December 19, 2023 • 46 mins
As we prepare to launch our fourth season at iHeartRadio, we’re revisiting some of host Alec Baldwin’s favorite episodes from the archives. In advance of the release of the film “Maestro” – directed by and starring Bradley Cooper – we’re sharing Alec’s interview with two of Leonard Bernstein’s three children. Alec speaks with Jamie and Alexander Bernstein about life growing up with the world-famous conductor and composer. While they knew him in the tux and tails, they also knew him as the dad who loved games — he was a killer at anagrams — and was always up for tennis, squash, skiing, or touch football. The two talk about listening to music — Jamie says she learned “more about music by listening to The Beatles with my dad than I think I did any other way”— and how their father's relationship to fame evolved during his lifetime. Alex remembers his dad saying, “I’m so sick of Leonard Bernstein. I've had it with him."
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, it's Alec Baldwin here. Before we launch our next
season of Here's the Thing at iHeartRadio in January, I
thought I'd share a few of my favorite shows from
the archives. Few people could have convinced Hollywood Studios to
back a biopic about the life of the composer and
conductor Leonard Bernstein. But when its director and leading man
(00:23):
are Bradley Cooper, who could say no? His film Maestro
premieres tomorrow, December twentieth on Netflix. Here's my interview with
two of Bernstein's children, Jamie and Alex Bernstein.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Carnegie Hall in New York City, the home of the
world's greatest musical events.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
In the nineteen fifties, television was a powerful new spotlight
in search of a talent that could shine back just as.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Bright and here is mister Bernstein.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
When it landed on Leonard Bernstein, the young conductor more
than shined back. His primetime show, Leonard Bernstein Young People's
Concerts with the New York Philharmonic was a benchmark of
quality programming and seduced the entire country.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
No matter how many times people tell you stories about
what music means, forget them. Stories aren't what music means
at all. Music is never about anything. Music just is
music is notes, beautiful notes, and songs put together in
such a way that we get pleasure out of listening
(01:29):
to them.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
That's all there is to Bernstein was a masterful teacher,
explaining classical music with a passion and clarity that couldn't
help but influence an entire generation of musicians and artists.
In those days, there were far fewer celebrities, and Bernstein
was one of the biggest. He wore it well, taking
his seat at the piano at the center of the party.
Speaker 5 (01:51):
He really enjoyed the public. Leonard Bernstein, he loved the key.
Leonard Bernstein loved and he loved being famous, and he
loved meeting everybody in the world and.
Speaker 6 (02:02):
In fancy hotels and flying first class. And he'd take
us along and share it with us, like.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
Isn't this cool.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Bernstein was a musician, a conductor, a teacher, and a
composer of classical music as well as Broadway musicals. He
was also a father.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
I'm the bossy one.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
Bernstein and his wife Felicia had three children, Jamie, Alexander,
and Nina, and while they knew him in the tucks
and tales. They also knew him as the dad who
loved games. He was a killer at anagrams and always
up for tennis or squash or skiing or touch football.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
The word games, you have no idea.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Two of Bernstein's children, Jamie and Alexander, spoke with me
about their legendary father and what it was like to
grow up with people like Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins
as regular HouseGuests.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
When we were really little.
Speaker 6 (02:52):
Alexander and I used to share a bedroom when we
were like, you know, really little, and we lived in
the Osbourne, which is that grand building, and Alexander and
I slept, you know, at sort of right angles to
each other in this bedroom, and we would go to
sleep listening to the grown ups carrying on downstairs. Is
what we fell asleep to the noise of the you know,
the laughing and the roaring around the piano, singing, sneaking
(03:15):
of the glasses, and the smell of the cigarette smoke
washing up the sas shape. We could not wait to
be grown ups because obviously all grown ups did was
have fun.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
That's interesting.
Speaker 6 (03:24):
That's how it seemed to us, And it seemed like
our dad certainly had fun when he was working too,
so we never saw anything that resembled drudgery, which is
probably a thing that most kids perceive in their working parents.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
It's tough. What about your mother?
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Was your mother someone who was his companion and she
was along for the ride and all of it and
loving it.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
Or was she someone who was sitting in the room going,
when's it gonna stop my eyes?
Speaker 1 (03:49):
The energizer bunny and the Martini in his hand and a.
Speaker 7 (03:53):
Pell Mell in the other Scotch not Martinez, Scotchie, Valentine's
a Valentine's beer, Oh Scotch, Scotch did am and she
had a Chesterfield my grandfather vodka and the other.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
But your mother was his trusted companion. She was she
was in. She was all in, absolutely.
Speaker 6 (04:14):
All in, and I think it drove her crazy, every
bit as much as she loved it all.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
She was very social. Where was she from? And where
did they meet?
Speaker 5 (04:23):
They met at a party given by Claudio organist and.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
Who was her teacher because he was studying piano.
Speaker 5 (04:31):
She had told her parents that she was coming to
New York to study piano, but she really wanted to
be an actress, so she came.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
She's a beautiful woman, and she was beautiful, very beautiful.
Speaker 5 (04:42):
So she had this understanding with Aral that she would
be sort of studying with him, But meanwhile she was
studying with my parents.
Speaker 8 (04:53):
Now make this sound of the piano. The debuts we're
like to make parents now in exactly so America.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
I think it was very much like that.
Speaker 6 (05:08):
It was, And the legend has it that our mother
sat at his feet and fed him shrimps one by one.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
That was the beginning of the romance. Yeah, yeah, not around.
She might have been doing that and they got engaged.
But where was he ad in his career then?
Speaker 6 (05:25):
So he had already had his big debut with the
New York Philharmonic, because that was in nineteen forty three.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
Were he filled in for for he filled in the.
Speaker 6 (05:32):
Ailing Bruno Vaulter, as he's always referred to in that circumstance.
I thought his first name was ailing anyway, So this
must have been like maybe four or five years later,
So he was riding high, but he was not yet.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
That'll be a name.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
I stay in a hotel, and from now I love
good names for hotels. I'm going to stay in a
hotel under the name.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
Ailing e h l I aiming. Bruno Vote is the
name I would use this hotel, and so Bruno Vote.
The fluent year was that. That was November fourteenth, nineteen
forty three.
Speaker 9 (06:08):
Wow, good afternoon, the United States Rubber Company again invites
you to Carnegie Hall to hear a concert of the
New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. Bruno Vaulter, who was to
have conducted this afternoon, is ill, and his place will
be taken by the young American born assistant conductor of
the Philharmonic Symphony, Leonard Bernstein.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
And he had to get up there on a moment's notes.
Speaker 6 (06:30):
And he'd been up all night the night before because
he'd had a premiere of a song cycle of his
called I Hate Music, and it had premiered the night before.
So of course it was a cardi a town hall
and it was very well received, and of course there
was a party afterwards, and they were up all the
livelong night. And at the time, you know, our dad
was living in Carnegie Hall in those little apartments they
used to have at the top. So he gets back
(06:52):
to Carnegie Hall at you know, five in the morning
and passes out and then like an hour and a
half later, the phone rings and it's Bruno Zerrato of
the New York Philharmonic saying, this is a.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
Kid you have to go on this afternoon. And it
was on the radio. It was a national broadcast, which
is why it was such a big deal.
Speaker 9 (07:09):
Lennard Burns, Dane has come out on the platform.
Speaker 6 (07:11):
It was highly covered in the press, probably because it
was the middle of the war and everybody needed a
feel good story. Yes, American boy makes good kind of thing.
So one guy said, it's like a shoe string catch
in center field. Make it and you're a hero, Muffett
and you're a dope. Bernstein made it.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Did he ever reflect on that to you? Meaning when
people have that kind of debut? He came up that
night and everything changed after.
Speaker 6 (07:37):
That, Right, he pretty much knew that it was a
sort of Cinderella tale and that he just got this
unbelievable lucky break.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Yeah, And did he believe was it ever discussed even
by your mother or people like that? Did your father
realize he must have that his sexuality and that his
good looks were as much a part of this talent
as anything else.
Speaker 3 (07:56):
I think there's no.
Speaker 5 (07:56):
Doubt about that, and I think played he played it
probably from high school on, you know, and as soon
as he started playing the piano and knew he had
this incredible talent and could play at parties and get
all his attention and.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
He had a meeting out of his hands, Oh my god,
and the shrimp out of the hand. Yeah, at age
twenty five, he was still a little geeky.
Speaker 6 (08:21):
I mean the pictures of him with the Philharmonic after
the debut, where he's all exhausted and tousled and sweaty,
he actually looks like like a bar Mitzvah.
Speaker 9 (08:30):
Boy.
Speaker 6 (08:30):
He was a little funny, and I think he kind
of grew into his grooviness over the subsequent years.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
So your father, he had three children over ten years.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
Yeah, yeah, And what was that like for him in
terms of were there did he have certain kind of
rules in terms of how he protected you from the
public and the schools you went to and the way
you lived your life, or was he just very loosey goosey?
Speaker 3 (08:54):
You know, I would say that he was not your
mother in charge.
Speaker 6 (08:58):
He was the one who really designed the way our
lives went on a day to day basis. He was
busy being the maestro, and then you would come home
and play with us and hang out, but have fun
and have fun.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
But he was not really the designer of the domestic scene.
Speaker 5 (09:14):
He was a great He was home. He was really home.
You know, you didn't have an office to go to.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
And when did you get him aware of who your
father was?
Speaker 6 (09:23):
You know, you when you're growing up, your family's just
your family. You have no objectivity about it, and your
parents are just your parents, and you don't really think
about how different they might be from the others until
you get older. At some point when we were pretty young,
there was an episode of The Flintstones.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
What time is it, Betty? It's tenants to nine, Betty
and Wilma. We're going to go to the HALLI Rock Bowl.
I love to watch Leonard Burnstown conduct and the first
thing on the.
Speaker 4 (09:55):
Program is that gorgeous symphony by Rocky Manning A.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
When we were here, he had hit the big time.
And how old were you kids? Little kids? Yeh, like
you know, nine and six even less? Was there a
downside to it? Did you feel like there were things
that were tough for you with him?
