Still, it was heady stuff to be counted among the ranks of Island Records’ artists—Bob Marley, the B-52’s, Grace Jones—even if the company did seem to be in some disarray. The New York office had a turnover of three different presidents in the course of that year. By president number three, I would walk into the Island offices and not recognize a single face.
But none of it mattered—because I had David Thomas. The trick now was for David to get a job in New York so we could live together. Luckily, his job-hunting visits gave him many opportunities to share in Bernstein events—including a particularly celestial performance of my old favorite, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, with the Vienna Philharmonic on their US tour.
By then this piece had so much resonance for me—starting with the swimming pool in Redding, where Alexander and I had splashed along to the first movement’s sleigh bells; then, years later, sitting in the rocking chair at the Dakota crying my eyes out during the slow movement. I thought I’d felt all there was to feel about this piece. But now, with David, I felt something new. My siblings and I had spent a lifetime trying to maintain a delicate equanimity in the face of our regularly received, almost too sublimely intimate aesthetic experiences dispensed by our own father. It was much easier, I was now discovering, to accept Daddy’s musical love while sitting with my hand enfolded in David’s; this man’s quiet ardor and deep musicality allowed us to share the Mahler together on a level that for me, in the past, had felt almost unsafe.
But all too soon, David would go back to Chicago, and for me it was back to write-a-hit at Jones Street. Why was it so hard to crank out a brainless, catchy little number that everybody liked? At one point I even presented a new song to Vince called “Is This What You Had in Mind?”—hoping it was the hit he was waiting for. It wasn’t.
Finally I wrote a song that got a rise out of Vince and the Island execs. “Nervous Dancer” went over well, I was grimly sure, because the chorus sounded like Duran Duran and the feel was like the Thompson Twins; both of those bands had techno-pop hits on the radio that I couldn’t have cared less about.
Revlon had a magazine ad at the time extolling “a certain drop-dead worldliness.” Techno pop aspired to that precise sensibility. “I hate drop-dead worldliness,” I groused in a letter to Ann. “Maybe I’m a sap like my old man after all, but this music is cold.”
On one end of the pop music spectrum was the Brit-influenced techno pop, while at the other end was the overblown, overproduced stuff coming out of LA. I couldn’t warm up to either of them. As for my old man himself, he had lost interest in pop music—but we agreed on one exception: Michael Jackson. Daddy thought he was a stunning performer, both vocally and as a dancer, and Jackson’s androgyny only made him more alluring to both of us.
Other than that, my enthusiasm for what I heard on the radio was at an all-time low. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for this racket after all; maybe I didn’t even like pop music anymore. But I’d picked a hell of a time to be having this realization; I signed the Island Records deal.
David Thomas’s New York job finally came through, and together we piled all his belongings into a U-Haul truck and drove from Chicago directly to Fairfield, Connecticut—where David, in adorably courtly fashion, asked my father for my hand in marriage. Daddy danced us both around the kitchen. David and I moved into a little Greenwich Village third-floor walk-up apartment with exposed brick walls. It was just a few blocks from Jones Street, where I still went every day to write-a-hit. A close second in difficulty to that enterprise was finding a wedding date that could be wedged into my father’s hectic touring schedule. There were endless contortions and testy exchanges. Uncle Mikey Mindlin teased David: “Why did you bother to ask Lenny for Jamie’s hand? You should have gone straight to Harry Kraut.”
We finally settled on December 2; there was to be a small morning wedding at the Dakota apartment, followed by a larger party that evening at the freshly renovated Starlight Roof of the Waldorf Astoria. Between my father’s address book and my own, our guest list was quickly approaching four hundred.
David was raised Episcopalian, but he agreed to a Jewish wedding ceremony, to please Grandma (and perhaps to please her firstborn son, too, although I guessed my father wouldn’t have insisted upon it). We met with a rabbi my father recommended; afterward, I found myself in tears on the subway. I ached for some meaningful spiritual expression, but I knew this expensively dressed, smooth-talking rabbi was not the solution. He did, however, make one astute observation. After I’d described some recent family history, he said, “So in other words, this wedding is the first happy thing that’s come along for your family after losing your mother.” That was certainly true; it made the event resonate all the more, and maybe even justified the mad, mad expense.
