The Leonard Bernstein Letters (4 page)

The selection of correspondence in
The Leonard Bernstein Letters
is necessarily a personal choice: there were some very difficult decisions to be made in terms of what to leave out, and there is scope – and more than enough correspondence – for several further volumes. To give just a couple of examples: I have omitted most of the correspondence with his sister Shirley (including a large number of letters, mostly undated, written while she was a student at Mount Holyoke College) and from his brother Burton. A book of Bernstein family letters could make for fascinating reading. Many of them, however, concern family matters, and I had already decided that my principal focus for this book should be on correspondence that told us something about Bernstein himself, and particularly his life as a musician. It is for a similar reason that I have omitted most of the letters from Martha Gellhorn – many of them have little to say about music – though I have included a splendid letter about
West Side Story
and a most revealing one about her marriage to Ernest Hemingway.
¹

Illuminating a Musical Life

Anyone interested in Bernstein has the great advantage of Humphrey Burton's superbly researched and beautifully written biography. Twenty years after its first publication, it remains definitive as well as enthralling, and subsequent writers on Bernstein owe Humphrey Burton a great debt of gratitude. The present book would have been unthinkable without his work, but it sets out to do something different. While Burton quotes from a good deal of correspondence, his main purpose is to tell a life story. In
The Leonard Bernstein Letters
I have aimed to allow the letters mostly to speak for themselves, rather than to be woven into a linear biographical narrative. In addition, a number of letters have emerged or become available since Burton's book was published in 1994.

One of the delights of the Bernstein Collection is its astonishing breadth: there's extensive correspondence not only with those working in music, but also with writers, politicians, film stars, artists, journalists – and long-standing friends
who offered Bernstein support at times when he needed it. I have tried to reflect something of the range of these friendships. Even so, it is as a gigantic
musical
personality that Bernstein is remembered, and this has been my primary criterion for choosing the letters to include in what is the first published volume devoted to Bernstein's correspondence. In terms of other composers, Bernstein was in very close contact with Aaron Copland from the end of the 1930s onwards, and he also had an extensive correspondence with David Diamond stretching over five decades – a group of letters sometimes marked by tetchiness on Bernstein's part, and by a tendency to over-sensitivity on Diamond's. Such is the volume of the correspondence that I have had to omit letters from other close musical friends such as Paul Bowles and Irving Fine. These deserve to see the light of day in a future publication. In addition to correspondence with composers and performers, I have also aimed to include letters that chart the genesis of Bernstein's compositions. Two of his first big successes were collaborations with Jerome Robbins: a ballet (
Fancy Free
) and a musical (
On the Town
). In the case of
Fancy Free
, much of it was conceived and composed while Robbins and Bernstein were working away from home. As a result, there was detailed discussion by letter. It's frustrating that Robbins’ letters to Bernstein about this ballet seem not to have survived. (Bernstein was constantly moving house at the time – and it was just before the arrival on the scene of his assistant, Helen Coates, who ensured that everything thereafter was carefully saved.) However, Bernstein's letters to Robbins constitute a fascinating chronicle of the work's composition.
On the Town
is a very different case: a collaboration where those concerned were working in the same place at the same time. As a result, there is no substantial correspondence about it with any of the collaborators (Bernstein, Robbins, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green) – indeed, in 1945, just after the show had opened on Broadway Comden mentioned in a letter to Bernstein that it was the first time she had written him since 1941.

