My sailing trip with Gore Vidal and Leonard Bernstein

A great argument over lunch – including plate smashing – to waltzing in the street with the author Jay Parini’s wife

As a child in the 50s, I was mesmerized by Leonard Bernstein whenever he appeared on television, as he often did, in the role of teacher, conductor, or enthusiast for classical music. Later I would listen again and again to a recording of West Side Story – one of the most riveting scores in Broadway history. Bernstein was, to me, an authentic hero of the arts, a man of passion and wide-ranging creativity, a kind of Picasso in the realm of music. So it caught my attention when Gore Vidal (a friend) called from Ravello one summer day in 1988 to ask if my wife and I would join him for a sail up the Amalfi Coast with “Lenny” and Howard Austen, Gore’s partner of many decades. We were, at the time, living in Amalfi itself, just down the hillside from Ravello. Lenny was trying to convince Gore (without success) to rewrite the book of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the only musical by Bernstein that had fallen flat. It had appeared on Broadway in 1976 and lasted for only seven performances. The composer, quite rightly, assumed that the problem lay with the book and libretto, not the music.

We met the next morning in the harbour, boarding an old motor launch that Gore often hired.

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