It became, for Alexander, Nina, and me, our favorite morning of the year. Julia, however, did not love the parade. Thanksgiving was a purgatory of toil for her, and she made sure we understood how burdened she felt. After our feast, it made my heart sink to find Julia in the kitchen all alone, eating the turkey neck and staring balefully into space over her big cup of oversteeped Lipton tea. The older I got, the more it bothered me. The world was changing around us, and Mummy’s traditional South American domestic model was getting harder and harder for us to accept. Years later, we would beg Julia to eat with us at the Thanksgiving table, but she categorically refused; Mummy’s old model was Julia’s model, too.
* * *
Justus had his New York debut in a concert with my father and the Philharmonic. I took the Shuffle down from Boston for the occasion. Justus was basking in the attentions of one and all, and Daddy seemed to enjoy presenting this handsome, gifted young musician to his hometown. If a tongue or two wagged, he evidently didn’t care. For my part, I was vaguely titillated, knowing I’d had my own recent romance with the blond German pianist.
The other half of the program was the US premiere of an orchestral suite my father had created from his Dybbuk ballet the year before. It sounded pretty good—albeit “pointy” as ever. But the bleak, airless Jewishness of the piece was hard for Alexander, Nina, and me. The S. Ansky story of a young girl being possessed by her dead lover was intriguingly spooky, but the three of us were actually more spooked by the whole notion of Jewish Orthodoxy. The kabbalah rites evoked in the Dybbuk ballet—the numerical chanting, the knockings on the floor a certain number of times—struck us as disturbingly compulsive, while in real life, the rocking and muttering of Orthodox Jews seemed to us almost like a neurological disorder handed down through the generations.
Our way of being Jewish was nebulous. We loved our raucous Passover seder—closely followed by Mummy’s ingeniously devised Easter egg hunt. In December, we lit the Hanukkah candles for a few nights—but our attentions were soon diverted to decorating the Christmas tree.
On Yom Kippur, Daddy and Alexander would go “shul-hopping” together, catching various cantors in assorted synagogues around Manhattan. One time, I was invited along on the shul-hopping. When we arrived at a conservative synagogue, the usher informed me that I had to go upstairs and sit with the other women. What? But—but I was with my father and my brother! Sorry: rules were rules. As I trudged up to the balcony, I thought to myself: That’s it. Count me out.
Culturally, however, we were very Jewish: the Yiddish expressions, the music, the literature, the theater people—and the Life Jokes. That was the part of being Jewish that spoke to us; the religion part spoke to us less and less.
My father’s way of being religious was quite personal. He seemed mainly to explore it through his reading and his music, so maybe his own kids’ indifference didn’t bother him too much (we hoped). After all, he’d married our mother, who was raised a Catholic. True, she took “the vows of Rachel” when she and my father were married, but that seemed to be mainly for the benefit of Sam and Jennie. I always imagined that Mummy might have had her fingers fibbing-crossed behind her wedding dress, for her mother, Chita, to see. It had certainly been important to our father for Alexander to have his bar mitzvah—but once Grandpa died the following year, my brother was off the hook.
The morning after Justus’s concert, I went upstairs to Mendy’s apartment, where Justus was staying. We wound up in bed together. I thought nothing of it; it was, as I told my friend Ann, “like dancing with an old friend.”
I was still living with Sam. Back then, the thinnest of walls separated the notion of fidelity from the possibility of the next amorous adventure. There was as yet no fear of disease; we young women were all on the Pill and felt no particular pressure to settle down with one person, get married, have kids. In fact, we felt we were expressing ourselves as liberated women by postponing wedlock and motherhood, pursuing our careers, and making the most of our unfettered youth.
