Things bernstein did for the gay community

Then again, Bernstein was nothing if not overt. His exuberance, on the podium and off, was exhilarating … and exhausting. Bettmann Archive. An artist in her own right — actress, pianist, painter — Felicia knew what she was getting into when they married but, helpless in her adoration, went ahead anyway.

One night he left his kids to make small talk with Woody Allen and Mia Farrow for an hour at the dinner table while a barber cut his hair in the bathroom. A gay man in a heterosexual marriage, Bernstein was both a victim and beneficiary, and a sometime agent, of homophobia.

“It was a kind. Meekly, Jackson told him he was trying to cover up a pimple. When all was said and sung, Leonard Bernstein was, his daughter assures us, a good man. No amount of notes could do that. When she died, he was demolished. Bernstein didn’t want anything getting in the way of him and his dreams of musical direction, not even himself.

Those gay romances were particularly hard on his wife, Felicia Montealegre, a Chilean actress of Jackie Kennedy-esque elegance. Lenny, as most New Yorkers knew him, emerges as a man who, up until his death inat 72, lived large and passionately.

And then there were the perks. Granted, they were aspiring actors at the time, but, as Jamie tells it, they could never hear themselves recite those oaths without wincing. In Bernstein the forces of twentieth-century homophobia converged with talent, ambition, and repression, yielding momentous results for his family, intimates, colleagues, and rivals, and for US and international arts and culture.

To all we know about Leonard Bernstein, add this: Not only did the “West Side Story” composer kiss everyone on the lips, but he used his tongue, too — even on his daughter. Mercifully, the Holocaust opera they were to collaborate on never took off.

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 An exceptionally bright child, it’s clear from Bernstein’s letters home how much he adored her.

Jamie Bernstein recalls his meeting with a heavily made-up Michael Jackson. Jamie Bernstein reveals that her uninhibited dad French-kissed everyone he met.

Did Leonard Bernstein 39

Though he had a number of affairs with men, Bernstein was happily married for 25 years. Not many dads could get you into Studio 54 and onto the cover of The Post, as Bernstein did. He had an almost erotic hold on every orchestra he conducted, which made the music that much more thrilling.

This changed in when he decided to live openly with his boyfriend, then returned to his wife a year later when she became ill. While Bernstein couldn’t hide his Jewish-American heritage in a widely European and at times anti-semitic music scene, he did certainly try to hide his homosexuality.