David and I ended up choosing a rumpled, uncharismatic rabbi from the local VA hospital. He didn’t solve my spiritual needs; maybe nothing Jewish could. But at least this rabbi wasn’t smug.
Shirley was hoping to serve as a mother substitute in helping me plan my wedding, but I feared she would drive me and everyone else crazy. I hurt her feelings when I chose decorator Gail for my wedding planner—but it was a wise choice. Gail’s unfettered love for her friend Felicia helped bring my mother’s spirit into the proceedings in a way that Shirley’s complicated jealousies never would have.
By summer’s end, Island approved my record’s producer—actually a trio of guys that Vince had put together. There had been great dispute over who was going to produce my record. Many possibilities were floated, vetted, and rejected—including David Pack, who was devastated by the rejection. He felt, justifiably, that he’d earned the right to produce it. I was no longer sure his California pop sensibility was right for me, so I let myself be talked out of going with him. Then I wallowed in guilt and uncertainty. More weenie behavior, and more elf’s thread.
I referred to the month of December as “Redding, Wecord, Wecord, Redding.” How could two such momentous, long-awaited milestones be happening simultaneously? The dual exclamation points oddly neutralized each other; I couldn’t exult or concentrate properly over either one.
Amid this excitement, LB had his own momentous recording project: he was going to conduct the score of his most famous work, West Side Story, in a New York City recording studio, with the city’s top-level session musicians, and world-class opera stars singing the leading roles. Deutsche Grammophon, LB’s new label since he’d left Columbia in the 1970s, was planning a big release—while his video director, Humphrey Burton, would film the whole adventure for a BBC documentary. Harry was very busy, cooking up all those hot deals. As usual, everything was very elaborate, very expensive, and very last-minute.
My father was keen to make the case that his musical could cross the boundary from Broadway to the opera stage, and this recording was going to prove his point. Opera star Kiri Te Kanawa was cast as Maria. Tatiana Troyanos, with her huge mezzo voice, would sing Anita. An up-and-coming American baritone, Kurt Ollmann, would sing Riff.
But who was going to sing Tony? The recording date was fast approaching, and the tenor had not been locked in. Apparently Luciano Pavarotti’s name was floated, but LB instantly shot down the idea; how ludicrous would it be for Tony of the Jets gang to have an Italian accent?!
At this point, the story gets a little murky. Did LB hear a tenor he liked at English National Opera, singing Siegfried? Or did he hear the voice late at night on the radio, semiconscious from sleeping pills? Whichever way it went, he couldn’t remember the singer’s name, only that it was Hispanic. And so everyone came to the conclusion, without looking into matters too carefully, that Leonard Bernstein wanted José Carreras to sing Tony on his West Side Story recording project.
Carreras was hurriedly booked, and flown to New York straight from his vacation in Greece, one day before the sessions began. LB rapidly grasped that this Carreras fellow was not the singer he’d had in mind, but it was too late to do anything about it. (It turned out the voice he’d liked belong
ed to a British tenor from Liverpool with the misleading name of Alberto Remedios.)
José Carreras was from Spain. His unmistakable Spanish accent, when he sang in English, was grotesquely wrong for the role of Tony—even worse than Pavarotti’s Italian accent would have been. A language coach was hired to work with Carreras to make his voice sound like it was more plausibly emanating from a member of the Jets gang than from the rival Puerto Rican Sharks. But as the Yiddish saying goes, gornisht helfen—loosely translated: fuggedaboutit. LB was not pleased—and viewers of Humphrey’s documentary would see much glowering from both men.
