GLR November-December 2024

ESSAY

1947: Tales of Tanglewood V AL H OLLEY

I N DECEMBER 1947, Chilean-American actress Feli cia Montealegre broke off her much-publicized en gagement to Leonard Bernstein, which had been announced in Hollywood a year earlier. Biographers pin the blame on events at that summer’s Berkshire Music Festival at Tanglewood, in Lenox, Massachusetts. The year 1947 marked Bernstein’s fifth season at Tanglewood, sum mer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. While he had just assumed the lofty post of guest conductor, he still carried a taint of notoriety from the raucous, campy goings-on at his rented cottage during the previous summer. This year, the mélange of artistic souls at his cottage would be no less frisky. Meryle Secrest reported in her biography of Bernstein that Montealegre felt that Bernstein paid insufficient attention to her during her Tanglewood visits. “By that,” Secrest elaborated, “she might have meant that he was paying too much attention to someone else.” The identity of “someone else” and the nuts and-bolts of that Tanglewood summer are revealed in this arti cle for the first time. On April 9, 1947, Leonard Bernstein boarded the SSAmer ica to begin a conducting tour of Paris, Prague, and Palestine. about Romney and, schmoozing and cocktailing aboard the America several hours later, he had undoubtedly consigned this experience to oblivion. For Romney, however, meeting Bern stein fulfilled a long-held dream and would affect his life pro foundly. He wandered about New York the morning after in a besotted state, imagining Bernstein leaving for the dock, being out in the harbor, even “smelling the newness of the ship.” That evening, he wrote Bernstein a letter, “to be sure and have me with you your first day in Paris.” He asked Bernstein to send short notes and reviews of his concerts. Already, he had cut Bernstein’s picture out of an old Playbill to carry in his wallet. “I miss you more than I have a right to,” he concluded, “and I feel awfully like a little girl saying it.” Romney’s rapture did not subside. He poured out his heart again five days later. “I know we did get quite close,” he de clared. “You moved me to consider things which are easier not Val Holley, an independent historian living in Manhattan, is the au thor of Frank J. Cannon: Saint, Senator, Scoundrel . This article was adapted from the forthcoming book Slouching Towards Gotham: A Gay Mormon Example (University of Utah Press). The night before embarking, he headed out to New York’s gay haunts—possibly the Eighth Street bars he was known to frequent. His conquest for the night was a Mormon man who had moved to New York from Los Angeles, Richard Romney, whose blond good looks were what most often attracted him. But Bernstein had no reason to obsess

to consider most of the time.” However, he vowed he would not write again without Bernstein’s encouragement. He may have been ready to give up all hope, but then the door buzzer at 34 Beekman Place rang early in the morning on May 8th. Barely awake, Romney staggered down the “deathtrap stairs,” naked (as he made sure to tell Bernstein), thinking the telephone on the ground floor had rung. He feared he was having a night mare—until he spied a cable slipped under the door. From Tel Aviv, the touring maestro had dashed off: “ NO LETTER DOES NOT MEAN NO REMEMBRANCE YOUR WORDS HAPPILY WELCOME PALES TINE IS HEAVEN LOVE LENNY .” Romney’s appeals to Bernstein for a reply had paid off. Romney did not know Bernstein’s itinerary and was loath to launch “unaimed” declarations of same-sex love into inter national postal labyrinths. Fortunately, when he telephoned Bernstein’s office for help, Helen Coates, Bernstein’s former piano teacher, now his loyal secretary, answered. Coates would have discerned both the nature of Romney’s interest in Bern stein and its origins. She “probably knows more about Lenny than he knows about himself,” observed Bernstein’s brother Burton. When “men emerged from Bernstein’s bed in the morn about you. Said he would write you in Paris.” Romney planned a vacation in Bermuda. Sending a note to Bernstein’s West 10th Street apartment, he asked if they might hook up again before he departed. Then he added a portentous postscript: “I did see somewhere that you will be marrying Miss Taleanegro [ sic! ] in August. Let me wish you well in person.” He was signaling that he understood Bernstein was leading a double life, which he would have considered unremarkable. Rather than revel on Bermudan beaches, Romney brooded over Bernstein’s continuing silence. Again he phoned Helen Coates, who informed him that Bernstein had returned to New York on June 20th—the day after Romney flew to Bermuda— and would soon begin his Tanglewood residency. “Without her friendliness, I should be at a loss to write you,” he told Bern stein. “I fear I have forced myself more than you have cared for me to do—but in a way it has been impossible to restrain my self.” Bernstein finally found time to write the letter that Rom ney, still in Bermuda, so ardently awaited. He proposed meeting at Tanglewood. “Your theory about ‘forcing yourself’ is all wet,” he reassured Romney. “Forget it. And do write, and do come to the Berkshires.” On Romney’s awareness of his en ing, with Bernstein still asleep,” wrote biog rapher Joan Peyser, “Coates asked for their names and numbers in the event the maestro wanted to call on them again.” Coates spoke to Romney as a friend, recounting the tri umphs and pratfalls of Bernstein’s tour-in progress. To Bernstein she wrote: “Your friend, Mr. Romney, called, wanted to know

While Bernstein wel comed Richard Romney to Tanglewood, Felicia Montealegre (his fiancée) had to force her way in.

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