Famous Father Girl

by Jamie Bernstein

  10

  One Toe Out of the Nest

  Sledding in Central Park during Harvard winter break.

  I did get accepted into Radcliffe/Harvard—but by then, I’d cooked up the great idea to attend NYU, which would keep me in New York City near my family, but above all near Nick, who’d been accepted into Columbia. “What are you talking about?” Daddy said when I told him. “You’re going to Harvard—best school in the world!” End of discussion. It was one of the few times I can remember my father acting like a traditional, assertive parent.

  Sometime that spring, I’d received a remarkable invitation: to act (and sing!) in a film Milos Forman was directing called Taking Off—in which a group of young singer-songwriters participate in an audition. Maybe I got the offer through the playwright John Guare, who was writing the screenplay; he’d worked with my father and Jerry Robbins on the stillborn Brecht musical project a couple of years earlier, and had probably heard me sing at Daddy’s fiftieth birthday. Anyway, the contract lay on my desk for several weeks while I pondered whether to sign on the dotted line or take a summer job as a “guide” at Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. My father, who had participated in Tanglewood since its founding in the 1940s, was able to pull some strings and get Nick a job there, too. If I went to Tanglewood, Nick and I would be together. If I did the movie, we’d be separated—plus, crucially, I’d be getting a lot of attention, and Nick would not. I knew that wouldn’t go well for us. He was already bitter that my college was grander than his.

  I turned down the movie and went to Tanglewood to be with Nick: to be with his doe eyes and hippie cool, his wounded rage and slim-hipped New York intensity. I knew no one could stand him but me. I was grateful that my family seemed to have resigned themselves to his presence.

  The decision felt like a safer one in another way, as well. When Nick informed me that no one liked my being “loud and obnoxious,” he may not have known that his criticism echoed my deepest fears. There was a palpable vertigo that came along with all the attention I’d received in school for my record, for Guys & Dolls, for writing the senior show. What if my friends thought I was conceited? What if they stopped liking me?

  At home, Mummy shushed and scolded us if we got too loud or acted too self-important. The unspoken message was that there was only one person in the family who got to be an annoying show-off, and that person got away with it because He Was a Genius. Nick was unwittingly echoing my mother’s subliminal message that too much showing off was, for the rest of us mortals, unacceptable behavior.

  So yes, there was some comfort and safety in shunning the spotlight. Life was changing fast, and maybe I just needed to hunker down for the summer with my job and my boyfriend. As for that outgoing part of me, the part that really did like to jump around and draw attention to myself—well, I was just going to put that troublesome creature in a little box and seal it up. Tight.

  The Berkshires were beautiful, but the Tanglewood job was exhausting. Guides did everything from giving tours of the grounds, to standing guard backstage, to giving directions at the front and back gates. Nick and I had frequent fights. One particularly tearful episode ensued when he caught me deliberately spoiling my winning hand of gin rummy so as not to beat him yet again. I devoured buckets of Colonel Sanders fried chicken, and felt my body thickening.

  I took it upon myself to do Nick’s laundry along with mine. Ironing his shirts made me feel very wifely. But I discovered it was quite boring to iron all those shirts. Wasn’t I supposed to like it? What was the matter with me?

  Tanglewood tried a new thing that year: they invited the Fillmore East to present three rock concerts in the big open-air Shed with its copious surrounding lawn. The day of each concert, a convoy of yellow Ryder trucks would roll into the backstage area and its occupants set up enormous quantities of equipment, including stacks of Marshall speakers capable of blowing the hair off the hippies at the farthest reaches of the lawn. I was assigned to backstage duty on the night of the Who concert. The crowd was enormous, and the music so deafening it was an out-of-body experience—especially where I was, crouched between two towers of speakers, directly behind bass player John Entwistle. Midconcert, a shiny black june bug crawled in front of me along the stage floor. I was fixated on this large insect, lumbering obliviously into the middle of that titanic human event. Then, just as obliviously, Entwistle took a step backward, and the heel of his mighty black boot came down squarely on the june bug. So cosmic, man!

