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Bernie was such a lovely and supportive friend and producer to me during my time at Lincoln Center and beyond. His family has always been so good to me. I am grateful for wonderful holiday parties and positive collaborations with Cora and Jenny as well. I will never forget a long and sensitive conversation we had on the occasion of my leaving his show (The Light in the Piazza) to do another (The Pajama Game). It was one of the most difficult decisions I have ever made. He came to my dressing room and told me that I had to follow my heart. He told me that I would be missed but also that I would be welcomed back. He spoke of the importance of allowing artists to grow and the hope that those artists might bring back that growth to benefit Lincoln Center. In a way, he didn't just give me permission to leave. He gave me a goal to achieve. I hope I made Bernie proud.
I met Bernie in 1988 when Stephen dragged me to a meeting at Lincoln Center I had no business being at. I had on a leather jacket, short skirt, and army boots--with some insane colored hair. Bernie welcomed me without question. And I met you all shortly after---you followed his lead and welcomed me like family. I"m honored to have been involved with each of you in completely different aspects of the work I've found myself doing over these decades. You each carry his ethos---a love of and commitment to the people who make theater. One Bernie story that always stuck with me: we were leaving a show by a director he was friends with and I started talking arrogantly talking about some aspect I didn't think quite worked. Bernie gently and firmly shut me down, "I loved it. I love what he does." Love above all. Thank you Bernie.
What a mensch. He was an amazing human being. I work for a huge producer that often did business with LCT and Bernie. I would often be in the company of this producer and I never felt like I was a third wheel. Let's be honest, Bernie was a huge NYC mogul and I was an assistant and yet, he always went out of his way to say hello to me, BY NAME, and include me in any conversation. We were at an event at Shakespeare in the Park and his whole beautiful family was present and he was telling stories, cracking jokes and I saw an influential POWER-HOUSE being human with all the love and joy of his family surrounding him... and that family included the people of theater and the arts. Yesterday someone referred to Bernie as a LION. He was as fierce and loyal as a LION and as gentle and cuddly as a LION... a LION is befitting our beloved Bernie! RIP you wonderful, loving, beautiful man, father, grandfather, husband and friend!
I was introduced to NY and to Cora and Bernie’s beautiful apartment on 7th Avenue by Jenny when I was 18. Everything on that trip was exciting and glamorous – a trip to Lincoln Center, sneaking into Bernie’s plays on Broadway, tea at the Plaza, eating meals cooked by Bernie and drinking the freshly squeezed orange juice that he prepared every morning for his family. I loved staying with the Gerstens and was lucky to do it many times over the next ten years – I always felt welcome – Bernie and Cora were generous hosts. But my favourite story about Bernie – which I’ve told many, many times over the last 32 years – is from a time before I had met him. Jenny and I were in her dorm room trying to remember a word. She said ‘I can ask my Dad’. She told me he had a rule that calls at work from Cora, Jenny and Jilian were always put through, no matter what he was doing. So she called and asked ‘Dad, what’s the name of young man who takes an older woman to the theatre, to restaurants, and out on the town?’. ‘Gigolo, darling. Is there anything else I can help with? I’m in the middle of board meeting?’. What an amazing way to live and what an amazing man.
My first not-quite encounter with Bernie happened when I was in high school, and an apprentice at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. A man in, as I remember, a wood-paneled station wagon drove up the winding drive to the theater and stole away our dance instructor Cora Cahan, to take her back to New York and marry her. We apprentices all pooled our money to buy them a wedding present, which I was charged with selecting: a Lazy Susan. I must have learned her new married name, but it did not stick.
Maybe 6 years later, after I graduated from college, I interviewed with Bernie, whose name was not familiar to me, for a job at the Public Theater, about which I knew very little. He sent me along to Alison Harper, and I worked in the box office for a year. We all got tickets for the opening of TWO GENTS on Broadway, and there I saw two familiar faces. I turned to whomever I was with and snarled: “What is Cora Cahan doing with Bernie Gersten? She is MARRIED!”
.........
A couple of years later, by an indirect route and great good fortune, I became Bernie’s assistant at the Public. (This was for the better part of the Seventies.) Just a couple of memories among a decade’s worth:
Bernie was quite a wordsmith, and a doodler. An artist friend of mine liked one of his usual doodles so much that he had it framed; Bernie wasn’t interested, and so I still have it. Another was a commentary on a season in formation, after Joe decided to do a play with a title that would be....difficult to promote. Here was the season, laid out in a banner (and without the asterisks):
SU** THIS FU** THAT HAMLET EAT SH**
And his words, and grace in expressing them.....he was simply one of the best writers I have known, and he helped unknot my rather turgid and academic style.
