If you were a well-heeled Massachusetts lady in the late 1920s and wanted your hair fixed like the movie stars, there was one man to turn to: Samuel Bernstein. In 1927, this entrepreneurial immigrant, who had arrived in New York from Tsarist Russia, 26 the only local license to sell the machine for curling hair. Like many businessmen of the times, he expected his eldest son to follow him into the family firm. But Louis Bernstein, known to everyone as Lenny (he officially changed his name to Leonard as a teenager), had different ideas. The family had no musical roots, but ten-year-old Lenny found himself drawn obsessively to his aunt's piano. No matter that his father remained vehemently 27 the notion that he should make music his life, there was but one path ahead. For all his early misgivings, Samuel later 28 that his son was a genius. In his passport, Leonard Bernstein simply called himself a "musician"—characteristic humility from a man whose broad 29 are unique in musical history. Bernstein was a conductor whose interpretive gifts over the course of five decades shone light on the classics from Haydn to Mahler, Bartok to Stravinsky. He was a fine concert pianist and pioneering broadcaster; an educator, Harvard lecturer, writer and humanitarian; a husband, father, lover. Such a 30 life was not without complexities, contradictions and critics—but oh, what a life.