From the Archives: Alex and Jamie Bernstein

Hey, it's Alec Baldwin here. Before we launch our next season of Here's the Thing at iHeartRadio in January, I thought I'd share a few of my favorite shows from the archives. Few people could have convinced Hollywood Studios to back a biopic about the life of the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. But when its director and leading man are Bradley Cooper, who could say no? His film Maestro

Carnegie Hall in New York City, the home of the world's greatest musical events.

In the nineteen fifties, television was a powerful new spotlight in search of a talent that could shine back just as.

Bright and here is mister Bernstein.

When it landed on Leonard Bernstein, the young conductor more than shined back. His primetime show, Leonard Bernstein Young People's Concerts with the New York Philharmonic was a benchmark of quality programming and seduced the entire country.

No matter how many times people tell you stories about what music means, forget them. Stories aren't what music means at all. Music is never about anything. Music just is music is notes, beautiful notes, and songs put together in such a way that we get pleasure out of listening to them.

That's all there is to Bernstein was a masterful teacher, explaining classical music with a passion and clarity that couldn't help but influence an entire generation of musicians and artists. In those days, there were far fewer celebrities, and Bernstein was one of the biggest. He wore it well, taking his seat at the piano at the center of the party.

He really enjoyed the public. Leonard Bernstein, he loved the key. Leonard Bernstein loved and he loved being famous, and he loved meeting everybody in the world and.

In fancy hotels and flying first class. And he'd take us along and share it with us, like.

Isn't this cool.

Bernstein was a musician, a conductor, a teacher, and a composer of classical music as well as Broadway musicals. He was also a father.

I'm the bossy one.

Bernstein and his wife Felicia had three children, Jamie, Alexander, and Nina, and while they knew him in the tucks and tales. They also knew him as the dad who loved games. He was a killer at anagrams and always up for tennis or squash or skiing or touch football.

The word games, you have no idea.

Two of Bernstein's children, Jamie and Alexander, spoke with me about their legendary father and what it was like to grow up with people like Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins as regular HouseGuests.

When we were really little.

Alexander and I used to share a bedroom when we were like, you know, really little, and we lived in the Osbourne, which is that grand building, and Alexander and I slept, you know, at sort of right angles to each other in this bedroom, and we would go to sleep listening to the grown ups carrying on downstairs. Is what we fell asleep to the noise of the you know, the laughing and the roaring around the piano, singing, sneaking of the glasses, and the smell of the cigarette smoke

That's interesting.

That's how it seemed to us, And it seemed like our dad certainly had fun when he was working too, so we never saw anything that resembled drudgery, which is probably a thing that most kids perceive in their working parents.

It's tough. What about your mother?

Was your mother someone who was his companion and she was along for the ride and all of it and loving it.

Or was she someone who was sitting in the room going, when's it gonna stop my eyes?

The energizer bunny and the Martini in his hand and a.

Pell Mell in the other Scotch not Martinez, Scotchie, Valentine's a Valentine's beer, Oh Scotch, Scotch did am and she had a Chesterfield my grandfather vodka and the other.

But your mother was his trusted companion. She was she was in. She was all in, absolutely.

All in, and I think it drove her crazy, every bit as much as she loved it all.

She was very social. Where was she from? And where did they meet?

They met at a party given by Claudio organist and.

Who was her teacher because he was studying piano.

She had told her parents that she was coming to New York to study piano, but she really wanted to be an actress, so she came.

She's a beautiful woman, and she was beautiful, very beautiful.

So she had this understanding with Aral that she would be sort of studying with him, But meanwhile she was studying with my parents.

Now make this sound of the piano. The debuts we're like to make parents now in exactly so America.

I think it was very much like that.

It was, And the legend has it that our mother sat at his feet and fed him shrimps one by one.

That was the beginning of the romance. Yeah, yeah, not around. She might have been doing that and they got engaged. But where was he ad in his career then?

So he had already had his big debut with the New York Philharmonic, because that was in nineteen forty three.

