Famous Father Girl

by Jamie Bernstein

  Luckily, my father had Adolph Green along; his old pal was to play the part of Pangloss in the concert—an inspired piece of casting. Adolph could always bring a smile to my father’s face, with his perfectly recalled obscure musical references or entire movie scenes quoted from memory. A combination of court jester and zany genius, Adolph was one of the very few people in the world who had known Lenny since his teenaged camp-counselor days. Adolph knew exactly who Lenny Bernstein really was, under that calcified, complicated exterior. Toward the end, few knew the real Lenny—maybe not even Lenny himself—but Lenny felt the goodness of keeping Adolph close. And now they had this rare and delicious performing opportunity together, so late in both their lives. The pair of concerts were a great success, even though Daddy’s tempos were stretched out almost to the breaking point. When it came to his own music, he really didn’t want it to end.

  Then, still suffering from “the Royal Flu” that had seized the entire cast as well as Queen Elizabeth herself, LB flew directly from London to Berlin, where he would take part in one of the truly momentous events in his lifetime: the pulling down of the Berlin Wall. After all the decades of Soviet rule, my father could hardly believe he was witnessing the disintegration of that once immutable oppressor.

  The occasion gave rise to the ultimate—and most meaningful—of all Harry Specials. LB conducted a mighty ensemble comprising players volunteering from various orchestras around the world who, along with four soloists and a local girls’ chorus, gave a pair of performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: one in East Berlin and one in West Berlin. And to make the performances extra-historic, LB changed Schiller’s text in the final “Ode to Joy” movement: now it was “Ode to Freedom.” “Freiheit!” The word rang out again and again, wreathed in Beethoven’s harmonies, and the whole world watched it on television on Christmas Day.

  Which is exactly how I watched it.

  I’m sorry now that I didn’t go to Berlin: what a moment to have missed. Certainly for Daddy, it was the pinnacle of his own lifelong advocacy for world peace and brotherhood—never more eloquently expressed, and never to so many, than through Beethoven’s notes in that historic Christmas performance. It may have been his peak performing experience; I wish I’d been there to share it with him. I watched the concert in Fairfield, lying lengthwise on the velvety brown corduroy couch that Mummy had originally bought for the East Hampton house. As Evan alternately nursed and napped alongside me, I couldn’t help thinking how grateful I was to be supine, in my sweatpants, with my tiny, beautiful boy—and not in Berlin, suffering the multiple punishments of jet lag, panty hose, entourage gridlock, and small talk with dignitaries. Lying on that couch felt like being swallowed by a great, soft beast; in my half slumber, “Freiheit” in Berlin seemed magnificent and very, very far away.

  When Daddy got back, he presented us all with chunks of the Berlin Wall that he’d chipped off himself. Then he hightailed it to Key West to recover his health.

  He didn’t recover it.

  20

  A Departure

  LB and Frankie have bath time fun in Inky West.

  With David and our two small children, I went down to “Inky West,” as Frankie called it, to spend a few days with Daddy. He was gray, shrunken, still coughing explosively. On the bright side, he was in love—again. Now he was sharing music, poetry, and passion with a brand-new guy; my father called him by his initials, MAT. Mat was a young Democratic speechwriter from Alabama, and he was very, very tall. I inadvertently walked in on the two of them kissing on the living room couch, like high school sweethearts. They sure did make an odd couple: the lanky young southerner and the wizened, white-haired old man cuddled up next to him. My father wasn’t really that old—only seventy-one. But all those decades of living at maximum volume appeared to be catching up with him at last; he seemed newly frail. And yet there he was, in love like a teenager.

  A fortune-teller in Key West told my father, “You ain’t gonna die no time soon.” Daddy recounted this to everybody. But really, he wasn’t well. I spotted a long list of complaints he’d scribbled onto some notepaper next to his bed: items to discuss with his doctor back in New York. But this was nothing new; he often wasn’t well; he was always going to the doctor. Wasn’t this just more of the same? Wouldn’t this go on indefinitely?

  So we were all brought up terribly short a few months later, when Daddy was diagnosed with lung cancer.

  Above all, I found myself enraged at him: How dare he put us through the torment of watching a parent go through this disease all over again—just as I’d feared? Also, I was furious that his famous luck had run out. “Oh, I’ll never get cancer,” he’d boasted in the past, and I’d believed him. If he could get sick like this, then there was no magic left in the world.

