West of Eden

by Jean Stein

  As SAG president, Reagan granted MCA a blanket waiver that permitted the company to operate a talent agency, MCA Artists, and also a new television production company, Revue Productions. This was otherwise prohibited because of the inherent conflict of interest in simultaneously being agent and employer. A few years later Reagan became the host, program supervisor, and star of a Revue production called General Electric Theater. The role resurrected his acting career and got him into the home of every American that owned a TV. By the end of the 1950s, MCA produced or co-produced more television series than any other company, and it got some cut from about 45 percent of all TV network evening shows. That’s how powerful the blanket waiver was: MCA could make up the rules because no one in the commercial world was strong enough to challenge them. It wouldn’t have been possible without Reagan’s waiver.

  By 1961 it was evident to Wasserman and Stein that time was running out for them, as both producers and agents. Their monopoly was too blatant. And if they had to choose, they would clearly take the production business and cast the agency business aside. Leonard Posner, a lawyer from the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, was rapidly uncovering many aspects of MCA’s antitrust violations and some evidence of the secret dealings between MCA and Reagan. But what he was really looking for, as far as Reagan went, was evidence that he had been bribed by MCA to give the waiver. In 1962 Reagan was interviewed before a grand jury in L.A., and he claimed he couldn’t remember any of the details of any dealings with MCA while he was SAG president. With John F. Kennedy in the White House, and Robert Kennedy as attorney general, MCA and its subsidiaries were finally charged with violating the Sherman Antitrust Act, and SAG was named as co-conspirators. In a settlement Wasserman negotiated with the government, MCA agreed to dissolve its agency business but preserved its ability to become a full-scale entertainment conglomerate—MCA Universal.

  Not long after that, Reagan’s political career got under way. Father George Dunne, a Jesuit professor of political science at Loyola University, said in an interview very early in Reagan’s political rise, “This is a dangerous man, because he is so articulate, and he’s sharp. But he can also be very ignorant, as he clearly was, in my judgment, interpreting everything in terms of the communist threat.” Taft Schreiber, the MCA executive who was very close to Stein and Wasserman’s die-hard adversary, joined a group of wealthy Republicans to support Reagan when he ran for governor of California. Soon, Schreiber was Reagan’s chief fundraiser and campaign co-chair. Stein was heavily involved in the campaign financially, too.

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  GORE VIDAL: Jules and I would talk politics, and that’s how we got on so well. He wanted the dish on the leaders of the country. I would tell him what they were like, and he was eager to find out. Good agent. One day, they might be useful, you know. And I very much enjoyed him. And apparently he enjoyed talking to me, which was a wonder since he thought my mother was the devil—the mad shiksa who must have been married with a stake in her heart. Jules got very Old Testament around her. She was a drunk. He didn’t feel that Doris needed any encouragement along those lines. But my mother’s influence was negligible. It was basically Johnnie Walker who got there first.

  My mother, Nina, had married her third husband, General Olds, and headed out to drink her way through the war at the Beverly Hills Hotel. That was my mother—this deranged flapper. She moved into Bungalow 1, and she had a double bungalow so she could have the nanny at one end, and at the other end Mrs. Olds held court with her lady-in-waiting, Mrs. Stein. They didn’t do much waiting, those girls. They just started right in. The early dawn would see them mixing the first martini. My mother and yours held really strategic conferences in the Polo Lounge. Yeah, right around noon, they would check in, and that’s where they conducted the Second World War and that’s how we won. Nina and Doris were just in charge of everything, until Doris fell into a rosebush on one side, and then Nina on the other side. Dorothy Earl, their good friend from Santa Barbara, who was six feet tall, just plucked both ladies by the nape of the neck out of the rosebushes, the way you do with kittens, and steered them into another drink.

  My mother had previously been Mrs. Hugh D. Auchincloss from Newport, Rhode Island. In those days, those names were titles. Instead of being the duchess of Devonshire, you were Mrs. Hugh D. Auchincloss. Brits would ask me, “Why don’t you people have proper titles?” Because we have names. Everybody knew who you were when they heard your name. Doris wanted to hop over into shiksaland. And that’s how my mother entered your mother’s life.

