Famous Father Girl

by Jamie Bernstein

  That fall, my father resided in a suite in Eliot House, the very building he’d lived in as an undergraduate. He was having the time of his life—not just preparing his lectures, but also giving seminars and master classes, constantly surrounded by college students who had the stamina to stay up all night with him, yakking and drinking and playing music.

  Daddy loved being a professor. Everything he did, after all, was a form of teaching, and now he was engaging daily with the smartest cookies in the country. He immersed himself in his grand intellectual adventure: connecting Noam Chomsky’s theories of transformational grammar with the organic elements of tonality. My father was in way over his head and relishing every second of it.

  Also, he had an assistant on the project: Tommy Cothran, a ruddy-cheeked, elfin young man who was brilliant, deeply musical, well-read, and amusingly zany. Daddy loved him. No, really: Daddy was in love with Tommy Cothran.

  Alexander and I didn’t quite get it at first. Sometime that fall, our father had brought Tommy along to Fairfield, where we were given the impression that this young assistant was becoming a fun new family friend. But on the Harvard campus, we heard the gossip. Slowly Alexander and I grasped what was going on, but we almost never talked to each other about it. It was so much easier, when we were together, to smoke pot, watch TV, listen to music—all our usual ways of drowning out any uncomfortable realities. In particular, I was suppressing the evident fact that my father had lied to me that night on the glider outside his Fairfield studio. I couldn’t begin to figure out, or even dare to wonder, how I myself felt about any of it.

  At home, nothing was being acknowledged at all. The daily routines continued: the tennis, the dogs, the before-dinner drinks, the anagrams—as if everything were the same as always. And in fact, everything was—almost—the same as always.

  Mummy must have known the truth of the situation, but if she did, she never let on. Maybe she was just as glad to have Daddy out of the house for the better part of that year. She hunkered down with Nina, shuttling between New York and Fairfield, clinging to her close friends, drinking a lot of vodka, and smoking endless cigarettes through her elegant white Aqua Filter, a device that was supposed to remove all the carcinogens.

  My most reliable source of distraction was, as usual, my own love life. My junior-year boyfriend, Peter, was a clever, wiry, ambitious whippersnapper from South Orange, New Jersey. He was the managing editor of the Harvard Crimson, and seemed like the kind of guy who might run for office someday. (He did.) People either loved him or hated him. My family loved him. It helped that he was perfectly fearless around my father. He was the first boyfriend I’d ever had who seemed . . . plausible. That in itself made me nervous.

  It took Leonard Bernstein the full duration of my junior year to prepare his lectures—and still they weren’t ready. So now he was scheduled to come back to Harvard to deliver the lectures in my senior year. There was simply no getting rid of the guy; I just had to accept it.

  Harry Kraut invited me once again to work at Amberson that summer, this time to put together a “feasibility report” (new term for me) about starting a top-tier classical music festival in the Canary Islands. My assignment was to visit the island of Gran Canaria, learn about its infrastructure, scout around for possible locations and venues for concerts, take a lot of notes, and write the whole thing up.

  The Canary Island business began with a wealthy German friend of Harry’s who had a house on Gran Canaria, perched at the top of a volcanic ravine. Across that ravine was a new house just built by two German pianists: Christoph Eschenbach and Justus Frantz. In Europe, Harry and his German friend introduced my father to the two young pianists; an invitation to stay at their house in the Canaries soon followed. Daddy fell in love with everything there: the rough rock and searing sun; the airy house full of music, wine, and laughter; the talent and charm of Christoph and Justus. He was especially enchanted with Justus. “Oh, Jamie, you’re going to love him!” he crowed at the dinner table when he got back to New York, tanned as the devil and radiating good health.

  By proposing a classical music festival in the Canaries, Harry was essentially cooking up an elaborate excuse for Daddy to go on a regular basis to his new favorite place. This initiative was an early iteration of what we came to call a Harry Kraut Special: an elaborate scheme that would grow and diversify the Amberson company or build the Bernstein “brand.”

