Famous Father Girl

by Jamie Bernstein

  And then there were the cigarettes. I started smoking them because Linn smoked, and I wanted to do everything Linn did. But the bigger picture was that everybody smoked cigarettes—starting with my parents, but also Shirley, and Uncle BB, and Mike Nichols and Steve Sondheim and Betty and Adolph (although in a form of quitting, Adolph chewed unlit cigarettes for years). A perennial sight in every household was the spreading brown-orange stain of a discarded cigarette in the toilet. We smoked Marlboros and Kools, Winstons and Camels. Daddy smoked L&Ms; Mummy smoked Chesterfields (filterless, for crying out loud). Smoking made me feel elegant, urbane, graceful: adult. Plus, it gave you something to do with your hands. It woke you up, stirred your bowels, bonded you with your friends. What didn’t cigarettes do? The answer: much for your health. But who thinks about such things at the age of fifteen? Our parents scolded us for smoking—but they knew how hypocritical they sounded.

  Pot, cigarettes, and sex. At the school lunch table, sex was all anybody talked about. All my girlfriends seemed to be losing their virginity, but I hadn’t. I felt that if I didn’t hurry up and sleep with someone, my friends were going to start thinking I was what we termed a Stupid Idiot—something I secretly feared I was.

  One Friday night that senior year, I was alone in the New York apartment while the rest of the family was up in Fairfield. (Now that I was a high school senior, my mother deemed it safe to leave me in the city on my own.) I was playing Daddy’s piano in his studio downstairs, feeling a little spooked, writing that “Dear God” song and putting myself in a dangerous frame of mind. The phone rang and it was Simon the photographer, asking if I wanted to drop by his place a few blocks away. It was already ten p.m., so I called my parents in Fairfield, told them I was going to bed, and wished them good night. Then I left the house.

  That night I lost my virginity. It was awkward, painful, and conducted in pitch-blackness. There wasn’t a shred of comfort or emotional connection, or even the slightest acknowledgment of what was going on. All I kept saying to myself in that darkness was: Wait’ll I tell Ann. Wait’ll I tell Ann.

  Things never progressed beyond that one encounter with Simon, but more action was just around the corner. My all-girl school, Brearley, and Alexander’s all-boy school, Collegiate, collaborated on a coed senior drama production of Guys & Dolls. Since so many of our pals were Collegiate boys, a few of us girls decided to meet them at the auditions, “just for a goof.” To our astonishment, we all got cast. Ann got a role in the chorus, and my friend Debbie and I walked off with the two leading female roles.

  The Guys & Dolls production became our social hub. After Saturday rehearsals, we all went back to my place (my whole family being reliably up in Fairfield) and partied for hours. I was in the habit of making bourbon sours in the Waring blender, batch after batch. Neither my mother nor Julia ever made close inquiries about my weekend activities—and they either never checked on or didn’t care about the dwindling levels in the Old Grand-Dad bottles.

  As Christmas vacation began, our whole extended bunch of friends was celebrating at our hangout, Malachy’s, on 75th and Lexington, where the proprietor could not have cared less that we were underage high school students. The boys were singing into ketchup bottles Mick Jagger–style as the Stones played on the jukebox. I walked back up to 79th Street between two handsome Collegiate guys, Andy on one side and Nick on the other. We went upstairs to my empty apartment, and I think I was on the rug, making out with both of them by turns. Which one would I end up with?

  Andy finally bowed out, and Nick spent the night. And so began my first really big—and thoroughly disastrous—love affair.

  Nick was tall and slim, with aviator glasses and bushy hair. I thought he was dreamy, in a pleasingly New York Jewish way. He told me he was a famous author’s nephew, but this proved to be a lie.

  Our mad love sucked the oxygen out of every room we occupied. Nick would make out with me everywhere we went; it made me uncomfortable, but I was powerless to speak up. “Well, we’ve cleared another room!” he would joke. I felt a twinge of sadness when my own friends moved away from us, but I was spellbound, paralyzed.

