It's the centennial of the birth of Leonard Bernstein, a larger-than-life figure in America's classical and Broadway's musical world, hence the arrival of this memoir by his daughter Jamie.
Jamie Bernstein was born in 1952, the oldest of three children of Leonard and Chilean actress Felicia Montealegre. Her mother curtailed her own acting career to attend to the duties of motherhood and the demands of playing loyal helpmate to her husband, whose career and celebrity blossomed in the late 1950s.
Bernstein became the only American composer/conductor whose celebrity equaled his success as a musician, from such Broadway hits as "On the Town" and "West Side Story" to classical works such as "The Age of Anxiety" and "Kaddish."
He grabbed his biggest audience through television with his Young People's Concerts accompanied by the New York Philharmonic from 1958 to 1972, opening up classical works to many children while revealing his compelling personality and talents as an educator. More fame arrived through his humanitarian and civil rights activities, as well as a controversial 1970 New York magazine article by Tom Wolfe, "Radical Chic," which satirized Bernstein's politics.
But what about Jamie? It's her memoir, after all. Her father's celebrity, heightened by his bisexuality, was a joy and a curse. Her book describes a child eagerly courting her father's love and struggling for years to become a professional musician. It seems that Bernstein's shadow was simply too large to escape and that Jamie didn't inherit her father's musical talents.
She eventually changed course, using the Bernstein name and fame to make a career as the narrator of music programs by symphony orchestras, including her father's score for "West Side Story." She collaborated on a documentary about youth orchestras in Venezuela, appeared on radio commentaries and became a freelance writer.
Her emergence after the death of her father in 1990 came after years of searching for relationships and careers. Much of her memoir could be described as "Sex, Drugs and Gustav Mahler" or, perhaps, "Too Much Information."
Her father attracted many famous friends, including Aaron Copland, Stephen Sondheim, Mike Nichols, Lauren Bacall and Jacqueline Kennedy, and Jamie happily basks in their glow, even when it wasn't always attractive. The Bernsteins' Connecticut neighbor, novelist William Styron, comes off quite poorly.
