Famous Father Girl

by Jamie Bernstein

  Back in second grade, it hadn’t bothered me too much when my classmate Lisa dubbed me “famous father girl”—which devolved a week later into “famous monkey face.” But now, in fifth grade, I became self-conscious about my famous father. I didn’t want to be singled out; I just wanted to be normal—that elusive condition to which Alexander and I perpetually aspired.

  That spring, it got even tougher to be normal, when the movie of West Side Story came out. It was an enormous hit, winning ten Academy Awards. I was finally old enough to see it, and fell in love with the film. “I’m gonna see this movie ten times!” I vowed. I even managed to work up a crush on Richard Beymer, which took a little doing.

  I was disappointed that my father himself wasn’t fonder of the movie. He was particularly unhappy with the musical arrangements—but he’d been too busy with his conducting career to deal with the issues of adapting his score to the film. Having ceded that responsibility to a fellow named Johnny Green, the composer kept his cavils mostly to himself.

  Anyway, Leonard Bernstein was now more famous than ever, and we lived on Park Avenue. Did that mean I was rich? I had no idea. In our house, no one ever talked about money. Nanny Helen paid all the bills, and it was clear that both our parents were delighted not to have to discuss financial matters. I had no sense of where we sat on the scale of moniedness.

  Daddy often told us how his parents had fought about money; it was one of the blights of his childhood. Sam Bernstein tormented his wife, Jennie, by withholding money until she had to beg miserably for it; then he excoriated her for being a spendthrift. Sam was one of those fathers who withheld love by withholding money. He even resisted paying for Daddy’s piano lessons, to discourage his son from pursuing such an unlucrative career. He’d fully expected to pass his hard-won, successful hair and beauty supply business along to his eldest son: this was, after all, the immigrant dream come true. (Years later, after Daddy’s magical overnight success at Carnegie Hall, some journalist got wind of Sam’s behavior and confronted him: “Mr. Bernstein, is it true you wouldn’t pay for your son’s piano lessons?” Sam’s immortal reply: “Well, how was I supposed to know he’d turn out to be Leonard Bernstein?”)

  My father had clearly organized his home life to spare his children his own damaging childhood experience. We never saw our parents fight—and the subject of money never came up. We didn’t even have regular allowances; if we needed money, an appropriate amount was given to us.

  In those days, it was normal for schools like ours to have parents who didn’t get particularly involved in their children’s education; they just assumed the school would take care of everything. So it was unusual—alarming, actually—when Daddy showed up on Parents’ Day. There was a general tremor of awe when he slipped, not quite unobtrusively, into the classroom, making the teacher visibly nervous. I felt more than heard the whispering around me, while inside my head there swarmed a hive of self-consciousness.

  But nothing was worse than the Brearley Christmas Assembly Fathers’ Chorus, a scarring experience for Nina and myself. The music teacher, Mr. White, was in a dither, having the Maestro in his midst. At the assembly, when it was the fathers’ turn to perform their carol, Daddy felt compelled to sing not the tune but the descant, in his loud, tuneless voice: “Nowell, NO-WELLL . . .” You could hear him above everyone else. Mummy’s favorite Chilean expression was invented for moments like this: “Tierra, trágame.” Earth, swallow me.

  * * *

  When I turned ten, we said good-bye to the poky little Redding house and got a much bigger country house in Fairfield, Connecticut. Mummy told us about it one afternoon after school. She said it used to be a horse farm in the 1870s, and it had barns and stables, meadows and woods. It also had a swimming pool (which Redding had) and a tennis court (which Redding did not have). “How much did it cost?” we wanted to know. “Oh, I can’t tell you, it’s too horrifying. It was terribly expensive!” “Tell us, tell us!” “Oh, I can’t even say it out loud!” “Tell us! Tell us! Tell us!” Finally Mummy whispered, “Eighty.” “What? Eighty dollars? The house cost eighty dollars?” “No, no . . . eighty . . . [she could only mouth the word silently] . . . thousand.”

  The Fairfield house in spring.

  Photograph courtesy of Kelly Prizel

  “WOW, eighty thousand dollars? That’s so much money! This must be the biggest house in the world!” “Shh, shhh!” our mother begged. She hated speaking aloud of money.

