Victor [Aaron’s companion at that time] seems to be having difficulties getting this letter started so here I am to the rescue. If I didn’t know you were in Mexico I could read it on his face. He keeps urging me to write a symphony in Chapala, so if there weren’t a war on that would be the thing to do. Write a symphony with you as inspiration. As it is, life runs along very quietly at Oakland and now I’m more sorry than ever that you never did get up here to see how very nice it is … Well, anyway, the thing for you to do is to rest up, and come back soon, and continue to be an inspiration to everybody as usual.
Love, A.
Aaron often came to Mexico. He had a particular affinity for Mexico, its people, its landscape, and he had a collegial friendship with the Mexican composer and conductor Carlos Chávez. Chávez performed Copland’s music regularly with his Sinfónica de México. Copland dedicated several works to Chávez.
In Mexico, Aaron and I used to go to a sprawling lower-class dance hall called El Salón México. There were three separate spaces, each with a different admission fee. The very cheapest had a sign requesting patrons not to throw their lit cigarettes on the floor because they would burn the ladies’ feet. The ladies in question were of course barefoot. Aaron’s popular El Salón México came out of these evenings.
The gifted photographer Irving Penn took my favorite photograph of Aaron for me, sitting at the piano, in profile, the curve of the sheet music propped on the piano echoed by that beak of a nose. I was pleased that in a recent profile about Aaron (it was his centenary) in The New Yorker, “my” photo was used full page.
Leonard Bernstein
After meeting Leonard Bernstein at Aaron Copland’s house in Tanglewood, I was to be based in Europe for the next twenty-and-some years (1948–70), mostly in Paris. He had gone on to glory.
Our paths crossed on many occasions, Lenny usually accompanied by his sister, Shirley. He conducted in Paris in 1948, starting modestly with the Radio Orchestra and rapidly building to engagements with the top French orchestras. At first he was dismayed by the undisciplined orchestra musicians, who did not always come to rehearsals but would send substitutes. (Jerome Robbins had the same problem when he started to work with the ballet company of the Paris Opéra.) But by sheer force of personality, and his dazzling talents as conductor and pianist, he soon had them playing their hearts out for him.
The doyenne of Paris society, the aged and very musical Baronne Edouard de Rothschild, gave a supper party in his honor, after one of the concerts. Her invitations were prized. Guests arrived, most unusual in Paris, on the nose.
That evening Lenny had a particularly frenzied triumph. Shirley was not there to ride herd. In his dressing room backstage, admirers of various sexes were pressing one more scotch on him, gratefully received. In my role as sheepdog, I did my best to extract him; it was slow going. Finally, embarrassingly late, we arrived at the grand town house. I will never forget the tones of the butler as he announced in a stentorian voice, “La Baronne Edouard ATTEND.”
Of course the usual Bernstein charm righted the situation after a few Bernstein kisses.
Lenny and I were both friends of the French composer Francis Poulenc’s. On an unforgettable occasion, Poulenc invited us to a dress rehearsal at the Opéra Comique of his latest work, a spirited musical setting, full of fun, of a farce by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, Les Mamelles de Tirésias.
Poulenc, Lenny, and I sat huddled in the darkened house—it was freezing cold, as there was still very little heating in postwar Paris—while the ravishing Denise Duval, in transparent veiling—how she avoided pneumonia is a mystery—sang from a Folies Bergère–type runway that she was not going to be a housewife anymore. She was going to lead a man’s life.
We both loved Poulenc’s lilting music, and Lenny was to conduct Les Mamelles later in New York. David Hockney designed the engagingly witty sets.
That same year, Lenny was conducting in Holland, and I was in Holland writing some features for Vogue. Lenny and his sister were staying at a nearby beach resort, Scheveningen. I was at a hotel in The Hague. I went out to join the Bernsteins for lunch.
It was a glorious day, one of those days when the Dutch light lived up to all those marine landscapes. “Let’s go riding” was Lenny’s sudden inspiration.
