Gail Collins, the first female head of The New York Times editorial board wrote this to say goodbye to her friend.

By GAIL COLLINS
Published: January 31, 2006

Wendy Wasserstein and I had a running e-mail joke in which we took turns taking responsibility for everything bad that happened. “I’ll bring the Iraqi constitution and we can work on it in the bar,” she wrote last year before a theater date. I congratulated her for getting Michael Brown the FEMA job. We both claimed to be in charge of the Middle East peace process.

We were making fun of Wendy’s reputation for good-heartedness. Her outrageously premature death yesterday deprived the nation of a beloved playwright, but it also stripped the city of one of its best people.

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.

“Last month I was voted Miss Colitis,” Wendy once wrote. “I was honored at the Waldorf-Astoria and presented with a Steuben glass bowl — by Mary Ann Mobley Collins, a former Miss America. It’s not that the treatment of colitis is an unworthy mission, but I have no connection to the cause except that I received a letter from the Colitis Committee asking me to show up. In other words, I became Miss Colitis because I am very nice.”

Sometimes it was almost impossible to resist taking advantage. Wendy and I once jointly agreed to give talks at a convention of women journalists being held in Montana, under the theory that it would be an excellent opportunity to see one another. (We had reached that circle of scheduling hell in which two people who live less than a mile apart have to traverse the continent in order to have coffee.) After I arrived, I got a call from Wendy, who had missed the plane. Her only alternatives were to cancel or fly in at midnight, give her address at breakfast and then immediately return to the airport.

“You should do whatever you think best,” I said cruelly. “The only thing I can tell you is that these women are really nice and they’re looking forward to meeting you.”

I picked her up at midnight. “You were right,” she said, as we drove back to the airport 10 hours later. “They were awfully nice women.”

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.

In the essay that began with the Miss Colitis story, she noted that niceness had become unfashionable, and promised to be crankier in the future. It was just a literary device. Wendy understood that being considerate in a society of self-involved strivers was not for wimps. It required a steely inner toughness that was the hallmark of many of her heroines.

She also knew her own nature. “Frankly, I never want to leave a room and be thought of as a horrible person,” she admitted. But Wendy never explained what the rest of us were supposed to do when she left the room before us.

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Knew it would happen– but Jesus Christ. That this man is replacing Justice O’Connor. . .

Every single day the United States is becomes more and more a place I won’t be able to go back to. That I will be scared to go back to.

If Congress doesn’t snap Bush back on the illegal wiretapping. . . what’s next?

In other news an ex-postal employee killed four people before killing herself in Goleta, California. What clicks in someone’s brain that they do this sort of thing?

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Oscar nominations came out a few hours ago.

My secret lover George Clooney (it is so secret he doesn’t know) got a nod for Best Picture, Supporting Actor, Directing, and original screenplay along with Grant Heslov.

Best Actor is an interesting race. So pleased that I was right about David Strathairn getting a nomination. He is so respected by the acting community, he might be a dark horse. . .

Of the best film nominations, I’ve seen them all except for Crash.

Silly that I get excited about this stuff. I like to have or go to an Oscar party every year, so I don’t know what I am going to do here in London Town. I may need to take Monday off and watch them into the wee hours.

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When August Wilson passed away in October 2005 I knew he was ill but it was still shocking.

I had no idea that Wendy Wasserstein was even ill. She died today at 55 of lymphoma.

The first time I head her name was in my sophomore year at University when my professor Kay Cook announced that The Heidi Chronicles had won the Pulitzer. It also won the Tony and New York Drama Critics Circle awards for best play.

I never met Ms, Wasserstein. How I wish I had.

She is one of the reasons that I wanted to be a playwright. A dream of mine that now feels unfamiliar like clothing I used to be able to fit into. Maybe one day I will again be able to squeeze into my skinny jeans. But enough about me and my solipsistic whinging.

Today, we say goodbye to an important, beautiful, funny voice in American Theatre. The world is a bit emptier without her.

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When I was still in the USofA, Skype was a great way for S and I to talk- Is completly free if we are both at our computers. Since I’ve been on this here island, I’ve used it a few times to call my Mom. She hasn’t yet figured out how to use on her computer, so I just call her land line. It only costs something ridiculous like $0.003 a minute so it is great.

Today was a hallalulah moment. S told me that 800 callls to the US are free. I’m thinking- I can make 800 calls to the US? I would even pay for that! And on Skype they are free???

Over the spring to make my car payment, I had to depend upon the kindness of strangers (well not really strangers. Folks I worked with and trusted with my ss#) to call Volkswagon and make my payment over the phone for me since I couldn’t call a 800 number from overseas.

Now I can call! Not that I have a desparate need to call 800 numbers all the time but when credit cards and student loans only provide 800 numbers, what is a girl to do?