Speaker 5 (10:16):
And looking back on it now or when we got older,
probably look back and think about some downsides, but at
the time it really didn't seem so bad at all.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
It was a lot of when we were really little,
it was just a lark.
Speaker 6 (10:32):
I often try to think back to come on, you know,
there must have been some he was shadows, But we
had a pretty fantastic early childhood.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
It was.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
It was kind of wonderful.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
He's not some tortured introspective. He was a happy guy,
and he was a celebrity.
Speaker 6 (10:47):
Was introspective, he was, but but back in those early
days of our family life, that was overshadowed by the
joy and the happiness, the busyness and the family life,
and the kept that from you.
Speaker 5 (11:01):
We are ascended he kept that from you.
Speaker 6 (11:04):
I'll tell you in my memory, the moment when it
changed was November twenty second, nineteen sixty three, the day
JFK was assassinated. That was when the shadow fell over
and life became sort of real. Up until that point,
you know, grown ups just had fun as far as
(11:24):
we could perceive. And then that day we saw our
parents fall apart. They were crying because they were friends
of the Kennedys. They had been to the White House.
They had had dinner just the four of them.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
Imagine they had been centerpieces of Kennedy's cultural programming in
the White Acci.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
Yeah, they could.
Speaker 6 (11:44):
Not have been more connected to the Kennedy administration and
everything that it stood for. So on that day when
when he was assassinated, our parents just fell apart, and
so did the whole rest of the family and all
their friends. And they pulled down the shades and out
around crying all day. And just watch TV. Now we
could perceive that there were shadows and that there were
(12:05):
ups and downs that wasn't visible to us in the world.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Itself can affect people psychologically. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
What about your mom in terms of her music appreciation?
I mean, she studied the piano, but did she go
on have any kind of a serious career even ur
in her young years when she was with Arau, did
she play? Did she study? Once she met and married
your father? Did all that stop?
Speaker 5 (12:26):
Her piano playing stopped? She would play sometimes at home,
and quite beautifully, but she wasn't.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
As passionate about it. No, what was she passionate about?
Speaker 5 (12:36):
Was passionate about her acting? She kept at that sometimes
she would and what were some of the things she
was working on During her career.
Speaker 6 (12:44):
She did a lot of early television Playhouse ninety and
craft Heater and all those live dramas that they had
in early television.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
She did a lot of that and a lot of
stage work. Did that stop at some point? It kind of.
Speaker 6 (12:58):
Receded as she came missus maestro and a mom, which
was a double job that could keep anybody.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
Of course, when was she generally happy to do those things?
Did she ever a voice? Because it's interesting to me
to have someone who is in the world of music herself.
She was studied with raw It's a serious opportunity there.
She had aspirations about music and acting, and did she
miss those things? Did she ever say gosh, I fondly?
Did she have a little bit of a wistfulness about it?
Speaker 3 (13:26):
She was pretty ambivalent about it. Yeah she did.
Speaker 5 (13:28):
And she didn't really talk a lot about her inner
herself too.
Speaker 9 (13:31):
Ah.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
What she did tell you.
Speaker 6 (13:33):
About a little bit was that she had some stage
fright issues, and so when she started performing less in public,
she would say that she was relieved, and that being
you know, this, this Missus Bernstein persona was a way
of not having to confront her fears about performing, But
(13:56):
I think you know, anybody who has performed, how a
part of them that still wants to perform. But she
knew that that it was just going to be too
hard to have these two rampant egos in the household.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
Probably a good call.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
Coming up more about Bernstein's early years in Massachusetts and
his final concert at Tanglewood, which his brother described as
Lenny coming home to die.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
This is Alec Baldwin.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
I'm talking with two of Leonard Bernstein's children, Jamie and Alexander.
(15:01):
I see someone like your dad who sounds very childlike
did the young People's concerts father, fun and joy and
and and family and love bursting with love. Leonard Bernstein
is someone to me who when he's on the podium,
who love is just shooting out of him like a rainbow.
Love of this and love of that, and love of life,
(15:22):
and love of sex, and love of sound, and love
of women and love of beauty. And I wonder was
it because as the result of his classical training, did
he not have enough childhood?
Speaker 6 (15:34):
His childhood was not about music. He was raised where
he was where he was born, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and
then shortly thereafter they moved to the Boston area.
Speaker 10 (15:46):
First they lived in Roxburgh. He was a hair products salesman.
He was a salesman and his mom was she musical.
How did the music get into his life?
Speaker 6 (15:57):
Well, here's the thing. There was this Clara who moved
to Florida, and so she sent all her furniture over
to her brother Sam's house, and along with all the
couches and breakfronts, arrived this upright piano.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
Our dad was ten years old.
Speaker 6 (16:16):
The piano got hauled into the house and as our
father told it, he touched the piano and that was it.
He knew it's one of those stories. And he taught
himself theory. He just played the piano.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
He figured he could figure it all out late in
the modern world.
Speaker 6 (16:34):
And the thing about his dad, Sam Bernstein, is that Sam,
you know, it was a depression. But Sam was very
proud that he was able to tide his family over
the depression because he had this very successful beauty supply business,
the Samuel J. Bernstein Hair Company in Boston. It's Bernstein
(16:54):
was the slogan, and he had the New England franchise
for the Frederick's Permanent Wave machine.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
And everybody knows it, even in a depression. There's two
things you don't like, go booze and vanity. There you go,
you have your hair done.
Speaker 6 (17:07):
All those women would go in and be attached to
that that machine that looks like Bride of Frankenstein. They
were all doing it. So they got through the depression.
And Sam was so proud that he was able to
pass the Samuel J. Bernstein Hair Company along to his
eldest son to run. And of course Lenny had no
intention of running the Samuel J. Bernstein Hair Company in Boston.
(17:28):
It's Bernstein and it was a real problem between hair.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
Yes, he did swell had of hair.
Speaker 5 (17:35):
Then what Sam was not going to let him be
a kletzmer musician, you know, because he can't get weddings
and funerals. And that was it, you know, that's what
a musician does in the old country.
Speaker 6 (17:47):
That a musician was a beggar, a homeless guy who
went from Stettl to Stettele playing the fiddle and.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
Getting a few kopeks at the wedding you call out
a living.
Speaker 5 (17:55):
So what happened so little by little it became clear
that he was immensely talented at this and it went
to the Boston Latin School and then to Harvard.
Speaker 3 (18:05):
And he gets to Harvard to study what music. Just know,
they had no music, no music department. You couldn't major
in it. So he was he a literature guy.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
She was born in nineteen eighteen eighteen. So he's there,
you know, class thirty nine. No music department at Harvard.
There and the just immediately prior of the war. And
then when he leaves Harvard, where does he go. He
goes to Curtis. So Curtis where for one he goes
to the next level he was.
Speaker 5 (18:30):
Curtis is where the music at Harvard, he's writing music,
he's putting on shows constantly.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
Curtis is the real temple of musical study that he enters.
And this is the real formalizing of his musical education.
Speaker 5 (18:41):
He studies with Fritz Reiner, right, you know, studies conducting.
Speaker 3 (18:45):
It all goes on a big level here, a big level.
And it was it was tough. He was very lonely.
It was it was a tough year or two for
him at Curtis. He's there for how long a little
over a year?
Speaker 5 (18:56):
I think, then what happens a long time? And then
he came to New York, desperate to find work. He
was ready to hit New York and do what he started.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
He wrote.
Speaker 5 (19:08):
Arrangements, arrangements and stuff under an assumed name Lenny Amber.
He arranged Ornette Coleman charts. He did all sorts of
weird things he did, didn't you do? Like a fourhands
version of Ilsel and Mickey co for Aaron Copeland. Well
that was the big thing that he got to know
Eric Copeland to know how did that happen?
Speaker 3 (19:27):
That he was still in college when he met Aaron
Harvard or Curtis Harvard, Harvard. Yeah, so at Harvard he
meets Copeland under what circumstances? Because if he's not in
a music program, how does he rub shoulders with?
Speaker 5 (19:36):
I think he gets invited to He came to New
York for the weekend.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
He was invited to be seeking out and sniffing out
the musical world, even though it was at Harvest and
he's an a concert.
Speaker 5 (19:45):
I think it was now sitting next to Aaron and
they get to know each other.
Speaker 6 (19:50):
And it turned out to be Aaron's birthday and Aaron
invited our dad back to his loft for the party.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
Clara Ships the piano of the house.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
That's that's ooh moment number one. He gets seated next
to Copeland Ooh moment number two, and.
Speaker 6 (20:05):
Then goes to the birthday party and plays Copeland's piano
variations in front of the whole crowd, which our dad
was in the habit of doing and clearing rooms because
it's a very gnarly piece.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
And so he said, are you sure you want me.
Speaker 6 (20:18):
To play it at this party because it usually clears
the room, And Aaron said, not at this party.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
And he played it and didn't clear the room. He
did not clear that lands.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Yeah, it's all of Copeland's contemporaries, and he plays, and
a friendship and a relationship with Copeland commences there right
lifelong another than I would say, probably as much, if
not more than slat Can. Your father was one of
the great interpreters of Copeland. I mean that the two
of them were my two favorites. Bernstein and Slatkin are
my two favorite Copeland isers. And then what is the
(20:47):
quick series of steps that gets them to the associate
directorship of the Philharmonic?
Speaker 5 (20:52):
I think an introduction to Krusoviski going to Tanglewood conducting
a tangle.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
She was a guest conductor of tangle You know, he's
a student student conductors student.
Speaker 6 (21:04):
Tangle would have just been invented by Krusovitski, and our
dad was in that first class.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
And so Kruzovitski is the one who builds tango, would
he he.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
Is, He's the music director, He's theso who oversees the
construction of that. What are some of your best memories
of your dad there?
Speaker 3 (21:20):
What would you do? Remember? What was this?
Speaker 6 (21:22):
If you will go ahead, give me give me here
you're laughing, Well, we're laughing because our dad loved to
go to tangle Wood so much his entire life. Every
time he went up there, it was like he would
be rejuvenated, he would turn into a kid again.
