Growing up with my dad, Leonard Bernstein
The Times
October 6, 2024
Interview: The composer’s daughter Jamie shares memories of her childhood and Bradley Cooper’s film Maestro as the Royal Opera House stages her father’s operas for the first time
When she was 12, Jamie Bernstein came to London with her parents, Leonard and Felicia, and her two siblings. It was the Swinging Sixties, Beatlemania was everywhere, and the family, arriving for the premiere of her father’s Chichester Psalms, stayed at the Savoy hotel.
“It was so glamorous and our dad had the childlike sensibility to share his own enthusiasm with us,” Jamie, 72, says. Leonard Bernstein’s eldest daughter, an author and film-maker, is speaking to me from her garden in Connecticut. “He was running around the suite in glee, ‘Look at the water pressure — this gigantic bathtub can fill up in a minute and a half!’ My brother and I pretended to be a dance line, doing the can-can between the mirrors.”