Famous Father Girl

by Jamie Bernstein

  A day or two after finding her dream house, my mother was brushing her hair, and great clots of it came out. She arrived at the breakfast table shaken and fearful, and said, “The jig is up.” “What, they’ve sold the house to someone else?” Daddy said. “No, my hair is falling out!” “Oh, thank God!” he replied, and they both burst out laughing.

  * * *

  My father’s lawyer, Paul Epstein, knew a guy who created marionettes that looked like real people if you sent in a photo. So Paul decided to commission five puppets representing the five members of our family, and present them to my parents for Christmas. I volunteered to write a show for the puppets, and I put a team of pals together to pull off the production.

  Although the puppets were supposed to look like us, my story had them all playing other characters: there was an evil king in an imaginary kingdom who was plotting to poison the queen so as to acquire some valuable item from her . . . I barely remember the convoluted story anymore.

  When Christmas Eve came, the Dakota apartment was chock-full of friends and family. My mother looked beautiful in her Kenneth wig. After dinner, I made everyone sit in the library to watch our show. It was long . . . very long. The audience created a spontaneous break partway through, tearing past us to get to the bar. Lillian Hellman was particularly grouchy. Well, she always groused, but still, I had a sinking feeling that things weren’t going well. It reminded me of that night I performed at Erik’s: Was I excelling or making a terrible fool of myself?

  The last complete family holiday card, Dakota living room, December 1977.

  PHOTOGRAPH BY HENRY GROSSMAN: / © GROSSMAN ENTERPRISES, LLC

  A few weeks later, Aunt Shirley invited me to lunch. She’d decided enough time had gone by so that she could tell me frankly what she’d thought of the puppet show.

  How was it possible that neither I nor any of my cohorts had perceived the subtext of my story, in which the Lenny puppet was scheming to poison the Felicia puppet? Shirley told me people didn’t know where to look when it was over. Here I was, an est graduate, a dedicated shrink patient, priding myself on being insightful about human dynamics . . . How could I have been so catastrophically blind? I left the lunch quivering in mortification; I wished Shirley had never told me.

  In January, my mother was well enough to join her husband in Vienna, where he was conducting Beethoven’s Fidelio at the State Opera. She was ambivalent about going on that trip, and we couldn’t quite figure out why she was doing it at all. Mendy went along as her companion—her helper, really; she was very weak. But they had some laughs. Mendy told us that Mummy had adopted the German word “ausgeschlossen”—closed, or locked out—to mean anything that was unbearable or impossible. She would stretch her hands in front of her like a traffic cop and proclaim: “AUS-geschlossen!!”

  Mendy reported that the weather in Europe was persistently freezing and damp, as were the hotels. In Milan, Mummy started to cough in earnest. The people they had to socialize with were stuffy diplomats, fancy folk, and music administrators. It was Mrs. Maestro time at its worst. Why had she agreed to go on that trip?

  When Mummy returned to New York, she gradually regained some strength and, with the help of some massive cortisone shots, began picking fabrics, wallpapers, and furniture for the East Hampton house. Sometimes I was conscripted to run out there on various errands in the company of LB’s new assistant, confusingly named Jamie. Jeff had arranged for Jamie, his best friend, to take over the job after Jeff himself had received his untimely termination. To reduce confusion, we referred to Jamie as Jet.

  The three of us became a triumvirate. Jeff, Jet, and I played music together, and dreamed of forming a band. We even started looking for a loft downtown where we could live and play music. Lofts were cheap in SoHo, and the old cast-iron buildings down there were teeming with artists and musicians.

  The music and the loft-hunting were good distractions from the Mummy terrors—but evidently not distraction enough. I came up with the grandest one of all: I was falling out of love with Jeff and falling seriously in love with his best friend, Jet. And yet the three of us were still planning to move into a loft together. The drama of it all was conveniently all-consuming.

  My mother endured new rounds of chemo, harrowing episodes of heart fibrillation, a new tumor in her back. She was in constant pain. “We must make it seem hopeful,” Daddy kept saying.

  “It’s been hell,” she whispered to me in her darkened hospital room after vomiting all afternoon. Her cough sounded like a thousand sails tearing in a typhoon.

