Lenny’s Offspring Like the Nose

The New Yorker
November 13, 2023

Jamie, Alexander, and Nina Bernstein compare notes on “Maestro,” Bradley Cooper’s film about their dad.

The three children of Leonard Bernstein uphold their father’s legacy with waggish exuberance. In September, at the Venice première of “Maestro,” a new film depicting Bernstein’s fraught but loving relationship with their mother, the actress Felicia Montealegre, they gleefully air-conducted along to the end credits, in the irrepressible manner of their father. While the actors’ strike sidelined Bradley Cooper—the film’s director, co-writer, and star—the Bernsteins subbed in as the film’s unofficial mascots. They like to call themselves “the three-headed monster.”

“A former boyfriend of mine coined it,” Jamie, the eldest, said. “Because of all the noise and the carrying on and jokes.” Jamie (blond bob, voice like an oboe) is the memoirist—in 2018, she published “Famous Father Girl”—and the mouthpiece (“I’m a yakker”).

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