Bernie had an uncanny genius for budgeting. I assisted him on our grant applications, in which we had to forecast budgets for unknown seasons of an unknown number of productions, in theaters big and small. Somehow, somehow, he was always close to the mark. (I was later advised, at another theater company, that to do your budgets you had to start with the price of nails.) I would go with him to meetings at the NEA and the NYS Council on the Arts. The faces of the staff would light up as we passed through. One year our mounting deficit was a matter of some concern to the NYSCA staff. Here was Bernie’s response: we will just have to have an enormous hit, and I believe we will. He was held in such regard that...they took him at his word. And shortly after that, Michael Bennett came in with his idea that became A CHORUS LINE.
—with love to Cora and Jenny and Jilian from Peggy Marks
It's not that our relationship was ever professional, or that we saw each other very frequently. We met in the mid 1970's when we became neighbors in Katonah, NY, each looking for a place outside of Manhattan, but not too far, to spend weekends or weeks with family. Jenny and Jilian were close in age to our sons, David and Peter, and became friends, playing at our place or their's. Many times the Gersten Nanny (Carol) would supervise all four. We last saw Cora and Bernie in the Fall of 2019. While contacts were few, they were mostly memorable because of Bernie's calm, warmth, humor and his ability to make you feel that the conversation you were involved in was the most important thing in the world. Whether he wast telling a Joke about a shipwrecked Jew isolated for years who identified one of the many buildings he constructed as "the synagogue I don't go to", or graciously accepting my only call to his office to request a favor for the first and only time for four tickets to see Kevin Spacey in The Iceman Cometh. He responded promptly and positively, but he gently teased me that it was not one of his plays. We did, however, see "Anything Goes" on three different occasions, with different guests, without Bernie's intervention. On one of those occasions, we were surprised to meet Bernie in the theater lobby with our four sons. He greeted us warmly and enthusiastically. We asked if he attended running performances frequently, and he said no, this was a special occasion: apparently the understudy for Patti Lupone was going on for the first time; he said she was extremely nervous, and he was there to keep her calm!! How typical of Bernie; how rare this combination of expertise, compassion, humility, and humor. Paul slotwiner pslot@yahoo.com
I last saw Bernie two years ago at the opening of My Fair Lady. We opened well over 100 shows together in his 28 years as producer at Lincoln Center Theater and me as its adman. But that night we were both guests. We opened Napoleon at Radio City Music Hall and in 20 cities across the country. He showed me around Zoetrope Studios. We walked the set of One From The Heart and premiered the film at Radio City. We opened A Chorus Line at the Shubert in New York and the Shubert in Los Angeles. Three Penny Opera, The Cherry Orchard and Hamlet at the Beaumont; Runaways, For Colored Girls… on Broadway, and maybe another 20 or 30 at The Public. The infamous Birthday Party at the Delacorte. Bernie added The Feld Ballet to my portfolio and Cora added The Joyce Theater and The New Victory, oh and I have Cora to thank for Judy Garfinkel the dancer who became my wife. I worked with Bernie for 39 years, Cora for 37. He kept me with him through two ad agencies I founded and three that employed me. I know he rooted for me to become more prosperous, more prominent. But like Bernie, I loved the work and I wasn’t the best self-promoter. Unlike Bernie, I wasn’t organically kind to everyone. Were we friends? We had lunch about once a year. We were at Cora and Bernie’s for decades on New Year’s Day at their two bedroom apartment that grew to the entire 20th floor. And at Cross River in the summer for volleyball and a swim. They came to my 40th birthday way out in New Jersey and offered their apartment for Judy’s 30th. A unique relationship? There are hundreds of us who could have written this. Hundreds who’s professional life was lovingly nurtured, mentored, enabled, cheered, curated and rewarded by this brilliant and generous man and wife. Back to the infamous Birthday Party at the Delacorte. John Guare had written a sketch, perhaps too knowingly, in which a crazed playwright gunning for Joe Papp accidentally shoots Bernie (played by John) to which Joe says, “get me another Bernie Gersten.” Not in a million years.
