Lenny’s Offspring Like the Nose

The three children of Leonard Bernstein uphold their father’s legacy with waggish exuberance. In September, at the Venice première of “Maestro,” a new film depicting Bernstein’s fraught but loving relationship with their mother, the actress Felicia Montealegre, they gleefully air-conducted along to the end credits, in the irrepressible manner of their father. While the actors’ strike sidelined Bradley Cooper—the film’s director, co-writer, and star—the Bernsteins subbed in as the film’s unofficial mascots. They like to call themselves “the three-headed monster.”

“A former boyfriend of mine coined it,” Jamie, the eldest, said. “Because of all the noise and the carrying on and jokes.” Jamie (blond bob, voice like an oboe) is the memoirist—in 2018, she published “Famous Father Girl”—and the mouthpiece (“I’m a yakker”). Alexander, the middle child (electric-blue shirt, expressive Lenny-like face), handles rights for “West Side Story” and other Bernstein musicals, and he oversees Artful Learning, an arts-education program. Nina, the youngest (tortoiseshell glasses, apricot scarf), is the president of the Leonard Bernstein Office. But they collaborate, to the point of finishing one another’s sentences—as they did one recent morning, ordering brunch at the Carnegie Diner & Cafe, on the ground floor of the Osborne, the building where their parents moved around the time of their marriage, in 1951. “Then I was born in ’52,” Jamie said. “Alexander was born in ’55. And then our mother got pregnant with Nina, in ’61, and suddenly the apartment was too small. Besides, he was now the fancy conductor of the Philharmonic, so they wound up movin’ on up, to the East Side.” They all broke into the theme song from “The Jeffersons.”

“If we weren’t here, we were there,” Alexander said, pointing to Carnegie Hall through the window. Jamie attended Bernstein’s first Young People’s Concert there, when she was five. “It started with the ‘William Tell’ Overture,” she recalled. “He does about fifty seconds and says to the audience, ‘What’s that music all about?’ And everyone goes, ‘The Lone Ranger!’ He says, ‘That’s what I thought you’d say. My daughter Jamie, sitting right up there, said the same thing. Well, I’m sorry to tell you, it’s not about the Lone Ranger at all.’ At that point, I stopped listening, because it was all very philosophical and way over my little wispy head.”

The siblings realized that their dad was a big deal when they saw an episode of “The Flintstones” in which Wilma and Betty go to the Hollyrock Bowl to see Leonard Bernstone conduct Rockymaninoff. “Life was not boring, and our parents’ friends were not boring,” Jamie went on. (Jerome Robbins, Mike Nichols, Lauren Bacall.)

“And then, when we met our friends’ parents and their friends, they were less fun,” Nina chimed in.

A more confounding realization was that their father had affairs, sometimes with men. When Jamie was seventeen, she spent the summer at Tanglewood, where she heard gossip about her father’s “wild youthful days.” “I wrote a letter to my mother, mentioning that I had heard all these rumors. So he took me aside and denied it. As I was writing my book, it occurred to me that maybe our mother put him up to denying the rumors. Just speculation, but evidently Bradley decided to run with that.” (Maya Hawke plays the teen-age Jamie.)

“I’d always wondered if he had had affairs with women, travelling the world,” Alexander said. “It was almost a cool thing to think about.”

“And I was just plain confused,” Nina said. Unpacking their parents’ relationship, she added, has been an “ongoing effort. Certainly, having this film puts a new spin on it.”

About fifteen years ago, the producer Fred Berner approached them about a bio-pic. Scorsese and then Spielberg had both been attached to direct, years before Cooper threw his hat in. “His pitch was that he had always wanted to be a conductor, since he was a little kid, and he used to practice in the mirror with a baton,” Alexander said. Nina saw traces of her father in Cooper’s intensity and his “penetrating gaze.” “There was one scene where he’s complaining about his bad back, and he asks for a massage from our mom,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Well, in actuality, she would walk on his back.’ That ended up being in the movie.”

In August, the trailer for “Maestro” caused an uproar over Cooper’s fake nose. The siblings released a statement affirming, “It happens to be true that Leonard Bernstein had a nice, big nose.” They said the prosthetics didn’t bother them. “Even the earlobes were accurate,” Jamie observed.

After carrot cake, the siblings went around the corner to the Osborne’s entrance, which has a medallion honoring Bernstein. A doorman stopped them in the lobby: “Sorry, it’s a private residence.” Did the name Bernstein get them anywhere? No luck. In the old days, it could get them into sold-out movies. “ ‘Pulling a maestro,’ we used to call it,” Jamie said. ♦