Jean Stein, author and editor, took her own life earlier this week when she leapt from the balcony of her Upper East Side apartment. Friends described her as depressed. She was 83, and leaves behind her two daughters, Wendy vanden Heuvel, an actress and producer, and Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of the Nation magazine.
I worked for Jean in the early 1990s at Grand Street, a literary magazine that she purchased from its founding editor Ben Sonnenberg in 1990. She’d worked previously at the Paris Review, under George Plimpton, who would later edit Jean’s most famous book, Edie: American Girl. It was my brief tenure with Jean that taught me F. Scott Fitzgerald was exactly right—the very rich are different from you and me.
Jean’s father was Jules Stein, the physician who started a booking agency for jazz musicians, the Music Corporation of America, that evolved into MCA, one of the world’s biggest media companies. Jean knew movie stars, musicians, writers, artists, political figures, all flattered to meet their prestigious counterparts in other fields at Jean’s parties. I used to think that one reason she brought them together was as a form of personal deterrence. To put them all in the same room to admire their own images reflected back to them in the glittering countenances of other gifted celebrities meant keeping them busy and at a distance.
The rich do not like being asked for favors. They do not give money away. Philanthropists purchase the right to put their name on a legacy that they were too busy to design themselves. What they are really buying is time—time future, and time present, slipping through their fingers. If the rich handed out money whenever someone needed it, and in Jean’s circles there was always some writer or artist who desperately needed money, they’d go broke. Even worse is the punishing emotional tax—or imagine what it’s like to be surrounded by people who need or want something from you, until it seems like there are only people who need or want something from you because everyone needs and wants, and life is a continent of need and want.
Children who grow up with money do not have the luxury to make the kinds of mistakes, errors of judgment, that shape most people’s sense of the social world. They have little sense of perspective or dimension, how to gauge threats, and how, if those threats are real, to ward them off. In the vast savannahs of society, they have difficulty distinguishing between a deadly predator and a house cat, a puppy and a dragon. They are often charmed by us. A friend of mine who worked with Plimpton at the Paris Review liked to tell the story about the time he took a dozen multimillionaires out to dinner. They’d all decided to go out together after a party for the magazine, to which they all donated money, and when the bill came they were at a loss. Like members of a cargo cult, they didn’t understand why their gods, after bestowing bounty, had now left them with a small piece of paper with numbers on it. Was this the map to eternal life? No, just the accounting. My friend decided it would be too difficult to explain the cultural habits of normal Americans out at dinner who split the check in equal parts, so he, an ordinary guy from Philadelphia who was still paying off college loans, covered the check himself. He told the story like he was a character in a Preston Sturges film.
Jean’s problem as an editor was that the social circle that gave her access to writers and artists was also the audience she most wanted to impress and she was terrified of making a misstep. She wanted it known she wasn’t just a rich Hollywood girl, but a serious cultural person. And she was. My introduction to her came through the novelist William T. Vollmann, a difficult taste and often a difficult person, but a great writer with epic ambitions, and Jean, who could have preferred an easier or more popular young novelist, was right to admire him. As a teenager she dated Faulkner, long after he’d become a legend—Jean knew the kind of energy that great talent radiated. However, she didn’t really trust herself.
I was editing an excerpt from a biography of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, and Jean wanted to make sure it was OK so she showed my work to a psychiatrist in her circle. The shrink disagreed with my edits, which was a very obvious sign, I should have seen, that my days at Grand Street were coming to an end. And yet this happened with almost every article, story, or poem under consideration. Jean wanted to make sure it really was good, that she wasn’t being fooled and she wouldn’t look foolish. So she’d send the submitted work out to friends to make sure it was OK, and of course they would disagree, fighting each other for Jean’s affection and favor through a proxy war manned by poems and stories. And yet it was Jean’s vulnerability, once untangled from the complex and frequently rigged game of high culture, that made her a great journalist.
There are at least two kinds of very good reporters: The first is the sort you see represented in the old pictures, a hardboiled soul in a trench coat who won’t stop asking the tough questions even after the bad guys punch him in the nose and his girl is begging him to move to the country with her and teach Latin at the high school like he once promised. Then there’s the type who doesn’t bully anyone but somehow gets people to talk, people as it turns out who were looking for a reason to open up and talk, who have been looking their whole lives for someone to give them permission to speak and then listen to them. That was Jean’s style.
She asked me to work on the transcripts of interviews for her book on Hollywood, which was published just last year as West of Eden: An American Place, some quarter of a century after she’d started. In one passage I recall, she’s interviewing the daughter of a famous figure who was reluctant to speak about her father or how she’d scraped together a middle-class existence from the chaos of her childhood. It’s when Jean opens up and shows a little bit of her own pain, her own childhood, that the interview subject responds more openly. Then they’re speaking. And then the woman tells Jean everything.
Most people speak because they like to hear themselves speak, and the trick for a journalist is to respect, and then profit from, human frailty long enough to keep your own mouth shut. But other people, usually more interesting people, don’t want to speak. Jean’s genius was in getting those people to talk by speaking herself. She understood that social space wants to be filled. Everyone fears certain types of silence, so they fill it with talk, the question then is about the quality of the talk. By exposing parts of her own pain, Jean made her subjects not only willing to reveal some of their own, but also, and more importantly, keen to protect her and join her at the place of her pain so she wouldn’t be left alone.
Here’s a practical example: Next time you attend a party and are called on to introduce two people but have forgotten the name of one or both, stutter. At least one, most likely both, will quickly volunteer their names in order to rescue you from your awkwardness. Why? Arguably, it’s because people are good. In any case, Jean’s aesthetic was premised on the idea that people are basically good and don’t want others to hurt, especially not in public. And that was perhaps Jean’s great theme—public hurt, American pain.
Her first book, also edited by Plimpton, was American Journey: The Times of Robert Kennedy, an oral biography centered around the funeral train that took Kennedy’s body from New York City to Washington, D.C. But Edie was Jean’s masterpiece, also an oral biography, a book that I think is generally misunderstood as a love song to the Warhol gang and the groovy 1960s underground.
Generations of young women, up to the present, have gone to New York with the legend of young Edie Sedgwick, the beautiful and doomed socialite celebrity, on their minds, steered by half-formed dreams of becoming the next “It” girl. One of those young women, a friend of mine, visited the Grand Street office when Jean was there and gushed to her about how much she loved the book, the scene it portrayed, the ethos of the moment. Jean’s face became very serious. She shook her head emphatically. “It was not glamorous,” she told my friend. And then I started to imagine how Jean must have seen it—like a vision of the underworld with generations of beautiful and naïve young women on the arm of some painter, or writer, or actor, eventually to be discarded and left alone in hell. That’s who Edie was, a kid who didn’t learn quickly enough the cost of not leaving a parade of death.
The space Jean Stein occupied was unique, moral, ambiguously optimistic in the American style, and is filled now by her books, a central part of the historiography of 20th-century America.
