I am one of the generation that can remember Leonard Bernstein as an almost ubiquitous figure on television in the 1950s. The CBS Sunday cultural program Omnibus featured Bernstein’s lecture/performances of classical music. The NBC Opera Theatre presented his one-act opera Trouble in Tahiti (later incorporated into his one full-length opera, A Quiet Place). CBS television produced a full-length version of Wonderful Town, with a brilliant score by Bernstein with Betty Comden and Adolph Green lyrics. There was also his fine score for the film On the Waterfront. Excerpts from his musicals Candide and West Side Story were sung on variety shows. “Tonight” from West Side Story was the theme song of Garry Moore’s nighttime variety show. In 1957, Bernstein became the first American-born Music Director of the New York Philharmonic. His Young People’s Concerts with the Philharmonic were also televised. Unlike most conductors, Bernstein was young and telegenic. And boy did he love to talk! He basked in his celebrity.

For all this exposure and success, Leonard Bernstein’s career and life were complicated. Shortly after his sensational last-minute debut with the New York Philharmonic in 1943, he wrote a ballet score, Fancy Free, choreographed by his friend Jerome Robbins that was turned into a hit Broadway musical, On the Town. This was followed by a couple of Broadway hits, Wonderful Town (1953), and West Side Story (1957). Candide (1956) was a Broadway flop that, with much revision, has become a staple of opera houses. Other works for the theatre had more checkered histories. Mass, written to open the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, was dubbed “Mess” by one critic. Unlike his hero, Gustav Mahler, also once Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, who famously said “My time [as a composer] will come” (and it did!), Bernstein’s classical works haven’t had a long shelf life. 

            Like Mahler during his lifetime, Bernstein was better known as a conductor than as a symphonic composer. His podium choreography could be distracting. His interpretations of works could be overwrought. In the seventies, he went through a period of choosing the slowest possible tempi. A soprano friend who was in the chorus of his recording of Carmen told me that he was stoned through much of the recording process, which may explain why his Carmen sounds more like Wagner’s Parsifal than Bizet. The one thing you could say is that Bernstein performances were never dull, never on automatic pilot like those of a recently retired Music Director of the CSO could be.

            Perhaps most important, he was a great music educator. He gave a serious of presentations on the classy CBS television program, Omnibus, then hosted the famous New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts, many of which were televised. Bernstein made serious music enjoyable for people who had once found it forbidding. He was the Julia Child of classical music.

            He was also a larger-than-life public figure and buddy of people like Jackie Kennedy. Even there, he made gaffes, like the notorious cocktail party he threw for the Black Panthers, cleverly skewered by Tom Wolfe in his classic essay, “Radical Chic.”

             Like everything else about him, Bernstein’s sex life was larger than life. He lived the life of many gay men at the time. When one of his mentors, Serge Koussevitsky, told him that no unmarried conductor would be music director of a major orchestra (not mentioned in the film Maestro), he realized he needed a wife (Ironically, his predecessor at the New York Philharmonic, Dimitri Mitropoulos, was an unmarried gay man.). So Bernstein had a highly publicized marriage to Chilean actress Felicia Monteleagre, during which he had many liaisons with men. Felicia always knew about her husband’s sexual orientation but expected respect and discretion. When in the 1970s Bernstein broke the rule about discretion and paraded about with his young lover-collaborator Tommy Cothran, Felicia demanded that Bernstein choose between her and Tommy. He chose Cothran, but went back to his wife to nurse her through her cancer until she died in 1979. After that, he had more relationships with young men. Despite his success, his daughter wrote that he always experienced self-loathing—a common problem for gay men at the time.

            Bradley Cooper’s flashy Maestro, available on Netflix, should be called ”Felicia”; for her story is the more arresting one and Carey Mulligan’s powerful performance is the heart of the film. We see in one exhilarating sequence how Felicia was literally swept away by Bernstein’s talent and charisma. He and she run off from a lunch with Boston Symphony maestro Serge Koussevitsky at Tanglewood and suddenly are on a stage where Fancy Free is being danced. The ballet morphs into the opening number of On the Town and Bernstein becomes one of the dancing sailors. Felicia is clearly enchanted. The enchantment dies when Felicia realizes the cost of living with the great Leonard Bernstein and, more important, the cost of living with a gay man who has never fully accepted his homosexuality. “Your truth is a fucking lie,” she screams. “You’re going to die an unhappy old queen.” How could she not be furious when Lenny holds hands with Tommy Cothran (Gideon Glick), while sitting right next to her in a box at the Kennedy Center. Late in the film, Felicia takes the blame for her unhappiness, “It was my arrogance to think I could survive on what he could offer,” and refers to her famous, philandering husband as “That child of mine.” Still, she can’t stop loving him. When Felicia gets cancer, Lenny becomes a devoted caregiver. Mulligan captures all Felicia’s moods brilliantly. It is no wonder that in the end credits she gets top billing.

