West of Eden

by Jean Stein

  Walter Hopps had called me earlier. He described the house and said you hoped that I would be willing to photograph it. He said, “You’ve been to Graceland, right? Well, this is on about that scale but completely different.” And I said, “Well, I’ll do it for Jean.” So I think I called you right away and said, “I’ll be there.” And that was the end of it until we started working. Those are some of my best memories, our working together out there. I loved that house. Whereas I hated Graceland.

  That was a hard job, photographing Misty Mountain. I didn’t know what to think the first time I saw it. I just attacked it like an attack. I did the best I could as a good soldier would.

  Credit 5.5

  The remains of the pavilion.

  I didn’t think the house was pretentious. It wasn’t my style. But who cares? Mostly I remember Barney eating in the kitchen. Which is so funny. I took a picture of it. That’s my favorite picture of the whole damn thing is Barney—your servant’s fixin’ a meal for himself. He’s chowing down. It’s like he’s completely disrobed. He would certainly sit down at the table and help himself. I liked him very much. Barney reminded me of the kind of young man who would have landed in Iwo Jima or Normandy. You get me? I think he would follow orders.

  —

  JOAN DIDION: I remember making our way to the pool. That was the last night you would have possession of the house. It was quite dark. And exotic. I had not even known this pool was there, ever. And then I remember you ran into the house and got a memento for me.

  —

  JEAN STEIN: A huge bottle of perfume from Mother’s mirrored bathroom.

  —

  JOAN DIDION: Which was Tabu. I still have it in the guest bathroom in New York.

  —

  MURRAY SCHUMACH (FROM HIS UNPUBLISHED BIOGRAPHY OF JULES STEIN): Born in Chicago in 1924, in this stewpot of crime, political corruption, dance bands, jazz and radio, was a little agency devoted to making money by booking bands in various parts of the Midwest, and by representing them for a commission. The company, with the grandiose name of Music Corporation of America, operated out of a two-room office in a grimy building in the Loop. It was founded by Jules Stein, a dapper twenty-eight-year-old ophthalmologist, who had worked his way through college and medical school by playing the violin and saxophone in dance bands; by leading bands, and then by booking them while still doing his internship and residency in Cook County Hospital, Chicago, and while practicing ophthalmology in that city with one of the leading oculists in the nation, Dr. Harry Gradle.

  Credit 5.6

  Jean Stein.

  The young doctor with a square jaw and lithe build abandoned a potentially lucrative medical career because he found booking bands more exciting and was convinced it would prove a quicker path to a Rolls-Royce, a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, and other luxuries that seemed so terribly prestigious to the son of Lithuanian immigrants who never owned more than a dry goods store in South Bend, Indiana, where he was born.

  —

  RUTH COGAN: The home I grew up in with Jules and my other brothers and sister was an ordinary house. Ugly, very ugly. We definitely lived on the wrong side of the railroad tracks. We lived next to our store. My father worked hard in the store. They sold notions and shoes and clothing to the farmers. Once in a while, they would trade a pair of shoes for whatever the farmers brought in as produce.

  It was not a happy home. It was a kosher home. We had two pantries. There was a synagogue in South Bend, a very Orthodox one. The women sat upstairs and the men downstairs. I would say about forty families. It was quite a Catholic town. There was a lot of friction there. I would go down the street and they would call me “sheeny.” My younger brother, David, too. I didn’t like it, but I knew I was Jewish.

  —

  JULES STEIN (FROM HIS UNPUBLISHED BIOGRAPHY BY MURRAY SCHUMACH): I remember I used to go into my mother’s room and put all of this paraphernalia on me, read the Torah or the scripts or whatever it was, and I remember so distinctly my rebellion. It was too much for me. My parents had not outgrown the old ways. They were still the same. I was going to this Hebrew school and I had no idea what I was reading. And I thought I was a little above that. I just couldn’t take it anymore.