  Nina and Doris were happy drunks together and they had lots of secrets. They were constantly whispering to each other about this and that. Oh, there were men drifting in and out, you know. They were good-looking women. I mean, neither one was disgusting-looking. You didn’t wanna run away. People came around. Your mother was raised in a much crasser world. Mine was raised to be a lady. It didn’t take. The very thought of art just gave her chills. Hated it. At least your mother liked furniture. Your mother had showgirl values. She knew a good rock when she saw one.

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  LOUIS BLAU: When your parents were traveling around South America, your mother took her jewelry case. It was big. And it was loaded. “Hang on to that and don’t let anybody touch it,” I told your mother. We never got out of the Guatemala airport with that. The Guatemalans thought maybe she was going to start a revolution, she was going to hire the army with all the jewelry. I told them, “She is very well known in the United States, and she will do a lot of entertaining when she’s in Latin America. And this is all part of her costume for entertaining.” “Well, no, no, no, no. No one can have anything like this. You have more inside your case than they have in the treasury of Guatemala.” And they had the minister of the interior come from downtown Guatemala City out to the airport to look this thing over. And finally, they assured me, first place, they weren’t going to let these go out of the airport. And they let me lock them up in a safe place in the airport. We retrieved the jewels when we went on from Guatemala. I think we flew next to Argentina.

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  JEAN STEIN: Mother claimed that Evita Perón admired the brooch she was wearing during their audience with the president’s wife. It seems the custom was to offer her anything she desired, but Mother had no intention of handing over her pin.

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  GORE VIDAL: My mother gave away my clothes and books after I’d left for the army, all my possessions to the Salvation Army on the grounds that I wasn’t coming back. She was one of the most horrible people that ever lived. All I wanted to do was murder her and I never got around to it. My half sister, Nini, had a nervous interior. She tried to be a good girl and she’d get knocked across the room, you know, teeth falling out.

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  NINA AUCHINCLOSS STRAIGHT: I remember all the furs that our mothers wore, with the animals biting one another, and they’d sling them around their necks, you know. And the tails would wag. If you saw a tail swinging, it was either gonna be Mrs. Stein or Mom.

  Everybody wore hats in those days. Day jewels, and afternoon jewels. And evening jewels, and hats to go with them. The casual aquamarine that covered somebody’s whole wrist. But your mother had the hair and the face and everything, so there must not have been much of an effort. The hairdos out in L.A. at that time were worthy of the eighteenth century. They made Marie Antoinette look like a biker.

  The last time I saw your mother, she had just gotten the most incredible square-cut diamond ring anybody’d ever seen. I just adored it. I meant to write you to say, “Please don’t sell it. I need to have somebody who owns that ring. It just gives me such a kick.” She said her friend Frances Goldwyn had seen the ring and said, “Doris, I didn’t think you needed that sort of thing.” It looked like the Rockefeller ice rink, open for summer practice.

  Our mothers together were like two guys looking for more guys. For prey. For my mother, it was an excuse to get out of bed and get dressed. I can’t even remember her kissing me or hug
ging me or anything. There are pictures of her being nice to me as a baby. But she just said she didn’t like girls. I was not a most fetching child, I must admit. I looked like Orson Welles’s moonchild.

  I can remember you wearing these great, incredible Scarlett O’Hara skirts to school. You could barely get through the door. We’d have to push you through with your petticoat. Going to your house for a party was quite an occasion. First you walked into that huge dollhouse upstairs. Loved it. Loved all the rooms. Wanted to live in it. My ambition as a little kid was to grow up and live in a bassinet. So cozy-looking, and all the silk and lace and everything. So, I thought the dollhouse was even better.

