That time my dad, Leonard Bernstein, introduced us to The Beatles
Jamie Bernstein - Forward.com
August 25, 2021
Editor’s Note: Today, Aug. 25, 2021, would have been Leonard Bernstein’s 103rd birthday. In honor of that auspicious date, we are revisiting this excerpt from his daughter Jamie’s memoir.
The following is an excerpt from “Famous Father Girl,” by Jamie Bernstein. Copyright © 2018 by Jamie Bernstein. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
In February of 1964, halfway through my sixth-grade year, the Beatles came to America. By coincidence, Aunt Shirley was returning from a trip to England on the same day the Beatles were landing at the recently renamed John F. Kennedy Airport. When we went to pick Shirley up, the airport was still crawling with dazed teenage girls; the Beatles had landed a mere couple of hours earlier. On the drive back into town, Shirley revealed that she had originally been booked on the same Pan Am jet that the Beatles were on, but at the last minute had changed her flight to TWA because, she explained, they had this great new feature: a projector was set up at the back of the aisle and a screen up front, and they showed a movie. I was aghast: For this, Shirley had missed being on the same plane as the Beatles?
A few days later, the Beatles appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” — an event so seismic that Mummy and Daddy agreed to let us watch it during dinner. Alexander and I wheeled the little TV down the hallway from the library to the casino fancy dining room — the same TV on which we’d seen Jack Ruby shoot Oswald just a few months earlier. We fiddled with the antenna until the black-and-white picture lost most of its fuzz, and then watched history in the making once again.