  (Today, of course, $80,000 would not buy you a pup tent in Fairfield, Connecticut.)

  The house was indeed wonderful, and not fancy at all: it was basically an old-fashioned New England saltbox onto which additions had been built over the years, giving it a charmingly meandering shape. Around the grounds, there were mighty trees of many varieties, including an enormous, invitingly climbable copper beech and a giant ginkgo, which, we would discover in the fall, dropped all its leaves at once overnight, leaving a bright yellow carpet on the driveway for us to find the next morning.

  The pool’s concrete foundation was covered in a turquoise blue plastic lining, with a logo at the shallow end showing the silhouette of a woman diving and the legend “An Esther Williams Swimming Pool.” This particularly delighted Aunt Shirley, who had been a big fan of the Esther Williams swimming movies. When Shirley wore her white bathing cap and launched herself sportily off the diving board, we thought she looked exactly like the lady on the logo.

  Our mother loved the new house, and relished fixing it up. She trolled the antique stores and junk shops along Route 7, often taking us along with her, to our desperate boredom. She found things made of wicker or murky brass, funny old paintings and eccentric lamps. Then she would set about restoring the stuff. Under a tree, she would scrape the old paint off the wicker furniture using dental instruments. Then she’d repaint. We grew accustomed to the rattle of those spray-paint cans being shaken, and the terrible fumes that pursued us right into the house.

  Also, Mummy obsessed over her flower garden, spending long hours weeding and pruning in her broad-brimmed straw hat. She had strong opinions about flowers. Gladioli—bad: too funereal! Petunias—bad: too suburban! Zinnias, peonies, rambling roses—all good.

  Aunt Shirley replicates the logo in the Esther Williams swimming pool in Fairfield.

  During the school year, the routine became that Mummy would drive us kids, Julia, and the dog up to Fairfield after our half day of school on Friday afternoons, and we’d spend the weekend up there. If Daddy joined us, he’d drive up later in the other car. Mummy was an excellent driver: a bit on the fast side, staying mostly in the left lane, but steady as a rock. It galled her to no end, therefore, that she was the one who always got the speeding tickets, while Daddy—who drove with the attention span of a puppy, paid minimal attention to lane dividers, and turned around to face anyone he was addressing in the back seat—somehow never got a ticket. His automotive invulnerability was all part of the Lenny magic.

  Our drives were fairly peaceable, but there was one part of the drive I hated, particularly in the cold months, regardless of which parent was at the wheel: the smoking. As a grand gesture to whoever else was in the car, Mummy and Daddy would crack the driver’s window one inch when they lit up, which would do virtually nothing to dissipate the noxious clouds of smoke that accompanied the first moments of lighting a cigarette. My stomach lurched with trepidation when they pushed in the car lighter, which popped out a few seconds later, glowing red within, ready to do its job. As the driver’s hand raised the stubby car lighter toward the cigarette waiting between his or her lips, I’d take as deep a breath as I could, and try to hold it until that first ghastly burst of smoke had subsided. But I could never hold my breath long enough, and inevitably I had to gulp down that heavy gray stink.

  The cigarette-lighting ritual was less odious in warm weather because we could crank down the car windows. In the summers, Mummy moved the entire household to Fairfield for the season: cook, maid, and all. Daddy’s favorit
e thing in those golden months was to go straight to the vegetable garden when he woke up. Wearing a terrycloth bathrobe over his bathing suit and carrying a saltshaker, he’d shuffle to the vegetable garden, pick a tomato, lick it so the salt he sprinkled there would stick to the skin, and take a big bite. “Heaven!” he’d gurgle through a mouthful of tomato pulp. After that, he’d shuffle back to the pool and take a swim. Then came breakfast under the poolside umbrella—the usual eggs and bacon and all the rest—and he’d read the paper until he got stinky. Then he would head up to his studio to attend to his various movements.

  The studio, a short way up the driveway (or even shorter, by way of the lawn), was a little two-room house attached to the old stables. Mummy had found Daddy a huge wooden stand-up desk; because of his back problems, he liked to work standing up. On the wall behind the stand-up desk, and all around the room, Daddy had a display of endlessly fascinating photos, many signed, of everyone from Carl Nielsen to Gustav Mahler to Aaron Copland to Darius Milhaud (who drew a mustache on his image with a ballpoint pen) to John F. Kennedy to a particularly mournful Abraham Lincoln.

