On January 14, 1970, Leonard Bernstein, the renowned composer and New York Philharmonic conductor, and his wife Felicia, the actress, philanthropist, and socialite, welcomed 80-odd guests to their 13-room duplex at 895 Park Avenue, one of the Upper East Side’s swankiest addresses, to raise money for an unlikely group: the Black Panthers, best known for mounting armed resistance to police — the pigs — and advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government.
A few weeks earlier, reporter Tom Wolfe of New York, a fledgling magazine, had dropped by the Harper’s office of his friend David Halberstam, also a reporter, and found him absent. Rather “nosily,” as Wolfe later admitted, he spotted on Halberstam’s desk an invitation to the party, handwritten by Felicia.
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