I had arrived in a town outfit; this was long before the ubiquitous blue jeans. “I’ll fix you up,” Shirley offered. We went to her room, and I got into a pair of her slacks and one of Lenny’s shirts, and we were off.
Our rented horses responded to the great stretch of open beach and Lenny’s urging and galloped presto con fuoco. Lenny started shouting poetry into the wind, Auden mostly. “Don’t you know any poetry?” he shouted to me. I was too out of breath from holding my plunging horse to respond.
A few days later we went to Amsterdam for a concert, at the Concertgebouw, conducted by Herbert von Karajan. “You know I’m a better conductor than von Karajan,” Lenny whispered all too audibly.
By now it is 1950. I was living and working in Paris, and Lenny and Shirley were in town. Lenny had come to conduct the Radio Orchestra. It so happened he had a gap in his schedule and I had accumulated a month’s vacation time. We were having dinner in one of those little upstairs rooms at Lapérouse and had finished off a diaphanous soufflé. “Let’s go somewhere, anywhere, you choose,” said Lenny. “All right, let’s make it Spain” was my contribution.
So we went. Those were still the Franco days, and Spain was very puritanical. They were dismayed at the Ritz in Barcelona that Lenny and Shirley wanted to sleep in the same room. They were also dismayed by the dachshund puppy the two had picked up en route that was far from housebroken.
Lenny was delighted by the sardana that was danced in the public square in front of the cathedral on Sundays. It is the most democratic dance in the world. Anyone can join in. You just step into the circle and grab the hand of your neighbor. The women place their handbags and the cake for Sunday lunch in the middle of the circle, and everything is safe.
Lenny being Lenny, he had to be part of the action. He pulled me in, and being a músico, he immediately grasped the structure and when we should stop—the music had a way of suddenly stopping, leaving me with one foot in the air.
He liked best the little bars of the barrio chino with its flamenco singers and children dancing outside entranced by the music. There was an old man who sang as if his heart were broken, eyes closed, stretching out his hand. We went to hear him night after night while Shirley sensibly went to bed. We loved his lament for his love who had entered a convent, “She who was most loved has become a nun” (“La Hija de Don Juan Alba,” it was called).
From Barcelona we went to Majorca, to a little fishing village a Spanish friend had recommend, Cala d’Or. We settled down happily to the swimming routine, but Lenny missed having a piano. The hotel management owned a little shack across the road we could use, and I managed to arrange for an old upright piano to be sent out to us from Palma, the capital.
So every day we went to what Lenny called “a mansion grand in a foreign land”—(courtesy of Auden?). Lenny played everything from musical comedy to grand opera, with Shirley a worthy singing partner, both of them remembering every word of every lyric, including numbers by our friends Adolph Green and Betty Comden—such as “I Can Cook Too.”
Both Bernsteins were confirmed hypochondriacs and traveled with a bulging satchel of potions and remedies. Inevitably, Shirley fell ill. A doctor from the nearest village was called in. He arrived in his little horse-drawn buggy. His name was Don Virgilio.
He examined Shirley. “What did he say?” Lenny asked me anxiously (at that point I was the only one who knew Spanish). “He says, ‘Either she will get better, or she won’t.’”
Some time later Lenny stepped on a bee, and his foot swelled alarmingly. Don Virgilio came back on the double. By this time, he was completely under the Bernstein charm and invited us all to his little house, where he gave us small glasses of sweet Málaga
wine and danced and sang to a song called “Mi Jaca,” with us providing a clapping accompaniment. Then we all danced.
Our month’s holiday over, we headed for the airport, with a few tears. Lenny went on to Israel to conduct; I returned to my Paris office. He took off a heavy gold link bracelet I always wore and put it on.
It was not as usual then as now for men to wear jewelry. A conductor’s wrist is very visible. The gold bracelet was the subject of comment. Later, when Lenny married Felicia, she sent the bracelet back to me. I still wear it.
I had not met Felicia Montealegre, the beautiful Chilean girl who had come to New York to study piano with Claudio Arrau. But Lenny talked to me about her often, and the pros and cons of marrying her. Twice he had been officially engaged, but twice he couldn’t go through with it.
