Contemporary Authors

• MOAB Music Festival - http://www.moabmusicfest.org/artist/jamie-bernstein

  Jamie Bernstein is a writer, narrator, broadcaster and filmmaker who has transformed a lifetime of loving music into a career of sharing her knowledge and excitement with others. Inspired by her father Leonard Bernstein’s lifelong impulse to share and teach, Jamie has devised multiple ways of communicating her own excitement about orchestral music. Beginning 15 years ago with “The Bernstein Beat,” a family concert about her father’s music modeled after his own groundbreaking Young People’s Concerts, Jamie has gone on to design, write and narrate concerts for worldwide audiences of all ages about the music of Mozart, Copland, Stravinsky, and many others. Jamie has also directed her father’s chamber opera, Trouble in Tahiti, in various locations around the country, including the Moab Music Festival and Festival del Sole in Napa, CA – as well as this past summer at Tanglewood.

  Jamie is the co-director of a film documentary, Crescendo: the Power of Music -- which focuses on children in struggling urban communities who participate in youth orchestra programs for social transformation inspired by Venezuela’s groundbreaking El Sistema movement. The film has won numerous prizes on the festival circuit, and is now viewable on Netflix.

  Jamie’s memoir, Famous Father Girl, was published by HarperCollins in June, as the Leonard Bernstein at 100 celebrations were at their peak all around the world. Jamie and her siblings, Alexander and Nina, are doing their best to keep up with the over 3,000 events worldwide.

• WTOP - https://wtop.com/entertainment/2018/06/jamie-bernstein-writes-famous-father-girl-memoir/

  Jamie Bernstein writes ‘Famous Father Girl’ memoir
  By The Associated Press June 13, 2018 11:21 am
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  “Famous Father Girl: a Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein” (Harper), by Jamie Bernstein

  Private schools, a New England country home and socializing with the likes of President John F. Kennedy and family — this is what it’s like to grow up as the child of famed composer and musician Leonard Bernstein.

  The maestro’s eldest daughter, Jamie Bernstein, has written a new memoir about her experience coming of age with her arguably eccentric and wealthy parents. The book, “Famous Father Girl,” is a name Jamie was given by a private school classmate.

  “Back in second grade, it hadn’t bothered me too much,” Bernstein writes. “But now, in fifth grade, I became self-conscious about my famous father. I didn’t want to be singled out; I just wanted to be normal.”

  Readers are taken behind the scenes into what most would consider a fantasy life. There were vacations, Beatles concerts, luxury apartments and dinner parties with famous guests. There were weekends spent with Jacqueline Kennedy and her children after President Kennedy was assassinated. Bernstein’s children attended Harvard, where he was schooled.

  To many readers, Jamie Bernstein’s childhood will seem charmed. And charmed is to be expected when the protagonist is a progeny of the man who composed music for “West Side Story,” among many other hit musicals, orchestras and so forth.

  Alas, the family has its issues.

  “Both our parents were dyed-in-the-wool confrontation avoiders; they loathed and feared melodrama,” Bernstein writes. “We offspring grew up avoiding confrontation, as well. So, as long as our mother pretended all was normal, that gave the rest of us permission to play along.”

  Jamie Bernstein grew up to be a filmmaker and writer in her own right. Readers may find interesting the (largely) bygone era of extravagance, and and tales of a quirky, yet average American family who got to experience the extraordinary.

• Jewish Exponent - http://jewishexponent.com/2018/06/27/jamie-bernstein-reflects-on-exuberant-father/

  Jamie Bernstein Reflects on ‘Exuberant’ Father
  By
  Marissa Stern -
  June 27, 2018
  0
  Jamie Bernstein discussed her new memoir about growing up with Leonard Bernstein at the Free Library. | Marissa Stern

  When children grow up with famous parents, inquiring minds often want to know: What was it like to grow up with [insert celebrity here]?

  Jamie Bernstein has been asked this question a fair amount about her famous composer father, Leonard Bernstein, so she decided to give it a “long and juicier answer” by writing a memoir.

  She discussed her new book, Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein, at a talk at the Free Library on June 20 with The Philadelphia Inquirer’s classical music critic and culture writer Peter Dobrin.

  “I had a story no one else could tell,” she said in a deep, soothing voice to a moderately full auditorium of Bernstein — both Jamie and Leonard — enthusiasts.

  Bernstein, a celebrated concert narrator and radio producer, had thought about writing a memoir for some time anyway, she said. But it seemed the timing was right for the book, which came out June 12, as 2018 marks the centennial year of her father’s birth.

  Philadelphia has already started celebrating; the Philly POPS led a Bernstein-themed concert Lenny’s Revolution in February. The National Museum of American Jewish History opened its special exhibit, “Leonard Bernstein: The Power of Music,” in March. (The exhibit is open through Sept. 2.) The Philadelphia Orchestra will celebrate on July 18 with a special performance at the Mann Center.

  And “tonight, tonight,” the library joined the celebration with the book talk, quipped the Free Library employee introducing the speakers.

  Throughout the hourlong program — including a Q&A portion during which her 10th- and 11th-grade teacher made a surprise appearance to an excited Bernstein — she shared family stories, tales of her own triumphs and was asked tough questions, such as if she could describe her father in one word, what would it be?

  “Exuberant,” she answered, after pausing to think.

  So what was it like to grow up with him?

  “He was a compulsive teacher,” she told the audience. “He never stopped needing to share whatever it was he was excited about. … Whether it was the Mahler symphony that he was rehearsing with an orchestra, or whether it was a really good Jewish joke. … Whatever it was, it all had the same quality of reaching out and grabbing you by the sleeve and saying, ‘Listen to this! I have to share this with you!’”

  She and her siblings had to be careful about what questions they asked him because they could get an hourlong answer, she added.

  Bernstein shared stories about his love for both traveling and spending time at home with his family — though they often came along with him.

  He invited them to rehearsals, to go on tours — such as with the New York Philharmonic, which was a “nonstop Wonderland of fun” for her and her siblings. They flew first class and stayed in fancy hotels and were taken to special tourist sites without waiting in lines.

  No one enjoyed it more than her father, she laughed.

  “One of the reasons our dad loved having us along was it allowed him to re-experience the fun and the VIP-ness of it all through our eyes, because he actually never got over it himself,” she said.

  Her book illuminates just how widespread her father’s influence was. For instance, it includes a story about when his casket was being moved after his funeral, a group of construction workers nearby waved their hard hats and said goodbye to “Lenny.”

  She and Dobrin spoke at length about different topics, from his Young People’s Concerts to the late Tom Wolfe’s infamous “Radical Chic” essay about a gathering Leonard and wife Felicia held at their apartment to raise money for the Black Panthers to her father’s evolving sexuality.

  She also openly talked about how growing up with him impacted her own professional musical journey as she sought to make her own career.

  “This is one of the things the book is really about, was how I figured out how to navigate living in this blinding sun and we were all sort of satellites revolving around this blinding sun, and how you figure out how to be on your own when you live in that intense light,” she said. “It took a long time for me to figure it out.”

  Deciding to be a musician made it doubly hard for her, she said. “On the one hand, I was really musical, I have a good ear and I loved music. But it was very hard to make music with my own body and be comparing myself, making those odious comparisons, and always feeling like I couldn’t measure up — which I couldn’t, let’s face it — and it drove me crazy to even be trying.”

  Dobrin also asked her to choose three Bernstein works (aside from West Side Story) that explain who he is. After thoughtful deliberation, she chose Mass, the violin concerto Serenade and musical On the Town.

  Of course, there are many works to choose from as his pieces blended genres and created long-lasting influence.

  “That was his whole thing, was taking down the walls between genres in everything he did,” she said.

  In a discussion about Leonard Bernstein and Alan Lerner’s failed musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and his own political awareness and involvement, she noted he would be “apoplectic” about the political climate. She lamented he isn’t around see Hamilton today.

  For audience members, it was a chance to get a glimpse into Leonard Bernstein’s life from a new perspective.

  Susan Levering had heard Jamie Bernstein speak before at NMAJH and was excited to see her again.

  “Exuberant would be a good word for her as well,” she said of Jamie. “[Leonard] was ahead of his time in a lot of ways. He was very creative, he made some major contributions to the world — and I just like him.”

• Cyso - https://cyso.org/news/jamie-bernstein-interview/

  Talking with Jamie Bernstein
  Posted on February 27, 2018 by CYSO

  Jamie Bernstein, eldest daughter of legendary American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, visited CYSO in February to accept the Note of Excellence Award at our 2018 Gala. The event celebrated the music of West Side Story as part of the worldwide celebration of the Bernstein Centennial for what would have been the composer’s 100th birthday.

  Three CYSO students—Interviewers Oliver Talukder and Nathaniel Sanchez, along with photos by Christine So—had the opportunity to sit down with Jamie Bernstein to talk about her life and work, and the tireless work of she and her siblings to celebrate and preserve their father’s legacy.

