Famous Father Girl

by Jamie Bernstein

  I thought about this for a moment, then replied, “Well . . . let’s make the best of it now.” My father roared with laughter and gave me a suffocating hug. I wasn’t sure why what I’d said was so funny; was he hoping I’d reassure him that I’d never act that way as a teenager? But how could I know what life would be like in that remote future? I figured he had to know more about it than I did.

  He knew more than I did about everything, of course—especially music. But music was something he wanted me to learn. I understood that it was my fate to take piano lessons, which commenced that very summer. My teacher was Shirley Gabis, a friend of my father’s from his student days at the Curtis Institute. After one of my early lessons, my father sat me on his lap and said, “Well, you’ll never be a great pianist.” Shirley was appalled; why did he say that—even as a joke? Still, I blundered along with my lessons: not particularly enjoying them, but with a docile acceptance that it was something I had to do, like brushing my teeth or going to the doctor.

  One summer when our father had to leave the Vineyard early and go conduct somewhere, he wrote a song to remind us of him. Mummy was at the piano, while Alexander and I sang the words, and we would perform it for all the visiting houseguests. Daddy’s lyrics went:

  Evening, when it’s booze time

  That’s the time we think of Daddy

  Nighttime, when it’s snooze time

  That’s the time we dream of Daddy

  Where is that funny face

  Where is that fatty

  Soon, soon, in September

  We will booze again, we will snooze again

  With Daddy . . . Daddy . . . Daddy . . .

  In the last Vineyard summer, just before I turned nine, there was a scary moment when Mummy was overcome with a terrible stomachache and had to be taken to the hospital in Oak Bluffs. Alexander and I weren’t allowed inside her room, but we could wave at her through a window. We were frightened at the time, but a few weeks later we found out, to our delight, that she was pregnant.

  Nina was born in New York City the following February. I’d had my piano lesson that afternoon, and Shirley Gabis stuck around to count the contractions. When our mother left for the hospital around nine p.m., I made Julia promise to wake me up if the baby was born during the night. Sure enough, Julia opened my door at about one in the morning. I sat right up in bed and asked hopefully, “Is it a girl?” Julia’s face darkened, and she mimicked back at me, “Is it a girl??” and slammed the door. In true Latin American form, she’d been hoping for another niñito.

  * * *

  The next summer, our family had a little country house of our own in West Redding, Connecticut. Daddy named the house the Apiary—a reference not to bees but to the Bernstein siblings’ lifelong obsession and identification with apes. They called themselves the Apes, and “Don’t be an ape!” was a common saying in our house. Uncle BB often made reference to that underappreciated baroque composer A. P. E. Bach. And we called Ed Sullivan, the TV variety show host, Ape Solomon. (That last one was also an homage to our grandpa Sam, who managed to render every notable person Jewish: he referred to Adlai Stevenson as “Steve Adelman”; even President Eisenhower became “President Eisenberg.”)

  The Apiary was on a steep, wooded hill where Alexander and I devised make-believe games using the trees, the rocks, the brook down the hill as the scenery and props of our inventions. Most of our fantasies were about life in a small town, where we ran little stores or walked to work, waving genially to each other along the way. In our real life, we felt some vague differentness: we knew our parents weren’t quite like other parents. What was more, we lived in the city, not in the suburbs, where the families on our favorite TV shows resided. We longed to be like the “normal” people we saw on TV; so Alexander and I created that illusion for each other in the woods.

  Felicia in curlers, in the days before her sun allergy.

  One afternoon, Daddy hauled his portable record player down the rocky path to the swimming pool so he could listen to a recording of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony while he studied the score. He was planning to reintroduce the long-neglected music of Gustav Mahler to his New York Philharmonic audiences in the fall. The conductor on the recording was Bruno Walter—the very maestro who had conveniently caught the flu and given Leonard Bernstein his big conducting break back in 1943. Now, nearly two decades later, Daddy sat in the sun in his bathing suit, with a fresh pack of L&M’s on the little table next to his lounge chair, following the recording with the score in his lap while his children splashed in the pool. As the record played, Daddy pointed out the kid-friendly features of the symphony to Alexander and me. “You hear that jingling? That’s sleigh bells! Listen—here they come again!” In the last movement, he told us that the soprano was describing a child’s vision of heaven.

