“He’s gone,” he rasped.
* * *
For some reason, certain people shine like candles in the dark around the sick and the dying. Mendy Wager was such a person. On a day-to-day basis, Mendy could be flighty, irritable, obsessing relentlessly over opera, Israel, Proust, and his own endless personal melodramas. But he was at Mummy’s side all of her last, terrible year, finding ways to make her laugh, sharing books, and watching Masterpiece Theatre with her. And as Daddy spiraled into his final ordeal, Mendy was right there again: cajoling, teasing, eliciting the rare smile with his endless supply of Jewish jokes. He spent many nights on the couch in Daddy’s studio, formerly Mummy’s bedroom; now it was Mendy who was on the other side of the ecclesiastical oaken door. Mendy knew the jig was up before the rest of us did. “He’s begging for oblivion,” he told me.
October 14 was Evan’s first birthday. The party was in Fairfield, outdoors in the sparkling autumn weather. The guests were departing at the end of the afternoon when the phone rang. It was Alexander, shakily telling me the impossible news that Daddy had just died. It was only five days after the press release had gone out announcing Leonard Bernstein’s retirement from the podium.
The news shouldn’t have been surprising, but I felt as if my hand had gripped an uninsulated wire. I was jangled to the marrow, beyond tears for a minute. Then unearthly noises came out of me. Frankie told me years later she thought I was playacting; she’d never heard me make sounds like that. Nina had already driven off, and there was no way to contact her. Then, amazingly, her car reappeared on the driveway—she’d forgotten something. I told her the news, right there in front of the house. “No, no, no,” she cried, reeling in circles and finally crumpling onto the grass.
David was overseas on business, so a friend drove the family station wagon while I sat in the back seat with Frankie and Evan, keeping them amused, keeping that birthday-party feeling going . . . the hardest two hours of my life. Every October 14 since that day, I’ve reexperienced the cognitive dissonance of that ride in the car.
When we got to the Dakota, Julia took care of Frankie and Evan so I could go into Daddy’s bedroom. He was in his bed, in a beautiful pair of cream-colored pajamas. (Julia had changed his clothing.) He looked very calm and small and un-Daddylike—mainly because of the stillness.
Alexander had been there all afternoon; once Nina and I arrived, he filled us in. He’d been in the library watching a football game on TV. Mendy, Dr. Cahill, and Cahill’s son Sean were with Daddy in his bedroom. They had worked Daddy into a standing position so that Dr. Cahill could give him an injection in his rear. Daddy said, “What is this?” and fell forward into Mendy’s arms—and that was it.
(Even this horrific moment acquired an indelible built-in punch line for the rest of us: in Humphrey Burton’s biography of my father, published four years later, Mendy’s last name, Wager, was accidentally misspelled, in a too-good-to-be-true salute to Mendy’s opera obsession: “Bernstein slumped in Wagner’s arms, dead.” Cue the Valkyries.)
Sean Cahill went to the library to fetch Alexander. Alexander found Daddy placed in the red velvet armchair, eerily slumped and limp. Alexander told us how he crouched down in front of Daddy’s body, took his father’s hand in his own—and then, as sometimes happens with people who have just died, Daddy’s mouth suddenly emitted a bizarre, lurching, burp-like sound. Alexander nearly jumped to the ceiling. Some would say that was the moment of the soul leaving the body; others would say it was the famously gaseous Bernstein stomach discharging one final eruption.
Alexander called Adolph Green with the news. “Lenny, Lenny, Lenny,” Adolph cried over and over. When he arrived at the door of the apartment twenty minutes later, Adolph was still saying it. In the bedroom, he clutched his oldest friend’s hand: “Lenny, Lenny, Lenny . . . wake up!”
Alexander and Nina both came down to my place to spend the night on the foldout couch in the living room. We couldn’t bear to be alone. We felt like—in fact we now were—orphans, needing to huddle together. We knew that everything coming up next would be unbearable.