  My parents didn’t think much of Nick. Ordinarily that would have bothered me, but I was past caring. Julia soon figured out that Nick and I were sleeping together. She was appalled. “How you can give yourself to that man?” she would say to me. The only grownup I confided in was Shirley, who loved being the repository of my secrets; I sensed that it gave her some kind of power in the family dynamic. But I couldn’t think about that too much, either. I couldn’t think . . . at all.

  Nick wasn’t in Guys & Dolls, and it galled him no end. All his friends had gone to that audition, but he hadn’t bothered, thinking it would be lame. Now Nick was the odd man out, and jealous of all the fun we were having without him.

  He liked it better when I tagged along to watch him play the drums at a school dance. I would stand to the side, admiring his coolness, but also feeling a little bored, or jealous, or something. Why wasn’t I feeling fulfilled? Didn’t I want to be just like my mother and cheer on my brilliant man? Wasn’t that how a loving, worshipful girlfriend ought to act? Nick certainly seemed to think so.

  As my romance blossomed in January, both my parents were busy. My father was preparing two operas at once: Cavalleria Rusticana at the Met, and a concert performance of Fidelio at the Philharmonic. He’d rehearse one opera in the morning, then walk around the Lincoln Center fountain and rehearse the other opera in the afternoon. Meanwhile, my mother’s longtime involvement in human rights issues had reached a new level. Through her work with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Committee for Public Justice, she’d agreed to organize and host a fund-raising event to assist the families of twenty-one men in the Black Panther Party who were in jail, with unfairly inflated bail amounts, awaiting trial for what turned out to be trumped-up accusations involving absurd bomb plots around New York City. My mother’s dual purpose was to raise money for a legal defense fund and to help the men’s families stay fed and sheltered until the trial came around. (And when the trial finally did come around, the judge threw the whole case out for being unsubstantiated and patently ridiculous.)

  To most white Americans at the time, the Black Panthers were scary. They were socialist, they advocated Black empowerment “by any means necessary,” and they were anti-Zionist, which had considerable negative resonance in New York City. So it was audacious of my mother to advocate on their behalf. But she understood better than most how politicians exploited the image of a group like the Panthers to pander to white voters, and how the news media turned the volume up on fear to boost readership and ratings. What my mother didn’t know at the time—none of us did, until much later—was how intensively the FBI was inflaming the entire situation for their own purposes.

  My mother pointedly did not invite any press to the fund-raiser, but the society writer for the New York Times, Charlotte Curtis, managed to sneak in, as did a rascally young journalist named Tom Wolfe.

  I myself had absolutely no interest in the Panthers or in my mother’s efforts on their behalf. On that day, I was hiding downstairs, and so only later learned that after an hour of snacks and drinks, my mother had introduced the Panther representatives and invited them to speak about their situation and solicit support from the assembled guests. At some point in the proceedings, my father arrived from his Fidelio rehearsal and joined the gathering. He wound up having an exchange with Panther representative Donald Cox, during which he asked questions and Cox explained the Panther philosophy further. In the corner, Tom Wolfe was silently ingesting all of it, like a python gradually swallowing a rabbit whole.

  Afterward, I found my parents together in my father’s studio downstairs. They were pleased at how things had gone; my mother had raised nearly $10,000, a terrific take in those days. She sat in Daddy’s lap, something she almost never did. They both looked tired but happy. I saw them as they saw themselves in that moment: Lenny working hard, making music,
spreading beauty in a tough world—and Felicia, with her passion for social justice, representing their joint commitment to a nation that protected all of its citizens. I could feel how they felt right then: united, aligned, purposeful, loving.

  They probably never felt quite that good together again.

  The next morning, Charlotte Curtis’s story appeared in the society section of the Times. It was filled with scorn for the Manhattan socialite wife of the Maestro, hobnobbing with Black Panthers:

  Felicia, LB, and Black Panther Field Marshal Donald Cox.

  Photo by Stephen Salmieri

  Leonard Bernstein and a Black Panther leader argued the merits of the Black Panther Party’s philosophy before nearly 90 guests at a cocktail party last night in the Bernsteins’ elegant Park Avenue duplex. The conductor . . . did most of the questioning. Donald Cox, the Panther field-marshal . . . did most of the answering, and there were even moments when both men were not talking at the same time.

