Famous Father Girl

by Jamie Bernstein

  12

  Not Really Grownup

  Just because something cataclysmic happens in a family’s life doesn’t mean that the rest of life stops happening.

  Yes, Mummy had her mastectomy, but also she was moving us out of our Park Avenue apartment. The East Side wasn’t a perfect fit for us: too WASPy and wealthy and everyone the same. We’d all grown weary of the area, our beautiful penthouse views notwithstanding. The West Side felt more real. And so, the family was moving back across the park, to live in the fabled, gabled Dakota—a building delightfully stuffed, in those days, with writers, artists, and theater folk.

  Earlier in the year, my mother had taken me over to see our future apartment. The ceilings in the 1880 building were stratospheric: sixteen feet high. The views out the second-floor windows didn’t compare with what we’d had across town, but looking at the tops of the trees across Central Park West conveyed the pleasant illusion that the park was our very own backyard. (We didn’t find out until the following November what was really amazing about that view.)

  Mummy showed me excitedly through apartment 23. “And this is the dining room . . . and here’s the morning room: a lovely place for breakfast, we’ll sit right by the window . . . and here’s Nina’s room . . . and this is Lenny’s bedroom . . .”—which was connected to my mother’s bedroom by a Gothic-shaped ecclesiastical oaken door she’d found in some antique store.

  Oh: they had separate bedrooms now.

  Mummy said how thrilled she was not to have to dress in darkness every morning during those hours when her husband was finally fast asleep—and not to listen to his stentorian snoring anymore. But it was hard not to read a deeper meaning into it. Was this a new phase in their marriage—and were they both okay with it? Alexander and I may have exchanged a sardonic sentence or two about the implications of our parents’ new sleeping situation, but as usual, it felt safer to act like we didn’t care. And we couldn’t bring ourselves to discuss it with Nina; she was only twelve. Nina was not being informed about anything. Mummy hadn’t even been able to tell her about the mastectomy until after it was over. She called Nina from the hospital and said, “The doctor was going to take a little bump off my nose, but guess what? It wasn’t about my nose after all . . . He took off something else.”

  “. . . and this is Nina’s room . . . and here’s the dining room, and the kitchen, and behind it is Julia’s room . . . So, what do you think?”

  Oh: I didn’t have a bedroom in this house. Neither did Alexander.

  Well, yes: I was graduating from college, and it was time to be a grownup and find my own place to live. But it stung all the same. To add insult to injury, Mummy had engineered the move without consulting either Alexander or me about our belongings. In her brisk let’s-get-this-done manner, she’d thrown out, among other things, Alexander’s priceless baseball card collection and my precious Tanglewood memento: Roger Daltrey’s ripped-in-two fringed polyester snakeskin shirt. But you can’t get mad at your mother when she’s recovering from major surgery.

  The other big change at the Dakota was that my father’s studio was now a separate apartment: two rooms on the ninth floor, tucked under the gables. Apartment 92 was, in its way, even more wonderful than the big apartment downstairs. Its ceilings were lower, which made it cozy—and the windows had cushioned seats where you could sit and look out over all, all, ALL of Central Park.

  Back on Park Avenue, Daddy had often complained about the noise and interruptions resulting from the central location of his studio. So now it was as if his wife were saying: Oh, you want privacy? I’ll give you privacy! But of course, there was so much more subtext in the kicking of my father upstairs to apartment 92. Maybe, in some way, our mother was tacitly giving him a private space in which to do whatever he needed to do to feel like a complete person, while allowing him to remain connected to his family downstairs. Yet at the same time, she had installed a charming but very small Murphy bed up there, the kind that pulled down from the wall; who even knew they still made such things? The bed was adorable but, perhaps pointedly, there was no way two people could squeeze themselves onto that bed. (I know; I tried.)