Speaker 3 (21:34):
It's a holy place. It's a holy place.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
And what he really loved was being with all those
Can we say that again, that that that the Berkshires
is a holy place. Your father loved it there.
Speaker 5 (21:51):
Tell you we both worked at Tanglewood. What did you
do it for a few more years than James.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
We were guide.
Speaker 5 (21:56):
We were guides, which was a fancy name for just
doing anything that they need to be done. But you know,
you man the gates and you show people around. That
was the guide part. Sometimes there would be tours, and
also you would tend to be backstage and help the
artists and move them around and pick them up at
the airport stuff like that. And it was just heaven
(22:16):
to be up there for a summer.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
And there was also this sense I think our dad
had it from the very beginning that.
Speaker 6 (22:24):
You know, everybody was sort of out in this beautiful weather,
in this beautiful place with all these fun people, and
there would be Shenanigans. We just fell right into the
Shenanigan's sensibility of the place that you know, it was
just fun and everybody was partying all night and having romances.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
And it's funny you say that, because it is probably
one of the two or three most romantic places I've
ever been.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
I mean, you can go.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
For those people listening who don't know, the tangle Wood
is in the Berkshires and Massachusetts and it's the it's
the summer residency of the Boston in the Orchestra.
Speaker 3 (23:01):
And you go up there to Lennox massive piece of land.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
It's a massive tract of land, and in that way,
in a good way that you can talk about going
somewhere with someone and driving that decompressing road trip that
as you drive and drive and you get closer and closer,
you just feel your your body relaxing. And then you
get the excitement of going to Tanglewood and you go
(23:26):
and you get your your basket.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
And your food and your wine. The real fun is
to be out on the lawn. The lawn.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
The lawn is even better in a way if you've
got the basket and the girl and the wine or
whatever your preference is there. And I think I've never
seen more people who are getting it right, you know,
I mean in terms of having a lovely evening and
if they get smashed on top of it, you know,
I guess what I'm saying is, there's nothing like getting
smashed at Tanglewood.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
It's it's the best kind of thing.
Speaker 5 (23:53):
You know.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
That I was a guide, there was no comment.
Speaker 6 (24:00):
And the year that I was a guide, there was
the year the Fillmore East came up there like three
different times, and I saw.
Speaker 3 (24:08):
And Jimmy Hendrick, you're saying that Bill.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Graham, he had his production company Fillmore meaning as a
production company.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
The Artist Boys.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Played the Shed played the Shed, And I was in
a bathroom. To them, we.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
Say, what real pleasure has to be back in Tangleod again.
We were on the heir last August.
Speaker 6 (24:38):
They trashed that long. That's why they were never invited back.
You would not have wanted.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Is it funny how we've changed Back then? I would
have been the who I'm like, we're not having them here.
We can have that that likes Sara and Tanglewood.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
They tried. Who else did the Graham?
Speaker 5 (24:53):
Mister Kylie, who ran the head of the groundskeepers, was
just beside himself.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
He really was. It was a disaster. Your father loved
it there.
Speaker 6 (25:03):
Though he loved it, and you loved to stay up
all night yacking with the students.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
That was what really did your dad admire in his constellation?
Who did he? I heard a story once from someone.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
They said they were at your family's home and your
father's standing there with a cigarette in his hand and
a drink in the other. And someone says, I just
came from seeing the Beatles and the and the quote
was a very simple one. They said that Bernstein said
turned to my friend and said.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
You came and sold the Beatles. He says, I can't
wait to see them myself.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
He said, I'm mad for them, and he just had
a passion for all disparate forms of music.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
And he really did love the Beatles a lot.
Speaker 6 (25:39):
And we were so lucky as we were growing up
because I was a complete beatlemaniac and my dad loved
their music too, So together we would discover the Beatles,
and when they had a new album, I would run
out and get it and go straight to my father's
studio and say, look, look I've got rubbers Oll and
you'd say, great, let's put it on right now, and
we'd stick the echered on. And I learned more about
(26:02):
music by listening to the Beatles with my dad than
I think I did any other way.
Speaker 3 (26:06):
You know, my dad passed away. He was very young.
My dad was only fifty five. He was a year
older than I am now.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
He had a very rare form of cancer and he
died of lung cancer when he was fifty five. And
your dad didn't live a very long life either. How
old were both of you when your dad passed.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
Away, Well, he died at seventy two, which is not five.
It was you were thirty five and I was thirty nine,
So you were grown a dull people.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
But like you.
Speaker 6 (26:35):
Our mother died when she was fifty six, and we
were much younger when that happened. She died in nineteen
seventy eight, so we were in our early twenties, and.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
Our dad died in what year?
Speaker 6 (26:47):
He died in nineteen ninety, so by then we were
you know, adults more or less. But when our mother died,
we were still a very young family. Nina was only
fifteen or something. But did your mother die from un cancer?
Speaker 3 (27:00):
Was a smoker? Yep?
Speaker 1 (27:03):
My point is that your dad didn't live a very
long life. Did he die suddenly or did he get
sick and he knew he was in trouble he got
he was sick for like six months of being released.
Speaker 5 (27:15):
He was diagnosed with Uh he had all sorts of
chess problems, sure, you know, through his life, but uh,
it was it was not cigarette related, which was probably
asbestos thing when he was a kid or who knows.
I mean, it didn't help that he smoked, obviously, but
but you know, just having the oxygen and stuff. That
(27:37):
was the last, you know, a month or so. He
(28:08):
died in October and his last concert was at Tanglewood
in August that nineteen ninety's okay, so he could barely
get through the.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Last thing your father conducted was a public performance into
the summer. He did the Beethoven seven at Tanglewood in
August of nineteen ninety yep, and died that October. I
(28:41):
think about your dad and did he just when he
knew he was sick and he knew he was in
trouble healthy because my dad knew he was in trouble.
I mean, there was a moment I had with my
dad where he like, he looked at me with this
look in his eye, like he knew it was over,
and he and he just I mean, he had a
tear one down his face. And my father said, I'll
never know my grandchildren. And when I think about this
with your dad, a guy like that, who had so
(29:01):
much more he wanted to do, did.
Speaker 3 (29:03):
He ever express that too? Did he ever talk about
that he wasn't done?
Speaker 6 (29:06):
Yeah, he did, you know, And I think, you know,
he had this fantastic climactic moment at the very end
of nineteen eighty nine, the year before he died, when
he conducted at the Fall of the Berlin Wall, and
he did the Ode to Joy and instead of singing Freuda,
which means joy. They sang thrii height, which means freedom.
(29:32):
It was such a big deal for him to be
there when the Berlin Wall came down, and it was
such a momentous occasion.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Where were you when that happened?
Speaker 6 (29:41):
I wish I had been there, And in retrospect, I
regret that I wasn't there, But I had just given
birth to my son, Evan, like.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
Less than eight weeks earlier. Do you have an excuse?
That was my excuse.
Speaker 6 (29:54):
So I watched it on the couch on Christmas Day
while I was nursing my infant son. I watched it
on TV because they showed the whole thing in the
live broadcast about you.
Speaker 5 (30:03):
I don't even have an excuse, and I can't remember
why I didn't go. I can't believe that I wasn't there.
It's just unbelievable.
Speaker 6 (30:09):
You know, we didn't know he was going to be
gone within the year, so you know, he was always there,
and there were always these occasions where you could go
and meet him on the road, and there were hundreds
of them, and it was kind of a pain to
go get in with that whole retinue and the whole
madness of being of the tour thing.
Speaker 5 (30:28):
And so but Bill did it become entourage city.
Speaker 4 (30:31):
You know.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
Right after that he got really sick with a flu.
And what year was that, nineteen eighty nine. It was
like this at the fall.
Speaker 6 (30:39):
Christmas of nineteen eighty nine. And I remember visiting him
about a month later, less than a month later in
Key West, and he was just not feeling right and
he told me so, he said, I just I'm not
I don't feel right. That was the beginning of the
slow decline. And then things got a lot worse in May,
and then he just kind of struggle through all his
(31:01):
gigs over the summer and then barely made it through
that Beethoven seven. We were all in the audience clutching
each other's hands, like, is he gonna make it?
Speaker 3 (31:09):
Is he gonna make it?
Speaker 1 (31:11):
We're taking a break, so stay with us. What was
his life like after your mom passed away? He didn't remarry,
did he?
Speaker 6 (31:20):
No?
Speaker 5 (31:20):
He did not, And it was why do you think
he was so miserable for a long time after she
He needed her, he needed her, and he was just
a long long time until we went on vacation. Probably
I don't know. Eight months later or something like that,
and we sort of started seeing signs of a person again.
Speaker 6 (31:45):
Tell about what happened in Jamaica. After the Christmas dinner
and then we went to the bar.
Speaker 5 (31:52):
Oh my god, this was the vacation in Jamaica. A
bunch of our family and a couple of friends, and
we went down to the bar and there were probably
a couple of people in there. And he sits down
at the piano at the bar. And this was after dinner,
after you know, a lot of Scotch whatever, a lot
(32:14):
of wine, and he plays Rhapsody in Blue from beginning
to end. It was the most amazing performance you could
possibly imagine. I mean, he's just ripped it. It was unforgettable.
(32:49):
And then that's kind of when I knew he was back,
And it was just through the music he was.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
He tells us, Oh my.
Speaker 5 (32:57):
God, so obviously never married again.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
But why do you think he never married again?
Speaker 1 (33:03):
You see a guy like that, You mean, my gun,
he could have had any woman in New York. He
didn't have room in his life for that anymore.
Speaker 5 (33:09):
No, And there were some men that he was very
close to.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
And and would you say that once your mother passed
away was your father's life as a bisexual man, that
he just lived it more vividly once your mother was gone,
was much more, much more living color about it.
Speaker 5 (33:24):
His uh, his mother was still alive. Oh, and I
think that played a great role. That was kind of
a governor there that for him, kind of a governor
yet and then when he still had a public it
was a different time.
Speaker 3 (33:37):
She outlived him.
