Famous Father Girl Read online

  Lenny, Shirley, and BB on Martha’s Vineyard.

  Shirley and BB were the most constant presences, but our house was continually full of our parents’ friends. Only much later did I realize how extraordinary it was to be surrounded on a regular basis by (let the name-dropping begin) Dick Avedon, Mike Nichols, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Lillian Hellman, Steve Sondheim, Jerry Robbins, Sidney Lumet, Betty (Lauren) Bacall, Isaac Stern . . . Their luminosity meant nothing to Alexander and me.

  It made sense that so many of these friends were also our father’s work colleagues; the membrane between work and play was, for him, virtually nonexistent. When Alexander and I would peek into Daddy’s studio and see him through a bluish haze of cigarette smoke, pounding away at the piano surrounded by Betty and Adolph, or by Jerry Robbins, Arthur Laurents, and Steve Sondheim, it was hard to distinguish that scene from the one around the living room piano after dinner, when those same pals all clustered around our father to bawl out silly songs and make one another laugh. Daddy effortlessly and inevitably became the center of attention; he never seemed to tire of it.

  But Mummy could get tired. Over time, she developed a habit of “slipping away,” as she put it, without saying good night. Daddy was always the last one standing. He couldn’t sleep anyway; his was an engine that would not, could not shut itself off. He had terrible insomnia, and in my early years he was already well into his lifelong dependence on sleeping pills. But then, all the grownups took sleeping pills in those days.

  Daddy did most of his composing during his sleepless night hours. I wasn’t born yet when he wrote Fancy Free, which led to On the Town; nor was I around for his first two symphonies or his one-act opera, Trouble in Tahiti. And I was unaware of the pieces he was writing during the first few years of my life: his concert work Serenade; his second Broadway show, Wonderful Town; the score to the film On the Waterfront; his jazzy piece Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs. The first works I was just barely conscious of Daddy composing were two musicals he was writing simultaneously: Candide and West Side Story.

  Candide opened first, in 1956. I was four. I remember my parents all dressed up one night; clearly they were about to do something exciting. “Where are you going?” I asked. “We’re going to see Candide!” Mummy said, with a little shiver of anticipation.

  They were going to see candy? That sounded wonderful. “I want to go, too!” I said. “No, darling, this is for grownups.” Candy—for grownups? Impossible. “But I want to see the candy! I want to see the can-deee . . . !” I was still kicking Julia’s shins in the throes of my tantrum as my parents scurried out the door in their opening-night finery.

  The following summer, while Daddy was working feverishly to finish the West Side Story score, Mummy escaped the heat of the city (and the show) by taking me down to Chile to visit her family. While I played with my cousins, Lenny and Felicia kept in touch through letters. One of them that arrived was addressed to me.

  July 23: DERE JAMIE: IT IS VERY HOT HERE AND HUMIT AND I SURE WISH WE WERE ALL SKI-ING IN THE ANDEES MOUNTINS, INSTED OF WRITING THIS *FUKING SHOW. I DON’T LIKE JERY ROBINS. YESTERDAY WE HAD OUR FURST READING AND EVERYONE IS HISTERICAL. I HOPE AFTER YOU GO TO BREERLY YOU CAN SPEL BETER THAN THIS. KIS MUMMY A LOT FOR ME . . . I ADORE YOU. WRITE TO ME! YOUR LOVING, LONELY FATHER, LENNUHTT.

  I was too young to see West Side Story on the Broadway stage, with its knife fights and scary gunshot at the end. But Alexander and I listened constantly to the recording on the little record player in our bedroom. We listened to all Daddy’s shows. I loved On the Town, with its goofy “Taxi Number” and the dreamy, melancholy “Lonely Town” ballet music that spoke to a place inside me no one knew about. Wonderful Town featured the song “A Quiet Girl,” which I was told my father had originally written as a lullaby to me—a delightfully inapt dedication as I was, by all accounts, the noisiest girl in the world. Candide had a thousand words we couldn’t follow, but the tunes were irresistible. Were we putting on the records, or was someone else putting them on for us? Either way, we came to know those scores by heart.

  Jamie holds Henry’s leash at the stage door of Carnegie Hall.

  Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images

  West Side Story was a Broadway hit and Leonard Bernstein’s fame increased—but later that same season, something else happened to him that I found far more impressive: not his first season as music director of the New York Philharmonic, but rather his presenting the orchestra’s traditional Young People’s Concerts, live, on CBS network television. As far as Alexander and I were concerned, nothing was more magical than being on TV.