  Meanwhile, up the hill in the house, Mummy was performing her magic trick of silencing baby Nina’s cries by playing a Brahms intermezzo on the piano. She looked so beautiful while playing those swoony, melancholy pieces by Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms. But her visits to the piano had been dwindling. She used to play duets with Daddy, but Mummy told us it now made her too nervous.

  We’d begun to understand that our mother harbored fear. She told us she suffered from stage fright, and that was why she’d been turning down acting jobs recently. She was afraid of heights; she nearly expired over Daddy’s prank of balancing four-year-old Alexander on an overhanging gargoyle at the top of Notre-Dame Cathedral. Mummy was terrified of airplanes; she crossed herself on takeoff and landing, and in between she clutched the armrests in a grim panic. There was a strange new darkness hovering at the edges of our mother’s demeanor and we avoided inspecting it too carefully.

  That summer in Redding, Mummy played the piano more than usual: not just to soothe baby Nina, but also because Daddy was away at the MacDowell Colony, the artists’ retreat in New Hampshire, working on his third symphony. When he drove back down to Redding, he arrived with not one but two puppies in his car! (By then, Henry the Second was no longer with us.) Daddy explained that they were “mongrels”—a nice new word—and that their names were Franny and Zooey, siblings from a book. We were besotted with our beautiful new puppies: Zooey for Alexander and Franny for me. Our mother was considerably less enthusiastic.

  Just a normal pair of parents.

  The “mongrels” turned out to be part German shepherd, and before you could say J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey got really, really big. When it was time to return to the city in the fall, our mother announced that Franny and Zooey were not coming with us. This was increasingly the pattern: Daddy would do something impulsive that got us all excited, and then Mummy felt compelled to be responsible and ruin the fun. Alexander and I were heartbroken, but now I can well imagine what was going through our mother’s mind as her husband pulled that pair of energetic creatures out of the back seat of his car.

  * * *

  Aunt Shirley got me hooked on reading. She’d drive me to the little Mark Twain Library a few miles away, where I’d replace the three Nancy Drew books I’d devoured over the past few days, and pull out the next three from the shelf. But on the way home from the library, Shirley often took us on a detour to the general store, where Alexander and I were permitted to assemble a magnificent pile of penny candy for what she dubbed our Cavity Party. Back at the house, the three of us would sit in a circle on the living room floor with the candy in the middle and eat it all. Shirley wasn’t entirely like a grownup.

  At the end of that summer Daddy turned forty-four—and to celebrate the occasion, Shirley helped Alexander and me cook up a birthday entertainment in Redding. (She was no doubt remembering her own childhood summers, when Daddy conscripted Shirley and all the neighborhood kids into ambitious productions of Carmen and The Mikado at their lakeside community in Sharon, Massachusetts.) Our presentation was to be a takeoff on our favorite Sunday night TV program: The Ape Solomon Show. Alexander played Ape himself; I played guest star Jimmy Durante, spor
ting a big rubber schnozzola and performing a song I’d made up, affecting Durante’s signature rusty Lower East Side voice. We persuaded Rosalia, the cook, to come out and do the commercial for Helena Rubinstein hand cream; she gleefully recited our purple-prosed ad copy with her outlandish Chilean pronunciation. Rosalia was a good sport; Julia wouldn’t have dreamed of participating in such antics. (Daddy was such a big Rosalia fan that he christened a ship in Candide after her—the Santa Rosalia—and named a Sharks girl Rosalia in West Side Story.)

  Our show concluded with Alexander and me singing lyrics I’d written to the tune of “Hey, Look Me Over”:

  Oh, happy birthday, dear Daddy-O,

  I guess that life just doesn’t go so slow.

