* * *
The really big event of 1988 was LB’s seventieth birthday, on August 25. Everyone was excited about the occasion—with the exception of LB himself. He was spooked by the ancient biblical designation of “threescore and ten” as the allotted span of a man’s life. Suddenly Daddy felt old. Officially old. He hated that feeling.
Harry cooked up a mega-special: an audience-crammed, star-studded concert in the Maestro’s honor at the Tanglewood Shed, the large outdoor venue where LB himself had performed at least a hundred times since the 1940s. The event was to be broadcast live to Europe and videotaped for subsequent broadcast on PBS. Humphrey Burton, Daddy’s longtime friend and video director, pulled the whole splashy hodgepodge together.
Everyone from Slava Rostropovich to Midori to Yo-Yo Ma participated. Once again, I wrote a song for the Quartet to sing to Daddy. The last lines of “The Seven-Oh Stomp” could have been addressed to myself:
Don’t . . . you . . . wish you could do
A quarter of the things he can do?
Don’t . . . you . . . hope you’ ll have been
Half that cool by threescore and ten?
The concert was long, as such extravaganzas always are, but it was full of highlights—including Bobby McFerrin singing and chest-tapping “Somewhere” from West Side Story; and Betty Bacall, perched on an upright piano, huskily delivering a sidesplitting lyric by Steve Sondheim to a Kurt Weill tune: “Poor Lenny, ten gifts too many . . .”
The only person not having fun at the concert was Poor Lenny. To begin with, he loathed sitting passively while others made a musical fuss over him; he would have vastly preferred to be up on that stage, making music himself. But he had to sit there, acting gracious and enthusiastic throughout; the TV cameras were constantly on him, getting reaction shots. In a way, Harry had devised an exquisite torture device for his . . . client? Prisoner? Golden-egg layer?
Worse, my father had recently developed prostate problems. That night, he’d apparently taken a pill that would allow him to pee without difficulty, but it kicked in, with five-alarm urgency, right in the middle of the second act. Unable to excuse himself in the middle of the celebration in his honor, especially with all those video cameras trained on him, he had no choice but to pee, right there in his rattan seat, in the dark of the Shed. The concert concluded with that mother of all grand finales, “Make Our Garden Grow” from Candide. All the performers came downstage to sing, while LB’s years-back assistant conductor, Seiji Ozawa, conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It was a magnificent climax, and everyone was awash in emotion, but LB was also awash from the waist down. And of course he had to go up on the stage and hug everyone. On camera.
Nina, Jamie, and Betty Bacall rehearsing for Lenny’s seventieth birthday at Tanglewood.
Photograph courtesy of Christina Burton
His devoted publicist, Margaret Carson, came to the rescue, giving him her long black cashmere shawl. LB draped it around himself, went up on stage, and no one was the wiser. But when the Quartet found out about it later, we shuddered to think of the distress Daddy had endured. That was not an experience to help a person feel good about turning threescore and ten.
The next day, he didn’t get up till five, and was nearly mute with gloom as family and close friends gathered at his rented house for the birthday dinner. To cheer him up, we put a big pile of presents in front of him on the dining room table. Daddy liked presents. He began to rally a little. When at last he began festooning his big ears with some of the wrapping ribbon, as was his ancient practice, I breathed a sigh of relief; maybe he was going to be okay.
19
An Arrival
That fall, my father fell head over heels in love with a young aspiring conductor named Mark. Mark appeared frequently at the Dakota dinner table—and at the breakfast table, too. And Mark accompanied LB on tour. We weren’t sure what the excitement over this mild-mannered fellow was all about, but it was good to see Daddy animated. Everything had become such an effort for him: his breathing, his insomnia, and all the additional threescore-and-ten indignities. His belly was terribly distended, while the rest of him seemed to be collapsing in on itself.
But he pressed on, wowing his audiences, carousing with his retinue, holding forth on all his big topics: Israel (he was depressed about it), AIDS (he was depressed about it), and President Reagan (he was deeply dismayed).
