At such moments, Nina, Alexander, and I would find ourselves thinking the thought we tried not to have: how Mummy would react if she could see the way Daddy was now. She had been such a stabilizing force in his life; now, in her absence, he was a wild child. It had certainly been difficult for both of them. On the one hand, Lenny needed Felicia’s steadying influence: needed a Mrs. Maestro, as well as someone to tell him not to wear the flocked orange sweater. On the other hand, Lenny needed his other life; he wasn’t entirely alive without it, and in the end he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, suppress it. Felicia found herself forced into the role of an angry scold—and that wasn’t fun for either one of them. And of course, there was her terrible curse at the dinner table, the year before she died.
The thing of it was, they’d really loved each other. Maybe that explains why Mummy put up with Daddy’s stifling attentions as he stretched himself out next to her on her sickbed. And maybe that explains why, in Munich four years later, LB required his scotch, his multicolored pills, and an entourage filling an entire swimming pool at the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten to suppress the very same thought that Alexander, Nina, and I couldn’t help having.
And maybe even that wasn’t enough. A few years later, LB dedicated his recording of the Mozart Requiem to his late wife—the very piece he’d insisted on everyone listening to at her funeral Mass in East Hampton. For the album cover, he selected an image of Felicia Montealegre herself, engulfed in a backdrop of flames: the very same photo Alexander and I had obsessed over as kids. Our mother had once written to her future husband: “I am willing to accept you as you are, without being a martyr and sacrificing myself on the L.B. altar.” But the truth was, she had done exactly that; the role of Joan of Arc was all too apt.
Felicia as Joan of Arc on the cover of Lenny’s Mozart Requiem.
© Deutsche Grammophon
I felt my mother’s absence on my thirtieth birthday like an invisible bruise.
* * *
Stephen and LB began workshopping parts of A Quiet Place in New York. I heard Act 1 of the opera for the first time in a rehearsal room at the Juilliard School. That whole first act took place at Dinah’s funeral, where the freshly bereaved Sam encounters his two estranged children, Junior and Dede, and their mutual lover, François, who have all just driven down from Canada. LB’s jaggedly atonal music made an eerie blend with Stephen’s idiomatic dialogue, peppered with “ums” and “I means.” There were some funny bits, but overall the act was dense, dark, and difficult.
Junior, psychotic and disjointed, makes a disruptive late entrance to the funeral, then sings a truly disturbing striptease number: “Hey, Big Daddy, you’re driving me batty . . .” Old Sam, silent through most of the act, at last growls, “You’re late . . . you shouldn’t have come”—which turns into a hair-raising aria of bitter rage at his children. I couldn’t help but wonder to what extent the words that came spitting out of Sam’s mouth reflected any of my father’s genuine emotions:
None of us can talk to anyone. Not even now . . .
It makes me angry (and guilty) and plenty angry.
(Frightened!) You demean your mother . . .
I could hate you. I fight not to feel it.
At the end of the act, everyone has left the funeral home except Junior, who grieves silently over his mother’s coffin, to music so beautiful, so unbearably sad, that I was shaken to my bones.
The plot was disguised, but the pain rang true: all my father’s own mad, complicated despair—maybe even beyond what I knew about—was devastatingly manifest in his notes. Whatever would the world make of all this? It was tough stuff; I could barely take it myself, and this was only Act 1.
That same spring, an article appeared in Harper’s Magazine called “The Tragedy of Leonard Bernstein.” Written by Leon Botstein, a conductor and the president of Bard College, it was a deeply dismissive analysis of Bernstein’s unrealized potential, couched in an erudite, sneering tone that made me want to hurl the magazine across the room. I hoped my father never read it, but I heard that he did. “What did I ever do to him?” my father reportedly said.
Botstein pronounced Bernstein’s orchestral works “fatuous and bombastic,” the first two symphonies “static and dull.” He declared Mass to be “endless and flat-footed,” and West Side Story “a decorative, condescending urban version of Romeo and Juliet.”
I gasped to read: “Bernstein’s Mahler readings are some of his worst.” Who was this Botstein guy?