Were he filled in for for he filled in the.

Ailing Bruno Vaulter, as he's always referred to in that circumstance. I thought his first name was ailing anyway, So this must have been like maybe four or five years later, So he was riding high, but he was not yet.

That'll be a name.

I stay in a hotel, and from now I love good names for hotels. I'm going to stay in a hotel under the name.

Ailing e h l I aiming. Bruno Vote is the name I would use this hotel, and so Bruno Vote. The fluent year was that. That was November fourteenth, nineteen forty three.

Wow, good afternoon, the United States Rubber Company again invites you to Carnegie Hall to hear a concert of the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. Bruno Vaulter, who was to have conducted this afternoon, is ill, and his place will be taken by the young American born assistant conductor of the Philharmonic Symphony, Leonard Bernstein.

And he had to get up there on a moment's notes.

And he'd been up all night the night before because he'd had a premiere of a song cycle of his called I Hate Music, and it had premiered the night before. So of course it was a cardi a town hall and it was very well received, and of course there was a party afterwards, and they were up all the livelong night. And at the time, you know, our dad was living in Carnegie Hall in those little apartments they

Kid you have to go on this afternoon. And it was on the radio. It was a national broadcast, which is why it was such a big deal.

Lennard Burns, Dane has come out on the platform.

It was highly covered in the press, probably because it was the middle of the war and everybody needed a feel good story. Yes, American boy makes good kind of thing. So one guy said, it's like a shoe string catch in center field. Make it and you're a hero, Muffett and you're a dope. Bernstein made it.

Did he ever reflect on that to you? Meaning when people have that kind of debut? He came up that night and everything changed after.

That, Right, he pretty much knew that it was a sort of Cinderella tale and that he just got this unbelievable lucky break.

Yeah, And did he believe was it ever discussed even by your mother or people like that? Did your father realize he must have that his sexuality and that his good looks were as much a part of this talent as anything else.

I think there's no.

Doubt about that, and I think played he played it probably from high school on, you know, and as soon as he started playing the piano and knew he had this incredible talent and could play at parties and get all his attention and.

He had a meeting out of his hands, Oh my god, and the shrimp out of the hand. Yeah, at age twenty five, he was still a little geeky.

I mean the pictures of him with the Philharmonic after the debut, where he's all exhausted and tousled and sweaty, he actually looks like like a bar Mitzvah.

Boy.

He was a little funny, and I think he kind of grew into his grooviness over the subsequent years.

So your father, he had three children over ten years.

Yeah, yeah, And what was that like for him in terms of were there did he have certain kind of rules in terms of how he protected you from the public and the schools you went to and the way you lived your life, or was he just very loosey goosey?

You know, I would say that he was not your mother in charge.

He was the one who really designed the way our lives went on a day to day basis. He was busy being the maestro, and then you would come home and play with us and hang out, but have fun and have fun.

But he was not really the designer of the domestic scene.

He was a great He was home. He was really home. You know, you didn't have an office to go to.

And when did you get him aware of who your father was?

You know, you when you're growing up, your family's just your family. You have no objectivity about it, and your parents are just your parents, and you don't really think about how different they might be from the others until you get older. At some point when we were pretty young, there was an episode of The Flintstones.

What time is it, Betty? It's tenants to nine, Betty and Wilma. We're going to go to the HALLI Rock Bowl. I love to watch Leonard Burnstown conduct and the first thing on the.

Program is that gorgeous symphony by Rocky Manning A.

When we were here, he had hit the big time. And how old were you kids? Little kids? Yeh, like you know, nine and six even less? Was there a downside to it? Did you feel like there were things that were tough for you with him?

And looking back on it now or when we got older, probably look back and think about some downsides, but at the time it really didn't seem so bad at all.

It was a lot of when we were really little, it was just a lark.

I often try to think back to come on, you know, there must have been some he was shadows, But we had a pretty fantastic early childhood.

It was.

It was kind of wonderful.

He's not some tortured introspective. He was a happy guy, and he was a celebrity.

