Famous Father Girl

by Jamie Bernstein

  The doctor subsequently told us that the tumor was in a lymph node and not in the lung itself, which meant it could be successfully treated. Everyone was euphoric. Our mother was released from the hospital and we all went out to Mendy’s house in Roxbury for a raucous dinner where Mummy played the castanets. The next day in Fairfield, Mike Nichols came over with his wife, Annabel, and their two kids: Max “the Mouse” and Jenny “the Peach.” Dick Avedon came out, too, and a few other close friends. My mother looked somehow more beautiful than she ever had. The heat had subsided, and there was plenty of tennis and swimming, eating and drinking. All the usual elements, framed in an unspoken panic.

  Felicia, after the diagnosis, July 1977.

  Some family friends asked me to help persuade my mother to take laetrile—a countercultural anticancer remedy made from apricot pits that was getting a lot of attention at the time. My shrink, who had actually testified in court on the subject, told me that laetrile was a lot of hooey. I felt caught in the middle—but in any case Mummy didn’t want to discuss it: any of it, with anyone, at all, ever.

  LB rushed home from Austria, and there we all were at the dinner table: Mummy, Daddy, Alexander, me—and Harry Kraut. (Nina was at her summer job at Tanglewood.) With the new health crisis, any discussion of ejecting Harry had been set aside. He was, after all, a manager—and the new circumstances certainly cried out for management.

  Up at Tanglewood, Nina was being told nothing, as usual. I began filling her in through an exchange of letters. I think our parents were clinging to the illusion that as long as they didn’t tell their littlest child what was going on, none of it was really happening.

  All summer, I cringed to hear Mummy’s cough: a long, slow, tearing sound, over and over, as she tried to get to the bottom of the congestion. My father’s lavish attentions on Mummy were also hard to take. He would stretch himself out alongside her on the bed; the nicotine stink of his breath made her nearly retch, she confessed to me. But the most she could ever bring herself to say was, “Lenny, you’ve been smoking a lot today.” He never took the hint, and she never kicked him off her bed.

  My mother had the lymph node removed, but the new reports were that maybe the disease wasn’t just in the lymph node after all. At the hospital, LB befriended Dr. Lewis Thomas, whose bestselling book, The Lives of a Cell, had turned the author into everyone’s literary hero. LB described the situation to Dr. Thomas, hoping for a better interpretation from the brilliant physician. “I’m afraid it’s going to be pretty grim,” Dr. Thomas said. That turned out to be an accurate diagnosis.

  LB had brought his wife a present from Austria: a little plaster angel from a country church, painted pink, green, and gold. She placed it on a stand to the left of her bed so that it perched over her shoulder. All I could think of, looking at that angel, was what Daddy had said to Alexander and me the day before, as we stood in the murky corridor, keeping our voices low: “We simply have to accept that every day of Mummy’s life from now on is going to be about death.”

  Alexander, Daddy, and I accompanied Mummy to her radiation therapy. We sat in the waiting room with all the cancer patients. After twenty minutes, my father and brother got up. Daddy turned to me and said, “We’re going to do the unspeakable for a moment. We’ll be right back.” Cigarettes.

  LB returned to Europe, and Mike Nichols invited the rest of us to his house in Bridgewater, Connecticut, for the weekend. It was heaven to be out of the steaming city, to be taken care of. Mike was gentle, funny, welcoming. At dinner, he sliced and served the meat, passing plates around, so graceful and completely without airs—and there were suddenly tears in my eyes.

  As far as I could recall, my father had never carved a roast in his life. Suddenly that felt like the most grievous possible omission in my upbringing.

  In the fall, the author Susan Sontag began coming over to the Dakota to spend time with my mother. Daddy had organized these visits, because Susan herself had recently gone through breast cancer. She was brimming with knowledge and advice, and was writing a fascinating book, Illness as Metaphor, about diseases and their relationship to the culture in which they occur. Susan Sontag was handsomely beautiful, an intense and brilliant woman who had handled her own illness by immersing herself into every aspect of its science and history. The dining room walls reverberated with the authority in her voice.

  But the last thing on earth my mother wanted to do was to talk about her condition with others. The bouts of chemo-induced sickness were so awful that when they were over, she just wanted to flush away the entire experience, pretend it hadn’t happened: that was her own way of coping. So it was a hardship for her to put up with Susan Sontag.

