Famous Father Girl

by Jamie Bernstein

  As if things weren’t already bad enough, our parents’ beloved friend (and my godfather) Marc Blitzstein was murdered that January by sailors on the island of Martinique. I didn’t find out for many years that it was a homosexual hate crime, which must have made the loss even more ghastly for my parents. All I knew at the time was that I’d lost my godfather, that glorious screen villain, tormentor of the pyramid builders in “Call Me Moses.” (I subsequently appointed Mike Nichols my surrogate godfather; he graciously accepted the nontask.)

  The following summer, our parents invited Mrs. Kennedy, Caroline, and John-John out to Fairfield for the weekend. It had been less than a year since the assassination. Our family felt this visit as both an honor and a burden. Mummy told us we had to be polite, and to play nicely with the two children. We promised to try; we knew Mrs. Kennedy and her children must be very sad. Before the guests arrived, Mummy and Daddy frantically hid all their books on the various assassination conspiracy theories. (Vaughn Meader’s First Family album had been buried long before.)

  Jamie with Mike Nichols in Fairfield.

  The family arrived in several cars, amid a welter of Secret Service agents. The weekend went relatively smoothly. Caroline was about five years younger than I, but we did fine together. I took her to the apple orchard, where we sat in the tree house; I don’t remember our conversation, but Caroline seemed cheerful enough. John-John was so little, he couldn’t really be a companion for Alexander. But the time passed agreeably, and one afternoon we put on a miniature talent show. When it was her turn, Mrs. Kennedy did a Russian sailor’s dance, with her arms crossed, alternately extending one long leg and then the other from a squatting position. That was impressive.

  Early Sunday morning, I came down for breakfast and wandered outside, whereupon I discovered that my favorite climbing tree, the big copper beech by the driveway, had acquired a hideous pink gash in its bark, as big as a dinner plate. I gasped in outrage: “Who did this? Boy, whoever did this to our beautiful tree is really gonna pay!” I soon found out that an hour earlier, John-John had somehow escaped the attention of the half dozen Secret Service guys drinking coffee in the house, and wandered all alone out to the driveway, where he’d opened the door of their station wagon, climbed into the driver’s seat, and released the emergency brake, just like the nice Secret Service man had shown him . . . and the car started rolling downhill. Apparently John-John had managed to leap out before the car gained momentum and veered to the right, rolling off the driveway and crashing headlong into the copper beech.

  The pink gash eventually healed over, but the scar remained, providing a delicious anecdote with which to regale Fairfield visitors—until 1999, when John-John’s plane plunged into the ocean. After that, it was too sad to tell the story anymore.

  * * *

  After seven years of being the full-time music director of the New York Philharmonic, my father was finally overcome with frustration; he wasn’t getting enough composing done. In the fall of 1964, he began a yearlong sabbatical from the Philharmonic to devote his time to composing. He started work on a new show with Betty and Adolph, to be directed by Jerry Robbins, based on the Thornton Wilder play The Skin of Our Teeth. Daddy seemed happy to be back with his pals, all of them enveloped in their magic nimbus of cigarette smoke—but for some reason that has never been fully understood, the project didn’t go well. They gave it up, and Daddy was bitterly disappointed, and upset that he’d already squandered half of his sabbatical on a stillborn project.

  And something wasn’t quite right with Mummy. Every now and then, she would have a bizarre physiological explosion: violent vomiting and diarrhea, followed by her blood pressure plummeting nearly to zero. Our parents’ doctor, Chuck Solomon, would rush over and arrange for an ambulance to speed our mother to the hospital. It was frightening to see the orderlies hustling her out of the apartment on a stretcher. At the hospital, she’d gradually pull out of it, and a few days later would return home, weak and terribly pale.

  She also had developed a sun allergy. To avoid getting the itchy bumps, our mother had to give up her beloved gardening and now spent the better part of our summers in the shade, tackling assorted projects: giving a brass chandelier an antique patina using bathroom cleanser and a toothbrush, magic-markering all the green patches in an Oriental rug to a color she preferred, and executing prodigious feats of needlepoint. She was never still. I noticed that she had developed a nervous tic with her fingers, tapping one, then another lightly and persistently against her thumb in a complex pattern known only to her.