Was introspective, he was, but but back in those early days of our family life, that was overshadowed by the joy and the happiness, the busyness and the family life, and the kept that from you.

We are ascended he kept that from you.

I'll tell you in my memory, the moment when it changed was November twenty second, nineteen sixty three, the day JFK was assassinated. That was when the shadow fell over and life became sort of real. Up until that point, you know, grown ups just had fun as far as we could perceive. And then that day we saw our parents fall apart. They were crying because they were friends of the Kennedys. They had been to the White House. They had had dinner just the four of them.

Imagine they had been centerpieces of Kennedy's cultural programming in the White Acci.

Yeah, they could.

Not have been more connected to the Kennedy administration and everything that it stood for. So on that day when when he was assassinated, our parents just fell apart, and so did the whole rest of the family and all their friends. And they pulled down the shades and out around crying all day. And just watch TV. Now we could perceive that there were shadows and that there were ups and downs that wasn't visible to us in the world.

Itself can affect people psychologically. Yeah.

What about your mom in terms of her music appreciation? I mean, she studied the piano, but did she go on have any kind of a serious career even ur in her young years when she was with Arau, did she play? Did she study? Once she met and married your father? Did all that stop?

Her piano playing stopped? She would play sometimes at home, and quite beautifully, but she wasn't.

As passionate about it. No, what was she passionate about?

Was passionate about her acting? She kept at that sometimes she would and what were some of the things she was working on During her career.

She did a lot of early television Playhouse ninety and craft Heater and all those live dramas that they had in early television.

She did a lot of that and a lot of stage work. Did that stop at some point? It kind of.

Receded as she came missus maestro and a mom, which was a double job that could keep anybody.

Of course, when was she generally happy to do those things? Did she ever a voice? Because it's interesting to me to have someone who is in the world of music herself. She was studied with raw It's a serious opportunity there. She had aspirations about music and acting, and did she miss those things? Did she ever say gosh, I fondly? Did she have a little bit of a wistfulness about it?

She was pretty ambivalent about it. Yeah she did.

And she didn't really talk a lot about her inner herself too.

Ah.

What she did tell you.

About a little bit was that she had some stage fright issues, and so when she started performing less in public, she would say that she was relieved, and that being you know, this, this Missus Bernstein persona was a way of not having to confront her fears about performing, But I think you know, anybody who has performed, how a part of them that still wants to perform. But she knew that that it was just going to be too hard to have these two rampant egos in the household.

Probably a good call.

Coming up more about Bernstein's early years in Massachusetts and his final concert at Tanglewood, which his brother described as Lenny coming home to die.

This is Alec Baldwin.

I'm talking with two of Leonard Bernstein's children, Jamie and Alexander. I see someone like your dad who sounds very childlike did the young People's concerts father, fun and joy and and and family and love bursting with love. Leonard Bernstein is someone to me who when he's on the podium, who love is just shooting out of him like a rainbow. Love of this and love of that, and love of life, and love of sex, and love of sound, and love

His childhood was not about music. He was raised where he was where he was born, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and then shortly thereafter they moved to the Boston area.

First they lived in Roxburgh. He was a hair products salesman. He was a salesman and his mom was she musical. How did the music get into his life?

Well, here's the thing. There was this Clara who moved to Florida, and so she sent all her furniture over to her brother Sam's house, and along with all the couches and breakfronts, arrived this upright piano.

Our dad was ten years old.

The piano got hauled into the house and as our father told it, he touched the piano and that was it. He knew it's one of those stories. And he taught himself theory. He just played the piano.

He figured he could figure it all out late in the modern world.

And the thing about his dad, Sam Bernstein, is that Sam, you know, it was a depression. But Sam was very proud that he was able to tide his family over the depression because he had this very successful beauty supply business, the Samuel J. Bernstein Hair Company in Boston. It's Bernstein was the slogan, and he had the New England franchise for the Frederick's Permanent Wave machine.

And everybody knows it, even in a depression. There's two things you don't like, go booze and vanity. There you go, you have your hair done.

