My father was genuinely fascinated by rock music. He often declared that it had more energy and inventiveness than the austere contemporary compositions he had to premiere with the Philharmonic. He even made a TV show about rock music, featuring guest musicians including Janis Ian. I was too young to understand her remarkable song “Society’s Child,” but Daddy completely grasped the power of its music and lyrics.
Another guest on that show was Tandyn Almer, who wrote the ingenious lyrics to “Along Comes Mary,” a big hit that year for the band the Association. Whenever the song came on the radio, Daddy would obsess over the torrent of lyrics—but he couldn’t quite make them all out. So one day he drove with Alexander and me down the hill to Zera MusicLand in Fairfield to ask for the sheet music to “Along Comes Mary.” “Oh, we don’t have that just now, Mr. Bernstein,” the nerdy store clerk replied. “But we’ll order it for you and you can pick it up next week.”
The following week, the same clerk brightly presented my father with the lyrics to “Along Comes Mary”—which it turned out the clerk had written out himself. The sheet of paper is long lost, but we still remember one part. Tandyn Almer’s actual lyrics to the chorus go:
When we met I was sure out to lunch;
Now my empty cup is as sweet as the punch.
Sweet as the punch . . . !
The nerdy clerk’s version went:
When we met I was sure out to lunch;
No one in Chicuck is as slee as a bunch.
Slee as a bunch . . . !
In a footnote, the clerk helpfully explained that “Chicuck” was slang for Chicago.
Daddy was enchanted by the entire episode. He subjected every houseguest that summer to the clerk’s rendition of “Along Comes Mary,” pounding away on the piano, with Alexander and me joining in on the lyrics. The clerk had neglected to explain what “slee” meant, but to this day, whichever of us siblings is in Chicago always writes to the other two: “Feelin’ slee in Chicuck.”
6
Summer Games
The family by the Esther Williams swimming pool in Fairfield, Connecticut.
Library of Congress, Music Division
Summer continued to be our family’s best time—and now, in Fairfield, the summers stretched out like a long, hazy dream. Lunch was served on the shady back patio. Our dazzling new cook, Anita, made us hollowed-out tomatoes, their innards mixed with sweet corn, fresh-picked basil, and homemade mayonnaise, then reinserted in the tomato shell. Mummy liked offering iced coffee with optional scoops of Häagen-Dazs coffee ice cream, which you could stir in with a tall, reedy, silver spoon that was also a straw. Even outside, every table setting had its own individual ashtray, and both ends of the table had silver cups containing cigarettes. The grownups lit up after the first course, after the main course, and after dessert. They would have smoked while chewing if they could have.
There was always a summer visit from Aaron Copland. Aaron was the closest thing to an official composing teacher that Daddy ever had—but their connection contained so much more. Aaron was mentor, friend, confidant, co-lefty, and devoted pen pal. (If they had ever been lovers, it was the least important aspect of their deep friendship.) I could sense their mutual affection when Aaron shambled in and Daddy enveloped him in a bear hug. Aaron was not the kid-friendliest guy in the world, but his buckteeth, goofy grin, and infectious giggle made him irresistible. His music was part of our family’s DNA. Aaron’s music had the power to move me as much as Daddy’s did; every one of Aaron’s notes always seemed to be in just the right place. Daddy told me that Aaron would point to a particular spot in his score and say, “That’s the note that costs!” Daddy loved this because, he explained, Aaron was such a penny-pincher that it was the perfect expression for Aaron to use in describing the judicious parsimony of his own notes. I also remember Daddy telling me that in the mornings, Aaron was in the habit of flapping open the newspaper with a cheery “Who died?” Daddy sometimes opened the paper that way himself, in Aaron’s honor.
We made good use of our tennis court in the summer months. Uncle BB was the strongest player in the family; he had been a high school and college athlete. Daddy had a firm forehand and a nice serve—and of course, he was competitive as hell. Shirley was coordinated but ditzy, and could get addled and silly on the court. Mummy started out clueless, but took lessons and got much better. She had spirited, laughter-filled games with Shirley, and Uncle BB’s wife, Ellen. We all played in our bathing suits so we could walk back up the hill and jump straight into the pool.