West Side Story
presents a more complex case – partly because it took so long to get started. A fascinating letter from Arthur Laurents, undated, but probably written in April 1949, raises some detailed points responding to what had evidently been a difficult phone conversation with Bernstein. A follow-up letter from Laurents (Letter 283) reveals that Bernstein considered pulling out of the project altogether. In 1955, the collaboration was revived, with greater determination on all sides to see it through. Again, there are some revealing letters, especially one from Robbins in which he responds in detail to Laurents and Bernstein about a draft scenario. Stephen Sondheim joined the creative team just after this, but there is no correspondence with him about the show until the opening night on Broadway (26 September 1957; Letter 402); then, a few weeks later, a marvelous description of the sessions for the original cast recording and the trials and tribulations of the show early in its run. Sondheim and Bernstein were not only in the same town but often in the same room while they were working on
West Side Story
, so the lack of correspondence during its
creation shouldn't come as a surprise. That it was a happy creative partnership from the start, we learn from letters sent to other people: Bernstein wrote to his brother Burton in October 1955 that “
Romeo
proceeds apace, with a new young lyricist named Steve Sondheim, who is going to work out wonderfully” (Letter 363). The final stages of
West Side Story
are described by Bernstein in an engrossing series of letters to his wife Felicia, full of interesting details as well as his excitement, frustration, exhaustion, and optimism.

Bernstein's descriptions of his concerts reveal some recurring tensions. He often wrote (without irony) of his “triumphs” on the podium, but his phenomenal public success in the United States, in Europe, and in Israel was often tempered by an underlying frustration: after describing yet another acclaimed performance, Bernstein would sometimes declare that he was going to do less and less conducting, in order to devote time to what really mattered to him – composition.

It was conducting that gave him the opportunity to travel extensively, and Bernstein wrote some memorable letters home describing the places he visited. From being a young man who told his Harvard friends that he wasn't sure whether European travel was for him, he became not only a globe-trotting maestro but also an unusually observant traveler, writing about the sights and sounds of Prague, London, and Paris in the years after the Second World War, of months spent in Italy in 1955, of South America, Japan, and – most touching of all, perhaps – the accounts of his long visit to Israel during the 1948 war.

“Every one I love, I love passionately”
²

Music was Bernstein's greatest and most constant passion. But his love life was an essential part of his make-up, and his letters allow us to form a fuller picture of an emotional life that was full of twists and turns – neatly summarized by the conducter Marin Alsop in 2010: “Clearly, he was comfortable with being sexual in many different ways and yet he wanted a traditional life, with a wife and children to whom he was devoted. He was a complex, complex man, and complex people have complex personal lives.”
³
Intriguing as the letters are from those (usually men) with whom Bernstein had relationships during the 1940s, I have chosen instead to focus on Bernstein's own attitude to his sexuality, and its implications for his career. In correspondence with Copland and David Oppenheim in particular, and in some letters to his sister Shirley and to Diamond, he explores his sexual identity, often revealing a state of confusion and inner conflict. On the one hand, his background inculcated traditional values and relationships – ultimately marriage; on the other, his preferences in the 1940s were usually for men. Once his college studies were over, he began a process of self-exploration with the psychoanalyst he called the
“Frau” – Marketa Morris. As we can see from their letters, he shared the same analyst with Oppenheim (with whom Bernstein had a close, surely intimate relationship in the early 1940s; their friendship was lifelong).

It's no surprise that Bernstein remained silent on the subject of his sexuality in letters to Koussevitzky – until, that is, he proudly announced his first engagement to Felicia in December 1946, suggesting a picture of his sexuality that was at best incomplete. Bernstein himself was anxious that his sex life might have a damaging impact on his employment prospects, fearing he could have difficulty finding a job as a conductor if it became known that he was gay.

It's worth pausing for a moment to consider the cultural and social context that gave Bernstein such concern about how others might view his sexuality. Many American psychoanalysts in the 1930s and 1940s considered homosexuality to be a mental illness that could respond to “treatment”. The research by Alfred Kinsey and others published in 1948 as
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
(the first “Kinsey Report”) attempted to codify degrees of homosexual, heterosexual, and asexual behavior in men with the “Kinsey Scale”, aiming to demonstrate that men did not fit into neat and exclusive categories.
⁴