All those women would go in and be attached to that that machine that looks like Bride of Frankenstein. They were all doing it. So they got through the depression. And Sam was so proud that he was able to pass the Samuel J. Bernstein Hair Company along to his eldest son to run. And of course Lenny had no intention of running the Samuel J. Bernstein Hair Company in Boston. It's Bernstein and it was a real problem between hair.

Yes, he did swell had of hair.

Then what Sam was not going to let him be a kletzmer musician, you know, because he can't get weddings and funerals. And that was it, you know, that's what a musician does in the old country.

That a musician was a beggar, a homeless guy who went from Stettl to Stettele playing the fiddle and.

Getting a few kopeks at the wedding you call out a living.

So what happened so little by little it became clear that he was immensely talented at this and it went to the Boston Latin School and then to Harvard.

And he gets to Harvard to study what music. Just know, they had no music, no music department. You couldn't major in it. So he was he a literature guy.

She was born in nineteen eighteen eighteen. So he's there, you know, class thirty nine. No music department at Harvard. There and the just immediately prior of the war. And then when he leaves Harvard, where does he go. He goes to Curtis. So Curtis where for one he goes to the next level he was.

Curtis is where the music at Harvard, he's writing music, he's putting on shows constantly.

Curtis is the real temple of musical study that he enters. And this is the real formalizing of his musical education.

He studies with Fritz Reiner, right, you know, studies conducting.

It all goes on a big level here, a big level. And it was it was tough. He was very lonely. It was it was a tough year or two for him at Curtis. He's there for how long a little over a year?

I think, then what happens a long time? And then he came to New York, desperate to find work. He was ready to hit New York and do what he started.

He wrote.

Arrangements, arrangements and stuff under an assumed name Lenny Amber. He arranged Ornette Coleman charts. He did all sorts of weird things he did, didn't you do? Like a fourhands version of Ilsel and Mickey co for Aaron Copeland. Well that was the big thing that he got to know Eric Copeland to know how did that happen?

That he was still in college when he met Aaron Harvard or Curtis Harvard, Harvard. Yeah, so at Harvard he meets Copeland under what circumstances? Because if he's not in a music program, how does he rub shoulders with?

I think he gets invited to He came to New York for the weekend.

He was invited to be seeking out and sniffing out the musical world, even though it was at Harvest and he's an a concert.

I think it was now sitting next to Aaron and they get to know each other.

And it turned out to be Aaron's birthday and Aaron invited our dad back to his loft for the party.

Clara Ships the piano of the house.

That's that's ooh moment number one. He gets seated next to Copeland Ooh moment number two, and.

Then goes to the birthday party and plays Copeland's piano variations in front of the whole crowd, which our dad was in the habit of doing and clearing rooms because it's a very gnarly piece.

And so he said, are you sure you want me.

To play it at this party because it usually clears the room, And Aaron said, not at this party.

And he played it and didn't clear the room. He did not clear that lands.

Yeah, it's all of Copeland's contemporaries, and he plays, and a friendship and a relationship with Copeland commences there right lifelong another than I would say, probably as much, if not more than slat Can. Your father was one of the great interpreters of Copeland. I mean that the two of them were my two favorites. Bernstein and Slatkin are my two favorite Copeland isers. And then what is the quick series of steps that gets them to the associate directorship of the Philharmonic?

I think an introduction to Krusoviski going to Tanglewood conducting a tangle.

She was a guest conductor of tangle You know, he's a student student conductors student.

Tangle would have just been invented by Krusovitski, and our dad was in that first class.

And so Kruzovitski is the one who builds tango, would he he.

Is, He's the music director, He's theso who oversees the construction of that. What are some of your best memories of your dad there?

What would you do? Remember? What was this?

If you will go ahead, give me give me here you're laughing, Well, we're laughing because our dad loved to go to tangle Wood so much his entire life. Every time he went up there, it was like he would be rejuvenated, he would turn into a kid again.