  I knew I wanted to go away. It wasn’t that I wanted to get away from home, but I wanted to go someplace. I was expansive in my thinking, I suppose, even as a child. I was conscious, even then, that there were more important things going on outside South Bend.

  During my high school days, I enrolled for a summer course at Winona Academy, at Winona Lake, which was known mostly for being the summer home of the evangelist Billy Sunday. I was using these extra credits to shorten my high school term. I was always urgent about everything. Time was always the most costly thing to me. This terrible loss of time seemed to me to be something I would never be able to recover.

  It was my first time away from home, and I got so lonesome I almost went back to South Bend. However, Warsaw, Indiana, was only four miles away, and since this was a resort town, I got the bright idea of looking for a dance hall there in which I could promote Saturday night dances for the students of Winona Lake, which was also the location of the Indiana University summer school. I found a second-floor hall and made arrangements for the interurban streetcar line to run a special car from Warsaw back to Winona Lake at midnight. I printed postcards announcing these Saturday night dances and sent them to all the students in town. This was my first dance promotion.

  —

  RUTH COGAN: My mother was a strong, determined woman. And very ambitious for the children. Education was important to her. She encouraged your dad, my brother Jules, to go away to college. It was not a happy marriage with my mother and father. There was no love there. They were just stuck with each other. Divorce didn’t exist at that time. I think it was an arranged marriage. My father had already been living in South Bend and they wrote to Europe to send a bride. She was a very beautiful woman. Her name was Rosa.

  Jules went to study at the University of Chicago. He graduated there, then he went to Vienna to study ophthalmology. When he came back he practiced with Dr. Gradle in Chicago. At the same time, he started this little band-booking business at 32 W. Randolph Street in Chicago with Billy Goodheart. It did very well. In fact, it did so well that he took a leave of absence from Dr. Gradle to start the Music Corporation of America business.

  —

  JULES STEIN (FROM HIS UNPUBLISHED BIOGRAPHY BY MURRAY SCHUMACH): When I got the charter for MCA, it was just a name. I didn’t look upon it as a major decision of my life. It was a routine thing. I needed a corporate name. By 1925, I was getting bored with medical practice because 90 percent of it was just fitting glasses. Finally, one day I went to Dr. Gradle and asked for a leave of absence so that I could get my business organized. He agreed. For a couple of years after he still kept my name on the door of his offices. He was a wonderful man. I offered him 25 percent of my business for nothing. He wouldn’t take it. I think that deep down when I asked Dr. Gradle for a leave of absence, I knew I would never come back.

  —

  RUTH COGAN: My oldest brother, Billy, and Jules moved us all to the Piccadilly Hotel in Chicago. But my father was left behind. My mother was very strong, and my father was, I would say, on the weak side. I think my younger brother, David, identified with my father, who was a weak person, because he knew he, too, was weak.

  —

  JEAN STEIN: I have a distinct memory of meeting my grandfather, Father’s father, one day when I was six years old. We were in the garden outside our house, and Uncle David came by with an old man in a big felt hat. Father really loved and admired his mother, but he had no admiration for his father. I think Uncle David identified with his father because they had both sort of failed in life. So there I was in the garden, looking at this man I was told was my grandfather and wondering why he was wearing a big felt hat. I’d never seen such a hat, and I thought he must have been awfully hot wearing it in the sun like that. It
really baffled me. Later, of course, I learned that he wore it because he was an Orthodox Jew.

  —

  DAVID STEIN: My mother always thought Jules was going to be the bright star of the family. My father was less imaginative. But he was a worker who built up his department store next to the house where we lived. And he was very much, I think, the follower of my mother’s desires, in creating an atmosphere for the children.

  When MCA started, I was doing jobbing dates, playing in Chicago with all the bands from the time I was about sixteen years old. I was having a good life. I was a member of the union and playing in orchestras. I loved to play the saxophone. And your father gave me my first saxophone lessons. My mother was very anxious that the boys—meaning Billy and Jules—should advance and not stay in South Bend. And should go on their own as fast as they could. Which they did.