My father loathed Reagan. That Christmas, he composed a song he called “Xmas Wrap,” in which he lampooned Reagan’s warmongering policies. He gathered the Quartet around the piano, slapped his new manuscript against the stand, and excitedly played us his new piece, just as in olden times. He explained that he would accompany the four of us singing it on Christmas night at the Styrons’ house in Connecticut, and then the following week, back in the city, we’d perform it with him at the annual New Year’s Eve Concert for Peace in the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine.
“Xmas Wrap” turned out to be my father’s version of a rap song. He was fascinated by hip-hop. I give him credit for intuiting a major new musical genre in the making, but the song he wrote was—how can I say this?—really square. His satire of Reagan fell a little short of hilarious, while the rhythm he’d devised was uncharacteristically leaden. He told us we were supposed to bang pots and pans to that rhythm, a notion that did not fill us with joy. The first lines already had us squirming as he played the song for us at the piano:
Hip-hop Rappaport—rap rap;
Tell me, baby, where it’s at . . .
We caught one another’s eyes in dismay. At the song’s conclusion, we were barely able to choke out the traditional “Hey, that’s great!” Did we really have to perform this song in front of the Styrons and all their friends: Mike Nichols, Arthur Miller, Mia Farrow? And then perform it again a week later, for a huge crowd of strangers? We didn’t want to let Daddy down, but—really? Our lily-white Quartet ersatz-rapping in front of a massive—and massively diverse—New York City audience? It was a horrifying prospect.
In the car on the way to the Styrons’ house, we confessed to Daddy that we had “forgotten” to bring along our music. He was furious and stung, and that made me very sad. He’d thought it would be such fun for all of us to perform his satirical rap song together. But the Quartet felt almost protective about concealing LB’s misfire. We managed to worm out of singing the song at the cathedral, as well—although he did manage to rope Michael Barrett into performing it there with him.
It’s the only composition by Leonard Bernstein that his family has ever suppressed. No, do not ask to see it.
My father’s public loathing of President Reagan was just the sort of thing that would have generated new entries in the FBI’s Leonard Bernstein file. But J. Edgar Hoover, Bernstein’s personal Javert, was no longer around, and the Freedom of Information Act now permitted citizens to examine their own FBI documents. So Daddy took a look at his.
His dossier turned out to be a staggering eight hundred pages long. J. Edgar Hoover had been obsessing on Leonard Bernstein since the 1940s, when informants started supplying insinuations that Bernstein was a Communist. My father could now read such entries as: “I know that Bernstein is a card-carrying Communist but I have no proof of it but I can tell by the way he talks.”
The file had substantially increased in girth during the Red Scare years in the 1950s, when my father had even been briefly denied a passport. In 1970, when the Black Panther business transpired, the FBI became obsessed with Leonard Bernstein all over again; Hoover was deeply paranoid about the Black Panthers. And Mass made things even worse; there it all was in the files, about President Nixon’s advisers looking into that “secret message” in Latin, designed to embarrass the president.
On Nixon’s tapes, the president’s voice can be heard reacting to H. R. Haldeman’s description of Bernstein at the curtain call of Mass, kissing the male members of the cast: “Absolutely sickening.” But Daddy was rather proud to have been referred to by President Nixon as a
“son of a bitch.”
If Nixon thought Bernstein’s curtain call kisses were sickening, he would have been freshly appalled at Bernstein’s efforts on behalf of AIDS advocacy. LB and Harry were both deeply immersed in that movement. Not only was there no cure, and no money for research, but the disease had such stigma attached to it, mainly due to its association with gay men, that President Reagan wouldn’t even acknowledge its existence in public for an infuriatingly long time. Harry told me he’d lost thirty-one friends in a single year. “Such beautiful, sweet young men. What did they ever do to anyone to deserve this?” Harry said to me in a rare moment of emotion. And among many others, my father had lost his own beloved Tommy Cothran, whose original diagnosis of lymphoma had preceded the identification of HIV. But by the time Tommy died, it was clear what had killed him.