It's a holy place. It's a holy place.

And what he really loved was being with all those Can we say that again, that that that the Berkshires is a holy place. Your father loved it there.

Tell you we both worked at Tanglewood. What did you do it for a few more years than James.

We were guide.

We were guides, which was a fancy name for just doing anything that they need to be done. But you know, you man the gates and you show people around. That was the guide part. Sometimes there would be tours, and also you would tend to be backstage and help the artists and move them around and pick them up at the airport stuff like that. And it was just heaven to be up there for a summer.

And there was also this sense I think our dad had it from the very beginning that.

You know, everybody was sort of out in this beautiful weather, in this beautiful place with all these fun people, and there would be Shenanigans. We just fell right into the Shenanigan's sensibility of the place that you know, it was just fun and everybody was partying all night and having romances.

And it's funny you say that, because it is probably one of the two or three most romantic places I've ever been.

I mean, you can go.

For those people listening who don't know, the tangle Wood is in the Berkshires and Massachusetts and it's the it's the summer residency of the Boston in the Orchestra.

And you go up there to Lennox massive piece of land.

It's a massive tract of land, and in that way, in a good way that you can talk about going somewhere with someone and driving that decompressing road trip that as you drive and drive and you get closer and closer, you just feel your your body relaxing. And then you get the excitement of going to Tanglewood and you go and you get your your basket.

And your food and your wine. The real fun is to be out on the lawn. The lawn.

The lawn is even better in a way if you've got the basket and the girl and the wine or whatever your preference is there. And I think I've never seen more people who are getting it right, you know, I mean in terms of having a lovely evening and if they get smashed on top of it, you know, I guess what I'm saying is, there's nothing like getting smashed at Tanglewood.

It's it's the best kind of thing.

You know.

That I was a guide, there was no comment.

And the year that I was a guide, there was the year the Fillmore East came up there like three different times, and I saw.

And Jimmy Hendrick, you're saying that Bill.

Graham, he had his production company Fillmore meaning as a production company.

The Artist Boys.

Played the Shed played the Shed, And I was in a bathroom. To them, we.

Say, what real pleasure has to be back in Tangleod again. We were on the heir last August.

They trashed that long. That's why they were never invited back. You would not have wanted.

Is it funny how we've changed Back then? I would have been the who I'm like, we're not having them here. We can have that that likes Sara and Tanglewood.

They tried. Who else did the Graham?

Mister Kylie, who ran the head of the groundskeepers, was just beside himself.

He really was. It was a disaster. Your father loved it there.

Though he loved it, and you loved to stay up all night yacking with the students.

That was what really did your dad admire in his constellation? Who did he? I heard a story once from someone.

They said they were at your family's home and your father's standing there with a cigarette in his hand and a drink in the other. And someone says, I just came from seeing the Beatles and the and the quote was a very simple one. They said that Bernstein said turned to my friend and said.

You came and sold the Beatles. He says, I can't wait to see them myself.

He said, I'm mad for them, and he just had a passion for all disparate forms of music.

And he really did love the Beatles a lot.

And we were so lucky as we were growing up because I was a complete beatlemaniac and my dad loved their music too, So together we would discover the Beatles, and when they had a new album, I would run out and get it and go straight to my father's studio and say, look, look I've got rubbers Oll and you'd say, great, let's put it on right now, and we'd stick the echered on. And I learned more about music by listening to the Beatles with my dad than I think I did any other way.

You know, my dad passed away. He was very young. My dad was only fifty five. He was a year older than I am now.

He had a very rare form of cancer and he died of lung cancer when he was fifty five. And your dad didn't live a very long life either. How old were both of you when your dad passed.

Away, Well, he died at seventy two, which is not five. It was you were thirty five and I was thirty nine, So you were grown a dull people.

But like you.

Our mother died when she was fifty six, and we were much younger when that happened. She died in nineteen seventy eight, so we were in our early twenties, and.

Our dad died in what year?