  My mother got Parkinson’s and died. And my father died a lonely man. Lost, cast off to the side. My oldest brother, Bill Stein, who was a few years older than Jules, had a weak heart. He was a very bon vivant character. He loved show business. He was a good-looking man. Very artistic. He followed show people, and he was very involved with the beginnings of MCA. He died too young. We had a lot of tragedy in our family.

  —

  RUTH COGAN: Billy went to Notre Dame in South Bend. He always had one shiksa after another. He screwed around quite a bit. God forbid, never Jewish. Maybe he was trying to project himself in a new image. He had a heart problem. He ended up with an amputated leg.

  Early on Billy was in business with your father for a little while. I think he’s the one that discovered Lew Wasserman. He was an usher in Cleveland and Billy brought him to Chicago.

  —

  LEW WASSERMAN: Jules Stein created a whole industry. I don’t think people realize that but he certainly created the traveling band, which in those days never existed. And he certainly had the vision in the area of the one-nighters where he took bands to towns. Isham Jones told me the story about how your father signed him up. He was playing at the Hotel Sherman. He was getting twenty-five hundred dollars a week, which was an incredible sum of money, and he said that this young man came up to him, admired his playing, and told him he wanted to talk to him about going on the road. And Isham Jones said to the young man, “Do you know how much money I make? Twenty five hundred dollars a week. The only way you can get me to leave is if I get a certified check for ten thousand dollars for four weeks and a Pierce-Arrow bus,” which was the biggest bus of all. And he forgot about it. Four or five days later, your father came back with a certified check for ten thousand dollars. Jones didn’t realize that when he went out for the trip he got the ten thousand dollars by getting deposits from the places where he was going to play. And your dad made thirty to forty thousand dollars on the tour, and that started a company. No one had ever done it before. Your dad, because he had played Kansas City, knew there was a lot of money out in America in the early twenties.

  —

  JULES STEIN (FROM HIS UNPUBLISHED BIOGRAPHY BY MURRAY SCHUMACH): There was a time when I probably knew just about every town in the Midwest with a dance floor and its train connections. We had contacted the headquarters of Western Union and we told them: “You could do a lot more business if you were to get the local offices to check out their areas and tell us where all the dance floors and promoters are located. In turn we will use your offices to make sales for playing dates on tours.” They agreed and out of this we prepared a fantastic working list of dance floors and operators.

  The one-night stands were where the money was. We got 20 percent for the one-nighters, compared to 10 percent for booking an orchestra into a longer engagement. The main reason we wanted to get a radio broadcast from a hotel or nightclub where we had a band with a long engagement was so that the band would become better known and it would make it easier for us to book it for one-night tours. The important thing was to have the band working seven nights a week.

  From 1929 to 1937 we spent most of our time in Chicago, commuting to New York about twice a month with occasional trips to London and Los Angeles, where I had established branch offices, primarily to book dance bands. In the depths of the Depression, 1929 to 1932, MCA was enjoying great success and profitability since people wished to escape from their problems and difficulties, and seemingly the popular dance bands gave them this satisfaction. I was aware that this craze would not continue forever, so I sought diversification in representation by adding the management of singers, dance teams, and other talent the public would patronize. Radio was becoming an important part of public entertainment, so we lost no time in representing artists for this blossoming new field. During this time, my wife, Doris, was making friends with scores of new people, many of them within the industry, and entertaining artists and clients wherever she could be of help.

  I first met Doris when she was a few months short of fifteen while I had my own orchestra during the opening year of the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City. I thought she was very pretty, even though I was interested in another Kansas City girl who was several years older. I distinctly remember the spring of 1917 when I was sporting a two-seater yellow Stutz Bearcat automobile and taking Doris and other girls of her group for short rides on the south side of the city. In fact, I still possess a photograph with Doris at the wheel. The spring of 1917 was one of the most interesting of my youthful days. I had my own orchestra of five musicians at the hotel. I was netting over one hundred dollars a week including a fine room; I had not reached my twenty-first birthday; I had a Stutz Bearcat for which I paid nine hundred dollars to Mrs. Morton of the salt company.

