Jean Stein dies; author wrote about NY, Hollywood elite

Jean Stein, the literary editor and author known for producing engrossing oral histories on topics as disparate as the tumultuous life of an Andy Warhol acolyte and the dastardly intrigues of early Hollywood, has died at 83.

Her death Sunday was confirmed by a representative for the Nation magazine in New York City, where Stein’s daughter, Katrina vanden Heuvel, serves as editor and publisher.

The representative did not reveal the cause of death, but a New York Police Department official said that Stein had fallen to her death Sunday from the 15th floor of a Manhattan tower.

A child of Hollywood royalty (she was the daughter of MCA co-founder Jules Stein), Stein had most recently published the well-received “West of Eden: An American Place,” a 2016 book that tracked the development of Hollywood and Southern California through the lives of five powerful Los Angeles families.

Book critic Judith Freeman, in the Los Angeles Times, described it as “compulsively readable.”

Other notable titles were done in collaboration with journalist and editor George Plimpton, who served as editor on some of her projects.

This included her debut oral history “American Journey: The Times of Robert Kennedy,” published in 1971 after she rode Kennedy’s funeral train from New York to Washington, D.C. Eleven years later she published the international bestseller “Edie: An American Biography,” about the life of socialite bohemian actress Edie Sedgwick, who often hung out at Warhol’s studio in New York and whose life ended in a drug overdose.

Stein began her career at the Paris Review in the mid-1950s, interviewing figures such as novelist William Faulkner. By the end of that decade, she served as an assistant to Clay Felker, the legendary magazine editor who was then the features editor at Esquire.

From 1990 until 2004, she edited the literary journal Grand Street, known for combining the literary highbrow (work by, say, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet John Ashbery) with the more popular (an interview with actor Dennis Hopper, whom Stein counted as a friend).

Stein was born and raised in the Los Angeles area, but since the 1950s had primarily lived in New York City.

She is survived by her daughters, publisher vanden Heuvel and Wendy vanden Heuvel, a film and stage actress.