Famous Father Girl

by Jamie Bernstein

  Julia Vega had become a proud, active American citizen. She kept up with world events on TV and voted Democratic (a considerable evolution since her days of admiring Richard Nixon’s haircut). She even voted for Barack Obama. Julia had seen and done it all: from kissing a pope’s ring to dressing a maestro’s corpse. What an astonishing trajectory from that farm in the foothills of the Andes.

  Although it wasn’t our primary purpose, the three of us discovered an additional benefit to maintaining a family headquarters: it gave the spirit of Leonard Bernstein an enduring presence in New York City. At our annual holiday party at the Dome, the guests could feel the reflected warmth of our father as an artist, husband, father, and friend. The Dome kept Mummy alive, too: through her own paintings on the walls, through the grace of her objects, and through us, her children.

  When the “ocean” at Sotheby’s rolled around, we discovered that Mummy’s antique-store finds, while charming, were not excessively valuable. But we knew such items as Leonard Bernstein’s batons and capes—and above all the B-52 Bösendorfer with its “Mark of Lenny” cigarette burn—would fetch significant sums. And they did. The BETA Fund was saved, but it was disconcerting to watch our family belongings being oceaned off to strangers. There was one painting from the dining room that I loved—an eighteenth-century Brittany woman with the ribbons of her bonnet blowing in a breeze. Alexander and Nina both wanted it to go into the auction; I relented, but it bothered me. Then I made a side deal with decorator Gail: she bid on the painting and won it—whereupon I gleefully bought it back from her.

  * * *

  When Frankie started preschool, I asked the teachers about their music program. They said, “We don’t have one. Would you like to start it?” I wished I hadn’t opened my mouth, but I agreed to try. Twice a week, I took my guitar down to Village Infant Center on West 13th Street, to play and sing for the kids. It was the one and only regular music gig I ever had.

  At first, I just sang the standards: “Home on the Range,” “B-I-N-G-O,” “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” But soon I was devising ways to get the kids more engaged. I turned “On Top of Spaghetti” into a play. “Who wants to be the meatball? Who wants to be the spaghetti? Who wants to be the bush? Okay, now let’s act it out!” I played the soothing lullaby “Rock-a-Bye Baby” at punk-rock speed: belly laughs! Nothing was more gratifying than getting a rise out of this most challenging of all audiences.

  But “real” songwriting wasn’t that much fun anymore. What used to be the most fun (if agonizing) was showing my songs to Daddy—and best of all had been writing all those songs in honor of Daddy himself. In his absence, it was as if the engine had been extracted from the vehicle. In one whole year, the only song I wrote was “Jump, Little Pumpkin, Jump.”

  Songwriting was not the only casualty of my father’s absence. When he died, I sensed right away that some essential equilibrium in my marriage had been put in jeopardy. David’s and my happiness had so much to do with the way he’d fit into the family puzzle—and the way he and my father had delighted in each other. For over six years, the presence of David had made it fun again to be around Daddy, and made the more annoying patches endurable. David, too, I knew, felt my father’s death as a catastrophic loss. Our marriage hung on for another decade, but the deep harmony we experienced while Daddy was alive never returned.

  Still, there were plenty of bright spots in the 1990s. Frankie was self-possessed, preternaturally verbal, already a writer at the age of seven. Evan was blond and funny, with a mimic’s ear and a fierce passion for his videos. The four of us, plus Julia, spent most weekends in Fairfield together: my own childhood in a mirror. Julia’s devotion to my kids opened my heart to her; it was the classic transformation between mother and childbearing daughter that I would never experience with my own mother. By the time Julia died in 2009, I realized I’d had her in my life more than twice as long as I’d had Mummy herself.

  In a deeply gratifying surprise move, Patty, my father’s chef in his last years, volunteered with her husband, Serge, to take care of the Fairfield property. They brought the joy back to the place, raising chickens for fresh eggs, planting flowers and vegetables in profusion, taking up beekeeping and sharing the honey they harvested. All that was missing was Daddy to sample the tomatoes and Mummy to clip the multihued zinnias.

