Jamie Bernstein Recalls Life with ‘Lenny’ in ‘Famous Father Girl’

By Eddie Arruza - Chicago Tonight WTTW
July 26, 2018

Over the past year, the musical world has been commemorating the 100th birthday of the towering American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. (His actual centenary is Aug. 25.)

On Saturday, the Ravinia Festival will honor Bernstein with a performance of his monumental work entitled “Mass.” And on Friday, a much more intimate affair will take place at Bennett Gordon Hall with an evening of songs and stories called “Late Night with Leonard Bernstein,” as narrated by the conductor’s oldest daughter, Jamie.

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Jamie Bernstein
'He was high-brow, low-brow, every-brow!' – the genius of Leonard Bernstein

Interviews by Imogen Tilden, Fiona Maddocks - The Guardian
July 12, 2018

Composer, conductor, inspiration, FBI suspect … Leonard Bernstein was born 100 years ago this August, and this summer’s Proms will celebrate his work. Musicians, critics and his own family remember an astounding talent.

Jamie Bernstein: Bernstein the father
He was an incredibly attentive and affectionate father. Of course there were many prolonged absences when he was travelling, and sometimes I found it frustrating to share him with the rest of the world, but when he was at home he was always really present. We’d have big dinners and play word games and have proper family time, my parents, my younger brother and sister and I. He loved to share anything he was excited about, and that was everything from Lewis Carroll to Gilbert and Sullivan to vaudeville routines he remembered from his childhood.

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Jamie Bernstein
Daughter Finds Light in Bernstein’s Shadow

By Jonathan Kirsch - Jewish Journal
July 11, 2018

On the cover of “Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein” (Harper), we see a photograph of two people, one of them iconic and one whom most of us have never seen before.  There’s Leonard Bernstein, handsome and commanding, a conductor’s baton in his right hand, a wedding ring on his extended left hand. And then there’s a little girl seated in front of him as he puts an orchestra through its paces. She looks exquisitely bemused by all the goings-on around her. 

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Jamie Bernstein
Tanglewood, Tannery Pond, Taconic Music, Sevenars Shine

By Stephen Dankner - iBerkshires
July 11, 2018

Tanglewood enters its second week of classical programming with inspiring concerts in the Shed and in Ozawa Hall. As always, excellence is the watchword: from Leonard Bernstein’s delightful and brilliant comic opera "Trouble in Tahiti" to classic symphonic works of Mozart, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms and Wagner; from Bernstein's emotionally uplifting "Chichester Psalms" to a semi-staged performance of Puccini's "La bohème," Tanglewood hits all the high notes.

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Jamie Bernstein
"Famous Father Girl" Jamie Bernstein On Bernstein Centennial Events At Tanglewood

By Joe Donahue - WAMC
July 6, 2018

The composer of "On the Town" and "West Side Story," chief conductor of the New York Philharmonic, television star, humanitarian, and inveterate partygoer Leonard Bernstein was a massive celebrity during one of the headiest periods of American cultural life, and perhaps the most talented musician in American history.

To his eldest daughter, Jamie Bernstein, he was all that and more. She writes about her father in the new memoir, "Famous Father Girl."

She joins us to talk about the book, all of the international events celebrating Leonard Bernstein's Centennial this year -- including two very special events at Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts. She’s directing "Trouble in Tahiti" on July 12 and hosting the Young People’s Concert on August 10.

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Jamie Bernstein
Jamie Bernstein, her ‘Famous Father,’ and nothing to hide

By Zoë Madonna - Boston Globe
July 5, 2018

This centennial year has been packed with commemorations of conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s yearlong celebration of his works. As part of that, Jamie Bernstein, his filmmaking, concert-narrating eldest daughter, is directing a semi-staged performance of her father’s one-act opera “Trouble in Tahiti” on July 12 at Tanglewood. But one of this year’s remembrances is also personal: In her new memoir, “Famous Father Girl,” Jamie dishes out the details and explores the complications of growing up with one of the most famous and charismatic musicians of his generation.

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Jamie Bernstein
Daughter’s loving but unsettling portrait of Leonard Bernstein

By Sibbie O'Sullivan - The Washington Post
June 29, 2018

Let us now praise ordinary fathers, ones who don’t constantly smoke and drink, or French-kiss their daughters, or pound the table while yelling, “Everyone shut up but me.” An ordinary father who watches his daughter receive her diploma from Harvard instead of hanging out with the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. One who doesn’t show off “his cute teenage daughter” at discos.

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Jamie Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein's daughter tells Philly: My dad would love 'Hamilton' and be 'a little jealous'

By Peter Dobrin - Philadelphia Inquirer
June 28, 2018

The reputation of Leonard Bernstein — the starry composer, conductor, pianist, and educator — continues to be made and remade more than two and a half decades after his death. Right now, as the world celebrates the 100th year since his birth, aspects of the Bernstein story are found in more than two dozen biographies, photo books, collections of essays, and memoirs of and by him.

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Jamie Bernstein
Jamie Bernstein Reflects on ‘Exuberant’ Father

By Marissa Stern - Jewish Exponent
June 27, 2018

When children grow up with famous parents, inquiring minds often want to know: What was it like to grow up with [insert celebrity here]?

Jamie Bernstein has been asked this question a fair amount about her famous composer father, Leonard Bernstein, so she decided to give it a “long and juicier answer” by writing a memoir.

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Jamie Bernstein
Jamie Bernstein Reflects on ‘Exuberant’ Father

Marissa Stern - Jewish Exponent
June 27, 2018

When children grow up with famous parents, inquiring minds often want to know: What was it like to grow up with [insert celebrity here]?