  Dr. Solomon, who rescued my mother during her episodes, also wound up saving my father’s composing sabbatical. The doctor’s friend Walter Hussey, dean of Chichester Cathedral in England, had offered Daddy a commission to compose a short choral piece that, Dean Hussey hoped, would have echoes of West Side Story in it. My father had turned down many an offer like this, but maybe because it was Chuck Solomon’s friend and the timing was right, he accepted this commission—and that’s where a great deal of the Skin of Our Teeth material wound up. Chichester Psalms emerged quickly. He didn’t struggle; it sort of popped out. He’d put so much more toil and travail into his Kaddish Symphony, and yet this simple, unambitious work, setting the Hebrew texts of four psalms, was the one everybody loved. Kaddish was so thorny, while “Chich,” as Daddy called it, was friendly and accessible.

  I loved that first movement, with its rollicking 7/4 rhythm, its great joyous bursts of choral singing, and that huge thump of a bass drum at the end. Then the second movement had the boy alto singing “The Lord is my shepherd” (in Hebrew) so purely, so simply; the chord progression was almost like a pop song. Then the men in the chorus interrupted him with their ferocious, bellicose “Lamah rag’shu” section—“Why do the nations rage”—thrilling! Daddy told us that the tune was from the original opening number of West Side Story: “Mix! Make a mess of ’em, make the sons-of-bitches pay, make a mess of ’em . . .” Those were hard words to spit out in English; it was probably a good idea to cut that opening number. (In “Chich,” the “Lamah rag’shu” words were even harder to sing—but somehow choruses worldwide seem to manage.) The last movement began with a very anguished opening section, but then morphed into a lovely tune in 5/4 for the chorus, serene as a flowing river. And the mystical, hushed chorale at the end was so beautiful, capped off by the chorus singing a hushed “Amen” while a muted solo trumpet floated the five opening notes of the piece, high above them all.

  On the road with Daddy.

  bpk Bildagentur / Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich / Felicitas Timpe / Art Resource, NY

  “Chich” had catchy tunes, fun rhythms, and lots of heart. It was accessible, unpretentious, straightforward, and short. Everyone loved it. Alexander and I thought it was pure, perfect Daddy music. Why couldn’t he compose this way all the time?

  For the premiere of “Chich,” Alexander and I got to accompany our parents to England, which made us feel very grownup. The performance at the cathedral was underrehearsed but exciting. Daddy said the cavernous acoustics had hidden a multitude of sins in the orchestra.

  We soon left Chichester for London, where the four of us stayed in a magnificent suite at the Savoy, the swellest hotel we had ever seen and ever would see. Our father exhibited an irrepressible, childlike delight in luxurious things, and relished them anew through us, his kids. At the Savoy, he reveled in summoning the liveried headwaiter at the pull of a bell cord, and he couldn’t wait to show us how the hotel’s fierce water pressure filled the boat-sized bathtub in ninety seconds. But for Alexander and me, nothing could beat the mirrored folding closet doors, in front of which we could create a Rockettes kick line that stretched into infinity.

  5

  The Beatles Portal

  Alexander and Jamie share the Beatles with their dad.

  In February of 1964, halfway through my sixth-grade year, the Beatles came to America. By coincidence, Aunt Shirley was returning from a trip to England on the sam
e day the Beatles were landing at the recently renamed John F. Kennedy Airport. When we went to pick Shirley up, the airport was still crawling with dazed teenage girls; the Beatles had landed a mere couple of hours earlier. On the drive back into town, Shirley revealed that she had originally been booked on the same Pan Am jet that the Beatles were on, but at the last minute had changed her flight to TWA because, she explained, they had this great new feature: a projector was set up at the back of the aisle and a screen up front, and they showed a movie. I was aghast: For this, Shirley had missed being on the same plane as the Beatles?