I squirmed and swore as I read the article. But some of what Botstein wrote was accurate—and it was the accuracy that was most upsetting of all. He was onto something, I had to admit, when he referred to “Bernstein’s need for adulation, for instant and perpetual acclaim.” And I cringed to read of “a haze of decadence and mental drowsiness, a mind exhausted by exposure, excessive fame, and wealth.” What Botstein had omitted from that list of mind exhausters were the scotch and prescription pills.
To conclude the article, Botstein quoted Gustav Mahler himself—“You must renounce all superficiality, all convention, all vanity and delusion . . .”—and then Botstein hammered his final nail halfway into the coffin: “It is not too late.”
So, what with one thing and another, a great deal was riding on A Quiet Place; we all felt it, and we knew Daddy did, too.
At least he was making progress on his opera; by contrast, I had precious little to show for myself. David Pack and I were sure Warner Bros. would snap up our new demo tape—but they didn’t. “Too Broadway,” was the latest aperçu.
Pack said I had to find a manager. I repeatedly underwent the grisly experience of sitting across from a prospective manager, keeping my body still and my face impassive while he or she listened to my demo tape—and then delivered a verdict to my face. “Unshoppable,” one manager declared.
In the week before the Houston Grand Opera premiere of A Quiet Place, Alexander, Nina, and I rented a car in LA and drove together to Houston, going through canyon country in Arizona, mountains in New Mexico, down to Carlsbad Caverns, across Texas Hill Country. We stayed in poky motels, smoked bales of pot, laughed ourselves into fits. It was the true forging of the entity we eventually dubbed the Three-Headed Monster.
The Maestro’s children made a stylish landing at the Four Seasons Hotel in Houston: three grimy, disheveled (and stoned) siblings in a dust ball of a car littered with four days’ worth of travel debris. The liveried doormen collected our crumpled napkins and soda cans with majestic solemnity. We were escorted to our very own spacious suite, a designerly fantasy in taupe and chrome. Also, the hotel had a big, big rooftop pool. Let the entourageousness begin.
Between the rehearsals and run-throughs we attended, there was a great deal of downtime. We spent it by that rooftop pool, with the ever-increasing numbers of friends, family, and hangers-on who were descending on Houston for the big premiere. The drinking began before lunch. We didn’t see much of LB; he was working hard, surrounded by a humming cloud of colleagues and assistants.
Everyone working on the opera was in a dither. The director, Peter Mark Schifter, had made some choices that particularly baffled and alarmed Stephen, who was himself an opera director. At one point Stephen even tried to write furtive notes directly to the singers. LB saw the typewriter being delivered to Stephen’s room and put a stop to it. The director is the director, he told Stephen; you have to let him do his job.
But the directorial choices being made by “Schifty Pete,” as LB and Stephen dubbed him, were unpopular with others, as well. For example, while the Trouble in Tahiti trio sang about the joys of suburbia (the older opera would open the evening), a surreal parade of actual, full-sized appliances was to float across the stage on a conveyor belt. The parade lasted all of thirty seconds—but in order to create the effect, a team of burly stagehands off stage right had to lift washing machines, hi-fi consoles, and refrigerators onto the belt, one after the other, while a second team of stagehands had to haul them all off into the wings on the other sid
e. No, the stagehands did not love Schifty Pete.
There was a bit of socializing with some culture-minded Houstonians. Lynn Wyatt, the blond, vivacious wife of an oil tycoon, took a shine to my brother: “Oh, Alex-AYN-dah, you’re abso-LEWT-ly di-VAHN!” Nina and I took every opportunity to reiterate that tender sentiment in our brother’s presence.
Opening night arrived, with its queasy combination of anticipation and outright dread. Alexander, Nina, and I doubled down on our preperformance ritual of kissing both sides of a good-luck penny, then giving it to our father to keep in his pocket; this time, we taped three pennies to a postcard we’d picked up on the road, and lovingly misquoted Junior’s “Hey, Big Daddy” aria: “You’re driving us gladdy!”
The three of us clung to one another in the vast, russet-colored opera house; the occasion seemed to be reopening our collective scar tissue from the 1600 premiere. We loved this music; we knew every note; we wanted the world to love it, too. But we were worried. Maybe the Houston audience wasn’t the ideal testing ground for this thorny, profane piece.