  Oliver: So, I’d really like to know what a typical day in your life is like.

  Jamie Bernstein: Well, my current life is nuts, because we’re in the middle of the centennial celebration for my dad. To give you an idea, we have a database at the Leonard Bernstein office where everyone is keeping track of all the different centennial related events worldwide and we are well past 2,500. Luckily I have a brother and a sister so there’s three of us. We sit down with the schedule and map it out like a military campaign, ‘Okay, you go to Vienna, and then you go to London, and then I’ll meet you in San Francisco, and then we’ll go to Miami’ and like that. It’s just nuts, but it’s very exciting!

  Jamie, Alexander, and Nina Bernstein at at Bernstein at 100 event

  So, to answer your question, every single day of the week is different and every weekend is different. Where was I last weekend? Oh yeah, first I went to Philadelphia to do a brand new family concert about my dad with the Philadelphia Orchestra and a lot of young performers and that was a great thing to put on in Philadelphia because they all came from Curtis! [Laughter and cooing] So that worked out beautifully, it was a really good concert! And then I went straight from the hall to the airport to fly to Los Angeles so that the next afternoon I could see the LA Philharmonic performing my dad’s Mass which also has loads of other people involved. Not just the orchestra, but also an adult chorus and a kids chorus and the Celebrant, who’s the protagonist, and then the street chorus, who all sing in this Broadway vernacular, plus a rock band, a blues band, and a marching band.

  And then I got back on the plane the next morning and flew home to New York because I had a big meeting with my publisher because I have a memoir coming out in June. It’s called Famous Father Girl. [Laughter] Because that’s what’s my second grade classmate used to call me to tease me. I decided it was a kind of fun snarky type title for my book.

  So anyway, right at this moment in my life, everyday is different but everyday is about my dad. You get the idea right?

  Nathaniel Sanchez (left) and Oliver Talukder (center), Symphony Orchestra oboe players, interview Jamie Bernstein.

  Oliver: Yeah! You mentioned before that you traveled to narrate a concert right? So, I just want to know more about what narration is, how you do it, and how you found that as your passion.

  Young audience members watch as Leonard Bernstein addresses a crowd at a Young People’s Concert.

  JB: Well, it was kind of by accident. This was not what I was intending to do with my life. I had done this and that for many years and then in the 90’s, a few year after my dad died, his publisher had this interesting idea to develop a family education concert, modeled on my dad’s Young People’s Concerts that he did on television with the New York Philharmonic. They thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to get somebody to write a young people’s type concert but about Bernstein and his own music and then offer it to orchestras around the country?” and we all said, “Yeah, that’s a really good idea,” and I saw my hand go up and said, “Actually, I would like to help develop that concert.”

  I had never done anything like that, but for some reason I thought that I could. We developed a concert, that was all about my dad and his music, and our topic—because my dad’s Young People’s Concerts always had topics— was rhythm, which of course automatically steers you to all the jumping that Bernstein music.

  So, it turned out really well, it was called The Bernstein Beat. And, while I was writing it, I didn’t think that I’d be the narrator but by the time I’d finished writing the script, I just felt like it was in my voice and that I could do it. So, we premiered it with the Utah Symphony in Salt Lake City and it went great! We wound up doing that all over the place, and I really mean all over the place. We took it to Beijing, we took it to Havana, and then we started taking it around the country.

  Carnegie Hall invited us to do the concert there and they liked is so much that they invited us to write more educational concert about other topics and we made one about Aaron Copland, and we did one called Extreme Orchestra which is all about tempo and dynamics. All the fastest, and the slowest, and the loudest, and the softest music but all in different combinations. We just kept writing new concerts, one after another! So, that’s how I got into this racket, and I’ve been doing it now for about 18 years. So, by now I’ve gotten kind of good at it. [Laughter].

  Jamie Bernstein holds a “Mambo” sign during a Bernstein Beat performance in Caracas, Venezuela, with Sinfonica Juvenil de Caracas.

  Oliver: What impact did your parents have on your music education and your love of music?

  JB: Well, that’s a big question in my case! That’s why I wrote my book. So, the long answer is in my book, which you can read in June when it comes out! But the short answer is that all three of us, my brother and sister and I, were all very musical and we were all forced to take piano lesson, but we did not like our piano lessons. We never practiced and we had terrible attitudes and it just didn’t take.

  But when I finally quit my lessons, around the age of 16, I started playing the piano just for fun and was also playing the guitar because I found a guitar in the closet. Somebody had given it to my dad and he didn’t care about the guitar, but I did because I was totally crazy about The Beatles.

  Jamie and Leonard Bernstein in 1980 after she made her singing debut at a popular New York City club.

  So I taught myself how to play it and I realized that I could play pretty much any song on the radio. All the “doo wop” songs had the same chord progression. So, suddenly I just understood everything. I was writing songs myself and getting more and more into it and for a while I actually did pursue a career as a singer-songwriter. I moved to LA and I made demo tapes, and I finally got my record deal! And I made my record and it didn’t come out very well and, the record company decided not the release it. THE END! [Laughter]
  “This narrating concerts thing turned out to be an unexpected good compromise. It kept me in the world of music and it allowed me to experience music.”

  By then I had gotten married and I started having my kids and I thought, “Ugh. I’m too old for this and anyway. I’m way too old to be on the road.” Which is so funny because [now] I’m on the road all the time. But I was so relieved when I wasn’t trying to make music with my own body anymore because it always made me nuts. I would get so anxious and I would make mistakes and I would forget my lyrics.

  But it turned out that this narrating concerts thing turned out to be an unexpected good compromise. It kept me in the world of music and it allowed me to experience music, be with musicians, to think about music, and to talk about music that people are listening to, and adding value to the proceedings because people like to know a little bit about what they are going to hear. It helps them absorb the music. So, that was the unexpected turn that my life took, but it’s turned out to be very satisfying.

  Nathaniel: What was it like growing up with a composer in the house?

  JB: Read the book. That’s why I wrote the book because so many people ask me, “ What was it like growing up with a famous father?” And the short answer is: it was really fun and cool most of the time. Both my parents were amazing, interesting, smart, fun-loving people, and they had really interesting, smart, fun-loving friends.

  The house was always full of people, and there was always music, there was always laughter, and there were word games, and charades. In the summer we could play tennis, and we swam in the pool, and there was a lot of extended family, and so like the house was always full of people and full of talk and laughter. Everybody was reading books and going to the theater, and so, you know, there was just all this vivacity and intense exchange of ideas.
  “My parents just were really involved in trying to make the world a better place.”

  Leonard Bernstein speaking at the Moratorium March against the Vietnam War in 1969.

  Also, my parents and their friends had really strong political opinions, and they were very involved in social justice, especially my mother, who worked for the ACLU and the Committee for Public Justice. Mmy parents were always throwing themselves into any causes that they felt would help relieve any injustice in the world. So they were very involved with Civil Rights and very involved with the Anti-War Movement during the Vietnam War. Later my father was very involved in AIDS advocacy. You probably don’t know this, but in the 80’s, the AIDS Crisis was raging and people were dying by the thousands, all over the country.

  My parents just were really involved in trying to make the world a better place. So my brother, sister, and I grew up completely immersed in that experience. We marched against the Vietnam War as a family, and it was all about no nukes, and speaking up. My parents got in trouble often for speaking up, but they spoke up anyway. That’s what they felt they had to do, and that was the message we absorbed as we grew up in their midst.

  The Bernstein Family: Nina, Jamie, Leonard, Alexander, and Felicia Montealegre

  Oliver: So a final question, do you have any advice for the kids in this orchestra and all teenagers who are aspiring to be professional musicians?

  JB: Oh, that’s a good question. Well, I’ve been very involved in the El Sistema Movement and I made a film, a documentary, that you can watch on Netflix, called Crescendo: The Power of Music. It follows three kids who are in these kinds of youth orchestra programs for social change, two of them in Philadelphia and one in Harlem in New York City.

  I feel like the great thing that is happening for young musicians today is that they have this fantastic model for how to bring your music into the community. And how not to be squirreled away in an ivory tower, but instead to really bring your music right into the that world you live in.

  I think that’s the best thing that has happened to music in a really long time. It’s going to save classical music from turning into some sort of ancient, desiccated artifact. Instead it’s going to give it new energy because all these youth orchestra programs are being started up all over the country in all these different kinds of really diverse communities. So many people in these communities are going to be exposed to this orchestral repertoire.

  The idea is not that everybody attends the youth orchestra should become a musician; The idea is that it helps you be a citizen and helps you be in the world in what you do, and give you confidence—all those good building blocks for adulthood—no matter what you wind up doing.

  But some of those kids will turn out to be musicians [and] each of those kids brings their entire community with them if they join an orchestra. So it’s exponential. All of a sudden, you’ve got these new audiences who are going regularly to concerts. They are following their kid as they become professional musicians. You’re infusing concert hall with these brand new, really enthusiastic audiences who have been going to concerts for quite a while.

