Leonard Bernstein – composer, conductor, pianist, educator, and more – is remembered as one of the greatest American musicians of all time.
His voracious appetite for art extended to his love life. He had many relationships with men, but he also longed for the experience of having a wife and children.
Beautiful, elegant Costa Rican Chilean actress Felicia Montealegre was able to offer him that life, albeit at a cost.
Montealegre went into their marriage fully aware of and sympathetic to Leonard’s attraction to men. Their marriage wasn’t easy or simple, and they separated for a while in the 1970s. But they never got divorced, and when Montealegre died, Bernstein was at her side.
Over the course of their marriage, they had three beloved children. Today, we’re looking at each of their lives and how they’re working to keep their parents’ legacies alive.
Jamie Bernstein
Jamie Bernstein
Jamie Bernstein was born on 8 September 1952, the day before her parents’ first wedding anniversary.
Some of her earliest memories consist of falling asleep to the chatter of the charming, artistic people at the dinner parties her parents threw downstairs.
The first time she realised her father was famous was while watching The Flintstones, when the characters went to see “Leonard Bernstone” conduct.
The Flintstones: Leonard Bernstone and Rockymaninoff
Bernstein began conducting his Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic in January 1958, when Jamie was five years old. They became hugely successful productions that are still watched today.
However, the knowledge that her father was a famous television personality unnerved her. “We just wanted to blend in and be like everybody else – this desire to be normal. And it kind of gave me the creeps to not be normal. It made me feel left out,” she told NPR in 2018.
When it came time to choose a career, Jamie decided to go into what her family knew best: music. Unfortunately, as the talented children of many greats have discovered, it’s not easy to make your own way without being compared to your famous parents.
“It’s hard to live in a very bright sun and try to figure out what you’re going to be on your own in that blinding light, and it took me a long time to figure it out,” Jamie said in the NPR interview.
The summer after she graduated from high school, she went to study at Tanglewood, where her father was on the faculty. While there, she started hearing rumours that he had romantic and erotic relationships with men. She asked him point-blank if the rumours were true. He said no.
Person to Person, hosted by Edward Murrow – Leonard & Felicia Montealegre Bernstein (1955)
The 1970s proved to be tumultuous years for the Bernsteins.
Like her father, Jamie went to Harvard. During her junior and senior years, her father gave a series of legendary lectures there, which eventually were turned into a book called The Unanswered Question. He was working closely with an assistant named Tom Cothran and living openly with him; the two had fallen deeply in love. She was gradually beginning to understand the truth about her father’s identity.
The day after Jamie’s Harvard graduation in June 1974, her mother shared with her the news that she had found a lump in her breast and that she needed to have a mastectomy. Post-operation, the family was hopeful there would be a positive outcome.
Two years later, Leonard decided that he wanted to spend the summer with Cothran in California. However, Felicia’s patience had reached a breaking point, and she told him not to bother coming back. He said fine and moved out to California.
However, Leonard found that he wasn’t ready to live a public life as a gay man, and his relationship with Cothran broke down. He came to miss the company of his wife and children, and he moved back in with Montealegre. Around the same time, her cancer returned and, tragically, just a year later, she was dead.
After her parents’ period of estrangement and her mother’s death, Jamie decided to try her hand at becoming a singer-songwriter. However, she struggled with career-related anxiety, and after she recorded her first album and sent it to the record label, they decided not to release it.
She had recently gotten married, and she decided to focus on being a parent instead. She and her husband had two children, Frankie and Evan.
On October 14, 1990, on her son Evan’s first birthday, her father died, propelling her into a new stage of her career: preserving and promoting her father’s legacy.
When people asked her what her childhood had been like, she had a standard answer: “Well, it wasn’t boring.” But as she got older, she felt like she wanted to share more. In 2018, she wrote a book about her childhood called Famous Father Girl: Growing Up Bernstein.
Today, her website describes Jamie Bernstein as an “author, narrator, director, broadcaster, and filmmaker.”
Alexander Bernstein
Alexander Bernstein was born on 7 July 1955, three years after his sister Jamie.
Like his father and older sister, he attended Harvard. He went on to get his master’s degree in English education from New York University, having inherited his father’s love of teaching. For five years, he taught at the Packer-Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, New York.
Like his mother, he worked for a while as a professional actor.
Today, however, Alexander is president of Artful Learning, Inc., and Vice President and Treasurer of The Leonard Bernstein Office, Inc.
Artful Learning is a teaching model that uses Leonard’s ideas to enrich arts education and encourage interdisciplinary thought among students.
CRESCENDO meets: Alexander Bernstein
Nina Maria Felicia Bernstein
Nina Maria Felicia Bernstein © survivalresources.com
Nina Bernstein was born on 28 February 1962, when her sister was nine and her brother was seven.
She was just three years old when she went to her first Leonard Bernstein concert. She later recalled feeling awestruck by her father’s physical motions on the podium and tried to copy him. The performance was being televised, and a cameraman had to escort her out.
Nina was twelve years old when her mother was diagnosed with cancer. At the time, it was so taboo to speak about breast cancer that Felicia only told Nina that she was going to have “a little something taken off her nose” when she went in for a mastectomy.
Eventually, the truth came out. Felicia died of cancer in June 1978, when Nina was sixteen. She and her siblings banded together to try to support each other in their grief and look after their devastated father.
Like her mother and brother, Nina became an actor, working at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since 2008, she has also worked as a food educator in underprivileged neighbourhoods.
After her father’s death in 1990, she joined forces with her siblings to run the family business and to keep their parents’ legacy alive.
BBC Radio Interview: Nina Bernstein on Leonard Bernstein
Working Together On the Maestro Movie
The Bernstein children teamed up to work with actor and director Bradley Cooper on Cooper’s 2023 film Maestro, about Leonard and Felicia’s marriage.
They even opened the doors to their family’s Connecticut home to film crews so the set could be as accurate as possible.
Together, the Bernstein children have presented a united front, working on preserving their parents’ legacies and teaching audiences about their lives.
For more of the best in classical music, sign up for our E-Newsletter
