IN DECEMBER 1947, Chilean-American actress Felicia Montealegre broke off her much-publicized engagement to Leonard Bernstein, which had been announced in Hollywood a year earlier. Biographers pin the blame on events at that summer’s Berkshire Music Festival at Tanglewood, in Lenox, Massachusetts. The year 1947 marked Bernstein’s fifth season at Tanglewood, summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. While he had just assumed the lofty post of guest conductor, he still carried a taint of notoriety from the raucous, campy goings-on at his rented cottage during the previous summer. This year, the mélange of artistic souls at his cottage would be no less frisky.
Meryle Secrest reported in her biography of Bernstein that Montealegre felt that Bernstein paid insufficient attention to her during her Tanglewood visits. “By that,” Secrest elaborated, “she might have meant that he was paying too much attention to someone else.” The identity of “someone else” and the nuts-and-bolts of that Tanglewood summer are revealed in this article for the first time.
On April 9, 1947, Leonard Bernstein boarded the SS America to begin a conducting tour of Paris, Prague, and Palestine. The night before embarking, he headed out to New York’s gay haunts—possibly the Eighth Street bars he was known to frequent. His conquest for the night was a Mormon man who had moved to New York from Los Angeles, Richard Romney, whose blond good looks were what most often attracted him. But Bernstein had no reason to obsess about Romney and, schmoozing and cocktailing aboard the America several hours later, he had undoubtedly consigned this experience to oblivion. For Romney, however,
meeting Bernstein fulfilled a long-held dream and would affect his life profoundly. He wandered about New York the morning after in a besotted state, imagining Bernstein leaving for the dock, being out in the harbor, even “smelling the newness of the ship.” That evening, he wrote Bernstein a letter, “to be sure and have me with you your first day in Paris.” He asked Bernstein to send short notes and reviews of his concerts. Already, he had cut Bernstein’s picture out of an old Playbill to carry in his wallet. “I miss you more than I have a right to,” he concluded, “and I feel awfully like a little girl saying it.”
Romney’s rapture did not subside. He poured out his heart again five days later. “I know we did get quite close,” he declared. “You moved me to consider things which are easier not to consider most of the time.” However, he vowed he would not write again without Bernstein’s encouragement. He may have been ready to give up all hope, but then the door buzzer at 34 Beekman Place rang early in the morning on May 8th. Barely awake, Romney staggered down the “deathtrap stairs,” naked (as he made sure to tell Bernstein), thinking the telephone on the ground floor had rung. He feared he was having a nightmare—until he spied a cable slipped under the door. From Tel Aviv, the touring maestro had dashed off: “NO LETTER DOES NOT MEAN NO REMEMBRANCE YOUR WORDS HAPPILY WELCOME PALESTINE IS HEAVEN LOVE LENNY.” Romney’s appeals to Bernstein for a reply had paid off.
Romney did not know Bernstein’s itinerary and was loath to launch “unaimed” declarations of same-sex love into international postal labyrinths. Fortunately, when he telephoned Bernstein’s office for help, Helen Coates, Bernstein’s former piano teacher, now his loyal secretary, answered. Coates would have discerned both the nature of Romney’s interest in Bernstein and its origins. She “probably knows more about Lenny than he knows about himself,” observed Bernstein’s brother Burton. When “men emerged from Bernstein’s bed in the morning, with Bernstein still asleep,” wrote biographer Joan Peyser, “Coates asked for their names and numbers in the event the maestro wanted to call on them again.” Coates spoke to Romney as a friend, recounting the triumphs and pratfalls of Bernstein’s tour-in-progress. To Bernstein she wrote: “Your friend, Mr. Romney, called, wanted to know about you. Said he would write you in Paris.”
Romney planned a vacation in Bermuda. Sending a note to Bernstein’s West 10th Street apartment, he asked if they might hook up again before he departed. Then he added a portentous postscript: “I did see somewhere that you will be marrying Miss Taleanegro [sic!] in August. Let me wish you well in person.” He was signaling that he understood Bernstein was leading a double life, which he would have considered unremarkable.
Rather than revel on Bermudan beaches, Romney brooded over Bernstein’s continuing silence. Again he phoned Helen Coates, who informed him that Bernstein had returned to New York on June 20th—the day after Romney flew to Bermuda—and would soon begin his Tanglewood residency. “Without her friendliness, I should be at a loss to write you,” he told Bernstein. “I fear I have forced myself more than you have cared for me to do—but in a way it has been impossible to restrain myself.” Bernstein finally found time to write the letter that Romney, still in Bermuda, so ardently awaited. He proposed meeting at Tanglewood. “Your theory about ‘forcing yourself’ is all wet,” he reassured Romney. “Forget it. And do write, and do come to the Berkshires.” On Romney’s awareness of his engagement to Felicia Montealegre, he was silent. He would try to accommodate his friend, but cautioned that his cottage’s “guest list [is]more than imposing.”
