Famous Father Girl

by Jamie Bernstein

  On the other hand, how could I have dared to second-guess my professional production team when I was, let’s face it, such an amateur? Yeah: I had it coming, all right. I knew I would suck. I knew I couldn’t write-a-hit. Elf’s thread spun its toxic shroud.

  I wondered: Did Daddy, too, struggle with elf’s thread after he got bad reviews for his compositions? The ambivalent reception for Mass. The debacle of 1600. The Gordian knot of A Quiet Place. I knew it had to hurt. But he, at least, had the constant healing balm of his concert audiences, with their euphoric ovations, their tears and flowers—especially in Europe. No wonder Daddy couldn’t cut down on his conducting. That was a more potent painkiller than any drug—far better, in fact, because the high came from the gratifying and universally celebrated act of sharing something beautiful with others. He wasn’t called a “conductor” for nothing: the energy—music, sublimity, love—traveled through him in a magical circuit from the players to the listeners and back around again. What activity could be more healing—and more addictive?

  I never grieved properly over the death of my record. First I was numb, then relieved. Now I could turn my attentions wholly on my husband, David; he would be my healing balm. Maybe I could even get pregnant. “Fuck ’em,” I wrote to Ann. “There’s more than one way to get something made around here.”

  18

  Forward Motion

  The fix was in; it had always been in; my existence as a musician was built to self-destruct. And it was just as well: making music was the one activity that reliably gave me that grisly old Stupid Idiot feeling.

  I felt I was missing some crucial resource. I called it the Golden Blind Spot: the ability of creative artists to suspend judgment, even common sense, to believe that what they were creating was earthshaking—and to believe it long enough to allow them to complete their creation. I felt mired in gray reality as I struggled on the guitar or the keyboard, writing my songs. The little voice in my head almost never shut up: You’re wasting your time. Clearly my father had a Golden Blind Spot. Where was mine?

  Only one way of making music had stayed fun: oddly enough, I still enjoyed cooking up songs in honor of Daddy himself, songs I could sing to him in the company of my siblings—and now also David. Maybe the built-in guarantee of my father loving anything his daughter made for him erased my need for a Golden Blind Spot.

  LB was to be promoted to Commandeur de la Légion d’honneur by the French government in Paris, and his assistant conductor, Michael Barrett, was coordinating the celebratory concert. Michael suggested that as a surprise, maybe I could write something for David, Nina, Alexander, and me to sing. I instantly knew what I wanted to do.

  Over the following weeks, I devised “The Maestro Suite”: four little a capella songs in four-part harmony. My lyrics were full of in-jokes that I knew my father would love. Writing out the music was a grisly business: my dyslexia for musical notation, combined with my thrice-erased child’s scrawl, made every bar a humiliating torture. But I kept at it.

  With David’s help, I recorded the four vocal parts on my four-track tape recorder. Then I created individualized practice cassettes for each of us. I drilled everyone shamelessly. Where had all this assertiveness been when I was making my record?

  With David’s true-blue tenor turning the sibling trio into a sturdy quartet, we went to Paris and gave a fine rendition of “The Maestro Suite.” The Maestro hugged us black and blue. It was gratifying to have devised a way for all four of us “kids” to express our love to our father, who’d become so difficult to love so much of the time.

  He returned from his next long tour thoroughly worn out as usual, but I found myself worrying about him in a new way. I knew how his road life was: in addition to the hard work and relentless travel, he was staying up all night, drinking to excess, pills to sleep, pills to wake up—the usual. But he was older now; it was harder for his body to recover. He was increasingly exhausted and irritable. More and more, he was reminding me of his own description of God that began the narration to his Kaddish Symphony:

  . . . ancient, hallowed,

  Lonely, disappointed Father:

  Betrayed and rejected Ruler of the Universe,

  Angry, wrinkled Old Majesty . . .

  Now that my father was home, his plan, as usual, was to get back to composing. His composing periods were hard-won glades of cleared calendar between conducting jobs. But the older he became, the harder it was for him to switch gears from conducting to composing.