  When I visited Venezuela, where El Sistema began, I saw this actually happen. I went to a concert with one of the youth orchestras in Caracas. Gustavo Dudamel was conducting and the audience was completely full of kids with their instruments tucked under their seats and also lot of those kids’ relatives were there, too. And they were playing Tchaikovsky 4 or 5, and [the kids] were leaning forward in their seats like it was a ball game because everybody knew it and everybody knew what was coming. “Oh, here comes the really, really loud fun part.” They were all like so into it. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen.
  “The idea is not that everybody attends the youth orchestra should become a musician; The idea is that it helps you be a citizen and helps you be in the world in what you do, and give you confidence—all those good building blocks for adulthood—no matter what you wind up doing. “

  So my dream is that one day something like that might be happening in the US because we’ll have so many youth orchestras that have been around for long enough that some of those kids are now entering the professional orchestras and bringing all their people with them. Well, that’s a nice dream isn’t it?

  Nathaniel Sanchez, Oliver Talukder, and Christine So pose with Jamie Bernstein after the interview.

  This interview was edited for length.

• Harvard - https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/11/daughter-of-leonard-bernstein-shares-memories-of-her-father-during-harvard-visit/

  Learning from a legend (a.k.a. Dad)
  Jamie Bernstein '74 (left) writer, broadcaster, and daughter of composer Leonard Bernstein '39, speaks with Steven Ekert '20 and Kristen Fang '19 about her father's work and influence.

  Jamie Bernstein '74 (left) writer, broadcaster, and daughter of composer Leonard Bernstein '39, speaks with Steven Ekert '20 and Kristen Fang '19 about her father's work and influence.

  Photo by Scott Eisen
  Daughter of Leonard Bernstein shares memories of music, life as momentum builds behind centennial celebrations

  By Jill Radsken Harvard Staff Writer

  DateNovember 8, 2017

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  It seemed likely that centennial celebrations of the life and work of legendary maestro Leonard Bernstein ’39 would spill over with music, requiring more than a single year.

  And that is precisely how the occasion — with more than 2,000 concerts and shows already planned across the country and the world — is shaping up.

  “It’s an unrepeatable opportunity to remind the world of who he was, what he did, the legacy, and to introduce him to a new generation of music lovers who don’t know who he is anymore,” said Jamie Bernstein ’74, who will crisscross the globe with her brother and sister for many of the events celebrating their Lawrence-born father. “It is quite an undertaking, and a good thing I have two siblings.”

  Bernstein came to campus late last month for a concert talk with the Harvard Radcliffe Orchestra. Before the concert, she met students taking Carol Oja’s course on her father’s Young People’s Concerts.

  “Leonard Bernstein’s historic work with the New York Philharmonic offers an opportunity to study classical music performance within the context of social justice and American culture at large,” said Oja, the William Powell Mason Professor of Music, who described her course as “a mix of memory, music, and media.”

  Jamie Bernstein’s visit came as students were preparing to travel to New York to see (and hear) the philharmonic and interview longtime subscribers who attended the concerts as children. In her time on campus, Jamie joined students to watch archival clips from the Young People’s Concerts, which began in 1958 when her father persuaded CBS to broadcast the shows.

  “It was always too long. There’d be frantic, feverish lunch meetings between performances. My dad never wanted to cut anything, but they had to,” said Jamie, whose earliest memories as a girl on the set include stealing donuts from the musicians and eating roast beef sandwiches.

  She also remembered the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” coming on the radio during the drive home to Connecticut after a performance.

  “That’s in the Mixolydian mode,” her father observed. “Do you know what a mode is?” Jamie was stumped. Sure enough, the title of the next Young People’s Concert was “What Is a Mode?”

  “He could never turn off the teaching faucet,” she said. “It was his impulse on everything he did. We got it at home 24/7.”

  Harvard Radcliffe Orchestra conductor Federico Cortese, who as a student at Tanglewood had a chance to see Leonard Bernstein at work, described the maestro as “the most communicative musician I’ve seen in my whole life.”

  “It was inspiring,” he said.

  Jamie Bernstein talked about her father’s political and social consciousness, which was demonstrated in the pieces and places he played. In 1948, during the Israeli War of Independence, he led the Israel Philharmonic in Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto. When the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989, he made Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with its “Ode to Joy,” his song of celebration.

  Disciplines among Oja’s students range from neurobiology and philosophy to computer science and music. Some play instruments, and several cited “West Side Story” as their baseline knowledge of Bernstein. Few had heard of the Young People’s Concerts before the course.

  “I don’t think I have ever taken a course that is so specifically focused on one individual,” said Arlesia McGowan ’19, a concentrator in human developmental regenerative biology and music. “I like that we have spent a lot of time not only getting to know Bernstein as an artist but as a person. I feel like with a lot of composers-conductors, we musicians only know them by their music … we often forget that they are humans like us who were criticized just as much as they were praised.”
  Related
  ‘Symbiotic’ Web archive launched

  Bernstein material available for first time

  Before the classroom conversation, Jamie Bernstein described working to uphold her father’s legacy through her 2014 documentary “Crescendo! The Power of Music,” about children in U.S.-based youth orchestras for social change that were modeled after Venezuela’s groundbreaking El Sistema program.

  “These Venezuelan youth orchestras were originally devised as a way to get the kids off the streets, but what became clear very quickly was that not only was it a safe space, it was also an environment where kids could learn the best lessons for being a good person in the world,” she said. “It reminded me so much about my dad, and how he used music to express the best things about humanity. You are not just playing your instrument in your ivory tower. You are using music to make the world a better place.”

  Jamie recalled that her time as a Harvard student was “not my happiest.” Homesickness was a challenge, along with her father’s larger-than-life visits.

  “Those were tough years for me, further complicated in my junior year,” she said. “Guess who arrived on campus to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures? And who had so much fun he came back in my senior year? It’s only been in the last decade I could find ways to come back to the Harvard campus and feel like I’m adding value in some way.”

• Billboard - https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/8252364/leonard-bernstein-centennial-jamie-bernstein-interview

  On Leonard Bernstein's Centennial, Daughter Jamie Reflects on the Composer's Legacy & Their 'Raucous' Household

  3/19/2018 by Joe Lynch

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  Paul de Hueck/Courtesy of the Leonard Bernstein Office
  Leonard Bernstein

  Born Aug. 25, 1918, in Lawrence, Mass., to Ukrainian Jewish parents, Leonard Bernstein would grow up to be one of the most successful and influential composer-conductor-pianists of the 21st century. He set new high-water marks in musical theater with On the Town and West Side Story, composed operas, ballets and symphonies, and became one of the New York Philharmonic's most celebrated music directors. But unlike most of his peers, Bernstein was as recognizable in popular culture as he was critically renowned. His series of Young People's Concerts on CBS (airing from 1958-1972) brought music education into living rooms around America, and following the assassination of President Kennedy (with whom he was real-life friends), he conducted Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony No. 2 as part of a national televised memorial, making the music of Mahler an indelible part of the American national mourning experience.

  Bernstein passed away in 1990, but the public's appreciation for his music and impact continues to grow. With 2018 seeing thousands of Leonard Bernstein centennial events taking place across the globe, Billboard spoke to one of his three children, Jamie Bernstein, about her father. A warm and lively interviewee who seems to have her childhood memories on instant recall, she spoke to Billboard about growing up in a "raucous" musical household, her father's love of the Beatles, and why The Flintstones revealed to her just how famous her father was. She also opened up about her father's sexuality -- a topic that has become more public knowledge over the last few years and will be addressed in greater depth in her upcoming book Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein -- and her own shelved album of singer-songwriter material from back in the day.

  Growing up, did you understand what it was that your dad did, and beyond that, how important he was on a national scale?

  We get that "what was it like?" question a lot which is one of the reasons I've written my book, which comes out in June. It's called Famous Father Girl, which is what my second grade classmate used to call me. The longer, juicier answer will be in the book, but the shorter answer is we grew up in this incredible lively, affectionate, raucous household. It was always full of friends and relatives, extra chairs getting dragged up to the dining room table.

  My sister was born later but my brother and I came up together and we shared a room. We would be in our beds at night and we could hear the grownups downstairs, carrying on on the piano and laughing. Board games, charades -- we thought grownups had fun all the time. We couldn't wait to be grownups. Of course we figured out eventually being a grownup was much more complicated.

  The moment I understood that was November 22, 1963. Which was the day Kennedy was assassinated and I saw the grownups cry for the first time. I had never seen grownups cry. All of the sudden everyone was crying, sitting around together, watching TV and smoking and drinking and all the shades were pulled down.

  Your father and JFK knew each other, so that must've been especially hard.

  They were actually friends. They were both at Harvard at the same time, I believe the president was one year older, and once he became president my parents were invited to the White House numerous times. They had a real friendship. And it was devastating in every possible way you can imagine when Kennedy was assassinated. It was a calamity.