David and I attended most of the recording sessions. Kiri Te Kanawa was nursing a cold throughout the project, but she gamely sang on. There was great camaraderie in the youthful chorus as the Jets sang “Gee, Officer Krupke” and the Shark girls sang “America.” The orchestra itself was brilliant; the composer was extracting lush, powerful performances out of the players. My father said, “I’m falling in love with my music all over again.” And so were we all.
But it was the Carreras drama that was most riveting. We loved how he’d pluck the chewing gum out of his mouth the second before he sang into the microphone. There was a take of “Maria” that was going spectacularly well—Carreras was even nailing the American r in “Maria”—and as the orchestra surged to the climactic moment featuring Carreras’s big sustained B-flat “money note,” we all leaned forward in anticipation . . . whereupon Carreras stepped back from the microphone, popping his gum back into his mouth. “I do that part tomorrow,” he announced. LB was apoplectic. And all caught on film. Later, Humphrey Burton cursed himself for having turned off his cameras before LB and Carreras were seen walking down the corridor arm in arm—some sort of peace having been restored between the two divos.
Not only was there all the Carreras drama to observe; there was an additional angle of great interest to me. Alexander and Nina had been hired to record several instances of midsong spoken dialogue between Tony and Maria: during “Dance at the Gym,” when they first meet; on the fire escape as part of the “Tonight” duet; and in the middle of “One Hand, One Heart,” as the couple exchange their make-believe marriage vows in the bridal shop.
Both Nina and Alexander were aspiring actors at the time. Each in their turn had studied with our mother’s friend and acting teacher, Herbert Berghof. LB decided it was a great idea to give the dialogue task to his kids (or possibly Harry decided). But it was inherently so embarrassing for the two siblings to speak Arthur Laurents’s lines of romantic dialogue that they were in a slow-burning agony of discomfort throughout the recording process—and being filmed to boot.
Everyone thought they did a fine job. Alexander sounded American, which lent needed credibility to Carreras’s Tony. And Nina, with her bilingual upbringing, knew how to make Maria sound authentically Latina. But I was squirming right alongside them; I knew all too well about the ambivalent experience of “riding on the LB train.” To this day, the three of us still can’t quite bear to listen as Nina and Alexander murmur “To love and to honor,” “To hold and to keep” to each other on that recording.
What was our father thinking? Well, this was how everything seemed to be back then: big ideas, big doings, and no time to reflect on anything. It’s a tribute to the beauty of the music that eventually all three of us siblings were able to fall back in love with “One Hand, One Heart.”
The recording sounded wonderful overall, and did indeed make a strong case that West Side Story is as comfortable with operatic voices as with musical theater ones—even if it isn’t to everyone’s taste (book writer Arthur Laurents, in particular, loathed the recording). And maybe, given all his recent creative failures, LB was grateful to immerse himself in a work of his that was unequivocally admired.
I predicted with great certainty that the Carreras-as-Tony casting fumble was so preposterous that no one would buy the CD. But it sold well and got some good reviews. No matter what the circumstance, I could never spot a hit.
* * *
A hundred people came to the “small wedding” at the Dakota on the morning of December 2. My father had gone to great pains to arrange for the music. “Trust me, I know show business,” he’d said when I questioned some of his choices—but he turned out to be right. He walked me (a bit shakily) into the living room, while a piano trio played his artful interweaving of two Aaron Copland songs. It felt right to have Aaron’s music at my wedding; he was like a musical godfather to all of us.
David awaited me under the huppah, which was rigged from an opulent Russian blanket Mummy had found on one of her antique-store jaunts—a perfect way to evoke her presence.
After the vows, a chorus of family and friends sang “Almighty Father” from Mass. David wore a yarmulke and stepped on the wineglass, like a mensch. (We found out a few years later that his great-grandmother had, in fact, been a Lithuanian Jew. “I knew it!” Grandma crowed.)
There were so many people to hug, so many smiles, so much champagne, so much of chef Ann’s delicious food. Julia was beatific. Ever since I’d moved to LA, she’d discovered that she missed me, and we got along much better now—plus, she was bonkers for David.