  The Maestro would come off the road, manic and drenched in adulation, to find himself at the dinner table with his family. Unlike his fans and acolytes, this crowd was not hanging on his every word and triumphant exploit. We almost felt it was our job to interrupt him, to remind him he was a mortal like the rest of us. He knew it was for his own good, but he’d soon grow irritated. “Everyone shut up but me!” he’d yell, pounding the table. He rattled the silverware, but not us.

  Most difficult of all for him was the shift from being constantly surrounded by people while on tour—the orchestra, the entourage, the fans, the patrons, the journalists, the friends, the lovers—to being all alone at his piano, facing a blank sheet of manuscript paper. For my father, that was the most naked horror of all. He hated the lonely, tortured process of composing. Yet it was what he aspired to most—and at some point, despite all the obstacles he put in his own way, he would eventually creep to the piano at some godforsaken hour and wrestle new notes out of the void. This usually started happening after being home for about six weeks—which was just about the time he was scheduled to go back on the road.

  By the following summer, LB was acting so demanding and imperious that one night, apropos of some minor altercation, Harry suddenly decided he’d had enough—and quit.

  Harry quit! At home, we were gleeful but anxious about Harry’s exit, as if the teacher had abruptly abandoned the homeroom: Now what would we do?

  LB and the New York Philharmonic went off on their US tour, with Margaret Carson, his PR stalwart, filling in for Harry. One of the tour pieces was Tchaikovsky’s Sixth; Daddy made up a new lyric for the famous march tune in the penultimate movement: “I’m gon-na quit like Har-reee . . .” And sometimes he did feel like quitting. Alexander told me about sitting next to Daddy as he looked through the sheaves of schedules Harry had prepared, some running as far as five years in advance. Daddy pushed them all away with a grimace. “I’m so sick of Leonard Bernstein,” he said.

  But the quitting crisis didn’t last long. Amberson, the large, complex machine that Harry had built up for fifteen years, couldn’t run without him at the controls. And LB could no longer run his life without Harry. And Harry, of course, had by then devoted his entire existence to Leonard Bernstein. Was it a business relationship, a love obsession, or an evil manipulation? There was no way to figure out any of it. But they all needed one another: Daddy, Harry, and Amberson. Within a month or two, manager and client patched up whatever their disagreement was, and the three-way symbiosis reasserted itself.

  By this time, my father had become like an intensely tended-to queen bee, unable to move around on his own anymore. Oh, he’s so coddled and insulated, I would think contemptuously; he probably couldn’t walk down 72nd Street to buy himself a pair of shoelaces. And then, a moment later, I’d realize the more likely outcome: he’d stroll guilelessly down the block, make friends on the way with five doormen, a couple of cops, and a dozen old ladies—and wind up with six pairs of shoelaces, presented to the beloved Maestro for free.

  The Maestro persisted daily in bossing everyone around, roaring at people over the phone, sleeping till five p.m. But there were glades of jollity, usually on the weekends in Fairfield. Shirley, who was almost always along, was a reliable source of mirth. It helped that she and David adored each other. Was it just me, or was David’s presence improving the family experience for everyone?

  Shirley had taken over my old bedroom across the hall from my father’s. Late at night, the two of them coul
d be found on her bed or his, working side by side on their tricky British crossword puzzles, wreathed in cigarette smoke, chortling in Rybernian—as comfortable and intimate as two siblings could ever be. Shirley, it seemed, had finally achieved her lifelong wish: in their sixties, one widowed and one unmarried, the brother and sister were life companions at last (at least whenever the brother didn’t bring his latest lover along).

  On those Fairfield weekends, David and I occupied whichever bedroom was available. Sometimes there wasn’t one available at all. One family-filled night, we even slept in the back of the station wagon. What were we going to do if we had a kid . . . ?

  Wait—not if: when. I was pregnant.

  * * *

  At five a.m. on March 4, 1987, after a long, agonizing labor, my daughter, Frankie, was born, with a perfectly round head under a thatch of dark brown hair. When it was all over, David brought me a fried-egg sandwich: the single greatest meal of my life.

  The family came down to the hospital to meet Frankie that evening. I was tired and very sore, but thrilled to be providing everyone with this grand event. My father’s kisses were sloppier and more embarrassingly ardent than ever, but I had to admit: it was quite a kick to have presented Daddy with a granddaughter.