  Five years after our father’s death, Alexander got married: the first happy family event to come along and pull us out of our collective grief. Nina and I loved our new sister-in-law, Elizabeth, who was fiery and funny, with a dead-aim aesthetic eye like Mummy had.

  Alexander had turned into the sweetest, most deeply intelligent and compassionate man we knew. His friends loved him fiercely. Alexander refused ever to whine; it was as if he’d decided that all his lucky breaks in life gave him no right to complain about anything, ever. But I often sensed he suffered silently; as his sister, I knew how hard it was for him to achieve—and maintain—dignity, patience, and strength.

  In 1998, Elizabeth gave birth to Anya Micaela. Frankie and Evan were besotted with their new cousin. And Alexander was the happiest dad in the world; he was born to be a dad, it turned out.

  Then it was Nina’s turn. She married Rudd, a wry, soft-spoken film producer. A few years later, Nina gave birth to Anna Felicia, a peach of a girl. That turned out to be the full complement of cousins produced by the three of us. It felt good to have little kids crawling around under the Passover table again. Possibly no one was happier than Julia. Oh, how she fed and fed her four little ones. (And no gentile on this earth ever made a more authentically sublime matzoh ball soup.)

  * * *

  An inquiry came to Amberson from my father’s music licensor, Boosey & Hawkes: Would we be interested in permitting the development of an educational concert, modeled after Leonard Bernstein’s televised Young People’s Concerts, but about the music of Bernstein himself? Wouldn’t offering this concert to orchestras around the country be an excellent way to promote the Bernstein music catalogue, as well as introduce his music to a new generation of listeners?

  That did indeed sound like an excellent idea. Oddly, unaccountably, I volunteered to develop the concert.

  What made me think I could do this? I had certainly watched Daddy devise his own Young People’s Concerts, and I’d attended nearly every one of them—but I’d been far more focused on the trestle table laden with doughnuts set out for the musicians backstage. Now I was hoping that perhaps by osmosis, I’d absorbed a sense of how those concerts were put together.

  And then there was another small issue: How was I going to create this concert when I wasn’t a trained musician? I immediately called Michael Barrett, who had worked so closely with my father during his final decade. Michael and I decided to split LB’s job in half: Michael would work out the musical details, and I would write the script. As we batted the ideas back and forth, my father’s music pushed us forward like a sail catching the wind.

  The Utah Symphony agreed to let us test-drive our concert with them. Michael would conduct and I would narrate. Narrate . . . ? I hadn’t planned at all to be the narrator—but as I began writing, I heard my own voice. It felt perfectly natural. Why did this all feel so natural?

  It took Michael and me the better part of two years to prepare The Bernstein Beat. My father used to crank out four or five of those scripts per season; however did he do it?

  I wrote my script in longhand, then typed it into my very first laptop. When I hit “print” and the pages began their slow march out of the printer, I felt a rare new joy.

  We gave our test-drive concert in Salt Lake City. Michael knew exactly how to conduct Bernstein music; the orchestra sounded plush and bright. Our topic, rhythm, had steered us to all the jumping-est Bernstein compositions. I told the young audience they had permission to bop around in their seats if the music made them feel like it. (I myself was incapable of sitting still during those lively excerpts from On the Town and West Side Story.) But it was a full-length concert,
complete with intermission. For little kids. Clearly we had some tweaking to do.

  The audience loved the part when I asked nine kids to come up on the stage and represent the beats in a nine-beat bar. I explained how to understand any complex rhythm by breaking it down into bundles of two beats—“hot dog”—and three beats—“ham-burger”—and pretty soon I had the nine kids in formation to represent a tricky nine-beat dance rhythm from LB’s Mass. Before our concluding excerpt from West Side Story, I “rehearsed” the audience in their participatory moment: “Aw, c’mon, you can do it louder than that!” We rehearsed it again. Then, when the orchestra played the piece, I held up my big sign at the appropriate moment and the kids roared “MAMBO!” to shake the rafters.

  I didn’t know it, but my new life had just been born.

  One last “Mambo!” during the bows, with Michael Barrett.