Later, at the Waldorf, the receiving line alone took an hour and a half. The tables had vases of roses with stems so long that we could see each other across the table beneath them. There was a fifteen-piece band so wonderful that even Grandma danced; in her joy, she forgot all about her painful knees.
Daddy was probably pretty drunk by the time he made his toast. First, he acknowledged that the occasion was also Adolph Green’s birthday. “A very big birthday, in fact,” he said, nodding to his longtime friend. “But he asked me not to mention how big. So let us simply raise seventy glasses to Adolph!”
Daddy concluded his toast by raising his glass to David—“my favorite son.” There was a “cow town” strength howl from the family table. I hoped that Alexander was too blitzed at that moment to register his father’s heedless gushing.
At ten p.m., after the band had packed up and left, there came a cool woman DJ from downtown who put on the first song, cranked up the volume, and promptly blew out the Starlight Roof’s brand-new sound system. I was devastated: No more dancing at my wedding? After a doleful half hour, I heard a strange, rhythmic thumping, growing louder, closer—and into the Starlight Roof bounced a fully costumed Brazilian samba band, loaded with percussion instruments, whereupon everyone tumbled onto the dance floor for a delirious two hours. It was David Pack who had inadvertently saved the day: he’d heard the band at a Brazilian club the night before and hired them on the spot as a wedding surprise.
After our ten happy honeymoon days in southern France, David returned to New York, and I went to Nashville for a month to finish my record in a studio called the Castle. It was, in fact, a replica of a European castle, where the producer trio and I could live together and work nearly around the clock. I was feeling so confident that, for a while, I was unbeatable at Ping-Pong.
Quincy, the Gloved One, LB, JB, and David Pack.
Photo by Lester Cohen / Getty Images Entertainment / Getty Images
I abandoned the team for two days to fly to LA, where my father was receiving a special Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys ceremony. The night before the show, David Pack granted LB his birthday wish from the year before: to meet Michael Jackson. Pack arranged a private dinner for our whole family, along with Jackson’s producer, Quincy Jones, who was a Lenny fan—and the Gloved One himself. There were so many of us, and such fierce competition to sit near the guests of honor, that something inverted inside me; I suddenly couldn’t bear my own desire to be near all that pop music greatness. I went and sat at the far end of the table.
Michael was terribly shy. His longest conversation with LB took place, I learned later, when they found themselves in the men’s room. LB touched Michael’s face where it looked as if he’d applied a great deal of foundation makeup. “What’s all this on your face?” my father asked. “
You don’t need to wear all that.” Michael replied in his reedy voice: “Oh, Mr. Bernsteen, didn’t you ever have a pimple?”
When I got back to Nashville, I found my producing trio exhausted, grim-faced, burned out. Why weren’t they having fun anymore? True, the mixing phase was always the most draining part of the recording process—but I sensed an uneasy, unspoken consensus that the record wasn’t coming together.
When we got back to New York and played the tracks for Vince, he was, I reported to David, “heartbreakingly unenthusiastic.” This did not bode well for the reaction at Island.
After several postponements, the meeting with Island president Chris Blackwell finally came around, but the producer trio was disinvited. Uh-oh. Sure enough, Blackwell declared that the production was bad, particularly the rhythm section. Rescue options were discussed. Blackwell even suggested going back to David Pack—after all the earlier anguish of Pack’s being iced out of the project! I walked out of that meeting past the rows of unfamiliar Island employees, imagining that to those young strivers, my record was of less interest than a dog’s leftovers.
Apparently Blackwell felt the same. A week or two later, he simply pulled the plug on the whole project. No record release. Over and out.
How could everything have gone so wrong? Was it because I was such a hopeless weenie? I hadn’t liked the sound of the rhythm section, either—why didn’t I speak up? The voice of Nick-oh-Nick evidently still whispered in my inner ear, warning me against being “loud and obnoxious.” My mother’s voice was in there, too: “Don’t make waves,” she used to say.
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