  After they all left, I leaned back in my hospital bed with my arms behind my head and permitted myself one delicious moment of repose: I didduhtt.

  If only Mummy could have been there . . . I remembered her stories about giving birth to me: how she’d taken Lamaze classes for natural childbirth, then became so overwhelmed with the pain of labor that she’d yelled for the gas, swearing like a sailor. Afterward, hordes of well-wishers crammed into her hospital room, where she lay groggily as they swilled booze, smoked cigarettes, and ordered—yes—room service.

  Frankie was barely three months old when we took her along to Rome, where Daddy was conducting Puccini’s opera La Bohème with a young, all-American cast. He fed Frankie a clam out of his pasta. I was aghast: A clam? She wasn’t even eating solid food yet! But even in Rome, we remained inside the Daddy magic circle: a place where it never rained on outdoor concerts, speeding tickets never got doled out, and food was never poison. So Frankie was fine.

  I was so besotted with the marvel of her; I could not begin to express what happened to me when I smelled the top of her head, listened to her milky whimpers, held her dumpling foot in the hollow of my hand. All I could do was clutch the deep feelings to myself, and love my intense, blue-eyed little girl with a secret, speechless ardor. It was even more than I could share with David.

  I continued making underslept, half-hearted attempts to revive “my so-called career,” as I called it. After the Island Records debacle, I pursued new record company leads with my manager, Vince, but there was little momentum. As for the songwriting itself: after my friend Susanna lost the red-beamed studio on Jones Street, my father invited me to move my songwriting gear into apartment 92, under the rooftop gables of the Dakota. Since his studio was now downstairs, apartment 92 was a place in need of a purpose. So I went up there in my Frankie-free moments—but barely a song came out.

  Sitting on the window seat, with Central Park stretched out below me like a fairy-tale kingdom, I felt perched on the pinnacle of an unearned glory: a magnificent nothingness. I’d have been more ashamed of my low productivity if I weren’t simply so sleepy. One day when Frankie was about seven months old, I was staggering around the Dakota kitchen downstairs, making her dinner. While something was heating up on the stove, I fastened the bib around her neck. “Oh, am I having dinner, too?” Nina asked. I’d put the bib on my twenty-five-year-old sister.

  But one memory from that time remains clear.

  We got a memo from Harry, explaining that a lady named Joan Peyser was writing a book about Leonard Bernstein, and that she would be reaching out to all of us for interviews, and that while this was not exactly an “authorized” biography, we should nevertheless strive to be polite, responsive, and . . . Well, Harry’s language was so perplexingly circuitous that I got the impression we should actively cooperate. So when Ms. Peyser snagged me at some event and asked if she could talk to my siblings and me, I agreed to round everyone up. And we all went, David included, to Joan Peyser’s house one evening for drinks.

  She had a lovely town house down on Charlton Street, and was awaiting us wearing a cheerful pink caftan. There was an array of yummy snacks on her coffee table—deviled eggs!—and every sort of alcoholic beverage on offer. Like the wicked witch in “Hansel and Gretel,” she was fattening us up for the kill. After about an hour of pleasant questions, when we were all nicely soft and tipsy, she sprang her trap: “So, about your father’s homosexuality . . .”

  We were caught off guard, but really, it wasn’t all that terrible. Over a decade had passed since the worst of the troubles; by now, this was a topic the three of us freely discussed among ourselves, and we really had nothing to hide. Yes, he was gay. Yes, he had lovers. Yes, we were a family that still hugged and laughed and clung to one another. Any other questions?

  But once we were out on the street, we gasped to realize how we’d been snookered: how the wicked witch in the pink caftan had plied us with liquor and then pounced.

  We put the experience out of our minds, and time passed. Then Joan Peyser’s book came out: it was loathsome, prurient, tabloidy stuff. She’d managed to extract a lot of gay gossip from “friends” of Daddy’s from his past, including some composers he’d helped, who might have been more gracious. I read the book backward, so as not to ingest it too thoroughly. One thing was clear: Leonard Bernstein had become a Controversial Person—a long, complex evolution from his wunderkind public persona of the 1950s.

