GLR November-December 2024

New York Herald Tribune : “Music comes first and it always will. If [Bernstein] ever does marry, his wife will have to rec ognize that from the beginning.” In June, Montealegre wrote Bernstein that Coates “doesn’t scare me anymore, she just makes me mad.” Once Romney was back in New York, his letters grew com pulsive and confessional. Acknowledging that Romney’s long winded letters “call for all kinds of discussion,” Bernstein pleaded exhaustion and an aching back. “So let me just not be ‘Pappy’ now, and send you my love and thanks.” He again en couraged Romney to attend his concerts, “though I can’t prom ise you space here for awhile”—which, in translation, probably meant that Montealegre was expected. The day after Tangle wood’s closing ceremonies, she began a week’s engagement nearby at the Berkshire Playhouse in a production of YearsAgo . Then she accompanied Bernstein to New York to see The Medium. Bernstein went alone to Sharon, Massachusetts, to visit his parents before returning to Tanglewood. “Life in Stock bridge is now blessedly quiet,” he told a friend. Romney arrived for his second Tanglewood sojourn. On August 25th, Bern stein’s 29th birthday, Romney followed up on his earlier rec ommendation by presenting Bernstein with a copy of TheAge of Anxiety . Later, from New York, Romney lamented: “Quite the con trary to the way I felt after leaving you in July, I have been quite sad and low since getting back this time.” Fortunately for his peace of mind, they would soon reunite. Bernstein had accepted Romney’s invitation to visit art patron Alice DeLamar, in We ston, Connecticut, on September 4th. “Mid-week there should be just us,” Romney exulted. “We can swim first, have a cock tail, and eat lunch in our shorts on the terrace. You can study scores between dips.” They stayed at Delamar’s that night. But Bernstein and Delamar failed to hit it off. Driving back to the city, Romney was dismayed at Bernstein’s “somewhat bitter manner in saying [he] found Alice could give [him] noth ing.” Thirty-five years later, Delamar remembered the visit when The New Yorker published chronicles of the Bernstein family by Leonard’s younger brother Burton. “I think [Leonard] had gotten rather too much to drink on that evening,” Delamar reminded Romney. “No one else but us was there and he got very agitated ... it was a long and impulsive discourse that was completely unintelligible to anyone not acquainted with the elaborate Jewish ritual.” Since Burton Bernstein’s article con firmed that neither he nor his siblings were observant, Delamar said she had never understood why Leonard, “who was of the younger [generation], was able to get so very agitated about it.” Romney’s note to Bernstein confirming the Delamar outing had concluded by asking: “What about Felicia? Is she returning with you?” This was as close as he dared come to broaching the bedroom farce in which he had been a supporting player that summer. Bernstein, as usual, ignored the question. His datebook notes only his own return. He and Montealegre attended a party for actress Judy Holliday in Manhattan on September 10th. However, wrote Joan Peyser: “Nothing could have helped Fe licia hold Leonard during the summer of 1947. By the fall, Bernstein was back to living the life of a homosexual, which certainly worked against the career he wanted.” In New York, Romney attended Bernstein’s October 13th and 14th concerts at the helm of the City Symphony. He spent

those nights in Bernstein’s bed, an outing that did not end ro mantically. “I hope you have forgiven me for quietly disappear ing that last morning,” he wrote sheepishly. “I awakened with all kinds of little guilt complexes for not being in school.” (Romney was belatedly taking courses to earn his high school diploma.) § T HE FOLLOWING J UNE , as Romney packed for his first trip to Eu rope, Bernstein was in Holland concluding another tour. Bern stein regretted that they would pass each other on the Atlantic but hoped Romney would “love Europe as much as I have.” From Paris in late July, Romney sent a lively report of Alice Delamar’s Bastille Day party at her Left Bank apartment. He persuaded Delamar and others to attend Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias . ”Afterward,” he wrote in triumph, “we went to Les Halles for snails—and all of the [ Les Mamelles ] themes you had played me kept running through my head, and Alice boastfully told the table that you ... had played it for me a year ago.” Throughout 1948, they kept missing each other by a few hours. Just before flying to Israel to conduct, Bernstein tried phoning Romney but learned he had just enrolled at the Uni versity of Virginia. “But it’s good to know you are safely en sconced in the sheltered halls of old Virginia,” he wrote, “studying, and, I presume, making love like a beaver.” On Vir ginia letterhead, Romney urged Bernstein to return from Israel via Paris, so he could look up someone with whom Romney had had a brief fling—Sergio Matta, brother of Chilean artist Roberto Matta and “an old friend of your Felicia.” Romney’s move to Charlottesville curtailed their opportu nities to meet. In the winter of 1949, Bernstein guest-conducted the Pittsburgh Symphony on its four-week concert tour of Southern states. “It would be fun to have a shady, rainy ren dezvous in the South,” he wrote Romney. He thought that Roanoke, where the orchestra would perform on March 2nd, would work best. “It will be great fun to see you again,” he wrote. “Do plan to stay overnight.” Bernstein had been working feverishly on his symphonic Age of Anxiety before its sched uled April 1949 world premiere in Boston. He completed the orchestrations while on the road with the Pittsburgh Symphony. Bernstein’s imprint stayed with Romney his entire life. When Romney was eighty and living in Albany, a friend took him to Manhattan to tour his old stomping grounds, and he en thusiastically pointed out the Dakota on Central Park West as one of Bernstein’s homes. Although their affair flew under bi ographers’ radar, Romney’s act of bringing The Age of Anxiety to Bernstein’s attention and encouraging him to base a sym phonic work on it is acknowledged in program notes accompa nying its performances. After Bernstein conducted the New York premiere in 1950, Romney told him: “ The Age of Anxiety means something special for me—you may recall I got to bring it to you for your birthday, August 1947.” R EFERENCES Burton, Humphrey. Leonard Bernstein . Doubleday, 1994. Peyser, Joan. Bernstein: A Biography . Beech Tree Books, 1987. Rorem, Ned. Knowing When to Stop: A Memoir . Simon & Schuster, 1994. Secrest, Meryle. Leonard Bernstein: A Life . Knopf, 1994. Simeone, Nigel, ed. The Leonard Bernstein Letters . Yale University Press, 2013.

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