The Godfather.(Leonard Bernstein)

In order to fully know his father, Adam Green had to get to know his father's best friend, the legendary Leonard Bernstein.

Throughout his life, my father's greatest joy was finding someone with whom he could share his passions. The moment I could utter a few rudimentary words, he began sneaking me into the second act of Broadway matinees, giving me art-history lessons at the Met, having me sit through a double bill of City Lights and Modern Times. But our most frequent destination, it seemed to me, was Lincoln Center, where we went to hear the New York Philharmonic led by Leonard Bernstein, who also happened to be my godfather. I remember having to shush my father, who would be singing and conducting along, and I remember believing that swashbuckling leaps and Byronically tossed forelocks were necessary to the making of great music, a notion that still strikes me as fundamentally sound.

After the concert, we always went backstage, where a crush of people would be waiting for an audience with Bernstein, who, a silver tumbler of scotch in one hand and a cigarette perched between the fingers of the other, held court in a state of glamorous dishevelment, jacket draped over his shoulders, shirt unbuttoned to the navel. He was an infamously profligate kissermy father thought someone should make a movie about him called Lips, whose tagline would be "He only wanted to say hello." When Bernstein inevitably swept me up in his arms, planted a wet one on me, and announced, "This is my godsonI held him when he was circumcised," it would fill me with that particular mix of warmth and embarrassment that can only be evoked by family. Once, to my delight, he surprised me with a gift of the cork-tipped wand that he had just wielded on the podium.

That literal passing of the baton did not, I'm sorry to say, lead to a brilliant musical careermy desultory efforts as a piano student remain a blot on the family escutcheonbut it was not without symbolism. It connected me to my father's best friend and to the years of private jokes, mutual enthusiasms, and bursts of creativity that bound them together. Somehow, I knew that the calculus of my relationship with my father involved finding my own place in their ancient camaraderie.

That friendship was born in the summer of 1937 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, at Camp Onota, which my father later dubbed "Uncle Lou's Heavenly Haven for Healthily Well-Fed Young Hebrews." Bernstein, who had just finished his sophomore year at Harvard, was the camp's music counselor; my father, a self-described aimless bum at the age of 22, had been invited by a friend to guest star as the Pirate King in the camp's production of The Pirates of Penzance. Moments after they had been introduced, Bernstein, who had heard about my father's uncanny knowledge of classical music, dragged him into the dining hall and challenged him to identify a Shostakovich melody, which he played on an upright piano. After a few bars, my father said, "I don't know what that is, but it's not Shostakovich." Bernstein leaped up, threw his arms around him, and confessed that it was a piece he himself had written.

Late into the night, they wandered through the hills surrounding the camp, singing each other snatches of music, impressing each other with esoteric bits of knowledge, and discovering their common love of everything from Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat to an obscure novelty song called "I Wish That I'd Been Born in Borneo." Recalling their meeting years later in a letter, my father wrote, "I felt a sudden, complete exuberance, the fresh air of 1,000,000 windows opening simultaneously + a sense that my life had been building towards a turning point + that it had happenednow."

By the time Bernstein graduated from Harvard, Betty Comden, Judy Holliday, and my father were performing satirical sketches and songs at the Village Vanguard. Bernstein moved to New York, occasionally playing piano for the Revuers, as the troupe was known, and sharing a squalid apartment with my father on East Ninth Street, where they lived, I've been told, with a contempt for property and hygiene that bordered on the criminal.