I thought: Oy vey.
I remember only two things about the opening night of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: my blinding headache, and the way Daddy, who was sitting to my left, would grip my knee each time he wanted the audience to be particularly ravished by the beauty and emotion of his music—as if he were willing the show to be good through my patella.
Clive Barnes’s review in the New York Times the next morning was a death knell. Harry Kraut called the Dakota apartment to report that the show would close on Saturday, after seven performances. Coca-Cola would lose all its money.
My father and Alan Jay were so shattered, they couldn’t even face making a cast album. And so all that work, all that music—it was simply gone.
As Steve Sondheim liked to say: “At least when Lenny falls off the ladder, he falls off the highest rung.”
Lenny may actually have believed that if he just wrote the right combination of notes, he could unlock the secret to saving the planet. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was his most earnest attempt yet to heal wounds and open hearts through the power of his own music. He had always tried, as hard as he knew how, to make the world a better place through his outspoken advocacy for the things that mattered: civil rights, human rights, world peace. He’d often gotten in trouble for saying what he felt, or composing as he chose. But we, his kids, understood from his example that you stood up, you spoke out, for the things you believed in—and you took your lumps.
Jamie, Felicia, Alexander, and LB on the opening night of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
PHOTOGRAPH BY HENRY GROSSMAN: / © GROSSMAN ENTERPRISES, LLC
Leonard Bernstein had certainly taken his share of lumps. But it hadn’t been difficult for us to cling to our vision of him as an essentially successful human being. Those Grammys and Emmys that ran the length of his studio shelves displayed a shiny parade of achievement. His concert audiences went into paroxysms of adulation, all over the world. He’d written the score of West Side Story, for God’s sake! But 1600 was a Failure with such a great big capital F that the scales felt like they were tipping vertiginously toward some other definition of who he was, and therefore who we all were.
There’s a line that can be traced through so many Bernstein pieces, showing one iteration after another of his crisis of faith: his lifelong battle with his spiritual Creator. Alexander, Nina, and I now found ourselves in a similar crisis over our biological creator—and 1600 was its inflection point. When we were little, our father had been unassailably magnificent to us—just as he had been to the world. Now he seemed complex, flawed, mortal. Squaring the early Daddy with the later one would be our challenge from now on.
* * *
Finally, in July, arrived the endlessly hyped Bicentennial. On the Fourth, Daddy was conducting the Philharmonic in Central Park. Alexander and I chose not to go, which made me feel guilty, but I felt better when Nina announced she didn’t want to go, either. With Nina now fourteen, Alexander and I were expanding into a trio, far more capable of resisting the Lenny juggernaut. Anyway, we were pretty sure our father would forget all about us not being there at the concert.
A few days later, for Alexander’s big twenty-first birthday party up in Fairfield, Daddy had arranged for a small plane to fly over the house trailing a banner that said “Happy Birthday Alexander!” But when the plane made its appearance overhead, Alexander was indoors smoking pot with some friends; he missed the flyover. Daddy flew into an uncharacteristic rage.
Mummy didn’t join the party until late in the day. She emerged at five p.m. with big sunglasses on; that meant she’d been crying.
Later, we pieced it all together. Julia reported that she’d heard the two of them arguing the night before and that La Señora was using her big, scary theater voice. Alexander found Daddy’s watch in the guest room the next morning. It emerged that our father had decided not to go up to Martha’s Vineyard with the rest of the family the following month. It further emerged that he was planning instead to spend the month in Northern California with Tommy Cothran. And Mummy had apparently told him that if he did that, he would not be welcome to come back to the Dakota in the fall. And Daddy had said okay.
Alexander said, “He’s coming out of the closet ass-first.”
