Some of My Lives

by Rosamond Bernier

  Later, I was able to send him a teapot via a Hong Kong connection.

  A year later the Metropolitan Museum put on a large Byzantium exhibition with magnificent examples from great monasteries. A large contingent of black-robed and black-coiffed visiting ecclesiastics were on hand, each one standing by the vitrine displaying his monastery’s treasures, just as collectors hover by their own displays. We found ourselves by the Saint Catherine exhibits and greeted the head abbot. He made an almost imperceptible gesture toward John and whispered to his attendant, “New York Times.” Then he handed me a card with his e-mail address.

  Back on this continent, a new experience was speaking for television. John and I did some programs together; he wrote, I spoke. We did programs for the National Gallery of Art on Luminism; we went to France to film a program on the spot on France and French painting for the San Francisco Legion of Honor Museum. For CBS, I was on my own interviewing Henry Moore, Paul Mellon, Joseph Hirshhorn, Philip Johnson, and a number of others. A friend looked it up on the Internet and found that I had done sixteen television programs for CBS and Channel 13, one of which won a Peabody.

  Along the way I was awarded two French decorations: Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and the Légion d’Honneur. And the king of Spain, Juan Carlos, bestowed the Cross of Isabel la Católica on me, with a lovely yellow-and-white ribbon to go with it.

  John and I were both named “National Treasures” by the Municipal Art Society of New York in 2004, and the New York Landmarks Conservancy named us “Living Landmarks.”

  Aside from this, Alexander Liberman lured me back to Condé Nast, and for years I wrote first for House & Garden, then for Vogue—some hundred articles. I never got around to counting them.

  Hilde Limondjian, who had directed the Concerts and Lectures series at the Met since the late 1960s with brio, took a chance on me—completely unknown here at the time. I started in 1971 and was still at it over two hundred lectures later, when, as I said to John, my motto was “Stop at the top,” and I did.

  They were happy years, and backstage at the Met became my second home, with Mikel Frank, Steve Rotker, and Felix Cotto as a convivial support team, and John always keeping me company until I had to go out onstage.

  P.S.

  In an interview in The New York Observer on July 13, 2010, about her retirement from the Met, Hilde Limondjian answered, when asked who were some of the influential speakers in the lecture series:

  In the early ’70s, a very gifted speaker, Rosamond Bernier, revolutionized what I like to call the “art of the art lecture.” She spoke from the 1970s until just recently and gave more than 200 lectures. Her glittering speaking style, the immediacy of her delivery and the fact that she had known many of the famous artists in Paris in the ’40s turned her lectures into the hottest ticket in New York.

  Philip Johnson and Our Wedding

  I met Philip Johnson in the early days of the Museum of Modern Art. He took an almost avuncular interest in me and, when I moved to Paris to work, made sure that I checked in when I passed through New York.

  That often meant meeting him for lunch at the same corner table of the Four Seasons restaurant on the ground floor of the Seagram Building. It is not surprising that he felt at home there, since he designed both the bar and the dining room itself. He may well have told the chef how to make the excellent crabmeat dish that he often recommended to his guests, and he certainly explained just how he wanted the vermouth that turned up automatically in front of him when he arrived.

  I was privileged in that most of the people who lunched with him were in some way concerned with architecture. They might be young or old, American or from overseas, but no matter who they were, they would find him formidably well-informed—and not least about the latest gossip.

  He followed my adventures in creating an art review in Paris. He offered introductions to architects I should know about: Frank Gehry and Paul Rudolph were among them. He supplied moral support during certain upheavals in my private life.

  Whenever I had the time, he invited me out to the Glass House and provided a car and driver to bring me. The first time I went, however, was with Alfred Barr (the first director of the Museum of Modern Art) and his wife, Marga. Philip was fanatically neat. His décor was as sparse as his person. When Marga noticed I was about to put down my coat, instead of hanging it up immediately, she whispered a warning, and added, “Admirez! Admirez!” I did.

  Although the Glass House is accepted today as one of the classic buildings of the twentieth century, Philip told me that it didn’t always get too easy a ride from some of the architects he most admired.

  Frank Lloyd Wright, for instance, walked in and kept his hat on. “Should I keep my hat on or should I take it off? Am I indoors or out?” Apparently, the Glass House made him very uneasy. It didn’t give him the sense of shelter that he got from his own houses, with their wide overhanging eaves and their rows of little windows.

  The great French architect Auguste Perret didn’t like it either. He came in, he sat down, and he said, “Too much glass,” and that was that. Later he made a great effort and said, “Well, I suppose it’s a little more comfortable than a railway station,” but he really missed the concrete that he had worked with all his life.

  As for Mies van der Rohe, whom Philip revered, he almost took the house as a personal offense. He just hated it. Philip said that at first this made him very unhappy, but then he realized that the Glass House was both too close to Mies’s own style and yet not close enough. What seemed to Mies the “mistakes” drove him quite crazy. In fact he disliked it so much that he refused to spend the night there, and Philip had to telephone all over to find him a room in a decent hotel.

