Famous Father Girl

by Jamie Bernstein

  * * *

  The year 1968 was a big one for my father: not only was he turning fifty, but he was changing his position at the New York Philharmonic from full-time music director to something the orchestra management invented to make sure he’d come back on a regular basis, called conductor laureate. This new relationship was going to give him more time to compose, which was what he said he wanted to do more than anything. But the transition wouldn’t be official until the following spring. First up was a tour through Europe and Israel with the Philharmonic, beginning right on his fiftieth birthday. So before he left, Mummy threw him a big party in Fairfield, with a tent set up behind the house. For the occasion, I outdid myself in the birthday-show department. This time, I composed most of the songs myself. I tortured poor Alexander, forcing him to sing the tunes against my harmonies. “One of us is flat,” I would say tactfully during our rehearsals.

  Looking back on this birthday party, I’m astonished by my chutzpah in getting up in front of all my parents’ friends—those illustrious friends—to regale them with my Daddy-roasting sketches and songs. One song, called “Fastest Beast in the East,” was about that silver Maserati he had acquired in Italy the summer before, which turned out to be a lemon and was nothing but trouble:

  The morning sun shines on my face,

  I’m getting looks from everyplace:

  “Hey—there’s Leonard Bernstein the movie star,

  And man oh man, look at his car.”

  Ho-hum, I say, an average day

  In my Masera-ti, my Masera-ti, my Masera-ti . . .

  Alexander’s big number in the show was “Haf Torah Will Travel,” in which he recited, verbatim, Daddy’s explanation of the project he’d been working on all that year with Jerry Robbins: an ambitious musical based on a play by Bertolt Brecht. Every dinner guest of the last several months had been subjected to this long description—which was how Alexander and I had learned it by heart. Our gimmick for the birthday show: Alexander chanted Daddy’s description to the cantillation from his bar mitzvah the month before. That brought the house down.

  But Daddy was depressed about turning fifty. It spooked him. He’d given notice at the Philharmonic, and now he was going to compose like mad. But there was trouble already with the Brecht musical; it wasn’t coming together. His turmoil over that show was intertwined with his despair about the country. He supported Eugene McCarthy, but the senator wouldn’t take a hard line on gun control—even after the two ghastly assassinations that year. Daddy couldn’t sleep, couldn’t compose, and he talked openly and incessantly about it. A few months later, the Brecht show was abandoned altogether—yet another stillbirth, like the one my father had experienced with Skin of Our Teeth four years earlier.

  * * *

  In November, Election Day arrived at last. Eugene McCarthy was long gone. Weakly, we rooted for Hubert Humphrey, but it was hard to be enthusiastic for someone we viewed as a glad-handing party hack—and anyway, he lost: to Richard Nixon. Once again, the grownups were drinking and crying.

  That same November, my father made a special arrangement with Columbia Records and his longtime record producer, John McClure, for me to record those songs I’d written for the fiftieth birthday. I found myself in a real, professional recording studio, playing the guitar I’d found in the closet five years earlier, singing into a fancy microphone, getting McClure’s instructions over the loudspeaker while he and my father sat in the control room behind the glass panel. Was this actually happening?

  Our parents arranged for the pressing of a couple hundred copies of Daddy’s 50th Birthday, and gave the record to all their friends for Christmas. It had a black-and-white Columbia Records label on it, and the cover showed Alexander, Nina, and me seated at the mirrored table in the Casino Fancy dining room, so that our images were reflected in the table, upside down. At school, this record got me almost more attention than I could handle, leaving me with a sickening combination of emotions: immense excitement, along with a creeping discomfort about inviting comparisons with the more illustrious musician in my house.

  My various teenage preoccupations left me with little remaining bandwidth to process the next big family event: that spring, Grandpa died. Back we went to Boston, with a funeral instead of a bar mitzvah at Temple Mishkan Tefila, a graveside ceremony, and yet another gathering of the motley relatives in my grandparents’ parlor. I suspected my father was feeling, above all, relief that his complex relationship with his father had drawn to an acceptable conclusion.

