It is already being tipped as the film that could earn Carey Mulligan her first Oscar. But last week’s release of the first trailer for Maestro – about the life of legendary West Side Story composer Leonard Bernstein – also sparked global outrage because lead actor Bradley Cooper used a large prosthetic nose to play the Jewish music icon.
Cooper, who is not Jewish, was accused of playing off a stereotypical anti-Semitic “Jewface” trope, though Bernstein’s three children released a statement in support of the film saying, “Bradley chose to use makeup to reinforce his likeness and we are fine with that. We’re also sure our father would have been fine with it too.’
But while the feud dominated the headlines, it’s Mulligan’s performance as Bernstein’s long-suffering wife Felicia Montealegre that has Hollywood buzzing. The 38-year-old Londoner has been nominated for an Oscar twice – for An Education in 2010 and Promising Young Woman in 2021 – but has yet to win.
Last night, a major studio producer told the MoS, “The Jewface controversy may hurt Bradley’s chances, but everyone who has seen the film is thrilled with Carey’s performance. It’s powerful, poignant and incredibly moving.’
Maestro, which hits theaters in November and streams on Netflix in December, explores the complicated private life of one of America’s greatest composers. A child prodigy, at age 40, Bernstein became the youngest-ever Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, producing critically acclaimed classical scores in addition to Broadway hits such as Candide and his greatest success, West Side Story.
Maestro is about the life of legendary West Side Story composer Leonard Bernstein (right)
The trailer sparked a global outcry because star Bradley Cooper used a large prosthetic nose (pictured) to play the Jewish music icon
The passionate and flamboyant Bernstein, who died in 1990 at the age of 72, has been praised by critics, with the New York Times declaring him “one of the most wonderfully gifted and versatile musicians of the 20th century.”
By the time he met Chilean actress Montealegre in 1946, he had already engaged in numerous homosexual affairs, including with composer Aaron Copland and a young Israeli soldier named Azariah Rapoport, to whom he wrote a passionate letter declaring, “I can’t quite believe i should have found all the things i wanted in one. It changed everything.’
But while his sexuality was widely known in the music world, it probably would have ended his career if it had gone public at the time. “Lenny didn’t have the option of getting out,” a friend would later say. “He grew up in a time when being openly gay was not an option.”
Montealegre nevertheless fell “madly in love” and pursued him relentlessly for years. His contributor to West Side Story, Arthur Laurents, said, “Lenny was a gay man who got married. He wasn’t confused at all. He was just gay.’
But Maestro tells a much more compelling story.
Bernstein, who once admitted that he needed women for emotional support “but men for sex,” developed a deep “loving friendship” with Montealegre, and the couple married in 1951. They had three children together, none of whom had any idea that their father gay until they grew up and discovered a letter written by their mother shortly after her marriage.
“You are gay and may never change,” she had written.
“I am willing to accept you as you are. Our marriage is not based on passion but on tenderness and mutual respect.’
The couple agreed that while she would play the dutiful wife – the consummate hostess who staunchly supported her husband and career – he would never humiliate her with his homosexual excesses.
But by having sex with a lover in the hallway of the couple’s Connecticut home while his wife sat a few feet away in the living room, it was clear he couldn’t keep their covenant.
His eldest daughter Jamie wrote a memoir revealing that her father would try to kiss everyone on the lips, even his own children. “It was kind of a litmus test that he liked to fire at people. My dismay was tempered by knowing that he had done it to so many others. Dad’s tongue intrusion was less a trigger for regulation and more for tired eye rolls.”
Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan while filming Maestro in Central Park
Leonard Bernstein with his fiancée, actress Felicia Montealegre in 1946
Bernstein’s attempt to juggle his double life took its toll. In desperation, he underwent psychoanalysis by a psychiatrist who specialized in “curing gay men of their inversion.” Jamie describes Bernstein as a “dazzling light” that enchanted every room he entered. In her memoir, she recalls growing up in a home full of actors, musicians, and artists, including Woody Allen, Lauren Bacall, Richard Burton, and Stephen Sondheim.
Bernstein finally left home in 1976 after his wife discovered him in bed with Tom Cothran, a music scholar several years his junior. She cursed him, screaming, “May you die like a lonely old queen!”
But Bernstein returned to the family home less than a year later when Montealegre was diagnosed with lung cancer. He nursed her until her death in 1978.
Bernstein was racked with guilt, believing that the stress of his double life caused his wife’s fatal illness.
Plagued by depression, he wrote one of his most famous pieces, Massa, with the lyrics: ‘What I say I do not feel, what I feel I do not show, what I show is not real, what is real I don’t know.’
Jamie said, “He was in such serious emotional conflict all the time…I think he was suffering from the fact that his marriage and his family weren’t enough, that he needed something else that he couldn’t achieve.”
The film stars American actor Gideon Glick Cothran, whom Bernstein continued to romance during his wife’s illness and after her death. Jamie said: ‘As often happens in families, these things are hard to talk about. In those days it was all very muted. So we didn’t sit down and talk about it exactly, but we sort of came to a mutual understanding that this thing was happening around us.”
Cothran died of AIDS in 1987 and Bernstein died of a heart attack three years later, at the age of 72.
Jamie said finding her mother’s letter, in which Montealegre admits she knew about her husband’s sexuality, “clarified everything.”
She said, “To know that her eyes were wide open about this marriage and what she was getting into, that was an amazing thing to find out.” It said a lot about our mother that she would write this letter to our father and say, ‘Look, you know I get it. It’s complicated. But let’s do this because we love each other.” ‘
The Bernstein family would have fully cooperated in the film in which Steven Spielberg is one of the producers. “It’s a great movie and Carey Mulligan shines,” the Hollywood source said. Carey brings everything to the table.
“If she’s not on stage with an Oscar at the next Academy Awards, there’s no justice in Hollywood.”