  “Don’t step on the cables,” warned whoever was holding my hand backstage at Carnegie Hall for the first live broadcast of a Young People’s Concert. I carefully lifted my party shoe over the anaconda-sized wires. Of the concert itself, I remember nothing, except that it began with the Lone Ranger theme, followed by Daddy explaining that the music had nothing to do with the Lone Ranger, at which point I stopped listening. Afterward, a lady kneeled down in front of me and asked brightly, “Did you understand what your father was talking about?” “No,” I replied.

  2

  The Vineyard and Redding

  It was in the summers that we came alive as a family. In those early years before Nina was born, we spent the summer months on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Cape Card.

  But first we had to get there. It was a quasi-military operation, involving my mother driving the station wagon with Julia, Rosalia, and the maid; plus all of Rosalia’s cooking utensils, which she insisted on bringing; plus duffel bags full of sheets and towels; plus the canary and the fish and the turtles and, of course, Henry the dachshund. Plus Alexander and me. The spillover went into Daddy’s gray, yacht-sized Lincoln Continental convertible, a present from the car company that sponsored his television shows. The car was all button-operated—one of the first of its kind—and the buttons were always jamming and short-circuiting. But it was exceedingly glamorous.

  One summer, we had so much stuff to transport to the Vineyard that a U-Haul trailer was affixed to the rear of the Lincoln. I rode along with Daddy, just the two of us: a treat. (I was still too young to fret over the fact that Leonard Bernstein was the most terrible, erratic, reckless driver on the planet.) We should have set out on the Connecticut Turnpike, which permitted our multipleaxled vehicle, but Daddy preferred the bucolic, truck-free serenity of the Merritt Parkway. So we took the Merritt, and were soon pulled over by a trooper. He pointed out that we were breaking the law, no trailers allowed, and asked for my father’s license and registration. “Oh—you’re the conductor? I saw you on the television!” On came the dazzling Lenny smile, the laser-beam charm. Pretty soon the trooper was reminiscing about his violin lessons in elementary school, and shaking Daddy’s hand, and oh, forget the ticket, Maestro, just take the next exit to the Connecticut Turnpike. A pleasure to meet you, sir! And off we went.

  But the Maestro liked it on the Merritt, so we stayed on the Merritt. “Daddy, they’re gonna arrest you! We’re gonna be in trouble!” “Naw, it’ll be fine, you’ll see!” Soon enough came the siren and the flashing light, and once again we were getting pulled over.

  Trooper, license, registration, Lenny laser beam, handshake, just take the next exit, Maestro—a pleasure to meet you, sir!

  The man was blessed. But I was a shrunken ball of mortification—not for the first time and not for the last, by many a country mile.

  The Weaver house, our rental on the figure-of-speech lagoon, was a paradise for Alexander and me. We shared endless make-believe games, indoors and out. Somehow I’d gotten the impression that “Casino” was a normal part of a restaurant name, so I invented a game where the house had three restaurants: Casino Fancy, Casino Medium, and Casino Sloppy. At Casino Fancy, in the dining room, you used supergood manners, and everything was just so, and you spoke with a fancy accent about fancy things. Casino Medium was so boring that we never
went there. Casino Sloppy, outside the kitchen door, was the most fun: you could eat chicken with your fingers, wipe your mouth on your sleeve, and talk like a cowboy. Years later, we came to understand that these two restaurants were perfect manifestations of our parents: Casino Fancy was elegant and well behaved, like our mother, while Casino Sloppy was messy, spontaneous, a little naughty, and (we had to admit) more fun, like our father.

  The family on the figure-of-speech lagoon, Martha’s Vineyard.

  Actually, our father wasn’t sloppy so much as clumsy. His siblings teased him about his “lappes”—Yiddish for paws. He spilled things; he forced objects and broke them; he never owned an audio system he didn’t bust. And despite his prodigious gifts, he had no visual sense at all. He’d sported many god-awful, garish outfits until Felicia came along to civilize him. She bought many of his clothes, and surreptitiously hid or threw away the ones she disapproved of. Years later, we would open a blanket chest to find it stuffed with things like flocked orange sweaters and black leather bathing trunks: we’d accidentally discovered Felicia’s burial ground for her husband’s sartorial atrocities.

