So with Mass, Daddy was giving himself the freedom to compose using unapologetically tonal elements—and not just rock, either. In addition to the rock band, Mass would include a blues band, a marching band, a kids’ chorus, a grownups’ chorus, twelve Broadway-style soloists, the lead Celebrant, a dance corps, and a full symphony orchestra. Two hundred people were going to fill the stage and pit of the Kennedy Center Opera House on its inaugural evening, September 8, 1971—which would also be my nineteenth birthday.
Aunt Shirley, who had started her own theatrical agency, had a young composer-lyricist client by the name of Stephen Schwartz. She took my father to see the off-Broadway production of Godspell, for which Steve had written the score and lyrics. Daddy liked what he heard well enough to invite Steve to cowrite the lyrics of Mass with him. Steve could write more inner rhymes than we thought humanly possible. Sometimes it felt a little over the top. For Mass he wrote: “There are local vocal yokels / Who we know col-lect a crowd . . .” (Today, thanks to his megahit Wicked, Stephen Schwartz is one of Broadway’s most successful and beloved composer-lyricists.)
Most evenings in Fairfield that summer, Daddy would arrive from his studio before dinner, carrying a piece of manuscript paper with music scrawled on it. “Listen to this!” he would say, and we’d follow him to the piano, where he’d slap the paper against the rack, then accompany himself croaking out whatever he’d written that afternoon. Alexander and I were a little uneasy with the rock music stuff. Even the truly beautiful “A Simple Song” featured a moment where the accompaniment devolved into a decidedly hokey boom . . . chick, boom-boom . . . chick that left Alexander and me squirming.
Any self-respecting teenager feels uncomfortable when a parent seems to try too hard to be in-with-the-kids. But this was the tricky part: we were pretty sure Daddy wasn’t composing Mass to be with-it; he meant every note he wrote. This music, and everything it was trying to say, came from the composer’s heart in a way that no other piece of his ever had before. And precisely because this was true, we knew he felt more vulnerable than he ever had before. That’s why, when he planted that fresh sketch on the piano rack and sang for us, our response always needed to be “Wow, that’s great!” And we’d leave it politely at that.
During the dress rehearsal in Washington, carpenters were feverishly banging away, trying to finish the building before the opening the following night. My high school pal Steve and I found an empty room backstage, where we ceremoniously lit up what was surely the first joint ever to be smoked in the Kennedy Center.
Like the carpenters, Daddy and his collaborators were also hammering away right up to the last minute. In his spacious suite at the Watergate, Daddy would sit around the dining table with his creative team, all of whom were desperately trying to convince Daddy to make cuts in his music. The show was intermissionless, and long. Could he at least cut one of the three instrumental Meditations? He could not.
Mass was the first piece Daddy wrote during which Alexander and I fully experienced his process. (Nina was nine and still a little young.) And it did seem as if he were aiming the piece so much at us—not just with the rock music but also with the antiwar theme. The scruffy members of the “Street Chorus” were supposed to be a bit like hippies: questioning authority, challenging their elders’ assumptions, searching for fresh meanings. Meanwhile, the be-robed chorus, representing dogma—or the Establishment, as the rule makers were referred to back then—would sing the Latin liturgical text in robotic, unmelodic twelve-tone phrases. We knew this was Daddy’s sly dig at the rigidity of the musical Establishment, who decreed that all “serious” music had to be composed using the twelve-tone system.
Unlike the robot chorus, everyone else in the cast of Mass would be singing tunes in a multiplicity of tonal genres. The message was clear: twelve-tone was rigid and soulless, while melody was organic, authentic, diverse, human. Daddy had been wrestling with these issues for quite a while. Tunes were fiercely fighting twelve-tone back in his Kaddish Symphony. Daddy once told me about some academic types who’d attended a Kaddish rehearsal. They were nodding contentedly through the spiky twelve-tone passages—but then, when the grand, sweeping, thoroughly tonal main tune kicked in, the visitors rolled their eyes in disgust and left. Oh, that pesky Bernstein: he’d let them down again.