As luck would have it, just this AM I e-mailed one of my student loans to see if I could get a deferment and they of course told me to call the 800 number so it is like kismit.

Except different.

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One of my favorite movie lines is from the wacky but no means good film, Dragnet:

Joe Friday: Ah, sure, but just like every other foaming, rabid psycho in this city with a foolproof plan, you’ve forgotten you’re facing the single finest fighting force ever assembled.

Reverend Jonathan Whirley: The Israelis?

I remember thinking, “good” when I first learned that Mossad had assassinated many of the Black September architects of the Munich Massacre. “They deserved it. Don’t mess with Israel.”

In my early twenties I slowly started to reconsider my position on the Israel-Palestinian conflict. By no means do I agree with terrorist tactics, but when Palestinians are murdered by Israeli settlers when they are simply trying to harvest olives, future suicide bombers are created.

I slowly came out to my friends with this opinion. Not being Jewish, I was taking a risk. To accuse Israel of wrongdoing is to take the risk of being called an anti-Semite. If you are Jewish, you are accused of being a self-hating Jew.

With the release of Munich, there have been a number of op-eds that of accused Steven Spielberg of as much, which is beyond ridiculous. Spielberg said, “I wanted to make a realistic film. I did not want to demonize the targets. To deal with the war on terror, you have to deal with the world as it is. And real people exist on both sides of these issues.”

Munich is simply one of the best films Spielberg has ever made.

The screenplay by Oscar winner Eric Roth (Forrest Gump) and Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner, Tony Kushner (Angeles in America) do not present a battle between good verses evil but all the grays in between.

The toy maker turned bomb-maker, Robert (French actor Mathieu Kassovitz) exclaims, “”I don’t know that we ever were that decent. Thousands of years of hatred doesn’t make you decent. But we were supposed to be righteous. It’s a beautiful thing. That’s Jewish. That’s what I knew. That’s what I was taught. And now I’m losing that… and I lose that and… that’s… that’s everything. That’s my soul.”

The German antiques dealer, document forger Hans (Hanns Zischler) disgusted with himself after a vengeance killing says, “In seven months, we’ve killed six of the eleven names. We’ve killed one replacement. One of our targets is in prison and four, including Ali Hassan Salameh, is at large. One of our own has fallen. Since we began, the other side has sent letter bombs to eleven embassies, hijacked three planes, killed 130 passengers in Athens, and wounded scores more… and killed out military attaché in Washington. Some of it was done by a Venezuelan called Carlos “The Jackal,” who replaced Zaid Muchassi, who replaced Hussein Al-Chir. Black September’s original leadership has been decimated. But new leaders are emerging for whom Black September wasn’t violent enough. And to dispatch our six dispatched targets, we must have spent something close to $2 million. Mrs. Meir says to the Knesset, ‘The World will see that killing Jews will from now on be an expensive proposition.’ But killing Palestinians isn’t exactly cheap.”

Long time Spielberg editor Michael Kahn keeps the tension taunt and one scene in particular in Paris out Hitchcock’s Hitchcock in nail biting tension.

You are able to tell each city you are in almost just by how cinematographer Janusz Kaminski has shot it.

John Williams has created another gorgeous score.

The film starts with the Black September terrorists taking Israeli athletes hostage then brilliantly intercutting between ABC archival footage of Jim McKay and the voice of the late ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, Israeli and Arab families as well as the terrorists watching the television.

I was only two during the Munich Olympics so I had never seen the footage before. While I knew the facts of what had occurred, I had never heard McKay’s famous line, “In life our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized. Tonight, our worst fears have been realized. . . They’re all gone.”

Heartbreaking.

Avner, (Eric Bana) head of the team created to avenge the athletes has flashbacks to Munich throughout the film, filling in the holes that the ABC footage doesn’t show, culminating in the terrible events at the airport.

The film ends with Avner asking his Mossad contact Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush) to “break bread” with his family that evening in his Brooklyn home for Shabbat.

Ephraim refuses. “I can’t.” And he walks away.

In the distance, across the Hudson, the World Trade Center Twin towers are part of the lower Manhattan skyline.

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Bless Janelle. She brought me back Tapatío frrom California. Had it on my eggs this morning. Yum.

In my old office, my team had a huge vat of the stuff that we shared. Good stuff. Kicks Brown Sauces ass.

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Guess I didn’t mess up the interview as much as I thought.

Deep sigh of relief.

Doesn’t start till March maybe mid March so money is still impossible, but at least there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

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When I first heard about the wool that James Frey pulled over my eyes, I thought, what’s the big deal. Then I read the Smoking Gun article and saw how much of the book was fabricated and I got pissed.

Looks like Oprah had a similar arc. . .

Oprah Tells Frey He ‘Betrayed’ Readers
Thursday January 26 4:50 PM ET

In a stunning switch from dismissive to disgusted, Oprah Winfrey took on one of her chosen authors, James Frey, accusing him on live television of lying about “A Million Little Pieces” and letting down the many fans of his memoir of addiction and recovery.