Family friends played tennis with us, too. Isaac Stern was portly, but could move with deceptive speed. Our favorite on the court was Adolph Green. He had his own unique way of playing that resembled a cross between Charlie Chaplin and a Mexican jumping bean. When he missed, he would shout spontaneously invented euphemisms, like “shillelagh juice!” His wife, the actress Phyllis Newman, would keep us in stitches with her running commentary on the game.
Alexander and I had tennis lessons a couple of times a week. It was frustrating not to be as good as the grownups, but the tennis lessons were more tolerable than the piano lessons; at least we could go swimming when they were over.
As Alexander improved, he started playing tennis one-on-one with his father. They played at the end of the day—“sunset singles,” Daddy called it—and then, as those games became ever more competitive, he began calling them “Oedipal sets,” which also gave him the opportunity to tell us all about the Sophocles play. Alexander hated losing to his father, and would often stomp back up the hill in tears. That gave Daddy the opportunity to make up yet another expression: ELF’S THREAD, a beautiful anagram of SELF-HATRED.
August was corn time, and Daddy was in his glory. At dinner, he often requested a “monomeal”: just a dozen ears of corn, the butter dish close by, and nothing else. “Heaven!” Daddy crowed, the clumps of kernels plopping juicily out of his mouth. He loved any summer food he could eat with his hands: barbecued chicken, or a big steak on the bone (the dogs loved him), or his favorite— boiled lobster. That was Daddy in August: sun-burnished, covered in flecks of lobster meat and corn kernels, aglow in joy and butter.
LB tucking into his monomeal.
After dinner, we played anagrams. Steve Sondheim whipped up the craze as part of his consuming passion for wordplay. He and Daddy were furiously competitive at the anagrams table—well, they were competitive in everything: crossword puzzles, Christmas presents, symphonic music trivia (to say nothing of composing for musical theater). But Steve, to Daddy’s annoyance, had the edge in anagrams.
We played “cutthroat” anagrams: that is, it was everyone’s turn all the time. True, the players did take polite turns flipping a letter tile face-up at the center of the table—but anyone could yell out a word of five letters or more the very second its components were spotted. Once you yelled out your word, you possessed it, and would arrange it proudly face-out in front of you. The game continued as before—but now, in addition to looking for words to make from the center, you also had to protect your own word, because everyone else was staring at it, thinking up ways to steal it from you by scrambling it and adding letters from the center. Which meant you had to think up the changes, too, and shout them out before someone else did, to keep the word in your possession.
As the tile flipping continued, you had to be as poised as a Zen archer, ready to blurt out whichever word changes you were waiting for, the instant your desired letter got flipped up—plus, you had to continue looking for brand-new words in the center. As the players accumulated words in front of them, and the letters piled up in the center, the tension would become nearly unbearable.
Some changes were simply poetry. Steve Sondheim turned BLINDER into INCREDIBLE. Bill Styron caused an uproar when he turned CALIPERS into PHYLACTERIES. My own finest hour came when I changed SUITABLE to INSCRUTABLE. Nina, ever the youngest and scrambling to catch up, eventually skunked us all: she stole CAPARISON from Daddy by turning it into RAPSCALLION.
And she took SATURATE from Steve by turning it into . . . MASTURBATE. Nina wins!
Anagrams was not for everyone. Many a houseguest fled in tears—as did Alexander, Nina, and I from time to time. But the day came for each of us when we finally beat our father in anagrams. That was a sweet day—but not for Daddy. He hated losing, and would stalk away from the table, in a drama of gloom about his life being over. He’d wander around outside in the dark just long enough for everyone to start wondering what had happened to him. Then he would reappear, his face haunted by despair, and announce that he was exhausted and had to go to bed. His dejection was so profound, so existential, and put such a pall over the house that it almost wasn’t worth the victory.
The annual climax of every summer was my father’s birthday, on August 25. The summer he turned forty-eight, I wrote him another “show”—really just a few pop songs from the radio, with new lyrics. But now, thanks to those lessons at camp, I was accompanying myself on the guitar. I played some Beatles and Rolling Stones songs—with my new Daddy-teasing lyrics—and performed them in the Fairfield living room for the assembled family and friends. I sat on a chair while Alexander sat on my feet, a human music stand holding up my lyrics, which I’d written out on a couple of Daddy’s shirt cardboards.
