Famous Father Girl

by Jamie Bernstein

  * * *

  Maybe Mummy was getting just a little impatient with . . . everything. She accompanied her husband on tour less and less. She was deeply absorbed in her painting, as well as in working for the American Civil Liberties Union. Maybe it was simply wearing thin to be Mrs. Maestro. In any case, Leonard Bernstein had become the newly anointed musical king of Vienna, complete with rapturous reviews for his concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic and half an hour’s worth of curtain calls for his conducting of Verdi’s opera Falstaff at the State Opera. Neither his wife nor any of his children were present to witness his ascent to the Viennese throne.

  I could tell from the way my father talked about it that the level of adulation in Vienna was something unprecedented. Even in Israel they didn’t carry on like this—and in Israel, he almost really was a king, having been there in 1948 during the war that gave birth to the new Jewish nation. Vienna offered the added frisson of all those former Nazis groveling at the Maestro’s feet; that had to feel grimly good.

  Daddy would come back from his conducting triumphs in Vienna walking on air—and then everything would pull him back down to earth. The New York Philharmonic’s surly union was nothing like the all-embracing Vienna ensemble. And the New York music critics were relentless in their aggrieved sniping. Every Friday morning, Daddy would open the New York Times to read Harold Schonberg’s latest evisceration of his subscription concert the night before. And then there was his own family, whose sworn duty it was to remind the Maestro that, after all, he was a human being like the rest of us. Shirley and BB teased and interrupted their brother; he hated it and loved it. Alexander, Nina, and I observed and absorbed. We understood that it was okay to make fun of our father: that it was even for a good cause.

  Daddy always brought back fun presents from the road, but he came back from a triumphant New York Philharmonic tour to Japan with a truly smashing present for me: a Sony “tummy television,” the smallest TV known to man in those days. In the commercial, a fat man balanced it on his stomach—hence the nickname. The TV was so small that I could hide it under the covers, with its single antenna poking out the edge of the sheet, and watch movies all night long without anyone knowing.

  Alexander, Nina, and I watched a lot—I mean a lot—of television. First it was cartoons. (Our first experience of classical music was not with our father, but with Bugs Bunny.) Then it was sitcoms, Westerns, variety shows—we’d watch just about anything. At age ten, I developed two seething TV crushes: one on Ben Casey—the broody, swarthy brain surgeon—and one on Dr. Kildare, who was soft and blond and girly. And behold, a lifelong template was born: I ping-ponged back and forth for years to come between the dark, Semitic, aggressive boyfriends and the blond, effeminate, gentle (and, it often turned out, gay) ones.

  When my friend Ann slept over, we’d sit on my narrow bed, with the little TV on a chair in front of us. This was the position from which we discovered Marlon Brando.

  It mattered exactly not at all to me that the score to the film On the Waterfront was composed by my father (and is one of his most thrilling works). Ann and I were too much in love with Brando to care about anything else. We wept over his performance: oh, the way he got beat up at the end! We didn’t realize the degree to which my father’s music was manipulating our emotions to a fever pitch.

  Jamie, in her Fillmore East football jersey, with her friend Ann in front of the Fairfield Christmas tree.

  Eventually we saw all Brando’s films by combing the newspaper TV listings and planning our sleepovers around the late-night movie broadcasts. He was a blond Nazi in The Young Lions, a laconic outlaw in One-Eyed Jacks, even a toga-draped Mark Antony in Julius Caesar—and of course that almost unbearably sexy motorcycle tough in The Wild One.

  So it came as fairly big news that Aunt Shirley had a screenwriter friend who’d been married to Marlon Brando’s sister—and they had a son, Marty, just my age. And Marty was coming to New York City with his dad for the Christmas holidays! Shirley arranged for me to meet Marlon Brando’s nephew, and I could hardly contain my anticipation.