That was certainly my outlook, and so I felt increasingly uncomfortable to observe my mother’s slow descent into a mute, existential despair. As I saw it, she’d given up her theatrical career to be Mrs. Maestro, and it struck my twenty-two-year-old mind as an old-fashioned, limiting choice for a woman to make. Back then, I could not begin to imagine my mother’s calculations as she’d leaped into that marriage. Only much later, when I read her letters, did I come to understand what a complex but clear-eyed decision it had been for her. She knew the challenges; she knew she was marrying a tsunami—and a gay one at that. She believed she could handle it all, that she wouldn’t sacrifice herself “on the L.B. altar.” And she did handle it, for a long time. But then there was Tommy Cothran. And a mastectomy. And loneliness.
My father was conducting in Tanglewood on July Fourth, and we all went up for the holiday. We were given rooms in a grand old Berkshire pile called Wheatleigh, where Daddy had his own marvelously idiosyncratic quarters in a renovated aviary. (The Baldwin Piano Company had a hell of a time getting the Maestro’s requisite piano up the spiral staircase.)
A bunch of us were sunning down by the pool when my mother arrived. She immediately walked over to the shadows and sat down. We knew it was because of the sun allergy, but still, Mummy’s cold unhappiness chilled us like a damp cloud.
During the Haydn symphony that night, I saw her shoulders shaking. Was she crying? Later that night, she told me her beloved childhood nanny had died. I wondered if losing her Mamita had opened a rare floodgate for all the other grief my mother usually forbade herself from expressing.
Everyone seemed out of sorts that summer. A few weeks later, at dinner in Fairfield, Mummy remarked that my father had agreed to write a commissioned piece for Eugene Ormandy, the music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, “out of vanity.” It was a Mummy barb like any other, but Daddy bristled. “Vanity?” he yelled, rising out of his chair. “Vanity??”
He went outside and stalked around by himself for a while.
Later that night, he came up to Alexander and me and asked us, a bit sheepishly, what it was exactly that had made him leave the table. We weren’t even sure ourselves, but we tried to reconstruct the conversation. “Hmm,” Daddy said, “I guess I must be getting a little paranoid in my old age.”
In a letter to Ann the following day I wrote: “It’s as if the whole family’s going through adolescence this summer. Everybody’s so TOUCHY.”
In August we all convened in Salzburg for the summer music festival—along with Mendy, whom Mummy was fond of introducing as her “retarded stepdaughter.” (Mendy loved that.) My father spent the week rehearsing Mahler’s Eighth Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic: a huge and historic undertaking. After decades of resisting Mahler’s music, the orchestra was finally coming around, largely due to my father’s advocacy. We went to the rehearsals and reveled in the magnificent music-making. We had to pinch ourselves sometimes: remind ourselves to stay amazed at our good fortune as we witnessed Daddy driving forward those earth-shattering Mahler symphonies. It was our task—our life’s work, really—not to take these experiences for granted.
The family in Salzburg, summer of 1975.
That week, we had a strange, stiff lunch with the Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan and his wife, Eliette, a French former fashion model, at their house outside of Salzburg. The decades-long rivalry between the two maestros was legendary, so we all felt self-conscious. I was braced for encountering a rigid, authoritarian presence; he was a former Nazi, after all—a fact that had very much exacerbated the Bernstein-Karajan rivalry. So I was taken aback to witness Mme von Karajan flirting, it seemed to me, almost maliciously with Daddy, while making jab after jab at her frail, tense, socially awkward husband. From that lunch, I would never have guessed he was a titan on the podium. My father had certainly infuriated Mummy many a time, but I never saw her belittle her husband in front of others the way Mme von Karajan did to her own husband that day. I left
that lunch with a lump in my throat I couldn’t explain.
* * *
Sam and I drifted apart; he returned to live with his parents in New Jersey, and I moved into room 126 on the ninth floor of the Dakota—a “servant’s quarters” that had come with the downstairs apartment. Mummy installed a bathroom so I wouldn’t have to use the old communal bathroom down the narrow, spooky hallway.
Room 126 was an ideal transition between living at home and being independent: I could come and go and entertain visitors however I wished—but a hot meal and laundry opportunities were always just down the back stairs.