Speaker 6 (33:38):
Yeah, she was ninety two when he died, and she
said memorably, this will shorten my life.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
Wow. And so he and so he.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
You think that he kept that quiet and kept that private,
not only because it was that that is nature to
be a little more private.
Speaker 3 (33:54):
Like theatre.
Speaker 5 (33:55):
He sort of came out sort of a few times,
and I think he was once he was hoping people
would take more notice of it than they did, I think.
But I think he didn't want his mother to have
to deal with it with her friends and you know,
people talking about it.
Speaker 3 (34:16):
If he was alive now, how old should that be?
If he was alive now, he'd be nice.
Speaker 5 (34:21):
Yeah, yes, centennial will be twenty eighteen.
Speaker 3 (34:25):
Who was someone?
Speaker 1 (34:25):
I mean, I'm sure that we're boundless people because your
father was very generous of heart, it seems very passionate.
But who were some of the people other than Kuzovitski
and Copen that we've covered before. Who were some of
the people that were contemporaries of your father that you
remember him speaking very glowingly abou Who did he admire?
Speaker 5 (34:40):
Lucas Voss would be one.
Speaker 6 (34:42):
They were a Curtis together, that's where they met, and
they stayed friends and colleagues their entire lives. And Lucas
was a stupendous pianist in addition to being an excellent composer.
So he played our dad's Age of Anxiety, which is
a sort of like a piano concerto. Older it's called
a symphony, and Lucas could.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
Just play the hell out of it.
Speaker 6 (35:16):
And and our dad premiered many of Lucas's pieces with
the Philharmonic, And so that was he was one of them.
Michael Tilson Thomas was someone that our dad kind of
nurtured along when.
Speaker 3 (35:29):
Hezovitsky to a degree, Yes, to a degree. Who else
did who else did he mentor? Oh well, he was
mister mentor to a great degree.
Speaker 10 (35:40):
I think yeah, John, another guy with great hair, great hair,
school of conducting.
Speaker 3 (35:47):
Nothing like that hair flying through the air looks great.
It's amazing how many great hair conductors there are, isn't
that so? Right? Well, when nothing at the Philharmonic, it
was his relationship with Sondheim.
Speaker 6 (35:58):
Oh that was a big, big relationship, big friendship and
colleague ship.
Speaker 3 (36:03):
You know, west Side Story.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
Jerry Robins, all of them had this phenomenal success. Initially,
West Side Story was supposed to be if I'm if
I'm an Irish.
Speaker 3 (36:14):
Jewish gang, Yeah, a lower east Side. It was going
to be east Side. It was going to be Lower
east Side. Tempers would flare over the Easter passover holidays
right right right right as Leles versus the Missus. Yeah, yeah,
something like that.
Speaker 6 (36:31):
And then apparently Jerry Robins saw some article about gang
wars with Puerto Ricans on the Upper West.
Speaker 3 (36:38):
Side and he went, ding, you know the bulls, Jerry
it was I think it was Jerry or was it Arthur?
Speaker 5 (36:44):
Always said it was Arthur, so I don't know.
Speaker 3 (36:46):
Maybe it was Arthur.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
Probably the most romantic line in the movie I've ever heard,
and it always brings me to tears when he turns
to her, they have the moment of the dance. Then
he turns to her and says, you're not lying to me,
are you? And she says, I have not yet learned
to lie about such things.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
That's right. I have not yet learned to joke that way.
I think you're not joking that what she says, you're
not joking. I have not yet to give it to
me again. You say it here we got rid of
a live performance.
Speaker 5 (37:15):
Go you're not joking with me.
Speaker 3 (37:19):
I have not yet learned to joke that way. I
think now I never will. There you go, there it is.
Speaker 6 (37:24):
And the reason we're laughing is because there's a recording
of our dad conducting west Side Story for in a
recording session, and he got Alexander and my sister Nina
to do that dialogue so much to believe you're not.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
Joking me, I have not yet learned how to joke
that way.
Speaker 8 (37:41):
I think no, I never will.
Speaker 3 (37:46):
Now.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
Speaking of films, your father only composed I mean, other
than them transferring west Side to the film, your father
only composed one film score, that's right, and it was
a hell of a film.
Speaker 3 (37:56):
Score and very Wartenstein asque.
Speaker 1 (37:59):
And why do you think he only did? Your father someone?
I mean, I see people, this is interesting because I
see so many people Billy Joel Sting. I mean, you
see Elton John make his fore way into that. But
I see so many people who I think the mess
of Billy, especially who's a friend. I say, my god,
you could be doing so much music a movie score
if you wanted to, and they just don't. They don't
have a passion for it. Why did your father just
(38:20):
do the one?
Speaker 6 (38:21):
You think, Well, because he really did not enjoy the experience.
Why because he was being bossed around? Because an yeah,
well what happened. For the example he gave was that
he wrote, you know, the soaring music, that the dynamics
that he composed were all in his head and all
recorded a certain way, and then when they're mixing, they
(38:43):
just dunk the fader on it so that, as our
dad put it, so that you could hear Marlon Brando's grunt.
And so just at the climactic moment of his love music,
you know, in the final mix, they just dunk the fader.
Speaker 5 (38:58):
They would say, okay, fifteen bars of passion and then
you know, thirty seconds of you know, quick. And he
just couldn't write that way. That way, it was impossible,
So he he loves they but he just hated doing
(39:19):
the work.
Speaker 3 (39:20):
You have children. I have a daughter. You have a
daughter who's how old?
Speaker 5 (39:23):
She'll be fourteen in two weeks.
Speaker 3 (39:25):
You have a daughter that's fourteen, and what does she into?
What does she do?
Speaker 5 (39:29):
She's into her first year of high school and loving it.
And she's into theater in a big way. She loves
to you're raising your kids in the city. You're outside
the city in the city. You're raising your daughter inside
the city. And she likes acting. She likes acting, but
she's also you know, she loves her English class and
history class and math, to her school and her friends
(39:50):
and her What about you.
Speaker 3 (39:52):
I have two.
Speaker 6 (39:53):
I have ad they're in their twenties now, they're in
their early t do My daughter, Frankie, lives in Brooklyn,
she's a right and my son is still in school
up in the Berkshires.
Speaker 3 (40:06):
As a matter of fact, he's up and he lives
in Lee, Massachusetts.
Speaker 1 (40:08):
No, well, you know, for both of you, your children,
I mean, obviously they know they didn't have to watch.
In their case, they weren't watching Leonard Bernstone. That wasn't
the cartoon, wasn't the gateway into an understanding of who
their grandfather was.
Speaker 3 (40:22):
But they know who he is and have you had
and do they do? They have an appetite and a
passion to understand who he is and see who he is.
My kids don't.
Speaker 6 (40:29):
They're very careful about sort of keeping their distance from
that whole connection. I think it makes them a little shy,
a little a little anxious, and so they don't.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
They don't embrace.
Speaker 1 (40:42):
Based on without getting too personal, because I have an
opinion about that because of my daughter. Oh really, well,
what they want is that they sense that celebrity has
become so exponentially out of control now and they prefer
their privacy. If knowing that I was related directly to
Leonard Bernstein was going to lead to something appropriate or
comfortable or rite, there would be one thing, But nowadays
(41:04):
everybody's after the wrong thing.
Speaker 3 (41:05):
And that's really interesting.
Speaker 5 (41:06):
I mean I think about that a lot because our
father really loved being famous and we had fun with it,
and it was just a different type of thing in
those days.
Speaker 3 (41:18):
It was different.
Speaker 5 (41:19):
It's more of an industry now. And he started seeing
that more and more starting in the eighties, and you
talked about it a lot, and he once said to
me I'm so sick of Leonard Bernstein.
Speaker 3 (41:31):
I've had it with him. I've always had a problem
about time. But when I had a problem about.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
Time at the age of twenty five or thirty, when
you're still, at least in part, thinking you're immortal and
nothing's ever going to change the way you are.
Speaker 3 (41:59):
Abbreviated, everything's all right.
Speaker 2 (42:03):
I mean I would go on concert tours and compose
in the airport or on the plane, or on the train,
or I wrote half of the Age of Anxiety and
airports and trains and hotels. I can't do that anymore,
and it's been some time since I could. One of
the reasons is one's standards get higher and higher. Self
(42:25):
identification with the composer whose works you are performing become
closer and closer to the point where there are performances
which are the ones I call good performances, but I
know it's been a really good performance. It's one in
which I have the feeling I've written the piece standing there,
(42:47):
and when it's over, I don't know where I'm standing.
Speaker 1 (43:11):
As he grew older, Bernstein's connection to the music of
Gustav Mahler, whom he had championed throughout his career became
even stronger.
Speaker 5 (43:20):
I think he felt a deep association I mean, apart
from the music itself, obviously, an association with Mahler as
a conflicted musician, Mahler being Jewish and in a Georgian
Jewish world and being a tonal composer in an a
(43:42):
more atonal world, becoming so being a European man who
came to America. You know, somebody from the classical tradition
coming to America and suddenly finding themselves in this crazy world.
(44:04):
So I think there was an affinity there.
Speaker 6 (44:07):
Plus, he was the combination of composer and conductor, which
there aren't.
Speaker 3 (44:12):
That many of. I would love to have known your father.
Speaker 1 (44:36):
Your father was so singular and remains so singular because
number one, whenever he came on, I was happy, And
whenever he came on, I was excited, and he never
disappointed me. And when I would see him, I'd say,
once you get from Bernstein, you can only get from Bernstein.
He was the original in his field. Leonard Bernstein's children,
(45:13):
Jamie and Alexander, say their father was so original in
part because he just never stopped celebrating music, celebrating life.
Speaker 6 (45:21):
He never slept. He was a terrible insomniac. I think
that's probably why I managed to squeeze in so much action.
Speaker 3 (45:28):
He was always at it.
Speaker 5 (45:30):
You know.
Speaker 3 (45:30):
I wish he was around.
Speaker 1 (45:31):
He and I could have hung out together. Oh oh,
I'm an insomniac. And could you imagine you're in Stein
and I watching YouTube together.