First, there were the phone calls: endless numbers of them, just like the “dress rehearsal” five days ago. It fell to Uncle BB to tell Grandma the news. He reported his ninety-two-year-old mother’s reply: “This will shorten my life.”
In our shocked and weakened states, just as when Mummy died, we turned the arrangements over to Harry, thereby cementing his role as the posthumous leader of everything. (He was in fact a co-executor of the Leonard Bernstein estate, along with Daddy’s old friend and colleague Schuyler Chapin and Daddy’s attorney, Paul Epstein.) Harry had already assumed the role of family coordinator when Mummy died; that was how she’d ended up at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Now Daddy would be buried next to her in that same plot, just as Harry had planned from the beginning.
The funeral was in the Dakota living room, where I’d gotten married six years earlier. Instead of Mummy’s Russian blanket raised on poles as a huppah, there now stood a big, brutish, shiny casket: a sickening intrusion. So much grief was in that room, it felt like a communal drowning.
After the speeches and prayers, the casket was loaded into the hearse outside the Dakota gates. Everyone who had been upstairs piled into a long line of limousines, and the cortege made its way to Brooklyn. The construction workers along the FDR Drive waved their hard hats as we passed: “Bye, Lenny!” Daddy would have loved that.
In our limo, both Shirley and David were smoking. When we got to Green-Wood, there was a delay as the long line of cars snaked its way up the hill to the gravesite. Three-year-old Frankie opened the sunroof to stick her head out. David told her to get down. “But how shall I get the fresh air?” she said. I knew exactly how she felt.
All I remember from the gravesite ceremony is Mendy and the rabbi moaning the multiple “amens” in the kaddish prayer, while Frankie danced among the headstones in the autumn dapple.
21
Life Goes On
Alexander, Nina, and I quickly grasped that we’d acquired a new job for the rest of our lives: to carry our illustrious father’s legacy forward. We felt exhausted already by the prospect; it was hard enough to mourn the loss of our father privately, yet here we were with this very public-oriented task to take on. Each of us found different ways to begin doing it.
Nina had abandoned her acting career and was now a trained chef. With Daddy’s chef, Patty, she’d started a catering business called Eats of Eden. But in her spare time, Nina set about finding a home for Leonard Bernstein’s ultra-voluminous archives. Letters, speeches, essays and poems, music manuscripts, awards, photos, video- and audiotapes—the contents filled one entire floor of a storage facility downtown. Nina recommended that we donate the Leonard Bernstein archive to the Library of Congress because, at the time, they were the institution most advanced in digitizing their collections to be made available, free of charge, online. Nina, who was the tech-savviest among us, knew that was the way of the future.
Alexander, meanwhile, had also set aside acting, and gotten himself a master’s degree in education at New York University. He became a full-time teacher, while also undertaking the daunting task of bringing our father’s philosophies of education to life. Daddy had been cooking up some notions in his final decade about using the arts to connect disparate subjects across the whole curriculum. Learning about one subject through the lens of another was precisely what our father had done in his Norton Lectures at Harvard, connecting music with linguistics. Leonard Bernstein himself was, in effect, the poster child for his own initiative: a teacher-artist-student who never stopped inquiring, and never stopped sharing what he’d learned.
A year before he died, my father had used the money from the Praemium Imperiale prize he’d received in Japan to launch the Bernstein Education Through the Arts (BETA) Fund. Now Alexander arranged for the project to be developed further at the Nashville Institute for the Arts.
Back in his school days, Alexander had
been an ambivalent student: disaffected, resentful of poor instruction methods, and often resistant to Daddy’s own relentless pedagogy, as we all were. Nina and I were impressed that our brother seemed to be solving some inner calculus by pursuing his vision for the ideal educational model.
As for me, I collaborated with my father’s former assistant Craig Urquhart to create a newsletter that would keep the international community of Lenny fans connected, as well as apprised of Bernstein-related performances and events. We named the newsletter after Daddy’s jazzy piece Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs.
