Written by his former assistant and using a foreword by Broadway legend Harold Prince, this book celebrates Leonard Bernstein’s centenary with a romantic and in-depth look at the public and private life from the Maestro.

Leonard Bernstein reeked of cheap cologne and obviously hadn’t showered, shaved, or slept in a while. Was he drunk to boot? He greeted his new assistant with ‘What are you drinking?’ Yes, he was drunk.

Charlie Harmon was hired to control the day-to-day parts of Bernstein’s about On the Road and Off the Record with Leonard Bernstein: My Years using the Exasperating Genius lifestyle. There is one additional responsibility: make sure Bernstein met the deadline for an opera commission payment. But things held getting in just how: the centenary of Igor Stravinsky, intestinal parasites found in Mexico, teaching all summertime in LA, a baker’s dozen of young men, plus despair, exhaustion, insomnia, and cut-throat games of anagrams. Do the opera get written?

For four years, Charlie saw Bernstein each day, as his sociable director, gatekeeper, valet, music copyist, and itinerant orchestra librarian. He loaded (and unpacked) Bernstein’s umpteen pieces of suitcases, got the Maestro to his concerts, kept him occupied changing planes in Zurich, Anchorage, Tokyo, or Madrid, and learned how to make little talk to mayors, ambassadors, a chancellor, a queen, and a Hollywood tale or two. How could anyone absorb all those people and locations? Because there was music: late-night piano duets, or the Maestro’s order to accompany an audition, or, by the way, the best orchestras in the globe. Charlie achieved it, and this is exactly what it was like, informed for the first time.