He died in nineteen ninety, so by then we were you know, adults more or less. But when our mother died, we were still a very young family. Nina was only fifteen or something. But did your mother die from un cancer?

Was a smoker? Yep?

My point is that your dad didn't live a very long life. Did he die suddenly or did he get sick and he knew he was in trouble he got he was sick for like six months of being released.

He was diagnosed with Uh he had all sorts of chess problems, sure, you know, through his life, but uh, it was it was not cigarette related, which was probably asbestos thing when he was a kid or who knows. I mean, it didn't help that he smoked, obviously, but but you know, just having the oxygen and stuff. That was the last, you know, a month or so. He died in October and his last concert was at Tanglewood in August that nineteen ninety's okay, so he could barely get through the.

Last thing your father conducted was a public performance into the summer. He did the Beethoven seven at Tanglewood in August of nineteen ninety yep, and died that October. I think about your dad and did he just when he knew he was sick and he knew he was in trouble healthy because my dad knew he was in trouble. I mean, there was a moment I had with my dad where he like, he looked at me with this look in his eye, like he knew it was over, and he and he just I mean, he had a

He ever express that too? Did he ever talk about that he wasn't done?

Yeah, he did, you know, And I think, you know, he had this fantastic climactic moment at the very end of nineteen eighty nine, the year before he died, when he conducted at the Fall of the Berlin Wall, and he did the Ode to Joy and instead of singing Freuda, which means joy. They sang thrii height, which means freedom. It was such a big deal for him to be there when the Berlin Wall came down, and it was such a momentous occasion.

Where were you when that happened?

I wish I had been there, And in retrospect, I regret that I wasn't there, But I had just given birth to my son, Evan, like.

Less than eight weeks earlier. Do you have an excuse? That was my excuse.

So I watched it on the couch on Christmas Day while I was nursing my infant son. I watched it on TV because they showed the whole thing in the live broadcast about you.

I don't even have an excuse, and I can't remember why I didn't go. I can't believe that I wasn't there. It's just unbelievable.

You know, we didn't know he was going to be gone within the year, so you know, he was always there, and there were always these occasions where you could go and meet him on the road, and there were hundreds of them, and it was kind of a pain to go get in with that whole retinue and the whole madness of being of the tour thing.

And so but Bill did it become entourage city.

You know.

Right after that he got really sick with a flu. And what year was that, nineteen eighty nine. It was like this at the fall.

Christmas of nineteen eighty nine. And I remember visiting him about a month later, less than a month later in Key West, and he was just not feeling right and he told me so, he said, I just I'm not I don't feel right. That was the beginning of the slow decline. And then things got a lot worse in May, and then he just kind of struggle through all his gigs over the summer and then barely made it through

Is he gonna make it?

We're taking a break, so stay with us. What was his life like after your mom passed away? He didn't remarry, did he?

No?

He did not, And it was why do you think he was so miserable for a long time after she He needed her, he needed her, and he was just a long long time until we went on vacation. Probably I don't know. Eight months later or something like that, and we sort of started seeing signs of a person again.

Tell about what happened in Jamaica. After the Christmas dinner and then we went to the bar.

Oh my god, this was the vacation in Jamaica. A bunch of our family and a couple of friends, and we went down to the bar and there were probably a couple of people in there. And he sits down at the piano at the bar. And this was after dinner, after you know, a lot of Scotch whatever, a lot of wine, and he plays Rhapsody in Blue from beginning to end. It was the most amazing performance you could possibly imagine. I mean, he's just ripped it. It was unforgettable.

He tells us, Oh my.

God, so obviously never married again.

But why do you think he never married again?

You see a guy like that, You mean, my gun, he could have had any woman in New York. He didn't have room in his life for that anymore.

No, And there were some men that he was very close to.

And and would you say that once your mother passed away was your father's life as a bisexual man, that he just lived it more vividly once your mother was gone, was much more, much more living color about it.

His uh, his mother was still alive. Oh, and I think that played a great role. That was kind of a governor there that for him, kind of a governor yet and then when he still had a public it was a different time.