  —

  GERALD OPPENHEIMER: Doris had got to know Jules through the Jewish community at the dances he would organize at the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City. Every Sunday afternoon, you’d go down there and dance and listen to orchestras. Jules was the leader of the orchestras. And he was like a Sinatra. He had a raccoon coat and a Stutz Bearcat car.

  In the meantime, my mother married my father, Harold, when she was sixteen, and then she had me and my older brother, Larry. My father was very unsuccessful. He took over his family’s liquor business, and then Prohibition came and knocked him out. After about seven years, she got a divorce.

  Doris saw Jules again at a New Year’s Eve party. That’s about the time that Doris decided she wanted to go to live in New York, which I think was a good thing for her. She wanted a career. And Kansas City, for divorcées in those days, was not the best place to be. In New York, she got a job at Bergdorf Goodman. And that’s when Jules started dating her. And she dated other people, too, as I understand. She would come back to Kansas City once a month or so to see my brother and me, which was a big deal because we didn’t have airplanes in those days. Well, once every three months. And she’d telephone every week.

  —

  GILLIAN WALKER: Bergdorf Goodman was a heaven, and the women who worked there were known as Angels. Angels knew how to help men who came into the store to buy that little special something, which would allay the suspicions of girlfriends or wives at home. In the course of such counseling, an Angel just might meet a man, divorced or bored with his marriage, and fly him off his feet. As an Angel, your mother never took her eyes off the prize. She came for and indeed wooed and won your father with amazing efficiency.

  —

  GERALD OPPENHEIMER: I understand Jules proposed over the telephone. He married Mother despite her being a divorcée and having two children. He softened up a bit when you and Susan came along. But he was a relatively cold individual, actually.

  —

  LEW WASSERMAN: I first met your father in his office in Chicago, and I never got my coat off. He looked at me and said, “I hear from my brother Bill that you’re very good at something. If Bill wants you, it’s okay with me.” Your father wore those clip-on glasses and had a big, big office. He was truly the only so-called business executive I had ever come in contact with. They offered me a job as national director of advertising at the
enormous salary of sixty dollars a week. I was making a hundred dollars a week before where I was working. So I went back to Edie—we’d just been married. You know, we got married in July of ’36 and this must have been September. I told Edie that I was going to take this job. She said, “Why? We just got married, we don’t know a soul in Chicago.” We had no money to speak of. We had a two-door Chevrolet an uncle of Edie’s had given us for three hundred dollars. I said, “There’s got to be a great future in this company.” She asked, “Why?” I said, “The man who owns it is very old.”

  —

  ARTHUR PARKS: I don’t know if you knew this or not, but during Prohibition, when Karl Kramer was in charge of the one-nighter cards—posters which he’d have printed up and sent out to the promoters—he was also in charge of buying the liquor, because there were only speakeasies in those days.

  —

  LOUISE MILLS: My father, Karl Kramer, knew Jules Stein when he was a bandleader, and he recalled that your father knew Mae West when she was a brunette. My father had been doing publicity for the Orpheum Circuit, the vaudeville chain, and he had an offer to join the newly formed company Music Corporation of America. My mother said, “Oh, do you really want to give up this known job for a new venture?” And I guess he did. Your father was the one who hired him. He became the treasurer of MCA. He kept the books. If you’re the treasurer of an organization, you know everything about the organization.

  MCA was providing everything for the clubs. In Chicago, and then later when they would send the bands on tours, they would make agreements with the nightclubs. They provided the noisemakers, the funny hats, the booze. This was during Prohibition. I was born in 1929, and I think my father was working for MCA then. I don’t know whether it was Capone’s gang, but there was some kind of mob involvement. The mob element controlled the liquor industry, and in order to book the bands and handle all of these arrangements, you had to cooperate with the people who were the bosses. So I think they worked out some kind of arrangement.