“Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein” by Jamie Bernstein

This is a memoir by the oldest daughter of Leonard Bernstein, a legendary conductor/composer/music lecturer/pianist. It is his centennial this year. Just about every major orchestra and concert series throughout the world is celebrating his legacy with programs featuring his works. Appropriately, the memoir also came out this summer, along with many books and articles about this influential figure. It has garnered much attention, and has been recommended to me by many of my friends, including a professor of American Studies whose book about Lenny is due to be published next year.

What makes it a page-turner? Is it our human fascinations with celebrities? Or is it the anecdotes of Lenny’s flamboyant and impulsive behaviors? Or is it Jamie’s intimate portrayal of a father, however influential a musician and a charismatic public figure he was to the rest of the world?

His homosexuality has always been a common knowledge to pretty much every musician of my generation. To me, it was more surprising that this was not known to Jamie until she was in College: during her summer job at Tanglewood Music Festival (where her father was a conductor) after her freshman year at Harvard (her father’s alma mater). Her informants just assumed that she knew. She pretended that she did, then wrote her father a letter to confront. He flatly denied by telling her that many people were jealous of his success. Much can be read into from an anecdote like this: the gay right issues in the late 60’s to Lenny’s communication skills, his priorities (was it his daughter’s feelings, or his public image?), what he thought his responsibilities were as a father, etc.

What exactly is a healthy family relationship, if there can really be such a thing? Another friend, a psychiatrist who urged me to read this book, thought that Bernstein forced all those around him to live in his shadows: his siblings, his wife, his children, and maybe even some of his friends and lovers… Jamie recounts many occasions in which Lenny demanded his family’s adulation. Is genius innate or nurtured in someone like Bernstein? Would the family members of an equally genius female artist endure her demands for that nurturing, attention and adulation? But her father’s demands leave his daughter resentful, at least partially. Jamie gives some of his failures substantial pages of her book (most notably 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a legendary Broadway flop closing after 7 performances). To her credit, she also devotes much pages to her own failure as an aspiring singer-song writer. Still she does seem to blame her father for her failures, personally and figuratively, while she holds him responsible for his own failures. The book sometimes comes across as the author’s attempt  to exorcise her father out of her own sense of self.

To me, the book humanized an American icon. He was much more of a family man than I ever thought would be possible for someone like Lenny: a flamboyant public figure, who happened to be highly sexual and gay in a heterosexual marriage. And he was a man with much needs: for attention, for adulation, for devotion, for indulgence, and for affection: physical and otherwise. Is it a matter of course for someone with mega outputs to need as much input? In the age of #MeToo, and sensitivities about political correctness and appropriate behaviors –  sexual or otherwise – I suspect that much of his behaviors would not have gone unpunished. I know some are begrudging his centennial celebration because of his sexual misconduct and the current sentiment of #MeToo overall holding him posthumously accountable. I feel conflicted about all of this.

Some may assert that the memoir is receiving the attention solely for the ever-lasting glory of Leonard Bernstein, and not for the merit of its writing or the writer. As someone who is struggling to weave a narrative out of my own life, I admired Jamie’s accomplishment in formulating a narrative that is easy to follow out of such a complicated family and its surrounding circumstances.

I was glad to have spent the time to read this book.