Bradley As Bernstein

On the town and on the set with the biopic version of Lenny.

- By Justin Davidson

THOUGH HE WAS born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Leonard Bernstein was always a New Yorker, from his first cigarette of the morning to his last dying day. More than 30 years after his death, he's ambling through Central Park in the person of Bradley Cooper, who is playing him in the forthcoming film Maestro. This term suggests an aloof European mandarin, but Bernstein invented a character that had barely existed before: the American conductor-pious, possessed, profane, political, histrionic, and defensive.

He was most famous for composing West Side Story, for conducting the New York Philharmonic, and for lecturing kids about sonata form on TV, but none of these was the key to his celebrity. A public figure from earliest adulthood, he bore the spotlight with casual ease. He was cool, with the masculine allure of a '50s movie star. He wore ordinary clothes like costumes: rolled-up shirtsleeves in his young hotshot days, turtlenecks in his leonine middle age. As the on-set photos suggest, Bernstein and his wife, Felicia Montealegre (played by Carey Mulligan), dressed for a walk in the park as if for a photo shoot.