  My father and brother resolved jointly to go to Smokenders, which was supposed to really, really work. Daddy had gone through several prior attempts to quit, all of them failures. Our family had been particularly beleaguered by a regime imposed by a hypnotist, who’d instructed our father that after dinner he was to close his eyes, count to twenty, and slowly raise his arm in front of him. We had a feeling he hadn’t been told to do this at the dinner table, but that is what he did. It was a conversation stopper for sure. And it didn’t work at all.

  For Smokenders, Daddy was told to write down every cigarette he smoked, smoke with his other hand, delay the after-dinner cigarette by thirty minutes. He was also to drop his stubs into a large glass jar, which became a truly odious artifact. I hoped all this would work, but I had my doubts.

  One spring afternoon I visited my mother in the hospital, and she discussed her death for the first and only time. She said she was going to ask soon for a priest. She said she wanted her funeral to be “almost Quaker—no rabbis.” She said there were certain things she wanted certain people to have, and that one of these afternoons we’d sit down together and go through it all.

  We never did sit down together and go through it all. She never went through anything, with anyone.

  But the priest she was hoping for did come. Father Puma, a friend of her doctor’s, came to her bedroom in the Dakota and gave her Communion. The effect was dramatic; Mummy was radiant. She even ate Chilean empanadas the next day. Daddy was very polite and friendly to Father Puma, but he seemed a bit bewildered by it all. The implication was that the husband had done all he could for his wife. She was turning elsewhere now.

  Adolph, Mendy, and LB in East Hampton, a few days before Felicia’s death.

  On a Wednesday in late May, in a caravan of cars plus ambulance, we all moved, with Mummy, to East Hampton. The house wasn’t ready, but we went there anyway; the sense was that if we didn’t hurry up, she might not get to see it at all.

  The next weeks were an eerie miasma of extended family and visiting friends, errands and more errands for the house, the “kids” playing lawn Frisbee in the late sunsets, furtive conferring in corners, testy dinner conversations, much drinking. And there I was, in the midst of it all, changing boyfriends midgallop, like some daredevil circus performer. And both of them plucked out of Daddy’s own life, for a change.

  It had always been true that my mother loved fixing up a new house, while my father only started enjoying the place once everything was settled—which was precisely the moment when Mummy would get restless and start hankering to move to a new place. Now, in East Hampton, my father didn’t know where to put himself. His studio couldn’t be assembled until the carpeting arrived; he had no place to call his own but the bed in his bedroom—so that is where he mostly stayed. He slept till late in the afternoon, and emerged complaining of problems like noise, or unsuitable lamplight. His main problem was, of course, unfixable.

  One morning, Father Puma came out to celebrate Mass in my mother’s bedroom. She lay in bed with her mobcap on, her makeup beautifully executed. The altar, at the foot of her bed, was a wicker table covered with a white linen tablecloth, a brass candleholder and white candle, and a small bowl of blue, yellow, and pink flowers. Father Puma put on his white robe in front of us. Outside it was foggy and damp. During the silences, we could hear the morning birds twittering, and the distant roar of the ocean. Mummy was glowing with joy. She read
a passage from Song of Songs in a quiet, mellifluous voice. Later, Father Puma spoke in nearly frightened tones of my mother’s spiritual energy. She didn’t even know she had it, he said.

  My father was in the next room, sleeping throughout. And Nina chose not to participate; instead, she performed the indispensable deed of answering the door for the workmen who had arrived at last to lay the carpet in Daddy’s studio.

  Later that day, my mother had enough strength to give her husband a haircut. And that evening, as I sat beside her bed, she squeezed my hand and told me that all I needed, all anyone needed in this world, was to be sensitive to others. “Kindness,” she said. “Kindness . . . kindness . . . kindness.”

  Daddy found a stale Carlton Menthol lying around the house somewhere, and he smoked it—on his Smokenders cutoff day. In truth, he and Alexander could not possibly have picked a more stressful time during which to kick the very habit that steadied their nerves.

  Mummy started losing her bearings. Daddy said to her, “Isn’t it wonderful that Jim Holland’s coming out tomorrow?” “Who is Jim Holland?” “He’s your doctor.” “I don’t have a doctor named Jim Holland.” “Well, who is your doctor?” “Chuck Solomon.” She had gone way back.