By 1989, AIDS awareness had evolved, and my father was now participating in a big-ticket benefit at Carnegie Hall: the first Music for Life concert. David Pack was helping to coordinate the music for the event, and he invited me to cowrite a song with my father for the occasion.
LB accompanying the Quartet at the Music for Life benefit, 1989.
©Steve J. Sherman
People often asked me if I ever collaborated with my father on music, and my answer would always be a vaguely huffy no. But just around the time Pack asked me about Music for Life, the one record company that had remained interested in me—and had been stringing me along for a year—concluded its negotiations by simply going belly-up. I decided that was an excellent moment to put an end to my so-called career. I parted ways with my manager, Vince, and his colorful sweaters, and that was that.
Suddenly all the stuff I’d fretted about for so long didn’t matter at all: the comparisons, the striving for autonomy, the write-a-hit straitjacket—any of it. And so, for the first time since I was seven years old on Martha’s Vineyard, I agreed to write a song with my father.
We did it mostly over the phone, while he was vacationing down in Key West. While Julia plied Frankie with tasty food, I stretched the long, curly cord of the Dakota kitchen wall phone around the corner to the laundry room, where I hunkered over the washing machine, scribbling under the overhead fluorescent light as we talked.
On the stage of Carnegie Hall, the Quartet sang the song, accompanied by LB on piano. The pianist himself got one singing line: “Hey, what about me?” The lyrics cited the various ways family members drive one another crazy. The refrain went:
It’s written in stone and it never gets better—
It’s hard to keep a fam’ ly close together.
Mm, mm . . . close together . . .
After Christmas, my father went back to Key West. He’d fallen in love with the place: the warm weather, the picturesque streets, and the island’s lively scene of intellectual gay men. He felt unfettered there, and well attended to. While in Key West, he received a call from one David Hampton. This young man recently had been calling him back in New York, claiming to be Sidney Poitier’s son and acting wildly flirtatious on the phone. Seduced by the young man’s energy, my father took to “shrinking” him over the phone, as was his practice: asking him personal questions and drawing him out—but this time, it was the young man who was drawing in the Maestro.
It emerged that this fellow had stolen an address book from a school friend of Nina’s, and was working his way through the names. He’d eventually found his way to chatting with Leonard Bernstein over the private line at the Dakota. A few weeks later, Hampton was calling the Maestro in Key West. And how had he acquired that number? He had shown up at the Dakota, that impenetrable fortress, and talked his way upstairs; then he hung out in the kitchen all evening with Julia and Gigi, the maid. From the little round table where they sat chatting, Hampton was able to read and memorize the Key West number scribbled on a piece of paper on the wall next to the kitchen phone. So chummy did he become with Julia and Gigi that they all took pictures together in front of our Christmas tree.
This talented con artist would become, in fact, the inspiration for John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation. And now, on the phone with LB, Hampton announced that he’d arrived in Key West, and was ready to party.
Meanwhile, the parents of Nina’s school friend had caught on to the address book deception, and were urgently calling around to warn one and all about David Hampton. When the message finally filtered down to Harry in Key West, he hired detectives and bodyguards. Hampton was chased away, and eventually landed in jail. (He died a few years later, of AIDS.)
Everyone was shaken by the incident. How easily our family had been penetrated; how quick everyone had been to think the best of this attractive, well-dressed young black man. That’s what made the con so ingenious; so many families in that address book were, like ours, comprised of well-intentioned liberals who prided themselves on being compassionate, open-minded, and free of prejudice. We were all sitting ducks for that guy.
* * *
In the spring of 1989, one of the notations in my calendar was for “amnio”: I was pregnant again. I marveled at how, not so long ago, I’d thought there was something wrong with me: I had no special hankering for children; maybe I couldn’t even have them . . . and now here I was, married to David, loving our little girl, and pregnant a second time. It was the double surprise of my life. The test results revealed that a boy was on the way. Julia was euphoric, of course. Daddy named the fetus Spike.
