Unable To Conduct Himself

Robert Gottlieb flips through a new collection of Leonard Bernstein’s letters, bringing us a portrait of the musical icon away from the bandstand:

Letters came easily to the young Bernstein—he’s as fluent a writer as he’s fluent at everything else—and he understands how self-centered he is. (To his great pal Kenny Ehrman, he once said, “Who do I think I am, everybody?” To Helen Coates, first his piano teacher, later, and for decades, his assistant, guide, life-support system: “Before I forget myself and write an ‘I’ letter, I want to wish you a very pleasant summer.” He pours out his heart to just about everybody. He’s met the perfect girl (boy). He’s written this, he’s done that. So-and-so complimented him, so-and-so is giving him a hand up. Always there’s the assumption that anyone he’s writing to wants to know everything about him—a narcissism that’s normal, even touching, in a young man, but less so in a (supposedly) mature one. Think how he would have taken to blogging! …

[B]y the 1970s, his life as a homosexual had become flamboyantly open, to [his wife's] increasing distress. He was now immensely famous and powerful, and he cast off all restraints—the self-regard he had always exhibited had hardened into unmitigated narcissism. Burton reports that Paul Bowles, a very old friend meeting him after many years, thought that “he had become ‘smarmy’ and ‘false’; ‘a small crumb of what he once had been.’ His success had been ‘painfully destructive’ of his personality. It was,” [biographer Humphrey] Burton remarks, “a chilling assessment,” and the letters validate it.

(Video: Bernstein rehearses with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1982)