a family circus
by
Douglas Messerli
Jamie
Bernstein Famous Father Girl: A Memoir
of Growing Up Bernstein (New York: HarperCollins, 2018)
If
there was ever any question that Charlie Harmon’s memoir about his brief
employer and mentor Leonard Bernstein might have been an overstatement, a kind
of hyper-inflated vision of the kind of near mental-breakdown he suffered while
working with the Maestro, you need only read Bernstein’s elder daughter’s
memoir, published the same year, to perceive how extreme it all was.
If the genius creator of American music,
the wonderfully erudite teacher of younger and older American audiences of how
music worked, the brilliant conductor who charmed an entire generation of US and
international audiences with his ability to convey the musical nuances of so
many great composers throughout the centuries, he was also a truly psychological
mess of desperate needs, stalking down young and older men for sexual pleasure,
sloppily kissing everyone, including his daughters, with tongue-in-mouth
frontal assaults, drugged-out with uppers and lowers constantly as he marched
through a musical assault that charmed and, sometimes, shocked the entire
cultural world. If may admirers such as Jackie Kennedy might breathlessly bow
to his larger-than-life persona, others, as even Jamie Bernstein admits, played
with him wildly as children in a kind of adult sand-pile, including his sister
Shirley, his brother Burton (called affectionately BB throughout the book), and
a pageant of famous figures that would be impossible to list—unless you wanted an
index of figures longer than the index to this book—which include Adolph Green,
Betty Comden, Mike Nichols, Lauren (Betty) Bacall, Lillian Hellman (who later
broke with her father after her failed contributions to Candide), Richard Avedon, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, Aaron
Copland, Stephen Schwartz, Seiji Ozawa, Michael Tilson Thomas, and endless
other celebrities and hangers-on—whom this young girl, her brother Alexander,
and her younger sister Nina had to endure, while still enjoying the circus into
which they had been born.
And then there was their beautiful
Chilean-born mother, actress, painter, talented wife-of-the Maestro, Felicia
Montealegre Bernstein, who kept, during her life, everything at even keel,
overseeing their overstuffed and dramatically absurd household with her nanny,
and long-time friend, Julia, who kept the family together even after Felicia’s
early death. If Bernstein described himself to Harmon as Mississippi Mud, we
now perceive his as a kind of strange Mississippi Merman, who sang sangfroid’s
that might have been right of Wagner to absolutely everyone he might have ever
met, complicating the lives of his family and, despite his deep love and need
for his children, smothering them with an impossible-to-bear love-hate
relationship that draws tears to one eyes even to read about it.
Fortunately, Jamie Bernstein, the author
of this long, often painful admission of what it was like to “grow up
Bernstein,” being forced to play your entire life in a world of anagrams,
constant lectural sufferings from their so-highly educated father, and, later—in
their adolescence, having to come to terms with their increasing gossip of
their father’s homosexual activities—all of them survived, and Jaime tells her
story in almost a comical jaunty style that balances what one might have
presumed would have destroyed most children of “famous father families,” with a
great deal of joy, love, and appreciation of the world in which she grew up.
Surely, as to expected, there are lots of
drugs, particularly for Jaimie and Alexander, to have to be ingested, lots of
meaningless sexual encounters, travels back and forth across the country, educational
(all three were forced to attend Harvard, from which their father had
graduated) resentments, career vagaries—for a long Bernstein’s daughter
attempted to create her popular music, without success—as well as the deep pain
the entire family felt with the death of their mother of complications from
breast cancer when she was just 51.
Yet, in the end, the marvel of Jamie
Bernstein’s story is that she is a quite brilliant and resilient writer who
could finally make her own family, as all three of the children gradually
turned to, like their father, educating the public about music, in this case
about the works of their own powerful father.
While Charlie Harmon might have later
become one of Bernstein’s stalwart musicologists, strangely enough he speaks
very little about the composer’s own works, while Jaime proves a quite insightful
commentator not only about her father’s compositions, revealing important
perceptions about Trouble in Tahiti and
the later operatic sequel, but often speaks quite intelligently about them.
Of Bernstein’s late Arias and Baracrolles, for example, she writes:
At the time, I couldn’t relate
much to Arias and Baracrolles. 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 delight surprises—'Tit…come’
and Ebonics notwithstanding. [elements to which
she originally found “cringeworthy’]
But
then there are all those absolutely wonderfully gossipy moments, sometimes from
a child’s point of view, regarding all the figures who surrounded her difficult
father. She wanted to be—what young might not want—the witty and clever Betty
Comden. She might have longed to be a kind of Betty Bacall, to aspire to the
acting talents of her own mother (Alexander and Nina both studied acting). But
she also desired to be her father’s girl, the daughter of a near-impossibly
complex figure that no one, let alone his young daughter, could ever become.
Famous parents are difficult people to grow
up with, let alone helpful to leave a self with a sense of true personal
legacy. As Jamie beautifully discovers through this loving memoir is that she
needed to realize herself by both embracing and releasing the remarkable past
in which she had participated. Truly, I’m rather amazed that she could so gracefully
do so in the sometimes stumbling, occasionally obscene, puerile, but ultimately
loving woman, who raised her own two children and guided them to safe harbor.
Her family, Leonard Bernstein at the helm,
was perhaps much too very close, bumping into themselves, aunts, uncles,
impossibly talented friends, and famous admirers. Most of us might have
collapsed simply with the weight of all these endlessly gifted folks running
through the halls of the Dakota apartments and the Fairfield, Connecticut house;
yet Jamie Bernstein, along with her brother and sister, apparently, walked
away, burdened surely, but all the stronger for it. If their childhoods were
crazy, they also had love; if their father looked broadly afield for attention
and love, he still brought it home for them. And they survived quite nicely, so
it appears.
Los Angeles, September
12, 2018
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