ca. 1982

Lenny

“This must be about where John Lennon was shot,” said Don. We were in front of the Dakota apartment building, 15 minutes early for our date with Leonard Bernstein. The Dakota was nothing like I had imagined it. There was nothing as far as I could see to distinguish it from all of the buildings around it.

Except the number of security guards. Security was pretty tight, as you can imagine, since the Beatle had been killed there about two years earlier. We were scrutinized by half a dozen armed guards (my backpack was thoroughly searched), asked a lot of questions, and kept in a small, wood-paneled room while someone phoned Bernstein’s apartment. Someone on the phone (not Bernstein) told us he was expecting us, but we would have to wait. After maybe a half-hour of uncomfortable small talk with a balding security guard, there was a phone call, and the guards told us we could go up.

Don had brought along a wobbly, glittered pair of costume antennae to wear on his head, and had bent a plastic straw into a small triangle and wedged it over his nose to complete the effect. We rang the doorbell and waited. When the door swung open, standing there was not the Maestro, but rather his diminutive Hispanic maid, who stared at us suspiciously.

“Yes, what is it?” she said, eyeing Don’s goofy-looking antennae and drinking straw. Don cleared his throat and earnestly told her we were here to see Lenny. She motioned us into the corridor and told us to wait while she went to get him. The place had an antiquated look about it — old-fashioned light fixtures, dark wood paneling, somber-looking furniture — which surprised me. I guess I was expecting something more glitzy. We stood there, half in the entryway, half in the adjoining dining room, afraid to venture any further, whispering as if we were in a museum. There were ceiling-high bookcases filled with hardcover books, all neatly arranged. A Sony TV and VCR sat blinking in a corner looking very out-of-place. It was late afternoon, and we could see the light of the setting sun in the trees of Central Park through the expansive tinted windows (which we later found out were made of bullet-proof glass).

After a few minutes Lenny showed up, bellowing out a welcome to Don and greeting him with an aggressive bear hug and a full-mouth kiss. He was much shorter than I had imagined, and his famous leonine gray locks seemed thinner than they do on all the album covers. He was dressed in a style I can only characterize as “dapper” — a loose-fitting pastel leisure suit, with a European-looking scarf tied around his neck, and blinding white tennis shoes. In his hand was the obligatory cigarette in an absurdly long, corny-looking cigarette holder (Lenny is a notorious chain-smoker). He held Don at arm’s length, suddenly noticing the antennae and straw-bedecked nose.

“Well, well, what did you come as today?” he said. “As Don Byrd, who else? And who have you brought with you?” He moved toward me as Don introduced me as a good friend of his and Doug’s. Lenny gave me the same bear hug and a short but passionate kiss, with just a little tongue in it. I could feel the amazing strength of his upper arms and barrel-chested torso, no doubt from years of conducting. He didn’t

release his grip right away, but continued to appraise me, his face just an inch from my own.

“Splendid face, splendid face,” he said.“You should see it up close,” I said, trying to avoid squirming. He laughed and

released me. He went back to Don and threw an arm around his neck in a championship-wrestling hold.

“Don, my boy! Good to see you,” he said, planting another kiss on Don’s cheek. He pulled Don into the dining room and I followed. We sat down on some plush chairs and I stashed my backpack in a corner. Don took off his antennae and drinking straw.

“Well, what can I get for you, Don?” said Lenny. “Anything, anything at all. Food? Dope? Love?”

“Only a dope would give him love,” I said, wincing at this inexplicably pointless joke even as I said it. Why in the world would I say such a stupid thing? Lenny winced, too, and then looked puzzled, repeating my words slowly, as if trying to decipher some hidden meaning in them.

“Only... a... dope... would... give... him... love. Hmm... Is there something I’m missing?” he said. Don said something or other to change the subject, and Lenny’s attention turned back to Don.

“So how’s our friend Doug?” asked Lenny. “Still as unsatisfied as ever?” We talked a bit about Doug’s book Gödel, Escher, Bach, which Lenny was a big fan of. Lenny had met both Don and Doug at Indiana University in Bloomington recently during a weeklong workshop in which he was conductor/composer/teacher-in-residence. Lenny expressed concern about Don, whose mother had just recently died. (Lenny didn’t seem to want to pursue this topic too much, though.) The topic of conversation changed constantly and erratically, with Don and Lenny doing most of the talking. Which was fine with me. I was hoping he wouldn’t ask me any questions. I had never even seen West Side Story. I couldn’t sing you a single theme from, say, Beethoven’s 2nd Symphony. All I could think of was the old proverb “Better to keep one’s mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.” I’d already opened my mouth twice, once to admit Lenny’s tongue into it, the second time to utter that stupid joke. Maybe if I kept it closed from now on, he would assume I was smart like Don, but just shy and socially inept, like Kafka or Wittgenstein. Or Beethoven.