Finding Bernstein’s invitation upon his return from Bermuda, Romney was eager to accept. “This deep-rooted affection for you,” he wrote, “is quite a difficult thing for me.” He had just seen a news item reporting (incorrectly) that Bernstein’s engagement was over. “That presents a ‘Why?’” he wrote. “I do think you ought to marry—someone very intelligent, well-born, and who can take the ‘part’ of the wife of a composer-conductor in the best sense of the relationship.” His comments seem surprising for someone who scarcely knew Bernstein, and he admitted it was none of his business. Finally, he got down to brass tacks: could they “sneak away from the Berkshires and get to know each other alone in Albany”?
Apparently, either Bernstein or Helen Coates noticed an imminent vacancy in their guest rooms and told Romney to come right away. In Bernstein’s date book, Coates noted Romney’s arrival on Monday, July 14th, at 7:30 p.m. Only five hours earlier, Montealegre had left for New York. While Richard Romney, seemingly from out of nowhere, was welcomed to Tanglewood, Felicia had to force her way in. That spring, she had complained to Ann Ronell, hostess of her engagement party, that Bernstein’s Tanglewood guest list included many of his friends and relatives—but not Montealegre. Ronell told two biographers that she advised Montealegre simply to show up.
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Romney’s first full day at Tanglewood was his birthday, and subsequent letters imply that Helen Coates improvised a party for him. He was so touched that he later sent Coates a gift. To Bernstein he wrote: “How is that angel, Helen? Did she really not hate me for my camping—what happened to me there for a minute? It wasn’t the martini (of that I’m sure).”
At Tanglewood with Romney, the maestro reclined in a hammock outside his cottage to relieve back pain. He quizzed Romney, seated nearby, on endless topics: his Coast Guard service, his educational goals, whom they knew in common, whether he was an antisemite. At the piano, Bernstein habitually demonstrated motifs from all manner of composition, and their derivations, to his visitors. For Romney, he played excerpts from Francis Poulenc’s new opéra bouffe, Les Mamelles de Tirésias. Poulenc had given him the score a few weeks earlier in Paris.
Romney had recently discovered W. H. Auden’s new epic poem, The Age of Anxiety, and told Bernstein about it. This conversation would lead to the creation of Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2. As soon as Bernstein read Auden poem, he later reported: “I began to hear the music in my head.” Romney hoped Bernstein would see it as concert music rather than a ballet, “where many different talents brush it up. It’s too good a thing for many hands.”
Sexually, the visit must have been a success, judging from Romney’s leering salutation to Bernstein the following Monday: “Dear Pappa Whore-Lady.” He went on: “You were an angel to me and I shall never forget it. And I can say ‘I love you’ without your giving a start in return.” Three friends who saw Romney that day exclaimed that he was “blossoming,” and he asked if Bernstein could guess why. “Pappa Whore-Lady” marked the beginning of their playful assumption of parent-child roles, with Bernstein as “Pappy” (even though Romney was one month older).
Bernstein encouraged Romney to attend his Tanglewood concerts, but the need to keep him out of Montealegre’s sight would preclude the pleasure. His conducting a student orchestra in Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring on Friday, July 18th, was a “great success,” but Romney knew that only because Coates told him so in a letter. Montealegre was in the audience, while Romney had retreated across the Massachusetts state line hours earlier.
The contrast between Helen Coates’ solicitude toward Romney and her disdain for Montealegre was stark. Soon after the latter met Bernstein, Coates’ refusal to put her calls through, because Bernstein had not instructed her to do so, must have been infuriating. By the time the engagement was announced, the two women seemed to have reached a truce. “It was wonderful to get your blessing!” wrote Montealegre. “Your friendship means so much to me … there will probably be very hard times ahead, I know that, but good times too. Please help us have them—if you can.” In April, while Bernstein conducted in Palestine, Coates sent her flowers on his behalf. However, biographer Humphrey Burton inferred that Coates regarded the engagement as a publicity stunt. For a profile on Bernstein, Coates told The New York Herald Tribune: “Music comes first and it always will. If [Bernstein] ever does marry, his wife will have to recognize that from the beginning.” In June, Montealegre wrote Bernstein that Coates “doesn’t scare me anymore, she just makes me mad.”
Once Romney was back in New York, his letters grew compulsive and confessional. Acknowledging that Romney’s long-winded letters “call for all kinds of discussion,” Bernstein pleaded exhaustion and an aching back. “So let me just not be ‘Pappy’ now, and send you my love and thanks.” He again encouraged Romney to attend his concerts, “though I can’t promise you space here for awhile”—which, in translation, probably meant that Montealegre was expected. The day after Tanglewood’s closing ceremonies, she began a week’s engagement nearby at the Berkshire Playhouse in a production of Years Ago. Then she accompanied Bernstein to New York to see The Medium. Bernstein went alone to Sharon, Massachusetts, to visit his parents before returning to Tanglewood. “Life in Stockbridge is now blessedly quiet,” he told a friend. Romney arrived for his second Tanglewood sojourn. On August 25th, Bernstein’s 29th birthday, Romney followed up on his earlier recommendation by presenting Bernstein with a copy of The Age of Anxiety.