For the next several weeks, Mummy was alternately furious or bleakly exhausted. Alexander couldn’t bear to discuss the situation at all, beyond the occasional sarcastic remark. I couldn’t tell if Julia knew what was happening. Nina was being kept in the dark, as usual, but she couldn’t escape noticing that everyone was deeply out of sorts—her mother most of all. The entire family seemed to be in some kind of paralysis, where no one could speak honestly to anyone else. It was a rough month on Martha’s Vineyard—all the rougher because our mother’s idea of renting a house there in the first place had been a quixotic attempt to recapture the family bliss of all those years ago, on the figure-of-speech lagoon. How could the rambunctious, close-knit family that had resided there be the same one that was now in such sorry tatters?
I went back and forth between the Vineyard and New York; I could take the atmosphere on the island for only a few days at a time. But Alexander was truly devoting himself to looking after Mummy; he’d decided not to go back to Harvard in the fall so he could be near her. Well, maybe that was his rationale—he wasn’t enjoying his college experience much—but it was a compelling one. I wondered: Was I not being supportive enough of my mother during this most awful time for her? Alexander seemed to be “taking sides,” while I was trying so hard to be equitable. I wanted my father to find his true self and be happy with who he was—that was my est graduate’s thinking—but I couldn’t help being ambivalent over how gracelessly he was going about it, and how much pain he was inflicting on our mother. It was bad enough that he was leaving her, but leaving her for a man, and leaving her to deal with the social repercussions in New York while he gallivanted with impunity on the West Coast—well, it was galling as hell. Sometimes I wondered if I should have been taking sides.
At the same time, though, I knew my father was suffering over the debacle of 1600. Maybe that was part of what had hurled him into his new life with Tommy: a fresh, healing life of love and poetry and composing. Later that month, I read something that reminded me of why the business of composing was more fraught than ever for him. It was an article in the Atlantic magazine about twentieth-century American composers, with a family-tree arrangement of the names spread across several pages. I started reading the names: a catalog of American musico-academic orthodoxy. Leonard Bernstein’s name was nowhere to be found. His diverse, tonal compositions had effectively wiped him off that tree. I never discussed the article with him, but I guessed that, while he couldn’t have been too surprised, he was probably stung all the same.
I talked with my father’s lawyer and friend, Paul Epstein, about what we could do to help find new composing projects for LB, as everyone had taken to calling him. (I myself felt the initials injected a welcome millimeter of distance between my father and me.) Paul came up with the idea that I should collaborate with LB on a project: write him a set of lyrics, or a libretto, or something. It was a tempting fantasy: the joint project, the rehabilitative element. But hadn’t I been striving all these years to attempt to define myself apart from LB? Did I really want to hitch myself to his blinding star before I’d made anything bright out of myself?
“It’s a terrible idea,” my shrink declared. He then told me about Anna Freud, and how she’d wound up devoting her life to her father’s work at the expense of any gratifying personal life of her own. Beware of turning into Anna Freud, he said. (That warning haunts me still.)
My father came back from California sporting, of all things, a beard. I told Alexander I thought Daddy looked “like a Hasidic koala bear.” He moved into a suite in the Hotel Navarro on Central Park South, and Tommy Cothran was there with him much of the time. LB was madly in love, starting a new life—so he was cheerful, acting exuberantly gay and calling everyone “darling.” He’d even
adopted my mother’s elegant white Aqua Filters, which elongated his every gesture into campy extravagance.
It was Mummy who was suffering. What a godsend that she got cast in an interesting play, Poor Murderer, by Czech playwright Pavel Kohout, directed by her old friend and drama teacher, Herbert Berghof. It was the ideal distraction; she was busy day and night with rehearsals and performances. The play got a good review, and all Mummy’s friends came to see her. Her old stage fright seemed to take a back seat to her pleasure in having this intense work to focus on. In one scene, while dressed in a skimpy corset, Mummy leaned over the actor Laurence Luckinbill from behind. From the audience, I could see down her cleavage into the empty space on her left—or was I just dreading that I could see the empty space?