  The grounds were so torn up after the Fillmore concerts that Tanglewood ended that experiment permanently. But after the Who concert, I made off with a great prize: Roger Daltrey’s sweat-drenched snakeskin-pattern fringed polyester shirt, which he’d ripped in two midway through the show, and which I worshipfully fished out of the wastebasket in his dressing room.

  Alexander was also at Tanglewood that summer, working as a gofer to run back and forth across the campus with messages and documents. He was fifteen, had cascades of curly brown hair, and was stoned nearly all the time, shuffling around the Tanglewood grounds with his torn jeans and his one and only ornament: a graying shoelace permanently tied around his neck. Alexander was sweet and cute and everyone loved him—particularly the slightly older women. Everyone at Tanglewood did not love Nick. I alone loved Nick—fiercely, toxically, relentlessly.

  Tanglewood and Leonard Bernstein had entwined histories. He was in the summer festival’s first conducting class there in 1940. Thirty years later, Daddy was still devoted to Tanglewood, and most summers he was up there at some point, teaching “the Kids,” as he called the student orchestra, and conducting. The summer I worked there, I observed how Daddy’s arrival turned the place into an adulation machine. Oh, how they carried on over him! His Sunday afternoon concert with the Boston Symphony attracted a huge mob; the lawn was packed with picnickers. It never rained on Daddy’s big concert days; the Tanglewood staff called it “Lenny weather.” Daddy’s magic was on extra-bright display at Tanglewood, and I was seeing it up close in a way I never had before. He was a superstar up there. I found it a little disconcerting.

  Composer and conductor Lukas Foss was at Tanglewood that summer, as well; he and my father had been friends since they’d attended the Curtis Institute together, decades earlier. Lukas was a dashing flirt, and my fellow guides whispered about his late-night carryings-on with the female students in the Curtis Hotel swimming pool.

  The guides also seemed to know a lot of stories about Leonard Bernstein’s wild youth at Tanglewood—including his amorous escapades with other men. This brought me up quite short; you weren’t supposed to hear such things about your own father. There were tales of moonlit naked swims in the lake, scurryings between practice cabins.

  They talked about it quite casually in front of me, so I pretended I knew all about it—but I didn’t. I mentally reviewed past experiences; had I sensed, or observed, anything to indicate that my father was homosexual? He was extravagantly affectionate with everyone: young and old, male and female. How could I possibly tell what any behavior meant? And anyway, weren’t homosexuals supposed to be girly? There were plenty of attractively effeminate men among my parents’ friends, and often I’d develop crushes on them. When I’d tell my mother, she would say, “But, Jamie—he’s queer as a coot!” Yet there was nothing I could detect that was particularly effeminate about my father. How exactly did he fit into this category? I was bewildered and upset. I couldn’t understand any of it—but in any case, my own existence seemed living proof that the story was not a simple one.

  The guides’ stories, combined with my hurt feelings over Daddy’s missing my recent big events—and all of it doused in the kerosene of teenage agita—detonated a righteous indignation that I expressed to Daddy in a long letter, which I mailed to him in Fairfield. I also mentioned the rumors I’d heard about his past.

  It was Mummy who wrote me back. She suggested I come down to Fairfield on
my day off. The following weekend, I drove the two hours down to Fairfield in my Band-Aid-colored Buick Skylark, my graduation present from my parents. After a relatively normal, chatty dinner, Daddy invited me for a walk. We didn’t go far: just up the driveway to his studio. We sat outside together on the glider on his little deck, the cicadas chirping and buzzing away in the humid darkness. Then Daddy got up and started pacing in front of me. Over the course of the next hour, he told me about the various people in his life who’d been envious of him, and who’d made up wicked stories about him to jeopardize his career . . . In short, he denied the rumors.

  All these years later, I find myself wondering whether my mother put him up to it. My father would certainly have had his reasons to obfuscate the truth—but that really wasn’t his style. More likely it was my mother who had begged her husband to make the denial, to preserve her own dignity.