Ours was a small relationship over parties and food. First we met planning for the grand party that The Public had for A Chorus Line in 1983 but I really met Bernie and his special family year after year on New Year’s Day when I cooked for his fun New Year’s Day feast. It was a big open apartment and everybody in or around the theater dropped by for Bernie’s famous baked beans with other food made by me. The apartment became a big club that anyone was welcome to belong to. Everyone treated everyone like a friend whether they knew each other or not. It felt like the old days at The Public when I used to cater there. An afternoon at those Gersten Cahan get togethers made you feel like this is the way the world should be...everyone feeling valued and loved. Especially in these times I miss the memories of those warm New Year’s Day parties when I departed Bernie would hug me and say “next year darling”. I’ll make some baked beans tonight and toast you Bernie.
Beginning with his decision, after my fourth poster for Lincoln Center Theater, to offer me the chance to become the official poster artist for the Theater, Bernie changed my life. Nothing I had done as an illustrator would have the kind of impact that this long procession of posters has had. It was Bernie's confidence in me and his spirited defense of my work that made it possible for me to take creative chances and establish a particular kind of seriousness in the Theater's visual advertising. Bernie loved art of all kinds and was often willing to respond to a sketch with intuitive pleasure whether or not he felt it would finally pass muster. He seemed to see what had given me pleasure esthetically in the making of the sketch even when he could also see that I had gotten off on the wrong foot thematically. It made it so much easier to go back to the drawing board and rethink my metaphor. One of the highlights in our history of our collaboration is when he asked me, somewhat mischievously, to come up with a "behind-the-scene" solution to the poster for South Pacific while the agency was working on the kind of image others had asked for. I think he took as much pleasure as I did when my painting won out over the other design and became the printed poster. If there was any one person that I would have to thank for having an enormous impact on my career it would be Bernie Gersten. I would also thank Cora, Jenny and Jilian for befriending Kate and me during those early years where we felt like such outsiders at the opening parties and dinners. A poster artist never quite knows where to sit at a dinner where the tables are organized by all the basic categories of theater art, but Cora and Bernie fixed that -"Come sit with us!" they said.
Bernie was such a lovely and supportive friend and producer to me during my time at Lincoln Center and beyond. His family has always been so good to me. I am grateful for wonderful holiday parties and positive collaborations with Cora and Jenny as well.
ReplyDeleteI will never forget a long and sensitive conversation we had on the occasion of my leaving his show (The Light in the Piazza) to do another (The Pajama Game). It was one of the most difficult decisions I have ever made. He came to my dressing room and told me that I had to follow my heart. He told me that I would be missed but also that I would be welcomed back. He spoke of the importance of allowing artists to grow and the hope that those artists might bring back that growth to benefit Lincoln Center. In a way, he didn't just give me permission to leave. He gave me a goal to achieve. I hope I made Bernie proud.
I met Bernie in 1988 when Stephen dragged me to a meeting at Lincoln Center I had no business being at. I had on a leather jacket, short skirt, and army boots--with some insane colored hair. Bernie welcomed me without question. And I met you all shortly after---you followed his lead and welcomed me like family. I"m honored to have been involved with each of you in completely different aspects of the work I've found myself doing over these decades. You each carry his ethos---a love of and commitment to the people who make theater. One Bernie story that always stuck with me: we were leaving a show by a director he was friends with and I started talking arrogantly talking about some aspect I didn't think quite worked. Bernie gently and firmly shut me down, "I loved it. I love what he does." Love above all. Thank you Bernie.
ReplyDeleteWhat a mensch. He was an amazing human being. I work for a huge producer that often did business with LCT and Bernie. I would often be in the company of this producer and I never felt like I was a third wheel. Let's be honest, Bernie was a huge NYC mogul and I was an assistant and yet, he always went out of his way to say hello to me, BY NAME, and include me in any conversation. We were at an event at Shakespeare in the Park and his whole beautiful family was present and he was telling stories, cracking jokes and I saw an influential POWER-HOUSE being human with all the love and joy of his family surrounding him... and that family included the people of theater and the arts. Yesterday someone referred to Bernie as a LION. He was as fierce and loyal as a LION and as gentle and cuddly as a LION... a LION is befitting our beloved Bernie! RIP you wonderful, loving, beautiful man, father, grandfather, husband and friend!