The performance began well enough with the older work, Trouble in Tahiti. The jazzy, tuneful music, complete with soaring arias and the showstopping “What a Movie!” was a natural audience-pleaser. The intermission buzz seemed positive.
Good luck postcard and pennies.
Library of Congress, Music Division
Then Act 2 began—that is, all of the new material: two-plus hours of it, presented in one long intermissionless blob that began with that forty-five-minute funeral scene, bristling with new characters and dense, overlapping twelve-tone verbiage. And then, with barely a pause, a scene with old Sam and daughter Dede rereading Dinah’s diary on stage right; meanwhile on stage left, Junior has a crazed panic attack while his lover, François, tries to calm him down, partially in French. Torrents of words and plot points and obscenities and complex four-part singing. And then, still with no break, the final scene in the garden the following morning. I fervently hoped the audience around me was noticing the heartbreaking beauty of Dede’s opening aria, “Mommy, Are You There?” The daughter singing to her dead mother in the neglected garden always made me cry. But I feared the audience’s memory of that aria might have been elbowed aside by the fast-paced multiple singing and plot complexity that followed, including something about a gun that had appeared in the previous act and reappeared in the final act but was never fired, violating one of the hallowed tenets of dramaturgy . . . but that was the least of it. I stewed in my worry: Were the people around me missing crucial sung dialogue? Were the Houstonians appalled by Junior’s aria that hinted at incest? Were they distracted by the gun thing and didn’t notice how beautiful—beautiful—the final music was? It was beautiful music, but it sure wasn’t West Side Story or On the Town. LB was now using his mature musical vocabulary: confrontational, prickly, challenging—especially in contrast to the ear-pleasing Trouble in Tahiti at the beginning. I fretted: What if the audience felt they’d been served a slice of chocolate cake, only to have it followed by three heaping tablespoons of cod-liver oil?
Still, it was a premiere, and the audience was appreciative enough, providing standing ovations for the many bows. Afterward, there was an elaborate dinner for the bejeweled patrons and donors, the principal cast, the authors, and all the copious entourage. We dove gratefully into our wine.
Eventually it was LB’s turn to go up to the microphone and say a few gracious remarks, as one does at an opening. “I never imagined,” he began, “that my little opera would be born in this cow town!”
The Three-Headed Monster howled the loudest. “I mean, former! Former cow town!” LB yelled over the pandemonium. Waiter, more wine, please! And could you just hand it to us down here under the table?
The reviews of the opera came dribbling in. There were a couple of good ones—Leighton Kerner in the Village Voice wrote of “the birth of a powerful new opera”—but the scorn drowned out the praise. Alan Rich in Newsweek bemoaned the opera’s “dreary psychological quagmire.” Donal Henahan in the New York Times pronounced the work “as hollow and faddish as Mass.” Double ouch.
All that work, all that anticipation, all that pressure on Daddy to have a success this time around. I felt sick at heart for him. Yet again.
But already his conductor friend John Mauceri (who had conducted the Mass I was in two years earlier) was initiating discussions with the authors about restructuring the opera for its upcoming performances at La Scala and the Kennedy Center. Out of these conversations came the idea of inserting T in T into the middle of the opera, as a flashback. And the opera would now have three acts; the audience would no longer be pinned to their seats for two unbroken hours. It was a little wacky, but at least the creative team was moving forward, not moping around. (And it did turn out to be a significant improvement.)
Meanwhile, I went back to my life: more demo tapes, more East-West shuffle, no manager, no record deal—and no serious boyfriend. (Brian and I had parted as friends.)
My friend Marjorie had an expression for a certain kind of high-strung, intense Semitic guy, of which her husband, Elliott, was one: an “electric Jew.” I had begun to detect that I was repeatedly attracted to—and entangled with—electric Jews. Nick-oh-Nick had been but one of them.
My father, of course, was the electric-est Jew of them all. “A man with a motor,” as Mummy had said long ago. Maybe I was making a mistake even to be looking for a comparable motor.