  The fact that Marty turned out to be a slightly sweaty fourteen-year-old with braces who bore only the vaguest resemblance to his uncle didn’t deter me from developing a crush on him. We went on a couple of dates. While he felt me up at the movies, I became paralyzed as if in an awful dream; it took my last fiber of inner resolve to move Marty’s creeping hand away from the front of my blouse, from the hem of my skirt. The unacknowledged tug-of-war continued through most of the movie, with never a word exchanged, the two of us staring resolutely ahead at the screen.

  A second lifelong template was forged with Marty, the one in which I bring a boyfriend home: the family thinks he’s unworthy, I wrestle with the conflict, and when I finally dump the guy, I’m joyfully welcomed back into the family bosom, where I feel safe and relieved.

  Every girl secretly measures her boyfriend against her father. In my case, I soon realized, this was going to be an ongoing problem. After all, what hope did the average teenage boy have in competing with the Maestro? But the situation was made worse by the impossibly high standards of the whole circle of grownups. They could accept no one who was boring, or stiff, or short on wit. They were hard enough on their contemporaries; a fourteen-year-old boy didn’t stand a chance.

  The next boyfriend was an even bigger challenge for my family. He was into reading French poetry aloud, which my mother could not abide. He was obsessed with Hungarian saber fencing; Steve Sondheim dubbed him “Count Épée.” More acute embarrassment. More giddy relief and family celebration when at last I disengaged myself.

  * * *

  During Christmas vacation, Alexander and I found ourselves without much to do, so our father, in his typically generous way, invited us along to his rehearsals for a performance of Verdi’s Requiem that was to be a benefit for the Philharmonic’s pension fund. First we heard the four soloists rehearse with Daddy around the piano in his studio. There was Marilyn Horne; Daddy called her voice “peaches and cream.” There was Richard Tucker: old-school and short, but could he ever sing. Justino Diaz was a dashing, up-and-coming bass-baritone. And soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, the cellist Slava Rostropovich’s wife, was very Russian and grand, although vocally a little shaky.

  Then we went to the Camerata Singers’ rehearsal. They piled on the decibels for the “Dies Irae.” This was great stuff.

  Then we heard the Philharmonic’s rehearsal. Daddy put the “Tuba mirum” trumpets way up in the balcony; the effect was tremendous. By now we were getting the hang of the piece: so colorful, so varied, so full of tunes. Perfect for kids, actually.

  Finally, the big ensemble rehearsal. Alexander and I were riveted by this point. We knew every note; we knew what to look forward to and when to worry. (Galina’s pianissimo, supposed-to-be-ethereal high note on “Requi-eeeem” in the “Libera Me” section was an ongoing cause for concern.)

  At the concert, Alexander and I craned forward in our seats as if we were at a ball game. It was the greatest fun we’d ever had at a concert of Daddy’s. That night we made the priceless discovery that the better we knew a piece, the more we’d enjoy the performance.

  Photograph by Ken Heyman

  I was finally developing some interest in attending Daddy’s regular subscription concerts—especially if my new friend Linn came along. We developed instant crushes at the debut of a cute young pianist named Misha Dichter, and went around for days afterward singing the big tune from Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto.

  A few months later at the Philharmonic, Linn and I went to Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which neither of us had heard before. In fact, few people in that audience had; this concert was part of Daddy’s ongoing education of his public about the neglected wonders of Gustav Mahler’s symphonies. During the Adagietto movement, the most achingly beautiful music we’d ever heard, Linn fell apart. I’d never seen her cry over anything before; she was notoriously flinty. Now here she was, streaming with tears—and
that made me break down, too. She never did explain why that music got to her the way it did—but that was how we discovered the point of music like the Adagietto: how it could express the deepest part of one’s inner universe, the part that could never be put into words. Especially when you’re fifteen.

  8

  School, Family, and the World

  In history class that fall, I was assigned to debate my classmate Nancy, and advocate the position that the US should not be involved in Vietnam. Once home, I went straight to Daddy’s studio to get help. I knew next to nothing about Vietnam; these were relatively early times in the conflict, and the national antiwar movement had not yet gained momentum. When my father asked me what I thought about the situation, I groped to sound sensible: “Well, I guess if we’re already there, um, we should just finish what we started . . . ?”

