Excerpts from Include Me Out: My Life from Goldwyn to Broadway:
In the late 1950s, I had another musical experience with Lenny and Aaron. At Tanglewood, Lenny was conducting a performance of “Aaron’s Appalachian Spring with the New York Philharmonic. Aaron and I were sitting together in the back of the tent, and he whispered a running commentary on tempi and interpretation throughout the piece. His remarks were basic enough for me to understand and not too bitchy. It was the best time I’ve ever had at a concert.
Lenny knew I was going to the theater that evening. He asked if I would meet him later at his place for a midnight supper. I did, and it could not have seemed more right when he asked me to stay. I did. We had a couple of glorious days and nights together. He was as passionate and enthusiastic a lover as he was a conductor. Then real life intruded. I started work on Side Street. That meant that I was up at six A.M. and worked all day, and Leonard was rehearsing in the afternoons and conducting every evening. Carving out time to be together became more complicated, but we managed. It was very easy to be completely caught up with Leonard Bernstein. Charisma was not a word in vogue at that time, but it could have been coined for Lenny.
One night during my second week of filming, Lenny surprised me with a ticket to accompany him on his South American tour, which was to begin at the end of the month. He also told me that he had decided to put his engagement to Felicia Montealegre, the “Chilean pianist and actress, on hold. Both pieces of information came as a complete surprise to me. Nothing about any engagement had ever been mentioned, nor had we ever discussed our relationship as lasting beyond the present while I was working in New York. We had never been clandestine about being together. I’d assumed that Lenny and I were living completely in the now without a worry about the future.
I tried to explain why I couldn’t go with him to South America—my film, which was not finished, my contract to Goldwyn, which was far from finished … .
“Don’t you want to come? It will be terribly exciting. Think of all the beautiful places we can visit together, all the new people we will meet. We’ll be the toast of South America.”
“But, Lenny, it’s just not possible. I have a contract, and I’m in the middle of a film. It would be like you walking out on the New York Philharmonic in the middle of a concert.”
A man of his talent and powers of persuasion didn’t get where he was by ever accepting “It’s just not possible” as an answer. He got there by refusing to accept the impossible, but he eventually agreed that he had been hoping to postpone the inevitable.
I returned to Hollywood to finish the film at MGM, and Lenny left for South America. Shortly after his tour ended, he and Felicia “were married. Our paths continued to cross for a number of years, and those occasions were always warm and affectionate. Our moment in time is one that will always stay with me..