Before Felicia Montealegre came into his life, Leonard Bernstein was something of a slob, subsisting on salami sandwiches, drinking milk straight from the carton, oblivious to the impression his garish ties made on a cultured world. Felicia, with her unerring aesthetic instincts, made a gentleman out of him—at least most of the time.
Lenny and Felicia, my parents, met in the late '40s, at a double birthday party for her and a fellow Chilean, the pianist Claudio Arrau. Daddy loved to tell us how Mummy had sat at his feet feeding him shrimp, one by one. Felicia's aristocratic beauty disguised a switchblade wit, a laughing-in-church irreverence, and a weakness for scatological jokes. She laughed so hard at the bean-eating scene in Blazing Saddles that we feared for her health.
My own first decade as a Bernstein, as the first of their three children, took place in The Osborne, a grand, sooty old building catercorner from Carnegie Hall—an easy commute for my father to his podium in front of the New York Philharmonic. My little brother, Alexander, and I would eat an early dinner in the kitchen in the company of Julia, our devoted, irascible nanny, and Rosalia, the cook. Julia and Rosalia were also from Chile, so life in the kitchen was in Spanish. Julia tended toward rules and scolding, but on Fridays, her day off, Rosalia would let us do the unthinkable, the illicit, the delicious: eat dinner in front of the television.
After dinner came bath, and after bath came pajamas, bathrobe, fresh-brushed hair, and an escorted visit downstairs to the library, where Mummy and Daddy would be having drinks with friends in a companionable nebula of cigarette smoke. We were permitted to chat and clamber for 10 or 15 minutes, then, at an unseen signal between Julia and our mother, it was time for kisses and curtsies all around and for us to go upstairs to bed.
Alexander and I would drift off to sleep listening to the steady waves of laughter, the clatter and clink of dinner, and later, the piano playing and raucous singing. We knew the names and could picture their faces behind our half-closed eyes: Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Steve Sondheim. Hal and Judy Prince. Mike Nichols and Goddard and Brigitta Lieberson and Judy Holliday and Isaac Stern and Sidney Lumet and on and on.
In those early years, our summers consisted of endless, euphoric months on Martha's Vineyard. The grown-ups were especially fun in the summer—relaxed and sun-blissed. Lenny's kid brother, Burton, our Uncle BB, was also there during those summers. A walking jack-in-the-box of practical jokes and magic tricks, Uncle BB was also the star (and principal cinematographer) of elaborately plotted silent home movies with titles like The Laszlo Finster Story and Call Me Moses. The latter was a biblical epic complete with a chase sequence across the Red Sea-on water skis. Daddy was Pharaoh, in a striped beach towel and with a lampshade on his head. Alexander and I got to be in the movie, too. Our scene called for Pharaoh's children to play canasta with him and look bored until Uncle BB's future wife, Ellen, came along looking luscious as Moses' girlfriend. Pharaoh took one look, threw all his cards into the air, and chased after her. We didn't really get it about our father's fame until the night the Flintstones went to the Hollyrock Bowl and Betty Rubble said, "Oh, I just love to watch Leonard Bernstone conduct!" That's when we understood that Daddy had hit the big time.
In 1961, the New York Philharmonic moved to Lincoln Center, and Mummy became pregnant with our sister, Nina. The whole Maestro thing was getting grander, and the family was getting bigger. It was time to move. Alexander and I came back to the city at the end of that summer to find ourselves in what we were sure was the biggest apartment in the world at the top of the tallest building in the world. A sprawling penthouse duplex on Park Avenue, it had a wraparound terrace with perfect views of Central Park, the 59th Street Bridge, and the parade of illuminated Christmas trees down the middle of the avenue. There were fireplaces in the living room, library, and dining room—all of which were upstairs—and imperial-size bathrooms connected to the bedrooms downstairs. An upside-down house! The two floors were joined by a theatrically circular staircase, nicely carpeted for soundless spying on visitors in the front hall.
What a place for a party. And there were lots of them. After all, our mother was Mrs. Maestro now, and she turned out to be a kind of social genius, mixing heady cocktails of artists, intellectuals, and celebrities who had names even we could recognize: Richard Burton, Lauren Bacall, Jacqueline Kennedy, Vladimir Horowitz. But for us the biggest thrill was meeting Jack Larson, the guy who played Jimmy Olsen on the Superman TV show. (It turned out he was a composer as well.)
Part of our mother's secret recipe for combining comfort and elegance was the delicious Chilean food she served at her parties, prepared by an ever-changing cast of talented, high-strung South American cooks. Rosalia was often in tears, and not just over her onions. Guillermina could not be persuaded to switch to sweet butter even after we observed that her chocolate cakes tasted salty. (Though I actually liked them that way.) And Anita was positively fearsome in her pirate-style bandanna, worn to ward off migraines.
At pre- or postconcert parties, we children were particularly fond of filching Anita's cheese-filled mini-empanadas. These were deep-fried and served piping hot, so that when you bit through the crispy dough you instantly burned your tongue on the heavenly melted cheese inside. But you had to work your way through your empanada fast, because the minute it was cool enough to eat painlessly, the cheese would have begun to relumpify. Everyone at those parties would talk while desperately fanning their mouths and sucking in cool air.
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