  They’d had a rough ride. There were the boyhood tussles over the piano lessons; the pressure on young Lenny to take over the family business; the intensity of Sam’s Talmudic fervor combined with his cold, punishing ways with Jennie; the constant bitter squabbling over money. On the other hand, he’d taken his eldest son to synagogue on Friday nights, where Lenny experienced his first thrill of live musical performance. It’s no accident that the notes of the shofar, the ram’s horn blown on high holy days, appear in several Bernstein works—including the three notes that provide the key to the entire score of West Side Story. The cantillation of the rabbis provided my father with rich material, as well; those ancient melodies show up in his Symphony no. 1, Jeremiah, which he’d pointedly dedicated to his father. It was through his music, really, that Daddy found the most success in working out his complex father issues—all confusingly interwoven with his equally complicated feelings about God.

  After Sam’s death, Grandma went on to have a rich extra chapter in her own life, unencumbered by a bleak marriage: just hanging out with her two remaining sisters, Bertha and Dorothy—“the Three Fates,” Daddy and his siblings called the trio. They went everywhere together—even, one day, to the White House.

  Right on the heels of Grandpa’s funeral came another conclusory event: my father’s last official concert as music director of the New York Philharmonic. The incoming new conductor was to be Pierre Boulez, a Frenchman who composed notoriously difficult atonal music and whom Daddy considered a bit grand, a bit arrogant and chilly. The Philharmonic could not possibly have found a sharper contrast to Leonard Bernstein.

  The whole family and all the close friends showed up at Philharmonic Hall for the emotional evening. The last movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony seemed to linger beyond time itself, as if the musicians and their conductor were lovers who couldn’t bear to part. The president of the Philharmonic presented my father with a set of keys to a high-speed motorboat, christened the Laureate: their thank-you gift to him. They certainly knew their maestro.

  After the performance, we were all crammed into Daddy’s dressing room, waiting as usual for him to be ready to leave. Finally he was showered and dressed, and the group started walking up the corridor. The last one out of the dressing room was Uncle Mikey Mindlin, who came bustling toward us, his arms loaded with toilet paper rolls and piles of hand towels from the dispenser in the bathroom. “We leave Boulez nothing!” he proclaimed.

  9

  Stone Teen

  Felicia vamping in Jamie’s bedroom on Park Avenue.

  By now I was about as tall (short) as my mother, and she was generous about letting me borrow her beautiful clothes. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was a hopeless clod: that I would never be elegant or graceful or have a clever aesthetic eye like my mother. In a lifelong recurring dream, I’m pawing through my clothes, trying to find something appropriate to wear to my father’s concert. When at last I put on an outfit, Mummy looks at me and says, as she so often did in my youth: “You’re not going out in that.”

  It was easier to identify with my father, who was more spontaneous, less critical.

  One trait of his I’d hoped to inherit was his confidence. My mother may have had an unerring visual sense, but she had those fears. The stage fright. The self-consciousness about playing the piano in front of my father. The fear of heights, and airplanes. All of this, combined with her inevitable role as family policeman and Lenny stabilizer, made her less fun to be aro
und—and I didn’t aspire to becoming such a person. Daddy, by contrast, was a daredevil: he loved roller coasters, fast boats, vertiginous ski slopes. He shared vaudeville jokes and radio jingles and recited Lewis Carroll. Who wouldn’t prefer to be like him?

  When I was in eleventh grade, Mike Nichols invited my mother, whom he adored, to replace the actress Margaret Leighton in his Broadway revival of Lillian Hellman’s play The Little Foxes when it went on tour. She played the fragile character Birdie, who was fond of her elderberry wine. My mother was wonderful in this role, and we were thrilled that she was acting again. Despite her return to the stage, I wrote an English class essay that year asserting that I’d inherited all my artistic tendencies from my father. I got a good grade on the paper, and proudly showed it to my parents. Afterward, Mummy confronted me. We were standing in Daddy’s studio, ironically enough, when she told me how stung she’d been by what I’d written. Was she not a creative artist: a pianist, a painter, a working actress? Her tone was so plaintive; I was sick at heart over what I’d done—not just because I’d hurt her feelings, but also because I’d been caught in an unconscious, unseemly act of favoritism.