  ©Steve J. Sherman

  22

  A New Millennium

  One time, in my twenties, I had to renew my passport. Back then it was a brutal errand, involving a visit to the dreaded passport office at Rockefeller Center, where a thick welter of humanity stood in line for hours amid a few grossly inadequate electric fans. Finally it was my turn to approach a window. As the dour civil servant examined my paperwork, she asked if I might be related to Leonard Bernstein. When I told her he was my father, she looked up at me, joy suddenly lighting up her face and turning her into a human being. She told me how much she enjoyed Bernstein’s recordings and his Broadway shows: how she’d watched his concerts on television. What a wonderful person he was, she said. And I realized: Daddy himself was the greatest passport of all.

  Three decades after that day, Leonard Bernstein was no longer alive—but he was still very much my passport: Michael Barrett and I took The Bernstein Beat to Beijing, China.

  Any ten-year-old American kid can snap their fingers to the iconic bebop riff in “Cool” from West Side Story: “Boy, boy, crayzeee bo-oy . . .” But the China National Symphony had very little experience with twentieth-century American music; my father’s notes were pulling them out of their comfort zone. At the first rehearsal in Beijing, when Michael gave the downbeat to the “Cool” ballet, the orchestra began playing a stolid march, one-two, one-two: they didn’t know how to “swing.” Michael taught them, suggesting they imagine the insouciant gait of a cat.

  Michael and the orchestra pulled it together for the performance. The children in the audience were patient and attentive, even with my own narration having to be repeated every few sentences in Mandarin, which lengthened the proceedings. The “hamburger, hot dog, hot dog, hot dog” demo went over nicely (“han-bao-bao, re-gou, re-gou, re-gou”), and the kids were all waving little flags that had been provided by one of the concert’s sponsors—incredibly, McDonald’s.

  The following year, the Lenny passport took The Bernstein Beat to Havana, Cuba, where for the first time I narrated in Spanish, my mother’s native tongue. It was almost mystically gratifying to combine my parents’ worlds in this new way. We were not prepared for the high spirits of the Cuban children, nothing like the quiet, well-behaved youngsters in Beijing. At the end of the concert, the ovation was so prolonged that Michael launched the orchestra into a reprise of the Mambo. The kids were all on their feet, and as usual I couldn’t sit still . . . Next thing I knew, I’d hopped off the stage yelling, “Bailemos!” The girls and boys came pelting down the aisles, and we all danced together. When the music stopped, they covered me in hugs and kisses.

  Nina caught all this on video for a film she was making. When I saw the footage, I knew I was looking at my very happiest self.

  * * *

  Back home, New York’s classical radio station, WQXR, sent me up to Tanglewood to prepare and present live broadcasts of concerts by Daddy’s beloved “Kids”: the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra.

  Tanglewood! My father’s old stomping grounds, and scene of many a fraught visit of my own . . . but now it felt very different. It was delicious to drive up to the Berkshires on a summer morning with my new QXR pals. Feverishly we conducted interviews, then cobbled together our preproduced “halftime show” in the hours before the concert. Then came the adrenaline rush of the live broadcast—clapping on the headphones, rolling with the punches—and afterward, the richly earned hangout on the rocking chairs behind Serge Koussevitzky’s mountaintop manor, Seranak, where the Tanglewood folks kindly housed us overnight. Under the myriad stars, sharing a bottle of wine with my new friends, I felt useful, validated, competent, comfortable in my skin; my old Stupid Idiot feelings were nowhere in sight.

  I realized I still had one foot on the gas pedal, but my other foot wasn’t simultaneously slamming on the brake anymore.

  I traveled the country narrating The Bernstein Beat with other orchestras, other conductors, in places like Fayetteville, Arkansas; Flint, Michigan; San Antonio, Texas. As I introduced my father’s music to hall after hall full of kids who knew nothing about him, I felt my age-old discomfort with the Lenny connection ebbing away. This was a job that needed doing, and I was, of all things, uniquely qualified to do it.

  Many of the orchestra musicians, it turned out, had watched the Young People’s Concerts on television. “That’s how I fell in love with music,” they would say. Those who had experienced Bernstein firsthand always had a personal story to tell: a moment when they’d had a meaningful exchange with Leonard Bernstein that they never forgot.