She outlived him.

Yeah, she was ninety two when he died, and she said memorably, this will shorten my life.

Wow. And so he and so he.

You think that he kept that quiet and kept that private, not only because it was that that is nature to be a little more private.

Like theatre.

He sort of came out sort of a few times, and I think he was once he was hoping people would take more notice of it than they did, I think. But I think he didn't want his mother to have to deal with it with her friends and you know, people talking about it.

If he was alive now, how old should that be? If he was alive now, he'd be nice.

Yeah, yes, centennial will be twenty eighteen.

Who was someone?

I mean, I'm sure that we're boundless people because your father was very generous of heart, it seems very passionate. But who were some of the people other than Kuzovitski and Copen that we've covered before. Who were some of the people that were contemporaries of your father that you remember him speaking very glowingly abou Who did he admire?

Lucas Voss would be one.

They were a Curtis together, that's where they met, and they stayed friends and colleagues their entire lives. And Lucas was a stupendous pianist in addition to being an excellent composer. So he played our dad's Age of Anxiety, which is a sort of like a piano concerto. Older it's called a symphony, and Lucas could.

Just play the hell out of it.

And and our dad premiered many of Lucas's pieces with the Philharmonic, And so that was he was one of them. Michael Tilson Thomas was someone that our dad kind of nurtured along when.

Hezovitsky to a degree, Yes, to a degree. Who else did who else did he mentor? Oh well, he was mister mentor to a great degree.

I think yeah, John, another guy with great hair, great hair, school of conducting.

Nothing like that hair flying through the air looks great. It's amazing how many great hair conductors there are, isn't that so? Right? Well, when nothing at the Philharmonic, it was his relationship with Sondheim.

Oh that was a big, big relationship, big friendship and colleague ship.

You know, west Side Story.

Jerry Robins, all of them had this phenomenal success. Initially, West Side Story was supposed to be if I'm if I'm an Irish.

Jewish gang, Yeah, a lower east Side. It was going to be east Side. It was going to be Lower east Side. Tempers would flare over the Easter passover holidays right right right right as Leles versus the Missus. Yeah, yeah, something like that.

And then apparently Jerry Robins saw some article about gang wars with Puerto Ricans on the Upper West.

Side and he went, ding, you know the bulls, Jerry it was I think it was Jerry or was it Arthur?

Always said it was Arthur, so I don't know.

Maybe it was Arthur.

Probably the most romantic line in the movie I've ever heard, and it always brings me to tears when he turns to her, they have the moment of the dance. Then he turns to her and says, you're not lying to me, are you? And she says, I have not yet learned to lie about such things.

That's right. I have not yet learned to joke that way. I think you're not joking that what she says, you're not joking. I have not yet to give it to me again. You say it here we got rid of a live performance.

Go you're not joking with me.

I have not yet learned to joke that way. I think now I never will. There you go, there it is.

And the reason we're laughing is because there's a recording of our dad conducting west Side Story for in a recording session, and he got Alexander and my sister Nina to do that dialogue so much to believe you're not.

Joking me, I have not yet learned how to joke that way.

I think no, I never will.

Now.

Speaking of films, your father only composed I mean, other than them transferring west Side to the film, your father only composed one film score, that's right, and it was a hell of a film.

Score and very Wartenstein asque.

And why do you think he only did? Your father someone? I mean, I see people, this is interesting because I see so many people Billy Joel Sting. I mean, you see Elton John make his fore way into that. But I see so many people who I think the mess of Billy, especially who's a friend. I say, my god, you could be doing so much music a movie score if you wanted to, and they just don't. They don't have a passion for it. Why did your father just do the one?

You think, Well, because he really did not enjoy the experience. Why because he was being bossed around? Because an yeah, well what happened. For the example he gave was that he wrote, you know, the soaring music, that the dynamics that he composed were all in his head and all recorded a certain way, and then when they're mixing, they just dunk the fader on it so that, as our dad put it, so that you could hear Marlon Brando's grunt.