  ’Cause you’re already forty-four years old,

  But you can conduct, and you can compose,

  And you can still be bold! [arrghh]

  And you’ll grow like a beanstalk, high on a vine

  Don’t work so hard but take a tip from mine [sic]:

  Way down deep in your heart you’re not growing old,

  So listen to our words:

  Happy birthday . . . happy birthday, Daddy-Ooooo!!!

  3

  Park Avenue and Fairfield

  Lenny and Felicia on their way to something elegant, vamping it up in the elevator vestibule for Jamie’s Instamatic camera.

  Between the birth of our baby sister and Daddy’s high-profile job as conductor of the New York Philharmonic (about to become even higher-profile upon the orchestra’s move to its new home in Lincoln Center), it was time for our family to move to a bigger, fancier apartment.

  When school began in the autumn of 1962, Alexander and I were newly residing in a penthouse duplex at 895 Park Avenue. We had our own rooms now, while Julia and baby Nina shared a third bedroom. The bedrooms, plus Daddy’s studio, were all downstairs, while the living room, library, dining room, and kitchen were upstairs: an upside-down house. My bedroom had three windows facing west, offering me a sunset over Central Park every single day—plus, I had one window facing south, where I could look straight down Park Avenue. There was so much light drenching the enormous apartment, it felt as if an intensely bright beam were being trained upon us. Our whole family life seemed somehow ratcheted up.

  We sensed that Mummy was taking her role of Mrs. Maestro much more seriously. Her new walk-in closet was a marvel of treasures: Chanel suits, Dior evening dresses, a parade of elegant shoes and purses—all that glittering armor for the myriad events she attended and hosted. Even her hairdo from the Kenneth salon seemed blonder, the swept-up French twist somehow more regal. When she sat at her desk, immaculately dressed, one hand holding the phone receiver to her ear, the fingers of the other hand extending her cigarette ceilingward as she intoned, “Hello, this is Mrs. Leonard Bernstein calling . . . ,” well, she was formidable. (Years later, I gasped in recognition to see Betty Draper on Mad Men assume this exact posture.)

  Felicia on the phone in her bedroom on Park Avenue.

  Mummy seemed invincible to me, but maybe she was having some pangs of insecurity—for despite her unerring eye for design, she sought professional assistance in raising penthouse A to a higher level of grandeur. We always had to shake hands and be very polite to Mr. Irvine, who was stuffed into his pin-striped suit like a sausage into a casing. A noted interior designer, Keith Irvine talked our mother into some uncharacteristically flamboyant decisions. The dining room had Clarence House wallpaper and matching drapes depicting birds of paradise perched along vivid floral braids. The dining table was made entirely of mirrors, surrounded on two sides by a claret-toned corduroy banquette, itself backed by a mirrored shelf holding crystal candelabras and a collection of antique mercury glass orbs. The walls behind the banquette were mirrors, reaching all the way to the ceiling. At a dinner party, amid the dazzle of crystal, the gleaming silverware, the flowers and mercury glass and vaulting birds of paradise, all multimirrored in candlelight—the effect was downright magical. That dining room really was Casino Fancy.

  By now, our parents had become socially beholden to many people who were not close friends. To erase all the pesky obligations at a single blow, Mummy came up with a solution she dubbed “monster rallies”: large dinner parties, with extra tables set up in the Casino Fancy dining room. Alexander, Nina, and I steered clear of those events, hiding downstairs throughout. But there was one monster rally we heard about at dinner the next day.