  But it was hard not to buy into the Bernstein family’s own mythos: hard to resist the dynamism of its larger-than-life chief representative. I liked thinking of myself as a true Bernstein—even if I didn’t have all the characteristics. For example, I lacked the “Bernstein chest”—chronic respiratory problems like asthma and bronchitis, which Alexander had—and the Hebraically prominent “Bernstein nose,” visible principally in the men. But when it came to the “Bernstein stomach”—that perennially gaseous, noise-generating mechanism—I was blessed with that one.

  After school, still in Brearley uniform, seeking advice in LB’s studio.

  PHOTOGRAPH BY HENRY GROSSMAN: / © GROSSMAN ENTERPRISES, LLC

  All the Bernstein self-mythologizing must have been exhausting for my mother. I don’t recall her attributing any shared characteristics to herself and her two sisters. She loved them, but the three women didn’t have that obsessive closeness that my father had with his brother and sister. Mummy was able to leave her sisters behind in Chile, and move all the way north to New York—whereas my father and his siblings never put more than a handful of miles between one another.

  It was my mother’s fate to be repeatedly cast in the thankless role of the lone grownup supervising a sandbox full of quasi-adults. It was the Bernstein siblings’ childlike exuberance that made them so irresistible, but it also made them exhausting to be around so much of the time. Maybe Mummy was starting to weary of it.

  When I wrote in that essay that I was like my father, perhaps what I might have better clarified was that I was, above all, obnoxious like my father. I was so bossy, so excitable and loud. Still, I had my fans. Steve Sondheim was, incredibly, one of them. We obsessed together over the genius of singer-songwriter Laura Nyro. I learned so much about songwriting by listening to Steve describing what made Nyro’s songs so terrific: how she’d tweak a phrase so it was different the second time it came around; or how, in the closing section, just when you thought nothing new was going to happen, she’d suddenly shift to a new melody in a new key, and make you gasp as if you’d opened the door onto a bright, windy day.

  Steve introduced me to a photographer friend of his, Simon: twenty-six, handsome, a dead ringer for the actor Tony Perkins. Steve knew I’d be excited that Simon was photographing Laura Nyro for her upcoming album, New York Tendaberry. It was arranged for me to accompany Simon to one of Laura’s nighttime recording sessions. This was heady stuff. Simon the photographer picked me up in a cab, and then picked up someone else, and then we went to where Laura lived. We were instructed to wait in the cab while Simon fetched her. He was gone for a long, long . . . long time. It was uncomfortable, sitting in the cab with a person I didn’t know, making forced small talk and waiting for Simon to come back out with Laura Nyro. When they finally appeared, I was beyond shy. I was grateful, in a way, that Laura barely addressed me.

  The recording session focused on a small slice of the song “Mercy on Broadway.” It was the usual recording studio mixture of fascinating and excruciatingly tedious. These were the halcyon days of Columbia Records, when pop artists got all the time and money and session players they could ever want—and Laura Nyro made the most of it. There was a story going around about the ten trumpet players she’d demanded to play the single note at the end of “Save the Country.” But at the time of the session I attended, apparently what was mainly going on for Laura Nyro was a lot of heroin—which may have accounted in some way for her delay in coming down to the cab.

  That evening seemed all of a piece with a new thing that was happening to me. I’d finally quit my piano lessons the year before, and now I was creeping back to the piano on my own and writing songs—very Laura Nyro–esque songs, in fact, full of passion and wailing. I wrote a stormy song called “Dear God” that ended this way:

  Dear God, I wish you were everywhere.

  There must be someone that I can turn to

  Instead of you . . .

  But who?