  Oddly, it wasn’t the kind of lung cancer associated with smoking; mesothelioma is linked to asbestos exposure. But this diagnostic hairsplitting meant very little to any of us.

  Harry was obsessed with keeping the news a secret from the press. My father went through his course of radiation under an assumed name: Franco Levi. He was particularly anxious about hiding the news from Grandma. He didn’t want to alarm her—she was ninety-two, after all—but mothers can smell this kind of a rat from a considerable distance. When we went up to Brookline to introduce Evan to Grandma, she’d bizarrely asked her son point-blank: “Lenny dear, are you . . . terminal?”

  Daddy denied everything. He did, however, tell his mother that at long last, he was going to quit cigarettes. “Good,” Grandma said, and turned to her daughter, Shirley: “Now I’ll pray for you.”

  Shirley, meanwhile, had become ultra-protective of her older brother, and was full of grievances about his care. She referred to his doctor, Kevin Cahill, a celebrated author and renowned specialist in tropical medicine, as “that tsetse fly doctor.” She meddled, she argued, she criticized, she scoffed—all good ways of not dwelling on the essential fact that her brother was gravely ill, and there was nothing she could do about it.

  Dr. Cahill was liberally prescribing pain medication, as his patient complained of constant back and side pain. That spring, my father hauled himself to Sapporo, Japan, for the inaugural of his long-planned Tanglewood-style project, the Pacific Music Festival. He was fearsomely short of breath, though still smoking. (As usual, the quitting thing hadn’t worked at all.) His assistant Craig Urquhart told us later that LB had been taking as many as eight Percocet a day in Sapporo—plus two Halcion, two Valium, and all the rest. One day in the hotel, Craig found his boss passed out on the floor and had a frighteningly difficult time rousing him. LB subsequently denied the whole incident, explaining that he’d just been on the floor “looking for something.” “Hmm,” Nina later mused, “a contact lens?” We got our laughs where we could.

  It was something of a miracle that LB could do anything at all in Japan; he was so weak, so diminished. The doctor who had drained LB’s lungs of fluid the month before was specially flown over to examine the Maestro. But it turned out the patient was mainly exhibiting junkie symptoms; he was thoroughly addicted to his painkilling medicine. The doctor took away the precious black leather toiletry case; if the Maestro wanted a pill, he had to ask for it. Shirley was livid when she heard about it: “The man is in pain! How can they treat him like this?”

  Somehow, he pulled himself together for several rehearsals and concerts, but LB was flown home early from Japan: doctor’s orders. Four big concerts were canceled; the students in the orchestra were crushed. Once home, my father went through a battery of tests, followed by a powwow with all the doctors. He said it felt like facing a tribunal. They announced that the malignancy hadn’t grown since the radiation, and there was no metastasis. One doctor said a spinal test had detected some “hot spots”; another doctor said those could be anything from arthritis to scar tissue. The hot spot doctor, a big Bernstein fan, told my father, “You’re a great man. We’re really going to miss you.”

  The tribunal decided to put him
on an experimental “mystery drug” to help control his constant pain. It was referred to only as “p.k.,” for “painkiller.”

  We all went out to Fairfield, to try and spend some normal summer days together before the annual Tanglewood doings. Daddy would emerge in the late afternoon, more gaunt and short of breath than ever. Isaac Stern turned up one day with Zabar’s shopping bags laden with bagels, smoked salmon, and all the trimmings; you really find out who your good friends are when you’re sick.

  It wasn’t certain Daddy could even make it to Tanglewood, but somehow he did. David and I went up, too, with Frankie and Evan. The usual house wasn’t available that summer; the LB entourage wound up in a dark, damp house he dubbed the Mildew Palace. It seemed like yet another sign that the magic Daddy circle was losing its power.

  He made it through the first concert—Copland’s Third Symphony with “the Kids”—but only barely. Next he had the big concert with the Boston Symphony to contend with—and after that, he was supposed to take the Kids on their highly anticipated tour of Europe, the first time such a tour had ever been organized for Tanglewood’s student orchestra.