Felicia hung on resolutely, in spite of what must have been humiliating public rejections (nothing was kept under wraps with Lenny).
He wanted to be a good Jewish family man, but he had an unquenchable, as he called it, “dark” side.
Finally, they did marry in what was the best possible move for him but not all plain sailing for her. I became extremely fond of Felicia. She was charming and talented—both musically and as an actress. She gave him three splendid children. Lenny adored them. She made their apartment in the Dakota a center of lighthearted multilingual hospitality. I owe many happy evenings and stimulating encounters to her.
At one such evening, a fellow guest was the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. He spoke no English or French but had picked up a bit of Spanish while in Cuba. He rather stuck to me as, aside from our Chilean hostess, no one else spoke Spanish. We left at the same time, and in the elevator he asked me, “What did you think of the dinner?” Somewhat surprised, I answered I thought it delicious. “But so short …” I understood he meant so few courses. He continued as we exited, “When you come to my house, there will be platos y platos y platos”—“course after course after course.” I gathered Russian hospitality involved a steady succession of dishes.
Sadly, Felicia died far too soon, in 1978. I was deeply touched when Lenny and the children asked me to speak at her memorial.
On a happier note, Jamie, Lenny’s eldest daughter, had a baby boy. We were all in the Bernstein box to hear and watch Lenny conduct the Philharmonic. After the concert we rushed to the Dakota, where the baby was left in the care of their faithful Julia. Lenny, bursting with pride, pointed to the baby: “There goes the first Jewish president of the United States.”
Lenny was as generous as he was expansive. Soloists who performed with him have told me that no conductor could be more supportive. When I started my lecturing career at the Metropolitan Museum in 1971, he sent me, unsolicited, this little text to be used for my publicity: “Madame Bernier has the gift of instant communication to a degree I have rarely encountered, and in a field where it is not easy to be communicative without being glib. Indeed, her lectures are richly informed, full of fresh surprise, and delivered with elegance and simple charm.”
And the night after my lecturing debut at the Met, Lenny and Felicia gave me a large party. If it had not been for that, I think only a handful of people might have come to the auditorium. I had been away from New York for twenty years and so was an almost unknown quantity.
Lenny immediately took to my husband, John Russell, when he arrived from England. Typically, he wrote an eloquent paragraph for John’s book The Meanings of Modern Art. When John Russell and I were married, on May 24, 1975, Lenny was John’s witness; Aaron Copland gave me away; Philip Johnson gave the wedding. He had arranged a little concert following the ceremony in his new sculpture gallery. And who led me in on his arm? My new husband? Not at all—Lenny Bernstein.
Afterward, Lenny asked me, “Why didn’t you ask me to write a piece of music for your wedding?” “It never occurred to me; I wouldn’t have had the pretension,” I answered. A few days later a music manuscript arrived from Lenny.
For the Russells, R. + J.
Meditations on a Wedding
With love from Lenny, May 1975
(Marked Andante con tenerezza [tenderness] followed by dolce … )
So I own an unpublished Bernstein work.
Whenever something important happened in my life, I always wanted Lenny around, and he was always there.
I was given a French decoration in 1980 (Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres). I was told that I could have a few guests but that the ceremony had to start on time. I told Lenny, “I’m inviting you, but don’t come if you are going to be late.” He was notoriously late everywhere. When John and I arrived at the French consulate, there was Lenny, walking up and down in front of the entrance, cape flapping in the wind, pointing to his watch when he saw us to indicate he had arrived not only on time but ahead of us.
When John’s book of essays Reading Russell was published some years ago, his publisher gave him a lunch in a private room at Le Cirque. Lenny was invited. We sat at the bar together before the tables were seated. “Do you remember ‘La Hija de Don Juan Alba’?” he asked me. More than thirty years had passed since we had heard it in Barcelona, and he remembered every word, in Spanish, and conducted me for a duet in his cigarette rasp and my feeble contralto.
I was lecturing in Turkey for an American organization in 1990. John and I were cut off from the outside world for some time, so we did not get news of Lenny’s alarming deteriorating health.