  Then she began rejecting her medication, spitting it out and accusing Elizabeth, the nurse, of trying to poison her. Elizabeth asked Mummy, “Who am I?” Solemnly Mummy intoned, “Savonarola.”

  She began losing the power of speech. When Uncle BB arrived, her face lit up and she said, “Bee-ba? Bee-ba!” The only words that came out ungarbled were the fillers, like “Oh boy,” or “I can’t believe it,” or “It’s wonderful.” Alexander said it was as if she were tripping on acid.

  One evening, Elizabeth, the nurse, told me Dr. Holland had instructed her to give my mother a Demerol injection every two hours—in other words, Mummy was going to remain asleep. “So you mean this is it,” I said. This was it, Elizabeth confirmed. I held Mummy in my arms and soothed her as Elizabeth administered the injection, after which there would be no further consciousness.

  Mummy died early the next morning. In the afternoon, my father’s friend Rabbi Judah Kahn drove out from New York City to officiate over the coffin in the living room. I remembered how Mummy had said “no rabbis.” But at this point it was more for Daddy than for her; I was sure that wherever she was now, she would understand that. Anyway, Father Puma had his turn later that afternoon, when he celebrated Mass right there in the same living room.

  The Mass was on the long side, because my father had requested that it be interspersed with a recording of the Mozart Requiem in its entirety. As the “Tuba Mirum” movement began, a white moth suddenly fluttered up from the coffin and flew lightly down the middle of the room, past the assembled family, friends, and domestic staff—and out the door. Mendy said later that the white moth was Mummy herself, saying, “That’s it—too boring! AUS-geschlossen!! I’m getting out of here!”

  14

  Crawling from the Wreckage

  We’d all driven out to East Hampton behind the ambulance; now, three weeks later, we all drove back behind the hearse. Why exactly was Felicia Montealegre going to spend the rest of eternity in Brooklyn? It was a Harry Special. The plot in Green-Wood Cemetery had room for additional family members—plus, Harry pointed out, the cemetery was easily reachable by subway, which would be convenient for the maids to visit. They were the ones, he said, who were most likely to want to visit the grave on a regular basis. Everyone in the family was too stricken to argue.

  There was an open-ended gathering at the Dakota. The first person to arrive, and leave, was Mrs. Onassis. After a few hours, Jet and I couldn’t take the atmosphere anymore. I left the house with him, wearing skimpy terrycloth shorts that barely covered my backside; Daddy was scandalized. “I’m in mourning!” he protested. As the sorry days unspooled, he was barely functional. He couldn’t get out of bed. “I don’t ever want to get up,” he said. I believed him. The combination of loss and remorse had to be an intensely toxic brew—and he didn’t have a fresh romance to hurl himself into, like I did. He didn’t dress; he didn’t shave; it was all Julia could do to get him to eat a few forkfuls of scrambled eggs. Julia herself was a hollow-eyed mess: visibly anguished, but at least able to perform her tasks, unlike El Caballero.

  Eventually, Daddy was persuaded to go on a luxury yacht in the Aegean with Shirley and Uncle BB; the latter was himself reeling from his nasty divorce from Ellen. The three siblings managed to comfort one another and even have a laugh or two; Uncle BB told us things really looked up when “the great god Freon” chose to restore the air-conditioning on the ship.

  The Three Apes: Burtie, Shirley, and (a bearded) Lenny.

  Nina went back to work at Tanglewood, where she was taken under the protective wing of composer Yehudi Wyner’s family; Alexander bounced around between New York and East Hampton; and I stayed in the East Hampton house for the rest of that summer with Jet. I actually loved that house. No one else in the family did—especially my father, who never set foot in the place again.

  Things were terrible with Julia. Her despair over losing her beloved Señora mostly manifested itself as rage at us three kids. I was an easy target for her tirades in my new role as “dueña” of the East Hampton house. Julia had nothing but contempt for my housekeeping abilities. I’m sure I was not adept, especially compared to my mother, but the greater struggle for Julia was to perceive me, her hapless charge since the age of two, as the dueña of anything.