            The Leonard Bernstein of Bradley Cooper and Josh Singer’s script is less clearly focused. There are some telling moments. In one scene, Lenny encounters his former lover David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer) and his wife and children in Central Park. Bernstein and Oppenheim silently walk downtown until Lenny stops, teary eyed. While the two men embrace, Bernstein wonders whether the people across the street recognize him. It’s not fear that they will see him embracing another man: it is fear that he might not be recognized. His love of being a public figure poisons all his relationships. He also knows that his need for attention—his public life—keeps him from the private activity of composing serious music.

            In an unnecessarily long sequence, we see Bernstein conducting the finale of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony. Granted, this is one of the greatest ten minutes in all music, but it seems to be here so that Cooper, coached by Yannick Nezet-Seguin, can do a fairly accurate imitation of Bernstein’s flamboyant conducting technique. It’s typical of Cooper’s performance, which is greatly, with the help of prosthetics, imitation. Oh, those prosthetics! Oh, that nose! In the final scenes, the old-age makeup so fascinated me that I couldn’t pay attention to anything else. Cooper got the voice and the gestures right. And, of course, the constant cigarette. Still, Carey Mulligan steals the show. 

            Cooper and Singer have filled the film with people from Lenny’s inner circle, but they flash in and out with little identification. At the party where Bernstein meets Felicia, librettists and lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green sing “Carried Away” from On the Town, but the writers assume that you know who they are. Other real-life figures flit in and out with barely any identification beyond first names. We hear somebody greet “Aaron.” Aaron Copland, the most famous American composer of the time, was a long-time friend and mentor to Bernstein, a very important person in his life. If you didn’t know that, you would have no idea who “Aaron” is. The same with Bernstein’s longtime collaborator, Jerome Robbins. Bernstein’s sister Shirley pops up when explaining Lenny is important to a scene. 

Even the serious romantic relationships get short shrift. Bernstein’s close friend and sometime lover David Oppenheim was a clarinetist who later worked with Bernstein in his capacity as producer for Columbia Records, Bernstein’s label. Bernstein suggested to Oppenheim that he marry comedienne Judy Holliday (the first of Oppenheim’s three wives). Bernstein met Tommy Cothran at a party in San Francisco, where Tommy was Program Director of a classical music radio station. Thus began a seven-year relationship in which Tommy was lover and also collaborator on Bernstein projects including Mass. The relationship ended when Felicia got sick. Tommy died of AIDS in 1986. In the film, Tommy seems to be nothing more than a Bernstein groupie. 

            The film switches back and forth from black-and-white to color. The black-and-white sections cover the 1940s when the couple met and fell in love. They look like a 1940s movie. When the story jumps into the 1970s and the crisis state of the marriage, the film goes to color. It is another flashy intervention. Cooper, like his actor-director predecessor Orson Welles, loves to show off. Of course, so did Leonard Bernstein. 

            Maestro does show that Bernstein was a gay man (or perhaps bisexual), who lived before such behavior was acceptable, when “normality” and acceptance meant having a wife and family. When daughter Jamie wants to know if the rumors about her father’s sexual proclivities are true, Felicia screams, “Don’t you dare tell her the truth.” Of course, he doesn’t, though it looks like the dishonesty pains him. Throughout, his marriage and family life, like everything else, seem to be performances. Bernstein did come out publicly when it became somewhat safer to do so—that crucial moment is left out of the film. Maestro doesn’t dig too deeply into the pain of gay men at the time. If you want to see what it was like to be gay in the 1950s, watch the MAX/Showtime series, Fellow Travelers, in which Matt Bomer brilliantly captures the anguish of a man in love with another man, but needing the social acceptance that comes with marriage and family. It is one of the most powerful performances of the past year.

            Maestro is Bradley Cooper’s Citizen Kane, his chance to show off as film-maker and as actor. Unlike Citizen Kane, there is no downfall here, unless you see the sight of an old man flirting outrageously with a cute young conducting student as sad. Leonard Bernstein was a more benign monster than Charles Foster Kane. He wanted to be loved by everyone, not feared. He also was capable of love—just not of only one person at a time.