  Alexander continued to be close at hand, in his fugue state, relying heavily on the many substances in constant supply all around us. Well, we both relied on them. Not only were we smoking pot all the time, but there was an inexhaustible supply of liquor at home, as well. Plus, there was our father’s toiletry case.

  It was a hefty black leather valise, with upper tiers that lifted out sideways, like wings. Each winged tier had a little round box with a tortoiseshell screw lid. One box had the blue Valiums and red Seconals; the box on the other wing had the green Dexamyls and orange Dexedrines. Downers on the left, uppers on the right. Alexander and I visited that toiletry case often, but Daddy never remarked upon the attrition rate of the pills, nor did any of his assistants; maybe they, too, were availing themselves of the contents.

  I resorted to my various diversionary behaviors to distract myself from the fearsome troubles. Swanning around New York with my father was a reliable source of distraction, and Mummy often let me borrow her clothes for these excursions. One evening, I wore her beautiful gray silk Halston pajamas to accompany my father to some gala event, which was followed by a party at Studio 54. The next day, as I walked past the lobby newsstand in the office building where I had a part-time job, I did the double-take of a lifetime: there, on the front page of the afternoon edition of the New York Post, was a picture of me in the Halston pajamas, dancing with Daddy at Studio 54! Was it the coolest thing or the silliest thing that had ever happened to me? Maybe both.

  On the front page of the New York Post!

  Credit Adam Scull/PHOTOlink.net / Courtesy of New York Post

  Like a homing pigeon, I sought refuge in old boyfriends. I even made a date with my old nemesis, Nick-oh-Nick. “Get off my bed!” Mummy shouted when I told her. “Don’t do it!” Alexander said. But it was as if I had some old, grisly, dangling string to tie up; I slept with Nick that night, and was consumed with a deranged glee.

  One iteration of my diversionary behavior was to develop obsessive crushes on celebrities—comedians mostly, for some reason. One was with Chevy Chase, then the absolute king of the new hit TV show Saturday Night Live. I would walk dreamily through Central Park, certain that I would run into Chevy at any moment, whereupon our lives would be forever united. Then it was Lily Tomlin. She was the only person I ever waited for at a stage door to get an autograph.

  And then it was Steve Martin, whose comedy made me feel fizzy to my very bones. Alexander, Nina, and I doted on his routines and catch phrases—and I also loved his unaffected, accomplished banjo playing.

  I arranged for a whole bunch of us to see a late-night Steve Martin performance at Avery Fisher Hall. I even insisted that my father come along; what could be a better distraction from our family troubles than the zany hilarity of Steve? As I think back now to that evening, I wonder if Daddy had consumed an orange pill; his disconcertingly flirtatious manner of tormenting me was in high gear that night. I described the events in a letter to Ann:

  I arrived at the Dakota. Oohs and aahs over my very red dress. Mummy said I looked swell. But LB had a problem. He wanted me to tie up the strings that hang from the collar. “But they’re supposed to hang loose like that,” I explained. “That’s impossible,” he said. “Come on, tie them up.” “No, really, it’s okay, Daddy.” “Tie them up! You look like
a slut!” he roared. He was half playing with me, making a fuss for the fun of fussing with me. “Ask Mummy,” I said. “Go ahead, ask her!” Mummy said that just the other night she’d seen some chic woman wearing her shirt that way. LB was undaunted. He started in with me all over again.

  Fortunately, Betty Bacall arrived, and LB’s attention was diverted for a while. Then he started in AGAIN about my shirt. He started coming after me to tie up my dress. Half laughing, I kept backing off and he kept advancing, all the way from the bar to the living room. “Jamie, Jamie . . . why do you hate me so much?” What was going on??

  LB laughed and laughed at the Steve Martin show. He was completely won over. After all the comedy gags and hilarious insincerity and bouncing around, Steve played his banjo. The incredible serenity that was suddenly washing over the audience from that stage!

  Afterwards, the backstage manager escorted us to the good old green room. Steve Martin made fun of himself for being ignorant of LB’s field, yet there he was occupying the Maestro’s very own dressing room. At one point LB, inspired by Steve Martin’s antic energy, attempted to scramble on top of the grand piano in the green room. I wanted to die.