ReplyDeleteI was introduced to NY and to Cora and Bernie’s beautiful apartment on 7th Avenue by Jenny when I was 18. Everything on that trip was exciting and glamorous – a trip to Lincoln Center, sneaking into Bernie’s plays on Broadway, tea at the Plaza, eating meals cooked by Bernie and drinking the freshly squeezed orange juice that he prepared every morning for his family. I loved staying with the Gerstens and was lucky to do it many times over the next ten years – I always felt welcome – Bernie and Cora were generous hosts. But my favourite story about Bernie – which I’ve told many, many times over the last 32 years – is from a time before I had met him. Jenny and I were in her dorm room trying to remember a word. She said ‘I can ask my Dad’. She told me he had a rule that calls at work from Cora, Jenny and Jilian were always put through, no matter what he was doing. So she called and asked ‘Dad, what’s the name of young man who takes an older woman to the theatre, to restaurants, and out on the town?’. ‘Gigolo, darling. Is there anything else I can help with? I’m in the middle of board meeting?’. What an amazing way to live and what an amazing man.
ReplyDeleteMy first not-quite encounter with Bernie happened when I was in high school, and an apprentice at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. A man in, as I remember, a wood-paneled station wagon drove up the winding drive to the theater and stole away our dance instructor Cora Cahan, to take her back to New York and marry her. We apprentices all pooled our money to buy them a wedding present, which I was charged with selecting: a Lazy Susan. I must have learned her new married name, but it did not stick.
ReplyDeleteMaybe 6 years later, after I graduated from college, I interviewed with Bernie, whose name was not familiar to me, for a job at the Public Theater, about which I knew very little. He sent me along to Alison Harper, and I worked in the box office for a year. We all got tickets for the opening of TWO GENTS on Broadway, and there I saw two familiar faces. I turned to whomever I was with and snarled: “What is Cora Cahan doing with Bernie Gersten? She is MARRIED!”
.........
A couple of years later, by an indirect route and great good fortune, I became Bernie’s assistant at the Public. (This was for the better part of the Seventies.) Just a couple of memories among a decade’s worth:
Bernie was quite a wordsmith, and a doodler. An artist friend of mine liked one of his usual doodles so much that he had it framed; Bernie wasn’t interested, and so I still have it. Another was a commentary on a season in formation, after Joe decided to do a play with a title that would be....difficult to promote. Here was the season, laid out in a banner (and without the asterisks):
SU** THIS
FU** THAT
HAMLET
EAT SH**
And his words, and grace in expressing them.....he was simply one of the best writers I have known, and he helped unknot my rather turgid and academic style.
Bernie had an uncanny genius for budgeting. I assisted him on our grant applications, in which we had to forecast budgets for unknown seasons of an unknown number of productions, in theaters big and small. Somehow, somehow, he was always close to the mark. (I was later advised, at another theater company, that to do your budgets you had to start with the price of nails.) I would go with him to meetings at the NEA and the NYS Council on the Arts. The faces of the staff would light up as we passed through. One year our mounting deficit was a matter of some concern to the NYSCA staff. Here was Bernie’s response: we will just have to have an enormous hit, and I believe we will. He was held in such regard that...they took him at his word. And shortly after that, Michael Bennett came in with his idea that became A CHORUS LINE.
—with love to Cora and Jenny and Jilian from Peggy Marks
It's not that our relationship was ever professional, or that we saw each other very frequently. We met in the mid 1970's when we became neighbors in Katonah, NY, each looking for a place outside of Manhattan, but not too far, to spend weekends or weeks with family. Jenny and Jilian were close in age to our sons, David and Peter, and became friends, playing at our place or their's. Many times the Gersten Nanny (Carol) would supervise all four. We last saw Cora and Bernie in the Fall of 2019. While contacts were few, they were mostly memorable because of Bernie's calm, warmth, humor and his ability to make you feel that the conversation you were involved in was the most important thing in the world. Whether he wast telling a Joke about a shipwrecked Jew isolated for years who identified one of the many buildings he constructed as "the synagogue I don't go to", or graciously accepting my only call to his office to request a favor for the first and only time for four tickets to see Kevin Spacey in The Iceman Cometh. He responded promptly and positively, but he gently teased me that it was not one of his plays. We did, however, see "Anything Goes" on three different occasions, with different guests, without Bernie's intervention. On one of those occasions, we were surprised to meet Bernie in the theater lobby with our four sons. He greeted us warmly and enthusiastically.
