The marriage of Costa Rican actress Felicia Montealegre and orchestra leader Leonard Bernstein: he left her to live with her boyfriend and returned to her when she was diagnosed with cancer
Details Published: Monday, December 25, 2023 5:52 p.m. Written by the editorial team
Felicia Montealegrea Costa Rican-born actress, and Leonard Bernstein, an American composer, pianist and conductor, met at a party in New York.
It was 1946, a few years after Montealegre had come to the city with dreams of pursuing a career as an actress.
At the time, Bernstein's name was on the rise, having been named associate conductor of the New York Philharmonic and making his debut as principal director in 1943 with a program that made headlines in the United States.
In 1976, the director recognized his homosexuality and they separated. Until she was diagnosed with lung cancer.
A successful and committed marriage
Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre married on September 10, 1951. Although she was conscious of her relationships with men, the couple had three children and lived together without complications for 25 years, the most fruitful in the composer's musical career.
From separation to reunion
Despite the complicity and support between Leonard and Felicia, the Bernstein-Montealegre tandem finally fell apart in 1976.
The director decided to openly acknowledge his homosexuality and start a new life with Tom Cothran, the musical director of the classical department of a station in San Francisco. However, when Felicia was diagnosed with lung cancer a year later, Leonard decided to return to her side and accompany her until her death on June 16, 1978.
BBC Mundo presented the following article about the story of Felicia Montealegre and Leonard Bernstein
The actress Felicia Montealegre went down in history with her role as the perfect partner of the legendary Leonard Bernstein.
As the New York Times noted 45 years ago when announcing her death: “Although she was a mainstay of acclaimed dramas on television and won critical acclaim on the stage, she gained notoriety as the elegant wife of the director and composer and as…hostess in New York.
She eclipsed her husband's light because he excelled like no other in conducting the best orchestras with a unique expressiveness; In addition, he was a great musical popularizer whose teaching was masterful, a renowned pianist and a versatile composer whose works include the Broadway musical West Side Story and “Love Without Barriers.”
This relationship between Montealegre and Bernstein, which began when he was in the early stages of his musical career and she was an aspiring actress, is the focus of the film “Maestro,” which Netflix recently released and in which the role of Felicia is played by the English actress Carey Mulligan.
But to know the real Montealegre, one must resort to the remaining recordings of works in which she appeared and the countless photos of the person who was called “the most beautiful woman in Chile”.
Or the numerous articles commenting positively and negatively on their activities, from travel to campaigns in defense of human rights.
However, much of her personality has been mentioned only in passing in what has been written about Bernstein's life and work.
By collecting those fragments of Montealegre that remained in her husband's archives and, above all, by rescuing the characteristics of her personality preserved in the couple's private letters, a portrait emerges, albeit still somewhat diffuse.
It shows a Latin American woman who was not only a wife, mother, actress and activist, but also an intellectually and emotionally sophisticated woman who quickly understood what took many years.
San Jose, Santiago and New York
Felicia María Josefa de Jesús Cohn Montealegre was born in 1922 in San José, Costa Rica.
She was the second of three daughters of Clemencia “Chita” Montealegre, one of Costa Rica's most powerful families, and Roy Elwood Cohn, an American mining engineer who came from an Eastern European Jewish family.
Shortly after her birth, her father was appointed director of the American Smelting and Refining Company in Chile, so she and her sisters Nancy and Madeleine grew up in Santiago and were educated at a British nuns' school.
She always dreamed of becoming an actress and living in the United States, so at the age of 21 she went to the embassy of her father's home country to swear an oath of allegiance to that country.
He convinced his parents to let him go to New York by telling them that he would devote himself to classical music: his teacher would be none other than Claudio Arrau, one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century.
In fact, he took lessons from the great Chilean, but since his arrival in Greenwich Village in 1944 he has devoted himself entirely to acting.
He studied theater with the important acting teacher Herbert Berghof and made his Broadway debut in 1946.
In the same year she met the man of her life.
Meeting and reunion
Arrau and Montealegre had more than just Chile in common: they were born on the same day, February 6th.
To celebrate his 43rd and 24th birthdays, the pianist threw a party and invited Bernstein, with whom he had recently played Brahms' D minor concerto in New York.
She had already seen him do what had made him famous overnight three years earlier: the masterful conduct of an orchestra.
But that day they met and liked each other immediately.
So much so that they got engaged within a few months. But before a year had passed, they regretted it and said that they were not ready to get married.
Montealegre continued to try to establish himself as an artist, but although he managed to get sporadic jobs, he sometimes had difficult times.
In a letter to Bernstein written from California on February 6, 1947 (a year after their meeting), he wrote:
“Thank you for your check. Montealegre's great career has completely stalled: I am seriously considering a return, defeated but healthy! The only problem is that I won't get a job in New York either! Oh shit”.
However, her luck changed in 1949, the year she appeared in ten teledramas and was named the most promising female actress in Motion Picture Daily's TV fame poll.
She also had a romantic relationship with actor Richad Hart, with whom she acted in several plays.
This love story ended abruptly when Hart died in her arms of a coronary artery blockage in January 1951 at the age of 35.
Months later she met Bernstein again and things were the same as they had been four years ago, so they married in September of that year.
In 1952 she gave birth to her first daughter, Jamie.
He returned to work a month later and played several leading roles on Broadway throughout that decade.
In 1955 she gave birth to her son Alexander; Nina was born in 1962.