Lenny couldn’t sit still. He was constantly standing up and sitting down again, and constantly lighting yet another cigarette. The maid came in several times to ask if he wanted to talk to so-and-so on the phone. There was some question about why the barber hadn’t come today as he was supposed to. It turned out he had come, but an hour late, after Lenny had already left the apartment for an appointment. Lenny complained about how hard it was to get a barber to come to your house on time. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be able to truly sympathize with that problem.

Lenny left the room a few times, which gave us the opportunity to look around a bit. There was a harpsichord in the dining room, and a grand piano in the living room. On top of the piano were several framed and autographed photos ¾ John F. Kennedy, Aaron Copland, various musicians and writers. I wondered if Lenny had kissed any of them. Well, Copland yes; Kennedy, probably not. Just a handshake, no doubt. He probably kissed Jackie’s hand, though.

Over the phone the day before our visit, Lenny had told Don that one of the things he wanted to do tonight was to go attend a dress rehearsal of a play which his son Alexander, an aspiring young New York actor, was appearing in. The cast of the play had arranged a special dress rehearsal just for Lenny, but Lenny said we would be welcome to come along. The dress rehearsal was at 8:00, and the theater was somewhere near Washington Square, quite a distance away from the Dakota. At 7:30, Lenny looked at his watch and said, “We better eat a light supper. The dress rehearsal starts in half an hour.”

Lenny called the maid, requested supper, and we continued our discussion. Within minutes there were miraculously plates and food on the kitchen table.

“What kind of beer do you want?” Lenny asked us.“What kind do you have?” I asked.“Any kind,” said Lenny.“A Beck’s dark, then,” I said. The maid appeared with it a few moments later,

along with everyone else’s drinks, and we sat down to eat. One unusual dish on the table was pickled okra.

“Do you like this stuff?” said Lenny, popping one in his mouth. “I love it.” Don commented that many people don’t like okra, because they find it unpleasantly slimy.

“So what?” said Lenny, “Lots of things are slimy. Snot is slimy. Semen is slimy. We eat those things. It doesn’t bother me at all.” He kept a lit cigarette by his plate as he talked.

At one point he turned to me and abruptly said “I have just one question for you. How do you stand on circumcision?” I gulped the rest of my okra down and answered that I wasn’t sure what he meant, exactly.

“I mean,” he went on, “that I know about Don, but I’m not sure about you.” As my face was still blank, he continued. “I mean, do you consider your ancestry to include the likes of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Are you of the Hebrew persuasion?”

“He’s not Jewish, no,” Don answered for me.“Then I have another question,” Lenny said. “Why are you trying to look like

Jesus Christ?” It’s true that I had a beard, my hair was somewhat longish and parted in the middle, and I was wearing a kind of buttonless muslin shirt which I suppose looked vaguely Biblical. But my looks were the result of a penchant for comfort, convenience, and entropy; I may have looked messy but not Messianic. I began to mumble the beginnings of some account of my sartorial tastes.

“It doesn’t matter,” Lenny interrupted, “I like Jesus Christ. He was a wonderful man. My wife was a Christian. We had a priest by her bedside when she was dying. I had no objections. Jesus is great. I love Jesus, as a matter of fact. When you find out what the real Jesus was like, the historical Jesus, you can’t help but fall in love with the man.” This led to a discussion of the Essenes, the ascetic, monastic brotherhood of Palestinian Jews which Jesus was supposedly a member of. Lenny had just read a book about them, so he was full of information. The Essenes, who existed from the 2nd century B.C. to about the 2nd century A.D., held all property in common in a quasi-communistic social arrangement. They pretty much shunned women. They lived in caves. They fasted a lot. The more I found out about the historical Jesus, the more I realized any resemblance between him and me was purely superficial.

