efficiently. During her career, which spanned nearly four decades, Wasserstein wrote eleven plays, winning a Tony Award, a Pulitzer Prize, a New York Drama Critics Circle Award, a Drama Desk Award, and an Outer Critics Circle Award. As Bruce had written scholarly articles on mergers, it was logical that Cravath partner Sam Butler would assign him to work on such transactions. The play essentially established Wendy, who was 27 at the time, as one of New York’s most promising young playwrights, and also showcased such young actresses as Glenn Close, Meryl Streep, Jill Eikenbery and Swoosie Kurtz. [7], Wasserstein's first production of note was Uncommon Women and Others (her graduate thesis at Yale), a play which reflected her experiences as a student at, and an alumna of, Mount Holyoke College. Their success was achieved through a combination of shrewd insight and highly effective self-promotion, and the good fortune to live through a period of economic and social revival in New York City, in which they were active participants. Ms. Wasserstein was born in Brooklyn in 1950 to a successful Jewish family, the youngest of four children. She gave birth to her daughter Lucy in 1999. [1] Wasserstein "once described her mother as being like 'Auntie Mame'". Meanwhile Bruce, returning from a Knox fellowship to England where he wrote a dissertation on government merger policy, was hired as an associate by Cravath Swaine & Moore, one of New York’s most prestigious corporate law firms and the one that probably represented more Fortune 100 corporations than any other. Wasserstein was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, the daughter of Morris Wasserstein, a wealthy textile executive, and his wife, Lola (née Liska) Schleifer, who moved to the United States from Poland when her father was accused of being a spy. Meanwhile in 1977, Wendy’s first full-length play “Uncommon Women and Others” was performed at the Marymount Theater on East 71st Street, a few blocks from where she had grown up, to rave reviews. Armed with an “A” average from City College and Joseph Heller’s enthusiastic recommendation, she was then accepted at the Yale Drama School, where she began in the fall of 1973. The play provided a formula which she would consistently follow in her writing for the rest of her career. In Wendy and the Lost Boys bestselling author Julie Salamon explores the life of playwright Wendy Wasserstein's most expertly crafted character: herself. Shrewdly able to assess corporate situations and formulate strategy, he also had the brash confidence to project plans to others and at times intimidate adversaries, and no reluctance to work the 70-hour weeks that were required in such transactions. As the co-head of the mergers and acquisitions group at First Boston, Wasserstein began to specialize in advising on hostile takeovers, which proved to be highly lucrative work. "Wendy Wasserstein: Her premature baby goes home", City University of New York, City College, Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections, http://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/mountholyoke/mshm325_main.html, "Wendy Wasserstein, Playwright Who Dramatized the Progress of a Generation of Women, Is Dead at 55", "Wendy Wasserstein Dies at 55; Her Plays Spoke to a Generation", "Wendy Wasserstein Pulitzer-Prize Winning Playwright, to Speak", "At the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's Critics Institute 5Q4 Dan Sullivan", "Making Trouble: Three Generations of Funny Jewish Women", "Playwright Wendy Wasserstein to be remembered in Schwartz Center symposium", "The Newest Wasserstein Creation Comes Home", "Wendy Wasserstein Gets Spotlight in a New Biography", "Wasserstein World Premieres, 'Welcome to My Rash' and 'Third', Play DC Through Feb. 15", Audio: Wendy Wasserstein at the Key West Literary Seminar, 2005, Wasserstein biography at Jewish Women Encyclopedia, "Wendy Wasserstein, The Art of Theater No. [1] Claims that Schleifer was a playwright are probably apocryphal, as contemporaries did not recall this and the assertion only appeared once Wasserstein had won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. [12] Pamela's First Musical, written with Cy Coleman and David Zippel, based on Wasserstein's children's book, received its world premiere in a concert staging at Town Hall in New York City on May 18, 2008. Her play, The Heidi Chronicles, won the Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize. He would also have a fierce desire for his children to assimilate into America and New York and would instill in them a strong ambition to succeed at the highest levels of American and New York society. By 2014, when Wendy’s sister Georgette Meyer died, none of the immediate family of Morris and Lola Wasserstein remained alive. Mother of Bruce Wasserstein; Wendy Wasserstein; Georgette … Her fame created a significant benefit for Bruce, who often claimed that she was the famous one in the family. Wendy Wasserstein's father was Morris Wasserstein Wendy Wasserstein's mother was Lola Wasserstein Wendy Wasserstein's children: Wendy Wasserstein's daughter is Lucy Wasserstein Photo of Bruce Wasserstein, Chairman and CEO of Lazard Freres, in 2008; and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein at the Whitney Museum of American Art gala, 2000. Family Papers consists of three undated typed student papers written by Wasserstein's brother Bruce Wasserstein, a 1961 McBurney School yearbook belonging to Bruce Wasserstein, whose name is inscribed on the front end paper; clippings, correspondence, and an obituary for Wasserstein's sister Sandra. “Uncommon Women” was reviewed by a theater critic for The New York Times and other papers just like a Broadway show, even though it never played on Broadway (it was later performed on PBS). 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