  The Weaver house was full of guests, just as the Osborne always was. Betty Comden and Adolph Green would make their way up to the Vineyard every summer. BettyandAdolph: they were a crucial presence in our collective lives. Theirs was not a romance, in the traditional sense—they each married other people and raised their own families—but it was a lifelong partnership. They wrote screenplays, they wrote lyrics and dialogue for musicals, and they amused and inspired each other for over half a century.

  Adolph, Betty, and Lenny in On the Town days.

  Stanley Kubrick for Look magazine / Museum of the City of New York. X2011.4.12304.96E. Used with permission of SK Film Archives

  Back in the 1930s, Betty and Adolph had paired up in a sketch comedy group called the Revuers, which also included the young actress Judy Holliday. Our father had gone to all their gigs at the Village Vanguard, sometimes accompanying them on piano. He taught us all the Revuers’ sketches by heart; they became part of the family DNA.

  We also knew about Lenny and Adolph’s memorable first encounter, at a summer camp where nineteen-year-old “Uncle Lenny” was the music counselor and Adolph had been imported from the Bronx to play the Pirate King in a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance. Upon Adolph’s arrival, Lenny began quizzing him on musical pieces, and rapidly discovered that he could not stump Adolph. Adolph knew everything—by heart, and all by ear—and he could sing anything from Tchaikovsky to Sibelius to a virtuosic, tongue-twisting rendition of “Flight of the Bumblebee.” Adolph was zany, quick on the trigger, deeply intellectual, and utterly unique. Lenny and Adolph became friends at that deep, mysterious level where humor, intellect, and aesthetic instinct all meet. It was a kind of true love that lasted all their lives.

  As for Betty, she struck me as the last word in female self-possession. Whip-smart, with her glossy hair and stylish outfits, Betty was a true career girl who could crack wise like a living screwball comedy heroine. From my listening post in bed at night, I could hear how often Betty’s voice generated the gales of grownup laughter. She could play word games with Steve Sondheim, and not quaver. She could quote Shakespeare and Ibsen and Bugs Bunny. I wanted to be just like her.

  A piano was set up for Daddy in a big airy room above the Weaver house garage. (In exchange for Leonard Bernstein’s endorsement of Baldwin Pianos, the company provided him with a piano wherever he went in the world.) Daddy announced that Alexander and I were going to help him write a show. We didn’t get far in the collaboration, but I remember my father at the piano, playing something we were “working on,” and as I casually leaned my little elbow into the crook of the piano in that room above the garage, I felt—oh, I felt just like Betty Comden!

  Mike Nichols would also visit every summer. He was a family favorite: witty and hilarious with our parents, warm and amusing with us kids. Once, when we were devising awful, imaginary ice cream flavors, Mike came up with the yummiest one of all: “liver ripple.”

  One weekend, I was going around the room offering all the grownups scalp massages. When I got to Mike, he demurred. I insisted, telling him he’d really like it. He said no, thanks. I continued insisting until Daddy suddenly raised his voice sharply: “JAMIE! He says he doesn’t want a scalp massage!”

  Daddy never yelled at us; Alexander and I were horrified. We ran upstairs and cried in our room. Daddy came up a few minutes later, sat on Alexander’s bed across from mine, and explained to us that when Mike was a little boy, he got a bad disease that caused all the hair on his body to fall out and never grow back. So he wore a wig and false eyebrows. And he had no eyelashes—which, we then understood, gave him that slightly peculiar gaze.

  I was mortified at what I’d done: the kind of mortification that makes you moan involuntarily every time you recall it. It took me a while to feel comfortable again in Mike’s presence, but his calm, affable ways and irresistible hilarity nudged me past my embarrassment.

  Another frequent guest was the playwright Lillian Hellman, who had her own house on the Vineyard. It was in those years that she and my father were collaborating on Candide. The idea for the musical was Lillian’s; she’d suggested using Voltaire’s eighteenth-century satirical novella to mock the House Un-American Activities Committee’s Spanish Inquisition–like persecution of left-leaning artists. The collaboration was a lengthy torture, but Lillian and my father managed to stay friends mostly due to Mummy, who adored Lillian and put up with her brusque, growling ways.