  Even worse, the article quoted the Maestro out of context. As my father explained it later, he’d asked Donald Cox some question about Panther philosophy, and Cox ended his answer with the phrase “You dig?” Daddy, in his typical way, picked up the word and tossed it back at Cox, saying, “I dig, absolutely, but . . .” and then went on to refine his question. Charlotte Curtis merely quoted Leonard Bernstein saying, “I dig absolutely,” which made him sound like a pathetic, middle-aged guy trying to act groovy. Everything about this article was loathsome, and my parents were both aghast.

  But that was just the beginning.

  The day after that, the Times followed up the Charlotte Curtis piece with an editorial.

  Emergence of the Black Panthers as the romanticized darlings of the politico-cultural jet set is an affront to the majority of . . . those blacks and whites seriously working for complete equality and social justice. It mocked the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. . . .

  The word “shitstorm” had not yet been coined, but that is what the situation now became. Lenny and Felicia’s own friends were criticizing them for what they had done. Uncle BB was furious at Mummy; he felt she’d taken a foolish stance against the Jews and Israel and didn’t speak to her for months. My classmate Kathie, who was both black and Jewish, strode up to me during recess and hotly announced that she would never come over to my house again; her Jewish side was apparently the more outraged. I was surprised Kathie didn’t join the noisy Jewish Defense League picketers outside the entrance to 895 Park Avenue; I had to thread my way through them to get back into the building after school. (Not until the 1980s did we learn that most of those picketers were FBI plants. What was more, the hate mail piling up on my father’s desk had also been churned out by the FBI.)

  My mother wrote a furious letter to the Times:

  As a civil libertarian, I asked a number of people to my house on Jan. 14 in order to hear the lawyer and others involved with the Panther 21 discuss the problem of civil liberties as applicable to the men now awaiting trial, and to help raise funds for their legal expenses . . . It was for this deeply serious purpose that our meeting was called. The frivolous way in which it was reported as a “fashionable” event is unworthy of The Times, and offensive to all people who are committed to humanitarian principles of justice.

  She delivered her letter to the Times by hand on the same day the editorial ran, but they didn’t print it until five days later. By then, it was too late for her message to make any impact.

  My parents were the butt of ridicule, all over New York City and beyond. Mummy was very pale and quiet over her morning coffee. Daddy buried himself in his pair of operas. I buried myself into my boyfriend Nick. And still it wasn’t over.

  The following month, when our final Guys & Dolls rehearsals went into overdrive, my parents were in Europe, where my father was conducting the Verdi Requiem in London and Fidelio in Rome. They were going to miss my pair of performances as Sarah Brown, the mission doll.

  Our show was a smash. After the Friday night performance, there was a cast party at Debbie’s town house on East 85th Street. We were feeling like veritable teenage gods walking the earth. When Steve, my Sky Masterson, walked into the party, I yelled out, Mick Jagger–style, “Well, ALL RIGHT!!” Everyone cheered and whooped—everyone except Nick, who grabbed me by the hand and said, “Come with me.” He took me to the top floor of the town house, sat me down on Debbie’s bed, and earnestly explained to me that I was “loud and obnoxious,” nobody liked it, and I would have to change my ways. “Oh Nick, oh Nick, I’m sorry,” I wept. He took me in his arms and told me he loved me and would help me improve my conduct. I dried off my face as best I could and went back downstairs, but I was too shaken to enjoy the party anymore.

  The second and final performance the following night was even more spectacular than the first. This time the cast party was at my place—chaperoned by Shirley and her best friend, Ofra. The two ladies stayed downstairs watching TV in my parents’ room while “the kids” reveled upstairs.

  Finally, around two a.m., the last guests were straggling out. As my pal Dick (Nathan Detroit) was saying good-bye at the front door, he spontaneously swept me up and gave me a big wet kiss on the mouth. We were just fooling around: we were actors! And pretty drunk besides. But as Dick got in the elevator, I turned around to behold Nick, pale as death, his eyes black pools of fury. He grabbed me by the wrist and marched me into the library, closing the double doors behind us. “How could you do that to me? What are you, some kind of whore?” And he slapped my face, again and again, as I sank lower and lower into a chair. He was raging, howling at me, and I was sobbing, “Oh Nick, oh Nick.” The library doors burst open and Ann came running in with Steve, who was a football player, an enormous guy, and he hauled Nick away from me. Then Shirley and Ofra came running in. Steve dragged Nick, still roaring like a bull, out of the house. Shirley made a late-night transatlantic call to Europe. All I could think was: Oh no, Nick is mad at me.

