A Literary Matchmaker in the Grand Scheme of Things

If MCA maven Jules Stein had had his druthers--and he generally saw to it that he did--his elder daughter Jean would have become a Hollywood agent.

Not just a Hollywood agent. A wonderful Hollywood agent.

“She had that gift for putting people together, for making things happen, for creating an environment or a climate in which people helped each other,” says Joan Didion, a longtime friend and occasional confidante of the Steins.

But while the formidable Jules Stein was able to move mountains when it came to The Industry, he had less luck with his shy, fluttery daughter, who nevertheless turned out to be a fairly intractable piece of topography herself.

Jean Stein never did go into her dad’s business. But that didn’t make Jules wrong about his No. 1 daughter.

She is indeed busy mixing and matching people. She’s the happy caretaker of one of New York’s great salons, an Upper West Side abode where she regularly collects as eclectic a bunch as she’s able to find--from Dennis Hopper to George Plimpton, from Jasper Johns to James Watson of DNA-discovering fame.

And now, ever the populist, she’s pouring her unlikely matchmaking fervor into Grand Street, considered one of the country’s most distinguished literary magazines. With the current issue, Stein assumes her place as Grand Street’s grande dame, and under her tutelage, the magazine reads like the literary equivalent of a splendid dinner party.

Here she has collected the poet Bei Dao, an exiled leader of China’s democracy movement, and she matches him up with Olivier Messiaen, who weighs in with a snippet of score from “Saint Francoise d’Assise,” the composer’s only opera. There are literary heavyweights the likes of Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery. But there’s also ice-hockey arena owner-operator-cum-poet Matt Jasper.

“He says he’s going to name his child after me, poor guy,” Stein says of her discovery.

That lineup doesn’t even include the artist Saul Steinberg, who contributed a portfolio of zoned-out dog drawings and antique dog postcards as well as the jazzy cover. Or Lewis Thomas, president emeritus of New York’s prominent Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, who offers up a handy-dandy scientific essay, “The World at a Glance.”

“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,” says Stein, 56. “And, in a way, I’ve lived my life in New York that way. I’m probably one of the very few people who brings people from different worlds to have evenings at home. So it’s a natural.”

Says Hopper: “She’s very generous, and I’m not saying by giving people loans, but as a person, intellectually. She’s extremely curious, and she goes out and she seeks out people. She seeks out experiences.”

When Stein talks about her latest venture, her voice sounds girlish. Her words come out in a breathy rush, tumbling over each other as a new thought overtakes an old one midstream. Now she’s talking about what a shame it is that the work of foreign writers under 40, uncommercial as it is, so rarely sees the light of print in this country, and how she plans to correct that in Grand Street.

“I just think it’s important,” she says. “The world is becoming smaller and smaller, and with some American writers, there’s a danger of provincialism. So much I find of American fiction today is studying one’s navel. There is more out there.”

And she says that it’s wonderful to have the Ashberys and the Bishops, the celebrities of the literary world, but there’s nothing quite like squaring them off with a talented unknown or three.

Rather like the way she arranges her life.

“I don’t want to end up living in that world, which is where I could easily be,” says Stein. “The celebrity world, it’s death finally. There are no ideas coming in any more.”

The rebel with the literary magazine, charmed as she is by incongruities, would be pleased to know that her tony quarterly made a mass-market appearance in a recent issue of People magazine, in a photo featuring her old friend Dennis Hopper. Hopper also appears in Grand Street itself, in a pastiche of interviews Stein published about some drugged-out days Hopper spent with writer Terry Southern at Larry Flynt’s palace, listening to Timothy Leary and G. Gordon Liddy howl at each other for their pseudo-debates, passing pot to Flynt’s wife and watching Flynt do a Hustler shoot delicately titled “Celebrity Porn.”

“I did meet Larry Flynt once,” Stein muses. “Dennis arranged for me to meet him. I was just terrorized.”

Tales of Stein’s adventures fail to ruffle her daughters Katrina and Wendy Vanden Heuvel, a 31-year-old Nation editor and 29-year-old San Francisco actress, respectively.

“They’re used to me by now,” Stein says cheerfully.

Stein raised $100,000 for her first issue (with a press run of 10,000) from Grand Street well-wishers who included Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner and Stephen Graham, a Washington Post scion, theater producer and budding novelist.

Of course, Stein, a longtime literary philanthropist, is also helping pay the bills with contributions funneled through the New York Foundation of the Arts. And the eight-room apartment on Central Park West where she raised her children and spent the last quarter-century is now totally transformed.

“It’s not a home any more,” she says. “Sometimes there are eight people working in there. The dining room is no longer a dining room. It’s like a campaign headquarters.”

Stein inherited the 9-year-old magazine from its founder, Ben Sonnenberg, who started it with the proceeds from the sale of his ancestral home at 19 Gramercy Park.

Being quite the rabble-rouser himself, Sonnenberg prided himself on bucking the tradition of literary magazines by paying writers real money, up to $2,000 a pop and sometimes even more. Stein says she plans to do the same.