  A few days later, the Beatles appeared on The Ape Solomon Show—an event so seismic that Mummy and Daddy agreed to let us watch it during dinner. Alexander and I wheeled the little TV down the hallway from the library to the Casino Fancy dining room—the same TV on which we’d seen Jack Ruby shoot Oswald just a few months earlier. We fiddled with the antenna until the black-and-white picture lost most of its fuzz, and then watched history in the making once again.

  To say I was a Beatlemaniac does not begin to convey the depth of my obsession. The Beatles were my ground of being: like air to a bird, like water to a fish. I wrote poetry about them, kept logs of my dreams about them. (In one dream, George Harrison noticed I was already wearing a bra and kissed me on the cheek. “But real suction!” I wrote.) My girlfriends and I listened over and over to the albums, gazing at the cover art, memorizing the lyrics. Whenever we sang Beatles songs, I always sang the harmony. I lived in that harmony.

  Daddy loved the Beatles, too, which made me particularly happy. In the swimming pool the following summer, he came up with a third part to “Love Me Do,” so that he, Alexander, and I could sing the song together in three-part harmony, right there in the corner of the deep end. On one of his Young People’s Concerts, Daddy explained the A-B-A structure of sonata form by singing a Beatles song. Oh, how the girls in the audience squirmed and squealed as he accompanied himself on piano, singing “And I Love Her” in his not-so-McCartneyesque voice! He must have known he was onto something, because he began regularly incorporating the Beatles, and other pop music, in his Young People’s Concerts, to illustrate his various points. It kept the kids in the audience interested, just as it had for Alexander and me. (We, and later Nina, were in effect the ongoing guinea pigs for Daddy’s Young People’s Concert ideas.)

  John Lennon was Daddy’s favorite Beatle, as he was mine. We were both enchanted by Lennon’s book of poetry, In His Own Write, and pored over it together. Daddy invented a singing game for Alexander and me to play with him while the three of us lay wedged into the hammock under the big maple tree after dinner. We would invent a round, à la “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” using Lennon’s poem “The Moldy Moldy Man.” Whoever started the round got to choose what kind of melody it would be: sad, perky, waltz, military. After the first line—“I’m a moldy moldy man . . .”—the second person had to come in, echoing person number one. Then the third person would come in. The fun of the game was, of course, that you couldn’t possibly repeat the line you’d just heard while simultaneously listening for the next one. It was deliciously hopeless, and a raucous shambles every time—always punctuated at the end by person number three dolefully singing the last line all alone after the other two had finished: “. . . I’m such a humble Joe.”

  Eventually, word got back to John Lennon—or to his manager or press agent or somebody—that Leonard Bernstein was thinking about possibly setting some of the In His Own Write poems to music. This led to Daddy being invited to meet Lennon backstage during a dress rehearsal for The Ed Sullivan Show. It was by now the summer of 1965, and the Beatles were returning to the US to make their highly anticipated second Ed Sullivan appearance. Naturally, our father asked if he could bring his two older children with him to the rehearsal.

  We were going to meet the Beatles!!!

  Daddy drove us into town from Fairfield. I was painfully conscious of the fact that I had braces and still didn’t shave my legs. What hope did I have of getting any Beatle to fall in love with me?

  Our father was summoned backstage first, while Alexander and I remained, perplexed and frustrated, in the theater seats watching a tedious rehearsal of a comedy duo who thought it was funny for one of them to wear a Beatles wig. Finally an usher came to escort us through the grimy backstage corridors of the theater until we were in front of a door with a star on it. The usher knocked.

  No actual event in my life would ever be more exciting than the seconds containing that anticipatory knock, on that particular door, on that particular day.

  The door opened and there they were: John, Paul, and George. But no Ringo. Why? Because the other three had been eating hamburgers with onions, and any Beatlemaniac worth her salt knew that the two things Ringo hated most were onions and Donald Duck, so of course he’d gone off to a less smelly room.

  Alexander and I were introduced, and shown to chairs. I was seated next to Paul, who went to the trouble to be friendly and ask me some polite questions. (I have since heard many similar reports from people who met the Beatles; Paul was a gent.)

