LOVE NOTES
TOall we know about Leonard Bernstein, add this: Not only did the “West Side Story” composer kiss everyone on the lips, but he used his tongue, too — even on his daughter.
“It was a kind of litmus test he liked to spring on people,” writes Jamie Bernstein, the most vocal and (one suspects) most French-kissed of the late maestro’s three children. “My dismay was tempered by knowing he did it to so many others. The intrusion of Daddy’s tongue was an occasion less for revulsion and more for weary eye-rolling.”
This year, the centennial of the beloved New York Philharmonic leader’s birth, has unleashed a tsunami of tributes, books, concerts and the prospect of two upcoming biopics — one with Bradley Cooper, the other with Jake Gyllenhaal. But if you really want to know what that messy, mercurial genius was like, you should read Jamie Bernstein’s “Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein” (Harper Collins), out Tuesday.
Lenny, as most New Yorkers knew him, emerges as a man who, up until his death in 1990, at 72, lived large and passionately. His daughter’s vivid, witty account occasionally veers into TMI territory, describing as it does those slobbery kisses; the nicotine haze that perfumed him and the pills, uppers and downers, that propelled him.
And then there were what Jamie calls “Daddy’s sexual complexities” — that is, his affairs with young men. Those gay romances were particularly hard on his wife, Felicia Montealegre, a Chilean actress of Jackie Kennedy-esque elegance. An artist in her own right — actress, pianist, painter — Felicia knew what she was getting into when they married but, helpless in her adoration, went ahead anyway.
“You are a homosexual and may never change,” she wrote him the year they wed, in a letter her children found after her death. “I am willing to accept you as you are . . .” And so she did, as long as Bernstein kept his dalliances discreet.
Alas, he didn’t always. After he left her to run off with a young male lover, Jamie Bernstein tells us, her mother cursed him: “May you die a lonely old queen.” But he returned to Felicia soon after, nursing her through her final battle with cancer.
When she died, he was demolished. Gradually, his libido recovered — and with gusto, as he began what his daughter calls a “slow creep toward overt gayness.”
Then again, Bernstein was nothing if not overt. He had an almost erotic hold on every orchestra he conducted, which made the music that much more thrilling. His exuberance, on the podium and off, was exhilarating . . . and exhausting. And he had no filter. Jamie Bernstein recalls his meeting with a heavily made-up Michael Jackson. “What’s all this on your face?” her father asked. (Meekly, Jackson told him he was trying to cover up a pimple.)
One night he left his kids to make small talk with Woody Allen and Mia Farrow for an hour at the dinner table while a barber cut his hair in the bathroom. (Awkward!) Mercifully, the Holocaust opera they were to collaborate on never took off. And for a man of such impeccable musicianship, Bernstein was amazingly tone-deaf: For a 1984 recording of “West Side Story,” he cast Jamie’s brother and sister as the lovers. Granted, they were aspiring actors at the time, but, as Jamie tells it, they could never hear themselves recite those oaths without wincing. Mean- while, Jamie, trying to make her own career in music, couldn’t escape her father’s formidable shadow.
And then there were the perks. Not many dads could get you into Studio 54 and onto the cover of The Post, as Bernstein did. Nor could they go backstage at “The Ed Sullivan Show” to let you meet the Beatles — whose songs he adored, and which he used in his Young People’s Concerts to hook a generation on classical music.
While other Park Avenue families had nannies, cooks and chauffeurs, few took Stephen Sondheim along on vacation or had dinner at Mike Nichols’ house or cocktails with the Kennedys, as the Bernsteins did. Even the children’s godparents were famous, for better or worse: Poor Nina, the youngest Bernstein, had Lillian Hellman.
“That’s right, kid,” the famously cranky writer croaked. “When the plane goes down, I getcha.” (“Imagine Nina’s alarm,” Jamie Bernstein writes.)
When all was said and sung, Leonard Bernstein was, his daughter assures us, a good man. Just about every piece he wrote — whether for Broadway, opera houses or concert halls — expressed a longing for peace: “Lenny may actually have believed that if he just wrote the right combination of notes, he could unlock the secret to saving the planet.”
No amount of notes could do that. But when you listen to Bernstein’s music, the world is, for a time, a better place.