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.
At sit-down dinners, the champion Chilean dish was pastel de choclo. Pastel (confection) of choclo (corn) had a bottom layer of spiced beef, onions, and raisins. On top of that was a thick yellow layer of corn pudding, baked until the sugared top was crusty and divine. Plopped onto a delicate flowered plate, it looked unusual, but oh, such a flavor. Craig Claiborne even published Rosalia's own recipe in The New York Times.
For the really big sit-down dinners ("monster rallies," Felicia called them), extra folding tables were set up in the dining room. When they were all laid out with their linens, silver, flowers, and china, everything winking in the mirrors and candlelight, the effect was like a hallucinogenic Arabian Nights banquet. We'd come up the back stairs and peek at the proceedings from behind the paneled screen that depicted a scene from Un Ballo in Maschera, with rustically hand-painted masked figures dancing around and stabbing each other and falling down—a gift from our parents' friend Franco Zeffirelli, the opera director.
The party we remember best is, of course, the one that featured a disaster. Herman Shumlin, a theater producer of fidgety disposition, was already a kind of verbal family mascot. Our Uncle BB loved the name so much that he never missed an opportunity to shoehorn "Herman Shumlin" into a sentence. At this particular dinner party, Mr. Shumlin inadvertently kicked the wing nut under one of those elegantly disguised folding tables, causing it to sink calamitously and dump Mr. Shumlin's dinner right into his lap. That was pretty good, but the best part, the part that still brings tears of joy to our eyes, was that after Daddy loaned Mr. Shumlin a clean pair of trousers and the table had been hurriedly reset and everyone had settled edgily back into their dinner…Herman Shumlin did it again.
Whatever their differences, and there were many, Felicia and Lenny agreed on this much: Cooking was something other people did for you and that you did yourself only in emergencies. Mummy could actually produce a few dishes, most of them involving eggs. She could make a nice omelet and, for an elegant lunch, she would whip up a hard-boiled-egg thing baked with cheese and béchamel sauce. It was delicious, though afterward it made you feel as if you'd swallowed a hippo whole. And, like all Chilean ladies, Felicia could make a fresh mayonnaise. We often found her beating egg yolks, adding the oil drop by drop while watching Walter Cronkite deliver the CBS Evening News.
You couldn't exactly call Daddy's kitchen activity cooking. Many mornings, we'd discover the evidence of his insomniac excursions: spooned-out jars of Beech-Nut strained veal; an empty eggshell with a hole in one end, the contents having been sucked out raw; godforsaken messes of peanut butter and canned corn in a saucepan, the blackened dregs still bubbling noxiously on the stove.
His one culinary triumph involved a sauce for venison that he volunteered to prepare at a friend's ski lodge in Vail, Colorado. We heard him tell the story often. The principal ingredients of his magic sauce were Coca-Cola, Scotch whisky (something he'd certainly been sampling when he volunteered to cook in the first place), and his great discovery of the evening, arrowroot—the alchemic final ingredient that literally brought it all together. He clearly remembered, he told us, the guests swooning over the robust yet subtle flavors.
Around the same time that we moved across town to our upside-down apartment in the sky, we also acquired a country house in Connecticut, a mere hour and ten minutes away. It had a swimming pool and a tennis court, woods you could almost get lost in, old barns to explore, and neighbors' properties to sneak onto. In Connecticut, Daddy reverted somewhat to his old bachelor habits, wearing questionable shirts and bathing suits, and enjoying his primary gastronomic passion: food he could eat with his hands and get all over his face: lobster, T-bone steak, barbecued ribs, and corn, corn, corn. Every day in August included a trip to the Wakemans' farm, down Long Lots Road. Daddy often volunteered for this errand, taking us along with him in his convertible with the radio tuned to our favorite pop station. He enjoyed this errand because Farmer Wakeman gave him special permission to wander into the corn rows, strip a few ears, and eat them on the spot. "Heaven!" he would crow through a mouthful of yellow mush.
Felicia turned some old stables into a studio for Daddy. It was rustic but not too rustic, with a fireplace and central heating, an air conditioner, and an antique stand-up desk Daddy loved because it kept his back from hurting. One day he emerged from his studio waving a big sheaf of papers over his head. "I did it!" he cried, as he crossed the lawn. His Symphony No. 3, Kaddish, was finished at last. We all cheered, and Mummy jumped into the pool with all her clothes on.
A few months later, President Kennedy was assassinated. I was 11, Alexander was 8, and Nina was a toddler. Lenny dedicated his just-completed symphony to Kennedy's memory. The grown-ups still gathered, still smoked and drank-in fact more than ever—but it was different. They were distracted and tetchy. They watched television all day long: Imagine, after all the grief they'd given us over the years for doing just that. It was kind of fun to watch so much TV with our parents, even if it was just the news. So there we all were in the library, watching TV together, when Jack Ruby pumped Lee Harvey Oswald full of lead. Our parents were electrified. They read every assassination-conspiracy book the minute it appeared. Then they had to hide them all the following summer when Mrs. Kennedy herself came to our Connecticut house for the weekend with Caroline, John-John, and two station wagons full of Secret Service agents.
There were some pretty good moments that weekend, given the basic inescapable tension of the visit. By Sunday, we kids were all playing together and devising silly routines to amuse the adults. Mrs. Kennedy reciprocated with her Russian Cossack dance, featuring full leg extensions. But the standout event came early Saturday morning, when four-year-old John—John wandered unnoticed (by eight Secret Service men!) out to the driveway, climbed behind the wheel of one of the station wagons, released the emergency brake, and hopped nimbly out of the car as it rolled down the hill and crashed into a copper beech tree, which bears the scar to this day.
The shadow came down on us again in 1968, when first Martin Luther King Jr. and then Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. Maybe being grown-up wasn't so much fun after all: They seemed exhausted, haunted, beyond reach. Through those sad, scary times, our mother kept the house open to one and all. There was comfort in our home: in the music, in the hugs and the humor, in the magnificent, healing Chilean soups coming out of our kitchen. There was comfort in Lenny's earthiness, and in Felicia's wit and grace. Together, the two of them conjured a kind of radiance, and for a time it seemed all the world came to them for warmth and solace. In the sad afterdust of September 11, this is what I now remember of that other awful time: that my siblings and I could concentrate on disaster for only so long. Then we had to escape into the safety of our own in-jokes and make-believes, just as my kids do today.