  The Canaries were indeed lovely—although strangely marred by a local law that said residents need not pay taxes on their houses until construction was complete. So of course no one ever finished their houses, and the roads were lined with ugly cinder block semi-structures. The more I delved into the matter, the less enthusiastic I was at the prospect of further disrupting the Canary Islands’ fragile ecosystem with yet more human gunk. My grand recommendation at the conclusion of my feasibility report was: don’t build the festival.

  While I was there, I met Christoph and Justus. Christoph had a lovely, whimsical way about him, and he was a deeply gifted musician. Justus had dazzling good looks and the more outgoing personality. Christoph was clearly gay; it was not clear what Justus was, but the two pianists lived together—in Hamburg, as well as in the Canaries—so what was one to think? In any case, just as Daddy had instructed the winter before, I fell right in love with Justus, who was so blond and tawny, so charming and musical and full of laughter. We began a delicious romance.

  All the more delicious for being ill-advised. First of all, wasn’t he, um, Daddy’s friend . . . ? An explanation of their own relationship wasn’t offered and I didn’t ask for one. I was drawn to the vague aura of transgression, but I was reluctant to discuss it, or give it a name.

  And what about my boyfriend Peter back home? When I returned from the Canaries, Peter sensed that I’d been up to something. I denied it, but he kept pressing. My side of the conversation went something like this:

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “No, really, I didn’t.”

  “I swear, I didn’t.”

  “I didn’t, I didn’t.”

  “Okay, I did.”

  I was the world’s most pathetic liar.

  At the end of that summer, there was another visit to the Canaries. This time my parents, Nina, and I were all there together, spending time with my father’s new best friends, Justus and Christoph. I’m not sure at what point I let my father know that Justus and I were having a romance. But I do recall all of us being at the pianists’ house on my twenty-first birthday, an evening with much wine, four-hands piano playing, and raucous conviviality. I found myself at one point manipulating a sock to explain to the assembled guests the difference between a circumcised and an uncircumcised penis—a distinction I’d ever so recently come to understand.

  * * *

  My father began delivering the Norton Lectures in the fall of my senior year. The first lecture was disrupted by a bomb scare; everyone had to be evacuated from the Harvard Square Theater. When the full audience didn’t return after the all clear, Daddy took it hard. He was all set to shake the very earth with his pronouncements about linguistics and tonality.

  That was the only one of the six lectures that Alexander attended. Now a Harvard freshman, he was keeping his father at a distance. If it had been tough for me to have Daddy on campus in my junior year, it was even tougher now for Alexander—plus, there was that eternal question mark hovering over the very fact of our enrollment. I had crippling doubts as to whether I would have gotten into Harvard had my father been less of an illustrious alumnus—and I’d been a pretty good student at Brearley. Alexander, with his checkered academic record, had even more misgivings about how he might have landed in that freshman dorm in Harvard Yard. So the only way for him to get through his college experience was, as he would say, to “goof on it”: to take none of it seriously. It was all a silly cosmic joke. But maintaining that level of Zen humor about the situation required a lot of pot.

  In one of the Norton Lectures, my father referre
d several times to “my blond inquisitor.” That was me; I had evidently asked him some provocative question that he’d then used as a structure for that lecture’s material. I must say, though, I wasn’t exceptionally inquisitive (or blond). I couldn’t maintain focus on those lectures. It was all just too much: the intensity of the material, the surrounding hoopla, the distraction from my attempts to have my own life. It was hard enough to figure out who I was and what I was doing on that convoluted Cambridge planet without the additional solar glare of the Maestro and his grand theories. So I smoked a lot of pot, too, just like Alexander.

  On campus, the Lenny Show never stopped. He was a major Harvard celebrity for everyone to fuss over. The Crimson ran a joke article: “Cretin Found in Bernstein’s Eliot House Closet.” Was this a veiled gay reference? I find myself wondering now—although no one alluded to it at the time, not even the gay male students who were making that era’s first cautious attempts at coming out. I felt comfortable around that bunch; they were witty, antic, quick on the trigger—like my parents and their New York friends. It was such a puzzle that one’s boyfriends could never be like that.