  An interesting offer came my father’s way that first summer in Fairfield. The Gas Company (or, as they called themselves on the TV commercial, “Your Gas Company”) offered him a staggering one million dollars to write—I can still hardly believe this—the Gas Symphony. These were the golden years of corporations underwriting cultural projects; evidently a piece by Leonard Bernstein was an extra-illustrious proposition, worth the grand expense. With our family’s devotion to the execution and perennial discussion of all personal gaseous emissions, the Gas Symphony was our favorite topic for several weeks. We fantasized about the tuba effusions, the trombone reports, the intestinal rumbles of timpani . . . And—a million dollars! “C’mon, Daddy, do it! We’ll be so rich!”

  Our father was tempted to take the offer; he was always longing for more composing opportunities, and that symphony he’d been working on at the MacDowell Colony was taking him forever to finish. So he strung along Our Gas Company long enough to accept their offer to fly him, Alexander, and me by helicopter from Bridgeport, Connecticut, to the New York World’s Fair, where we were treated to a lavish lunch at the Festival of Gas Pavilion(!). We were then escorted to all the most popular presentations without having to stand on the two-hour lines. General Motors, IBM, Ford, and General Electric had up-to-the-minute multiscreened films and animatronics; Alexander and I were enthralled. At sunset, the three of us were helicoptered back over Long Island Sound to Connecticut. Soon after, Daddy gave Our Gas Company the bad news: he wouldn’t be writing Their Gas Symphony after all. But hey—thanks for the ride, fellas!

  He went back to work on his symphony.

  One day in August, Alexander and I were sitting by the Esther Williams swimming pool with Mummy, while she had her end-of-the-day vodka. We heard the screen door slam shut in Daddy’s studio. We turned around to see him walking toward us across the lawn, waving a thick sheaf of paper over his head. “I didduhtt!” he crowed in Rybernian. “I finished my symphoneee!”

  “Hooray!” Mummy yelled. She leaped out of her chair and, to our everlasting astonishment, jumped into the pool with all her clothes on.

  4

  The First Shadows

  So, all the pieces were in place. Daddy had his job at the New York Philharmonic, newly relocated to Lincoln Center. We had our own new homes, on Park Avenue and in Fairfield. Mummy was the beautiful, gracious, witty wife and mother. Nina was the adorable toddler, always saying clever things. I was in sixth grade at Brearley, and Alexander was in third grade at the Collegiate School, just across the park. Julia kept things running on an even keel while doting on Alexander, fussing over Nina, and squabbling with me. Alexander and I had our weekly piano lessons; we loathed them, and never practiced. We had Aunt Shirley and Uncle BB and all the friends, who came over to the house for dinner and out to Fairfield on the weekends. It was a happy, noisy, busy pair of households. If there were any shadows, I didn’t see them.

  The 1960 presidential election was the first one to which I paid any attention. Julia wasn’t a US citizen yet, but she said that if she could vote, she’d cast her ballot for Richard Nixon, because “he has his hair combed.” She thought John F. Kennedy had an unruly look about him. (How right she was.) But my parents and all their lefty friends were thrilled when Kennedy won. Daddy even got to perform at JFK’s inaugural and came home with a delightful tale about getting caught in the epic blizzard while traversing Washington in a limo with Bette Davis. Because he couldn’t make it to his hotel, he conducted his specially composed presidential fanfare dressed in a Caribbean shirt, several sizes too big, lent to him by Harry Belafonte.

  Our parents were in love with the Kennedys. The feeling was mutual enough that they were invited to the White House several times. Once it was just the four of them: Lenny and Felicia dining in the family quarters with Jack and Jackie. Our parents’ eyes were shining as they told us the next day about how the president’s sisters, Eunice and Pat, called after dinner, asking what was going on over there. Jack told his sisters over the phone that Lenny and Felicia had joined them for dinner, and then reported Eunice’s reply: “You have all the fun! Why weren’t we invited?” Daddy loved the dynamic between the Kennedy siblings; he felt right at home. In fact he felt so at home that after dinner, according to Mummy, Daddy went and sat in the president’s very own iconic rocking chair. “Lenny!” she hissed. “Get up from there!”