  I would play my new songs for my friends at school—craving their compliments, even as I dreaded their contempt for my showing off.

  But playing my songs for Daddy was toughest of all. I would stumble on the piano keys, mangle chords on the guitar, forget my lyrics. When he gave me his suffocating hug at the end, I could hardly bear it: Did I deserve the praise, or was he just being an indulgent dad? And if he had any advice or criticism at all, I would crumble in disappointment. He probably knew how vulnerable I felt—but my discomfort was built-in, unavoidable.

  Being a high school senior provided some escape; my busy life and thick welter of friends were a perfect distraction from my private fears. Collectively we seniors felt, finally, like we owned the city.

  Those were the glory days of the Fillmore East. I saw Crosby, Stills & Nash there, and Steve Miller, and Jethro Tull. I still felt just a little young for it all; it was like hanging on for dear life on a very fast ride. One night an unknown English guy was opening for Leon Russell. I was electrified by this performer: his songs were brilliant, and he played the piano and sang with a galvanic energy that had me screaming with excitement. Afterward, I raised my forefinger in the air and solemnly predicted to my friends: “This guy is gonna be as big as the Beatles.” And little Elton John didn’t do badly for himself, at that.

  When we went to the Fillmore to see Blood, Sweat & Tears, Daddy came along. It was pretty loud for him, but he loved the excitement of the music, the kids, the huge old vaudeville theater reeking of pot. “Because Daddy was Daddy,” as I used to put it, we got to go backstage, and even took turns working the psychedelic gels in the famous Joshua Light Show.

  My friends and I were obsessed with the Who’s rock opera Tommy. When we went to see the Who perform it at the Fillmore, I brought my father along yet again; he was a big Tommy fan. Like me, he was thrilled by the sheer ambition of it: the long form, the grandiosity. And they even used French horns. I was proud to share my music with my father; he was so interested, so responsive. While my parents’ friends mostly turned up their noses at their kids’ music, my dad was actively embracing it. Sometimes he was even ahead of me; he liked the Rolling Stones far better than I did in the beginning, because he understood the context of their rough edges: their blues roots. Back then, I just thought they sounded messy.

  No one else among my friends was bringing their parents with them to the Fillmore. But then, neither were any of those parents composing an orchestral piece with rock music in it. My father by this point was already working on his theater piece Mass, which would inaugurate the opening of the Kennedy Center in Washington two years later. So when he went to the Fillmore, he was taking notes, in a sense—although I didn’t realize it at the time.

  After the Fillmore concerts, our friend Willie from Hong Kong often took us over to Chinatown, where we’d have delicious three a.m. meals that he
’d order for us in Cantonese. Although there were no cell phones back then, it would not have been that hard to find a pay phone to call home and say I’d be out late with my friends—but I hated doing it. One night I got home at five a.m., and my mother was waiting for me, wild-eyed and spectral in her bathrobe, beside herself with that toxic parental brew of worry and fury. “I was about to call the police!” Both Alexander and I pulled this stunt several times. We were terrible.

  Alexander had started smoking things not long after I did—in fact, my friend Linn and I turned my brother on to pot, just as Linn’s younger brother Richard had turned us on. Richard heard somewhere that waving a magnet in front of a color TV would ruin the color, so of course he had to try it on the big, hulking color TV in his parents’ bedroom. Linn and I would watch Star Trek sitting on her parents’ bed, stoned as could be and never sure if the peculiar colors were in our heads or the result of Richard’s magnet. (It was the magnet.)

  The pot was so friendly, so connecting. The ritual of it, the sharing. It was always best with my girlfriends. The mad giggles, the late-night munchies, the secret knowledge in public places. And best of all, listening to music: being transported by sound. The year before I started smoking pot, I sat at my father’s desk in his studio one night with the Doors’ “Light My Fire” cranked up on his powerful stereo, imagining what a pot party would be like. During the song’s long, spacey instrumental break, I wrote a poem about losing myself in the rhythm and trance of that music. I was getting myself high by imagining being high before I’d even gotten high.