Alexander holds up the lyrics while Jamie sings the birthday song to Daddy.
Daddy loved my presentation, and I got plenty of stifling, body-squishing hugs. But Daddy’s little golden girl was changing.
A few days later, I was upstairs in my bathroom and discovered some brownish splotches in my underpants. I walked out onto the balcony outside my parents’ bedroom and called down to my mother, who was on the patio below having drinks with my father and “Uncle” Mikey Mindlin, a family friend.
“Um, Mummy, can you come upstairs for a minute?”
“They all guessed!” Mummy told me after she’d given me a hug. I wished she hadn’t told me that, because once she got me all fixed up with the sanitary napkin, I had to face everyone on the patio, knowing that they knew. I came downstairs in a dizzy agony of embarrassment. I was grateful to Uncle Mikey for paying no attention to me. My father, however, silently took my hand and kissed it—a sweet and uncharacteristically restrained gesture, it strikes me now. But at the time, I was mortified. There really wasn’t anything Daddy could possibly have done at that moment that I wouldn’t have hated, short of ignoring me like Uncle Mikey did. And I probably would have hated that, too.
* * *
The following summer, in 1967, our family did something different: we rented a villa in Ansedonia, Italy, on the coast of southern Tuscany. Maybe our parents were feeling restless—even their exciting lives may have become too predictable—or maybe they were feeling pressures we knew nothing about.
Nina was five: precocious and bubbly. Alexander and I played with her and taught her to read. But I was lonely. My friends were all far away, and Alexander’s company wasn’t quite enough anymore. I was fourteen, in the vise grip of braces and budding libido, the sickening betwixt-and-between.
Mummy’s itchy sun allergy kept her to the shade, but she worked hard on her new avocation: painting. She was talented; we loved every still life and portrait. But one day, in a fit of frustration, she threw all her paintings into the sea—well, she thought she had. Actually she’d thrown them over the wall onto the rocks of the house next door. Alexander heroically retrieved them all, and Mummy thanked him, a little embarrassed that she’d subjected us to her own strange episode of elf’s thread. The summer resumed its natural rhythms, but I couldn’t forget the look on my mother’s face as she tossed away her own hard work; this was a side of her I wasn’t sure I wanted to know about.
Felicia painting in Ansedonia.
Photograph by Ken Heyman
Daddy wasn’t in the best of spirits, either. He was trying to compose, but nothing was coming out. He could hardly sleep at all, and when he did, his snoring was so thunderous that our mother had to creep out of bed and sleep on the living room couch, where Dina, the screechy housekeeper, would discover her in the morning—“Ohhh, mi scuuusi, Signora!”
But my father always had his diversionary behaviors. That summer, he bought a complete set of scuba diving gear and was attempting to learn how to use it in the swimming pool. (He never quite got the hang of it.) He also bought a rubberized motor boat called a Zodiac so that we could water-ski at a nearby cove. And most manic of all, he bought himself a silver Maserati: an absolute opera diva of a sports car.
Meanwhile, Daddy was giving Hebrew lessons to Alexander in preparation for the latter’s bar mitzvah the following summer. They would sit together on a porch swing, where I knew Alexander was gratified to have his father’s undivided attention, even as he squirmed with impatience. Now that we were older, we often felt this way when we were alone with him: the push-pull of being the focus of his attention, vaguely thrilling, but with the accompanying tedium of his endlessly teaching, teaching, teaching you things.
Complicating everything in Ansedonia was the constant presence of journalist John Gruen, a family friend who was writing a coffee table book about Daddy called The Private World of Leonard Bernstein. It would include photos by Ken Heyman, so Ken was also around a lot, snapping away while we swam or ate lunch or played cards. Gruen interviewed each of us, and spent long hours tape-recording Daddy in a corner of the garden. The tape-recording and photographing rendered us uncomfortably self-conscious as a family—as if we were acting in a TV show about those charming, carefree Bernsteins, at the very moment when we were becoming a far more complex version of ourselves.
Felicia cuts LB’s hair in Ansedonia. Jamie was sulky that summer.