Speaker 3 (45:38):
Would have come over at four am and you could
have hung out. God, we could have been watching old
movies together. And yeah, you would have gone to the
piano and played all the old Hermann scores. Yes, everything.
Speaker 1 (46:03):
This is Alec Baldwin. To learn more about Leonard Bernstein
and artful learning and educational organization that his son Alex spearheads,
go to Here's the thing dot org
Hey, it's Alec Baldwin here. Before we launch our next
season of Here's the Thing at iHeartRadio in January, I
thought I'd share a few of my favorite shows from
the archives. Few people could have convinced Hollywood Studios to
back a biopic about the life of the composer and
conductor Leonard Bernstein. But when its director and leading man
(00:23):
are Bradley Cooper, who could say no? His film Maestro
premieres tomorrow, December twentieth on Netflix. Here's my interview with
two of Bernstein's children, Jamie and Alex Bernstein.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Carnegie Hall in New York City, the home of the
world's greatest musical events.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
In the nineteen fifties, television was a powerful new spotlight
in search of a talent that could shine back just as.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Bright and here is mister Bernstein.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
When it landed on Leonard Bernstein, the young conductor more
than shined back. His primetime show, Leonard Bernstein Young People's
Concerts with the New York Philharmonic was a benchmark of
quality programming and seduced the entire country.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
No matter how many times people tell you stories about
what music means, forget them. Stories aren't what music means
at all. Music is never about anything. Music just is
music is notes, beautiful notes, and songs put together in
such a way that we get pleasure out of listening
(01:29):
to them.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
That's all there is to Bernstein was a masterful teacher,
explaining classical music with a passion and clarity that couldn't
help but influence an entire generation of musicians and artists.
In those days, there were far fewer celebrities, and Bernstein
was one of the biggest. He wore it well, taking
his seat at the piano at the center of the party.
Speaker 5 (01:51):
He really enjoyed the public. Leonard Bernstein, he loved the key.
Leonard Bernstein loved and he loved being famous, and he
loved meeting everybody in the world and.
Speaker 6 (02:02):
In fancy hotels and flying first class. And he'd take
us along and share it with us, like.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
Isn't this cool.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Bernstein was a musician, a conductor, a teacher, and a
composer of classical music as well as Broadway musicals. He
was also a father.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
I'm the bossy one.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
Bernstein and his wife Felicia had three children, Jamie, Alexander,
and Nina, and while they knew him in the tucks
and tales. They also knew him as the dad who
loved games. He was a killer at anagrams and always
up for tennis or squash or skiing or touch football.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
The word games, you have no idea.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Two of Bernstein's children, Jamie and Alexander, spoke with me
about their legendary father and what it was like to
grow up with people like Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins
as regular HouseGuests.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
When we were really little.
Speaker 6 (02:52):
Alexander and I used to share a bedroom when we
were like, you know, really little, and we lived in
the Osbourne, which is that grand building, and Alexander and
I slept, you know, at sort of right angles to
each other in this bedroom, and we would go to
sleep listening to the grown ups carrying on downstairs. Is
what we fell asleep to the noise of the you know,
the laughing and the roaring around the piano, singing, sneaking
(03:15):
of the glasses, and the smell of the cigarette smoke
washing up the sas shape. We could not wait to
be grown ups because obviously all grown ups did was
have fun.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
That's interesting.
Speaker 6 (03:24):
That's how it seemed to us, And it seemed like
our dad certainly had fun when he was working too,
so we never saw anything that resembled drudgery, which is
probably a thing that most kids perceive in their working parents.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
It's tough. What about your mother?
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Was your mother someone who was his companion and she
was along for the ride and all of it and
loving it.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
Or was she someone who was sitting in the room going,
when's it gonna stop my eyes?
Speaker 1 (03:49):
The energizer bunny and the Martini in his hand and a.
Speaker 7 (03:53):
Pell Mell in the other Scotch not Martinez, Scotchie, Valentine's
a Valentine's beer, Oh Scotch, Scotch did am and she
had a Chesterfield my grandfather vodka and the other.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
But your mother was his trusted companion. She was she
was in. She was all in, absolutely.
Speaker 6 (04:14):
All in, and I think it drove her crazy, every
bit as much as she loved it all.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
She was very social. Where was she from? And where
did they meet?
Speaker 5 (04:23):
They met at a party given by Claudio organist and.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
Who was her teacher because he was studying piano.
Speaker 5 (04:31):
She had told her parents that she was coming to
New York to study piano, but she really wanted to
be an actress, so she came.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
She's a beautiful woman, and she was beautiful, very beautiful.
Speaker 5 (04:42):
So she had this understanding with Aral that she would
be sort of studying with him, But meanwhile she was
studying with my parents.
Speaker 8 (04:53):
Now make this sound of the piano. The debuts we're
like to make parents now in exactly so America.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
I think it was very much like that.
Speaker 6 (05:08):
It was, And the legend has it that our mother
sat at his feet and fed him shrimps one by one.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
That was the beginning of the romance. Yeah, yeah, not around.
She might have been doing that and they got engaged.
But where was he ad in his career then?
Speaker 6 (05:25):
So he had already had his big debut with the
New York Philharmonic, because that was in nineteen forty three.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
Were he filled in for for he filled in the.
Speaker 6 (05:32):
Ailing Bruno Vaulter, as he's always referred to in that circumstance.
I thought his first name was ailing anyway, So this
must have been like maybe four or five years later,
So he was riding high, but he was not yet.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
That'll be a name.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
I stay in a hotel, and from now I love
good names for hotels. I'm going to stay in a
hotel under the name.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
Ailing e h l I aiming. Bruno Vote is the
name I would use this hotel, and so Bruno Vote.
The fluent year was that. That was November fourteenth, nineteen
forty three.
Speaker 9 (06:08):
Wow, good afternoon, the United States Rubber Company again invites
you to Carnegie Hall to hear a concert of the
New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. Bruno Vaulter, who was to
have conducted this afternoon, is ill, and his place will
be taken by the young American born assistant conductor of
the Philharmonic Symphony, Leonard Bernstein.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
And he had to get up there on a moment's notes.
Speaker 6 (06:30):
And he'd been up all night the night before because
he'd had a premiere of a song cycle of his
called I Hate Music, and it had premiered the night before.
So of course it was a cardi a town hall
and it was very well received, and of course there
was a party afterwards, and they were up all the
livelong night. And at the time, you know, our dad
was living in Carnegie Hall in those little apartments they
used to have at the top. So he gets back
(06:52):
to Carnegie Hall at you know, five in the morning
and passes out and then like an hour and a
half later, the phone rings and it's Bruno Zerrato of
the New York Philharmonic saying, this is a.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
Kid you have to go on this afternoon. And it
was on the radio. It was a national broadcast, which
is why it was such a big deal.
Speaker 9 (07:09):
Lennard Burns, Dane has come out on the platform.
Speaker 6 (07:11):
It was highly covered in the press, probably because it
was the middle of the war and everybody needed a
feel good story. Yes, American boy makes good kind of thing.
So one guy said, it's like a shoe string catch
in center field. Make it and you're a hero, Muffett
and you're a dope. Bernstein made it.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Did he ever reflect on that to you? Meaning when
people have that kind of debut? He came up that
night and everything changed after.
Speaker 6 (07:37):
That, Right, he pretty much knew that it was a
sort of Cinderella tale and that he just got this
unbelievable lucky break.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Yeah, And did he believe was it ever discussed even
by your mother or people like that? Did your father
realize he must have that his sexuality and that his
good looks were as much a part of this talent
as anything else.
Speaker 3 (07:56):
I think there's no.
Speaker 5 (07:56):
Doubt about that, and I think played he played it
probably from high school on, you know, and as soon
as he started playing the piano and knew he had
this incredible talent and could play at parties and get
all his attention and.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
He had a meeting out of his hands, Oh my god,
and the shrimp out of the hand. Yeah, at age
twenty five, he was still a little geeky.
Speaker 6 (08:21):
I mean the pictures of him with the Philharmonic after
the debut, where he's all exhausted and tousled and sweaty,
he actually looks like like a bar Mitzvah.
Speaker 9 (08:30):
Boy.
Speaker 6 (08:30):
He was a little funny, and I think he kind
of grew into his grooviness over the subsequent years.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
So your father, he had three children over ten years.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
Yeah, yeah, And what was that like for him in
terms of were there did he have certain kind of
rules in terms of how he protected you from the
public and the schools you went to and the way
you lived your life, or was he just very loosey goosey?
Speaker 3 (08:54):
You know, I would say that he was not your
mother in charge.
Speaker 6 (08:58):
He was the one who really designed the way our
lives went on a day to day basis. He was
busy being the maestro, and then you would come home
and play with us and hang out, but have fun
and have fun.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
But he was not really the designer of the domestic scene.
Speaker 5 (09:14):
He was a great He was home. He was really home.
You know, you didn't have an office to go to.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
And when did you get him aware of who your
father was?
Speaker 6 (09:23):
You know, you when you're growing up, your family's just
your family. You have no objectivity about it, and your
parents are just your parents, and you don't really think
about how different they might be from the others until
you get older. At some point when we were pretty young,
there was an episode of The Flintstones.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
What time is it, Betty? It's tenants to nine, Betty
and Wilma. We're going to go to the HALLI Rock Bowl.
I love to watch Leonard Burnstown conduct and the first
thing on the.
Speaker 4 (09:55):
Program is that gorgeous symphony by Rocky Manning A.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
When we were here, he had hit the big time.
And how old were you kids? Little kids? Yeh, like
you know, nine and six even less? Was there a
downside to it? Did you feel like there were things
that were tough for you with him?
Speaker 5 (10:16):
And looking back on it now or when we got older,
probably look back and think about some downsides, but at
the time it really didn't seem so bad at all.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
It was a lot of when we were really little,
it was just a lark.
Speaker 6 (10:32):
I often try to think back to come on, you know,
there must have been some he was shadows, But we
had a pretty fantastic early childhood.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
It was.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
It was kind of wonderful.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
He's not some tortured introspective. He was a happy guy,
and he was a celebrity.
