Roger L. Stevens; Headed Kennedy Center

Roger L. Stevens, a Realtor who bought and sold the Empire State Building, the Broadway angel who produced the classic musical “West Side Story,” and the man appointed by President John F. Kennedy to create a national cultural center, has died. He was 87.

Stevens, who from 1961 to 1988 headed what became the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, died of pneumonia Monday night at Georgetown University Medical Center.

“As founding chairman of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Roger can be credited with spotlighting our nation’s capital as a haven for the performing arts,” President Clinton said Tuesday. “The Kennedy Center, one of America’s finest cultural showcases, might never have been built if it weren’t for Roger’s dedication and energy.”

In a long list of accomplishments, Stevens helped create and headed the National Council on the Arts (now the National Endowment for the Arts) in the 1960s, helped create the Kennedy Center Honors for entertainment legends in 1978, and created the Fund for New American Plays in 1985.

In 1988, he won his own Kennedy Center Honor, as well as the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan and the National Medal of Arts.

“Well,” the man of few words said when Reagan handed him the Medal of Freedom. “It sort of boggles the mind. I feel most humble.”

At Stevens’ 75th birthday celebration in 1985, a Washington fund-raiser for the arts, the late composer Leonard Bernstein thanked Stevens for making “West Side Story” possible. He further expressed appreciation for Stevens’ commissioning Bernstein’s “Mass” for the Kennedy Center opening in 1971.

Bernstein said he and Steven Sondheim, director Jerome Robbins and author Arthur Laurents were in despair when funding for the racially tinged “West Side Story” fell through. They called Stevens, who was in London. “Keep writing,” said the man whom U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) has called the “Robin Hood of the performing arts.”

Stevens later said he made more profit on “West Side Story” than on any of the other 200 shows he produced, an impressive list that also includes “Bus Stop” and “A Man for All Seasons.”

Because of Stevens’ history of backing talented artists and raising funds for entertainment ranging from stage shows to film, books, orchestras and ballet companies, President Kennedy selected him to organize a national performing arts center. Stevens spearheaded fund-raising through the 1960s, proposed naming the center for Kennedy after his assassination, and shaped the center’s programming for its first two decades.

Born in Detroit and brought up in Ann Arbor, Mich., Stevens attended the tony Choate School in Connecticut. But his college education was rapidly canceled because of the Depression.

After working as a gas station attendant and on a Ford assembly line in his native Detroit, he turned to real estate.

His career-making transaction was to be Manhattan’s Empire State Building. In May 1950, the Realtor, investor and speculator assembled a forfeitable $1-million down payment on the landmark, with six months to raise the balance of the $50-million purchase price. He did it with only 48 hours to spare and a financial package so byzantine that settlement required 600 documents and 2,000 signatures. He sold his interest within a couple of years, turning a $1 million profit on his personal investment of $800,000.

Stevens earned enough over the years to enable him to, as he put it, “throw away a good real estate career for the theater.”

A financial angel on Broadway and across the country, he invested and donated money to encourage promising productions at such theaters as Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum and the Pasadena Playhouse. He even bailed out the Kennedy Center many times when it couldn’t meet a payroll or finance a performance he wanted. Stevens’ personal generosity set an impressive example when he solicited donations from others.

Stevens is survived by his wife of 60 years, Christine, and their daughter, Cristabel Gough.