  Another time, when our father was attending an event at the White House while a Young People’s Concert was being broadcast, he asked (rather impertinently) if there was a television where he could watch a bit of his show. He was taken up to the nursery, where he sat down on a chair behind the president’s four-year-old daughter, Caroline, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor, huddled close to the screen. She watched the program intently for a few minutes, impressing our father with her concentration. Suddenly she turned around to him and announced, “I have my own pony!”

  This was why we loved Daddy: because he would tell this story on himself, giving his family the gift of a chance to tease him. His endless parade of triumphs and that blazing energy that overtook every situation could be exhausting to live with, especially for our mother. She was particularly appreciative of any opportunity to tease her Lennuhtt—and Lennuhtt knew it.

  Our most-played record in the Park Avenue living room was Vaughn Meader’s First Family album, a bestselling collection of comedy sketches poking fun at the Kennedy family. Alexander and I knew all the routines by heart. Daddy had been at Harvard just a year behind Jack, and he really identified with those rambunctious, affectionate Kennedy siblings. When Daddy was horsing around with Shirley and BB, we imagined him feeling a bit like the Semitic counterpart of Jack: the illustrious head of a parallel Jewish Kennedy clan.

  One Friday in late November, I was eating lunch in the kitchen when the news came over the TV that President Kennedy had been shot while in a motorcade in Dallas.

  Mummy tried to keep herself together for Alexander’s and my benefit, but finally crumpled onto her side of the bed and sobbed. Daddy came rushing home from his Young People’s Concert production meeting. He was crying, too. Shirley came over, crying. The grownups drifted in, sat together in the library with the shades drawn: watching TV, drinking, chain-smoking, and crying. I had never seen the grownups cry before.

  The gloom persisted for days. Our father conducted Mahler’s Second Symphony in the president’s honor, and it was even broadcast on TV—but for once Alexander and I didn’t watch; it was too serious for us. We had never seen the grownups watch so much television. We were all in the library with the TV on when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. Everyone seemed thunderstruck by the events toppling over us, bursting right out of that little gray screen. We watched the funeral together: the skittish, riderless horse with the boots turned backward in the stirrups; Mrs. Kennedy in her black veil; little Caroline, dressed just like me at
that age in the velvet-collared Chesterfield wool coat with the matching leggings; tiny John-John Kennedy saluting as the coffin went by.

  Daddy decided to dedicate his new symphony to his beloved slain president. It was eerily appropriate: the symphony, named Kaddish, had a chorus singing the Aramaic text of the kaddish prayer, which is spoken for the dead. The symphony had an English narration that my father wrote especially for Mummy to recite. The text was a kind of argument with God: If you’re up there protecting us, then why is everything so terrible down here? After the assassination, the narration took on an even weightier meaning.

  The American premiere of the piece was in Boston, with Charles Munch conducting and Felicia Montealegre as narrator. The composer himself conducted it with the New York Philharmonic a few months later—with Felicia still narrating—and they subsequently recorded the piece. Alexander and I were too young to attend the concerts, but in the fall, when we played the newly released record in Nina’s nursery, we were taken aback. The music was dark, often dissonant, even snarly. The chorus was intimidating; sometimes they yelled, or sang in a kind of swirling cacophony. And that narration—it was hard for us to take. Mummy sounded all stagy and melodramatic; it made us squirm. “Tin God! Your bargain is tin!” she declaimed in her big scary theater voice, and we shrank into ourselves and covered our faces with our hands. This piece was a long, long way from West Side Story. And, as it turned out, the rest of the world had a similar reaction. The text, in particular, elicited scorn; one critic referred to it as “a lava flow of clichés.”

  We sensed that our mother, too, was uncomfortable with the Kaddish Symphony. But of course she was stuck with performing it; her husband had written that overblown narration especially for her. Perhaps she enjoyed the opportunity to perform once again—but even at our young ages, Alexander and I could tell she was ambivalent. This was a new situation: Daddy had composed something that was intensely earnest and impassioned, yet was getting mixed reviews—and even his own wife wasn’t entirely comfortable with it. Everything about this symphony was, for us . . . icky.