  He explained the situation to me: the Gulf of Tonkin; the hysteria about the domino theory, where one country after another would ostensibly fall to communism; the proxy war between the US and Red China; even Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex. I walked out of my father’s studio feeling thoroughly informed, and convinced that the US should get out of Vietnam immediately. Boy, did I win that debate the next day; Nancy didn’t stand a chance.

  I was soon swept up, like everyone else, by the tidal wave of events in 1968. First, Martin Luther King was assassinated. Down went the window shades, on went the television; once again the grownups cried and drank. Daddy cried extra; he had strong feelings about civil rights. He’d been immersed in those issues since college; he’d even written his college thesis on “The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music.” He’d played me “race records,” as the early 78 rpm blues recordings used to be called, introducing me to Lead Belly, and Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit”—the most mournful song I’d ever heard. Daddy had been supporting civil rights organizations for years—all of which, we found out much later, was just more grist for the FBI’s ever-thickening Leonard Bernstein file.

  Mere months after Martin Luther King was killed, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, mid–presidential campaign. This was almost more than the grownups could bear. My father was asked to conduct the Mahler Fifth Adagietto in St. Patrick’s Cathedral at Bobby Kennedy’s funeral. That morning, Daddy received some kind of death threat; we had to go to the church with a police escort. The funeral was beautiful and desperately sad. The Adagietto was no longer the special piece I shared with Linn; now I was sharing that music with all the mourners—including Bobby’s eldest son, Joe Kennedy, with whom I had a staring match during the music. Afterward, Daddy drove Alexander and me to Fairfield in his new convertible, with the top down. As we drove past the buildings on Third Avenue, Alexander was having a nervous breakdown in the back seat, convinced that there was a sniper on every roof, ready to mow our father down. A bit later, as we drove along the highway, Daddy and I were chatting up front, oblivious to Alexander’s back-seat trembling, when I noticed that the car ahead of us at the mouth of the approaching tunnel wasn’t moving. “Daddy, that car isn’t moving . . . Daddy, watch out for that car . . . DADDY, WATCH OUT!!!” He slammed on the brakes, and the car screeched and skittered across several lanes, ending up on the side of the road facing backward, the engine purring quietly as if nothing of any consequence had happened. And, in fact, nothing had. We resumed our trip, but now I was the one who was shaking.

  We arrived in Fairfield unscathed—as a result of which Alexander was able to travel to Boston the following month for his bar mitzvah.

  This was an important family event. The whole clan gathered at Temple Mishkan Tefila in Newton, Massachusetts, where our grandparents were congregants. Grandpa, the family patriarch, was frail but in his glory. Daddy, after a lifetime of conflicts with his own father, was probably feeling like a pretty good son himself that day: presenting his own young son to the Torah and stitching together the generations of Bernstein males. Grandma glowed with pride, having her whole family assembled there. This was the first time Alexander and I had ever seen all our Bernstein relatives collected in one place—including many distant cousins we’d never met before. Suddenly we understood the roots of Rybernian: the old-world accents and the nasal shouting were all emanating from this motley bunch.

  Whenever we had visited Sam and Jennie Bernstein in the past, our mother could barely disguise her displeasure at her in-laws’ tacky, plastic-on-the-living-room-furniture, middle-class, margarine-y Jewish ways, and she’d bristled when they Yiddishized my name to “Jamela.” It was not Mummy’s world, and now that I was older, I couldn’t help seeing everything in Brookline through her eyes. Daddy had more patience; it was, after all, his own background, his own mishpoche, and they adored him beyond all measure. But I had the sense that Mummy was holding her breath the whole time we were up there. She tried to be a “good egg,” as she would say, but she clearly loathed it. So a part of me loathed it, too, and that was confusing.