  Mummy dashed home from Europe to deal with the crisis. Nick was banned from the house, but Mummy knew I’d see him elsewhere. She said to me, “I can’t prevent you from seeing Nick, but at least I can keep you from getting pregnant.” And she took me to a doctor to get me on birth control pills.

  Despite her loathing of Nick, Mummy arranged for him to meet a physician she knew who was helping young men secure the coveted 4-F draft status that would relieve them of serving in Vietnam. The draft was a terrifying specter hanging over every teenage boy’s head in those days. (Girls didn’t get drafted.) My mother’s coming to Nick’s aid was a particularly poignant manifestation of her seriousness of purpose; she didn’t believe in that war, and she wasn’t going to stand by and watch young men be shipped off to their deaths if she could help it. Even if one of those young men happened to be someone she couldn’t abide.

  Meanwhile, I was applying to college. It was the last thing on my mind. I had no interest in changing my life: leaving Brearley, New York, my friends, or my family. Or Nick. Neither of my parents took me on campus visits; of the four colleges I applied to, I visited only Radcliffe, on my own. At the time, Radcliffe was somewhat uncomfortably merging with Harvard—so going to Radcliffe would mean, in effect, that I’d be going to my father’s beloved alma mater. That was certainly his wish, and his expectation.

  I didn’t see much of Daddy that year, but when he was home, our best moments were late at night, running into each other in the kitchen. We’d have long just-us-awake-in-the-world conversations while I made tea and toast, and Daddy spooned baby food straight out of the jar, or he would make a hole at both ends of a raw egg and suck out the innards.

  Often, in the morning, I would find a piece of paper slipped under my door with a British-style crossword puzzle clue that Daddy had made up in the night:

  This conductor toils madly! (5)

  (Answer: SOLTI—the renowned conductor—an anagram of TOILS.)

  When my graduation rolled around in early June, Daddy was away again, triumphantly con
ducting Fidelio in Vienna. His career seemed centered in Europe now; he was away more than he was home. It was starting to bug me in earnest that he kept missing my important events.

  The very week of my Brearley graduation, Tom Wolfe’s infamous “Radical Chic” article appeared in New York magazine, with the title “That Party at Lenny’s.” My mother’s very serious fund-raiser had become her celebrity husband’s “party.” When Wolfe’s article came out soon afterward in book form with the title Radical Chic, the misinterpretation and mockery were set in stone.

  It’s likely that to this day, Tom Wolfe may not understand the degree to which his snide little piece of neo-journalism rendered him a veritable stooge for the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover himself may well have shed a tear of gratitude that this callow journalist had done so much of the bureau’s work by discrediting left-wing New York Jewish liberals while simultaneously pitting them against the black activist movement—thereby disempowering both groups in a single deft stroke.

  Nor may Wolfe truly comprehend the depth of the damage he wreaked on my family. Maybe not so much on my father, who suffered embarrassment but could immerse himself in his various musical activities, most of which weren’t even in the United States. No, it was my mother who bore the brunt of the humiliation, anchored as she was in New York, with no illustrious career of her own to cushion the blow. Little Foxes had come and gone; she’d gone back to being Mrs. Maestro—and now, this was her reward.

  After that year, Mummy grew increasingly dejected and discouraged. The lines on the sides of her mouth pulled ever downward. She would stare into space in a way that made my stomach turn over, and I would have to look away. Four years later, Mummy was diagnosed with cancer and underwent a mastectomy—still a primitive act of surgical butchery at the time. Four years after that, she was dead of the disease, at fifty-six. Even now, my rage and disgust can rise up in me like an old fever—and in those nearly deranged moments, it doesn’t seem like such a stretch to lay Mummy’s precipitous decline, and even demise, at the feet of Mr. Wolfe.