Jean Stein, R.I.P.

Jean Stein was the author of American Journey: The Times of Robert Kennedy (1970), an oral history edited by George Plimpton. I read it at age 13 and it moved me. She interviewed people who knew RFK, traveling on the funeral train from New York to Washington.

Jean Stein, Who Chronicled Wealth, Fame and Influence, Dies at 83
By RICHARD SANDOMIR
The New York Times
MAY 2, 2017


Jean Stein, whose books included “West of Eden: An American Place,” in 1990. Credit Brigitte Lacombe
Jean Stein, a child of Hollywood wealth whose restless curiosity led her to produce oral histories about Robert F. Kennedy, the tragic Warhol star Edie Sedgwick and a group of people and families who transformed Los Angeles, died on Sunday in Manhattan. She was 83.

Her daughter Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor and publisher of The Nation, said her mother had died in a fall from her 15th floor apartment at 10 Gracie Square, on the East Side of Manhattan. She had been suffering from depression, Ms. vanden Heuvel said. The police said they were investigating the death as a suicide.

Ms. Stein, whose father was a founder of the entertainment giant MCA, found a vivid subject in Ms. Sedgwick, an heiress from a patrician family whose downfall came to define the perils of ephemeral celebrity. A beautiful and charming personality, Ms. Sedgwick turned to injecting LSD and speed and shoplifting sprees before dying of an overdose at 28 in 1971.

“I felt that she symbolized the 1960s the way that Zelda Fitzgerald represented the 1920s,” Ms. Stein told the interviewer David Rothenberg on the New York FM radio station WBAI in 1982, when “Edie: An American Biography” was published. “But what makes ‘Edie,’ the book, work is that she touched so many worlds — these different, alienated worlds in the 1960s — and the story is as much about all of those people as it is about her.”

Ms. Stein, who knew Ms. Sedgwick — and let her stay in her daughter Wendy’s bedroom after a hotel fire — was aware by 1967 of her dissolution. “She was the quintessential poor little rich girl,” Ms. Stein told WBAI. “She’d be wearing fur, but underneath it she was skeletal and wearing leotards and had anorexia.”

Photo

Ms. Stein in 1966 attending a benefit party for The Paris Review at the Village Gate. Credit Larry C. Morris/The New York Times
For her most recent book, “West of Eden: An American Place” (2016), Ms. Stein spent parts of more than 20 years interviewing people about the influence of Hollywood (through her own family, the Warner brothers and the actress Jennifer Jones), oil exploration (through the Doheny family) and real estate (through the Garlands, especially Jane, a schizophrenic heiress) on Los Angeles.

“All the while, there are the voices you can’t stop listening to,” Maria Russo wrote in The New York Times Book Review. “As Stein’s people rummage through their faulty memories, they talk the way human beings actually talk — heavy on score-settling, gossip and hearsay. It’s at times almost unbelievable what they are willing to say.”

Jean Babette Stein was born in Chicago on Feb. 9, 1934, the daughter of Jules Stein, who was an ophthalmologist before starting what became MCA, and the former Doris Jones. At the family estate in Beverly Hills, Misty Mountain, Ms. Stein would hear coyotes howling at night, she said in “West of Eden.” During World War II, her father built a secret room — a sort of bunker — behind the bar in case the Nazis attacked.

At a home where Hollywood stars were frequent guests, she and her sister, Susan, were “brought down to curtsy like little dolls in our dressing gowns,” Ms. Stein said. When she was 16, her father’s lawyer tried to set her up on a date with a young lawyer, Roy Cohn, who was part of the team prosecuting an economist, William Remington, for espionage and who would go on to notoriety as counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Ms. Stein went to watch Mr. Cohn in court, she said, “and within minutes my sympathies were with the victim.” They never went out.

She attended Wellesley College and the Sorbonne but did not graduate. Gore Vidal, a close friend who was interviewed in “West of Eden,” said that she had been “somewhat unfocused, not terribly interested in the academic world” of Wellesley, and he took her to literary events where she would meet interesting people.

“I didn’t see her for six months,” he said, “and the next time I did, she was with Faulkner.”

Indeed, in 1955, while she was in France, Ms. Stein interviewed William Faulkner for The Paris Review. When she asked if there was a formula to be a successful novelist, Faulkner told her it was 99 percent talent, 99 percent discipline and 99 percent work.

“An artist,” he said in the lengthy interview, “is a creature driven by demons. He don’t know why they choose him, and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.”

Stein: “Do you mean the writer should be completely ruthless?”

Faulkner: “The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one.”

Ms. Stein worked for several years at The Paris Review for its editor, George Plimpton, before moving to New York City to be an assistant to Clay Felker, then the features editor of Esquire magazine. Later, her marriage to William vanden Heuvel, a lawyer who had been a special assistant to Robert Kennedy when he was the United States attorney general, helped give her entree to the train that bore Kennedy’s body from New York to Washington after his assassination in 1968.

The journey inspired the structure of her book, “American Journey: The Times of Robert Kennedy” (1970), an oral history edited by Mr. Plimpton.

In Life magazine, Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of The Washington Post, described Ms. Stein as a “brilliant, non-obtrusive interviewer,” writing that there was “new vital history in these pages, more than any review can hold.” A review in The New Yorker said the book “mortalizes” Kennedy “by bringing his complex and contradictory character most vividly to life.”

Shy and with a fluttery voice, Ms. Stein turned her former apartment on Central Park West into a salon for writers, artists, politicians and academics.

“She loved to gather people of all kinds,” Katrina vanden Heuvel said in an interview on Tuesday. “She always had the most interesting writers mixed up with troublemakers. She had Daniel Ellsberg with Adlai Stevenson, or an ex-general with war protesters. Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer had a fistfight there.”

Ms. Stein sought a similarly eclectic mix when she was the editor and publisher of Grand Street, a quarterly literary journal, from around 1990 to 2004.

“I am very interested in these different worlds coming together, so you’re not only writing, you’re not only art, you’re not only science, you’re bringing them all together,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1990. “And, in a way, I’ve lived my life in New York that way.”

In addition to her daughters, Katrina and Wendy vanden Heuvel, Ms. Stein is survived by two granddaughters. Her marriages — to Mr. vanden Heuvel, a former American diplomat, and Torsten Wiesel, a Swedish neurobiologist who was a co-recipient of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine — ended in divorce.

Ms. Stein explained her embrace of the oral history form when she discussed “Edie,” which Mr. Plimpton also edited.

“Each person is speaking directly to you,” she told WBAI. “It’s like you have 25 people in the room talking to you, just as if you were in a conversation. Nobody is ever telling you, the reader, what you should think.”