Craig and I were a good team. He was adept at persuading friends, colleagues, and scholars to contribute articles. For my part, I discovered I had what amounted almost to a disability: my eye snagged on every typo. So I became the editor and proofreader. Also, I wrote “To Our Readers,” a few paragraphs on page two of each issue, summing up the contents.
There never seemed to be enough space for all the Bernstein-related news; we had to expand the number of pages as the years progressed. Leonard Bernstein wasn’t fading away; if anything, his legacy seemed to be gaining momentum. As I worked on PF&R over the years, I began to comprehend my father’s impact on the world in a new way.
Harry Kraut had built Amberson into a formidable business engine. But in the physical absence of Leonard Bernstein, the company was no longer coordinating his tours, performances, and new recordings—nor collecting the related fees. Amberson was now mainly in the business of managing the streams of income derived from preexisting recordings and videos, new usage licenses, and live performances of Bernstein works.
In the past, Alexander, Nina, and I had steered as clear as we could of Amberson. But now we were . . . well, we were the owners. We had to be present and alert at the board meetings around the long dining table in the Dakota apartment, absorbing a jumble of new concepts about intellectual property, music publishing rules, artists’ shares, grand rights versus small rights, mechanical rights versus performing rights . . . No wonder Leonard Bernstein had never attended a single board meeting of his own company; it was mighty dry stuff.
As the owners, we now had to work closely with Harry Kraut, our inherited Faustian bargain. He seemed glad enough to have us at the board meetings, but perhaps because he’d known us since we were children, that was how he treated us. In truth, we could be pretty infantile, with our in-jokes and perpetual teasing. But Harry wasn’t exactly encouraging our maturation as he sat at the head of the table, droning his way inaudibly through item after item on the spreadsheet, while we tried to follow along, squinting at our photocopies in their microscopic font. The subliminal message was: This is all far too complicated for you; let me handle it.
So we were relieved and pleased when Harry invited my husband, David, to join the company, to help run certain aspects of the business. It seemed an exciting prospect: the Quartet taking itself into the real world. David got us off to an encouraging start by pointing out that the company’s financial information could be presented in far more accessible ways. Bar graphs! Pie charts! Fourteen-point type!
Harry was not appreciative of David’s attempts to demystify business operations, nor did David enjoy working closely with Harry. We weren’t surprised to hear that Harry, as a boss, was overcontrolling, critical, even a bully. (I remembered it myself.) The experiment drew to a bitter conclusion five years later.
Our family friend Ofra, with her trademark Israeli accent, accused Alexander, Nina, and me of being “winnies.” We knew it was true: we were weenies. We could not stand up to Harry. We abhorred conflict and confrontation—just as our parents had. The trio within the Quartet wasn’t prepared for the real world after all. Were we ever going to be properly functioning grownups? Would we ever “pull up our socks,” as Mummy used to say?
The problem was already in its second generation. The intensity of Daddy’s force field had made it hard for his own siblings to grow up, as well. Uncle BB had wound up isolating himself and his family in the depths of Connecticut to increase his sense of autonomy (though he was still only fifty miles away). As for Shirley, not only had she remained single, she’d remained dependent on her older brother in more ways than we realized. For years I revered Shirley as a paragon of women’s liberation: an independent woman who eventually owned her own theatrical literary agency, Paramuse. Arthur Laurents, Daddy’s West Side Story collaborator, had been a Paramuse client, as had Stephen Schwartz, long before Wicked. It all seemed impressive, but after our father died, we found out that he, through Amberson, had been infusing Paramuse with a hefty monthly “consulting fee” to keep Shirley’s business afloat. Her glamorous office, her snappy outfits—had it all been window dressing? Shirley read her clients’ scripts and negotiated their contracts; she followed world events, did the tricky crossword puzzles—and yet some essential part of her had not developed; she was like a child playing a grownup. Alexander, Nina, and I worried: What if we turned out like Shirley, too?