In the midst of those complicated times, I was persuaded to take the Erhard Seminars Training, known as est. Many of my parents’ friends thought est’s founder, Werner Erhard, was the most enlightened man in the world. His repackaging of Zen Buddhist principles for Western consumption put us in touch with our true emotions, the reality of our relationships, and what an “asshole” we could be a lot of the time. Many people emerged from the est training feeling a little bit smarter than everyone else around them—in other words, more of an asshole than ever. I was no exception, even though I thought I was, which made it even worse.
Jamie in front of the Dakota.
When my solipsistic twenty-three-year-old self collided with the human potential movement of the 1970s, a little monster was spawned. I tortured my family with my new revelations about our interpersonal dynamics. I wrote both of my parents letters of deep, frightening, est-worthy truth. I can’t remember if I handed them over; I hope I didn’t. But est seemed like a promising tool for helping my family communicate honestly with itself; our ongoing inability to articulate our feelings to one another was making me nearly frantic.
I joined the grownups who had done est in trying to persuade my parents to take the training themselves, but we never could convince them. Daddy was too busy, and Mummy was put off by est’s tacky jargon. (I wasn’t too fond of it myself: “You are your own reality!” “Create your own space!”) Above all, my mother loathed est’s essential idea of “telling it like it is.” The very thought of articulating one’s feelings in front of others was abhorrent to her. She could barely tolerate visiting her new psychiatrist, whom she delicately referred to as “my doctor.” It was someone’s dirty trick to plant Felicia Montealegre into the middle of the blabber-mouthy 1970s.
I decided to take graduate writing courses at Columbia—not for the degree, but for the experience and the training. I liked being back in school in this unburdened, part-time way. Writing had always come easily to me, and my courses provided a pleasantly legitimate means of postponing any serious career decisions. The truth was, I had no idea at all what to make of my life. But I had to admit one thing: writing was so much less fraught than making music. I’d definitively moved on from my fledgling attempts at being a singer-songwriter. What a ridiculous idea that had been.
But maybe it wasn’t quite that simple. One night at the Dakota, Alexander and I were watching TV in the library with some friends when we discovered that Leonard Bernstein was on PBS, conducting my old favorite, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. The sleigh bells! I danced around the library to the familiar music. Then, when the soft, aching third movement began, I slipped into the adjoining living room and settled cross-legged into the big upholstered rocking chair. The back of the chair was so tall that no one in the library could see me as I listened to the slow movement with my eyes closed, tears streaming down my face.
The next day I wrote in my journal:
I was crying because I can’t be a musician. I was crying because I can’t be a musician. I was crying because I can’t be a musician.
13
Here Come the Terrors
My father was finally gaining some momentum in his new musical with Alan Jay Lerner. He’d been working on it off and on for a couple of years now, squeezing in the composing between all his conducting and traveling. But now the crunch was on; he and Alan Jay were determined to get it done in time for 1976, the Bicentennial year, mere months away. During the summer, I was often conscripted to pick Alan Jay up at the marina in Norwalk, Connecticut, where he would arrive in his seaplane. He had his very own island in Long Island Sound; I surmised that if you’d written the book and lyrics to My Fair Lady and Camelot, you could afford to buy an island and a seaplane.
Alan Jay was a most peculiar man: always hidden behind tinted glasses, full of nervous tics, perpetually smoking—as well as pulling on and peeling off a pair of beige linen gloves that either protected some skin condition he had or helped him not bite his nails, or maybe he just needed always to be picking and pulling at something.
Once again, we found ourselves gathering around the piano at the drinks hour as Daddy played us the latest number he’d written—just as we’d done when he was writing Mass. But our family was different now, four years later. We were older, stuff had happened—and the anger that lodged in our collective craw like an indigestible piece of gristle only made it harder for us to summon up the enthusiastic encouragement we knew our father craved.
He told me that when he started writing for Broadway in the 1940s, he was convinced that musicals were the genre of the future, that they would develop into a rich and sophisticated art, like opera. He was bitterly disappointed, he said, that somewhere along the line, musicals had stopped evolving in some crucial way. The great exception, of course, was his kid collaborator on West Side Story, Steve Sondheim, whose shows were steadily transforming what was possible in Broadway theater.
