Jean Stein
Oral history writer whose subjects ranged from Andy Warhol ‘superstars’ to her own family
JEAN STEIN, who has died aged 83, grew up in a well-connected Hollywood family which she fled to become an accomplished magazine editor and develop a line in hefty but incisive oral histories.
These were American Journey: The
Times of Robert Kennedy (1970); Edie (1982), about the Andy Warhol “superstar” Edie Sedgwick, and West of
Eden, published last year, for which she was not only interviewer but a participant in a film describing the often torrid and tragic lives of five Hollywood families, including that of her parents.
She was born on February 9 1934 in Chicago. Her father, Jules, had forsaken early training as an ophthalmologist to play the violin and saxophone in a band. With a fine eye for the small print of a contract, he founded a booking agency in a two-room office and gave it the grandiose name Music Corporation of America (MCA). The agency specialised in touring bands and Jules Stein became so wealthy that, shortly before Jean’s birth, he was warned he was a target for kidnapping by the Mafia.
The family moved to Misty Mountain, a large estate high in Beverly Hills, where, as Jean Stein recalled, “when the stars came to the house, my sister, Susan, and I would be brought down to curtsy like little dolls in our silk dressing gowns”. With MCA broadening into production and management, the Steins were by now so rich that, on a visit to Guatemala, Jean’s mother Doris’s jewellery box was confiscated because its contents were more valuable than the country’s Treasury and it was feared it might be used to fund a revolution.
Educated at the Katharine Branson School in Ross, California, then at Brillantmont International School in Lausanne, Switzerland, Jean spent two years at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, while being steered towards a “suitable” marriage.
At 16 she was set up for a date with an up-and-coming lawyer, Roy Cohn, whom she went to see conduct a case; but she felt more sympathy for the alleged communist he was grilling than for her would-be date and backed away. Cohn, who died of Aids in 1986, later became notorious as aide to Senator Joe Mccarthy during his crusade against communism and as mentor to a young Donald Trump.
Jean was then taken under the wing of Gore Vidal, under whose influence she left Wellesley and moved to Paris to attend the Sorbonne.
After conducting an interview – and an affair – with the novelist William Faulkner, she won a job with The Paris
Review. Back in New York, she worked in features at Esquire, and, partly to please her parents, married a lawyer, William vanden Heuvel, a gesture towards respectability that ended in divorce, though not before it brought another direction to her life.
Vanden Heuvel was a friend of Robert Kennedy, whose assassination in 1968 prompted her to publish (with George Plimpton, her editor at The
Paris Review) a “mosaic” of conversations with people who had known him, a format reminiscent of a lively dinner party that won her enthusiastic reviews for her unobtrusive interviewing technique.
This was an approach she developed further in Edie (1982) a work of almost 500 pages which traversed the life of the 1960s “It Girl” who became a muse to Andy Warhol, appearing in many of the films he made at the Factory, before descending into drug addiction, mental illness and an untimely and lonely death at the age of 28. Outwardly, Edie Sedgwick left little behind, but the book was a fine memorial to a decade and a milieu of which Edie was a shining beacon, and which Jean Stein herself knew well. The book became an international bestseller.
With her marriage, in 1995, to the Nobel-prize-winning Swiss neurologist Torsten Wiesel, Jean Stein continued to enjoy life as a Manhattan literary and society figure and, from 1989 to 2004, was editor of the quarterly literary and visual arts magazine Grand Street, founded in the 1980s by Ben Sonnenburg.
Jean Stein’s marriage to Torsten Wiesel was dissolved in 2007. She is survived by two daughters – Wendy, an actress and theatre producer in New York, and Katrina, editor of The Nation.
Jean Stein died after falling from the penthouse floor of a Manhattan building. Jean Stein, born February 9 1934, died April 30 2017