Grace Zaring Stone; Novelist Saw Works Made Into Movies

Grace Zaring Stone, a best-selling author whose novels included “The Bitter Tea of General Yen,” “Escape” and “Winter Meeting”--all made into motion pictures--has died at the age of 100.

Mrs. Stone, who also wrote under the name Ethel Vance, died Sunday at the Mary Elizabeth Nursing Center.

“The Bitter Tea of General Yen,” which dealt with the then-scandalous subject of miscegenation, was published in 1932 and made into a movie that year starring Barbara Stanwyck. It was chosen to be the first film ever shown at Radio City Music Hall in New York.

“Escape,” an anti-Nazi novel of suspense, was published in 1939. Robert Taylor starred in the subsequent movie. Mrs. Stone adopted the pseudonym Ethel Vance to protect her daughter, then living in occupied Czechoslovakia, and her husband, who was naval attache at the American Embassy in Paris.

As Ethel Vance, she also wrote “Winter Meeting,” the story of a repressed spinster, which was made into a 1948 film starring Bette Davis.

Mrs. Stone had studied to be a concert pianist but shifted to writing after her marriage to a Navy officer. Her first published story was an account in Atlantic Monthly of a hurricane striking islands where her husband was stationed. She wrote 12 novels from 1922 to 1951.

Her first novel, “The Heaven and Earth of Dona Elena,” was published in 1929 and was based on a background gathered from her husband’s assignment in St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Others were based on their travels to Japan, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Europe and Mexico.