Later, from New York, Romney lamented: “Quite the contrary to the way I felt after leaving you in July, I have been quite sad and low since getting back this time.” Fortunately for his peace of mind, they would soon reunite. Bernstein had accepted Romney’s invitation to visit art patron Alice DeLamar, in Weston, Connecticut, on September 4th. “Mid-week there should be just us,” Romney exulted. “We can swim first, have a cocktail, and eat lunch in our shorts on the terrace. You can study scores between dips.” They stayed at Delamar’s that night.
But Bernstein and Delamar failed to hit it off. Driving back to the city, Romney was dismayed at Bernstein’s “somewhat bitter manner in saying [he]found Alice could give [him]nothing.” Thirty-five years later, Delamar remembered the visit when The New Yorker published chronicles of the Bernstein family by Leonard’s younger brother Burton. “I think [Leonard] had gotten rather too much to drink on that evening,” Delamar reminded Romney. “No one else but us was there and he got very agitated … it was a long and impulsive discourse that was completely unintelligible to anyone not acquainted with the elaborate Jewish ritual.” Since Burton Bernstein’s article confirmed that neither he nor his siblings were observant, Delamar said she had never understood why Leonard, “who was of the younger [generation], was able to get so very agitated about it.”
Romney’s note to Bernstein confirming the Delamar outing had concluded by asking: “What about Felicia? Is she returning with you?” This was as close as he dared come to broaching the bedroom farce in which he had been a supporting player that summer. Bernstein, as usual, ignored the question. His datebook notes only his own return. He and Montealegre attended a party for actress Judy Holliday in Manhattan on September 10th. However, wrote Joan Peyser: “Nothing could have helped Felicia hold Leonard during the summer of 1947. By the fall, Bernstein was back to living the life of a homosexual, which certainly worked against the career he wanted.”
In New York, Romney attended Bernstein’s October 13th and 14th concerts at the helm of the City Symphony. He spent those nights in Bernstein’s bed, an outing that did not end romantically. “I hope you have forgiven me for quietly disappearing that last morning,” he wrote sheepishly. “I awakened with all kinds of little guilt complexes for not being in school.” (Romney was belatedly taking courses to earn his high school diploma.)
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The following June, as Romney packed for his first trip to Europe, Bernstein was in Holland concluding another tour. Bernstein regretted that they would pass each other on the Atlantic but hoped Romney would “love Europe as much as I have.” From Paris in late July, Romney sent a lively report of Alice Delamar’s Bastille Day party at her Left Bank apartment. He persuaded Delamar and others to attend Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias. ”Afterward,” he wrote in triumph, “we went to Les Halles for snails—and all of the [Les Mamelles] themes you had played me kept running through my head, and Alice boastfully told the table that you … had played it for me a year ago.”
Throughout 1948, they kept missing each other by a few hours. Just before flying to Israel to conduct, Bernstein tried phoning Romney but learned he had just enrolled at the University of Virginia. “But it’s good to know you are safely ensconced in the sheltered halls of old Virginia,” he wrote, “studying, and, I presume, making love like a beaver.” On Virginia letterhead, Romney urged Bernstein to return from Israel via Paris, so he could look up someone with whom Romney had had a brief fling—Sergio Matta, brother of Chilean artist Roberto Matta and “an old friend of your Felicia.”
Romney’s move to Charlottesville curtailed their opportunities to meet. In the winter of 1949, Bernstein guest-conducted the Pittsburgh Symphony on its four-week concert tour of Southern states. “It would be fun to have a shady, rainy rendezvous in the South,” he wrote Romney. He thought that Roanoke, where the orchestra would perform on March 2nd, would work best. “It will be great fun to see you again,” he wrote. “Do plan to stay overnight.” Bernstein had been working feverishly on his symphonic Age of Anxiety before its scheduled April 1949 world premiere in Boston. He completed the orchestrations while on the road with the Pittsburgh Symphony.
Bernstein’s imprint stayed with Romney his entire life. When Romney was eighty and living in Albany, a friend took him to Manhattan to tour his old stomping grounds, and he enthusiastically pointed out the Dakota on Central Park West as one of Bernstein’s homes. Although their affair flew under biographers’ radar, Romney’s act of bringing The Age of Anxiety to Bernstein’s attention and encouraging him to base a symphonic work on it is acknowledged in program notes accompanying its performances. After Bernstein conducted the New York premiere in 1950, Romney told him: “The Age of Anxiety means something special for me—you may recall I got to bring it to you for your birthday, August 1947.”
References
Burton, Humphrey. Leonard Bernstein. Doubleday, 1994.
Peyser, Joan. Bernstein: A Biography. Beech Tree Books, 1987.
Rorem, Ned. Knowing When to Stop: A Memoir. Simon & Schuster, 1994.
Secrest, Meryle. Leonard Bernstein: A Life. Knopf, 1994.
Simeone, Nigel, ed. The Leonard Bernstein Letters. Yale University Press, 2013.
Val Holley, an independent historian living in Manhattan, is the author of Frank J. Cannon: Saint, Senator, Scoundrel. This article was adapted from the forthcoming book Slouching Towards Gotham: A Gay Mormon Example (University of Utah Press).
