Remembering Lenny

by Paul Moor

Naturam expellas furca tamen usque recurret.
-- Horace: Epistle X

On October 15, 1990, The New York Times carried a three-column headline top-center on its front page: "Leonard Bernstein, 72, Music's Monarch, Dies." Not often does the good grey Times use language like that, particularly in a headline - in fact: the Monarch of Music.

Neither I nor The Advocate has any interest in "outing" Lenny, whom I knew for the last forty-odd years of his life. I also knew Felicia Montealegre, the lovely Chilean-American actress, for years before she married him. A logistical coincidence abetted our triplex friendship: Lenny lived at 32 West Tenth Street, I at 184, and Felicia at 69 Washington Place, a few blocks farther downtown. A group that gathered at Felicia's for Sunday brunch included me - and frequently Lenny, whose really big career had begun shortly before. More than once, while waiting for the food, Lenny and I played Mozart four-hand sonatas on Felicia's upright; more than once, on less happy occasions, Felicia sobbed on my shoulder when Lenny would change his mind and say he didn't think he wanted to get married after all. Aaron Copland, discussing that troubled relationship with me on one occasion, expressed moral misgivings about Felicia's attractiveness for Lenny as "window-dressing" - as camouflage.

Even in those days, as for the rest of his life, except when sleeping, or on the podium, or at synagogue, Lenny had a cigarette always in his hand, and he sucked on it like a breast-feeding infant - even after lung cancer killed Felicia in 1978.

Especially in the field of contemporary music in the forties in New York, Lenny and I - not to mention Samuel Barber, Marc Blitzstein, Paul Bowles, John Cage, Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell [this country's first internationally celebrated composer, who served a sentence on a "morals" charge in San Quentin Federal Penitentiary; his visitors there included Leopold Stokowski, Martha Graham, and other artists of similar stature.], David Diamond, Gian Carlo Menotti, and Virgil Thomson, to name only the gay composers - ran into one another frequently, at concerts and over supper afterwards. Virtually everybody in the entire international music world "knew about" Lenny.

I find it fair to say that Lenny, in his youth, permitted social pressures to force him into a trap. He found his first principal mentor in Aaron Copland, his second in the Boston Symphony's conductor Serge Koussevitzky, who called him Lenyusha (LENyusha). "Koussie" (as his adoring Tanglewood students referred to him) heard rumors, and raised the subject one day himself: "Tchaikovsky - pederastical. My Aaron - pederastical. Lenyusha, even I have heard you are pederastical." Lenny knew that Kouss, whom he worshipped, wanted it not to be true - so he dissembled. He also did for his immigrant parents; his father sold beauty supplies, his mother had worked in a textile mill.

The New York Philharmonic did manage to survive a gay conductor, Dimitri Mitropoulos, thanks to the fact that he apparently lived a personal life of almost monastic austerity; had the Board of Directors known, they would never have engaged him. (Have things in the music field changed since then? Well, has any American orchestra offered Michael Tilson Thomas a position comparable to the one he now holds with the London Symphony?) Lenny stood on the threshold of a great career, and he knew what his society considered his duty.

One memory seems ironic in view of the flourishing conducting career Aaron Copland himself enjoyed in later life. Aaron, who grew up eighteen years before Lenny did, told me he'd once asked Lenny, "How in the world can you stand up there on the podium and try to conduct a hundred or so men when you know all the time that they know about you?" In that regard, certainly, Lenny had no problems. I remember an encounter I witnessed during the Edinburgh Festival about forty years ago. Lenny had a guest appearance there with the French National Orchestra, and before his first rehearsal he met with the orchestra's concert master to go over some points in the scores.

The program would begin with Bach's fifth Brandenburg Concerto (with Lenny doing the big keyboard part, of course) and Lenny told the violinist that at the start of the third movement he wanted the first two notes phrased together - an unusual, certainly attention-getting, and, incidentally, highly questionable whim, musically speaking. The concertmaster's face clearly reflected his European opinion of this uncultured American caprice; he protested plaintively, "But that changes all my fingerings - not only mine, but everybody's." Lenny refused to budge. The concertmaster and the entire French National Orchestra, one of the world's greatest but composed of true professionals, did what brash, brilliant Lenny told them to.

Lenny's behavior, on many other occasions, manifests that contorted sort of guilt which derives from self-hating homophobia. During the Holland Festival around 1950, we lunched together at the Kurhaus in Scheveningen. He talked about a waiter on the Nieuw Amsterdam who had fallen hard for him during the voyage over and declared his readiness to follow Lenny anywhere, under any circumstances. In a manner I found chilling, Lenny told how he had sketched what that poor devil would have had to submit to: servant's quarters, and so on. Lenny made it clear he couldn't even think of him - lover or not - as anything but a menial.