  The Norton Lectures were a complex operation. Not only was my father lecturing; he was also providing musical examples at the piano, as he used to do on his Young People’s Concerts. In addition, there were orchestral performances, prerecorded with the Boston Symphony and projected on a screen as part of each lecture. All of which meant that the lectures were . . . long. But he had so much to say! I knew how excited Daddy was about his major academic inquiry. He was constructing an elaborate apologia for tonality: really sticking it to the twelve-tone academic cartel by “proving” that tonality was organic, instinctive, essential. In their own way, the Norton Lectures were as deeply personal a statement as Mass had been.

  A day or two after each lecture, my father would go to WGBH-TV studios and videotape the whole thing. They were later shown on television and released as books, and after that, they came out on video. Another Harry Kraut Special.

  Harry was ratcheting everything up: booking big, ambitious concerts that were also complex coproductions; arranging for the concerts to be recorded, filmed, released on LP, and also televised. Everything had become so mega. Harry had a vision for the Bernstein legacy, and he was a brilliant businessman. But Alexander, Nina, and I didn’t care about such things back then. It annoyed us to see our father being so aggressively marketed. Yet we weren’t sure we could put the whole blame on Harry; after all, Daddy was okaying Harry’s suggestions, wasn’t he? And that was the problem: we felt that maybe our father was buying into Harry’s aggrandized vision of Leonard Bernstein, and we didn’t much like what that implied about our father’s personality. So it was easier, safer, to blame Harry than it was to put the onus on Daddy himself.

  Equally tough to process was the way Harry seemed to be enabling Daddy’s slow creep toward overt gayness. Harry threw parties where our father could meet interesting, attractive young men. On the road, Harry brought young men over to my father’s hotel suite. And whenever Tommy Cothran went along, Harry arranged for him to get special status in the entourage—either as personal secretary, or assistant editor, or whatever the situation accommodated. When Alexander and I tagged along on a tour, everything was as exciting as ever, yet vaguely sickening. We were getting all the familiar perks: the adventures, the concerts, the parties. But now, our very presence rendered us complicit in a betrayal we couldn’t quite express—and so we traveled wrapped in a gossamer-thin but unremovable membrane woven of elf’s thread.

  Still, we couldn’t help softening on Harry when, midway through a European junket, he would pull out his wallet and say to us, “You need any money?” When you’re college age, “No, thanks” is not in your inventory of responses to that question.

  Mummy, to no one’s surprise, simply loathed Harry. But she strove to keep things normal, maybe most of all for Nina’s benefit. Had our mother declared overt war on Harry, Alexander and I might have felt moved to take her side, even give voice to our anger at our father’s infidelity. I sensed that Alexander, in particular, was harboring some deep resentment, and would have been glad for a way to express it. But both our parents were dyed-in-the-wool confrontation avoiders; they loathed and feared melodrama. We offspring grew up avoiding confrontation, as well. So, as long as our mother pretended all was normal, that gave the rest of us permission to play along.

  When Alexander and I returned to Harvard in the fall, we discovered that Harry had arranged for Daddy and Tommy to have a spacious suite all to themselves at the top of Quincy House. At home in New York, our family appeared as an inviolable unit; our parents were a well-established couple; our friends and extended family wouldn’t have seen any change in our routine. But up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Leonard Bernstein, Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, was test-driving a new life for himself.

  * * *

  Over the holidays, I visited Justus in the Canaries. Christoph was there, too. So, were the two pianists lovers? I couldn’t figure it out. Justus certainly seemed to like girls, but what about him and Daddy: Had something gone on there? Justus had told me no. It was hard to know what to believe. I wanted to know, but also I didn’t want to know. I rather enjoyed living wrapped in my damp, erotic fog.