The day I got back to New York came the unbelievable headline: Leonard Bernstein was dead (October 14). A heartbreaking note was that I found a telegram from Lenny apologizing for being late with my birthday greetings—my birthday is October 1—and sending love. It must have been one of the last things he did.
We had a cloudless friendship. He inscribed one of his books to me with the affectionate nickname he had for me and added, “who has never given me anything but joy.” I could say the same about him.
Early Mexican Moments
When I had met Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo at the Sinfónica rehearsal in Mexico City, they had invited me to go with them to the concert that night. I was to collect them at their house in a suburb called San Ángel.
The house to which I went later that day in high expectation was two houses in one.
There was a big blue cube for Diego and a rather smaller dark pink one for Frida, with a connecting bridge between them.
It was designed and built by a young architect and painter called Juan O’Gorman. It was remarkably daring for its date.
At that time, San Ángel was a countrified suburb in which sedate family houses stood in large leafy gardens. People who walked by the O’Gorman house must have said to themselves, “What on earth is it? Is it a factory? A ship that never went to sea? Why aren’t the stairs indoors, as they are everywhere else?”
But to me the house seemed like a wonderland, and not least for the flamboyant welcome that I got from my hostess.
Although I had done my best with my limited student’s wardrobe, Frida took a quick look at me and would have none of it. “Come on, kid, I’ll fix you up,” she said.
Next thing I knew, I had been transformed from an anonymous college girl to a transplant from a Tehuantepec market. Multicolored swaying skirt, embroidered huipil, pre-Columbian necklaces galore, and her masterpiece: my hair became a bright tapestry of flowers and ribbons.
Frida laughed a great belly laugh of satisfaction at her work (she could laugh like a trombone in rut), tossed down one more little shot of tequila, and called Diego over to admire me, and off we went to sit in their usual box for the Chávez concert.
You couldn’t mistake Diego Rivera. He was well over six feet tall. He had been known to weigh more than three hundred pounds. And, as he himself admitted, he had a face like a gargantuan frog.
Frida, by contrast, stood five feet three and was delicately built. An attack of polio in childhood had left her with a withered right leg, and she was never to recover completely from a horrendous traffic acc
ident in 1925 that had left her more dead than alive. Surgical and other painful treatments went on most of her life.
But she did not strike me as an object of pity who shrank from being looked at too closely. On the contrary, she drew attention to herself by adopting the spectacular costume of the women of Tehuantepec, of which she had made me a pale reflection—full-length swaying skirts ruffled at the hem and the embroidered overblouse called a huipil. Usually a big shawl went along with it, a rebozo. I still own a deep blue rebozo Frida gave me, and I have worn it onstage at the Met. Sometimes, as can be seen in some of the self-portraits, she added a face-framing extravaganza of ruffles and pleats that was the traditional Tehuana headdress. And she usually wore her hair entwined in a thicket of flowers and ribbons improvised every time. This was often topped off by garlands of heavy pre-Columbian necklaces. She didn’t stint on the rings, either, on both hands.
She often painted her nails—orange, purple, green, whatever went best with the outfit of the day. Incidentally, Frida had never been to Tehuantepec; she just liked the becoming costume, it played to Diego’s mexicanidad, and it made her the most noticeable kid on the block.
I was to discover she had a great sense of mischief. No one was more fun to be around. Her vocabulary in both Spanish and English would have made a truck driver blush.
Rare was the man or woman who was not seduced by her, and seduction was her specialty.
After such a beginning, how could I not fail to fall in love with Mexico?
Some Animals I Have Known
After my marriage to Lew, my new life in Mexico began.
As a child, I didn’t have any pets. No dog, no cat. I’m not counting two personable pink-eyed white mice that my Francophile father named Aglavaine and Selysette (these were characters out of a Maeterlinck play, I believe). The pet shop had guaranteed both were male, but one day Aglavaine or Selysette, I’m not sure which, produced sixteen offspring. That strained my schoolroom capacities. I think they were banished. (I had lessons at home tutored by a French governess.)
Some of My Lives Page 3