a very noisy place
by Douglas Messserli
Charlie Harmon On the Road & Off the Record with Leonard Bernstein: My Years with
the Exasperating Genius (Watertown, Massachusetts: An Imagine
Book/Charlesbridge, 2018)
“The stereo speakers
quit last night.” Or, “Get me tickets of
Idomeneo at
the Met this Thursday,” or,
“See if Jackie Onassis can come for dinner
tonight.”
Not
only was Harmon highly organized, but when Bernstein realized that Harmon had
studied music, could play the piano, and knew how to score musical
compositions, the Maestro might call him down in the middle of the night
(Bernstein traveled at all times with a piano in his room) to play Don Carlo or a duet. Since Bernstein was
working on his opera A Quiet Place
during the first year of his work as Bernstein’s assistant, Harmon was asked to
score all the instrumentals and distribute them to orchestra members.
Much
of his time was simply attending events with the Maestro, meeting and making
small talk with major musicians and celebrities, even dancing and singing with
Betty Comden and Adolph Green. And surely it didn’t hurt that Harmon could also
speak German and Italian and was a quick learner even of Hebrew.
Yet if you think that Harmon’s book might be simply a loving paean of
his time with the master, you’d be highly disappointed. The Bernstein of
Harmon’s book is not the well-dressed “Lenny” of the Kennedy’s whirlwind life,
but the LB (as Harmon and others of his entourage refer to him) who can be
rude, petulant, dismissive, haughty, unwashed, and, occasionally, downright
sleazy (his own nickname for himself was “Mississippi Mud”).
From
the very first after LB’s manager, the terrifying Harry Kraut, hired Harmon, Bernstein’s
private chef, Ann Deadman immediately looked over the new hire, responding “He’s
too cute; he’ll have to shave that moustache.” Even the sometimes naïve Harmon
wonders “Cuteness a liability? Had prior assistants been up for grabs in some
kind of sexual free-for-all?”
I
had known, of course that Bernstein, besides having been married (Bernstein’s
wife had died before Harmon came to work for him) and producing three children,
was openly gay; but I didn’t quite know just how open he was or how he notedly
sought out handsome younger men for his beds. Years later, when Harmon was
introduced to Bernstein’s new chauffeur for a stay in Italy, he
At
first, in fact, I was a bit irritated by Harmon’s book; why need he air all of
LB’s dirty laundry (which, in fact, was another of his literal jobs)? But as
the book progressed, I began to realize that if you truly loved this talented
genius, you had also to take in a fuller portrait. How else, for example, could
LB not be a speed addict given how the Maestro bounced back and forth from his
apartment in the Dakota in New York, to Italy’s La Scala, Vienna, Israel,
England, Tanglewood, Los Angeles, and his home in Connecticut—all in a single
year? Without it, as Harmon was, one could hardly be expected to survive; and
by book’s end the author has nearly had a nervous breakdown from his endless
tasks. There is even a kind of #MeToo moment, when, in a hotel room, the great
Bernstein attempts to grab Harmon’s crotch. The too cute gay boy pulled away,
simply explaining that that was not part of his job.
Besides, it is clear that the two men, although sometimes furious with
one another, had become close friends, LB even seeing his assistant as being in
a kind of “marriage” with him. And how else could Bernstein have gotten through
his last years? Harmon shares long descriptions of what he describes as the
perks of this job, meeting and becoming close friends with so many of Bernstein’s
celebrity acquaintances. If some might have treated the assistant—Harry Kraut among
them—as if he were only Lenny’s servant, many others recognized his importance
to the Maestro, opening their homes and their personal lives to him.
Moreover, there are all those wonderful times with not only LB, but with
his maid, Julia Vega, the chef, Deadman, and Bernstein’s long-time personal
secretary, his original piano teacher Helen Coates. Not only were there
hundreds of stars—Beverly Sills, Lauren Bacall, John Travolta, James Levine
(who unexpectedly took over Harmon’s roll so that the younger man might have
one day of much needed rest), but Queens and other royalty. And then, despite
his dislikable attributes, LB was brilliantly witty and funny, a long-time
player of anagrams, and a kind of bawdy poet who wrote dozens of messages for
his assistant, even, for one Christmas buying him a cabbage patch doll to which
one of LB’s daughters attached some strands of hair to make it look like
Charlie, a gift which they all dubbed as Carlito. Bernstein’s own loveable
mother once took him aside to ask what he was really planning “to do” with his
life, as if provoking him to think about what gifts other than endless
sacrifice to her son that he might wish to give to the world.
This
book, furthermore, does not represent a rush to press for the sake of dishing
out the good and the bad. Harmon waited 28 years after LB’s death to write this
memoir, obviously obtaining permissions from the estate and others who still live
to describe these often very personal events.
Finally, even when he left Bernstein’s
employ in utter exhaustion, he still kept close ties with LB, working with
Coates, who had kept in an apartment once used by LB, a wide library of
clippings, personal objects, scores, photographs, and other archival objects
which Harmon had evaluated by rare book appraiser George Minkoff (a man who
attempted to help me sell my own Sun & Moon Press archive).
When
he was told that Bernstein was ill and near death, Harmon paid him a visit at
the Dakota, where the two briefly and humorously spoke of their long friendship
(my summary).
Harmon to LB:
“You’re only the second person I’ve ever known
that I could
fight with.”
Harmon to LB:
(soon after) “Arguing isn’t the same as confrontation.
When both
sides agree to a compromise, a fight deepens a friend-
ship, instead
of destroying it.”
LB: (in a raspy
growl) “Fighting—it’s as good as fucking.”
Soon after, he takes Charlie’s hand and says:
“Please look after my music.” Repeating the sentence again.
Harmon did. After Bernstein’s death, he edited full scores of West Side Story and Candide before tackling vocal scores for Candide, On the Town, and
Wonderful Town. He might have gone on
to also edit performance scores for others of Bernstein’s works, but Kraut,
unable to see the importance of those projects, pulled the plug on further
edits he proposed. Yet today people still come to him asking his advice about
many questions of the scores and productions. Charlie finally discovered his
own life, while without abandoning the life of his great mentor and, as he
describes LB, rebbe.
Los Angeles, June 18, 2018
Reprinted from Reading with My Lips (March 2024).
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