Some of My Lives Read Online Free PDF Page B

that, I think only a handful of people might have come to the auditorium. I had been away from New York for twenty years and so was an almost unknown quantity.
    Lenny immediately took to my husband, John Russell, when he arrived from England. Typically, he wrote an eloquent paragraph for John’s book The Meanings of Modern Art . When John Russell and I were married, on May 24, 1975, Lenny was John’s witness; Aaron Copland gave me away; Philip Johnson gave the wedding. He had
arranged a little concert following the ceremony in his new sculpture gallery. And who led me in on his arm? My new husband? Not at all—Lenny Bernstein.
    Afterward, Lenny asked me, “Why didn’t you ask me to write a piece of music for your wedding?” “It never occurred to me; I wouldn’t have had the pretension,” I answered. A few days later a music manuscript arrived from Lenny.
    Â 
    For the Russells, R. + J.

    Meditations on a Wedding
    With love from Lenny, May 1975
    (Marked Andante con tenerezza [tenderness] followed by dolce … )

    So I own an unpublished Bernstein work.
    Whenever something important happened in my life, I always wanted Lenny around, and he was always there.
    I was given a French decoration in 1980 (Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres). I was told that I could have a few guests but that the ceremony had to start on time. I told Lenny, “I’m inviting you, but don’t come if you are going to be late.” He was notoriously late everywhere. When John and I arrived at the French consulate, there was Lenny, walking up and down in front of the entrance, cape flapping in the wind, pointing to his watch when he saw us to indicate he had arrived not only on time but ahead of us.
    When John’s book of essays Reading Russell was published some years ago, his publisher gave him a lunch in a private room at Le Cirque. Lenny was invited. We sat at the bar together before the tables were seated. “Do you remember ‘La Hija de Don Juan Alba’?” he asked me. More than thirty years had passed since we had heard it in Barcelona, and he remembered every word, in Spanish, and conducted me for a duet in his cigarette rasp and my feeble contralto.
    I was lecturing in Turkey for an American organization in 1990. John and I were cut off from the outside world for some time, so we did not get news of Lenny’s alarming deteriorating health.
    The day I got back to New York came the unbelievable headline:
Leonard Bernstein was dead (October 14). A heartbreaking note was that I found a telegram from Lenny apologizing for being late with my birthday greetings—my birthday is October 1—and sending love. It must have been one of the last things he did.
    We had a cloudless friendship. He inscribed one of his books to me with the affectionate nickname he had for me and added, “who has never given me anything but joy.” I could say the same about him.

Early Mexican Moments
    W hen I had met Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo at the Sinfónica rehearsal in Mexico City, they had invited me to go with them to the concert that night. I was to collect them at their house in a suburb called San Ángel.
    The house to which I went later that day in high expectation was two houses in one.
    There was a big blue cube for Diego and a rather smaller dark pink one for Frida, with a connecting bridge between them.
    It was designed and built by a young architect and painter called Juan O’Gorman. It was remarkably daring for its date.
    At that time, San Ángel was a countrified suburb in which sedate family houses stood in large leafy gardens. People who walked by the O’Gorman house must have said to themselves, “What on earth is it? Is it a factory? A ship that never went to sea? Why aren’t the stairs indoors, as they are everywhere else?”
    But to me the house seemed like a wonderland, and not least for the flamboyant welcome that I got from my