  Henry the dachshund hated Lillian; the minute she stepped through the door he’d lunge for her ankle, a reaction Alexander and I viscerally understood. Everything about Lillian Hellman was scary: her craggy face with the big, irregular teeth; the way her mouth turned down at the corners when she let loose with her gravelly laugh, “HAWWW, HAWWW, HAWWW.” It was enough to make you jump out the window. Upstairs in the Weaver house, Alexander and I would sit opposite each other on our bedroom floor, look at each other intensely, and whisper the dreaded words, “Lillian Hellman!”—triggering a mutual laughing fit that would leave us clawing the floorboards, gasping for breath.

  Jamie with Lillian Hellman, Martha’s Vineyard.

  Some years later in New York, Nina was in the library with our mother and Lillian while the two ladies were having tea. Mummy told Nina that Lillian had been appointed her godmother. “That’s right, kid,” Lillian told my five-year-old sister. “When the plane goes down, I getcha.” Imagine Nina’s alarm.

  The whole business of godparents was decidedly unofficial; it mainly served as a way for our parents to honor those closest to them. My own appointed godfather, composer Marc Blitzstein, had bonded with my father years earlier over music and politics; both were composers and confirmed lefties. (Harvard senior Lenny Bernstein had made a name for himself by presenting Marc’s inflammatory musical The Cradle Will Rock.) Bald, spry, and twinkly-eyed, Marc showed up in the Vineyard one summer in time to participate in an elaborate home movie my parents and Uncle BB were devising, entitled “Call Me Moses.” Marc played the Egyptian slave driver who whipped the Jewish slaves into building the pyramids—all of this being filmed on the beach by cinematographer Uncle BB using his 8-mm movie camera. Lenny took over as the shaky cameraman for the scenes in which his brother played the starring role of Moses, in full Orthodox Jewish regalia, payis included. On-screen, Lenny played the cruel pharaoh, in a regal lampshade crown, lusting after Moses’s girlfriend, played by Uncle BB’s actual girlfriend (and eventual wife) Ellen, all be-robed in white sheets. Felicia, in a Cleopatra-style wig, played the pharaoh’s wife, who lusted after Moses. Felicia masterminded these complex home movies, devising the shooting script and collecting all the props. On-screen, she was riveting; with her Chaplin-grade talent for body language and exaggerated facial expressions, Felicia Montealegre was born to play silent films.

  Alexander and I got bit parts as Daddy-the-cru
el-pharaoh’s children. In our big scene, he was distractedly playing cards with us until, spying the nubile Ellen, he knocked us kids unceremoniously to the side (a little too vigorously: Alexander cried). The climax of the film, the Red Sea chase, was filmed on the lagoon, with the two brothers taking turns filming from the motorboat while each of the characters made it across the Red Sea—or didn’t—on water skis.

  Steve Sondheim directed several of our Vineyard home movies, the greatest of which was an excerpt from the opera Tosca, in which Tosca (Mummy) murders the wicked Scarpia (Daddy, sporting a dastardly mustache applied with a burned cork). The innovation on that film was the addition of sound: our parents lip-synched to the Maria Callas and Tito Gobbi recording.

  Steve visited every summer. He had been the “kid” collaborator on West Side Story: a mere twenty-seven to Lenny’s and Jerry Robbins’s thirty-nine and Arthur Laurents’s forty. But Steve held his own. His powers of wordplay were prodigious, and he was madly witty at every party, often slouched on a couch, squinting through his cigarette smoke and making cutting remarks. With his slightly disheveled way about him, he was not exactly cuddly.

  There was an enormous party at the Weaver house when Daddy turned forty. Steve devised a complex treasure hunt; all the grownups were outside, dashing around in the dusk, screaming with laughter. Daddy also received a birthday song from Steve, with the lyric: “You’re only as old as you look—and you look . . . forty.”

  * * *

  My father loved the water: swimming in it, water-skiing over it, or steering a boat across it. He was particularly fond of sailing. One Vineyard afternoon it was just him and me on the Janie, a little sailboat that came with the house. As we drifted across the lagoon in figure-of-speech conditions, Daddy said, “Isn’t it marvelous out here, just the two of us? Oh, I can just imagine, though, when you’re a teenager, I’ll say, ‘Would you like to go for a little sail with your old pappy?’ And you’ll say, ‘Oh, but DAD-dy, Jim’s invited all the kids on his yacht, and I really want to go!’ And I’ll say, ‘Aw, but don’t you want to go for just a little spin with your old, old pappy?’ And you’ll say, ‘Oh, but DAD-dy, all the kids are going on Jim’s yacht!’ And away you’ll go, leaving your poor old pappy all alone.”