  Just like the musicians, the parents in the audience had also grown up listening to Bernstein recordings and watching the Young People’s Concerts on TV. “He turned me into a music lover!” they’d tell me—and that was why they’d brought their kids to The Bernstein Beat that day. The grandparents amazed me even more. So many of them had actually been there: Israel in 1948; the first Broadway run of West Side Story; the New York Philharmonic back in its old home, Carnegie Hall. I was touched beyond all expectation. Daddy was gone, with all his living complications and maddening excesses—but I marveled at what he’d left behind.

  The Daddy I knew seemed in danger of receding behind the Lenny everyone else knew. But an unexpected opportunity came up for me to reconnect with him, in a particularly intense way.

  The conductor James Conlon invited me to Cincinnati to be the speaker in my father’s Symphony no. 3, Kaddish. It was a grand offer, but I still vividly recalled my mother’s big, scary actress voice doing the narration on the original recording. Her melodramatic argument with God had left my siblings and me with a lifelong allergy to the work.

  And anyway, how could I possibly be the speaker when the very first line of the narration was “O, my Father . . .”? The very thought of the audience wondering whether or not the F in “father” was capitalized was, to me, unbearably embarrassing.

  But Maestro Conlon wouldn’t let it go. To worm out of the situation, I told him I’d ask Harry Kraut whether it was permissible for me to change the text, certain Harry would say no, and that would be that. To my surprise, Harry said: “Oh, sure, go ahead! Lenny used to change that narration all the time.” Suddenly, I was stuck with the gig.

  A few old demons immediately reared up. There was my old fear of not measuring up to my beautiful actress mother; this narration was, after all, written for her—and she’d been a legitimate actress. And didn’t I have a nerve to be changing my father’s own text? Plus, there was that old bugaboo, my complicated feelings about Judaism. Maestro Conlon’s invitation seemed in many ways like the worst possible assignment.

  But I became utterly absorbed in the task. As I studied my father’s narration line by line, I found myself mentally arguing with him, consumed by an ancient impatience, even fury. Why the complications, the melodrama, the weighty earnestness? This symphony, which so urgently expressed my father’s lifelong “crisis of faith,” turned out to be the perfect place for me to explore the crisis that had crystallized for Alexander, Nina, and me back in 1976, when 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue turned out to be such a colossal flop. Who was thi
s flawed, maddening biological creator of ours? It was now my turn to shake my fist at him.

  Musically, the symphony was a death match between tunes and twelve-tone—a metaphor my father returned to over and over in his compositions to express his fear and anger about existence (dissonance) versus his hope for a better future (melody). But why, I wondered, couldn’t the composer just relax and write those tunes? Why was he always in such a dither about tonality? Still, it was a glorious struggle. When I peeled away my father’s narration, I saw how rich and beautiful his music was underneath—despite all its maddening convolutions. Sometimes even because of them.

  I remembered Grandpa telling me how the ancient rabbis wrote their commentary in the margins of the Talmud, while a later generation of rabbis wrote their commentary in the margins of the previous commentary, and so on for centuries. So maybe my argument with my earthly father, written in the margins of his argument with his spiritual father—which contained much of his rage at his own earthly father, as well—all had a nice Talmudic ring to it. Maybe I was simply adding another generational layer to a long line of chutzpah.

  * * *

  Carnegie Hall’s education team asked Michael Barrett and me to develop a family concert about Mozart, in honor of the composer’s 250th birthday. It was Michael’s idea that I should narrate the concert in the persona of Mozart the kid. “That’s a horrible idea!” I said. “I hate when those children’s concert narrators come out dressed as Papa Haydn or Uncle Ludwig—so lame!” But then I had a vision of Mozart the kid as a sort of slacker smart aleck who knew he was a genius and didn’t care what anyone thought of him. And suddenly my path was clear.

  Carnegie arranged for the Metropolitan Opera to lend me an eighteenth-century costume, complete with periwig and little black shoes with silver buckles. It was just a supernumerary’s costume—the footman in the corner of some ballroom scene, holding up the candelabra—but the outfit was beautifully made. When I slipped into that cream-and-gold brocade jacket, and capered around the stage to the overture from The Magic Flute, I felt exactly the way Snoopy looks in the Peanuts comics when he dances for joy.