  The big Sunday afternoon concert was sold out, as usual. But in yet another ominous sign, the fabled “Lenny weather” didn’t appear; it was cold and rainy. We had to bundle up Grandma with multiple blankets to keep her feet warm. My father got through Benjamin Britten’s Sea Interludes, but he’d assigned a newly orchestrated version of his own Arias and Barcarolles to the assistant conductor, Carl St. Clair. The composer couldn’t conduct it himself; his brain was so oxygen-deprived by that point that he couldn’t track the complexities of his own music.

  Even the rows of oxygen tanks in his dressing room backstage weren’t helping. Luckily, he could conduct the last piece on the program, Beethoven’s Seventh, from memory—or probably even in his sleep. He was in fact almost unconscious by that point in the concert, from the sheer lack of air in his lungs and brain.

  During the third movement, Daddy was racked by a coughing fit so severe that for a while he was sagging against the podium railing, struggling to catch what little breath he had. Phyllis Newman was sitting to my left; we gripped each other’s arms in horror. The orchestra played on, rudderless, until my father managed to collect himself and take the symphony the rest of the way to its glorious finish line; there is no greater finale in all the Beethoven symphonies. At the end of the piece, as the audience roared its approval, Nina and I caught each other’s eye—we were shattered from anxiety. Our father came out for his bow: tiny, ashen, and nearly lost inside the white suit that now hung so loosely on him, it looked as if it had been tailored for some other species.

  That night, for his upcoming birthday, I presented Daddy with an intricate poem I’d devised around a Passover counting song, with lots of in-jokes that I knew would tickle him. But he was so befuddled, I could tell he wasn’t getting any of the references. He wasn’t getting much of anything. He really did seem to be sleepwalking.

  He canceled the tour to Europe with the Kids; he was just too sick. Harry had some terrible damage control to do. Everything was a heartbreaking mess.

  Meanwhile, strangely, all the talk became about getting LB into a drug detox program—as if that were the only problem that needed solving. Harry wanted him to go through the detox in the sealed privacy of the Dakota apartment, which struck me as a terrible idea. Surely there were too many ghosts in the Dakota—chief among them the ghost of our mother herself. It was there that she had laid her curse on her estranged husband at the dining room table. I couldn’t imagine my father facing that ghost without the help of a very strong painkilling drug.

  The day before the Dakota detox plan was to go into effect, my father said he couldn’t breathe at all. So instead, he was admitted to the hospital, and that’s where he was on his seventy-second birthday. While Julia looked after baby Evan at the Dakota, the rest of us gathered in the hospital room. Nina, Frankie, and I brought the cupcakes we’d made together. Harry brought silly hats and plastic leis, and Frankie played with the button that made Daddy’s bed go up and down.

  Detox did, in fact, begin at the hospital. My father complained that the sleeping medicine doses were “for an ant.” He told me he’d found himself praying to God to let him die. Once home, he tottered on toothpick-thin legs from the back door to his bedroom, into his blue pajamas, and straight into bed, where he pulled the covers right up to his chin, like a frightened child.

  It was David who made the excellent suggestion that we find some wise man—a rabbi, maybe—with whom my father could verbally wrangle. As David pointed out, LB’s crisis was as much a spiritual as a physical one.

  And so was born the idea of connecting LB to my former psychiatrist, Dr. Samuel Klagsbrun, a very wise man indeed and suitably rabbinical, who now ran a hospital in Westchester called Four Winds. Dr. Klagsbrun initiated a program for LB up in Fairfield, with round-the-clock nurses, various specialists, and physical therapists coming by every day. LB fired them all, leaving only his assistant Phillip, as if everything were back to normal, which it wasn’t. Phillip’s job was hard. He had to dole out the meds carefully, and resist his boss’s pleas for more. He had to persuade him to get up, eat something, move around a little. Each of these tasks presented a gargantuan hurdle. LB just wanted to sleep—and he complained of constant pain.

  Uncle BB had a college friend, Dr. Paul Marx, who had started a “pain center” at Sloan Kettering. Shirley got it into her head that her brother should be admitted to the pain center. She would not, could not stop talking about the pain center. When Dr. Cahill rejected the idea, Shirley called the oncologist. The oncologist called Cahill: Please make that lady stop bugging me. Furious, Cahill called Harry: Tell Shirley to stop bugging that doctor. Harry called Shirley. They had such a fight over the phone that they took turns hanging up on each other.