So now, by putting tonal music—and even electrified rock—front and center in Mass, Daddy must have known he would be taking himself off the Serious Composer list for good. It bugged him, it really bugged him, not to be on that list. But he took his stand with Mass.
While it was exciting that our father was speaking straight to us and our contemporaries through Mass, it also gave Alexander and me that old queasy combo of pride and embarrassment. Particularly embarrassing for me was the clear resemblance of the main character, the Celebrant, to Daddy himself. The Celebrant is the charismatic leader, the one the young people love, the one the congregation joyfully turns to. He begins as a humble guy in blue jeans, strumming his guitar and singing, “Sing God a simple song.” The little choirboys give him a robe. His congregants have questions, worries. As their demands and questions increase, they give the Celebrant ever grander and heavier vestments. He struggles with his own doubts; can he come through for his flock? Does he even believe in what he’s doing? The piece had become, among other things, a meditation on the cumulative effects of adulation, the trappings of success, the mounting pressure of the public’s ever-increasing expectations.
It becomes too much for the Celebrant. He finally cracks up . . . and has the composer’s proxy nervous breakdown.
That mad scene scared me. My father named it the Fraction, referring to the Latin word for breaking something; the Celebrant smashes the monstrance and chalice, destroying the symbols of his faith. But the Fraction was also a kind of fragmentation of my father’s musical self. The tune that begins the Fraction was borrowed, Daddy explained to me, from the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth—and what’s more, it was a twelve-tone row! All the tunes that appeared earlier in the piece come back in an ingeniously interconnected, demented jumble. The Celebrant finally crumples into himself; his notes dwindle and sputter, and with one last keening burst—“Ohhhhh, how easily things . . . get . . . broken . . .”—he gives up. He just sort of slinks off, and maybe dies. It’s not clear.
The mad scene was huge, extravagant, way too long. (Of course Daddy refused to cut a note of it.) After such a cataclysmic disintegration, I felt a little uneasy about how everything gets patched up so quickly. But it does—by a small choirboy. “Sing God a secret song, lauda laude,” he sings into the dark with his bright, tiny voice. All the players who’d swooned to the floor of the stage when the Celebrant broke the monstrance and chalice, and had lain there motionless for the entire eighteen minutes of the Fraction, now stir to life as they each receive the magic Touch of Peace from the little choirboy. They rise, one by one, until everyone is singing “Lauda laude” together, followed by a truly gorgeous chorale, “Almighty Father,” during which the audience itself is asked to pass along the Touch of Peace (Daddy had wanted it to be a kiss!) and then the Celebrant sort of limps back on stage and says, “The Mass is ended; go in peace.” The end.
It was a lot to absorb, a lot to accept—but against all odds, the performance at the Kennedy Center inauguration was immensely moving. Much of the audience was in tears. Mass, with its thrashings over faith and its audacity to ask some of humankind’s toughest questions, reached people at their core. It was in essence the same fist-shaking at the heavens that Mummy had done in her narration of the Kaddish Symphony: If you’re up there taking care of us, why do you let these terrible things happen to us down here, and why do you let us do these terrible things to one another? In a time of war, as we were back then, these questions had tremendous resonance. And the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was the perfect place in which to pose such questions.
The Kennedy Center opening was splashy and exciting, but there were a few notable
no-shows. One of them was Mrs. Onassis. (She saw it later, and told my father she loved it.) The other big no-show was President Nixon. He had been warned by the FBI to stay away from the event because there was a “secret message,” disguised in Latin, hidden in the piece for the express purpose of embarrassing him. The secret message? “Dona nobis pacem,” give us peace, a line in the standard liturgical text of the Catholic Mass. Typical Nixon administration hyperventilating. But I guess they couldn’t be blamed for squirming; the piece did convey a pretty pointed antiwar sentiment. In the process, about a hundred pages were added onto Leonard Bernstein’s FBI dossier.
It took a delicate mental balancing act for me to appreciate Mass. I loved so much of it, even as parts of it made me uncomfortable. I’m sure my mother was on that same tightrope—and she had far less affinity for the rock music and the hippie sensibility than Alexander and I did. But so much of Mass was actually for our mother. Daddy was drawn to that text in the first place as an acknowledgment of Mummy’s Catholic background in Chile. She’d even gone to a convent school—although she did almost get thrown out by the nuns, she told me, for passing out communist literature there.