During the early years of our friendship, Lenny had already concluded a serious, live-in relationship with another musician (who, like Lenny, went on to prominence in another area of music - and to marriage). After that, he seemed uninterested in anything more than casual contacts. He told me, for instance, of joint cruising forays with Paul Bowles, hunting rough trade. During an argument between us about stable relationships as opposed to casual, even anonymous contacts, he summed up his outlook in five memorable words: "Homosexuality without promiscuity is impossible!"

Tom Waddell, the physician and Olympic athlete, told me (shortly before AIDS killed him) about a San Francisco party Lenny had attended, along with the upper crust of our city's gay snobiety. When the host introduced Waddell as the founder of the Gay Olympics, Lenny launched a gratuitous attack: "Who needs Gay Olympics?" As Tom walked away, seething, Lenny's infuriated voice followed him: "Who's that fucking queen!" ("If he hadn't been so drunk," Tom said, "I think I'd have punched him." One dares hardly even think of the headlines.)

In pursuing Lenny, Felicia showed pathetic, almost desperate persistence. When all seemed lost, she began a relationship with the actor Richard Hart, who died tragically young. Felicia and Lenny, back together, finally not only married but had three children. The offspring of gay parents, especially of prominent gay parents, never have an easy time of it. Lenny whole-heartedly adored his children - and, in what he thought their best interest, he continued to maintain the charade, the façade.

As the AIDS epidemic became ever more hideous, Lenny became ever more eager to help. Last year, to protest what he considered censorship of an AIDS exhibit by the National Endowment for the Arts, he refused a Bush administration medal. He conducted AIDS benefit concerts, lining up some of the greatest names in the world as soloists. Archive tape I saw the night he died included a clip of him paying tribute to "those I love who have died of AIDS." Over and over, he gave every appearance of a profoundly troubled man desperately trying to come out.

When I reviewed the second volume of Aaron Copland's memoirs for Musical America, I wrote: "With the publication of a bumptious, unauthorized book in 1987, the homosexuality of a number of twentieth-century American composers . . . became a matter of public record. I have conducted a little experiment by drawing up a generously fair list of their straight contemporaries: Carter, Foss, Hanson, Harris, Ives, Moore, Piston, Riegger, Ruggles, Schuman, and Sessions. Those two lists provide an astonishing ratio of (at least) ten homosexual to eleven heterosexual composers. In other words, of this century's leading American composers, about half have been gay - a truly astonishing, possibly unique statistic in all musical history." [After this article appeared in print, I got a letter from a nephew of one of the composers on that list, assuring me that he had personal experience of his uncle that would remove him from those eleven - in other words, not less but more than half had classified as gay.]

Music's Monarch. That New York Times headline reminded me, unexpectedly, of another beloved friend, Leonard Matlovich, the dedicated U. S. Air Force sergeant who became one of the first and greatest gay activists. In one of his last public appearances (before AIDS killed him on June 22, 1988), I tape-recorded these remarks: "[Straight people] don't care if tomorrow morning in the Chronicle it says, 'John Jones, Homosexual, Rapes Billy' - they love that, and they want it all over their newspapers. But don't let it say tomorrow afternoon, in the Examiner, 'Linda Evans, Lesbian, Finds the Cure to Cancer' - they can't handle that. You can't discriminate against people who are contributing ... who are making society a better place. You just can't do it." I doubt that even our beloved Senator from North Carolina would dispute that Lenny, a lifelong homosexual, did make the world a richer and better place.

As Lenny's children grew up, he gradually became more open. After twenty-five years of turbulent marriage, he and Felicia began "a trial separation." (Lenny returned to her only after her cancer diagnosis.) Incidents got into the news; one involved an ex-Marine who had absconded with Lenny's car - which Lenny neglected to report to the police. Years earlier he had audaciously composed his Serenade for Violin, Strings, Harp, and Percussion after Plato's Symposium, one of all literature's greatest paeans to homosexual love. In Songfest, the poems he set included a late discovery by Walt Whitman, To What You Said, in which the great poet went perhaps farther than ever in writing of men's love for men. When Lenny conducted Songfest in Munich for a television film, he turned and recited that entire poem ("... I am he who kisses his comrade lightly on the lips at parting, and I am one who is kissed in return. ...") to an enormous, spellbound audience.

Even old Horace (65 - 8 B. C.) knew a fundamental psychological truth so many gay people still try to repress: Drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet still she will return. If Lenny never did come out in the customary sense, he did everything just barely short of it. Those of us with nobody to hide from any longer know, for certain, that if he had, it would have made him a far less unhappy man.

Originally published in 1990 in The Advocate.