  As we were leaving, we ran into Madeline Kahn. She said she was too shy to go in to meet Steve Martin, so LB said he’d take her in. The rest of us stood in the corridor, exhausted, hot, standing around, Waiting for Maestro. Finally I volunteered to go back in and get him out of there. Bravely I strode in and put my arm around LB and cleared my throat. And then, he did the unbelievable:

  “Steve, will you please tell my daughter to tie the strings on her shirt?”

  * * *

  I tried to hew to my writing and my various jobs, and yet I couldn’t quite set aside my guitar; songs kept leaking out. There was a little piece of me that craved musical connections, hungered for performance—but I had such a terror of performing. The odious comparisons frayed my nerves, and I could never get through a song without making error after maddening error. While I practiced a tough passage, my stomach would writhe in distress as I fought down an overwhelming urge to flee. I realized one day that it was the identical feeling I used to have in that sickening half hour before the piano teacher arrived.

  One drunken night at the grownups’ favorite hangout, Elaine’s, Alexander and I were sitting at a long table with family friends when it emerged that there was a new place across the street called Erik’s, and somehow I was persuaded by the owner, Erik, to perform my songs there that very evening—on the condition that I bring over all my pals from Elaine’s. It took courage and cocaine to pull it off, but I did in fact wind up later that same night performing three or four of my songs on the little stage of Erik’s restaurant, in front of the likes of Bill and Rose Styron, Nora Ephron and Carl Bernstein, Jann Wenner, and a few others. I was in an agony of excitement and uncertainty. I made mistakes; I sang off-key. I felt sick from the vertigo of my possible humiliation. To this day I’m not sure whether I did all right or made a colossal fool of myself. One thing was for certain: cagey Erik took advantage of Leonard Bernstein’s clueless twenty-four-year-old daughter to stack his new restaurant with luminaries.

  It was a tough break, in a way, to have to debut in front of such a glittering little crowd. But that was my world, and I wanted so badly to make a splash in it—even as I feared that my very ambition meant I was a bad person. In my family universe, LB’s ambition and grandiosity were tolerated. In the rest of us, such behavior was unacceptable—or at least that was the unspoken policy emanating from our mother. This perfect muddle of mixed signals was the conundrum I lived with. I couldn’t imagine how to be an assertive performer without courting the risk of becoming a vain, obnoxious monster whom no one would love.

  In spite of all my ambivalence, I pushed forward. I found a voice teacher, and I bought a guitar—a newfangled hybrid called an Ovation that could be plugged into an amp. In my ignorance, I thought it would sound all rock-’n’-roll-y, like an electric guitar, and was disappointed when it merely sounded like an amplified acoustic guitar, which is exactly what it was.

  I even took some sight-reading lessons from my Harvard friend Jonathan. Reading music was painfully difficult for me. I had a good ear, so in my piano lessons I’d always memorized quickly, to get away from the printed page. How did my father do it? How did he read entire orchestral scores, forward and vertically at the same time? It was such a mystery to me. When I saw a chord, I had to spell it out to myself, one note at a time, until finally I would realize: Oh, it’s D-flat major—just as people with dyslexia have to spell out a word letter by letter until they realize: Oh, it spells “table.”

  I arrived chronically late to my music lessons with Jonathan; they were a visceral torment for me. When it came to making music, I felt as if I were driving a car with one foot flooring the accelerator while the other foot was slamming on the brake.

  * * *

  LB had an endlessly revolving series of personal assistants. Once Harry came on the scene, the assistants tended to be attractive young gay men. None of them ever worked out for long. LB would subject his assistants to everything from scary word games to even scarier, shrinky discussions of their personal lives; he was eerily good, almost psychic, at locating a young person’s most vulnerable inner bruise. Meanwhile, Harry would make excruciating logistical and scheduling demands. That winter, the assistant was a sweet young guy named Jeff. He was looking for a place to live. I’d just moved into a funky railroad apartment on Madison and 93rd. The even funkier apartment underneath my own became available, and I’d added it to my monthly rent, thinking it might come in handy for playing music. It was an eccentric floor-through space: not for everyone, but Jeff was a drummer, and he’d be able to play music down there without bothering people. (Downstairs was a store and upstairs was me, and I didn’t care.) I thought it would be perfect to have a friendly, tidy, gay musician subletting the downstairs apartment.