  I remember somebody very stern wondering why I was in your mother’s hat closet—that must have been your governess, Miss Hirschberg. But I was not talking. I had friends in the closet. The iconography of those hats alone would tell the entire history of the movies. Nowadays, nobody gets dolled up. Back then, everybody had waistlines and really pulled themselves together.

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  GORE VIDAL: Your mother was so funny. I really liked her. Nobody likes mothers as mothers. She always referred to faggots as “our feathered friends.” It took me a long time to figure out she wasn’t going out with parakeets.

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  JEAN STEIN: Walter Hopps always said that my sister, Susan, and I were like props. When the stars came to the house, we’d be brought down to curtsy like little dolls in our silk dressing gowns. Our social life was carefully regulated, but I didn’t feel at ease with those Hollywood kids. Father didn’t much care to be with people, but Mother went out almost every night. She loved being with people. She was open with everybody, very flirtatious. But that was just her exterior. When she was at home alone with us, it was a different story.

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  EARL MCGRATH: Doris would always have a drink in her hand, you know. When her glass was getting low, she’d look at the butler, Charles Harris, and she would sort of look over at the shelf there. And she would look at Charles again, and look in the direction of one of the guests, then look at the shelf again, and Charles would pour another drink and put it over on the shelf. She’d put her old drink down and she’d go, “Oh, hello, how are you? Nice to see you.” And she would pick up the new drink that Charles had left for her. In this way, she would never have to finish a drink.

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  CHARLES HARRIS: I remember the first time I met your parents. They were in the dining room when I went in and introduced myself. I don’t know if I was just too damn lazy to go out and look for another job or just that it was easier to stay there and forget what was down below. Because all the jobs are the same, you know, when you get into domestics. You can’t improve yourself too much. You can do better on your job, but your wages are all more or less stabilized. You’re not going to get any raises or anything. They tell you to wait until they die and then they’ll leave you something. They’ll put you in the will.

  The Steins were in South America at the time I came. Misty Mountain was 1,000 percent different from the Hearst Castle. There was absolutely no comparison. With Mr. Hearst, when I went to work up there, he had forty-five thousand acres. And your dad only had nine acres and most of them were on the hillside. Mr. Hearst lived like a king. And your dad lived like a pauper. Although your dad probably had more money than Mr. Hearst did.

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  JOAN DIDION: I couldn’t fathom the moment when we would become close, your parents and I. I became close to your father, because he was fascinated by taxes and money. I was close to your mother because she was somewhat fun, and she’d pick me as the person who she could send to the bar to get a drink and wouldn’t embarrass her. I was taking Charles’s place.

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  JEAN STEIN: I’ll never understand what motivated Mother exactly. I remember her taking me for an interview to a private high school called Westlake. On the way, she said, “You probably won’t get in because you’re Jewish.” And I wasn’t accepted. I didn’t even know we were Jewish until I was six. The Second World War had started by then. Father came into our bedroom one night with Mother, and he told my sister and me that if anyone ever insulted us, it was because we were Jewish. I remember asking, “What is that?”

  I was apolitical until I was about sixteen, when my father’s lawyer, Edwin Weisl, tried to set me up with a young attorney. I suppose my father trusted Weisl’s judgment; he was a close confidant to several powerful men, including Lyndon Johnson, and he could be counted on as a fixer whenever needed. Of course, at sixteen I had very little idea of what all that meant. In any case, Weisl claimed that he had the perfect person for me to meet, and he took me down to the courthouse in New York where a trial was in progress. This was during the blacklisting period, and William Remington had been accused of being a communist. It turned out that the young attorney I was to meet was Roy Cohn, the venomous mastermind behind the prosecution. I sat and watched the proceedings, and within minutes my sympathies were with the victim. This was a pivotal awakening for me as a young person. Remington was a distinguished man, and he was tragically murdered in prison. Roy Cohn went on to become a henchman for Joseph McCarthy. The dark irony of Cohn’s career is that he headed up the witch hunt against homosexuals working in the U.S. government while he himself was one of them, something he denied until the day he died of AIDS.

