1918
The Letter
Leonard Bernstein is born, and Felicia Montealegre marries him with her eyes open
Leonard Bernstein was the most famous musician in America. He conducted the New York Philharmonic, wrote the music for West Side Story, and presented a television series that explained classical music to children and ran for fourteen years. He was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts on August 25, 1918.
He was also gay, at a time when an American public figure could not be, and the arrangement he came to was a marriage.
The woman was Felicia Montealegre, a Chilean-American actress. They met in 1946, got engaged, called it off, and married in 1951. She was not deceived about any of it. Early in the marriage she wrote him a letter setting out what she thought she was agreeing to, and it is a remarkably unsentimental document. “You are a homosexual and may never change,” she wrote. She said she was not going to pretend otherwise, that she was willing to live with it, and that if the arrangement stopped working neither of them was obliged to stay.
They were married for twenty-six years and had three children. He had relationships with men throughout, and she knew about them. Near the end of her life he moved out for a while to live with Tom Cothran, a music director he was involved with, and then came back. She died of cancer in 1978. He died in 1990.
That letter is now the most-quoted thing Felicia Montealegre ever wrote, and it is why people still argue about what their marriage was. What it was not is a woman being used as a cover story without her knowledge. She read the terms and agreed to them.
Smithsonian Magazine - the real history behind Bernstein and Montealegre