  Were you old enough to understand the gravity of the situation?

  I was only 11. It was hard to understand beyond the fact that the president was shot and now he's dead. But you can't process it in a more sophisticated way than that.

  To answer your other question, when did we figure out how illustrious our dad was, the answer is, we were watching The Flintstones. And Betty and Wilma were going to the Hollyrock Bowl to hear Leonard Bernstone conduct. That's when we thought, "Oh my god, he must've really hit the big time if he's on The Flintstones." It was a shocker. He was already on television, he was doing Young People's Concerts from the time I was 5. And it was a very big deal to us that our dad was on television, because it was the biggest thing in our lives. We watched a ton of TV. So that was already an eyebrow-raiser, but The Flintstones thing cemented it.

  Did you watch the Young People's Concerts?

  I went to almost all of them. They were such fun. When I got a little older, my brother and I, and eventually my sister, my dad would invite us along to spend the day with him as the show got put together. My brother and I would steal the donuts from the table for the musicians, we were allowed to run around the hall unsupervised, we'd watch it from the tippy-top of the hall, or go and sit in the mobile unite for a while where the director sat.

  Did you ever get scolded for running around the set?

  Nope, never. We were just completely on the loose; we could do whatever we wanted. Obviously we had to be quiet when they were working. It was really fun. At 2 p.m. they had the official concert, and by then we knew the script by heart and the music and we were completely engaged. Then afterward we would jump in the car and our dad would drive us to our house in Connecticut to join our mom and baby sister. And as soon as we got in the car he'd switch on the radio to the pop station. "Let's catch up," he'd say. And it was such a boon for me that he loved the Beatles. The Beatles were my everything. I was a total Beatlemaniac.

  Did you see them?

  We went for a dress rehearsal the second time they went to The Ed Sullivan Show. And I actually did see them at Shea Stadium but it doesn't really count. I can't even tell you how loud it was in there because of all the screaming from teenage girls. You couldn't even hear anything, and they were five miles away in the middle of the field, so it doesn't really count.

  Anyway, he'd talk about the music on the radio and we learned a lot about music from him telling us about the music we were listening to. And a lot of times what we were talking about in the car would end up in the next Young People's Concerts script. He would sit at the piano and play the pop songs and sing them to illustrate what we were talking about. We gradually perceived we were the guinea pigs for the Young People's Concerts.

  So he loved the Beatles, but was there anything on the radio he scoffed at?

  There was plenty to scoff at, because pop music is a mixed bag – some of it is fantastic and some of it is lame. But I know he really loved the Beatles and the Stones. He liked the Rolling Stones before I did because he knew all about the blues. He understood their musical context and I didn't, so for me, it bothered me that Mick Jagger sang out of tune and his voice was scratchy. I didn't understand what that meant. It took me longer to warm up to the Stones, but I did, a lot, but my dad was ahead of me on that. He was very interested in (pop music) and eventually wrote a work called "The Masque" that had a lot of rock n' roll and blues in it; he was listening to it with creative ears.

  Did you have memories of watching him conduct the New York Philharmonic, doing Mahler's symphony following JFK's assassination?

  I did not watch that. It was too serious.

  What about West Side Story, or were you too young for that?

  I was way too young, I was 5 years old. In 57-58, my dad took over the New York Philharmonic, he started the Young People's Concerts, and he premiered West Side Story. All in the same year. So I was too young to go. In fact, I wasn't allowed to see it – knife fights, stabbing, gun shot at the end. But I had the recording, the cast album, and I listened to it all the time. So I knew the music by heart, but didn't see it on stage for a few years.

  Once the movie came out in '61, you probably did?

  Yes, by then I was the right age, and fell in love with the movie and saw it a bunch of times.

  What is it like to love music your dad made? Is that strange?

  It's very exciting to feel so tethered to it; it's part of your own fabric. It was fun. But I will say in school I was a little self-conscious to have such an illustrious father. I just wanted to be normal and disappear into daily life, that's why when my friends called me "famous father girl" I was so embarrassed. When you get old enough to perceive peer groups, it kicked in.

  Did people ever tease you, or ask too many questions about him?

  Interesting you ask that because the other day I was visiting with a friend of mine from earliest school days. And she told me she was always careful not to make me feel special or weird or anything, she just wanted me to feel regular. And I was so grateful, because that's what I wanted more than anything – to just be one of the gang.

  What about your music history: did you start lessons at a young age?

  We all took piano lessons, and we all disliked our piano lessons and never practiced. We all had terrible attitudes and quit as soon as we could. In some families when the parents are professional musicians, kids take to it like ducks to water. And in others they don't. And for whatever reason in ours, we're in the latter category. However, in my case, when I quit my piano lessons around 16, I started to play the piano for fun, and I taught myself the guitar. That became my way of having music in my life. And I pursued a career for a few years as a singer-songwriter. I moved out to L.A., I made demo tapes and shopped them around, the whole deal. I even got a record deal eventually, but the record was not released, and that was just about the time I got married. And I thought "Oh the hell with this, I'm going to move on, start my family and be an actual grownup instead of pursuing this ridiculous goal of being some kind of rock star. What kind of real-life adult pursuit is that?" So I set it aside.

  What was your music like?

  People always ask you "what kind of music is it?" And some friend of mine told me, "just say it's one of your favorite artists meets the other of your favorite artists." So my answer was "it's Laura Nyro meets Talking Heads." Whatever that might mean.

  That would be a very strange record.

  Maybe it was very strange record! But the recording didn't turn out the way I had it in my head. It wasn't all the way to what I wanted. But I love my songs, and they're still sitting on my hard drive, waiting for somebody else to play 'em one day.

  Would you ever release them to the public?

  The recordings I made? I don't know. Somebody would have to talk me into it. Maybe.

  What about your father's unfinished work, such as Race to Urga, what did you know about that?

  I know a lot about it. I watched it all come together, and it all come apart at the seams. This was the second show that fell apart, he was writing one in 1965 with Betty Comden and Adolph Green based on Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth. They worked on it for half a year and for reasons that are not clear to me, it fell apart and they abandoned it. And then a few years later my dad was trying again this time with Jerry Robbins and various other collaborators, and they tried very hard, and that one too, for reasons that are unclear, didn't take off, and they abandoned it. And that was just devastating for my dad. Because he had so little time to compose, he was so strapped for time because of his double career, and his composing time was very precious. When what he was working on didn't pan out, he felt like he squandered his composing hours.

  Did you watch the dry rehearsal for that?

  Yeah but that came later. First they abandoned it in the late '60s, I was in high school and our dad was in the habit of playing things for us as he was working, so we'd get sneak previews of stuff as he was working. And then many years later, in the '80s, they tried one more time and put together a little workshop. And that was when they decided forever and for real and for sure, that it was not going to happen. Jerry Robbins was the one who said "this will never see the light of day." They didn't feel it was shaping up; it was too disjointed. Which is a pity because the songs were great, but it wasn't pulling together as a dramatic entity, I guess.

  Did you ever give him feedback?

  We tried to keep it positive because that's what he needed. When he played for us, that was not the moment to be critical.

  In the last few years, his homosexuality has become more public knowledge. Is that something you were aware of growing up? Or was it just not your business?

  The long answer to this question is in my book in June, you'll find out more then. But our parents went into their marriage with eyes open – they knew what the situation was and decided to give it a go anyway, and they were really devoted to each other. And they had us three kids, so there you have it. To whatever degree my dad was still pursuing some kind of gay life, he was keeping it extremely separate from his family life. I didn't bump up against it until I was in college. And that was the beginning of the dissolution of my parents' marriage. They finally separated in 1976 because my dad decided to go off with this guy who had been his assistant. And that lasted one year. And he just couldn't quite sustain it, and he wound up parting ways with the guy and eventually came back to be reunited with our mom and our family. And everybody was very relieved and happy they reunited, but my mother sure was coughing a lot. And then she went to the doctor, and they discovered she had a tumor in her lung, and one year later she was dead. So it was a very rough series of years. It was very difficult, especially for our sister who was only 15 when our mother died.

  And he passed away in 1990. But that must be gratifying to see how well regarded he remains – some reputations fizzle, but his seems to expand.

  It does seem that way. A lot of his music, particularly his symphonic music, was misunderstood in his lifetime for a number of reasons I won't get into, but now that it's his centennial year and his music is getting performed a lot, people are discovering it as if it were this brand new thing and going crazy for it. It's incredible gratifying to see his music's time has really come and audiences are relating to it.

  Were you surprised at the number of centennial events?

  We were hoping there would be a lot of attention, and at the Leonard Bernstein Office, our organization, we reminded everyone the centennial was coming and suggested things they might do for an opera, orchestra, film festival, or a university – our dad was so multifarious there was something for everybody to celebrate. We let them cook it up, and it's succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. On our database we've calculated there are over 2,700 Bernstein centennial events worldwide, so far, and still counting. And thank God there's three of us siblings to divide and conquer and participate in as many as possible.