  Justus had some recitals in Switzerland, and I tagged along. Each performance was followed by a reception, where I had to be polite and charming with assorted dull but important patrons. It occurred to me that I was playing my mother’s role. So this was what it was like to be Mrs. Maestro, eh? Christ, it was awful! If this was what my future with Justus held in store, I was not at all sure I wanted to sign up for it. No wonder Mummy had been accompanying Daddy on the road less and less over the years. I was beginning to get an inkling of how complicated life might actually be for Felicia Montealegre Bernstein.

  I thought for the first time about how a successful performing artist is constantly replenished through performance and audience adulation, while the artist’s companion gets slowly but inexorably depleted. Now I understood the darker implications of my mother’s frequent joke that she would title her memoirs Waiting for Maestro. Yes, her life had its distinct compensations: three children, two houses; brilliant, fun friends; music, theater, and travel; everything gracious and beautiful. My parents’ affection for each other was warm and genuine; we all felt it. But I wondered about the cost to Mummy. Might she have blossomed as an actress had she married someone less involved with his own career? Might she have had a more fulfilling union with a husband who had fewer complications of his own? Some essential part of my mother was not being nourished, and it was starting to show.

  My separations from Justus were painful. Transatlantic phone calls were expensive and maddening, with their fuzzy sound and second-and-a-half delay. We wrote letters, but there were never enough of them. As part of my campaign to be nearer-my-Justus-to-thee, I’d been taking German A at Harvard, an intensive yearlong course that met five days a week. In January, a new guy, Sam, showed up in the class. We would study together sometimes, drilling each other on verbs and vocabulary. With his shaggy blond hair and pink glasses, his skinny faded corduroys, his clogs, and his single earring, Sam was cute. And smart as hell. And a poet. Okay, Sam was amazing. I was head over heels in love with Sam. Good-bye, Justus—over the fuzzy transatlantic phone!

  I was so preoccupied with my busy life that I barely registered the premiere of Daddy’s latest piece: the score to a ballet called Dybbuk, choreographed by his longtime complicated pal Jerry Robbins. They’d been toiling over this ballet for months, but I’d been oblivious. I remember nothing from the premiere, except that Alexander, Nina, and I could not warm up to this piece, with its heavily Jewish thematic material; its kabbalah-inspired numerological intricacies; and the overall sound of the score, which was very—to use Nina’s word—pointy. Ironically, after my father’s grand defense of tonality in the Norton Lectures, he was now presenting the most aggressively twelve-tone piece he’
d ever written.

  The family, with LB and Jamie as the Harvard “goal posts.”

  When my parents came up to Cambridge for my graduation, they seemed strangely distracted and irritable—although they were excited that the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who had just defected from Soviet Russia, was receiving an honorary degree at the Harvard commencement ceremonies that morning. There was much hugging of their beloved friend Slava—so much hugging, in fact, that they wound up missing my own diploma ceremony at Adams House.

  It wasn’t until we were all back in Fairfield the next day that I discovered why my parents had been acting so oddly at commencement. That afternoon Mummy asked me, uncharacteristically, to take a walk with her. When we got to the frog pond, she sat down on the little stone bench and patted the empty space next to her for me to sit there. Some kind of confrontation was coming, and I was almost unable to breathe, so acute was my discomfort. She turned to me with the most distraught expression I’d ever seen on her face. Sitting there in the pleasant shade of the big Norwegian maple, my mother told me in a shaking voice that they’d found a cancerous mass in her left breast, and that she was going in for a mastectomy in a couple of days. She hadn’t wanted to ruin my graduation by telling me the day before.

  My first reaction was to be angry that she’d hidden this enormous piece of news from me, and then had proceeded to act so jittery and distracted at my graduation events. It was far easier to be angry than . . . panicked.

  After hugging my mother and saying whatever words I could summon up that were encouraging, I went up to my room, and cried myself to a husk. After that, I didn’t cry about it again for a very long time. We all had a new job now: to get through everything that would happen next.