On and on he went. Lenny was interested in everything, and had an opinion on every topic. He seemed to have read every book, heard (and usually conducted or played) every piece of music, met every famous person. Any remark by Don or me would engender an exposition, a paean, a lament, a sermon, a snide attack, a passionate and idiosyncratic discourse. A few minutes in his presence was enough to give one the sense of his prodigious intellect and wide-ranging erudition.

Lenny is so oral. He seemed to me to be primarily an insatiable mouth, as he sat at the table snarfing down a sandwich, puffing on his cigarette, coughing his raspy smoker’s cough, and talking, talking. His speech is peppered with phrases of French, Italian, and German, famous quotes, cryptic allusions, brilliant insights, banal observations, brutally frank questions, and constant and gratuitous references to sex.

Lenny is obsessed with sex. Sex is a constant metaphor, an ever-ready framework for his observations and comments. He once said “I only ask one thing of a piece of music: that it give me an orgasm.” And it’s clear that an orgasm, in one form or another, is what he’s always seeking in everything he does. (Once during a New York Philharmonic rehearsal of the overture to Wagner’s Tannhauser, Bernstein stopped the orchestra and addressed the brass section, saying “Come on! You can give me more volume than that, you big hunky brutes!” The amused members of the brass section showed up the next day wearing T-shirts bearing the words “Hunky Brutes”.)

Lenny is intense. And tiring. I couldn’t keep up with him as well as Don could. At one point a young man came into the room, Lenny’s amanuensis of sorts (I’ve forgotten his name). They discussed the logistics of something-or-other, and Lenny ended the conversation by giving the guy a little pop quiz on Verdi operas. (He performed dutifully and passed with flying colors, considering how awkward it must have been to be put on the spot like that. I remember hoping he was paid well.)

It was 8:15. We were already late for the dress rehearsal at the theater near Washington Square. Lenny told the maid to arrange for the limo to pick us up at the gate to the Dakota. The three of us walked across the courtyard back toward the guarded entrance. Lenny pointed out the apartments of Yoko Ono and Gilda Radner. He expressed sorrow at John Lennon’s death. “He was a nice man,” said Lenny, “They were such nice neighbors.” Lenny had his arms around Don a lot, and was kissing him on the cheek. Don wasn’t resisting really, but it was obvious to me that he felt a bit uncomfortable with Lenny’s octopus-like attention.

We passed by the guards at the gate and got into a waiting black limo with tinted windows. Don got in first, then me, leaving a place by the window for Lenny.

“Do me a favor and switch places with Don,” Lenny said to me, “I want to sit next to him.” I did so, awkwardly stuffing my backpack between my legs. (Why did I bring the damn thing, anyway?) Lenny shut the door and the driver pulled the car out. He was wearing a black chauffeur’s uniform with the hat and everything. He turned around to us and introduced himself.

“Hi,” he said, “I’m Bob. I’m your chauffeur for the evening. Where would you like to go?” Lenny told him where.

“And Bob,” said Lenny, “We’re pretty late already, if you know what I mean.”“Yep,” said Bob, immediately running a red light.Lenny’s hands were all over Don. Don was still not exactly resisting Lenny’s

advances, but he was obviously extremely uncomfortable with the situation. Don and I

both tried to make small talk with Bob. We found out he was an out-of-work actor. He liked driving a limo because his hours were flexible. He didn’t ask what we did.

Lenny started kissing Don repeatedly on the mouth and talking to him in a low voice. Bob and I were basically no longer part of the conversation. Bob kept his eyes on the road and kept running stop lights at sixty miles an hour. I felt relaxed. I felt what was happening had little to do with me.

Don’s sentences kept being interrupted by Lenny’s full-mouth kisses:“Yeah, you know Lenny, that reminds me of the mmphffff...”This went on for some time. Luckily, Bob’s driving was virtuoso stuff, very

efficient. As we approached the theater everyone’s attention was diverted by logistics of following street signs and parking. Bob parked the limo in front of a fire hydrant, and Lenny, Don, and I went into the theater. A few people were in the lobby, waiting for us. Lenny apologized for the delay. Someone assured him there was absolutely no problem, and we were escorted into the theater.

It was a very intimate place, seating only a couple hundred people maybe. Lenny’s son came out and talked with Lenny for a few minutes. Don and I stood talking in the aisles. Several people came up and introduced themselves. They were very interested in us. Several beautiful women smiled at me from across the room. Some people in the control booth were turning various colored spotlights on and off, so that sometimes we were all red, sometimes blue, sometimes yellow. Someone put on some flute and piano music on the sound system that sounded to me like Aaron Copland, though Don and I weren’t sure. Lenny stopped talking for a second and cocked his ear.