  He was tidy, all right—but it turned out that Jeff wasn’t so gay. And what was more, we fell head over heels in love.

  Harry inadvertently discovered the situation by calling Jeff from the airport. Jeff’s visiting friend Phyllis answered the phone. When Harry asked for Jeff, she said, “He can’t come to the phone right now, he’s sleeping upstairs. Can I take a message?” Phyllis reported much spluttering at the other end of the line.

  So Harry went off to Japan, and Jeff and I had skated out of a confrontation. But soon enough, Harry returned, and Jeff was fired. Whether or not Jeff had been good at his job, it was not okay for the personal assistant to be sleeping with his boss’s daughter.

  Meanwhile, Mummy rode the pitiless waves of chemotherapy, and had more hospital crises. Twice, the Dakota employees carried her downstairs in a wicker chair to a waiting ambulance. (One of those times, she’d gone into fibrillation after becoming rhapsodically overexcited earlier in the evening at an extraordinary Vladimir Horowitz recital at Carnegie Hall.)

  I went to see her at the ICU in Mount Sinai. Her eyes were wide with fear, dark around the edges. Her skin was flaky and discolored. My father told me later that under “Religious Affiliation” on her admission form, she’d written “CATH.”

  Once she was out of the ICU, my mother’s hospital room was regularly overrun with visitors, everyone very garrulous and “on.” I would see her body tensing when my father gave her one of his long, adhesive kisses, full of meaning and depth of emotion. I couldn’t help thinking that the preponderant emotion might be guilt.

  My mother had to have her pericardium removed. My father asked her oncologist, Dr. Holland, if he was sure they had to do this; weren’t they being a little hasty? Dr. Holland said, “We can’t be hasty enough.”

  Writing in a notebook in the waiting room at Mount Sinai, I gnawed at the situation like an animal trying to chew its paw out of a trap:

  She is scared. I am scared. LB is scared. He tells Mummy he’s not scared. They struck a bargain that if he’s not scared, she won’t be scared. But, Mummy said
, what if I’m not scared and you are scared? Then I will be scared. LB says he hasn’t been really scared until now. Now, he says, he’s really scared. But he was scared before; he just doesn’t remember that he was already scared.

  When she came home from the hospital, Mummy began wearing a frilly white cotton mobcap threaded with an apricot-colored satin ribbon; it was a present from her hair salon, Kenneth, where she’d had her hair done every week for the past twenty years. She looked like a sweet, ethereal old lady in a fairy tale. One afternoon, while I was lying at the foot of her bed, my mother asked me: “Why don’t you apply to law school?” I couldn’t have been more shocked if she’d flown to the ceiling. Law school? Hadn’t our entire family’s existence been based on the assumption that the arts were where the really interesting people were? All our friends were writers, musicians, painters, actors. But lawyers, accountants, businessmen—they were all drudges, weren’t they? I was so confused by this bizarre piece of advice coming from my own pianist-actress-painter mother. But maybe she was suddenly feeling fed up with artists.

  Because there was not already enough medical drama in the house, Daddy went and got himself a face-lift: just the eyelids and under the chin. He enjoyed the grandly appointed town house on East 78th Street where the surgery took place, and told us how he’d charmed the nurses and patients, and how his surgeon invited him to watch other people’s operations. All the attention did him good. But he looked strange to us afterward—a bit like a panda startled out of a bad dream. Mummy said, “All the kindness has gone out of his eyes.” But at least he could now read without peering past his drooping lids.

  In the midst of all this, an absurdly ambitious new project was launching: my mother had found a house in East Hampton, the place where most of her friends went in the summer, and where she’d come to wish she could be instead of isolated in Fairfield. LB would buy the new house—and sell the one in Fairfield—and Mummy would fix it up in her inimitable way so we could all be there together the following summer. How exactly was this going to work? Could people even function without a pericardium? Yet who dared second-guess Mummy’s enthusiasm? And certainly none of us dared voice our acute dismay at the prospect of losing Fairfield.