Seniors See a ‘Star’ as One of Their Own

 by Carl Glassman

There was a movie premiere of sorts in Battery Park City last month. It didn’t make the gossip columns. It lacked the usual red carpet and pack of paparazzi. And there wasn’t one plunging neckline in the entire crowd.

But for the audience that filled the Stuyvesant High School auditorium on the evening of Nov. 7, this was a movie event not to be missed. The star, after all, was one of their own.

The film, “My Uncle Berns,” is a feature-length HBO documentary about the life of Bernhardt Crystal—an artist, art dealer, and renaissance man who lives at the Hallmark senior residence in Battery Park City. The film won’t be broadcast until next spring. But Crystal had just turned 89, and it seemed fitting to celebrate by showing the movie to his fellow residents. Nearly all of them made the trip across Chambers Street to see it.

“I think people feel they know me more,” Crystal said later. “They came over and shook my hand or gave me a kiss on the cheek. I think it made us closer.”

The film seemed to strike a chord among his fellow octogenarians, who spoke afterwards of seeing a bit of themselves on the screen.

“Everyone, in their head, they’re saying you should have seen me when I was 20 or 30 or 40,” said fellow resident Bob Fishman. “I think the movie was a mirror of themselves. That’s why it was good for them—and for me.”

Crystal said it was not easy to watch his life unfold on the screen. In the film, he speaks openly about a mother whose vitriol forced him to leave home as a boy (they later became close), the men who died around him when he served as a combat artist on D-Day, and even his current, exhausting routine of physical therapy as he struggles to use his legs again.

“It’s difficult. I just try to think of my niece and the wonderful job she did,” Crystal said. The film is the work of Lindsay Crystal, Bernhardt’s great niece and the daughter of Billy Crystal, who appears frequently in the film.

As she was growing up, Lindsay Crystal heard a lot about her uncle from her father. But she hardly knew him until after Sept. 11, when he and other Hallmark residents were evacuated. The thought of losing him, she said, made her want to know him more. “I had to find out where he came from, I had to find out where I came from,” she says in her narration.

Indeed, the film makes that lineage clear. Billy Crystal’s grandfather—Bernhardt’s father—was an actor in the Jewish theater who translated King Lear into Yiddish so that he (playing Lear) and his wife (playing Cordelia) could escape the competitive New York scene and launch Yiddish theater in Michigan, where Bernhardt was born.

As “Uncle Berns” to a young Billy Crystal, Bernhardt made every family gathering a theatrical event. In the film, Billy says Bernhardt was “incredibly responsible” for his drive to perform.

“He was hats, he was coats, he was costumes, he was masks, he was wigs, he was props,” he says. “You couldn’t wait to get to his house because you would be in an opera.”

Michelle Dewitt, the Hallmark’s activities director, said so many of her residents have led fascinating lives that she wishes they could all have a movie. At the screening, she brought along a friend who had often asked her why she wanted to work with old people.

“After the film ended,” recalled Dewitt, “she turned to me and said, ‘Now I get it.’”