  My parents were ambitious for me to marry someone from a noble family. It was like a Henry James novel set in Hollywood. Gore Vidal’s family represented American aristocracy to my mother, so she approved of our relationship when we became close friends. Gore took me under his wing like a surrogate older brother. I was his eager student as he sought to broaden my horizons, giving me introductions to friends of his like Paul and Jane Bowles when I went to Tangier. Many of the friends I had when I moved to New York were through Gore. He provided a sanctuary when I started to rebel against my parents.

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  GORE VIDAL: You were around and somewhat unfocused, not terribly interested in the academic world to which you had been committed at Wellesley, like a nunnery. There you were in your nun’s gown. I said, “Meet some more interesting people.” So I took you to one or two literary things. I don’t usually recommend anybody to go to such things, but if you haven’t seen one, you have no idea. And as I’ve told everybody, I didn’t see her for six months, and the next time I did, she was with Faulkner.

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  JEAN STEIN: The year I lived in Paris at the home of my uncle David, I did an interview with William Faulkner for The Paris Review. I was twenty. I had met Faulkner at the Palace Hotel in St. Moritz of all places. He was doing a favor for his longtime friend the director Howard Hawks, who had helped him out years earlier in Hollywood with screenwriting projects when Faulkner was down and out. Hawks was preparing to make a film called Land of the Pharaohs and had commissioned Faulkner and Harry Kurnitz to write the script. St. Moritz was a stopover on the way to Egypt, where Hawks planned to shoot the film. So there they were with Robert Capa and Charles Feldman and his wife, Jean Howard, whom I had known through my parents. They invited me to join them and introduced me to Faulkner. The film turned out to be a disaster, and he didn’t seem to recall much about his time in Egypt when I asked him about it later. During the interview I did with him, he described the inane mechanics of the Hollywood system in a story about getting hired to write the dialogue for an MGM film set in New Orleans, which never got made. He called it all “foolish and incomprehensible activity.” Having grown up in that world, I thought that was rather apt.

  Meanwhile, my parents were still hoping I’d marry a prince. I gave in to them at one point and married William vanden Heuvel. We had two children—Katrina and Wendy. Bill represented respectability to my parents. He was actually from an immigrant family. His father had worked in a mustard factory in Rochester and his mother ran a boardinghouse. My parents were perfectly happy for me to marry someone in the Catholic Church. I had to take lessons about how to bring your children up as Catholics. I let them
be baptized and have Communion, but I had no intention of raising them in the church.

  Years later, not long after Bill and I were divorced, I told my parents that I was going to take back my maiden name. My mother said, “That is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done.” I was shocked to hear her say that in front of my father.

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  WENDY VANDEN HEUVEL: We were living in a different world than my grandparents. I was probably about eight when Nonnie, Popop, Mommy, Katrina, and I went to Disneyland. Popop always spoke of Walt Disney with great respect. He had a lifetime pass to Disneyland. It was gold, like a credit card. Our guide was a blonde from Orange County, an Anita Bryant type, dressed in a blue guide uniform made out of some synthetic material with a little red-and-blue polka-dotted scarf. A woman walked by in hot pants, platform shoes, and a halter top. No brassiere. It was pure seventies. The guide was taken aback. The woman was ejected from the park. Mommy asked, “What was wrong with that woman?” The guide said, “If visitors see people like that, they will no longer believe in Mickey Mouse.”

  Then Mommy asked the guide if there were any black people working at Disneyland. She looked very embarrassed and said there were two. It turned out that they worked the submarine ride. Next we went to a special exhibit about progress through history, sponsored by General Electric. Nonnie was talking about how great it was, and Mommy said, “This sucks.” Nonnie looked at her and said, “There is something wrong with you.” We drove back, and no one was speaking to Mommy. She knew it was time for her to leave for New York. That night Katrina and I had dinner with Nonnie and Popop, and Katrina said she didn’t understand what was wrong with people wearing hot pants. Popop turned on her and said, “You stay out of this. Your mother is a troublemaker. She’s a Commie.”