Was I going to end up like my aunt Shirley, who was never able to find anyone who measured up? She’d remained single—and childless—all her life. My grandmother once said about her daughter, Shirley, “She missed the boat.” I remember my mother being outraged by that comment. “How can she say such a thing?” Mummy huffed. “Doesn’t she realize that a woman is free to choose a career instead of a family?” That was the modern thinking. But here I was, over thirty, with no momentum in either direction. I wasn’t on any boat at all.
17
Redding, Wecord, and What Was in Between
After four years of hunting for a manager, I finally found one—not in LA but in New York City. Vince had a big friendly smile and was fond of colorful sweaters. Now I had someone actively helping me to shop around my demo tapes. Heartbreakingly, David Geffen declined; he didn’t like my voice. Neither did I much, frankly. But there were genuine stirrings of interest from Island Records, a company based, like Vince, in New York.
The gravity seemed to be shifting back East. The David Pack demos and connections had not borne any local fruit—and as it was, I was ambivalent about the whole LA pop music sensibility. So I set my sights on moving back to New York.
My friend Susanna Styron (Bill and Rose’s daughter) had a little studio apartment on Jones Street in the Village, which I’d actually helped her move into back in 1977. Together we’d painted the ceiling beams a handsome red. Now Susanna needed to move to LA for her filmmaking career, so we agreed to swap living situations: she’d live in my old room at Marjorie and Elliott’s, while I would live on Jones Street, under the ruby red beams.
But before I left Venice, I had a couple of houseguests: David Thomas and our mutual friend Chuck were coming to California for a vacation. David and I had barely communicated since that intense handful of days in Chicago. When the friends arrived, I boldly announced to David that he’d be staying with me in my room, and what did he think of that. He was fine with the arrangement, and David and I picked up our romance precisely where we’d left it off four years earlier. Late at night, joking around about how well we got along, David said, “Let’s get married.” “Okay,” I said. “Okay,” he said. We smiled into the dark.
Not only was David Thomas in LA; so was my father, once again doing his thing with the LA Philharmonic Institute. At the big dinner my father arranged for us all in Santa Monica, I noticed how singularly relaxed David was in Daddy’s presence. He was up for all the verbal jousting, the musical references, the jokes, the silliness—but there was a gentl
eness, a relaxed good cheer to David; he wasn’t an electric Jew at all, and it was a relief. I could tell my father thought David was terrific. Nina liked him a lot, too, which was no small thing. The pleasure all this gave me was so profound, it felt like the solution to some ancient inner puzzle.
* * *
In New York that fall, as my record deal with Island inched toward reality, I was under enormous pressure, above all else, to write a hit. I got an upright piano moved into the Jones Street studio, got my TEAC four-track tape recorder all set up—yet all I could do was moon over David Thomas, who was still living in Chicago. I found myself fantasizing about marriage, maybe even children. Children? I’d never had such maternal longings before.
Part of the explanation was undoubtedly the simple fact of my being thirty-one, and finding myself newly drawn to some of the more traditional ideas of adulthood than to the—let’s face it—puerile notion of being a rock star. But the star-maker machinery, as Joni Mitchell called it, was kicking in at last; wasn’t this what I’d always wanted?
Although David Thomas was in the film-rights business, he was quite an accomplished musician. He’d sung in the Harvard Glee Club; he played the piano beautifully; he could sight-read like the wind—yet he described himself as a dilettante. That made me wince. If David was a dilettante, what did that make me, a dodo?
Sure, I was musical, but I really was a very poor musician. I had no “chops.” And why did I have no chops? Because practicing was so painful. And why was practicing so painful? Because I couldn’t bear to compete. Yet I couldn’t stop competing. It was more exhausting than ever, this combination of craving success and feeling undeserving of success. The old one-foot-on-the-gas, other-foot-on-the-brake.
My New York music attorney was a very tall electric Jew with aviator glasses and a brusque my-meter-is-running manner. He always left me feeling particularly small and foolish. He teased me over lunch when I was too timid to complain to the waiter that the cream cheese on my bagel was speckled with an orange mold. But my attorney was right: I was such a weenie about everything. How was I ever going to be assertive enough to make a damn record?
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