ReplyDeleteWe asked if he attended running performances frequently, and he said no, this was a special occasion: apparently the understudy for Patti Lupone was going on for the first time; he said she was extremely nervous, and he was there to keep her calm!! How typical of Bernie; how rare this combination of expertise, compassion, humility, and humor.
Paul slotwiner
pslot@yahoo.com
I last saw Bernie two years ago at the opening of My Fair Lady. We opened well over 100 shows together in his 28 years as producer at Lincoln Center Theater and me as its adman. But that night we were both guests. We opened Napoleon at Radio City Music Hall and in 20 cities across the country. He showed me around Zoetrope Studios. We walked the set of One From The Heart and premiered the film at Radio City. We opened A Chorus Line at the Shubert in New York and the Shubert in Los Angeles. Three Penny Opera, The Cherry Orchard and Hamlet at the Beaumont; Runaways, For Colored Girls… on Broadway, and maybe another 20 or 30 at The Public. The infamous Birthday Party at the Delacorte. Bernie added The Feld Ballet to my portfolio and Cora added The Joyce Theater and The New Victory, oh and I have Cora to thank for Judy Garfinkel the dancer who became my wife. I worked with Bernie for 39 years, Cora for 37. He kept me with him through two ad agencies I founded and three that employed me. I know he rooted for me to become more prosperous, more prominent. But like Bernie, I loved the work and I wasn’t the best self-promoter. Unlike Bernie, I wasn’t organically kind to everyone. Were we friends? We had lunch about once a year. We were at Cora and Bernie’s for decades on New Year’s Day at their two bedroom apartment that grew to the entire 20th floor. And at Cross River in the summer for volleyball and a swim. They came to my 40th birthday way out in New Jersey and offered their apartment for Judy’s 30th. A unique relationship? There are hundreds of us who could have written this. Hundreds who’s professional life was lovingly nurtured, mentored, enabled, cheered, curated and rewarded by this brilliant and generous man and wife. Back to the infamous Birthday Party at the Delacorte. John Guare had written a sketch, perhaps too knowingly, in which a crazed playwright gunning for Joe Papp accidentally shoots Bernie (played by John) to which Joe says, “get me another Bernie Gersten.” Not in a million years.
ReplyDeleteOurs was a small relationship over parties and food. First we met planning for the grand party that The Public had for A Chorus Line in 1983 but I really met Bernie and his special family year after year on New Year’s Day when I cooked for his fun New Year’s Day feast. It was a big open apartment and everybody in or around the theater dropped by for Bernie’s famous baked beans with other food made by me. The apartment became a big club that anyone was welcome to belong to. Everyone treated everyone like a friend whether they knew each other or not. It felt like the old days at The Public when I used to cater there.
ReplyDeleteAn afternoon at those Gersten Cahan get togethers made you feel like this is the way the world should be...everyone feeling valued and loved.
Especially in these times I miss the memories of those warm New Year’s Day parties when I departed Bernie would hug me and say “next year darling”.
I’ll make some baked beans tonight and toast you Bernie.
Beginning with his decision, after my fourth poster for Lincoln Center Theater, to offer me the chance to become the official poster artist for the Theater, Bernie changed my life. Nothing I had done as an illustrator would have the kind of impact that this long procession of posters has had. It was Bernie's confidence in me and his spirited defense of my work that made it possible for me to take creative chances and establish a particular kind of seriousness in the Theater's visual advertising.
ReplyDeleteBernie loved art of all kinds and was often willing to respond to a sketch with intuitive pleasure whether or not he felt it would finally pass muster. He seemed to see what had given me pleasure esthetically in the making of the sketch even when he could also see that I had gotten off on the wrong foot thematically. It made it so much easier to go back to the drawing board and rethink my metaphor.
One of the highlights in our history of our collaboration is when he asked me, somewhat mischievously, to come up with a "behind-the-scene" solution to the poster for South Pacific while the agency was working on the kind of image others had asked for. I think he took as much pleasure as I did when my painting won out over the other design and became the printed poster.
If there was any one person that I would have to thank for having an enormous impact on my career it would be Bernie Gersten. I would also thank Cora, Jenny and Jilian for befriending Kate and me during those early years where we felt like such outsiders at the opening parties and dinners. A poster artist never quite knows where to sit at a dinner where the tables are organized by all the basic categories of theater art, but Cora and Bernie fixed that -"Come sit with us!" they said.