It was a cold winter’s day in Manhattan in February of 1996. The day before, I had gotten a call from my dear friend, Keith Martin - who, at the time, was Artistic Director of the Charlotte Repertory Theatre and in New York for a couple of days - asking me: “Guess where we’re going tomorrow?”
My “I dunno” answer prompted his joyful proclamation:
“To Leonard Bernstein’s apartment at the Dakota. I’ve gotten access to the archives for a show I’m planning to produce. I’ll be working with the archivist, and you can play the piano!”
Keith had been commissioned by the Charlotte Symphony to create, produce and direct a show to be called “Bernstein on Broadway”, featuring songs known and unknown, including fragments and sketches he might find in the archives that had never before been seen or heard.
And so, it came to pass that we entered the famous entry gate (or infamous, if you think of Mark David Chapman’s awful moment with John Lennon) and into the courtyard, half-surrounded by windows through which you could see Yoko Ono’s art on the walls, and into the Central Park-facing duplex of the Maestro.
By the way, Maestro, Bradley Cooper’s wonderful film biography, featured the interior scenes of the apartment that were so realistic, to my recollection, that I was shocked to learn they were perfectly-created sets and not shot at the actual residence.
Anyway, back to the B-52. The Bösendorfer grand piano in the living room, affectionately named by LB because of its size, sat right next to a window overlooking Central Park West. (The Maestro was called LB by many who knew and adored him, so why not me, too?) This dark, foreboding giant piece of furniture was adorned with two shaded triple-candlestick lamps and photos of the Kennedys and various other celebrities of his acquaintance, along with a Richard Avedon family photograph. Next to the piano was a funny little swiveling stool with what looked like a custom-jerry-rigged wooden rocking chair back that was height-adjustable by twirling it around.
So, while Keith and Charlie Harmon, the archivist, were down the hall in the archive room thumbing through cigarette-stained manuscripts of songs and fragments of songs that never made it to Broadway, amidst the bookshelves with the Oscar, the Tony’s and the Kennedy Center Honors medallion, I sat there at the B-52, reveling in a once-in-a lifetime moment in my erstwhile musical life … playing selections from Bernstein shows - of course!
My reverie was happily interrupted by the arrival of Jamie Bernstein, LB’s oldest child and someone who has become quite a personality herself as public lecturer and keeper of her parents’ legacy. We had a lovely chat.
And Charlie Harmon, who was also LB’s assistant for the final 10 years of his life - the Maestro had died two years earlier in 1990 - said to Keith, as they worked away in the archive room, “It’s really nice to hear the piano being played again”
My day was made several times over on that cold and wintry long-to-be-remembered afternoon on Central Park West.
A footnote on the B-52: The Bernstein children held on to the Dakota apartment well into the late 1990s, and in 1997 the piano was offered up at a special Bernstein sale at Sotheby’s, where it fetched $350,000. Whoever that anonymous bidder was, slipping away with the prize that day, secured a remarkable bargain - one made all the richer by the instrument’s storied owner and its long, luminous history.
(Ron Dukenski is a management and organization development consultant whose avocational life has always involved music and the performing arts - as composer, organist/choirmaster, local thespian and all-around raconteur. He and his wife, Beverly, live in Southbury, Connecticut. [email protected])