Photograph by Ken Heyman
One comforting ingredient of that summer in Ansedonia was Daddy’s and my mutual fixation on Sgt. Pepper. He knew right away that it was the Beatles’ masterpiece, and he played it for everyone who came over to the house, energetically pointing out the highlights: “You hear the sitar in the bass drone in that last verse of ‘Getting Better’?” “So deliciously ironic at the end of ‘She’s Leaving Home’ when they sing in that dreary voice: ‘She’s . . . having . . . fun . . .’”
At the end of the record, Daddy wouldn’t let anybody talk until that long, long, long piano chord had faded into complete silence.
7
A Little Teen in ’60s New York
In seventh grade, my best friend, Ann, could do such a persuasive Paul McCartney impression that the rest of us would actually scream while watching her pantomime Paul singing “All My Loving.” Ann played guitar, like I did. At Nina’s third birthday party, Ann and I repeatedly played the chorus of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” singing the lyrics in French; we were hoping to impress Mrs. Kennedy, who drifted through the party with her lovely, dazed smile and paid us no attention whatsoever. Meanwhile, Lauren Bacall’s hyperkinetic son Sam was downstairs, roasting Nina’s doll to an aromatic pulp in her Suzy Homemaker oven.
The ’60s were swinging for real by then, and no one could escape the cultural riptide. Over the next few years, Mummy’s hemline went way up; her swan’s neck rose alluringly from her clinging Pucci dresses. She looked great, I thought—and evidently, so did Robert F. Kennedy, who pressed his thigh against hers at a dinner party. When she told me this, I gasped and asked, “What did you do?” “I pressed back!” she said, laughing.
Meanwhile, Daddy’s hair overlapped his collar in the back; his sideburns flirted with his jawline; Otto Perl made Daddy’s trousers just a little bit bell-bottomed; and of course Daddy loved the heeled boots of the day, as they gave him an inch or more of extra height. (We were all such hopeless shrimps.)
My girlfriends and I were still a bit too young to be full participants in all the groovy goings-on, while my parents and their friends were just a little too old (I thought) to be dancing the Frug at places like Trude Heller’s, the hot Greenwich Village club. But Frug they did.
I got a lucky break over the holidays. Our parents’ frien
d Sybil Burton opened a disco called Arthur. Arthur was the spot to go to—just the sort of thing I was still, maddeningly, too young to experience. But in December, Sybil threw a special afternoon holiday party at Arthur for her friends and her friends’ kids. I wore a short little black velvet dress with white lace trim, and felt kicky as hell. The huge sound system thrilled me. My father and I posed for a photographer who was creating fake antique daguerreotypes. The pictures came out great—especially the one of Daddy with a stovepipe hat and a banjo; he always looked ridiculous in any sort of hat.
It was fun to gad about town with Daddy. He got so much attention—and he liked showing off his cute teenage daughter, too. But somewhere inside I felt a vaguely unclear boundary. Around that time, my friend Ann and I went to see Gone with the Wind for the first time, on a giant screen—a wonderful experience. But in the scene where Rhett Butler has taken his little Bonnie to Paris and she wakes up in the night thrashing in her bed and crying, I heard her saying, “Daddy, Daddy, no!” I thought her father was abusing her. Then Rhett runs into the room and turns on the light, and Bonnie repeats, “Daddy, Daddy—dark!” Oh, she was saying “dark”: she was just afraid of the dark. But to this very day, whenever I see that scene, I still have that quick, sick second of thinking that Rhett is doing something he shouldn’t be doing to his daughter. No such thing ever happened to me in real life. But I felt . . . what was it? It was hard not to feel my father’s sexuality. I mean, there it was. Everybody felt it. Tricky stuff for a daughter.
And while it was fun to get all the extra attention in public, I could never be sure what Daddy was going to do. On winter break, I went with him and Alexander to the brand-new ski resort in Vail, Colorado. One night, we all went to Casino Vail, a disco. They began playing the theme from Zorba the Greek, of all things, and Daddy grabbed me. The next thing I knew, we were dancing full tilt to the bouzouki music, just the two of us, while the crowd made a ring around us, clapping in rhythm and egging us on. Daddy pulled out a handkerchief and was waving it around above his head—then he was down on his knees! I danced in a circle around him; what else could I do? I was trapped: a mortified moon, doomed to eternal orbit around an ecstatic, sweaty, handkerchief-twirling sun.
Famous Father Girl Page 6