  Some years later—we are in the early 1970s—the brilliant English art critic John Russell had come to New York to join The New York Times and me. I had left my magazine and my former matrimonial attachment and moved to New York. Although completely committed to John, I hesitated at the word “marriage.” Philip was enthusiastic about John from the start and thought I should act. “You kids ought to get married,” he said. “Kids? We’re a couple of middle-aged birds,” I objected (we were both in our fifties).

  But by 1975, Philip had taken over as father and mother of the bride and planned the whole wedding with the attention to detail given to designing a new skyscraper. He corrected my guest list (I had been away so long that I didn’t know the abbreviation for “Connecticut” was no longer “Conn.” but “CT”) and sent out the invitations. He arranged a musical program to be given in his new Sculpture Gallery. He somehow got a small organ flown in and engaged the organist John Weaver to play Bach chorales. He hired young trumpeters from Juilliard to provide flourishes at appropriate moments. For all I know, he figured how many hors d’oeuvres would fit on each one of the many buffets that were circulated.

  Our only contribution was to provide ourselves, and we had asked our great friend Irene Worth to recite some Shakespeare sonnets and Millamant’s speech from Congreve’s Way of the World.

  We had negotiated with our host: no crowds at the actual wedding, just a few close friends. The guests poured in after the actual ceremony was over. Pierre Matisse was John’s best man, excruciatingly nervous because he thought he had to make a speech (he didn’t). My old loved friend Aaron Copland gave me away. Lenny Bernstein was John’s witness; his wife, Felicia, and daughter Nina—holding a bouquet of wildflowers—were my attendants. Stephen Spender flew in from London, bringing me a notebook in which he had handwritten my favorite poems.

  Incidentally, it was the hottest day of the century. Stephen heroically ignored suggestions that he take off his jacket. “She hasn’t seen it yet,” he explained. He had bought a new suit for the wedding.

  Photographs record the festive scene, with some two hundred guests wandering over the immaculate lawn and spilling into the new Sculpture Gallery—such shots as Lenny walking arm in arm with Virgil Thomson, Andy Warhol feeding his little dog a cock
tail sausage, Louise Nevelson with her usual triple layer of eyelashes, Leo Castelli chatting with John Ashbery, Helen Frankenthaler sitting on the grass with her shoes off, Philip giving the first toast, the bride and groom looking blissfully happy.

  In fact, May 24, 1975, was the happiest day of my life.

  I lost John on August 23, 2008.

  They were wonderful years. I am grateful for every one of them.

  Some of John’s Musical Friends

  Although officially an art critic, my late husband, John Russell, had been deeply involved with music and musicians all his adult life. He had written a biography in 1957 of the German conductor Erich Kleiber, one of the major conductors of the period between the two wars, and in the course of this had become familiar with the whole Kleiber family.

  Carlos Kleiber, the charismatic son, also became a conductor. Although he was well into middle age when I met him, John still referred to him as “young Kleiber.” John told me Carlos got absolutely no encouragement from his stern father. When, as a teenager, Carlos came home to report excitedly, “Papa, I have been accepted in the chorus of the Stuttgart opera,” the elder Kleiber answered, “What? They have room for you?”

  He became one of the most-sought-after conductors alive. He combined profound musicality with irresistible personal seductiveness. To watch him conduct was almost to hear the music. But it was not easy to hear Carlos Kleiber; he must have had the Guinness world record for canceling performances.

  We went especially to Munich to hear his Rosenkavalier, and at the last moment he canceled. He came to have lunch with us the next day at the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten. We complained about our disappointment. “Oh,” he said offhandedly, “I had a spat with the soprano.” She happened to have been a former mistress of his—one of many.

  Did he like being in such demand all over the world? Not at all. “Eating well and making love is what life is for,” he once said.

  After his son had realized that his father was being offered unbelievably high fees and turning most of them down, he said, “Papa, I think I’d like to conduct too.”

  “And why is that?” asked Carlos.

  “Well,” his son said, “I’ve noticed that the less you work, the more money you make.”

  One of the great Russian artists who was finally allowed to go abroad was the pianist Sviatoslav Richter.

  John described his debut in London in July 1961. “He made an unforgettable and distinctly curious impression. He had a mighty head, mighty shoulders, mighty legs and mighty coattails. He had compact but very large hands with which he dug deeply into the keyboard when the music asked for what he called ‘a singing sonority.’”

  I got to know Richter, Slava, as we called him by then, in the 1970s and 1980s, when he came every summer to a little festival he had founded not far from Tours in the Loire valley.

  As the guest of a music publisher friend of John’s, Francis Van de Velde, he had come across a noble thirteenth-century tithe barn the size of a small cathedral. Richter saw at once it had enormous possibilities, and he guessed the acoustics would be perfect. They were: what came to be called the Fêtes Musicales en Touraine opened there in June 1964 and continued to draw a full house (or a full barn) of music lovers, not only from the region, but from all over France. Richter chose all the other performers, and the programs, himself.

  During the Fêtes, Richter and his wife lived in a secluded house on the estate of the Van de Veldes. We were also fortunate guests there.

