The movie Maestro is based on the lives of Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia Montealegre. Bernstein was a brilliant composer and conductor, extraordinarily charismatic, energetic and vivacious. He had a passionate appetite for life, was bisexual, and had many relationships with men throughout his marriage. Felicia knew, at least to some extent, what was happening and for many years tried to accommodate it while keeping their marriage and family together. Eventually the strain between them became too great. They separated for a time, Felicia developed cancer, Leonard returned to care for her, and she died at fifty-six.
I would like to look more closely at their story. Obviously, I am not talking about their personal truths, because we don’t have access to that, and it is their business. But based on the characters in the film, I want to look at the lessons we can learn from this engaging, complex relationship.
Even though Maestro has many positive highlights and beautiful moments, it certainly didn’t have a happy ending, a sense of healing, or movement toward something better. But we’re going to pull that out from the wreckage.
Felicia was portrayed as a devoted, kind and loving person who died far too young. Leonard, although enormously talented and charismatic, became more and more chaotic, increasingly dependent on drugs, moving frenetically from one young male sexual encounter to another.
On the surface, many people may watch the movie and see it as an unavoidable tragedy. Leonard could not help being a bisexual man, and although he, to some extent, tried to accommodate the social conventions of the time and love his wife, he was strongly driven by his personality and his sexual desires. Felicia, on the other hand, was very devoted to him, kept forgiving him and tried to make the marriage work, but essentially died of a broken heart, via cancer — broken hearts take many forms.
I don’t think that is the real story. Or the real lesson. If every one of Leonard’s lovers had been a woman instead of a man, it wouldn’t change the much more important take-home from the situation.
Leonard
Leonard had very strong positive and negative qualities. On the positive side, he was a brilliant composer and conductor. He had extraordinary energy. He was vivacious, charismatic and passionate. He brought a huge amount of life wherever he went and reached out to many people wholeheartedly. But he was also self-centred and frenetic. He believed himself to be very loving, but much of what looked like love was fear and desperation. He couldn’t bear being alone. He didn’t even close the toilet door because he didn’t want to be by himself. He needed a constant stream of people, stimulation, sexual encounters, music, activity and eventually drugs.
So although he did not become physically sick in the way Felicia did, he was sick emotionally and energetically. He became increasingly unhappy, guilty, and torn apart by his own life.
Felicia
Felicia was kind, gentle, and gracious. She knew Leonard was extraordinary and probably felt that he was much more “important” and exciting than she. She accepted — and no doubt, at first, welcomed — the role of being the secondary person in the marriage.
She tried to accommodate Leonard’s dalliances because she wanted to keep him and their marriage, and also because of societal programming around relationships. She turned a blind eye to his relationships with men as long as he stayed sufficiently present as a husband and father. In a way, she was trying to meet him halfway.
But she was slowly dying of a broken heart. The heart does not listen to our logical compromises. It listens to what we believe in our deepest self. The mind may negotiate and rationalise, but the heart beats to emotion, not compromise.
Imagine
Now, I want you to imagine a very different story for them.
We know who Leonard is.
We know who Felicia is.
We know what happened.
But I want you to imagine a different outcome.
Move Away from the Pooping Bird
Imagine that somewhere along the way Felicia became really honest with herself. What if she recognised that she was profoundly unhappy and that the situation was slowly killing her?
At one point in the movie, Felicia says to Leonard, “There’s a saying in Chile about never standing under a bird that’s full of shit. And I’ve just been living under that fucking bird for so long, it’s actually become comedic.”
The thing is, she could have moved.
She didn’t have to stay living under the “fucking bird”.
Instead of trying to change the bird, she could have decided she didn’t want to live under it anymore.
She could have thought, “I want to be a bird too. I want to fly too. I want to live my own life.”
Instead of continuing to live under Leonard’s shadow, she could have rearranged her life so she wasn’t just a wife, mother, and support system, but someone creating something that made her happy on her own.
That wouldn’t have meant becoming selfish. Putting yourself at the centre of your own life is not selfish. We are responsible first for ourselves.
She had been living under the bird for so long that she probably didn’t even know what that looked like. But she could have started, and she would have found out. She could have put more energy into whatever she felt drawn to. Many middle-aged and older people suddenly realise they have spent decades without really knowing who they are, and at first it can feel foreign to start asking themselves what they actually want to do. But doing the thing is what makes the path. Countless people have done the same thing.