  Apartment 23 wasn’t ready yet when we vacated the Park Avenue apartment in June. After Mummy came out of the hospital, there were a few weeks when we were camped out, two floors up from our new place, in Lauren Bacall’s Dakota apartment, while she was off making a movie somewhere. We had never seen a home so crammed with objects in all our lives. We thought our mother was a mad collector, but she was austere as a monk compared to Betty Bacall. Not a square millimeter of those tall walls was left uncovered, and every horizontal surface was covered with tchotchkes from her world travels. It was charming, but exhausting—not unlike Betty herself. When she was in the mood, Betty could seduce a stone, but she was also notoriously imperious and cruel. Waiters shrank from her; maids quit; doormen held their breath as she strode past them with her coddled King Charles spaniel, Blenheim.

  Yet Betty was unfailingly warm to our family—and she had made a truly generous gesture in offering us her place at such a difficult moment. Betty and my father had a soft spot for each other. It wasn’t simply an erotic attraction; it was more like a mutual recognition of their shared magical quality: the mysterious and powerful charisma that made both of those LBs the stars that they were.

  The two LBs at Sardi’s.

  Photo by Tim Boxer / Archive Photos / Getty Images

  Another of the Dakota’s denizens was the actor Michael “Mendy” Wager. Mendy was already a close family friend, but now that he lived three floors above us, he would become a crucial thread in the family fabric. A son of one of the founding fathers of Israel, Mendy (né Emanuel Weisgal) had read all of Proust several times over, and was by turns encyclopedic and maniacal about opera. Mendy was my first opera queen, and he was the real deal. (The lead character of Terrence McNally’s play The Lisbon Traviata was based on Mendy, and even named after him.) Mendy was bisexual, with children from two different marriages. And he was madly hyper; today he would be quickly labeled with ADHD. He self-medicated, as everyone did back then, and eventually became a bona fide amphetamine addict.

  Mendy’s walls were covered in framed photos and posters from the many theatrical productions he’d acted in over the years. He’d been dusky-eyed and handsome in his youth, and he still cut a fine figure in his beige turtlenecks and velvety corduroy suits. But by the time we moved to the Dakota, Mendy’s primary source of dramatic activity (and considerable income) had become TV voice-overs. At the first rehearsal with the Harvard Glee Club for a concert of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, my father introduced Mendy, who was performing the work’s narration, by saying: “I give you Michael Wager—the voice of Drano.” Mendy took the teasing in remarkably good spirits; he loved any kind of attention.

  Mendy knew so much about music and literature that Daddy found him amusing company, in measured doses, but it was our mother who had the truly deep friendship with Mendy. They were almost in love, and would spend enormous amounts of time together, often trolling the antique stores along Route 7 in Connecticut (the activity we’d found so unbearable as kids)—because, in addition to all of Mendy’s other gifts, he had a sterling decorator’s eye. His apartment in the Dakota was splendidly beautiful, with its William Morris wallpapers, Pierre Deux fabrics, and antique brass bed. He mostly lived in that bed, floating in a sea of books, newspapers, and literary magazines.

  Some people in this world have a special gift: they remember jokes. Daddy himself was an accomplished joke archivist, but Mendy was the master—especially of the Jewish ones—and the Bernstein family was his most appreciative audience.

  All the jokes and their punch lines became so deeply woven into our family fabric that we still refer to them today. “Vat is doing de dogs?” “Schmuck—buy a ticket!” “My maid said hot water.” “Whatsamatter, you don’t like the other tie?” We call them Life Jokes: treasured family heirlooms that together comprise a collection of human wis
dom more precious than gold.

  Mendy bought a little white farmhouse in Roxbury, Connecticut, which he promptly rented out, and then converted the old red barn down the hill into a heavenly country hideaway for himself. We all loved it there at “Menderly,” as he called it. In the living room, behind the piano, if you pushed the bookcase in a certain spot, it sprang open to reveal a bathroom with a spiral staircase that took you up into the silo, where Mendy had his bedroom.

  From up in the silo, you could see the surrounding hills and meadows, a gorgeous eyeful in every season. And across from the bed was a raised platform covered in Oriental rugs and many pillows: Mendy’s “harem.” There was no sweeter spot on earth in which to smoke pot, and Mendy was very generous about letting “the kids” have fun in the harem. He often joined us, in fact; Mendy was barely an adult himself, so he fit right in. Sometimes Daddy came up there, too. He would take a puff off the joint and explode into coughing. “This must have hash in it!” he always said, gasping after those pot-induced coughing fits. He’d decided at some point that he was allergic to hashish.