  Daddy was sharing cigarettes with everyone and chatting away with them as if they were old friends. Maybe we sang them a round of “Moldy Man”? I don’t remember. I was in a coma of awe.

  The three Beatles had an interesting argument about whether to put on their signature suits for the rehearsal. John and George didn’t want to. Paul said, “Come on, lads, it’s a dress rehearsal! We ought to be dressed, then!” (Once again, Paul was the one behaving like an adult.)

  The Ed Sullivan Show dress rehearsal was very loud.

  Photograph by Ken Regan

  On our way out, the usher knocked on the adjoining dressing room door. We heard a muffled “Come in,” and when the door opened, we saw two feet in red socks on a cot; the head of the bed was obscured by a locker. But when the body wearing the socks sat up, it was a sleepy Ringo; we’d woken him up from a nap. Sorry, Ringo!

  The next day, back at my day camp in Connecticut, there was all-out pandemonium when the girls found out where I’d been the day before. Sometimes it was purely great to have Leonard Bernstein for a father.

  At that same day camp, a group of us had received little folk guitars, which we were soon to be taught to play. But I couldn’t wait. Before the lessons began, I took the instrument home, laid it on the floor, and composed a song with no words. I just hummed my tune while slowly plucking the open strings: E, A, D . . . E, A, D . . . I felt I was expressing all the wonder of life itself through my tiny song.

  The camp counselor eventually taught us three chords: E, A, and B7, of all the less-than-easy choices—oh, how I wrestled with my pinky finger to get it over to that G string—but with those three chords we could play “Easy Rider.” When I played it for Daddy, he told me it was a blues song, and explained what a blues progression was, and how the three blues chords were tonic, dominant, and subdominant. Suddenly I felt I had a road map—not just to Beatles songs, but to all the music on the radio.

  My father and the Philharmonic recorded on Columbia Records, so the label sent him free records by their pop artists, all of which he passed along to me. I listened to albums by two funny-looking guys called Simon and Garfunkel, and a couple of others by some songwriter with a terrible nasal voice I couldn’t stand; I read his name on the album cover as “Bob Dye-lan.” His singing sounded so out of tune to my ears compared to the Beatles’ celestial harmonies.

  I had to give the guitar back when camp ended, but that fall, in a storage closet off our murky back corridor in New York, I found a beautiful classical guitar in a battered case that someone had given Daddy as a present. I figured out how to change the broken strings, then tuned it up, just as I’d been taught at camp—and it sounded beautiful. It was bigger and harder to play than a folk guitar, but I didn’t care.

  Playing the guitar allowed music to belong to me. It was just for fun—plus, the guitar spoke directly to the music I listened to and cared about. I cou
ld pick out the chord progressions of my favorite Beatles songs. I could even correct Daddy when he heard the key wrong on the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.” He was interpreting the dominant as the tonic, I told him.

  The piano lessons, by contrast, were mandated from above, and they were not going well. Our parents insisted upon them, but they couldn’t bear, or possibly couldn’t be bothered, to nag us to practice. The only practicing we did was in the sickening half hour before the piano teacher showed up for the Tuesday lesson. Everything about piano lessons was lonely and discouraging. After all, I was constantly hearing music all around me being performed in its optimum state. But whenever I sat down at the keyboard, and those little frogs and spiders came squirming out of my fingers, I would think: Oh, who am I kidding. I’ll never get there, never. Alexander felt the same; he often contracted a stomachache right before the piano lesson. To this very day, he gets depressed on Tuesdays.

  As I approached the squirmy years of adolescence, it was the Beatles that provided the happy ground where my father and I most enjoyed each other’s company. When a new Beatles album came out, I would run into his studio: “Daddy, it’s here, look—I got it!” He’d slap the record right onto his stereo system, crank up the volume, and we’d sit together on his couch to scrutinize the lyrics while the album played. “Hey, that’s a sitar!” he exclaimed when he first heard “Norwegian Wood”; then he explained Indian ragas to me. “That’s a C trumpet—just like Bach used!” he said when we listened to “Penny Lane.” “Wow, can you believe that chord? So fresh!” he marveled on the fade-out of “Good Day Sunshine.”