Since 1957, Montealegre has also appeared as a narrator in classical music concerts and also in operas, collaborating with the best conductors and receiving critical acclaim.
Her charm was a great advantage for her husband's career, especially on his international tours with the New York Philharmonic, among which a historic tour of 21 Latin American cities in 1958 stands out.
However, the couple was not entirely conventional.
Bernstein tested the sound of the orchestra with Montealegre in Milan in 1955 from the stalls of the Teatro Nuovo.
The letter
Things weren't so easy behind closed doors.
There was love and respect between Montealegre and Bernstein, which is also documented by letters and anecdotes from their lives.
But one of these letters is particularly revealing.
It is from her to him and has no date, but is believed to have been written in late 1951 or 1952, shortly after the wedding.
“If I seemed sad today when you left, it was not because I felt abandoned in any way, but because I was left alone to face myself and all the chaos that is our married life.
“I thought a lot and came to the conclusion that it wasn't a disaster after all.
“Firstly, we are not sentenced to life imprisonment; nothing is truly irrevocable, not even marriage (although I used to think so).
“Second, you are gay and may never change; you don't admit the possibility of a double life, but if your peace of mind, your health, your entire nervous system depend on a certain sexual pattern, then what can you do?
“Third: I am ready to accept you as you are, without being a martyr or sacrificing myself on the altar of LB (It turns out that I love you very much; this may be a disease and if so , what better remedy is there?).
“Let’s try to see what happens when you can do whatever you want, but please without guilt or confession!”
“The feelings you have for me will be clearer and easier to express: our marriage is not based on passion, but on tenderness and mutual respect.”
She adds that she doesn't regret marrying him: “Let's relax knowing that none of us are perfect and forget that we are HUSBAND AND WIFE with such tense capital letters, it's not like that terrible!”
“When I read that, it blew my mind,” her daughter Jamie told NPR in 2013. “Because in a way she sacrificed herself on that altar, you could say.”
And she repeated it ten years later, accompanied by her brothers, in a CBS interview about the film “Maestro.”
“I feel like he needed everything to keep going. “It was very difficult for her and I think in some ways it contributed to her untimely death.”
However, Alexander disagreed with his sister.
“I would not go so far. “I think he probably regretted a lot of things in hindsight,” he said.
But he assured: “He had a rich and wonderful life, an almost wonderful marriage and a lot of love.”
“They obviously loved each other with all their hearts. They never fought before us. We never saw darkness. “They kept everything very neat and pretty well hidden.”
Jamie himself had told PBS in 1997 that “they were really good friends and that's probably the most important thing in the long run.”
“They could do what they enjoyed together, they read the same books, they went to the theater, they were interested in what each other thought, and they laughed together. That probably holds a marriage together more than passion.”
party
In addition, Montealegre and Bernstein shared left-wing politics and concerns about social change.
And on issues of social activism, she was the one who paved the way.
In 1963 she was the first president of the women's division of the American Civil Liberties Union; In 1967 she co-founded the pacifist organization “Otra Madre por la Paz”.
Montealegre also worked for Amnesty International, including behind the scenes in Chile during the political unrest of the 1970s.
In 1972, she was arrested at an anti-Vietnam War protest in Washington, DC.
And that's just one example.
But there was an event that threatened to destroy Montealegre's role as an activist and push all her cultural and political contributions into the background.
It was a meeting he organized at his residence in 1970 to raise money for the legal fees of the Panther 21, a group of Black Panther members accused of plotting to blow up locations in the city and attack police to have.
They were acquitted in 1971 after the longest and most expensive trial in New York state history.
The event at the Bernstein House inspired journalist Tom Wolfe to write a scathing article published in New York Magazine entitled “That Party at Lenny.”
Wolfe mocked Manhattan's progressive elites for their support of the Black Panthers, arguing that the contrast between their lifestyle and the causes they supported was too stark to be a real show of solidarity.
It also weakened political loyalties between blacks and Jews.
He did not describe Montealegre as a dedicated activist, but rather reduced her to a “beautiful lady with that rare polished beauty” who greeted the Black Panthers with her “tango smile” and served them appetizers that were too sophisticated for them.
She noted that the domestic workers were Latin American (which Montealegre decided to do so that her children would grow up speaking Spanish) and stated that she ran the so-called “Spic and Span Employment Agency.”
Noting that they weren't the only rich people supporting social causes, he labeled the trend “radical chic,” depriving it of any value.
The Bernstein residence was then demonstrated and the family received hate mail.
Years later, Leonard Bernstein's FBI file revealed that it was the same FBI that wrote the letters and organized agents to foment the protests.
See you later and goodbye
Montealegre continued her activism as well as her activities as a mother, wife, hostess, actress, singer and even an amateur painter.
But her husband had changed.
As more people began to be more open about their sexuality after the Stonewall riots in 1969, Bernstein also wanted to live more openly as a gay man.
In 1976, the couple announced a trial separation with “the hope of reconciliation.”
Bernstein moved to California to live with Tom Cothran, the music director of a classical radio station in San Francisco, with whom she had fallen in love in 1971.
Shortly after their breakup, Montealegre was diagnosed with lung cancer.
When Bernstein found out about this, he returned and cared for her until her death on June 16, 1978 at the age of 56.
Bernstein never fully recovered from the loss.
“He was heartbroken,” said his friend, the violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin.
Source: BBC World and Vanity Fair Magazine