  And what about Grandma: Did she read the book?! Harry had gone to some trouble to make sure she didn’t see it, but apparently a friend of hers read her a few passages. Grandma must have been upset, yet strangely, no one seems to remember what her reaction was. I’m guessing her motherly powers of denial were prodigious.

  The one person who definitely did not read Peyser’s book was Daddy himself. He promised Alexander, Nina, and me “on bended knee” that he never would. The book got mixed reviews and was briefly on the best-seller list, then disappeared. LB managed to avoid most of the blowback by being in Europe, where nearly all his work took place by then. Life went on, but we never did understand why Harry had encouraged Joan Peyser at all. It seemed a high price to pay for a little publicity.

  Around that time, there was a premiere of a new LB piece: a song cycle called Arias and Barcarolles. The title was a quote from, of all people, President Dwight D. Eisenhower. As my father told the story (and he loved telling it), he and members of the New York Philharmonic had just performed at the White House for President and Mrs. Eisenhower, back in the 1950s. After the concert, the president and his wife offered the musicians tea and cake. It was a decidedly stiff gathering; everyone was longing for something stronger than tea. The president said to my father, “I liked that last piece you played. It had a theme.”

  A theme? My father hadn’t the faintest idea what the president meant. But he gamely tried a response. “Oh—I think I understand what you mean; you mean it had . . . a beat?” President Eisenhower replied testily: “No, I mean a THEME. Not like all them arias and barcarolles!”

  Them arias and . . . barcarolles? Did the president even know a barcarolle was a song sung by Venetian gondoliers? What in the world was he talking about?!

  Every time my father recounted this story, he would describe how, at the moment of Eisenhower’s gnomic utterance, the teacups rattled on their saucers as the Philharmonic musicians tried to maintain their composure.

  Three decades later, President Eisenhower’s phrase became the title of LB’s song cycle. The piece was designed for four voices and four-hands piano—in the style of Brahms’s Liebeslieder Waltzes. The first performance, in the spring of 1988, was part of a memorial concert for Jack Romann of Baldwin Pianos, a generous gentleman who had died of A
IDS. LB, along with his friend and younger colleague Michael Tilson Thomas, accompanied the four singers. The subject matter was love: all kinds. Most of the texts were by LB himself, but one was by a Yiddish poet, describing a demonically brilliant fiddler who played at the poet’s wedding. I suspected that the description of the scruffy musician whose maniacal brilliance gave the poet a near nervous breakdown was, for my father, a kind of mirror fantasy.

  Another text, “Little Smary,” was a bedtime story Grandma made up that her son would beg her to tell him over and over when he was little. (Daddy made sure Grandma got an ASCAP credit for her “lyric.”) Much of the music was in LB’s later, thorny idiom, and his words, too, were challenging in a number of ways. Alexander, Nina, and I squirmed to hear the text of “The Love of My Life,” which featured the line “Tit . . . come . . .” The very clever song “Love Duet” also had some lines that made us uncomfortable:

  She: What do you think of triads?

  He: Triads be real relaxin’ . . .

  She: What’s with this sudden accen’ . . . ?

  He: Jesse . . . Jackson . . .

  At the time, I couldn’t relate much to Arias and Barcarolles. Now, all these decades later, it strikes me as one of my father’s most mature and nuanced pieces: wry and touching and full of delightful surprises—“Tit . . . come” and Ebonics notwithstanding. All I remember from that first performance, though, is my worry about how late it was getting, and how I had to relieve Julia from looking after Frankie.

  Grandma Jennie with Jamie and David at Tanglewood, 1988.

  Photograph courtesy of Christina Burton

  There was a recording made of the piece later that year, in a new version for two singers. One afternoon, Michael Barrett and his colleague Steven Blier, the two pianists on the recording, arrived at the Dakota with the singers, Judy Kaye and William Sharp, for the CD cover photo session with the Maestro—who was still fast asleep. The group waited several hours. At last he showed up, rumpled and ashen, in his scratchy old bathrobe. And that is precisely how he appears on the cover of the CD.