And if it’s true that you get what you pay for, Sonnenberg did well to open his pockets. Over the years, he published such writers as Samuel Beckett, Garry Wills, Christopher Hitchens and Alexander Cockburn. And he liked to say he named the magazine Grand Street, because that was where his parents met in New York. (His father, Ben Sonnenberg Sr., was a public-relations lion.)

Sonnenberg retired because multiple sclerosis was beginning to get the better of him, and because he wanted to write his memoirs. “Lost Property: Memoirs and Confessions of a Bad Boy” will be published by Summit Books next spring.

As for his choice of Stein as successor, Sonnenberg, in his typically wry way, says this of his old friend: “I had been meant to marry Jean when we were in our 20s, because she was the daughter of a man with a great collection of English 18th-Century furniture. And my father had a great collection of English 18th-Century furniture. And he thought it would be swell if the two collections could merge.

“So this is the fulfillment of a dream of my father’s.”

Stein’s famous father cast a big shadow over her childhood, and in a way, it’s where the story of her conception of the magazine begins. She grew up in a majestic house on Angelo Drive in Beverly Hills that overlooked Rudolph Valentino’s home, Falcon’s Lair. (Rupert Murdoch later bought the Steins’ mansion.)

“It was beautiful,” Stein recalls. “You really had a sense of privacy, being alone. It was kind of lonely, too.”

Stein was hemmed in by two strong-willed parents and a German governess, who were not fond of children having their own opinions.

“You were supposed to do what you were told,” Stein recalls. “I guess you become rebellious to survive.”

She was eventually shipped off to the Katharine Branson School in San Francisco, which was strict--”I always liked to say it was located between San Quentin and Alcatraz.”

And later to a school in Lausanne, Switzerland, which was not--”They only made a law after you broke it. But it was freedom. It was heaven.”

Stein later went to Wellesley College, but she dropped out and moved to Paris, where she studied at the Sorbonne and joined forces with her friend George Plimpton at the Paris Review in the mid-’50s. While she was in Paris, she met William Faulkner, who did double duty as a successful suitor and her first published interview subject.

In a rare and provocative coming out, Faulkner talked about art, Hollywood and bourbon, informing readers of the Paris Review that “the best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it’s the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.”

“He said it was the first time he had ever spoken seriously about his work,” Stein says. “Usually he would say to people, ‘I’m just a farmer.’ He was a very great man. He had great values, and I think growing up in Hollywood is not the best place for values. And I was a lost soul.”

In the late ‘50s, Stein worked in New York as an assistant to Clay Felker, then features editor of Esquire Magazine. But it was as an interviewer that Stein found her metier. By the early ‘60s, she was married to socialite William Vanden Heuvel. (They later divorced.) And when he was appointed a special assistant to then-U.S. Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy, they moved to Washington.

In those days, Stein’s interests were largely confined to the arts, and Kennedy liked to chastise her for her tunnel vision, reminding her that there was a big political world out there.

And when Robert Kennedy was assassinated, she rode his funeral train from St. Patrick’s in New York to Arlington National Cemetery in Washington. It was a life-turning event for Stein, prompting her to conduct years of interviews that resulted in a 1971 oral history edited by Plimpton, “American Journey: The Times of Robert Kennedy.” The book, structured as a series of recollections pegged to different stages of the funeral journey, was warmly praised by the New Yorker, which called it “serious, credible, and even beautiful.”

In 1982, Stein published “Edie: An American Biography,” another lauded oral history edited by Plimpton. This one was about California blueblood and Andy Warhol “youthquaker” Edie Sedgwick, whose troubled life ended in a drug overdose in 1971.

Stein had known Edie, and considered her sort of “a younger sister.” And she spent 10 relentless years on interviews for the book, returning to some subjects as many as 15 times. A friend liked to say that you’d think Stein was in a wind tunnel, she was so single-minded in her pursuit of people.

Now Stein has turned back to Hollywood for her next book, and her Larry Flynt piece is a small excerpt of it. It will be something about how the Old Hollywood meets the New Hollywood, and she’s been interviewing another diverse bunch, from filmmaker King Vidor to her parents’ butler for 25 years, Charles Harris, who had previously worked at San Simeon.

But Stein doesn’t limit herself to books any more, ever since the completion of “Edie” left her with “a really serious postpartum.”

“Starting the magazine gave me, even though I was already working on my next book, it gave me the feeling I wouldn’t fall off the precipice again,” she says.

It also gives her a chance to be a rebel, and quite a distinguished one at that. Stein is thumbing her nose at those who insist a literary magazine is all seriousness, and no fun. She wants to be, well, outrageous, to publish stuff about a millionaire porn pusher who employs a big security guard called Monstro-Kraut, and say, yeah, that’s Literature.

“Maybe it’s iconoclastic instead of outrageous,” Stein says thoughtfully. “That you have the freedom to rebel. That you can be what you want.”