What with Mass’s references to liturgy from both the Old and New Testaments; the rock, blues, and symphonic elements; the adult and children’s choruses and the Broadway-style singers; and the intense toggling between the universal and the deeply personal, my father had managed to weave together virtually all the threads of his life into one big expression of himself. Mass, with all its flaws, its grandiosity, its daring, and its tremendous, broken heart—it simply was Daddy.
So when the reviews came in, he was deeply hurt. Some critics loved it: “The greatest music Bernstein has ever written,” wrote Paul Hume in the Washington Post. But Harold Schonberg, my father’s old nemesis at the New York Times, called it “pseudo-serious . . . a showbiz Mass,” adding the very observation I thought wasn’t true: “The work of a composer who desperately wants to be with-it.”
Many critics at the time were dismayed by the mixing together of rock and orchestral music in Mass; this is such a common occurrence by now that it’s astonishing to recall how shocked people were in 1971. The Catholic Church had problems with the piece, as well. They blew hot and cold; some nuns and priests swooned over the piece, while over at the neighboring diocese, a planned local production of Mass would be forced to close down.
In the new millennium, the world has caught up to Mass. It was, in many ways, ahead of its time. The mixtures of styles, the unapologetic tonality, the urgent questioning of authority, the openhearted political outrage—all these elements freshly resonate today. And those passages Alexander and I found hokey? What once sounded dated now sounds . . . vintage.
11
Shifting Grounds
Jamie about to graduate from Harvard, and not too sure about much of anything.
PHOTOGRAPH BY HENRY GROSSMAN: / © GROSSMAN ENTERPRISES, LLC
My pleasant, Nick-free summer had cleared my head. Once the spell broke, I couldn’t believe I’d been under it. What had I been thinking? Well, that was just it: I hadn’t been able to think at all, for nearly two years. I managed to break up with Nick before heading back to Cambridge for my sophomore year; it felt like the single most assertive act of my life. My family was overjoyed; their relief and love poured over me like a balm, as had become the traditional, post-boyfriend ritual.
I moved into my new dorm at Adams House, euphorically unencumbered, and in gleeful possession of a hefty brick of hashish that would last my roommates and me right up to Thanksgiving.
At the beginning of the school year, every student received a free calendar booklet from the Harvard Cooperative Society (“the Coop”), where we bought our textbooks. My roommate Jane and I used our Coop calendars to keep track of our carousing: an x meant getting high, an o meant getting drunk, and an asterisk meant having sex. There was the occasional infinity symbol, for tripping on psychedelics.
While I was having fun, Alexander was having a rough year. Collegiate School had finally informed his parents that their son was not really, uh, participating, and it was decided that he would go to a boarding school in upstate New York that embraced the Shaker philosophy “Hands to work, hearts to God”—which translated into extracting free groundskeeping from the students. It was essentially an expensive combination of reform school and labor camp, and Alexander was miserable. He would come down to Cambridge on a few precious weekends and sleep on the couch in my dorm suite, grateful for the brief escape.
Nina, meanwhile, was so much younger that it was as if she were growing up in a different family. She liked horses—not the way I had at age ten, when I drew pictures and read books about them; Nina had an actual live horse. Mike Nichols, in his classically generous fashion, had given Nina a sweet little horse named Dixie. On the weekends in Fairfield, Nina would ride Dixie in shows, and take care of the grooming and currying and all the rest (although it was usually our mother who wound up mucking out the stables).
Unlike her siblings, Nina was industrious at her piano lessons. She practiced; she improved. For several years her teacher was none other than our father’s own early piano teacher and lifelong secretary, Helen Coates. Nina derived little joy from her piano lessons with Nanny Helen, but she stuck with it longer than Alexander or I did. She was altogether more obedient than we had ever been—but she was not having fun, at all.
Now that both her older siblings were away at school, Nina felt isolated, contending alone with our mother, who was tending more and more toward melancholia, and with Julia, who was relentlessly cantankerous and bossy. Nina would later compare her early youth to that of an only child in a Victorian novel—complete with wicked nanny. Also, Nina was struggling with her weight. I knew how much she was suffering over her changed appearance since her younger days as a sprightly preschooler.