There was a predictably violent reaction to Kinsey's findings: among others, J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, was quick to denounce the findings in the pages of
Reader's Digest
: “Man's sense of decency declares what is normal and what is not. Whenever the American people, young or old, come to believe that there is no such thing as right or wrong, normal or abnormal, those who would destroy civilization will applaud a major victory over our way of life.”
⁵
In other words, homosexuality, like communism, was “Un-American”. Two years later, in December 1950, the austerely named Senate Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments issued a report on the “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government,” coming to the hair-raising conclusion that “homosexuals and other sex perverts are not proper persons to be employed in Government for two reasons; first, they are generally unsuitable, and second, they constitute security risks.”
⁶

Bernstein was not, of course, seeking employment in the government, but he craved acceptance. There's little solid evidence to suggest that conductors were not appointed to particular positions because of their homosexuality in the 1940s and 1950s, though Dimitri Mitropoulos apparently believed he had been
victimized. But several of the most highly regarded figures in the arts were homosexuals, not least Aaron Copland, who had, by the mid-1940s, become the most popular and distinctive voice in American classical music. Bernstein, however, aspired to be the music director of a major American orchestra and felt– rightly or wrongly – that he needed to demonstrate he was a conventional, traditional family man. Despite Bernstein's frequent protestations that he craved the more private life of a composer (where his sexuality would not have been an issue), he could never let go of conducting as an essential part of his career.

What he didn't need to worry about as much was the possible impact his sexuality might have on his marriage – at least not as far as his chosen partner, Felicia Montealegre, was concerned. She knew what she was committing herself to: just after they married, she wrote: “you are a homosexual and may never change […] I am willing to accept you as you are, without being a martyr or sacrificing myself on the L.B. altar (Letter 320).”

After a shaky start (mainly due to Bernstein's initial tendency to regard marriage as a kind of experiment), the relationship of Leonard and Felicia blossomed – particularly after Jamie, the first of their children, was born in 1952. An exceptionally bright child, it's clear from Bernstein's letters home how much he adored her. The same love shines through in Bernstein's comments on all his children (Jamie, Alexander, and Nina); and his absolute devotion to Felicia is apparent in many letters from the early 1950s until the mid-1970s. It was a relationship that had its rocky moments, but only with the crisis of 1976 and their “trial separation” did it threaten to fall apart. At the end of his life, Bernstein joked to Jonathan Cott that “you need love, and that's why I have ten thousand intimate friends which is unfair to them because I can't give any one of them everything”.
⁷
But for a quarter of a century, Felicia was the exception: she was unquestionably the greatest love of his life.

Editorial Method

Original spellings have been preserved (except where stated otherwise), as have ampersands and punctuation in the main texts of letters, though opening salutations have been standardized to be followed by a comma. Names have sometimes been added in square brackets for the sake of clarification. Titles of works that would normally be italicized in a printed text (
West Side Story, Fancy Free, The Age of Anxiety
) have been italicized. In the original letters they appear in a variety of styles – in double quotation marks, in single quotation marks, underlined, in capital letters, in plain text. For the sake of consistency, I decided to standardize their presentation. Words underlined in letters have been italicized. Dates of letters are presented in a standardized day-month-year format, the form
usually preferred by Bernstein himself. Where a date (or part of a date) is uncertain, or speculative, or deduced from the content of a letter, it is given in square brackets. Addresses have been standardized, and for the sake of avoiding ambiguity, those sent from outside the United States include the country. Those sent from within the United States include the standard two-letter state codes (NY, MA, CA, and so on). In rare cases where a word is unreadable, this has been noted in square brackets. Most letters are presented complete, but where cuts have been made, or where only an extract has been included, these are shown by an ellipsis in square brackets, thus: […]. In many cases the letters speak for themselves, but occasionally clarification or further explanation is necessary, and those letters can have quite extensive notes. I have also included short notes about all the correspondents (at the end of the first letter to or from the person concerned). In the case of a particularly long or complex document such as Bernstein's 1953 affidavit, I thought it useful to include an explanatory note exploring the context in greater detail.