Speaker 6 (10:47):
Was introspective, he was, but but back in those early
days of our family life, that was overshadowed by the
joy and the happiness, the busyness and the family life,
and the kept that from you.
Speaker 5 (11:01):
We are ascended he kept that from you.
Speaker 6 (11:04):
I'll tell you in my memory, the moment when it
changed was November twenty second, nineteen sixty three, the day
JFK was assassinated. That was when the shadow fell over
and life became sort of real. Up until that point,
you know, grown ups just had fun as far as
(11:24):
we could perceive. And then that day we saw our
parents fall apart. They were crying because they were friends
of the Kennedys. They had been to the White House.
They had had dinner just the four of them.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
Imagine they had been centerpieces of Kennedy's cultural programming in
the White Acci.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
Yeah, they could.
Speaker 6 (11:44):
Not have been more connected to the Kennedy administration and
everything that it stood for. So on that day when
when he was assassinated, our parents just fell apart, and
so did the whole rest of the family and all
their friends. And they pulled down the shades and out
around crying all day. And just watch TV. Now we
could perceive that there were shadows and that there were
(12:05):
ups and downs that wasn't visible to us in the world.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Itself can affect people psychologically. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
What about your mom in terms of her music appreciation?
I mean, she studied the piano, but did she go
on have any kind of a serious career even ur
in her young years when she was with Arau, did
she play? Did she study? Once she met and married
your father? Did all that stop?
Speaker 5 (12:26):
Her piano playing stopped? She would play sometimes at home,
and quite beautifully, but she wasn't.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
As passionate about it. No, what was she passionate about?
Speaker 5 (12:36):
Was passionate about her acting? She kept at that sometimes
she would and what were some of the things she
was working on During her career.
Speaker 6 (12:44):
She did a lot of early television Playhouse ninety and
craft Heater and all those live dramas that they had
in early television.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
She did a lot of that and a lot of
stage work. Did that stop at some point? It kind of.
Speaker 6 (12:58):
Receded as she came missus maestro and a mom, which
was a double job that could keep anybody.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
Of course, when was she generally happy to do those things?
Did she ever a voice? Because it's interesting to me
to have someone who is in the world of music herself.
She was studied with raw It's a serious opportunity there.
She had aspirations about music and acting, and did she
miss those things? Did she ever say gosh, I fondly?
Did she have a little bit of a wistfulness about it?
Speaker 3 (13:26):
She was pretty ambivalent about it. Yeah she did.
Speaker 5 (13:28):
And she didn't really talk a lot about her inner
herself too.
Speaker 9 (13:31):
Ah.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
What she did tell you.
Speaker 6 (13:33):
About a little bit was that she had some stage
fright issues, and so when she started performing less in public,
she would say that she was relieved, and that being
you know, this, this Missus Bernstein persona was a way
of not having to confront her fears about performing, But
(13:56):
I think you know, anybody who has performed, how a
part of them that still wants to perform. But she
knew that that it was just going to be too
hard to have these two rampant egos in the household.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
Probably a good call.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
Coming up more about Bernstein's early years in Massachusetts and
his final concert at Tanglewood, which his brother described as
Lenny coming home to die.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
This is Alec Baldwin.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
I'm talking with two of Leonard Bernstein's children, Jamie and Alexander.
(15:01):
I see someone like your dad who sounds very childlike
did the young People's concerts father, fun and joy and
and and family and love bursting with love. Leonard Bernstein
is someone to me who when he's on the podium,
who love is just shooting out of him like a rainbow.
Love of this and love of that, and love of life,
(15:22):
and love of sex, and love of sound, and love
of women and love of beauty. And I wonder was
it because as the result of his classical training, did
he not have enough childhood?
Speaker 6 (15:34):
His childhood was not about music. He was raised where
he was where he was born, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and
then shortly thereafter they moved to the Boston area.
Speaker 10 (15:46):
First they lived in Roxburgh. He was a hair products salesman.
He was a salesman and his mom was she musical.
How did the music get into his life?
Speaker 6 (15:57):
Well, here's the thing. There was this Clara who moved
to Florida, and so she sent all her furniture over
to her brother Sam's house, and along with all the
couches and breakfronts, arrived this upright piano.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
Our dad was ten years old.
Speaker 6 (16:16):
The piano got hauled into the house and as our
father told it, he touched the piano and that was it.
He knew it's one of those stories. And he taught
himself theory. He just played the piano.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
He figured he could figure it all out late in
the modern world.
Speaker 6 (16:34):
And the thing about his dad, Sam Bernstein, is that Sam,
you know, it was a depression. But Sam was very
proud that he was able to tide his family over
the depression because he had this very successful beauty supply business,
the Samuel J. Bernstein Hair Company in Boston. It's Bernstein
(16:54):
was the slogan, and he had the New England franchise
for the Frederick's Permanent Wave machine.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
And everybody knows it, even in a depression. There's two
things you don't like, go booze and vanity. There you go,
you have your hair done.
Speaker 6 (17:07):
All those women would go in and be attached to
that that machine that looks like Bride of Frankenstein. They
were all doing it. So they got through the depression.
And Sam was so proud that he was able to
pass the Samuel J. Bernstein Hair Company along to his
eldest son to run. And of course Lenny had no
intention of running the Samuel J. Bernstein Hair Company in Boston.
(17:28):
It's Bernstein and it was a real problem between hair.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
Yes, he did swell had of hair.
Speaker 5 (17:35):
Then what Sam was not going to let him be
a kletzmer musician, you know, because he can't get weddings
and funerals. And that was it, you know, that's what
a musician does in the old country.
Speaker 6 (17:47):
That a musician was a beggar, a homeless guy who
went from Stettl to Stettele playing the fiddle and.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
Getting a few kopeks at the wedding you call out
a living.
Speaker 5 (17:55):
So what happened so little by little it became clear
that he was immensely talented at this and it went
to the Boston Latin School and then to Harvard.
Speaker 3 (18:05):
And he gets to Harvard to study what music. Just know,
they had no music, no music department. You couldn't major
in it. So he was he a literature guy.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
She was born in nineteen eighteen eighteen. So he's there,
you know, class thirty nine. No music department at Harvard.
There and the just immediately prior of the war. And
then when he leaves Harvard, where does he go. He
goes to Curtis. So Curtis where for one he goes
to the next level he was.
Speaker 5 (18:30):
Curtis is where the music at Harvard, he's writing music,
he's putting on shows constantly.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
Curtis is the real temple of musical study that he enters.
And this is the real formalizing of his musical education.
Speaker 5 (18:41):
He studies with Fritz Reiner, right, you know, studies conducting.
Speaker 3 (18:45):
It all goes on a big level here, a big level.
And it was it was tough. He was very lonely.
It was it was a tough year or two for
him at Curtis. He's there for how long a little
over a year?
Speaker 5 (18:56):
I think, then what happens a long time? And then
he came to New York, desperate to find work. He
was ready to hit New York and do what he started.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
He wrote.
Speaker 5 (19:08):
Arrangements, arrangements and stuff under an assumed name Lenny Amber.
He arranged Ornette Coleman charts. He did all sorts of
weird things he did, didn't you do? Like a fourhands
version of Ilsel and Mickey co for Aaron Copeland. Well
that was the big thing that he got to know
Eric Copeland to know how did that happen?
Speaker 3 (19:27):
That he was still in college when he met Aaron
Harvard or Curtis Harvard, Harvard. Yeah, so at Harvard he
meets Copeland under what circumstances? Because if he's not in
a music program, how does he rub shoulders with?
Speaker 5 (19:36):
I think he gets invited to He came to New
York for the weekend.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
He was invited to be seeking out and sniffing out
the musical world, even though it was at Harvest and
he's an a concert.
Speaker 5 (19:45):
I think it was now sitting next to Aaron and
they get to know each other.
Speaker 6 (19:50):
And it turned out to be Aaron's birthday and Aaron
invited our dad back to his loft for the party.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
Clara Ships the piano of the house.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
That's that's ooh moment number one. He gets seated next
to Copeland Ooh moment number two, and.
Speaker 6 (20:05):
Then goes to the birthday party and plays Copeland's piano
variations in front of the whole crowd, which our dad
was in the habit of doing and clearing rooms because
it's a very gnarly piece.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
And so he said, are you sure you want me.
Speaker 6 (20:18):
To play it at this party because it usually clears
the room, And Aaron said, not at this party.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
And he played it and didn't clear the room. He
did not clear that lands.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Yeah, it's all of Copeland's contemporaries, and he plays, and
a friendship and a relationship with Copeland commences there right
lifelong another than I would say, probably as much, if
not more than slat Can. Your father was one of
the great interpreters of Copeland. I mean that the two
of them were my two favorites. Bernstein and Slatkin are
my two favorite Copeland isers. And then what is the
(20:47):
quick series of steps that gets them to the associate
directorship of the Philharmonic?
Speaker 5 (20:52):
I think an introduction to Krusoviski going to Tanglewood conducting
a tangle.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
She was a guest conductor of tangle You know, he's
a student student conductors student.
Speaker 6 (21:04):
Tangle would have just been invented by Krusovitski, and our
dad was in that first class.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
And so Kruzovitski is the one who builds tango, would
he he.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
Is, He's the music director, He's theso who oversees the
construction of that. What are some of your best memories
of your dad there?
Speaker 3 (21:20):
What would you do? Remember? What was this?
Speaker 6 (21:22):
If you will go ahead, give me give me here
you're laughing, Well, we're laughing because our dad loved to
go to tangle Wood so much his entire life. Every
time he went up there, it was like he would
be rejuvenated, he would turn into a kid again.
Speaker 3 (21:34):
It's a holy place. It's a holy place.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
And what he really loved was being with all those
Can we say that again, that that that the Berkshires
is a holy place. Your father loved it there.
Speaker 5 (21:51):
Tell you we both worked at Tanglewood. What did you
do it for a few more years than James.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
We were guide.