  For a few weeks each year, as John described it, “life was a Franco-Russian paradise. There were no regular hours. Conversations drifted this way and that in Chekhovian style. Hugely gifted people drew upon their sense of play, as when the great violist Yuri Bashmet rode round and round the house on a tiny child’s bicycle.

  “Dinner was at no particular time and for no foreseeable number of people. It usually ran late. With good food and good wine, collegial good humor drew near to wildness.”

  One evening it leaked out that we had to move on the next morning. Richter pulled one of his more terrifying faces. “But you can’t go,” he said, “we’re going to play the Stravinsky Concerto for Two Solo Pianos tomorrow evening!” Then he paused. “Well … if you really must leave, we’ll play it for you now.”

  The dining room seated eight or ten and was an extension of the small living room that had two pianos, side by side. Richter and Vassily Lobanov came over and sat with their backs to us, just an inch or two away.

  Whether in public or in private, Richter gave all he had. The Stravinsky concerto in question is strenuous, from beginning to end. In high-summer short sleeves, Richter played as if he were laying his life on the line. That massive head, that rocklike back, and those formidable arms and hands radiated an implacable power. “That’s not the whole program!” Richter said at the end, and added two sizable encores before the evening was over.

  My husband and I had known Yehudi Menuhin for quite some time, though he was someone who had to be caught on the wing, so constantly was he on the move.

  I had seen him in Detroit, where he was conducting and I was lecturing. We were staying at the same hotel and leaving the same day. The concierge warned me to check out early because there was a convention going on and hundreds of people would be checking out at the same time. “But there is only one Madame Bernier,” Yehudi said gallantly.

  Some years later John and I were waiting in the Frankfurt airport for a connecting flight to St. Petersburg. We spied an unmistakable small figure in the lounge—it was Yehudi, accompanied by his wife, Diana, who towered over him. We embraced, and we found out we were all going to the same hotel in St. Petersburg and that Yehudi would be conducting two concerts at the conservatoire, just across the road. “Of course we will be there,” we said. “Then do come and see me during the intermission.”

  Wouldn’t he need a rest? “Not at all,” he answered. He was conducting the Hungarian Symphony Orchestra, which dated from the year the Russians marched into Hungary. It was not a great orchestra, but Yehudi remained loyal to it. “Besides,” he said, “the Hungarians are the only people in Europe who really have rhythm.” He had programmed Bartók, by the way.

  Yehudi was well into his seventies, but from the back, on the podium, his svelte silhouette and vigorous movements suggested a far younger man. He kept himself in top physical shape by a regimen of yoga and a complicated program of vitamins he invented for himself.

  After the concert we were to meet for supper. He told us he had to go to an official reception for him. “But I won’t stay more than two minutes. Do go and get us a table for four at the restaurant.”

  We didn’t hurry after the concert, because we didn’t believe about the two minutes. We were strolling along when a stocky figure in a big high-necked fisherman’s sweater came bounding down the stairs to the restaurant, leaving us way behind. It was Yehudi.

  Yehudi not only talked but listened, as if one’s story was of high interest to him. His incorruptible goodness and sweetness drew people to him everywhere.

  John remembered that Diana sometimes thought that he carried this too far. She never hesitated to give her opinions.

  “That violinist who played with you last week was just awful,” she said. “Admit it, now, she played like a pig.”

  “But she brings something of her own,” Yehudi answered mildly, and changed the subject.

  Another conductor who is in demand everywhere—every major symphony orchestra did a dance of seduction to try to lure him—but who doesn’t cancel is Simon Rattle: Sir Simon since we spent a week with him a few years ago in Birmingham.

  John was commissioned by The New York Times Magazine to write a major article on the conductor who was causing an international buzz, from a city not previously associated with star performers. So we went to Birmingham to watch him in action.

  As a very young man, Simon took over a minor orchestra—the Birmingham Symphony—and stuck with it year after year in spite of all inducement
s to move elsewhere.

  This dynamo with an abundant halo of graying curls is not swept away by adulation. He was, and is, totally unpretentious.

  We attended rehearsals, and concerts, and saw how he worked with the orchestra, with a chorus, with soloists. He was preparing Verdi’s Requiem and, for another program, a cello concerto with Lynn Harrell as soloist.

  In his usual rehearsal gear—a baggy multicolored sweater (perhaps knit by an admirer) over slacks—he worked with demanding but endless good nature. Orchestra sections were rehearsed separately, their members spoken to like colleagues. The tutti finally blossomed seamlessly.

  When we went out to lunch together, he pulled a pile of scores behind him on a little platform on wheels, “my little dog,” he called it.

  As a music student, he had been a percussionist. He had played in jazz concerts. Still an avid jazz fan, he would go after what should have been exhausting concerts that week to Ronnie Scott’s, a popular jazz hangout, and stay until the late hours.

  Later in London we heard Simon conduct a remarkable performance of Stockhausen’s Symphony for Three Orchestras. It was in the vast Royal Festival Hall with the three orchestras so widely spaced apart that three conductors were needed.

  At the end of the symphony Simon turned to the audience: “Now I would ask you all to move to another part of the hall, and I will play the Stockhausen all over again, and you will see if it sounds different.” Everyone was happy to comply.