Leonard Bernstein’s daughters on the biopic Maestro: ‘Take it from us, it is uncanny’

What do the following have in common — Judy Garland, Margaret Thatcher, Freddie Mercury and Stephen Hawking? Answer: they are just some of the real-life figures played by actors who have gone on to win Oscars. This is a well-trodden path to the red carpet of the Academy Awards.

One essential element is a subject with a high level of charisma, and nobody offered more of that than American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein. Netflix’s new biopic Maestro is already being touted as an awards contender and Bradley Cooper, who is remarkably convincing as Bernstein both young and old and also directed the film, looks to be in with a decent chance.

More than 30 years after Bernstein’s death, this musical giant’s star appeal hardly seems to have dimmed. In private and professional life alike, he had an all-enveloping embrace that knew no boundaries — composer, conductor, pianist, educationalist, humanitarian. He wrote three symphonies, but also the Broadway sensation West Side Story. He was Jewish, but composed Chichester Psalms and Mass. His love life was — let us say — complicated. To be in the room with him was to be dazzled by the high wattage of his personality.

Since this summer, when the prosthetic nose worn by Cooper in Maestro caused outrage on social media, Bernstein’s children have been vocal in their support of the actor’s portrayal of their father. “We’re perfectly fine with [the nose],” their statement read. “We’re also certain that our dad would have been fine with it as well.”

Now his daughters, Jamie and Nina, have flown to London to help promote the film. “We came to realise that Bradley really is a lot like our dad — that brilliant intensity and focus, exactitude and open-heartedness . . . It was very brave, a deep dive into a person.”

As Cooper never met their father, they invited him to immerse himself in their world, and some of the scenes were filmed at the family house in Connecticut. They gifted him their father’s medicine case and at one point in the film he wears the composer’s bathrobe.

“Bradley involved us a lot,” says Jamie. “Sometimes he would send us photographs or a little bit of footage or rewritten scenes from the script, and ask us, ‘Am I going in the right direction?’ He was generous about including us and we saw several versions of the film before the finished product. That meant we were prepared bit by bit, and maybe that was for the best, because there are many elements in the film that are challenging for us.”

As Nina puts it, “If it had just been — boom! — I don’t think we could have survived that.”

Do not expect a conventional biopic. Bernstein the all-round musical virtuoso is always present — there is a lengthy passage that reconstructs his legendary 1973 live-television performance of Mahler’s Symphony No 2 from Ely Cathedral (with Cooper brilliantly reproducing Bernstein’s conducting) — but the film’s primary interest lies elsewhere.

The opening scenes lay the tensions bare in more ways than one. First, we see the older Bernstein at the piano struggling to come to terms with the early death of his wife Felicia. Then the film jumps back a generation to the young Bernstein as he bounds on to a bed where a young man is lying naked face down and he enthusiastically plays the tom-toms on his buttocks.

This is a love story, but not of the conventional kind. How did Bernstein keep his family together even as his gay affairs pulled him away? How did he — and they — live a private life under the constant glare of the world’s spotlights?

The deep love between Bernstein and his wife, Costa Rican-Chilean actor Felicia Montealegre, is never in doubt. From their first meeting, the film charts the journey of their marriage through to moving scenes of her early death at 56, the main players given time to breathe and develop their roles.

“Last night, Carey Mulligan [who plays Felicia] came into town to have dinner with us,” says Nina. “We hadn’t seen her in person since before the film was shot and she has become the closest thing we have to a living mother, even though she is younger than us, which is disorientating.”

Jamie breaks in: “Carey had fewer resources to rely on than Bradley and, even so, she channelled our mother in a way that we completely recognise. Take it from us — it is uncanny. We never saw our parents fight or heard them through walls, as they kept that from us, but I imagine it was much like this. Mother was no shrinking violet.”

A turning point in the film comes when Jamie confronts her father with rumours of his extramarital liaisons. “This was the first time his two worlds collided,” says Jamie, reminiscing on the film’s depiction of that heart-to-heart in the garden of the family house.

Did Bernstein ever admit to his children that he was taking male lovers? “I don’t recall ever being sat down and having everything explained to me,” she says. “It was the early 1970s. In those days it was still very hard to have such conversations, because people didn’t have the vocabulary yet. That only came later. It just became apparent to us what was happening through osmosis.” Nina, who is younger, says that for her it was especially tough.

In the end, after Felicia died, the younger men in his entourage multiplied, with little attempt at concealment. As Alexander, Bernstein’s son, remarked pithily in Jamie’s 2018 memoir Famous Father Girl, “He’s coming out of the closet ass-first.”

Asked what they would like people to take away from the film, the two sisters chorus: “The music!” There is a lot beyond West Side Story, which is as far as many get. Even Bernstein never understood why he did not write another Broadway hit like it. It must have been an alignment of the planets, he said, because “the damn thing is I don’t know how I did it.”

“He never had enough time [to write], says Jamie. “He was this split personality. As a composer he had to be all by himself, staring at a blank piece of manuscript paper at four in the morning, and he hated that. He was so gregarious and loved being among people, with orchestras and with audiences. Our father was loads of fun to be with. He had that quality that charismatic people often have. When he was talking to you, you felt you were the only person in the world that mattered to him.”

‘Maestro’ will be in UK and US cinemas from November 24 and on Netflix from December 20

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