While our mother stayed at the theater for her two performances on Thanksgiving Day, the rest of us had turkey at the Dakota—LB included. It was all primarily for the benefit of Nina and Julia, neither of whom had been told exactly what was going on. Nina was always being “protected” from bad tidings. She’d found out that her parents’ separation was public knowledge by reading the gossip column in the New York Post over someone’s shoulder as she rode the bus to school: “West Side Story ’76: Bernstein and Wife Split.” And, incredibly, no one—either in our family or anyone close to us—ever thought to take a moment to sit down with Nina and attempt to explain her father’s complexities: that he was gay, or bisexual; that he still adored his children; that adults were complicated. Or whatever one might say to reassure a child at such a time. Maybe, in the mid-1970s, adults didn’t have the words yet for this situation. In any case, Nina felt painfully isolated, and would have a great deal of unraveling to do later on, when she began visiting a psychotherapist.
Julia, meanwhile, had heard rumors that there was “another woman.” Everyone felt Julia would have a nervous breakdown if she found out it was another man. Yes, Julia was Catholic and old-fashioned, but I felt it would honor her more as a human being, and as a member of the family, to tell her what was actually going on. So I sat down with her at the little round table in the Dakota kitchen, and over our cups of Lipton tea, I told her about El Caballero’s relationship with Tommy. She didn’t act exceptionally stricken; maybe she’d guessed after all. Afterward I felt grateful to have had at least one genuine exchange with a family member.
A few nights later, Mummy asked me to walk with her to her bedroom; she had something to say to me. The dread clenched my solar plexus; the last time this happened, she’d revealed her upcoming mastectomy to me on the little stone bench by the frog pond. What would it be this time?
Bearded LB with Tommy Cothran in Carmel, 1976.
Library of Congress, Music Division
In her bedroom, she didn’t invite me to sit. We stood awkwardly near the little Gothic wooden door that connected her bedroom to her husband’s. Looking intensely at me, she asked me a very special favor: to please refrain from socializing with Daddy and Tommy together while they were in New York. She told me Alexander had agreed to her request.
This was everything I’d hoped to avoid: a demand to “take sides,” which my est-enlightened self was trying so hard not to do, combined with the sinking feeling that maybe Alexander was being a better offspring than I was. But what if there was one of those typically large postconcert dinners that just happened to include Tommy among the guests? I didn’t feel I should be compelled to bow out of such a gathering, and I told my mother so. The anguished look on her face made my insides crumple; I knew how hard—humiliating, even—it must have been for her to beg this favor, and how badly I was wounding her by turning down her request. I also knew that she needed, at this most vulnerable of moments, to feel that everyone, everyone was in her corner . . . but I just couldn’t do it. I stood there in front of her in her bedroom, feeling as stiff and inhuman as the oak on the ecclesiastical door frame.
In those uneasy times, with all the guilt and pain in the air, it was difficult not to resent Harry Kraut. Sometimes it seemed as if everything had started going rotten when he came on the scene. It was confusing for me: I had so many beloved friends who were gay men, but Harry, who was gay, was so repellent. He had encouraged LB to embrace his new gay life, and I certainly wanted my father to be happy, but I couldn’t help feeling that Harry’s machinations were causing our family untold grief.
Harry went out of his way to be kind, but it often backfired. He cooked up the idea that after Christmas, I should take Nina on a week’s vacation in Puerto Rico; it would be a nice way to get her out of the oppressive home atmosphere. He set the whole trip up for us, and off we went. We arrived in San Juan to discover that he’d installed us in a seedy motel many blocks away from the beach—where, in any case, there were signs posted saying no swimming because the water was polluted. At midnight on New Year’s Eve, Nina and I found ourselves hugging each other in a bus shelter. But from that trip forward, we were more than older and younger sister: we were unshakable allies.
