Jean Stein

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 spokesperson for the Nation magazine in New York City, where Stein’s daughter, Katrina vanden Heuvel, serves as editor and publisher. A New York City Police Department official said that Stein had jumped to her death Sunday morning from the 15th floor of a Manhattan tower. Her father, Jules Stein, was the co-founder of Music Corp. of America. Stein was born in Los Angeles, the eldest daughter of Jules Stein and Doris Babette Oppenheimer. She was raised in a majestic Beverly Hills mansion on Angelo Drive that overlooked the home of Rudolph Valentino. Over her lifetime, Stein also produced two essential oral histories in collaboration with journalist and editor George Plimpton, who served as editor on some of her projects. She later attended the Katherine Branson School in the Bay Area — now known as the Branson School — a place that Stein later described as being “located between San Quentin and Alcatraz.” She also attended a private school in Switzerland, followed by a stint at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. But she dropped out to move to Paris and study at the Sorbonne, a move that would lead her to a life in letters. It was in Paris that she met Plimpton and by the mid-1950s was working at the Paris Review, where she interviewed figures such as novelist William Faulkner (with whom she also had a romantic dalliance). By the early ’60s, Stein had married attorney William vanden Heuvel, who became an assistant to then-Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy. She and vanden Heuvel had two daughters: Katrina vanden Heuvel and Wendy vanden Heuvel, a film and stage actress. The couple later divorced. Stein got remarried in the mid-1990s to Torsten Wiesel, a Nobel Prize-winning neurophysiologist. That marriage also ended in divorce.