  In addition, I was picking up on my father’s own conflicted feelings about Grandma and Grandpa. Daddy had gone to considerable lengths to prepare his son for the bar mitzvah, which seemed to indicate filial respect—but it was also true that Daddy and his siblings made constant, wicked fun of their parents, particularly their way of speaking. Grandpa, whose thick old-world accent never abated, was the king of malapropisms: “I canceled the trip to Miami; I got cold shoulders.” “They song-and-danced me.” Grandma, who acquired a nice broad Boston accent, made immortal remarks, as well. In his book Family Matters, Uncle BB recalled their maid with a beautiful singing voice whom Grandma called “a regular Florence Nightingale.” All these sayings were lovingly collected and recounted—but I sensed a subtext from the three Ivy-educated siblings who had made their own hard-won assimilative leap, while their parents still had one metaphorical foot in the old country. In making the distinction between the generations crystal clear, the three grown children seemed to be conveying just a whisper of . . . disdain.

  Alexander, the bar mitzvah boy, was terribly nervous, and not particularly motivated by any spiritual matters; he just knew he had to get through the whole thing to please his father and his grandfather—and he succeeded, nicely.

  I got away with not having a bat mitzvah; nobody pressured me, and I certainly didn’t request it. It was the one time in my life I was glad that my gender had relegated me to the status of second-class citizen. But I was impressed by the money Alexander received; he walked off with about $800. That came in handy the following year, when he started buying pot.

  As soon as the bar mitzvah was behind us, we returned to obsessing over the presidential election. In the absence of Bobby Kennedy, our parents had gravitated to another Democratic candidate, Senator Eugene McCarthy. McCarthy was vociferously against the Vietnam War, and my father provided the campaign with a touching antiwar song written with Betty and Adolph, called “So Pretty,” which Barbra Streisand sang as part of a Broadway for Peace concert at Philharmonic Hall. He wrote a second song, this time for a campaign event at Madison Square Garden, that had a more boppy feel: “Are we for Gene McCarthy? Yeah!” The refrain was: “Aaaaay-MEN.” Alexander and I were right there, below the raised stage platform—in the veritable trenches of the antiwar movement.

  Eugene McCarthy was the first political candidate I’d ever gotten excited about. That summer, I was a campaign volunteer, doing whatever one did in those messy, switchboard-beeping, typewriter-clattering, paper-choked days. We were convinced we were changing the world, over at the campaign headquarters in Columbus Circle.

  On tour in Europe in ’68, but always campaigning for Eugene McCarthy.

  Photo by Harry Weber / ANL / Vienna, HXBox065_316923

  Now that I was older, summers in Fairfield were less appealing. I wanted to stay in the city with my friends, but my mother wasn’t comfortable leaving me all alone in our apartment. Then a wonderful solution presented itself: Shirley gave me an open invitation to stay with her in her coz
y apartment on West 55th Street. At the time, Shirley was working in a theatrical agency, and had become quite the dashing career woman, constantly reading scripts and talking deals over the phone.

  That summer, while we devoured triple-decker sandwiches delivered from the Sixth Avenue Delicatessen, I would regale Shirley with stories about my girlfriends and my boy troubles. She always had plentiful advice for every situation. “I minored in psychology at Mount Holyoke, you know,” she would remind me.

  I never stopped to think too carefully about why, if Shirley was so full of wisdom about my love life, she never seemed to have one of her own. She told me she’d once been engaged to someone, but then she noticed that his bare leg was visible between his trouser cuff and his sock—and concluded upon the instant that she had to break off the engagement. That sure sounded like she was looking for any excuse to flee.

  And who could blame her, really? Where was the man out there who could provide a fraction of the warmth, the hilarity, the sheer comfort of her own brother?—to say nothing of the talent and the brilliance. And the good looks.

  For Shirley, never getting married had its distinct benefits. She was an embedded member of her older brother’s family, reveling in all the goodies—the dinners, the holidays, the country house, the children—while bearing none of the responsibilities. She had, somewhat by accident, found a legitimate way to remain a subadult for the duration of her adult life. At the time, however, what I saw was a clever career woman with cool clothes, a sweet apartment, and her devoted, malodorous basset hound, Daisy. I couldn’t see what was wrong with any of that.