The most visible symptom of our resistance to growing up at that time was our inability to let go of the Dakota apartment. It wasn’t that we wanted to live there; all three of us had opted for the funkier ambience of downtown Manhattan. We simply couldn’t bear the idea of parting with apartment 23; it would be too physical a manifestation of having lost both parents.
Also, we couldn’t bear the idea of parting with the Macy’s parade on Thanksgiving morning. And as Alexander likes to say, “The second reason is always the real one.”
Harry, Paul, and Schuyler, the executors of the Bernstein estate, tried to talk us into selling the Dakota apartment; they had counted on that sale to pay off the crushing estate tax. But we wouldn’t, couldn’t budge. We clung to the apartment for a good five years more. So the executors made the best of the situation by turning the place into a tax write-off: Nina’s old bedroom, along with our father’s bedroom and studio, became offices. Various Amberson assistants worked there—and David, too; he worked in the very room where his father-in-law had died. Julia, meanwhile, still lived in her little room off the kitchen. She made lunch for the gang every day, and was often babysitting Frankie and Evan, who loved spending the night on the foldout couch in the morning room and feasting on Julia’s pancakes and bacon the next day.
In the end, it was our desire to infuse money into the BETA Fund that propelled us into selling the Dakota apartment. We engaged Sotheby’s to hold an auction, the proceeds of which would go to the foundation.
The dismantling of apartment 23 began—and Julia was having a nervous breakdown. She hated the auction—or “the ocean,” as she pronounced it. A world-class hoarder, Julia wasn’t happy to throw away so much as a moth-eaten scarf—“Is very good scarf!”—and now here we were, offering strangers the prized possessions of La Señora and El Caballero, the very objects she had fiercely protected for over forty years. I couldn’t blame her for being upset; I wasn’t too happy about it myself.
Each of the apartment’s sixteen-foot-high closets was crammed from top to bottom with half a century’s worth of accumulated family belongings. In the kitchen, there seemed to be five of everything—from sets of flatware to rolls of Reynolds Wrap. An entire day was devoted to removing Daddy’s “B-52,” as he’d dubbed his mighty Bösendorfer grand piano, after the gargantuan military jets that had carpet-bombed Vietnam. The operation required prying off the wooden frame from the living room window, unscrewing the legs from the piano, swaddling the instrument in padding, and sailing it out the window by means of a crane parked on the street below. It was a sickening spectacle, Daddy’s B-52 teetering over Central Park West.
Every object in the house—every fork, ashtray, and Otto Perl– stamped coat hanger—got a sticker affixed to it, indicating where it was going next. A rainbow of colors represented the various destinations. Green was for the Sotheby’s warehouse; Julia would see a dish or a lamp with a green sticker and cry, “How you can throw that into the ocean?” Other colors indicated the house in Fairfield, or our three respective apartme
nts downtown. Also, there was Nina’s recently acquired rustic farmhouse in upstate New York. Coming of age during the family troubles had left its mark on Nina; she was far less sentimental than her older siblings about our past, and that included Fairfield.
There was yet one more colored sticker to reckon with: this one was for the new, smaller apartment that the three of us jointly bought in the Parc Vendome, a large prewar building on West 56th Street. We’d decided to continue having a “family headquarters”: a place for board meetings, social gatherings, and musical events—as well as Alexander’s office for the BETA Fund. We furnished the apartment with our favorite items from the Dakota; even the plants moved there, where they thrived in the penthouse sunshine. Nina called the bright, airy new apartment “the Dakota antidote.”
But the second (and therefore real) reason for getting “the Dome,” as we dubbed it, was to give Julia a place from which to continue in her role as materfamilias.
Julia was already seventy-five; we worried that the trauma of the move might do her in. On the day when every last object was finally cleared out of apartment 23, all that was left was Julia on her step stool in the kitchen; she would not leave. We feared the worst. But she withstood the transition, adapted to the Dome, and enjoyed sixteen more years of cooking daily soups and stews for Alexander, receiving a steady stream of devoted visitors, and doting on all our kids.
Famous Father Girl Page 27