But apart from Steve, my father said, Broadway remained mostly silly, safe, and essentially mass entertainment. The money came from the box office, so you had to please the crowd, he explained. But maybe now, he said, with corporations footing the bill the way Coca-Cola was doing for his new show, things could open up a little.
It was indeed true that the Coca-Cola Company had sunk one million dollars into the Bernstein-Lerner show: a corporate first. However, the show wasn’t going well at all.
Not only was 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue a story of the White House, with its presidents and their wives upstairs, and successive generations of a black servant family downstairs; not only was the White House the metaphor for the nation’s ongoing struggle to preserve its democracy; not only was the show about our nation’s original sin of slavery, and how racial injustice remained at the core of our national discourse; but in addition, all of this was supposed to be played out through the relationships of the actors themselves, who were in a rehearsal of the show, you see—because our country is in constant “rehearsal” for attaining true democracy—and the actors in the mixed-race cast would occasionally step out of character and argue among themselves about the meaning of the work they were rehearsing, and their fraught relationships with one another.
Like the Brecht musical my father had worked on seven years earlier, this show had levels—the collaborators’ favorite word. Alexander could have recited a hell of a Haf Torah cantillation for this one. Hearing Daddy repeatedly describe the show’s intricacies gave us a bone-deep exhaustion. We had the uneasy sense that this project meant more to him than anything that had come before it.
Nixon, Vietnam, and Watergate had shaken up thoughtful lefties like Alan Jay Lerner and Leonard Bernstein. Now the two collaborators wanted to make a major statement about the meaning of democracy: to remind their country of its true purpose. It was all terribly earnest and ambitious. I think they really believed that if the show was good enough, they could bring a troubled, divided nation to its senses.
But maybe Daddy had another, more personal agenda. Maybe he was doubling down on the very commitment to civil rights and social justice that had got him—and his wife—into so much trouble six years earlier with the Black Panthers incident. Maybe he felt he could avenge all the heartache and humiliation our mother had gone through. Maybe he felt that with this one show, he could fix . . . everything.
As the 1600 rehearsals progressed, all the reports were terrible. The director was fi
red. The choreographer was fired. The expectations were enormous, and Coca-Cola, our Bicentennial Beverage, probably had the highest hopes of all. After all, with those two Broadway giants at the helm, how could they lose?
While the show was still out of town, the authors, with their new director and choreographer, made a radical, last-minute decision. They cut the whole “surround” story: the part about the rehearsal and the black and white actors coming out of character to talk with one another about the meaning of the show. Alexander and I had thought the in-rehearsal device was somewhat clunky, but at least it turned the actors themselves into characters that developed, that you could possibly even root for. Without that element, the show was reduced to a lengthy pageant. We imagined the Philadelphia audience members, after president number five or so, feeling doomed in their seats—trapped until the end of the parade.
There were other strange decisions, too. Act 1 ended with the conclusion of the Civil War, but we never actually met Lincoln; we saw only his top-hatted shadow. In Act 2, in the part depicting the corrupt Grover Cleveland administration, there was a “minstrel show.” It was supposed to be riotously funny and a bit outrageous. But Alexander, Nina, and I cowered in our seats when the black actor sang “I got those red, white, and blues” in falsetto—and in drag.
The all-too-brief marquee for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Library of Congress, Music Division
And yet, and yet: So much of Daddy’s music was beautiful. Wipe-your-eyes beautiful, stuck-in-your-head-for-days beautiful. But his huge score had been stuffed into a vehicle that could not carry it.
A few days before the New York opening, we went to the “gypsy run-through” of the show, a Broadway tradition in which friends and family comprise the majority of the preview audience. That night may have been the show’s single oasis of optimism. After the performance, the front rooms of the Dakota apartment rang with the babble of voices sharing their collective conviction that the authors had a hit on their hands. “You know,” my father said happily after several scotches, “I think this is going to be a really important work.”
Famous Father Girl Page 14