The True Story Behind Leonard Bernstein's Marriage in 'Maestro'

Maestro, like many recent biopics about the great artists of our past, is more about the man than his art. The new Netflix film tracks the life of the great conductor Leonard Bernstein, but surprisingly sheds little light behind the making of his greatest works, Candide and West Side Story. Instead, Maestro—starring and directed by Bradley Cooper—focuses on Bernstein's complicated relationship with the many loves of his life. This includes, but certainly isn't limited to: music, his wife, Felicia Montealegre, and his various affairs.

In many ways, Maestro is exceptionally faithful to Bernstein's life. For starters, it was an open secret that he had extramarital relationships with men. In a letter to his clarinetist, David Oppenheim (played by Matt Bomer), he even suggested that it would be a good idea to marry a beard. Maestro alleges that the two friends and longtime collaborators also shared a relationship. The film may have inferred this through the letter's hint that Oppenheim second-guessed his marriage to singer Judy Holliday.

But after meeting at a party and having full awareness of Bernstein's struggles with his sexuality, actress Felicia Montealegre (played by Carey Mulligan) married him anyway. As she once wrote to him in a letter published alongside Oppenheim's in 2014's The Leonard Bernstein Letters, their marriage was "a bloody mess." Still, they two stayed married for over 25 years and had three children together, until Montealegre's death in 1978.

"You are a homosexual and may never change," she wrote at the time. "You don’t admit to the possibility of a double life, but if your peace of mind, your health, your whole nervous system depend on a certain sexual pattern what can you do?... I am willing to accept you as you are, without being a martyr... let’s try and see what happens if you are free to do as you like, but without guilt and confession." Montealegre also admits in the letter that she never regretted marrying Bernstein. She gave up her career as an actress to raise their family, and even converted to Judaism. "My mother was a fairly conventional lady and so she expected to be treated like one,” Bernstein's youngest daughter, Nina, told the London Times back in 2010. "The deal was that he would be discreet and that she would maintain her dignity."

All the while, Bernstein tried to hide his affairs from a deeply homophobic 1950s America. He sought advice from Aaron Copland (played by Brian Klugman), a fellow composer who was openly gay but still held a very private life. Russian conductor Serge Koussevitzky, one of Bernstein's mentors, allegedly urged the composer to marry Montealegre to conceal his private activities. In the film, Koussevitzky (played by Yasen Peyankov) goes even further—suggesting that Bernstein change his Jewish surname as well.

Maestro also details Bernstein's recurring affairs with music scholar Tom Cothran (played by Gideon Glick), with whom he would share many vacations in North Carolina. When his wife fell ill with lung cancer in the late '70s, Bernstein returned and stayed with her until her death. Even through all the fighting, resentment, and loose loyalties, many friends and family members affirm that Bernstein and Montealegre did share love for one another.

"They were really great friends and probably that counts for the most in the long run, that they could still make each other laugh," Bernstein’s daughter Jamie (played by Maya Hawke in Maestro) told PBS during an interview in 1997. "They could do things that they were interested in together, read the same books and go to the same theater and be interested in [what] one another has to say about those things, you know, I think that’s probably what keeps a marriage together more than, I don’t know, more than passion."

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