  At that point, they’d been married for nineteen years. Alexander, Nina, and I learned later from our parents’ letters that they’d entered into marriage with a clear-eyed acknowledgment of Daddy’s sexual complexities. “You are a homosexual and may never change,” she wrote to him the year of their wedding; “I am willing to accept you as you are, without being a martyr and sacrificing myself on the L.B. altar.” Felicia had assured Lenny that she could handle it—and because they genuinely loved each other, both felt they could take on the challenge. (But they were very, very nervous on that honeymoon in Cuernavaca.)

  During the early years of raising their children, while Lenny conducted the Philharmonic and Felicia performed her Mrs. Maestro duties, there was no behavior that would raise the eyebrow of any family member or close friend. But who knows what happened when he was on the road and his wife stayed home. As I look back, I surmise that if they’d struck any kind of deal, it was that Lenny should keep his extramarital activities elsewhere, and not speak of them. It must have been very upsetting for my mother to crash into that long-suppressed issue through a communication from her own daughter.

  When I got back to Tanglewood, I searched out my brother in his “office” in the attic of the main house, where he rolled around on an ancient wheelchair that had reportedly belonged to our father’s conducting mentor, Serge Koussevitzky. While we smoked a joint together, I told him about the rumors. He’d heard them, too, he said. I told him what Daddy had said to me over the weekend. Alexander and I stared helplessly at each other and were silent. But at least we had aired the subject. From that moment on, it was something we could talk about together—and that was going to matter more and more.

  Confab by the tennis court.

  I never spoke to either of my parents again about my conversation with Daddy on the glider. At the time, it was perhaps more upheaval than I could process. I flung myself with renewed fervor into the clinging arms of Nick, feeling not entirely reassured—about anything.

  * * *

  The station wagon was filled to the brim with my belongings. I stood on the Fairfield driveway with my parents on a bright September morning. They were about to drive me to college. I felt like I was being marched to the scaffold.

  For thirteen years, I had never been to any school but Brearley. Now I had to confront a brand-new school, in a hugely complex environment, crammed with people and things unknown. I had never really left home before, and now I was being (literally) driven out of the nest. And worst of all, naturally, was the impending separation from Nick.

  At least I had my own room, in a dorm up on the Radcliffe campus. My mother fixed it up ingeniously to be as cozy and comfortable as a college dorm room could be. She’d brought along a white wicker rocking chair, and she unrolled a cheerful Mexican carpet that had been in the family for years, tattooed with the pee trails of many a Bernstein dog. She also let me have the framed cover art from Daddy’s recording of Mahler’s Fourth: a collage of hazy mountains with Victorian paper-cutout angels hovering above. I was glad for those angels; I needed them.

  Jamie in her dorm at Harvard. The cover art to LB’s recording of Mahler Symphony no. 4 is hanging on the rear wall.

  PHOTOGRAPH BY HENRY GROSSMAN: / © GROSSMAN ENTERPRISES, LLC

  The three of us went to dinner at a Harvard Square restaurant called the Wursthaus, which Daddy remembered with fondness from his own undergraduate days. He was so excited to be up there, and I was so miserable—all the more so for ruining my father’s good spirits. Mummy smoked and tried to remain chipper; it wasn’t really a comfortable environment for her, either.

  When they left me alone in my dorm room that night, the hammer of despair slammed down on the anvil of my sorry little soul. And the marathon phone calls with Nick began (until Mummy cut off my long-distance service, one month and $300 later).

  My disarray was clearly visible, and my parents made a few arrangements to help me out. After several unfortunate highway scrapes in the Band-Aid-colored Buick, they supplied me with an Eastern Air Lines Charge-a-Trip card. Back then, there was youth fare; I could take the air shuttle—or, as Grandpa had called it, “the Shuffle”—from Logan Airport to LaGuardia for $18. And I Shuffled often.

  Also, my parents got me a shrink: none other than Robert Coles, whose Children of Crisis books—about disenfranchised groups such as migrants, Eskimos, and Native Americans—were already gaining attention. Dr. Coles eventually won the Pulitzer and many other prizes, but in 1970 he was still a practicing psychiatrist in the Harvard Health Services.

