Life With Leonard Bernstein

Jamie Bernstein can't call her childhood a typical one. On any given weekend, she might find Lauren Bacall, Isaac Stern, Richard Avedon, Mike Nichols, Stephen Sondheim, Lillian Hellman or Sidney Lumet hanging out at her house. Jamie's father was Leonard Bernstein.


The celebrated conductor, composer of West Side Story and host of television's Young People's Concerts was born 100 years ago, Aug. 25, 1918. To mark the centennial, Jamie Bernstein has published Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein, a frank recollection of family life and the struggle to find herself amid the "blinding light" that was Leonard Bernstein, who died in 1990.

Jamie Bernstein calls her father "a handful" who could be obnoxious. But she also remembers his warmth, genius, quick wit and the power of his sometimes misunderstood music. From her Manhattan home, Jamie Bernstein spoke openly about her book, why she chose talking about music rather than making it herself, and about her life growing up the child of one of America's most recognizable personalities.

Tom Huizenga: Your book makes me wonder if you kept a diary, because you remember all these small details about your life. For example, you spell out the individual word plays that family friend Stephen Sondheim used when playing anagram games with you, your father and your siblings, Alexander and Nina.

Jamie Bernstein: We so prized those words that actually we remembered them. But it is true that I kept journals. They were an invaluable source material for me, because otherwise I would have remembered no more than half of what I have in the book.

Did you decide to keep a diary because you realized your father was the famous Leonard Bernstein?

When I was young, I didn't care that much that he was Leonard Bernstein. I had no sense of duty about preserving his legacy; in fact, my brother and sister and I all went to a lot of trouble to distance ourselves from his legacy and his professional considerations. The whole business side of it was of no interest whatsoever. We just wanted to stay home and be a family and play anagrams. It was only after our dad was gone that we realized that there was this other job to be done and that we had an interest in doing it.


You talk about how you knew your parents weren't quite like other parents. What tipped you off?

My brother and sister and I have this semi-joke answer for this question: It's when we were watching The Flintstones and Betty and Wilma were going to the "Hollyrock Bowl" to hear "Leonard Bernstone" conduct. "Oh my God, he's on The Flintstones? Wow, we must have really hit the big time."

In the fifth grade, you say, you became self-conscious about your father's fame.

The very first inkling must have been when my father appeared on television, which started happening with the Young People's Concerts [with the New York Philharmonic] when I was only 5 years old. Television was the most important thing in life as far as my siblings and I were concerned. So we already knew that something else was going on, but it was a kind of cumulative process. We just wanted to blend in and be like everybody else — this desire to be normal. And it kind of gave me the creeps to not be normal. It made me feel left out.

Finding your own way in life is a thread that seems to run through the book.

It's hard to live in a very bright sun and try to figure out what you're going to be on your own in that blinding light, and it took me a long time to figure it out. Of course, I made everything exponentially more difficult by trying to be a musician myself. I describe it as one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake, simultaneously. There was constant conflict, mixed feelings and cross purposes. It was exhausting and neurotic, and it took me all those decades to figure out that I was a much calmer and higher-functioning person if I just didn't make music with my own body. I was a little sad to give it up, but overall, I think talking about music turned out to be a very good compromise.


You talk about how it was hard not to buy into the "Bernstein family mythos." But you also say, "I was, above all, obnoxious like my father." How was your father obnoxious?

He was exuberant, and he just sort of took over in spite of himself; he couldn't help himself. Plus, he was a know-it-all and he had answers for everything, and liked talking at great length and was bossy. So he was a big handful, and I think I wound up inheriting a few of those qualities. I think my brother and sister would both agree that I'm pretty bossy and full of opinions and very sure that I'm right about things — which often I am not. Sometimes I think that it might be a blessing that I'm such a shrimp, because if I were the way I am and I was tall, people would think I was insufferable.

Maybe this is a good time to talk about this made-up word — "elf's thread" — that slips through the book, almost like a curse.

My father's great anagram of "self-hatred," a brilliant one. Self-loathing is a feeling that so many of us have a lot of the time, and each person on this planet has their own little recipe for it, I'm sure. But my father suffered from it tremendously. He struggled with elf's thread, as all artists do.

My personal recipe was that I insisted on trying to be a musician; that just made me feel disgusted with myself. It's really the phenomenon of just having the sinking feeling that you're making a complete ass of yourself, and that was a feeling that would come over me repeatedly and it's what has subsided as I got older. Every now and then I can still have that stupid idiot, elf's thread feeling, but so much less frequently that it's not as debilitating as it used to be.

There's also, I think, a thread that relates to this, which is the idea of a crisis of faith — something your dad grappled with in his music.

And it wasn't just spiritual faith that he was in crisis about, but also in his marriage and being bisexual. I think that generated so many conflicting feelings that he was often in agony about it all.

[Recently] I heard a fantastic performance of his piece Mass at the Ravinia Festival. It was one of the greatest performances of that piece I've ever seen. The piece is such a self-portrait of my dad. There are lyrics that sound as if it's his own inner voice, where he says: "What I say I don't feel, what I feel I don't show, what I show isn't real, what is real I don't know." You could write a whole biography of Leonard Bernstein by tracking Mass itself.



You say about Mass, "With all its flaws, grandiosity, its daring and its tremendous broken heart — it simply was daddy." What's the "broken heart" part of that?

He was just in such despair about the world altogether, and the way we were not repairing ourselves and how humanity was in this constant state of belligerence. He was so depressed about the Vietnam War and about all the assassinations that we had experienced just before he wrote the piece. So that's part of the broken heart.

The other part is that he was in such dire emotional conflict all the time — about his wife and about his sexuality. He didn't talk about it, but I know that it must have been something he really suffered over. I think he suffered over the fact that his marriage and his family were not enough, that there was something else he needed that he couldn't get there. That was very hard for him, and he didn't want it to be true. But it was.

Leonard Bernstein, it's safe to say, was complicated, and that goes for his sexuality too. In the book you say, "It was hard not to feel my father's sexuality."

I didn't mean that his sexual preferences were palpable. Looking back on it, I wish I'd used the word "eroticism." What I meant was that his aura was so sexual, so erotic — because for him, really, music was a form of lovemaking. I think he brought that sensibility right into his music and it just permeated virtually everything he did. And so, you know, if you're his offspring, that's complicated.

Your father was married to Felicia Montealegre for 27 years, until she died of cancer in 1978. What did you think when you first began to realize that your dad was attracted to men in a romantic way?

I didn't have an inkling about it until I started hearing those rumors up at Tanglewood, the summer after I graduated high school. Then in the subsequent years I was in college, it all started kind of literally ... coming out. By the time I was in my senior year he was cohabiting with Tom Cothran, who was helping him put together the Norton Lectures, so by then it was pretty clear what was going on.

My brother and I were kind of going through the process of understanding it together, but as often happens in families, these things are hard to talk about: People didn't quite have the words to talk about bisexual parents. Now, that's a conversation you can have. In those days it was all very muffled. So we didn't sit down and talk about it exactly, but we kind of eased into a mutual understanding that this thing was going on around us.