My Time With a ‘Maestro’: Producer Howard Rosenman on “Very, Very Close” Relationship With Leonard Bernstein

Howard Rosenman made his way to a screening of Bradley Cooper’s Maestro at the Academy a few weeks back, and admits that before he took a seat, he really wanted to not like it.

The veteran producer (Father of the Bride, Call Me By Your Name) tried to sell a project based on the life and career of Leonard Bernstein years ago but “didn’t have the juice” to get it off the ground. But what Rosenman does have is close personal ties to the iconic composer, a man he says dramatically changed the course of his life — and then some. Instead of hating it, Rosenman, 78, tells The Hollywood Reporter that he was so floored by Cooper’s film that he couldn’t stop crying. “It’s a masterpiece,” he says.

The quick backstory. In 1967, Rosenman, who is Jewish, was in medical school in Philadelphia. Amid a rising conflict in Israel, he flew there to volunteer his services to support his people in the fight against Arab forces. “I knew that they would need medics because the thought was that so many people were going to be annihilated,” Rosenman says during a telephone interview. After a brief “basic training,” he traveled to the Gaza Strip when war broke out on June 5, 1967. “I worked in a medical field hospital for about six days. The war was over so quickly, and then I was transferred to the [Hadassah Medical Center] to fulfill the rest of my duty.”

Shortly thereafter, Bernstein traveled to Israel to conduct Gustav Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony at Mount Scopus on July 9, 1967 (a historic concert that is recreated in Cooper’s Maestro). Before the show, Bernstein visited with the volunteers. “He came right over to me and took one look at me and said, ‘Oh, my God, you look just like the guy I know who was my waiter at Discotheque in New York.’ I answered in Hebrew, saying, ‘Maestro, I was your waiter.’”

Bernstein was so taken by the surprise that he kissed Rosenman on the lips and offered him two tickets to the concert, Rosenman recalls. The encounter kicked off what would be a years-long relationship (despite a 27-year age difference). Asked to define their connection — was it was romantic, sexual or other? — the typically loquacious Rosenman is tight-lipped. “It was whatever. That’s all I’m going to say. We became close friends.”

He also became his assistant. Rosenman immediately accepted a gig working for Bernstein through the making of a documentary about him while he was conducting the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in Judea and Samaria. “Naturally, we got very, very close,” continues Rosenman, who has a memoir in the works that will be published by Regalo Books and distributed by Simon & Schuster next year. “He would say to me, ‘You should leave medical school and go into the arts. You’re such a great storyteller, you will never bow to the mistress of science.’ I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about.”

Rosenman resumed his studies in the fall of 1967, and he never forgot Bernstein’s advice. “I’ll never forget this moment, I was assisting in an amputation and I heard the Maestro’s voice saying, ‘You will never bow to the mistress of science,’ and so I decided to take a leave of absence. I went to New York and I called up Lenny Bernstein and told him that I listened to his advice.”

Bernstein promptly introduced Rosenman to Katharine Hepburn, who hired him as her assistant while she was making the Alan Jay Lerner Broadway musical Coco about the life of Coco Chanel. “I entered New York from medical school on such a high level thanks to Lenny that I thought my whole life would be spending time with all these geniuses, it was unbelievable,” Rosenman recalls of the time, during which he was a regular guest at Bernstein’s home for Shabbat dinners. “He lived on Park Avenue before moving to the Dakota and every Friday night, he would host these incredible Shabbat dinners with the entire world of Broadway, the entire world of classical music, the entire world of the social elite of New York. I was a kid, just 21, and there was Betty Comden, Phyllis Newman, Anthony Tudor and Isaac Stern. It was wild.”

Also pretty mind-blowing, Rosenman says, is the reaction he got when he told Bernstein and pals that he wanted to move to Hollywood to become a movie producer. “They patted me on the head and said, ‘Do you have a rich father or relatives in the business?’ I had nothing. But I went out to Hollywood and I started making movies.”

He kept in touch with Bernstein and his longtime wife, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein. Their relationship is the centerpiece of Cooper’s Maestro, which also shines a light on Bernstein’s dalliances with men. “He loved her gigantically,” Rosenman says of the marriage. “This was a major love affair. It’s just that he had other urges. I knew so many men in those days who were gay that were married with kids. It was the way things were done in those days. Everybody knew it, but everybody looked away because especially with Leonard and Felicia because everybody knew how much he loved her.”

Though Rosenman doesn’t say it, it’s clear how much he loved Bernstein. “He was a Don. He was a teacher, a polymath. He knew everything about everything. He knew about geography and history and science and math and music and art. I mean, I’m telling you, there was no one like him. It was overwhelming.”

He had the same feeling while watching Cooper’s film. Though he wanted to hate it, he was so moved by it that he’s now seen it twice. “It’s a masterpiece, just brilliant beyond belief. I’m so overwhelmed by the brilliance of it, the craft of it and all of the performances. Carey Mulligan is beyond the beyond and Bradley is so brilliant you can’t believe it. He got them both in such a big way. The way he lived as a tortured artist, the specificity of that, as well as dealing with his sexuality and the hundred other problems in his life. There was no one like him. He was a supernova and Bradley Cooper nailed it.”

The experience of seeing it has left him wistful. “I couldn’t stop crying both times that I saw it because I’m essentially mourning that period in my life, which was so brilliant and in Technicolor. There’s nothing like it. I miss Lenny. I miss Felicia. They were both beyond and I don’t know where I’m ever going to find anything like that ever again.”

Maestro premieres on Netflix on Dec. 20.