  Herman Shumlin, a theater producer of fidgety disposition, was already a sort of verbal family mascot. Uncle BB loved the name so much that he took every opportunity to shoehorn it into the conversation: “I’ll be back before you can say Herman Shumlin.” At this particular dinner party, Mr. Shumlin was seated with three other people at a small, elegantly arrayed table that was actually a very humble folding card table underneath. Mr. Shumlin had been unwittingly kicking at the butterfly wing nut that set the table at its higher-up position. He eventually managed to kick the wing nut all the way around, whereupon the table abruptly and deafeningly crashed down to its lower position, dumping Mr. Shumlin’s entire dinner onto his lap. There was a great commotion, and while the serving staff cleaned everything up, Mummy took her guest downstairs and lent him a pair of Daddy’s trousers. Mr. Shumlin reentered the dining room to general applause from the other guests, and he sat down to a nicely reset table and a fresh plate of food. This was a pretty great story to hear about the next day—and too good to be true that this festive calamity had happened to Herman Shumlin! But the best part, the part that still brings tears of joy to our eyes, the part that enshrines the story forever . . . is that ten minutes later, fidgety Herman Shumlin kicked the table down again.

  Felicia lights the candles in the Casino Fancy dining room.

  Don Hogan Charles / The New York Times / Redux

  One keen advantage for Mummy in the move across town was that Helen Coates, our father’s secretary, now had to make distinct appointments to come over to our house, to deal with his correspondence and “have him,” as she would put it, for a few hours.

  “Nanny” Helen lived in an apartment on the other side of the Osborne building and used to spend some hours at Daddy’s desk nearly every day. She had been one of Daddy’s first piano teachers, eventually turning her life over to him with the fervor of a nun devoting herself to God. She was prissy and persnickety, with an odd little nervous whinny peppering her speech. She kept every Lenny-related letter, photo, article, and concert program, inserting them all into tidy, labeled albums. Today they comprise a priceless trove, lovingly preserved at the Library of Congress. But she was terribly possessive of her Lenny; not surprisingly, she’d advised him against marrying Felicia. Now, with our move to Park Avenue, Helen was considerably less underfoot, much to our mother’s relief.

  Helen was but one of the many people looking after Leonard Bernstein. He had a tailor named Otto Perl, a spry Viennese who made house calls for fittings of suits and concert tails. (I found out he was a survivor of Dachau and Buchenwald—yet such a jolly man.) There was Dr. Z, a chiropractor for Daddy’s chronic bad back. During the session, we kids played under the folding massage table, flinching each time Dr. Z got a resounding crack out of Daddy’s vertebrae.

  Baby Jamie with Helen Coates.

  And there was Rita the Popper. Her job, and skill, was to twist one little hank at a time of Daddy’s hair around her forefinger and yank it suddenly, which would pull the scalp away from the skull with a sickening little pop. Daddy grimaced with every pull, but he put up with Rita the Popper’s visits; her treatment, which helped circulate the blood between skull and scalp, was supposed to help keep his famous hair on his head. (And since he kept some hair on his head to the very end, Rita the Popper may as well get the credit.)

  Our father also had a colorful assortment of valets and chauffeurs. There was Luis, who affixed little organizing signs onto Daddy’s closet shelves. Alexander and I were enchanted by “fancy dress shirst” [sic]. There was a chauffeur
with the august name of Frederick Stammers, who was so handsome that when he drove the convertible, he got more attention than Daddy did. Stammers was soon dismissed. Then there was “Lucky” Bob Beckwith, who stole Daddy’s Lincoln—and cuff links—until he was stopped for a routine speeding violation in Florida, where it further emerged that he was AWOL from the army. By comparison, Michael, the jovial Cockney from England, seemed like an elder statesman. We loved when he talked about the “wheews” of the car. And we were all willing to overlook the fact that during his off-hours, in a squalid storage room off the back hall, he would spy on neighbors using the powerful stargazing telescope Steve Sondheim had given our parents for Christmas.

  Another Daddy helper—albeit an inanimate one—was his sunlamp. He would lie under it on the floor of his bathroom, chatting with us while he cooked himself in that strange, smelly, violet light.

  * * *

  Our move across town coincided with my move from Lower School to Middle School. By now I was in fifth grade at the Brearley School, a rigorous private school for girls way over on East End Avenue. Middle School featured homework: lots of it. And life was no longer just about pleasing your teachers, which had been my specialty in Lower School. Now it was important to stay on the right track with your friends.