  Is that pretty much your whole year?

  That's pretty much our year. I just got back from Memphis where I was narrating my father's symphony No. 3, Kaddish, and I wrote my own narration which I do time to time. And I did it in Tucson five weeks ago, and in between I've been to Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, Scottsdale, Boston… you get the idea. It's very emotional. I've been doing concert narration and talking about music for over 15 years, but at this year I'm doing it at 10 times the intensity. It's like I've been in training for this year for the last 15.

  When did you make the decision to write your book?

  About three years ago, and then I wrote my head off for two years. And it's been a great experience – I'm sad it's over, I liked having that gigantic task to think about. I'll have to think of some other book to write. The whole time my father was alive, he worked so hard to make the world a better place and he did it through his music, though not exclusively. But his music is about speaking to the injustices of the world and advocating for tolerance and compassion and world peace. So much of his music has that quality, and one of the reasons people are relating so much now, is this sense of despair in our country that his music speaks to. From West Side Story to this Kaddish Symphony, which has so much despair in it, but it's a catharsis for the audience. They all go through an emotional journey and it resolves and ends on an optimistic note. That's very healing for people to experience right now.

• author's site - https://www.jamiebernstein.net

  Jamie Bernstein is an author, narrator, and filmmaker who has transformed a lifetime of loving music into a career of sharing her knowledge and excitement with others.

  Jamie’s memoir, Famous Father Girl, published by HarperCollins, details her youth growing up in an atmosphere bursting with music, theatre and literature. Her father, composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein, and her mother, pianist and actress Felicia Montealegre—who filled the house with a veritable who’s-who of friends in arts and letters—created an ebullient atmosphere that turned Jamie into a lifelong cultural enthusiast.

  Inheriting her father’s passion for sharing and teaching, Jamie has devised several ways of communicating her own excitement about classical music. In addition to “The Bernstein Beat,” a family concert about her father modeled after his own groundbreaking Young People’s Concerts, Jamie has also written and narrated concerts for audiences of all ages about Mozart, Aaron Copland, and Stravinsky, among others.

  As a concert narrator, Jamie has appeared everywhere from Beijing to London to Vancouver. In addition to her own scripted narrations, Jamie also performs standard concert narrations, such as Walton’s “Facade,” Copland’s “A Lincoln Portrait” and her father’s Symphony No. 3, “Kaddish.” A frequent speaker on musical topics, Jamie has presented talks around the world, from conferences in Japan to seminars at Harvard University. In Spanish-speaking locations such as Madrid and Caracas, Jamie narrates en español—thanks to her Chilean-born mother Felicia, who raised her three children to be bilingual.

  In her role as broadcaster, Jamie has produced and hosted shows for radio stations in the United States and Great Britain. She has presented the New York Philharmonic’s live national radio broadcasts, as well as live broadcasts from Tanglewood.

  Jamie is the co-director of a film documentary, Crescendo: the Power of Music—which focuses on children in struggling urban communities who participate in youth orchestra programs for social transformation inspired by Venezuela’s groundbreaking El Sistema movement. The film has won numerous prizes on the festival circuit, and is currently viewable on Netflix. More about Crescendo: the Power of Music can be found at http://www.crescendofilmdoc.com

  In addition to writing her own scripts and narrations, Jamie writes articles and poetry, which have appeared in such publications as Symphony, DoubleTake, Town & Country, Gourmet, Opera News, and Musical America. She also edits “Prelude, Fugue & Riffs,” a newsletter about issues and events pertaining to her father’s legacy.

  Jamie is a devoted mom to her two grown children, Frankie and Evan. She is an avid scrabble and tennis player, and makes an annual pilgrimage to the Utah desert to recharge her spiritual battery.

Music Man
Denby David
The New Yorker. 94.18 (June 25, 2018): p61.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Full Text:
Byline: David Denby

Music Man

Leonard Bernstein, as seen by his daughter-and by the rest of us.

tifPhotograph from Bettmann / GettyJamie Bernstein's memoir reckons with the secrets and successes of a man who was larger than life, at home and in public.61

What happens if you are Cinderella and the prince turns out to be your father? Jamie Bernstein, Leonard Bernstein's firstborn daughter, has written a memoir of her family, a family that her overwhelming dad-loving, inspired, and sometimes insufferable-dominated for decades. The author grew up wriggling inside a paradox, struggling to become a self when so much of her was defined by her brilliant parent. "Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein" (HarperCollins) is unique among classical-music memoirs for its physical intimacy, its humor and tenderness, its ambivalence toward an irrepressible family genius. In the year of Leonard Bernstein's centenary, with its worldwide celebrations, this book is a startling inside view-not a corrective, exactly (Jamie rarely thought her dad less than great), but a story of encompassing family love, Jewish-American style, with all its glories and corrosions. No one lives easily on the slopes of a volcano; Jamie Bernstein has been faithful to her unease. Truth-telling, rather than dignity, is her goal.

As a young man, Leonard Bernstein was prodigiously gifted and exceptionally handsome, and he slept with many men and with women, too. He seemed to be omnisexual, a man of unending appetite who worked and played all day and most of the night, with a motor that would not shut down until he was near collapse. Conducting, composing for the concert hall, composing for the theatre, playing the piano, teaching, writing about music, talking about it on television, suffering over everything he wasn't doing-he burned the candle from the middle out. From the nineteen-forties into the eighties, he was everywhere, an intellectual American Adonis, our genius-erudite, popular, media-wise, and unstoppably fluent. Many people long to be at the center of attention; Leonard Bernstein was actually good at the center-he routinely gave more than he received.

On the podium, he was so expressive that he embarrassed the fastidious, who thought there was something inappropriate (i.e., erotic) about his full-body conducting style. Using his hips, his arms, his back, his eyebrows, he acted out the music, providing an emotional story line parallel to the piece itself; he was narrative in flight. At some point in his adolescence, Bernstein must have discovered that he could express with his body whatever he thought or felt, a discovery that was just as important as a sexual awakening, though in his case the two were obviously related. Bernstein, one might say, liberated the Jewish body from the constraints felt by the immigrant generation, including his father, Sam, who relinquished his severe, stiff-collar demeanor only when celebrating the High Holidays with the Boston Hasidim. For Lenny, every day was a High Holiday. Most of the audience and his collaborators got used to his turbo-mobile style, or found it beautiful, even thrilling. But how, if you are his child, do you cope with a father whose sensuality enfolded everything?

After a whirlwind life as a young man, Bernstein married Felicia Montealegre, in 1951. He was thirty-three; she was twenty-nine. Montealegre was raised in Chile; her mother was Costa Rican and Catholic; her father, an American Jew, was a wealthy industrialist. A South American aristocrat who became socially ambitious in America, Felicia was an accomplished actress with an elevated elocutionary style that was losing favor to so-called naturalistic modes; she was good at narrating oratorios. Still, she had serious work for a while on the stage and in the burgeoning field of live TV drama. Once Bernstein became the music director of the New York Philharmonic, in 1958, she entertained the musical and social world at home. In general, she required rules and order, while her husband luxuriated in his own habits, some disciplined, some not. They were temperamentally at odds, but they adored each other.

They had three children: Jamie, who is now sixty-five; a boy, Alexander, and another girl, Nina, followed. Jamie says that her father was an ardent family man, attentive, affectionate, an unending didact who crammed his kids with poetry, music, Hebrew lessons. He was very much at home-when he was at home at all. The details of Jamie's memoir are intimate: Lenny eating Connecticut corn in the summer with his hands drenched in butter; or, back in New York, half awake and fragrant in the mornings. "In my mind's eye, my father is always in a scruffy brown wool bathrobe; my cheek still prickles at the memory of his scratchy morning hugs," she writes. You couldn't say of Bernstein, as you might of John Cheever (as revealed in his daughter Susan Cheever's sombre, brilliant book, "Home Before Dark"), that he was unreachable at times, or that his art absolutely came first. On the contrary, family was emotionally central to Bernstein. And family meant not just Felicia and the kids but his loving and foolish immigrant parents; his talented brother, Burton, a New Yorker writer; and his ebullient sister, Shirley, who ran a theatrical literary agency. Even in mid-career, Lenny would go off on holiday with Burtie and Shirley, the three of them joined in hilarity over childhood memories, complete with an invented nonsense language.

An eager paterfamilias at home, he remained sexually active with men. Felicia knew from the start and was hardheaded about it. At the time of their marriage, she wrote to him, "You are a homosexual and may never change-you don't admit to the possibility of a double life, but if your peace of mind, your health, your whole nervous system depends on a certain sexual pattern, what can you do? I am willing to accept you as you are, without being a martyr or sacrificing myself on the L.B. altar." But he did live a double life, and Felicia wound up tending the altar.