“That’s Copland,” he said, “A piece called `Duo for Flute and Piano’. Say, is there any coffee around here?”

“Coming right up!” yelled someone, running into the wings. A few moments later we were handed mugs of hot coffee, and we sat down to watch the play. We were the only people in the audience.

I can’t really remember much about the play. It was vaguely Tennessee Williams-ish, set in a small town, with one of the characters living in the past and another character wanting to break out of the stifling little world everyone else was trapped in, etc. etc., that sort of thing. Lenny’s son was so-so. He didn’t have a very large role. Lenny was sitting a few seats away from Don and me, smoking and looking a little bored.

At the play’s conclusion we made as much applause as three people can. Lenny jumped to his feet. He blew a kiss to his son.

“This production,” he said, as if addressing a full auditorium, “is magnificent. Deeply moving. Everyone was absolutely magnificent, truly.” He blew a few more kisses to the cast assembled on stage. All eyes were on him, and he seemed, for the first time that evening, somewhat at a loss for words. (Bernstein is famous for gushing, hyperbolic post-performance praise. After the Indiana University Opera Theater performed his Mass at Tanglewood in 1988, Lenny rushed to the stage and grabbed the microphone. “I have to say something,” he said. “This was one of the finest performances I’ve ever seen, not only of my Mass, but of anything.” He went on. “This performance is a great miracle. The miracle of youth. The miracle of faith. The ceaseless miracle of America.”)

The cast dispersed and Lenny went down to the stage to hug his son some more. Don and I went out to the lobby and talked to the director of the play for a while. He

probably thought we had something to do with acting and drama. And maybe we did, in some sense. Lenny finally came out and we got back into the limo.

It was pretty late by now, and Lenny had to get back to prepare for a trip he was taking the next day, I don’t remember to where. The party was about to be over. The obvious question was where to drop Don and me off. First, however, Don wanted to have a heart-to-heart talk with Lenny ¾ alone. I guessed that he basically just wanted Lenny to know that his unrelenting and insistent fondling and kissing were getting out of hand. (Don had already seen Lenny on several occasions, and had corresponded with him and talked on the phone with him. This was maybe the first time he had so overtly sexual with Don, and since it wasn’t clear where their relationship was going from here, it seemed important for Don to get things straightened out. Unclear how Lenny viewed the whole thing.) Anyway, for Don and Lenny to have a talk would entail finding a bar or someplace where the two of them could talk for a few minutes.

“It’s getting rather late, Don,” said Lenny, “You really want to have this talk, even though it’s going to be inconvenient?” Don replied that he thought it was indeed important.

Bob drove to an area where there was lots of nightlife and double-parked the car while Don and Lenny went into a neon-lit yuppie bar to talk. Bob relaxed, took off his hat and turned on the radio to a soft-rock station. I asked him some more about acting and the New York drama scene. Bob said he didn’t want to be a superstar, he just wanted to be famous enough to make a lot of money fast so that he could buy a plot of land and raise horses. Horses were his first love. I didn’t know much about horses, so I asked him a couple of questions about being a chauffeur; if it was hard to drive in New York City, and if he chauffeured a lot of famous people around. He just answered “Oh, yeah” to both questions. I can’t remember what else we talked about.

Lenny and Don came back and we drove back to the vicinity of the Dakota. On the way there I saw some liquor billboard in Italian which I could sort of understand all except one word, so I pointed the billboard out to Lenny and asked him to translate. He did so, and then launched into an impromptu discussion of the heuristics for turning one Romance language into another (such as the fact that the `l’ in French words like place becomes an `i’ in Italian, piazza). We talked about a lot of other things, but I can’t remember them now. Lenny’s arm was still around Don, but he had cut out the kissing.

And that was it. We got out of the car and said goodbye, back in the world of plebeian folk. A few minutes later we were in the subway again. I remember seeing, coincidentally, the initials `LB’ spray-painted among the graffiti on one of the cars. There was a violinist on the platform playing of the Bach partitas for unaccompanied violin, the gorgeous E major one. I stood there for a while and sort of tried to conduct the piece, though the violinist ignored me completely.

David Moser1990