The Gay & Lesbian Review

ters, many of which appear in this volume. It was only in the mid-1970s that Bernstein finally left Fe- licia to take up with Tom Cochran, who’d been his de facto lover since 1971. But soon Felicia was stricken with cancer— the suspicion has lingered that somehow it was a direct result of her husband’s departure—so Bernstein moved back home and saw her through until her death in 1978. He was devastated by her demise and lamented that she never forgave him for having left. However, her departure does seem to have freed something in Bernstein, who now became, at the age of sixty, much more open about his homosexuality. (By the way, Simeone does not include any material related to Bernstein’s relationship with Tom Cochran, which seems an odd omission.) A general impression one gets from these letters is the sense that Bernstein wanted to be loved by everyone, and that he drove himself mercilessly to this goal, however unachievable. A work titled “Bernstein Agonistes” would depict a man torn by inner conflicts involving his need to be everything to every- one. He always felt that he wasn’t doing enough. When com- posing, he wondered if he should be conducting; when writing musicals, he felt he should be working on an opera. Added to the mix was Bernstein’s Jewish identity. He needed to prove himself as a Jewish man in a world that was still quite anti-Semitic. Excused from military service during World War II due to health problems, he learned from afar about the destruc- tion of European Jewry by the Nazis. When he conducted in Vi- enna and in Bayreuth, Germany, Jews all over the world felt a sense of pride in his triumph. In my own family, Bernstein was

worshiped as a “Jewish boy who made good.” His Young Peo- ple’s Concerts and his Omnibus Series were must-hear events at our house. My mother bought tickets to see West Side Story on Broadway within the first month of its opening. Behind the scenes, the letters about the making of West Side Story will be of great interest to anyone who’s a fan of the bril- liant musical. We learn about the difficulty that Bernstein had collaborating with Jerome Robbins, who was notoriously diffi- cult to work with, and that he almost quit the show because of Robbins. Now for a couple of complaints about this book, as well- produced as it generally is. Simeone does not include many let- ters from Bernstein’s later years. There are no letters about his refusal to accept the National Medal of Arts from President George H. W. Bush as a protest against the revocation of an NEA grant for an AIDS exhibit when it was learned that the show featured works by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Ser- rano. A second quibble is that the footnotes are often unneces- sarily long and compete for space with the letters themselves. Those peccadilloes aside, The Leonard Bernstein Letters opens a window into the world of one of the most accomplished and brilliant artists of the 20th century. His letters reveal his search for meaning through his involvement, not with abstract ideas for the most part, but with the flesh-and-blood world of family, friends, lovers, and, of course, his music.

Provincetown 2013

Check out the beaches, chewed back by last fall’s hurricanes. At Herring Cove new showers, change rooms, snack shops cluster in the reconfigured dunes, wooden roofs angling clean above the sands, a rustic version of the Sydney Opera House. The sea seduces with same old tides, the air with its same salt tang. Seaweed clings to swimmers’ flesh in dark designs, Rorschach-like. Appetites grow for clam and lobster rolls, fried cod, cilantro mojitos, tea dance and after, the glamour and the camp. A full moon settles into pillows of cloud while Cher slices on her skateboard through gathering crowds, races the ebb and flow along Commercial Street.

J UDITH S AUNDERS

38

The Gay & Lesbian Review / WORLDWIDE