  Mendy and Felicia sharing a moment at Mendy’s wedding.

  For my mother in those years, Mendy would fill much of the emotional space that my father used to occupy. Mendy could be friend, brother, offspring, almost husband. Maybe even wife. They amused each other endlessly. Sometimes they’d rearrange all the furniture in a room, just for the fun of it. And sometimes they squabbled. “I’d like to hit you right now, but you’d like it too much!” Mummy would fume, and Mendy would cackle with glee.

  Mendy also gave Mummy a crucial escape valve for her deepening ambivalence about the world of gay men, a world that had become such a direct threat to her. Harry’s parade of handsome young fellows was on constant display: at parties, dinners, and concerts. Their tendency to sport the same fashions and grooming led Mummy to refer to them as “Chinese waiters.” Yes, we groan now at the awful reference, but this is how people spoke back then—and yes, the men all looked alike to her; she did not hide her contempt. But at Mendy’s apartment, as well as in Roxbury, she would spend many evenings with highly accomplished gay men—writers, directors, actors, painters—who showered her with attention and love, as did Mendy himself. For my mother, Mendy was a nontoxic iteration of her own husband—almost like a vaccine that would keep her from being sickened by the full-strength pathogen.

  Mummy recovered well from her surgery, and within weeks was installed in Fairfield for the summer, with the rest of us by her side as much as possible. For Alexander’s birthday in July, Mummy fixed up the ground floor of the caretaker’s cottage at the end of the driveway so that Alexander and his friends would have their own “pad.” It was the perfect solution: all that summer, Alexander could go off to smoke pot, drink beer, and watch sports to his heart’s content—yet he was always close by.

  Nina was a little shaky that summer. It was a tough combination: being on the cusp of adolescence, dealing with her mother’s illness, and still being younger than everyone else. She flatly refused to go to any kind of summer camp, so she rode her pony Dixie and watched plenty of TV.

  Well, we all did. In our family, as in so many others, television was a potent ally in our daily avoidance of topics that caused distress. Alexander was glued to his Yankees games. Nina knew every episode of The Odd Couple by heart. And there was the group ritual of the evening news before dinner. That summer there was a lot of news: we’d been glued all year to the Watergate hearings, and now impeachment was in the air. Sometimes Daddy would get so furious at our government’s dirty doings that he would slam his fist on the dinner table and the flowers would jump in their vase. (We even felt personally involved as a family; President Nixon’s infernal “enemies list”—in which he’d aggregated everyone he hated in politics, the media, the arts, and beyond—had eventually, inevitably, included Leonard Bernstein. Yet the Christmas before, our parents had also received a generic holiday card from the White House. Mummy framed the card together with the enemies list—and for extra effect, Daddy wrote in felt-tip pen at the bottom of the Christmas card: “With special love and esteem from Pat and Dick.”)

  Many nights that summer, Daddy and I—always the ones who stayed up latest—would find ourselves watching old movies together on the TV in the living room. It was the perfect way to enjoy each other’s company without ever venturing into difficult conversational territory. One night we came upon one of his favorites: All About Eve. “It’s the movie-est movie of them all!” he said; he adored Bette Davis. His spirited running commentary filled the annoying commercial breaks, and he recited all the famous lines along with the characters: “Fasten your seat belts; it’s going to be a bumpy night.” “I’m not to be had for the price of a cocktail, like a salted peanut.” “I’m Addison DeWitt—I am nobody’s fool, least of all yours.” That was the night I learned the word “oleaginous”—my father’s perfect description of the actor George Sanders as Addison.

  Another night we caught The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Daddy pointed out how Max Steiner’s march theme morphed along with the story: when the prospectors started out on their journey, the tune was jaunty and purposeful; later, when the men were down on their luck, slogging miserably through the mountains, the march slowed down to a doleful minor dirge. He reveled in the performances of Walter Huston and Humphrey Bogart, who was at his meanest and snarliest in that movie. Of course we knew from Betty Bacall that in real life, her husband Bogie had been the sweetest man on earth.