Jamie and the younger children knew nothing of their father's adventures away from home or of Felicia's way of coping with them. On the contrary, in Jamie's account of her childhood, one detects something like the fervent nostalgia of Russian expatriates for life before the revolution. There was glory then, ample country luxury as well as city luxury, faithful servants, tennis with Isaac Stern, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade from the windows of their apartment in the Dakota, and live music, much of it generated by Lenny sitting at the piano. The family gatherings were a conspiracy to have fun. Parents and children created rhyming nonsense songs for special occasions; they made clowning home movies ("What Ever Happened to Felicia Montealegre?," an overwrought salute to Bette Davis and Joan Crawford). If Lenny's effusiveness was sometimes hard to bear, plenty of smart people couldn't get enough of him, including Mike Nichols, Richard Avedon, Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and the young Stephen Sondheim. Lillian Hellman, terrifying to Jamie, was a growling presence. With that crew around, however, and L.B. driving the entertainments, the long evenings could become barbed-anagrams and other word games were played as life-and-death matters, and more than one participant, Jamie says, left the room in tears.

Jamie Bernstein's writing is devoted to what she directly experienced, altered, it seems, as little as possible by the passage of time. Leonard Bernstein is always "Daddy," not a figure in a novel, or the hero of myth, but an all too palpable man, with an endless capacity to please her or hurt her. Like the Tom Stoppard play "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," the book offers an off-angle view of a genius. We hear relatively little about Leonard Bernstein as a composer or as a working musician, studying scores, rehearsing orchestras and singers. The musical triumphs away from New York, in Vienna, Tel Aviv, and elsewhere, and Bernstein's citizenly public life-his advocacy of civil rights and world peace-are no more than a distant excitement, like the sound of an offstage band. Nor is there much sense of his development as a composer. (For that, one should read Allen Shawn's excellent "Leonard Bernstein: An American Musician.") The four great Broadway scores ("On the Town," "Wonderful Town," "Candide," and "West Side Story") were all composed before Jamie was born or when she was a small child.

She did, however, live through the composition and the premiere, in 1976, of "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue," which Bernstein wrote with the lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, and, for the first time, she experienced some doubt about her father's grip on things. "The two collaborators wanted to make a major statement about the meaning of democracy: to remind their country of its true purpose," she writes. The high-minded show was so resounding a flop that it was never recorded. "Our father had been unassailably magnificent to us-just as he had been to the world," she goes on. "Now he seemed complex, flawed, mortal." Yet the music was not entirely lost. In 1997, the Bernstein and Lerner estates put together a concert piece for voices and orchestra called "A White House Cantata," which has been recorded by soloists and the London Symphony Orchestra, with Kent Nagano conducting. It is one of Bernstein's retrieved scores, an element in the continuous revaluation of his work, and much of the music, as Jamie Bernstein says, is inventive and tuneful.

Leonard Bernstein found conducting easy and composing excruciatingly difficult, yet he was sure that it was more important for him to compose. Despite his many sufferings, and a hostile initial reception to much of the concert work, he managed to produce a great deal of music. It's now a safe bet that the following will remain active repertory pieces: the three symphonies; the ballets "Fancy Free" and "Dybbuk"; the Serenade for violin, strings, percussion, and harp; the choral work "Chichester Psalms"; the film score for "On the Waterfront"; as well as the four early musicals and (maybe) "A White House Cantata." Bernstein wrote a satirical, jazzy short opera about a warring honeymoon couple, "Trouble in Tahiti," in 1952. Thirty-one years later, he folded "Trouble" into a longer, tragic opera about the couple's family, "A Quiet Place"-a combined work that's both dazzling and bewilderingly sad. In all, the reputation of his classical compositions has gone way up in recent decades. A single historical marker will suffice to show the shift. In 1983, Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College and the conductor of the American Symphony, wrote, in Harper's, a lengthy, contemptuous dismissal of Bernstein as a classical composer and conductor. "His career until now has been an accumulation of false starts, spent opportunities; a record of extensive exposure with ephemeral results." Yet last fall Botstein programmed Bernstein's Symphony No. 3 ("Kaddish") with his own orchestra, and, from the stage, he acknowledged that Bernstein has had the last laugh. The centenary year completes the restoration: most of Bernstein's early work as the conductor of the New York Philharmonic-part of the activity that Botstein was condemning-has been recently reissued in a hundred-CD box set from Sony, including classic performances of Ives, Copland, Mahler, and Stravinsky. At the moment, Bernstein's music is being played all over the world. On a single day, June 23rd, there will be concerts featuring his work in Richmond, Kansas City, Hong Kong, Bilbao, and Klingenberg am Main. Two Hollywood bio-pics, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Bradley Cooper, are on the way.

"Kaddish," with its literally Heaven-storming narration ("O my father, ancient, hallowed, lonely, disappointed Father, rejected ruler of the universe"), will always remain troublesome-at least until someone satisfactorily rewrites the rambunctiously blasphemous text. But the piece has some of Bernstein's most powerful and lyrically affecting music. The other monster-the Mass, composed for the opening of the Kennedy Center, in 1971-can never settle into routine concert life, since mounting it at all requires huge forces. The Mass is led by a priest, the Celebrant, who is joined, and sometimes assaulted, by a chorus of street kids, dancers, syncopated jazz, rock, and several other forces, in frenzied antiphonal bursts, questioning the necessity of faith. Near the end, the Celebrant breaks down, in a fourteen-minute monologue that reduces audiences either to tears or to exasperation, followed by a boy soprano singing "Sing God a simple song." Mixing Broadway, rock, jazz, and classical, it's the most ecumenical of Masses, with pages of exciting music-a pleasure-seeking rebellion, Jamie says, against "the rigidity of the musical Establishment, who decreed that all 'serious' music had to be composed using the twelve-tone system."

In 1973, Bernstein appeared to settle the tonal/atonal question, in the extraordinary videotaped Norton Lectures, "The Unanswered Question," in which he insisted, using Chomsky's linguistics as an analogue, that tonality was rooted in human biology and in the laws of physics. (Despite these assertions, he occasionally blinked, flirting in his post-Norton music with both atonality and twelve-tone rows.) The Norton Lectures are the most ambitious of his pedagogical efforts, adding historical and theoretical context to his warm-spirited earlier work for the Young People's Concerts, which CBS aired in prime time during the nineteen-fifties and sixties, and to his many filmed commentaries on Mahler, Beethoven, Brahms, Shostakovich, and others. So much productive activity (there are a half-dozen books, too) is almost impossible to imagine.

In 1970, before entering Harvard, Jamie Bernstein spent the summer at the Tanglewood Music Festival, where her father had flourished as a young man. After a while, she heard tales of his earlier days ("moonlit naked swims in the lake, scurrying between practice cabins . . . you weren't supposed to hear such things about your own father"). His other life became inescapable, and she wrote him a long letter, demanding answers. He denied everything, at Felicia's insistence, as Jamie now believes-an assertion that (perhaps unfairly) places the blame for lying on her mother. In any case, Jamie's sense of her father as a sexual being, and his superabundant warmth with his children, added to her own romantic difficulties. There were many boyfriends, some good, some not, but all, apparently, lacking the divine spark. The phrase for this, I suppose, is emotional incest; Lenny was all over her life, tying her up without meaning to. He enjoyed rock music in the sixties, especially the Beatles, and would accompany her to concerts and clubs. But sometimes his enjoyment spilled over:

One night we all went to Casino Vail, a disco. They began playing the theme from "Zorba the Greek," of all things, and Daddy grabbed me. The next thing I knew we were dancing full tilt to the bouzouki music, just the two of us, while the crowd made a ring around us, clapping in rhythm and egging us on. Daddy pulled out a handkerchief and was waving it around above his head-then he was down on his knees! I danced in a circle around him; what else could I do? I was trapped: a mortified moon, doomed to eternal orbit around an ecstatic, sweaty, handkerchief-swirling sun.

She was dazzled, embarrassed, vaguely disgusted. In 1972, when she was a junior at Harvard, her father appeared with a young lover, Tom Cothran, and took up residence in Eliot House, his old dorm. For an academic year, he prepared the Norton Lectures. Professor Daddy, the campus hero! He stayed up half the night with undergraduates, talking and playing music, stealing her college social life.

After the early reveries of family happiness, frustration runs through the narrative; the story grows increasingly shadowed and anxious. Jamie had wanted to be a musician, but as a child she hated piano lessons. "Well, you'll never be a great pianist," Lenny told her, holding her in his lap, a remark that could be seen as hostile-or, possibly, as a benevolent warning against heartbreak. In any case, she was more of a rock fan than a classical kid, and for years wrote and performed songs herself, without much success. In the end, she wrote songs for her father on special occasions.