Second, and very importantly, Felicia could have been much more honest with Leonard about what was happening between them. Obviously, this would have been a two-way conversation. As painful as it can be for couples to speak truthfully, honesty itself is a positive step forward, whether the relationship continues or ends in separation. The more honest people are with each other, while still showing care, the more respect they will have for each other and the outcome of the relationship. It will automatically become clear what the best course is.
Sometimes one person tries to be honest, but the other isn’t willing. Isn’t that important to know? It shows that the relationship isn’t really based on a willingness to communicate. It may simply be based on the other person wanting their needs met and believing that’s all that matters. Well, that is also important to know.
Through honest communication, Felicia and Leonard may have reached an arrangement where they stayed together, but he was free to do as he wished and she was free to do as she wished. They might have agreed that he could have sexual encounters as long as he was honest about them. Perhaps they could have decided it was fine as long as nothing outside the marriage became serious. Perhaps Felicia would have formed her own relationships. Perhaps Felicia and Leonard might have lived together some of the time and separately some of the time. Perhaps as she built more and more of a life for herself, Felicia would have become so interested in it that she eventually decided to leave. They could have mutually agreed to separate but remain close friends.
Or perhaps the challenges of the relationship might have helped both Felicia and Leonard to grow in such a way that they no longer had the same problems. There may have been more harmony between them, more peace in their lives, less neediness, less franticness, more honesty and, ultimately, more genuine love.
Anything could have happened.
The point is that Felicia would have stopped waiting for Leonard to change, waiting like a brokenhearted victim in a love tragedy. She would have taken her happiness into her own hands and built a life that let it blossom, whether Leonard was in it or not.
Towards the end of the story, when she became mortally ill, there was another grand opportunity. Leonard had left and was living with another man, and then when Felicia became sick, he came home.
It often happens that when people develop a life-threatening illness, they finally find the courage to change the life they were previously too frightened to change. Felicia could have done that.
She could have said, “No. Don’t come home simply because I’m sick. That isn’t what I want. I want to remake myself. I want to use whatever time I have to make my own life.”
Although we cannot know when someone’s time is up, countless people have changed the course of so-called fatal illnesses by changing the underlying beliefs that created the illness in the first place.
Stop Running, Stand Still
Now let’s imagine a different scenario for Leonard.
Imagine that instead of continuing to run from himself, he began to notice that he was feeling worse and worse, that he was becoming more guilty, more divided, more desperate and miserable. Part of him wanted complete freedom. He wanted his sexual encounters. He wanted his music. He wanted excitement and stimulation. But another part of him wanted the love and security of his wife, his children and his family.
On the surface, it looked like an impossible situation: as though he couldn’t have both, and as though it wasn’t his fault he wanted both. But this is not about fault. It is about understanding ourselves. It is about understanding why we feel the way we do, and how we can build our lives so we can truly get what we want without hurting anyone, and, in fact, in a way that creates happiness for other people as well as ourselves.
Leonard could have stopped running and looked honestly at what his life was doing to him. Even if he completely ignored what it was doing to Felicia, he could have looked at what it was doing to him. He was miserable and depressed. He was taking drugs to numb what he felt. He was hurting people. He wasn’t only hurting Felicia. Think of all the lovers he had. Many of those men may have believed he loved them and been heartbroken when he moved on so quickly. Most of all, he was hurting himself.
He could have asked why he was so frightened of being alone. Why did he need constant input from others? Why did he continually need new lovers? Why did he need drugs? Why was someone who supposedly loved people so passionately leaving so much hurt behind him?
He could have made an honest decision about what he actually wanted.
Perhaps he would have decided, “I don’t want a normal married life. I want the freedom to have multiple sexual liaisons.”
There is nothing inherently wrong with making that decision. But then you have to tell the person you are married to.
You have to say, “This is the life I want. Are you happy to live with that?”
You don’t keep people you supposedly love in a situation where they are constantly hoping that one day you will change, when you already know that you don’t want to. Don’t do that to them. Don’t do it to yourself.
A Perfect Match
Felicia and Leonard seemed to have completely different problems. Felicia was abandoning herself by making another person the centre of her life. Leonard was abandoning himself by running away from who he was. She disappeared into him. He disappeared into other people, sex, music, drugs, excitement and activity.
But in a sense, they were a perfect match. Not in the conventional romantic sense, but in the evolutionary sense. Each reflected back to the other exactly what they needed to grow.
Leonard was the perfect opportunity for Felicia to understand that she had to put her own value first, create a life of her own and stop living underneath the bird. Felicia, in turn, was the perfect opportunity for Leonard to understand what love really was. He didn’t need to become heterosexual, conventional or sexually restrained. He needed to be honest about the effect he was having on himself and others.
The story could have turned out very differently.