  My birthday, two weeks after Daddy’s, was up in Fairfield. He came to the dinner table for a few minutes, but couldn’t sustain focus on either the food or the company, so he went back upstairs to bed. After he left, Shirley started in again about the pain center. David, usually unflappable, lost his temper. Nina left the table in tears. Julia brought out the birthday cake in the midst of all the screaming. She put a slice of cake in front of me, kissed me wordlessly on the cheek, and moved on.

  Just as there is a fog of war, there is a fog of illness. Was Daddy really in as much pain as he said, or was he to some extent augmenting the melodrama? Was the cancer really gone, or was it on the creep, and was his pain related to it somehow? Might the pain center be a good idea? Was the substance abuse really the main problem here? Was Daddy simply abysmally depressed? Had he lost the will to live, in which case all our efforts were for naught? No one had the answers to anything. Not even Harry Kraut.

  At least we got an answer about the pain center. It turned out it was designed for terminally ill patients, which was probably not what Shirley had in mind. We also found out that the secret, experimental “p.k.” drug that Daddy was given to get him off the Percocet was methadone. And where had it come from? The pain center at Sloan Kettering.

  The fog of illness pervaded our days. My father went to Dr. Cahill’s office and came out with a new prescription for Nembutal. One of his old favorite barbiturates! So, had we tossed the detox plan aside? He was very glad to have “the lovely little pills,” as he now called them. Meanwhile, the regular conversations with Dr. Klagsbrun seemed to be helping; Dr. Klagsbrun was very much up to the task of verbal arm wrestling with my father.

  There were some slight improvements. Daddy gained a little weight. He even went to the piano one evening and played, in slow motion, an arpeggio from a Ravel piano concerto that Uncle BB had been talking about at dinner. Though he was back to drinking again in the evenings, it was part of Daddy’s attempt to be sociable, which seemed like a good sign; we were grasping for any good sign.

  But the improvements were short-lived. My father was taking Nembutal every night—and Perc
ocet had somehow crept back into the mix. He could no longer sleep supine in his own bed; he breathed better sleeping upright in an armchair. A stair lift was installed on the back stairs; an oxygen machine was hooked up in the bedroom. My father could barely sustain the walk from one room to another.

  He decided to go back to New York. I accompanied him to his Dr. Cahill appointment. He had to sit down in the elevator from the second floor to the first. All the way across town in the limo, I held his hand while my forefinger skied up and down the arthritic slopes of his knuckles.

  The news from the latest scans was not good but, as usual, not precisely clear. The thickening of the pleura might be tumor growth, or it could be only scarring from the radiation. What was certain was that both of his lungs were in terrible shape. As this information was being delivered, my father lit a cigarette, right there in Dr. Cahill’s stuffy office.

  A few days later, the press release that Harry and my father had painstakingly devised together was given to the news media, announcing that Leonard Bernstein was retiring from conducting and would devote his remaining time to “composing, writing, and education.” Daddy had intended to make no mention of cancer; he was still trying to hide that ultimate piece of bad news from Grandma. But in the end, he called his mother to prepare her for a mention of a tumor in the lining of his lung. Harry summoned Nina, Alexander, and me to his office, where he showed us a list on his desktop computer (he was very modern) of all the close family friends who ought to be called in advance of the press release so they wouldn’t learn about it from the newspapers. “My God,” Nina muttered, “it’s a dress rehearsal for the funeral.”

  The press release was full of hopeful items about the future projects my father was planning to attend to as soon as he got his strength back: a chamber piece, a recording project, a memoir . . . but at the Dakota, the atmosphere was bleak. Daddy was on oxygen full-time. A wheelchair arrived. I found him sitting in it, poking feebly at Julia’s lovingly overbuttered scrambled eggs. In an effort to relieve the grimness, I made a reference to “What Ever Happened to Felicia Montealegre?”—one of our family’s elaborate, hilarious home movies from years ago. This one, directed by Steve Sondheim, had been a takeoff on the campy Bette Davis– Joan Crawford horror flick, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Mummy had played a wheelchair-bound former ballet dancer being tormented by her pianist sister, played by Phyllis Newman. Now, to wheelchair-bound Daddy, I joked blackly: “What ever happened to Lennuhtt?”