She looks back on her family life with an understanding of the distance between desire and happiness. Even Leonard Bernstein felt that distance. Fifty years ago, he could not live openly as a gay man, but he couldn't stop loving his wife, either, and he felt terribly guilty about what he put Felicia through. After twenty years of marriage, she was not doing well. Willing to serve as "Mrs. Maestro," she had given up most of her career. She developed eccentricities and odd illnesses, engaged in passionate busywork (collecting, decorating, gardening); she made paintings and threw them away. And then, in 1970, meaning well, she stepped into the social disaster of the century-a fund-raising party for the Black Panthers held in the Park Avenue family apartment, an event attended by Tom Wolfe, of New York, who published a poisonous (and funny) lampoon. Lenny, who was accustomed to brickbats, picked himself up and kept his conducting dates, but Jamie believes that Felicia, suffering from public humiliation, was never the same. At dinner one night, she pronounced a curse upon her husband: "You're going to die a lonely, bitter old queen! " Jamie says she uttered it as a joke, in the self-parodying tones of theatrical high camp. Maybe so, but it still sounds like the maledizione from "Rigoletto." Felicia turns out to be a victim of the family romance; perhaps next time the story needs to be told from her point of view.

By the mid-seventies, she was ill with cancer, and Lenny, having broken up with Cothran, returned to their apartment and nursed her until her death, at fifty-six, in 1978. And then, guilty and lost, he fell apart. The body electric no longer charmed everyone in sight. Adonis had become Silenus, sometimes drunk and mean, talking of sex too much, his hands too active, his tongue placed down unwilling throats. The extraordinary craving for sensation, for love, for contact, which he converted, refined, and fed back to his audience in lavishly expended musical effort-a gift to everyone-was wearing him out. Despite every medical warning, he smoked incessantly, even in doctors' offices. When he could sleep at all, he slept an entire day. Mortified by his increasing physical squalor, Jamie was also dismayed by the entourage that surrounded him away from home. At the 1983 Houston premiere of his late opera "A Quiet Place," or in some distant foreign city, the after-concert party would include his manager, his publicist, various musical assistants, his audio engineer, his video director, local notables and social lions, handsome young men, and assorted hangers-on. The reception had become a champagne-and-caviar version of a Rolling Stones tour stop.

As he turned seventy, in 1988, there were worldwide celebrations and a huge event at Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony, at the conclusion of which, Jamie writes, "everyone was awash in emotion," but Bernstein, incontinent, "was awash from the waist down. And of course he had to go on stage and hug everyone. On camera." For Jamie, the difficulties in his last decade figured as both the ordinary disasters of old age and the awe-inspiring decay of a national monument. "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." Yet, in thinking of Bernstein's later years, one has to invoke the mysteries of artistic will, its capacity to redeem and transcend many kinds of failure. Perhaps only Thomas Mann could have mastered the ironies of Bernstein's story. As he fell apart physically and morally, he wrote some demanding and beautiful music (including the song cycle "Arias and Barcarolles"), and his work on the podium became ever more disciplined, often profound, even visionary.

Not all the performances from the nineteen-eighties are at the same level, but the best ones, recorded live at concerts, put him among the immortals. There was a series of Mozart symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic; a fresh Mahler cycle recorded in Vienna, Amsterdam, and New York; a majestic Sibelius Fifth; Haydn, Schumann, Copland, Shostakovich; his own much abandoned, much revived 1956 show "Candide." The public acclaim and the music itself kept him going, and, again and again, he pulled himself together for a performance. Right at the end, in 1989, as the Wall was coming down, he led a powerful Beethoven's Ninth in Berlin, which was broadcast all over the world. The orchestral players were drawn from London, New York, Munich, Dresden, Paris, and St. Petersburg, in a kind of universal shout of happiness that Soviet Communism was finished. On the podium, the superb bone structure of his handsome brow was intact; a tuxedo pulled in the belly; his movements were not as fluent as earlier-he used his fists more-but he was completely in command. It was his last great public event. (All this late work-videotaped concerts and recordings-has been rereleased by Deutsche Grammophon as a gigantic box set. The recordings are individually available as well.)

He died in 1990, at seventy-two (young for a conductor), not alone, as Felicia had predicted, but attended by family and friends and saluted, as the cortege passed through the city streets, by New York hardhats ("Goodbye, Lenny!"). Charles Ives and Aaron Copland were great composers, but Bernstein was by far the greatest American musician. Occasionally, one is startled by a reminder. On YouTube, there is a filmed performance of Mahler's Symphony No. 4, from 1972, with the Vienna Philharmonic (the sound with good headphones is fine) that is astonishing for its transparent textures, its bold transitions from one mood to another. That symphony, with its musical sleigh bells, so reminiscent of childhood bliss, is a recurring motif in Jamie Bernstein's book. It's her Rosebud.

After L.B.'s death, chagrin gives way to relief; life resumes its usual shapes of success and failure. The overwhelmed children try to pull themselves together, and Jamie Bernstein finds a way-many ways, actually-of making a life out of music without being a musician, narrating concert works, creating an equivalent of the Young People's Concerts (the Bernstein Beat, devoted to his music), making a film about the training of young American instrumentalists. She and her brother and sister have devoted themselves to their father's name, his work, and his recordings, and have helped along restorative efforts on his compositions and much else. As the daughters of great men go, Jamie Bernstein has had a happy fate: the existence of this well-written book, with its poignancy and its shuddery detail-her father's fragrance in the morning-is a mark of sanity and survival. In telling his story, she got to write her own.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
David, Denby. "Music Man." The New Yorker, 25 June 2018, p. 61. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A544248479/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=68771e90. Accessed 14 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A544248479

Growing Up Bernstein: PW TALKS WITH JAMIE BERNSTEIN
Kathryn E. Livingston
Publishers Weekly. 265.20 (May 14, 2018): p48.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
On the centennial of legendary composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein's birth, Jamie Bernstein discusses life as his daughter in her memoir, Famous Father Girl (Harper, June).

What do you imagine your father would think of the book?

I wonder about what both my parents would think. I like to believe they'd appreciate that I told things as they happened and as they seemed true to me, and also true to my brother and sister, who had veto power over everything I wrote.

You write about your father's use of pills and his sexual proclivities. Were you worried about including those details?

Actually, I'm hoping that my story will help lift the veil on other people's memories of their own families. You know it wasn't just my dad, it was really a thing back then: alt the grown-ups relied on substances--uppers and downers. We lost a lot of valuable people as a result; think of Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe. People really believed that a pill was supposed to fix everything. I think that informed many people's behavior back in the day, including my father's, particularly in his later years.

What was the most difficult part of writing this?

Writing about my parents' deaths was pretty shattering, to put myself through that again.

You talk in the book about how it was simultaneously exhausting and energizing to be around your father. Was writing a book about him like that as well?

It was hard and it took a long time. It was exhausting, but I have to say I never flagged--I really relished the process, and I loved having a big project. It reminded me a lot of being pregnant, actually. It was that same feeling of having this gigantic project in the oven, and I'm just cooking and cooking, all the time.

Did you do a lot of research?

Mostly I depended on my own journals; I really wanted to tell the story as I saw it. I did spend a lot of time in my father's archives at the Library of Congress. My chronological bible was Humphrey Burton's excellent biography of my dad.

You said the title came from a secondgrade friend?

Yes, and she's still my friend. She called me "famous father girl" to tease me. I like it as the title because it's a little bit of a poke in the eye, it's just a little rude and amusing. My publisher wasn't sure about it at first, but they let me go with it.

If there was a theme to your father's life, what would it be?

Love. He was pretty much made of love. He talked about music as a total embrace, but really, he was a total embrace. People made fun of him because he hugged everybody and kissed everybody, and sometimes it was a little too much. But if he could have reached out to hug every person in the world, he would have done that. His music was the way he really came pretty close to achieving that.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Livingston, Kathryn E. "Growing Up Bernstein: PW TALKS WITH JAMIE BERNSTEIN." Publishers Weekly, 14 May 2018, p. 48. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A539387450/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d6da433d. Accessed 14 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A539387450

Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein
Publishers Weekly. 265.17 (Apr. 23, 2018): p74+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein

Jamie Bernstein. Harper, $28.99 (400p)

ISBN 978-0-06-264135-9

Film documentarian Bernstein (Crescendo! The Power of Music), the oldest of three children of conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, presents an in-depth, intimate view of her father, juxtaposed with her own upbringing in his shadow. Her memories can be jarringly candid at times: she recalls the superstar conductor on the toilet while smoking, perusing a score, and promising to be with her as soon as he finishes "this movement." Bernstein brings readers from her father's early conducting days at the New York Philharmonic to the creation of such hit musicals as "West Side Story and Candide, as well as his failures, such as the legendary flop 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. She depicts the family's various homes (a country house in Fairfield, Conn.; a Park Avenue penthouse; an apartment in the Dakota building), as well as the famous people she met (Lauren Bacall, Jackie Kennedy, Stephen Sondheim, Lillian Heilman). Although the star-studded environment was stimulating, Bernstein longed for one-on-one time with a "normal" father. As a young adult, she grappled with the realization that her father was bisexual, unfaithful to her mother, and addicted to amphetamines. The larger-than-life maestro looms energetically over the family even after his death in 1990: all three children continued to work toward forwarding his legacy, either by organizing his archives or starting a newsletter for his fans. Bernstein paints a fascinating picture of the dizzying magic that Leonard Bernstein brought to his music--and the complexity to his home life. Photos. June)

Caption: A photo of Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia Montealegre, as seen in Famous Father Girl by Jamie Bernstein (reviewed on p. 74).