They would say, okay, fifteen bars of passion and then you know, thirty seconds of you know, quick. And he just couldn't write that way. That way, it was impossible, So he he loves they but he just hated doing the work.

You have children. I have a daughter. You have a daughter who's how old?

She'll be fourteen in two weeks.

You have a daughter that's fourteen, and what does she into? What does she do?

She's into her first year of high school and loving it. And she's into theater in a big way. She loves to you're raising your kids in the city. You're outside the city in the city. You're raising your daughter inside the city. And she likes acting. She likes acting, but she's also you know, she loves her English class and history class and math, to her school and her friends and her What about you.

I have two.

I have ad they're in their twenties now, they're in their early t do My daughter, Frankie, lives in Brooklyn, she's a right and my son is still in school up in the Berkshires.

As a matter of fact, he's up and he lives in Lee, Massachusetts.

No, well, you know, for both of you, your children, I mean, obviously they know they didn't have to watch. In their case, they weren't watching Leonard Bernstone. That wasn't the cartoon, wasn't the gateway into an understanding of who their grandfather was.

But they know who he is and have you had and do they do? They have an appetite and a passion to understand who he is and see who he is. My kids don't.

They're very careful about sort of keeping their distance from that whole connection. I think it makes them a little shy, a little a little anxious, and so they don't.

They don't embrace.

Based on without getting too personal, because I have an opinion about that because of my daughter. Oh really, well, what they want is that they sense that celebrity has become so exponentially out of control now and they prefer their privacy. If knowing that I was related directly to Leonard Bernstein was going to lead to something appropriate or comfortable or rite, there would be one thing, But nowadays everybody's after the wrong thing.

And that's really interesting.

I mean I think about that a lot because our father really loved being famous and we had fun with it, and it was just a different type of thing in those days.

It was different.

It's more of an industry now. And he started seeing that more and more starting in the eighties, and you talked about it a lot, and he once said to me I'm so sick of Leonard Bernstein.

I've had it with him. I've always had a problem about time. But when I had a problem about.

Time at the age of twenty five or thirty, when you're still, at least in part, thinking you're immortal and nothing's ever going to change the way you are.

Abbreviated, everything's all right.

I mean I would go on concert tours and compose in the airport or on the plane, or on the train, or I wrote half of the Age of Anxiety and airports and trains and hotels. I can't do that anymore, and it's been some time since I could. One of the reasons is one's standards get higher and higher. Self identification with the composer whose works you are performing become closer and closer to the point where there are performances which are the ones I call good performances, but I

As he grew older, Bernstein's connection to the music of Gustav Mahler, whom he had championed throughout his career became even stronger.

I think he felt a deep association I mean, apart from the music itself, obviously, an association with Mahler as a conflicted musician, Mahler being Jewish and in a Georgian Jewish world and being a tonal composer in an a more atonal world, becoming so being a European man who came to America. You know, somebody from the classical tradition coming to America and suddenly finding themselves in this crazy world. So I think there was an affinity there.

Plus, he was the combination of composer and conductor, which there aren't.

That many of. I would love to have known your father.

Your father was so singular and remains so singular because number one, whenever he came on, I was happy, And whenever he came on, I was excited, and he never disappointed me. And when I would see him, I'd say, once you get from Bernstein, you can only get from Bernstein. He was the original in his field. Leonard Bernstein's children, Jamie and Alexander, say their father was so original in part because he just never stopped celebrating music, celebrating life.

He never slept. He was a terrible insomniac. I think that's probably why I managed to squeeze in so much action.

He was always at it.

You know.

I wish he was around.

He and I could have hung out together. Oh oh, I'm an insomniac. And could you imagine you're in Stein and I watching YouTube together.

Would have come over at four am and you could have hung out. God, we could have been watching old movies together. And yeah, you would have gone to the piano and played all the old Hermann scores. Yes, everything.

This is Alec Baldwin. To learn more about Leonard Bernstein and artful learning and educational organization that his son Alex spearheads, go to Here's the thing dot org