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…