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein." Publishers Weekly, 23 Apr. 2018, p. 74+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532925/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=38683657. Accessed 14 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A536532925

Bernstein, Jamie: FAMOUS FATHER GIRL
Kirkus Reviews. (Apr. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Bernstein, Jamie FAMOUS FATHER GIRL Harper/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $28.99 6, 12 ISBN: 978-0-06-264135-9

The challenges of living with a flamboyant, self-centered, and brilliant father.

Making her literary debut, broadcaster and filmmaker Bernstein offers an intimate, gossipy, and candid memoir of growing up the eldest child of renowned conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990). When a second-grade classmate called her "famous father girl," Jamie did not yet feel the impact of her father's fame; but within a few years, she began to realize what it meant. The "endless parade of triumphs and that blazing energy that overtook every situation could be exhausting to live with," she recalls. LB, as he was known, "was a daredevil; he loved roller coasters, fast boats, vertiginous ski slopes," and the author yearned to be just like him rather than like her mother, "the family policeman and Lenny stabilizer." Family life buzzed with activity and famous visitors: Stephen Sondheim, for one, who started them playing fiercely competitive "cutthroat" anagrams; and the "notoriously imperious" Lauren Bacall, who was their neighbor at the Dakota. Her father's fame had benefits: With LB, Jamie got to go backstage to meet the Beatles, making her the envy of her friends; and through his connections, she got various jobs and eventually pursued her dream of becoming a rock musician. One summer, working at Tanglewood, where LB had been in the festival's first conducting class, she heard rumors of his "wild youth," which included "amorous escapades with other men." When she confronted LB, he denied the rumors, claiming that "wicked stories" were made up by envious detractors. But a few years later, he fell in love with an assistant, an affair that led to his leaving his wife; "acting exuberantly gay," he embarked on a new life. Although her mother had known of LB's homosexuality when they married, this new turn incited grief and depression. Jamie reflects sensitively about her mother, who died of cancer in 1978, and the particular challenges faced by her brother and sister.

A cleareyed portrait of a spirited, and troubled, family.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Bernstein, Jamie: FAMOUS FATHER GIRL." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375219/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8e348573. Accessed 14 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A534375219

Book World: Daughter's loving but unsettling portrait of Leonard Bernstein
Sibbie O'Sullivan
The Washington Post. (June 29, 2018): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Sibbie O'Sullivan

Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein

By Jamie Bernstein

Harper. 385 pp. $28.99

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Let us now praise ordinary fathers, ones who don't constantly smoke and drink, or French-kiss their daughters, or pound the table while yelling, "Everyone shut up but me." An ordinary father who watches his daughter receive her diploma from Harvard instead of hanging out with the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. One who doesn't show off "his cute teenage daughter" at discos.

But ordinary fathers rarely become global cultural heroes or change how orchestral music is received by the masses. In "Famous Father Girl," Jamie Bernstein's memoir of her father, conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein, we learn that she "longed to be like the 'normal' people we saw on TV," despite loving the "raucous, confusing world" of her parents. At the center of this world stands her father, a compelling mix of intellect, warmth, charm, sexiness and immense energy. Seduction might have been his greatest talent, one countered by his daughter's aptitude for truth-telling. Her memoir portrays a man whose weaponized ego fits perfectly into American celebrity culture, but it's also a story of how his daughter survived that ego to become her own woman, even as she remains intent on keeping her father's legacy alive.

Between 1943, when he made his conducting debut with the New York Philharmonic, and his death in 1990, Bernstein was never out of the public eye. But at home he's not always a glamorous figure: Jaime remembers him sitting at the breakfast table smoking and farting. The constants of Jamie's childhood were "a bluish haze of cigarette smoke," the clink of late-afternoon ice cubes, household servants, word games, and frequent parties attended by artists and intellectuals. Everybody loved Lenny - as he was known to his friends and family - none more so than Jamie herself. Singing, playing and exchanging numerous hugs with him created a strong bond between them. But even her sunniest memories are tempered with shadows.

As Jaime moved from childhood into adulthood, navigating her father's exhibitionist tendencies became a challenge. Jamie's telling omits the yuck factor, so prominent in "Priestdaddy," Patricia Lockwood's recent memoir about her eccentric father, a priest by papal dispensation. Bernstein offers instead a one-size-fits-all explanation for her father's exuberance: It was just the way he was. Describing a dinner with a Russian actor, for example, she writes that her father kissed her "fully on the lips, then [pushed] his tongue into my mouth. Daddy tried this tongue-kissing stunt on almost everyone, usually late at night, after much drinking (and possibly an orange pill)." Though his actions embarrassed and sometimes hurt her, she's reluctant to fully consider their implications. At her 28th birthday party, before a group of people, Bernstein "gestured to a crease in his forehead and said to [Jamie,] 'You see this line here that runs right down the middle? That's the Line of Genius. You don't have one.' " Assessing this humiliation, Jamie simply writes that "it did seem unusually mean."

Thinking more deeply about her father's behavior might lead to unpleasant conclusions, and though Jamie denies there was any abuse, she writes that "it was hard not to feel my father's sexuality. ... Everybody felt it. Tricky stuff for a daughter." She even writes that her father's music would bring her to a "state of ecstasy," something many of Bernstein's audiences have experienced, though she acknowledges that, for her, "a subliminal discomfort" accompanied it.

Though we may wonder about Jamie's generosity toward her father, her brother, Alexander, had no difficulty directly expressing how he felt about his father's controlling nature. In Jaime's account, during a party to celebrate Alexander's graduation from Harvard, a school Bernstein insisted his son attend, guests found his diploma "impaled on the front door with a kitchen knife." This is just one of many punchy details in the book that reveal the ugly reality of what Jaime calls "the Lenny Show." There's also the moment when Jaime's mother, Felicia, forced a separation after one of Bernstein's homosexual affairs became too visible. Across the dinner table, in "her biggest, scariest actress voice," she tells her husband, "You're going to die a lonely, bitter old queen." When the affair ended, she took him back and "things were sort of back to normal."

Jamie writes lovingly about her mother, an actress whose main function was being "Mrs. Maestro," a job that entailed "a slow descent into a mute, existential despair." Fun-loving but deeply depressed, Felicia self-medicated by chain-smoking and drinking, just like her husband. Jaime feared becoming like her mother, a woman dedicated to her husband at the expense of her own talent. This fear partly explains Jamie's attempts to become "a rock star" with an album of her own songs. She never pulled this off, and given her admission that she has no musical "chops," her efforts just feel silly, rather than brave or risky, though they do put some distance between her and her father.

Tentative as Jamie is about her father's excesses, she is fiercer still in defending him. She explodes at Tom Wolfe's treatment of her family in his article "Radical Chic," which mocked the cocktail party/fundraiser her parents hosted for the Black Panthers in 1970. Felicia organized the event to raise money for families of jailed Panthers. Wolfe upbraids all who attended, especially the rich and famous. Though she was not at the party, Jaime remains enraged over Wolfe's article and the damage it caused. She goes so far as to write, "It doesn't seem like such a stretch to lay Mummy's precipitous decline, and even demise, at the feet of Mr. Wolfe."

"Famous Father Girl" is a good book that strives to keep Leonard Bernstein before the public eye. Short on psychological insight, it is long on love and acceptance: love for a father of boundless energy and acceptance of one who sometimes crossed boundaries a father shouldn't cross. By preserving his legacy, Jaime honors her father as both a great talent and a complex human being.

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O'Sullivan, a former teacher in the Honors College at the University of Maryland, recently completed a memoir on how the Beatles have influenced her life.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
O'Sullivan, Sibbie. "Book World: Daughter's loving but unsettling portrait of Leonard Bernstein." Washington Post, 29 June 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A544745054/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=17ab3d89. Accessed 14 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A544745054

David, Denby. "Music Man." The New Yorker, 25 June 2018, p. 61. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A544248479/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=68771e90. Accessed 14 July 2018. Livingston, Kathryn E. "Growing Up Bernstein: PW TALKS WITH JAMIE BERNSTEIN." Publishers Weekly, 14 May 2018, p. 48. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A539387450/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d6da433d. Accessed 14 July 2018. "Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein." Publishers Weekly, 23 Apr. 2018, p. 74+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532925/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=38683657. Accessed 14 July 2018. "Bernstein, Jamie: FAMOUS FATHER GIRL." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375219/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8e348573. Accessed 14 July 2018. O'Sullivan, Sibbie. "Book World: Daughter's loving but unsettling portrait of Leonard Bernstein." Washington Post, 29 June 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A544745054/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=17ab3d89. Accessed 14 July 2018.

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