Speaker 5 (21:56):
We were guides, which was a fancy name for just
doing anything that they need to be done. But you know,
you man the gates and you show people around. That
was the guide part. Sometimes there would be tours, and
also you would tend to be backstage and help the
artists and move them around and pick them up at
the airport stuff like that. And it was just heaven
(22:16):
to be up there for a summer.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
And there was also this sense I think our dad
had it from the very beginning that.
Speaker 6 (22:24):
You know, everybody was sort of out in this beautiful weather,
in this beautiful place with all these fun people, and
there would be Shenanigans. We just fell right into the
Shenanigan's sensibility of the place that you know, it was
just fun and everybody was partying all night and having romances.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
And it's funny you say that, because it is probably
one of the two or three most romantic places I've
ever been.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
I mean, you can go.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
For those people listening who don't know, the tangle Wood
is in the Berkshires and Massachusetts and it's the it's
the summer residency of the Boston in the Orchestra.
Speaker 3 (23:01):
And you go up there to Lennox massive piece of land.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
It's a massive tract of land, and in that way,
in a good way that you can talk about going
somewhere with someone and driving that decompressing road trip that
as you drive and drive and you get closer and closer,
you just feel your your body relaxing. And then you
get the excitement of going to Tanglewood and you go
(23:26):
and you get your your basket.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
And your food and your wine. The real fun is
to be out on the lawn. The lawn.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
The lawn is even better in a way if you've
got the basket and the girl and the wine or
whatever your preference is there. And I think I've never
seen more people who are getting it right, you know,
I mean in terms of having a lovely evening and
if they get smashed on top of it, you know,
I guess what I'm saying is, there's nothing like getting
smashed at Tanglewood.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
It's it's the best kind of thing.
Speaker 5 (23:53):
You know.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
That I was a guide, there was no comment.
Speaker 6 (24:00):
And the year that I was a guide, there was
the year the Fillmore East came up there like three
different times, and I saw.
Speaker 3 (24:08):
And Jimmy Hendrick, you're saying that Bill.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Graham, he had his production company Fillmore meaning as a
production company.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
The Artist Boys.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Played the Shed played the Shed, And I was in
a bathroom. To them, we.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
Say, what real pleasure has to be back in Tangleod again.
We were on the heir last August.
Speaker 6 (24:38):
They trashed that long. That's why they were never invited back.
You would not have wanted.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Is it funny how we've changed Back then? I would
have been the who I'm like, we're not having them here.
We can have that that likes Sara and Tanglewood.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
They tried. Who else did the Graham?
Speaker 5 (24:53):
Mister Kylie, who ran the head of the groundskeepers, was
just beside himself.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
He really was. It was a disaster. Your father loved
it there.
Speaker 6 (25:03):
Though he loved it, and you loved to stay up
all night yacking with the students.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
That was what really did your dad admire in his constellation?
Who did he? I heard a story once from someone.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
They said they were at your family's home and your
father's standing there with a cigarette in his hand and
a drink in the other. And someone says, I just
came from seeing the Beatles and the and the quote
was a very simple one. They said that Bernstein said
turned to my friend and said.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
You came and sold the Beatles. He says, I can't
wait to see them myself.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
He said, I'm mad for them, and he just had
a passion for all disparate forms of music.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
And he really did love the Beatles a lot.
Speaker 6 (25:39):
And we were so lucky as we were growing up
because I was a complete beatlemaniac and my dad loved
their music too, So together we would discover the Beatles,
and when they had a new album, I would run
out and get it and go straight to my father's
studio and say, look, look I've got rubbers Oll and
you'd say, great, let's put it on right now, and
we'd stick the echered on. And I learned more about
(26:02):
music by listening to the Beatles with my dad than
I think I did any other way.
Speaker 3 (26:06):
You know, my dad passed away. He was very young.
My dad was only fifty five. He was a year
older than I am now.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
He had a very rare form of cancer and he
died of lung cancer when he was fifty five. And
your dad didn't live a very long life either. How
old were both of you when your dad passed.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
Away, Well, he died at seventy two, which is not five.
It was you were thirty five and I was thirty nine,
So you were grown a dull people.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
But like you.
Speaker 6 (26:35):
Our mother died when she was fifty six, and we
were much younger when that happened. She died in nineteen
seventy eight, so we were in our early twenties, and.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
Our dad died in what year?
Speaker 6 (26:47):
He died in nineteen ninety, so by then we were
you know, adults more or less. But when our mother died,
we were still a very young family. Nina was only
fifteen or something. But did your mother die from un cancer?
Speaker 3 (27:00):
Was a smoker? Yep?
Speaker 1 (27:03):
My point is that your dad didn't live a very
long life. Did he die suddenly or did he get
sick and he knew he was in trouble he got
he was sick for like six months of being released.
Speaker 5 (27:15):
He was diagnosed with Uh he had all sorts of
chess problems, sure, you know, through his life, but uh,
it was it was not cigarette related, which was probably
asbestos thing when he was a kid or who knows.
I mean, it didn't help that he smoked, obviously, but
but you know, just having the oxygen and stuff. That
(27:37):
was the last, you know, a month or so. He
(28:08):
died in October and his last concert was at Tanglewood
in August that nineteen ninety's okay, so he could barely
get through the.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Last thing your father conducted was a public performance into
the summer. He did the Beethoven seven at Tanglewood in
August of nineteen ninety yep, and died that October. I
(28:41):
think about your dad and did he just when he
knew he was sick and he knew he was in
trouble healthy because my dad knew he was in trouble.
I mean, there was a moment I had with my
dad where he like, he looked at me with this
look in his eye, like he knew it was over,
and he and he just I mean, he had a
tear one down his face. And my father said, I'll
never know my grandchildren. And when I think about this
with your dad, a guy like that, who had so
(29:01):
much more he wanted to do, did.
Speaker 3 (29:03):
He ever express that too? Did he ever talk about
that he wasn't done?
Speaker 6 (29:06):
Yeah, he did, you know, And I think, you know,
he had this fantastic climactic moment at the very end
of nineteen eighty nine, the year before he died, when
he conducted at the Fall of the Berlin Wall, and
he did the Ode to Joy and instead of singing Freuda,
which means joy. They sang thrii height, which means freedom.
(29:32):
It was such a big deal for him to be
there when the Berlin Wall came down, and it was
such a momentous occasion.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Where were you when that happened?
Speaker 6 (29:41):
I wish I had been there, And in retrospect, I
regret that I wasn't there, But I had just given
birth to my son, Evan, like.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
Less than eight weeks earlier. Do you have an excuse?
That was my excuse.
Speaker 6 (29:54):
So I watched it on the couch on Christmas Day
while I was nursing my infant son. I watched it
on TV because they showed the whole thing in the
live broadcast about you.
Speaker 5 (30:03):
I don't even have an excuse, and I can't remember
why I didn't go. I can't believe that I wasn't there.
It's just unbelievable.
Speaker 6 (30:09):
You know, we didn't know he was going to be
gone within the year, so you know, he was always there,
and there were always these occasions where you could go
and meet him on the road, and there were hundreds
of them, and it was kind of a pain to
go get in with that whole retinue and the whole
madness of being of the tour thing.
Speaker 5 (30:28):
And so but Bill did it become entourage city.
Speaker 4 (30:31):
You know.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
Right after that he got really sick with a flu.
And what year was that, nineteen eighty nine. It was
like this at the fall.
Speaker 6 (30:39):
Christmas of nineteen eighty nine. And I remember visiting him
about a month later, less than a month later in
Key West, and he was just not feeling right and
he told me so, he said, I just I'm not
I don't feel right. That was the beginning of the
slow decline. And then things got a lot worse in May,
and then he just kind of struggle through all his
(31:01):
gigs over the summer and then barely made it through
that Beethoven seven. We were all in the audience clutching
each other's hands, like, is he gonna make it?
Speaker 3 (31:09):
Is he gonna make it?
Speaker 1 (31:11):
We're taking a break, so stay with us. What was
his life like after your mom passed away? He didn't remarry,
did he?
Speaker 6 (31:20):
No?
Speaker 5 (31:20):
He did not, And it was why do you think
he was so miserable for a long time after she
He needed her, he needed her, and he was just
a long long time until we went on vacation. Probably
I don't know. Eight months later or something like that,
and we sort of started seeing signs of a person again.
Speaker 6 (31:45):
Tell about what happened in Jamaica. After the Christmas dinner
and then we went to the bar.
Speaker 5 (31:52):
Oh my god, this was the vacation in Jamaica. A
bunch of our family and a couple of friends, and
we went down to the bar and there were probably
a couple of people in there. And he sits down
at the piano at the bar. And this was after dinner,
after you know, a lot of Scotch whatever, a lot
(32:14):
of wine, and he plays Rhapsody in Blue from beginning
to end. It was the most amazing performance you could
possibly imagine. I mean, he's just ripped it. It was unforgettable.
(32:49):
And then that's kind of when I knew he was back,
And it was just through the music he was.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
He tells us, Oh my.
Speaker 5 (32:57):
God, so obviously never married again.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
But why do you think he never married again?
Speaker 1 (33:03):
You see a guy like that, You mean, my gun,
he could have had any woman in New York. He
didn't have room in his life for that anymore.
Speaker 5 (33:09):
No, And there were some men that he was very
close to.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
And and would you say that once your mother passed
away was your father's life as a bisexual man, that
he just lived it more vividly once your mother was gone,
was much more, much more living color about it.
Speaker 5 (33:24):
His uh, his mother was still alive. Oh, and I
think that played a great role. That was kind of
a governor there that for him, kind of a governor
yet and then when he still had a public it
was a different time.
Speaker 3 (33:37):
She outlived him.
Speaker 6 (33:38):
Yeah, she was ninety two when he died, and she
said memorably, this will shorten my life.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
Wow. And so he and so he.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
You think that he kept that quiet and kept that private,
not only because it was that that is nature to
be a little more private.
Speaker 3 (33:54):
Like theatre.
Speaker 5 (33:55):
He sort of came out sort of a few times,
and I think he was once he was hoping people
would take more notice of it than they did, I think.