By the spring, Jane and I had tabulated quite a few adventures in our little black Harvard Coop books. A few months’ worth of my asterisks had been with Chris, a Greek-American from East Saint Louis who was at Harvard on a soccer scholarship, and had thighs so enormous he needed special jeans. Chris stopped by Fairfield once, and Mummy got to meet him. Afterward, as we stood together on the driveway watching him roar off in his Datsun 240Z, Mummy said, “I liked him. He’s got . . . a motor. I like a man with a motor.”
* * *
Meanwhile, Felicia’s own man with a motor was making some changes in his professional life. Harry Kraut, who had been my fearsome boss during the summer I worked at Tanglewood, was now Leonard Bernstein’s new personal manager, running his company, Amberson. (The German word for amber is “Bernstein.”) Harry had taken over for Schuyler Chapin, my father’s trusted friend and colleague of many years, who was now running the Metropolitan Opera. It was immediately clear that Harry was going to do things differently from the charming, gentlemanly Schuyler. Harry Kraut was an aggressive businessman, always a couple of moves ahead of everyone else. Like my father, he was a Harvard alumnus; Daddy admired Harry’s musical knowledge, as well as his ability to solve word puzzles. Harry’s chin strap of a beard, combined with bald pate, yellow-tinted aviator glasses, and an increasingly prominent paunch, gave him the aura of a slightly dissipated Mephistopheles. He perpetually wreathed himself in cigarette smoke, which contributed to the general sulfurous effect.
LB’s Minders. From left to right: Harry Kraut, Margaret Carson, and Helen Coates with LB.
PHOTOGRAPH BY HENRY GROSSMAN: / © GROSSMAN ENTERPRISES, LLC
Also, unlike Schuyler, Harry was gay, openly so. He loved talking about sex; that was how he chose to break the ice at meetings and dinners—although perhaps it didn’t so much break the ice as it did disconcert, which Harry could use to his advantage.
The summer after my sophomore year, Harry invited me to work at Amberson, thereby becoming my fearsome boss yet again. But I wasn’t a guide anymore, stationed all over many acres; now I would be right across the hallway from Harry in the Amberson o
ffices on West 58th Street. Everyone who worked at Amberson lived in fear of Harry. It was no fun when he turned his yellow aviator glasses on you to point out that you’d done something wrong. But I learned to type letters correctly, and to work the ungainly keys on the telex machine.
I had a summer romance with my office mate, Peter Lieberson, who was a composer (and would one day become a celebrated one). Peter was helping with the research on my father’s next big project, the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, to be delivered at Harvard later that year.
Peter’s father, Goddard Lieberson, was president of Columbia Records and a brilliant, dashing presence. Goddard and his wife, Brigitta (the former ballet and film star Vera Zorina), were dear family friends and had two sons, Peter and Jonathan. In Peter, the blending of his parents’ good looks was so devastating that Peter, as if to reject his own beauty, wore little wire-rimmed spectacles, grew a wispy beard, and shuffled around with a pronounced slouch. Jonathan, his younger brother, could not have been more different: he was a philosopher, dazzlingly articulate, a bit clownish, and flamboyantly gay, back when flamboyance took courage. (In a matter of years, Jonathan would be one of the earliest AIDS victims. Daddy was anguished to lose someone so young and promising—a brand of grief that would become all too familiar.)
Since the Liebersons were so close to our family, it was “cute” that Peter and I were an item. But it didn’t last long. By summer’s end, we’d parted ways, and I went back to college, on the loose as ever.
My junior year at Harvard had a brand-new feature: Leonard Bernstein was there, too. I’d known, of course, that he was preparing the Norton Lectures, but I hadn’t really thought about what it would mean to have my father on campus with me. Whatever slim momentum I’d built toward becoming an autonomous person since going off to Harvard, whatever hopes I’d had of figuring out who I might be, independent of my last name—all such aspirations were now effectively frozen in their tracks for the rest of my college days.
Famous Father Girl Page 11