The release of Bradley Cooper’s Maestro last fall signaled the start of a kind of Bernsteinmania, with interest in the life and work of Leonard Bernstein (August 25, 1918—October 14, 1990) reaching a fever pitch. Fifteen years ago, in the February 2009 issue of Vogue, Adam Green paid moving tribute to the American conductor and composer, whom he’d known since birth: Bernstein (or “Goddaddy Lennyâ€) and Green’s father, the lyricist and playwright Adolph Green, had been best friends since meeting at a Massachusetts summer camp in 1937.Â
Ahead of the Academy Awards next month—where Maestro is up for seven, including best actor (for Cooper), best actress (for Carey Mulligan, who plays Bernstein’s wife, Felicia), best original screenplay, and best picture—revisit Green’s essay below.
Throughout his life, my father’s greatest joy was finding someone with whom he could share his passions. The moment I could utter a few rudimentary words, he began sneaking me into the second act of Broadway matinees, giving me art-history lessons at the Met, having me sit through a double bill of City Lights and Modern Times. But our most frequent destination, it seemed to me, was Lincoln Center, where we went to hear the New York Philharmonic led by Leonard Bernstein, who also happened to be my godfather. I remember having to shush my father, who would be singing and conducting along, and I remember believing that swashbuckling leaps and Byronically tossed forelocks were necessary to the making of great music, a notion that still strikes me as fundamentally sound.
After the concert, we always went backstage, where a crush of people would be waiting for an audience with Bernstein, who, a silver tumbler of scotch in one hand and a cigarette perched between the fingers of the other, held court in a state of glamorous dishevelment, jacket draped over his shoulders, shirt unbuttoned to the navel. He was an infamously profligate kisser—my father thought someone should make a movie about him called Lips, whose tagline would be “He only wanted to say hello.†When Bernstein inevitably swept me up in his arms, planted a wet one on me, and announced, “This is my godson—I held him when he was circumcised,†it would fill me with that particular mix of warmth and embarrassment that can only be evoked by family. Once, to my delight, he surprised me with a gift of the cork-tipped wand that he had just wielded on the podium.
That literal passing of the baton did not, I’m sorry to say, lead to a brilliant musical career—my desultory efforts as a piano student remain a blot on the family escutcheon—but it was not without symbolism. It connected me to my father’s best friend and to the years of private jokes, mutual enthusiasms, and bursts of creativity that bound them together. Somehow, I knew that the calculus of my relationship with my father involved finding my own place in their ancient camaraderie.
That friendship was born in the summer of 1937 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, at Camp Onota, which my father later dubbed “Uncle Lou’s Heavenly Haven for Healthily Well-Fed Young Hebrews.†Bernstein, who had just finished his sophomore year at Harvard, was the camp’s music counselor; my father, a self-described aimless bum at the age of 22, had been invited by a friend to guest star as the Pirate King in the camp’s production of The Pirates of Penzance. Moments after they had been introduced, Bernstein, who had heard about my father’s uncanny knowledge of classical music, dragged him into the dining hall and challenged him to identify a Shostakovich melody, which he played on an upright piano. After a few bars, my father said, “I don’t know what that is, but it’s not Shostakovich.†Bernstein leaped up, threw his arms around him, and confessed that it was a piece he himself had written.
Late into the night, they wandered through the hills surrounding the camp, singing each other snatches of music, impressing each other with esoteric bits of knowledge, and discovering their common love of everything from Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat to an obscure novelty song called “I Wish That I’d Been Born in Borneo.†Recalling their meeting years later in a letter, my father wrote, “I felt a sudden, complete exuberance, the fresh air of 1,000,000 windows opening simultaneously + a sense that my life had been building towards a turning point + that it had happened—now.â€
By the time Bernstein graduated from Harvard, Betty Comden, Judy Holliday, and my father were performing satirical sketches and songs at the Village Vanguard. Bernstein moved to New York, occasionally playing piano for the Revuers, as the troupe was known, and sharing a squalid apartment with my father on East Ninth Street, where they lived, I’ve been told, with a contempt for property and hygiene that bordered on the criminal.