Spike was well into his seventh month in utero when we all trooped up to Tanglewood for my father’s annual August concerts. One afternoon, my cousin Karen and I were walking together outside Daddy’s rental house when we heard him calling out to us. We turned to discover that we were standing in front of his bathroom, where the stable-door-style window was swung all the way open, revealing my father sitting in his favorite place, with a cigarette in one hand and a score in his lap. He said, to us, “I have to tell you what I just discovered about Tchaikovsky!” And for the next fifteen—no, twenty—minutes, Karen and I were pinned to the spot outside the bathroom window while he regaled us with his research and theories about Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality, mood swings, and possible suicide encouraged by his Masonic brother. My father was in the midst of a deep immersion in, and rediscovery of, the symphonies of Tchaikovsky. That weekend, he gave a mighty performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth with “the Kids,” the Tanglewood student orchestra. Listeners and critics alike remarked upon LB’s increasingly stretched-out tempos—as if he never wanted the music to end.
Competing bellies: LB with Jamie, pregnant with Evan.
His seventy-first birthday that year was a study in contrast with the year before: just a pleasant, low-key family day. We took Daddy with us to a local ski area, which in the summer months had an alpine slide. Spike did not deter me from accompanying the gang up the chairlift, then back down the mountain on the little individual sleds that skittered down a winding concrete track. My father and I had always loved rides—and I knew he’d love this one. After several euphoric slides down the mountain, we all went to the snack bar, where Daddy wolfed down hot dogs and sang songs with two-year-old Frankie.
Evan (no longer Spike once he was born) arrived on October 14, 1989. The next day, when we got home from the hospital, Daddy, Harry, and Margaret Carson came over, brown bag of Ballantine’s scotch in hand, to meet the new Bernstein boy. I put one-day-old Evan in his grandfather’s lap, whereupon Daddy dipped his pinky into his glass of scotch and then popped his boozy finger right into Evan’s mouth. “Daddy!” I yelled, horrified. “He’s a newborn! That’s unsanitary!” As with Frankie and the clam, there were no ill effects within the magic Daddy circle. He wrinkled his nose at me: “That’s unsanitary,” he mimicked.
Two months later, LB was in London to conduct a concert version of his beloved, troubled show Candide. There had been so many versions of Candide over the years; songs, lyrics, dialogue, characters, and narrators came and went from production to production—and at one point Lillian Hellman, the originator
of the project, had been in such high dudgeon over all the transmogrifications that she demanded her name be taken off the work henceforward. That was so Lillian: self-defeatingly pure of purpose—too pure, above all, for the nasty, fly-by-night world of musical theater biz.
LB had liked a recent version of Candide that his conductor pal John Mauceri helped devise at the Scottish Opera, with Hugh Wheeler’s book judiciously expanded by codirectors Jonathan Miller and John Wells. This version had a clever, coherent narration, and managed to include so much of the glorious score that LB chose this one to conduct in concert form at the Barbican Centre, with the London Symphony Orchestra and big-time opera singers—“luxury casting,” as Humphrey Burton called it—including Christa Ludwig as the Old Lady and rising opera stars June Anderson as Cunegonde and Jerry Hadley as Candide. Not only was it the first time the composer had ever conducted his show; it would, in effect, be LB’s definitive statement on how he’d like Candide to sound and be. The performance would also be making the case—as the composer had done for his West Side Story five years back—that the work was equally comfortable in a concert hall, an opera house, or a Broadway stage.
“That’s unsanitary.” LB holding newborn Evan.
Daddy invited all three (four) of us kids to join him, as he so often did—but this time, we all declined. My own substantial excuse was that it was very hard to travel with an infant barely two months old. But the truth was, I just couldn’t take the entourage anymore. In fact, all three (four) of us were feeling burned out by the scene on the road. The adulation and postconcert carryings-on seemed to grow somehow louder and more frenetic even as my father grew older and weaker. It was too hard to watch, too high a price to pay—even for the glory of the music. So we stayed away this time. Now we wish we hadn’t.
Famous Father Girl Page 25
