Leah Bernstein, the eminent president of the Mountain Apple Company, died in the wee hours of July 4 at Queen’s Medical Center. She was 72.
She was born on Dec. 1952, in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Cause of death was cancer, an illness she had been battling for the past four-and-a-half years. Her husband Mark Bernstein, an attorney, said the diagnosis was confirmed by a New York doctor during an earlier visit to a Big Apple hospital.
On July 4, Mark summoned an ambulance so Leah could receive ER care. “I couldn’t give her painkillers any more,” he said. They resided in a Makiki Heights home, where an ER crew brought Leah downstairs on a gurney, for hospital treatment.
Meantime, Jon DeMello, Mountain Apple Company founder and a life-long work colleague and friend of the Bernsteins, was on vigil duty at Queen’s, settling in a hospital-provided cot nearby Leah. He was playing “Hawaii, in the Middle of the Sea,” a Brothers Cazimero album, on his iPhone “and I knew she was hearing it,” said Jon. He said Leah had texted Mark to bring her home pillows and other comforting items to the hospital.
“It was 3:20 a.m. on the Fourth of July morning when she made the transition, and that was the time when I called Mark at home. It took him just a few minutes to get down to the hospital… so Leah and I were alone when she died.”
Leah and Mark shared a close, tight relationship. “In our 55 years together, there have been only 100 days that we’ve been apart,” said Mark.
Only their families and their closest friends were aware that Leah and Mark were childhood sweethearts who married young and were inseparable. Together, they were the epitome of a power couple in the Hawaii they loved.
“Leah was the finest human being I have known,” said Mark, who first saw her walking the sidewalks of Hollywood in January 1969. “She was eating an orange, and I asked my friend, “Who is that?” he said.
Leah, attending Hollywood High School, ultimately met her future life partner, when she was 16 and he was 17. They became a couple when they moved in together when she was 17 and he was 18.
“Given how horrible it could have been in the end, I’m more than grateful to have had four years to grieve,” said Mark of the quality time they’ve shared amid the cloud of the cancer that surely interrupted their life but made their love for each other stronger.
They were ardent travelers, even taking trips to Japan and Canada when Leah could, after she was diagnosed with cancer. “We also had planned a trip to San Francisco,” Mark revealed, because she had good and bad days like other cancer patients, with a lifestyle including chemotherapy treatments.
Leah joined the Mountain Apple team in 1980. “It was a relationship made in heaven,” said Jon. “Music was in my fiber, and she saw it, and knew it. We merged, a short mold (him) and a tall mold (her).”
“She had an absolute way with numbers; she had world-wide awareness of Hawaiian music, and was a perfect fit for Mountain Apple,” Jon continued. He ultimately named her president and Mark eventually became — and remains — the company’s lawyer.
Mountain Apple initially was a record company but diversified over the decades, taking on publishing music, distributing CDs, managing acts, and producing iconic concerts like May Day at the Waikiki Shell and Christmas productions at Bishop Museum and the Blaisdell Arena.
With Leah’s oversight, Mountain Apple’s music publishing boasted the most extensive library of Hawaiian and Polynesian music, and company’s catalogue included The Brothers Cazimero, Bruddah Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole and Robert Cazimero as a soloist since the death of brother Roland Cazimero. Numerous other acts — Willie K, Amy Hanaiali‘i Gilliom, Emma Veary, Raiatea Helm, Nina Keali‘iwahamana, Jack DeMello, Keola and Kapono Beamer and Jimmy Borges, among others– benefitted from her vision and her marketing skills in sync with Jon’s overall leadership.
Mark arrived in Honolulu in June 1969, and proclaims he’s an “island boy, from the island of Manhattan.” Leah worked at Kendun Recorders, a Burbank-based recording and mastering studio, where she learned her chops before settling in Hawaii in May 1972.
She held a variety of music-related jobs –Tower Records, and Territorial Tavern — which were portals to the local music industry. In May of 1980, Jon hired her to join the Mountain Apple team.
She’s pragmatic, said Jon. She told me, ‘You gotta watch out for Mark,’” Jon said, of the frailty in his life after her death.
“There’s a lot of me in her, and a lot of her in me,” said Mark about their bonding. “Leah was the kind of person who never talked of her illness,” he continued. “She would be upset about how people might react to her situation. She didn’t want to make her friends feel bad.”
Robert Cazimero, the kumu hula and entertainer, commented, “One time in the early ‘80s I had gone to the Mountain Apple Company office with a young student of mine. I introduced him to Leah Bernstein. He took one look at her and said to me, ‘She looks like heaven.’ That nickname was hers for many of us, her whole life. I will miss my friend; I miss my friend dearly.”
Services will be private, per Leah’s request. “I’ll do what she wanted,” Mark said.’