“I feel duped,” she said Thursday on her syndicated talk show. “But more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers.”

Frey, who found himself booed in the same Chicago studio where he had been embraced not long ago, acknowledged that he had lied.

A sometimes angry, sometimes tearful Winfrey asked Frey why he “felt the need to lie.” Audience members often groaned and gasped at Frey’s halting, stuttered admissions that certain facts and characters had been “altered” but that the essence of his memoir was real.

“I don’t think it is a novel,” Frey said of his book, which had initially been offered to publishers, and rejected by many, as fiction. “I still think it’s a memoir.”

Thursday’s broadcast, rare proof that the contents of a book can lead to great tabloid TV, marked an abrupt reversal from the cozy chat two weeks ago on “Larry King Live,” when Winfrey phoned in to support Frey and label alleged fabrications as “much ado about nothing.”

“I left the impression that the truth is not important,” Winfrey said Thursday of last week’s call, saying that “e-mail after e-mail” from supporters of the book had cast a “cloud” over her judgment.

On a segment that also featured the book’s publisher, Nan A. Talese of Doubleday, Frey was questioned about various parts of his book, from the three-month jail sentence he now says he never served to undergoing dental surgery without Novocain, a story he no longer clearly recalls.

Winfrey, whose apparent indifference to the memoir’s accuracy led to intense criticism, including angry e-mails on her Web site, subjected Frey to a virtual page-by-page interrogation. No longer, as she told King, was she saying that emotional truth mattered more than the facts. “Mr. Bravado Tough Guy,” she mockingly called the author whose book she had enshrined last fall and whose reputation she had recently saved.

Talese and Doubleday were not spared. Winfrey noted that her staff had been alerted to possible discrepancies in Frey’s book, only to be assured by the publisher. She lectured Talese on her responsibilities: “I’m trusting you, the publisher, to categorize this book whether as fiction or autobiographical or memoir.”

Talese, an industry veteran whose many authors have included Ian McEwan, George Plimpton and Thomas Cahill, told Winfrey that editors who saw the book raised no questions and that “A Million Pieces” received a legal vetting. She acknowledged that the book had not been fact-checked, something many publishers say they have little time to do, but that future editions would include an author’s note saying parts of the book “had been changed.”

Winfrey did not unleash publishing’s version of the death penalty: revoking her endorsement, a devastating and unprecedented action. Only once before has she turned, relatively mildly, on a book club pick: In 2001, she withdrew her invitation for Jonathan Franzen, author of “The Corrections,” to appear on her show after the novelist expressed ambivalence over her endorsement.

Her current choice is Elie Wiesel’s classic, “Night,” a memoir with a concise, literary style that has led some to call it a novel.

Three years ago, Frey stepped up as publishing’s latest and baddest bad boy, with tattooed initials on his arm “FTBSITTTD” bearing a defiant and unprintable message. Winfrey’s selection made his book a million seller and Frey a hero to many who believed his story was theirs.

“In order to get through the experience of the addiction, I thought of myself as being tougher than I was and badder than I was, and it helped me cope,” Frey said Thursday on Winfrey’s show. “And when I was writing the book, instead of being as introspective as I should have been, I clung to that image.”

Frey’s career will likely never recover, although so far he has not suffered for sales. His book, a million seller thanks to Winfrey, remained in the top 5 Thursday on Amazon.com. A second memoir, “My Friend Leonard,” was in the top 20.

He currently has a two-book deal with Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Group USA, with a novel about contemporary Los Angeles due in 2007. The publisher did not have an immediate comment Thursday.

Beyond Frey, and his publishers, stories of suffering may themselves take a fall. Frey’s saga comes at a time when the work, and even the identities, of such alleged hard-luck authors as J.T. Leroy and Nasdijj have been questioned. St. Martin’s Press recently added a disclaimer to an upcoming book by Augusten Burroughs, another memoirist who has been challenged.

“I think for a while, this will make people careful,” said Ashbel Green, a senior editor at Alfred A. Knopf.

“But this question of fact checking is a complicated one. At The New Yorker and Time and Newsweek, you have experienced people who know where to go and what’s right and what’s wrong. We don’t. There’s been a traditional dependency on the author.”

___

Associated Press Writer Karen Hawkins contributed to this story in Chicago.

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Walking to the Tottenham Court Road Tube Station and there was a wind tunnel effect of wind between the buildings. S and I immediately started the “Holy Fuck! It’s Cold!” Chorus. Everyone we walked by wasn’t having conversations with the people they were walking with- they were also doing the Holy Fuck! It’s Cold song and shuffle-ball-change dance.

Slowly there is more light in the morning and it is taking longer for the sun to set. I am telling myself that in a few months there will be something resembling spring.

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