Jamie Bernstein has been asked this question a fair amount about her famous composer father, Leonard Bernstein, so she decided to give it a “long and juicier answer” by writing a memoir.

She discussed her new book, Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein, at a talk at the Free Library on June 20 with The Philadelphia Inquirer’s classical music critic and culture writer Peter Dobrin.

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Jamie Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein Through His Daughter’s Eyes

By David Denby - The New Yorker
June 25, 2018 Issue

On the centenary of his birth, a memoir captures what it’s like being raised by a man with mythic successes and long-held secrets.

What happens if you are Cinderella and the prince turns out to be your father? Jamie Bernstein, Leonard Bernstein’s firstborn daughter, has written a memoir of her family, a family that her overwhelming dad—loving, inspired, and sometimes insufferable—dominated for decades. The author grew up wriggling inside a paradox, struggling to become a self when so much of her was defined by her brilliant parent. “Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein” (HarperCollins) is unique among classical-music memoirs for its physical intimacy, its humor and tenderness, its ambivalence toward an irrepressible family genius.

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Leonard Bernstein’s daughter reveals composer’s bathroom jokes

By Dalya Alberge - The Sunday Times
June 17, 2018

To the audiences who flocked to his concerts, Leonard Bernstein was one of the most brilliant composers and conductors of the 20th century, with West Side Story among his masterpieces.

To his eldest daughter, Jamie, he was “the man in the scratchy brown bathrobe who smelt of cigarettes” and loved to crack crude jokes about bodily functions.

Often Jamie would have preferred an ordinary dad. But in a memoir coinciding with the centenary of Bernstein’s 1918 birth to Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants in Massachusetts, she recalls her father as “matinee-idol handsome, madly charismatic, a superstar”.

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Jamie Bernstein
Book Review: 'Famous Father Girl': Window into a Legend

By Erica Miner - Broadway World
June 13, 2018

Jamie Bernstein has described her newly minted book,Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein (Harper Collins, ISBN-13: 978-0062641359), as "a love letter to my whole family".

It is a love letter filled with candid, disarmingly frank memories: an insider's view of what it was like to grow up as the eldest daughter of the most influential American musician of the 20th century: Leonard Bernstein, or "LB," as Jamie came to call him in her young adult years.

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Jamie Bernstein
Jamie Bernstein writes ‘Famous Father Girl’ memoir

By Tracee M. Herbaugh | AP - The Washington Post
June 13, 2018

“Famous Father Girl: a Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein” (Harper), by Jamie Bernstein

Private schools, a New England country home and socializing with the likes of President John F. Kennedy and family — this is what it’s like to grow up as the child of famed composer and musician Leonard Bernstein.

The maestro’s eldest daughter, Jamie Bernstein, has written a new memoir about her experience coming of age with her arguably eccentric and wealthy parents. The book, “Famous Father Girl,” is a name Jamie was given by a private school classmate.

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Jamie Bernstein
Jamie Bernstein Part 2: Reminding the World Who Leonard Bernstein Was

By Erica Miner - Broadway World
June 12, 2018

Erica Miner: Traveling the US narrating your Bernstein Beat concerts, you encountered many musicians who have "a personal story to tell" about your father: "a moment when they'd had a meaningful exchange...that they never forgot." For me, working with him at Tanglewood and the Met Opera were life-changing experiences. Do you still get this kind of reaction and sentiment from musicians you meet now, or are we all getting too old?

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Jamie Bernstein
BWW Interview Part 1: Jamie Bernstein Celebrates Remarkable Centennial

By Erica Miner - Broadway World
June 10, 2018

Of the countless celebrations commemorating the 100th anniversary of this musical icon’s birth, perhaps none is more heartfelt than his oldest daughter Jamie’s newly minted memoir, Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein. I caught up with Jamie during her whirlwind book-related travels to discuss the birth of her book—and to reminisce a bit about old times.

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Jamie Bernstein
Ahead of Father's Day, Michael Chabon and Jamie Bernstein dive into the gaps between dads and their kids

By Bob Hoover - The Dallas Morning News
June 8, 2018

These new books, one by the daughter of a famous dad, the other by the well-regarded son of a little-known man, explore this abyss with a mix of regret and hope but always with love for their complicated male parent.

Jamie Bernstein, who turns 66 this year, is the oldest of three children of Leonard Bernstein, the larger-than-life figure of America's classical and Broadway musical world. It's the centennial of his birth, hence this memoir.

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Jamie Bernstein
Summer’s Five Best Celebrity Memoirs

By Julia Vitale - Vanity Fair
May 2018

Retta eats a cockroach, Leonard Bernstein’s daughter Jamie remembers her dad’s presence on President Nixon’s “enemies list,” David Lynch believes that artists should never get married, and more...

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Jamie Bernstein
9 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in June

By Sarah Stiefvater - PureWow

​​​​​​​Leonard Bernstein’s oldest daughter’s memoir is an intimate look at her father’s life and features a supporting cast including the Kennedys, Mike Nichols, John Lennon, Lauren Bacall and more.

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Jamie Bernstein
Seven Books to Keep on Your Summer Reading Radar

By Erica Dreifus - Jewish Journal
May 24, 2018

In this centennial year of Leonard Bernstein’s birth — and a year in which Jewish American Heritage Month (May) has spotlighted Jewish contributions to American music — this memoir by the eminent composer/conductor’s eldest daughter is likely to hold wide appeal. (Consider reading it before Aug. 25, when Lenny would have celebrated his 100th birthday.)

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Jamie Bernstein