Soon after Nina and I returned from San Juan, LB took off on his next big adventure, a very gratifying one: he was invited to perform at Jimmy Carter’s Inaugural Concert. It was the first really good piece of political news in a long time; at last, the final remnants of Nixon had been swept away. We all (minus Mummy, the hardworking actress) went down to Washington, a big noisy mess of us, for a weekend of celebrations. At the Inaugural Concert, LB conducted an excerpt from his new work, Songfest: settings of American poetry spanning three hundred years. He and Tommy had spent many hours together researching and choosing the texts; this piece was their “baby.” The text of the excerpted song, “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” was by seventeenth-century Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet. Daddy said he was dedicating it to President Carter’s wife, Rosalynn. In the song, a trio of women’s voices wove a rich harmonic tapestry expressing the depth of a woman’s love for her spouse. Hmm.
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can . . .
Why did Daddy always have to make everything so squirm-worthy?
But after spending several months in Palm Springs with Tommy Cothran that winter, LB apparently concluded that he couldn’t make a life with him after all. They squabbled constantly; they had completely different living habits. They remained affectionately in touch, but they parted ways. I suspected that my father wasn’t quite ready to adapt to life as an openly gay man. He was still considerably tethered to his middle-class immigrant upbringing, which prized assimilation above all; being openly gay sure didn’t figure into that time-honored trajectory. Aunt Shirley was trying to be supportive; maybe she even found it vaguely preferable not to be competing against another woman for her brother’s attentions. But Uncle BB wasn’t enjoying any of it. And my father, as well, could not have been too happy about this new element of discomfort with his beloved siblings—even though he’d generated it himself.
Above all, it was no small thing that Jennie Bernstein was still very much alive. Her son had not explained his new situation to her. Mothers are good guessers about such things—but if Jennie guessed, she preferred not to acknowledge. LB was very careful about his dealings with his mother. He called her every Friday, no matter where in the world he was. She adored him above all else—she called him “my prince of peace”—and he tried not to upset her. But he was tiptoeing around his mother more than ever.
And finally, maybe my father just couldn’t live with his guilt over abandoning his wife. He knew how badly she was suffering. So there were considerable forces at work to make him want to come back.
It happened gradually.
When LB conducted William Walton’s charming piece Façade at the brand-new Alice Tully Hall, Mummy and Mendy were the droll co-narrators. All of that went pretty well. As usual, Mendy served as the emulsifier: cracking jokes, singing aria snippets, and feigning melodramatic outrage over nothing at all.
Soon after that, my parents started going out to the occasional dinner, just the two of them. S
ometimes, my father even came to the Dakota for dinner. That was very confusing. We felt the tide was turning—but turning into what, exactly, we weren’t sure. Alexander was at one of those dinners; Mendy was there, too, of course, and maybe a few others. At one point, the conversation turned dark over something. Mummy pointed her finger across the table at her estranged husband and, with her biggest, scariest actress voice, laid her curse on him: “You’re going to die a lonely, bitter old queen.”
Maybe it was partly a campy joke—but not a very funny one. Daddy never mentioned the incident again to any of us, but we had the sense he never forgot what she said that night. It may well have accounted for how hard he worked in later years to keep the curse from coming true.
Mendy the emulsifier.
* * *
And then, one day, things were sort of back to normal. The beard was gone, and our parents were a couple again. There was tentative relief all around. Mummy sure was coughing a lot, though.
At first, Felicia’s prerequisite for her husband’s return was that he unload Harry. But the next thing we heard, she was planning to spend the month of August in a schloss in Austria, while LB conducted a festival of his own music over there. That sounded like she’d be jumping squarely back into the middle of all the difficulties—Mrs. Maestro, Harry Kraut, and all.
LB went to Europe first. Meanwhile, in New York, it was 104 degrees on July 21 when I arrived at the Dakota with friends, and Alexander asked me to “help him in the kitchen.” We got as far as the dining room when he slumped into the big mustard-colored chair. “Mummy’s fucked,” he said. She had a tumor in her lung. Her breast cancer had metastasized.
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