  I dread to imagine what he made of me. Some years later, I found out he wrote a subsequent Children of Crisis volume called The Privileged Ones: The Well-Off and the Rich in America. My heart sank as I pictured Dr. Coles listening to me sniveling on and on about my illustrious family, my troubles with Nick-oh-Nick, and my Eastern Air Lines Charge-a-Trip card. (In a freshman year’s worth of sessions, I don’t think I ever brought up the revelations about my father from the summer before.)

  Every night in the dining hall, I would eat alone, my back to the room. My intention to be solitary was bright as neon, but occasionally some guy (always a guy) would attempt to sit with me. They got nowhere. I was so determined to remain faithful to Nick that I wouldn’t so much as speak to a person of the opposite sex. At last, I’d become as quiet and meek as Nick had always wanted me to be.

  All I needed was to be abysmally depressed, and bingo—loud and obnoxious was gone.

  I decided to take a psychology course in life histories. I scooped up an A on a paper entitled “The Cases of Shirley Bernstein and Burton Bernstein: A Study of the Influence of an Older Sibling on Two Younger Ones.” In my concluding paragraph of the Shirley section, I wrote:

  My problems related to my father are similar to the ones Shirley had; the “right man,” for me, too, must live up to my standards which are based on my father’s qualities. I have had the unusual good fortune of already finding such a person; Shirley has not been so lucky.

  For a smarty-pants, I sure could be a Stupid Idiot.

  * * *

  I had no friends and spoke with virtually no one, but my dorm-building-mate Benazir “Pinky” Bhutto was inexplicably kind to me. We studied for the History of Islam exam together. Only afterward did I find out that Pinky’s father was president and later prime minister of Pakistan. I never guessed that Pinky, too, would one day be Pakistan’s prime minister, and that she, like her father before her, would be assassinated. Back then, we were just two maladjusted schoolgirls, giggling as we tried to absorb the difference between Sunni and Shiite. Surely she knew all that stuff already! Nevertheless, there we were, cramming for the exam, and she appeared to be just as insecure about the material as I was.

  By the end of that grisly freshman year, I’d finally made a couple of friends, and even had fun from time to time. That summer, Nick’s mother sent him to England to live with a family and work at some job. In his absence, I gradually noticed that I was in a much better mood; that my close friends did not, in fact, mind when I was loud and obnoxious; they even seemed to like me that way. The faintest
glimmer of a notion formed in my mind that maybe life was possible—and maybe, just maybe, even preferable—without Nick.

  All that summer, Daddy was hard at work finishing the most challenging piece he’d ever written: Mass. A couple of years earlier, Mrs. Onassis had called her old friend Lenny to ask him if he would be the artistic director of the soon-to-be-constructed John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. My father accepted the honor, hung up, and was in despair. “How could I say no to Jackie?” he moaned to his wife. “But I don’t want to be the artistic director of the Kennedy Center! I’ll hate it, and I’ll be terrible at it!” And it was true: Leonard Bernstein was not put on this world to be an administrator.

  Felicia saved the day by calling Jackie back to say how honored Lenny was, but really, might it not be better if he were to, perhaps, compose a piece for the inaugural? And that, according to my parents, was how Leonard Bernstein came to write Mass: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers.

  Mass was the piece in which my father’s fascination with rock music was finally going to express itself through a composition of his own. He really believed that the pop music of the day contained more creative energy than the so-called “serious” music coming from the new generation of conservatory-trained composers—ironically the very composers whom, as the conductor of the Philharmonic, he was passionately committed to presenting. It was his lot, in the mid-twentieth century, to introduce one thorny, cerebral piece after another to his recalcitrant subscription audiences. Those pieces usually employed the academically approved twelve-tone system: that meant they had no melody and were in no key. My father would twist himself into a veritable pretzel of explanation in his preconcert talks, trying to put that music into some sort of graspable context for his listeners. Sometimes his talk went on longer than the piece itself.