My father quickly discovered the dual nature of his friend’s personality. One afternoon, Bernstein walked into their apartment and, for no apparent reason, told him, “You’re so brilliant. It’s too bad you’ll never amount to anything.†And yet, a few years later, when a producer asked Bernstein, who had become famous overnight, to create a musical based on Fancy Free, his and Jerome Robbins’s ballet about sailors on shore leave in Manhattan, he insisted that my father and Betty write the book and lyrics. The result, On the Town, announced the arrival of a new generation on Broadway.
Over the years, their friendship weathered such storms as Comden and Green’s turning down an offer to write the book and lyrics for West Side Story (there went my trust fund) and Bernstein’s abandoning their collaboration on a musical version of The Skin of Our Teeth. In the mid-’70s, Bernstein briefly left his serenely beautiful Chilean wife, Felicia, for a young man, and somehow my parents managed to remain loyal to both of them. One night a year or so later, when Felicia was dying of cancer, Bernstein wept to my father, blaming himself for her illness. My father rested a hand on his friend’s shoulder and said, “Leonard, m’boy, I’m afraid you’re being a wee bit self-indulgent.â€
That self-indulgence, almost operatic at times, seemed to me to be inseparable from his charisma, which was the charisma of genius. Irving Penn captured that quality in his matinee-idol portrait of Bernstein, published in Vogue in 1948: Here he is, not yet completely at ease in his white tie and tails; his unlined face a mix of deep-seated insecurity and unbridled self-confidence; his bearing somewhere between the 25-year-old prodigy who captured the world by stepping in at the last minute for Bruno Walter to lead the New York Philharmonic and the larger-than-life maestro memorialized in his New York Times obituary as “Music’s Monarch.†To a young boy, he was a formidable figure. My memory is filled with images of him presiding rabbinically over hotly debated Passover seders; leading frenzied performances of Christmas carols; dominating cutthroat marathons of Anagrams, jotto, and other harrowing word games. When he chose to focus on you, Bernstein could make you feel as if you were the only person in the world. I remember, during a party at his apartment in the Dakota, a crowd of admirers hovering nearby while he and I had a long, heated discussion about Nabokov, with whom I, at 17, had recently become obsessed. At some point, my parents signaled that it was time to go, and I told him that I was leaving. His eyes flashed and he smacked me across the face, saying, “Fuck you—we were really talking.â€
A few months later, Bernstein told me that he was preparing to write an opera of Lolita and asked me to put off college for a year to assist him with the libretto. I immediately said yes, though I was taken aback when he grabbed me and said, “Oh, we’re going to have so much fun. We’ll work day and night in a kind of fever. We’ll explore, we’ll create, we’ll laugh, we’ll make love.†Later, I nervously recounted the proposition to my father, who just laughed. Bernstein never mentioned our possible collaboration again, and I eventually learned he had abandoned the project. I was relieved, partly because I wasn’t sure that I was up to the task and partly because I felt that it would have meant trespassing on my father’s territory. But I was thrilled when, on the day of my high school graduation, an envelope arrived containing a sheet of music paper on which, scrawled in pencil, were the opening bars of an aria for Humbert Humbert and the inscription, “For Adam—The very first sketch. Love, Goddaddy Lenny.â€
My father and Bernstein collaborated for the last time in the winter of 1989. Bernstein was conducting a concert version of his opera Candide in London, and he asked my father to sing the role of Dr. Pangloss. I will never forget watching my father belt out “The Best of All Possible Worlds,†conducted by his best friend, both of them wearing white tie and tails and half-moon reading glasses, tossing their now-white manes theatrically and exchanging sly glances in front of the crowd in London Symphony Hall as if sharing one final private joke.
Ten months later, Bernstein died at the age of 72. Shortly after we got the call, my father and I found ourselves, surreally, standing over his deathbed. Looking down at his ashen, lifeless face—eyes closed, mouth slightly open—I felt a sharp intimation of my own father’s mortality and turned to him. I expected to see him crying, his features melted in grief, but his face was hard, and he was trembling with anger. “OK, Leonard, this isn’t funny,†he growled. “Get up. Get up, goddamn you. This is bullshit.â€
It was years later, not long after my father died, that I came across the letter that he had written to his friend on his 50th birthday, recalling the night of their first meeting.
When I first read my father’s words, it was as if I saw him—and their relationship—anew. But then I realized that the walk he took that night was the same one that carried him through his entire life. It may have been rambling, but it only looked haphazard, and the connections go on.