  Watching those movies, we could temporarily bury every discomfort and concern. But it must have been hard for my father that summer, dealing with the aftermath of his wife’s surgery. They still shared a bedroom in Fairfield, but Daddy worked so late into the night in his studio that he might as well have stayed up there—and sometimes he did. They certainly had their own set of problems already, but in addition, what husband wouldn’t shudder over his wife’s losing a breast? Back then, there was no reconstructive surgery; Felicia Montealegre, that delicately beautiful creature, was disfigured.

  Also, just possibly, it was a little tough for Daddy to find himself not at the center of family attention for once. This was a feeling he couldn’t express openly, but it sometimes came out in other ways. So maybe he was feeling a bit underattended to on the night in July when he got it into his head that the lobsters weren’t still alive when they’d been dropped into the boiling water. (He believed that if they weren’t alive right up to that moment, you’d be poisoned.) Sure enough, after dinner, he started feeling awful. He was sweaty and fearful, and was making such a scene—was he having a heart attack?—that finally an ambulance was called, and Daddy was taken to Bridgeport Hospital. They kept him there for two days of tests. He was fine. When he returned to the house, he arrived dressed head to toe in doctor’s whites, with a stethoscope around his neck. He made a grand entrance, then jumped, fully doctor-clothed, into the pool.

  LB, back from Bridgeport Hospital, jumped in the pool wearing the doctor’s outfit.

  Later that month, while Daddy was on tour somewhere, Dick Avedon came out to Fairfield to recover from a heart ailment. Mummy and Dick bonded in a new way through their mutual convalescence. He, too, was “a man with a motor”; also, he was sunny and goofy and full of fun. He took wonderful pictures of us all while he was there—though we were amused to see that his helpers had affixed labels all over his little camera, because he didn’t know how to operate it by himself. He was enamored, as well, of Shirley’s Polaroid camera. His best shot of the week, he announced, was the Polaroid of himself and Mummy, their heads floating surreally in the swimming pool. “Beckett never wrote his greatest play because he didn’t see this picture!” he crowed. Shirley pointed out to Dick that he couldn’t possibly have taken the photo because he was in the photo; in fact, Shirley had taken it herself. It was a much-needed laugh—and Dick laughed the hardest over his logic-defying mental lapse.

  Dick and Felicia in the play that Beckett never wrote.

>   Those same helpers later assisted Dick in assembling his best shots into a beautiful little spiral-bound book, which he gave to us the following Christmas. Daddy wasn’t in the book, and somehow that absence was part of the story those pictures were telling.

  My father was also not there in August, when at last Nixon resigned. While the rest of the family gathered around the living room TV in Fairfield, champagne glasses in hand, Daddy was up at Tanglewood, conducting for his adoring crowds.

  * * *

  Sam and I decided to move in together. For my birthday in early September, everyone gave me stuff for our apartment in Cambridge. Harry gave me a set of Le Creuset pots and pans, a terrific present. (I use them to this day.) But Mummy was dismayed. She ran upstairs and came down with a pair of her earrings. “Here! I just can’t bear that it’s so much like a kitchen shower,” she muttered, pressing the earrings into my hand.

  Off I went to live with Sam in our little apartment on Harvard Street. I drove back to Fairfield regularly with Alexander, now a Harvard sophomore. In a family game of musical cars, my Band-Aid-colored, radioless Buick now belonged to Uncle BB’s wife, Ellen; I was driving Daddy’s blue Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme convertible—FM stereo, air-conditioning, and all. Meanwhile, Daddy had gotten himself a cute little red Fiat Spider two-seater, just like the ones we’d rented on the Canary Islands the year before.

  In November, we discovered the feature of the new Dakota apartment that erased every shadow: the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade came streaming down Central Park West, right below our second-floor windows. The signature giant balloons floated just above us; from our pair of tiny balconies, we could almost touch Snoopy and Superman and the Cat in the Hat. Sometimes in a strong wind they listed precariously close to our heads, while below us, the mad mosaic of hats, scarves, and kids writhed and oohed in excited alarm.