But I think he didn't want his mother to have
to deal with it with her friends and you know,
people talking about it.
Speaker 3 (34:16):
If he was alive now, how old should that be?
If he was alive now, he'd be nice.
Speaker 5 (34:21):
Yeah, yes, centennial will be twenty eighteen.
Speaker 3 (34:25):
Who was someone?
Speaker 1 (34:25):
I mean, I'm sure that we're boundless people because your
father was very generous of heart, it seems very passionate.
But who were some of the people other than Kuzovitski
and Copen that we've covered before. Who were some of
the people that were contemporaries of your father that you
remember him speaking very glowingly abou Who did he admire?
Speaker 5 (34:40):
Lucas Voss would be one.
Speaker 6 (34:42):
They were a Curtis together, that's where they met, and
they stayed friends and colleagues their entire lives. And Lucas
was a stupendous pianist in addition to being an excellent composer.
So he played our dad's Age of Anxiety, which is
a sort of like a piano concerto. Older it's called
a symphony, and Lucas could.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
Just play the hell out of it.
Speaker 6 (35:16):
And and our dad premiered many of Lucas's pieces with
the Philharmonic, And so that was he was one of them.
Michael Tilson Thomas was someone that our dad kind of
nurtured along when.
Speaker 3 (35:29):
Hezovitsky to a degree, Yes, to a degree. Who else
did who else did he mentor? Oh well, he was
mister mentor to a great degree.
Speaker 10 (35:40):
I think yeah, John, another guy with great hair, great hair,
school of conducting.
Speaker 3 (35:47):
Nothing like that hair flying through the air looks great.
It's amazing how many great hair conductors there are, isn't
that so? Right? Well, when nothing at the Philharmonic, it
was his relationship with Sondheim.
Speaker 6 (35:58):
Oh that was a big, big relationship, big friendship and
colleague ship.
Speaker 3 (36:03):
You know, west Side Story.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
Jerry Robins, all of them had this phenomenal success. Initially,
West Side Story was supposed to be if I'm if
I'm an Irish.
Speaker 3 (36:14):
Jewish gang, Yeah, a lower east Side. It was going
to be east Side. It was going to be Lower
east Side. Tempers would flare over the Easter passover holidays
right right right right as Leles versus the Missus. Yeah, yeah,
something like that.
Speaker 6 (36:31):
And then apparently Jerry Robins saw some article about gang
wars with Puerto Ricans on the Upper West.
Speaker 3 (36:38):
Side and he went, ding, you know the bulls, Jerry
it was I think it was Jerry or was it Arthur?
Speaker 5 (36:44):
Always said it was Arthur, so I don't know.
Speaker 3 (36:46):
Maybe it was Arthur.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
Probably the most romantic line in the movie I've ever heard,
and it always brings me to tears when he turns
to her, they have the moment of the dance. Then
he turns to her and says, you're not lying to me,
are you? And she says, I have not yet learned
to lie about such things.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
That's right. I have not yet learned to joke that way.
I think you're not joking that what she says, you're
not joking. I have not yet to give it to
me again. You say it here we got rid of
a live performance.
Speaker 5 (37:15):
Go you're not joking with me.
Speaker 3 (37:19):
I have not yet learned to joke that way. I
think now I never will. There you go, there it is.
Speaker 6 (37:24):
And the reason we're laughing is because there's a recording
of our dad conducting west Side Story for in a
recording session, and he got Alexander and my sister Nina
to do that dialogue so much to believe you're not.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
Joking me, I have not yet learned how to joke
that way.
Speaker 8 (37:41):
I think no, I never will.
Speaker 3 (37:46):
Now.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
Speaking of films, your father only composed I mean, other
than them transferring west Side to the film, your father
only composed one film score, that's right, and it was
a hell of a film.
Speaker 3 (37:56):
Score and very Wartenstein asque.
Speaker 1 (37:59):
And why do you think he only did? Your father someone?
I mean, I see people, this is interesting because I
see so many people Billy Joel Sting. I mean, you
see Elton John make his fore way into that. But
I see so many people who I think the mess
of Billy, especially who's a friend. I say, my god,
you could be doing so much music a movie score
if you wanted to, and they just don't. They don't
have a passion for it. Why did your father just
(38:20):
do the one?
Speaker 6 (38:21):
You think, Well, because he really did not enjoy the experience.
Why because he was being bossed around? Because an yeah,
well what happened. For the example he gave was that
he wrote, you know, the soaring music, that the dynamics
that he composed were all in his head and all
recorded a certain way, and then when they're mixing, they
(38:43):
just dunk the fader on it so that, as our
dad put it, so that you could hear Marlon Brando's grunt.
And so just at the climactic moment of his love music,
you know, in the final mix, they just dunk the fader.
Speaker 5 (38:58):
They would say, okay, fifteen bars of passion and then
you know, thirty seconds of you know, quick. And he
just couldn't write that way. That way, it was impossible,
So he he loves they but he just hated doing
(39:19):
the work.
Speaker 3 (39:20):
You have children. I have a daughter. You have a
daughter who's how old?
Speaker 5 (39:23):
She'll be fourteen in two weeks.
Speaker 3 (39:25):
You have a daughter that's fourteen, and what does she into?
What does she do?
Speaker 5 (39:29):
She's into her first year of high school and loving it.
And she's into theater in a big way. She loves
to you're raising your kids in the city. You're outside
the city in the city. You're raising your daughter inside
the city. And she likes acting. She likes acting, but
she's also you know, she loves her English class and
history class and math, to her school and her friends
(39:50):
and her What about you.
Speaker 3 (39:52):
I have two.
Speaker 6 (39:53):
I have ad they're in their twenties now, they're in
their early t do My daughter, Frankie, lives in Brooklyn,
she's a right and my son is still in school
up in the Berkshires.
Speaker 3 (40:06):
As a matter of fact, he's up and he lives
in Lee, Massachusetts.
Speaker 1 (40:08):
No, well, you know, for both of you, your children,
I mean, obviously they know they didn't have to watch.
In their case, they weren't watching Leonard Bernstone. That wasn't
the cartoon, wasn't the gateway into an understanding of who
their grandfather was.
Speaker 3 (40:22):
But they know who he is and have you had
and do they do? They have an appetite and a
passion to understand who he is and see who he is.
My kids don't.
Speaker 6 (40:29):
They're very careful about sort of keeping their distance from
that whole connection. I think it makes them a little shy,
a little a little anxious, and so they don't.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
They don't embrace.
Speaker 1 (40:42):
Based on without getting too personal, because I have an
opinion about that because of my daughter. Oh really, well,
what they want is that they sense that celebrity has
become so exponentially out of control now and they prefer
their privacy. If knowing that I was related directly to
Leonard Bernstein was going to lead to something appropriate or
comfortable or rite, there would be one thing, But nowadays
(41:04):
everybody's after the wrong thing.
Speaker 3 (41:05):
And that's really interesting.
Speaker 5 (41:06):
I mean I think about that a lot because our
father really loved being famous and we had fun with it,
and it was just a different type of thing in
those days.
Speaker 3 (41:18):
It was different.
Speaker 5 (41:19):
It's more of an industry now. And he started seeing
that more and more starting in the eighties, and you
talked about it a lot, and he once said to
me I'm so sick of Leonard Bernstein.
Speaker 3 (41:31):
I've had it with him. I've always had a problem
about time. But when I had a problem about.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
Time at the age of twenty five or thirty, when
you're still, at least in part, thinking you're immortal and
nothing's ever going to change the way you are.
Speaker 3 (41:59):
Abbreviated, everything's all right.
Speaker 2 (42:03):
I mean I would go on concert tours and compose
in the airport or on the plane, or on the train,
or I wrote half of the Age of Anxiety and
airports and trains and hotels. I can't do that anymore,
and it's been some time since I could. One of
the reasons is one's standards get higher and higher. Self
(42:25):
identification with the composer whose works you are performing become
closer and closer to the point where there are performances
which are the ones I call good performances, but I
know it's been a really good performance. It's one in
which I have the feeling I've written the piece standing there,
(42:47):
and when it's over, I don't know where I'm standing.
Speaker 1 (43:11):
As he grew older, Bernstein's connection to the music of
Gustav Mahler, whom he had championed throughout his career became
even stronger.
Speaker 5 (43:20):
I think he felt a deep association I mean, apart
from the music itself, obviously, an association with Mahler as
a conflicted musician, Mahler being Jewish and in a Georgian
Jewish world and being a tonal composer in an a
(43:42):
more atonal world, becoming so being a European man who
came to America. You know, somebody from the classical tradition
coming to America and suddenly finding themselves in this crazy world.
(44:04):
So I think there was an affinity there.
Speaker 6 (44:07):
Plus, he was the combination of composer and conductor, which
there aren't.
Speaker 3 (44:12):
That many of. I would love to have known your father.
Speaker 1 (44:36):
Your father was so singular and remains so singular because
number one, whenever he came on, I was happy, And
whenever he came on, I was excited, and he never
disappointed me. And when I would see him, I'd say,
once you get from Bernstein, you can only get from Bernstein.
He was the original in his field. Leonard Bernstein's children,
(45:13):
Jamie and Alexander, say their father was so original in
part because he just never stopped celebrating music, celebrating life.
Speaker 6 (45:21):
He never slept. He was a terrible insomniac. I think
that's probably why I managed to squeeze in so much action.
Speaker 3 (45:28):
He was always at it.
Speaker 5 (45:30):
You know.
Speaker 3 (45:30):
I wish he was around.
Speaker 1 (45:31):
He and I could have hung out together. Oh oh,
I'm an insomniac. And could you imagine you're in Stein
and I watching YouTube together.
Speaker 3 (45:38):
Would have come over at four am and you could
have hung out. God, we could have been watching old
movies together. And yeah, you would have gone to the
piano and played all the old Hermann scores. Yes, everything.
Speaker 1 (46:03):
This is Alec Baldwin. To learn more about Leonard Bernstein
and artful learning and educational organization that his son Alex spearheads,
go to Here's the thing dot org
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.