  Meanwhile, Julia nagged Alexander day and night for his disorderliness, for his sloth, for his smoking (Smokenders hadn’t worked for him, either)—but he was going back to Harvard in the fall and would escape her clutches. It was Nina, entering eleventh grade, who was going to be truly and hopelessly stuck with Julia in that cavernous, grief-soaked Dakota apartment. I promised Nina I wouldn’t abandon her, wouldn’t leave New York as long as she was still living at home. As for our father behaving as any kind of head-of-household, let alone single parent, he couldn’t be counted on for much of anything at the moment.

  Before the autumn and Real Life kicked in, we first had to get through Leonard Bernstein’s sixtieth birthday in late August.

  An elaborate, long-planned event was coming up at Wolf Trap, outside Washington, DC: a big-ticket fund-raiser for the National Symphony, bristling with musical celebrities, and televised to boot—a major Harry Special that Daddy felt obliged to honor, despite his being in no mood for celebrations. The extended family and close friends went down to Washington for the occasion. The night before the concert, all twenty-one of us—everyone from Grandma and her sisters to André Previn to Betty Bacall—gathered for a big, raucous dinner at the Watergate Hotel, where we were all staying. Everyone was in dire need of diversion, and alcohol. At the long table we sang songs, performed party tricks, told dirty jokes, and made an unseemly racket—all of which helped us feel a bit more festive.

  In the stultifying humidity of Wolf Trap’s outdoor venue, Daddy conducted Slava Rostropovich, André Previn, and Yehudi Menuhin in the first movement of the Beethoven Triple Concerto: a tremendous performance. Later, the entire audience spontaneously broke into a stately rendition of “Happy Birthday to You.” Daddy cried on stage—too shaken, for assorted reasons, to make a speech.

  Before the third section of the concert (the evening was endless), Lillian Hellman made some controversially bitter remarks that had to be cut from the TV broadcast: her friendship with Leonard Bernstein was almost destroyed, she said, by their collaboration on Candide, and their reconciliation was largely due to Felicia. It was the only time Mummy was mentioned in the entire evening.

  The loss of Felicia had ripped through our family’s world with a seismic shudder. She was so adored, so deeply beautiful . . . and was gone unbearably too soon, at fifty-six. Heartbreaking cards and letters arrived by the bushel. I wondered: Was everyone else more upset than I was? It was hard to attend to my private feelings when my mother’s death was being mour
ned so intensely by so many others. I could connect with my own grief only in isolated spurts. I’d had those nearly mystical private moments with my mother shortly before she died; after that, I pushed my feelings down and marched forward—just as I had four years earlier, when she told me she was going in for the mastectomy.

  In September, there was a memorial at Alice Tully Hall. The audience was thrumming with emotion. Among the speakers were Mike Nichols, Steve Sondheim, Mendy, Phyllis Newman, and the host of the event: dear, chivalrous Schuyler Chapin. A performance of the slow movement from the Schubert double-cello quintet—Mummy’s favorite—wrung us out with beauty and sorrow.

  I performed a song of my own: “Pull Up Your Socks!”—the phrase my mother used on me whenever I was consumed with melodrama. I had a crushing attack of nerves, my hands trembling so intensely that I could barely pluck the strings of my guitar. Halfway through, a faulty connection in the sound system began to make a deafening crackle. I was relieved that something other than myself was messing up my performance.

  While LB dragged himself back to Europe to work with the Vienna Philharmonic, Aunt Shirley moved into the Dakota apartment so Nina wouldn’t be left alone with the grief-addled Julia. Shirley herself had become ever shriller and more demanding over the years; she wasn’t ideal company for Nina at such a delicate time. Alexander said our aunt’s multisuitcased arrival was a little like acquiring a case of poison ivy to serve as a distraction from a kidney stone. “But at least you can laugh with Shirley,” Nina said. Meanwhile, Mummy’s decorator friend Gail Jacobs, who had helped with the East Hampton house, now redesigned Mummy’s bedroom into a comfy, handsome studio for Daddy; he was keenly relieved to have his bedroom and studio next to each other again, the way they’d been in the Park Avenue apartment. Apartment 92, meanwhile, was in flux; various of Daddy’s friends and assistants came and went, pulling down the little Murphy bed.