West of Eden

by Jean Stein

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  JEAN STEIN: In the summer of the Watergate hearings, Walter Hopps and I were sharing a house out in Trancas on the cliffs beyond Malibu. Dennis Hopper had introduced us, and we were kindred spirits, you could say. One night we decided to have friends over. Walter had many gifted California artists in his orbit. Ed Ruscha, Ed Moses, Larry Bell, and Billy Al Bengston were all there. I recall that when my parents walked in, my father took one look at the guests and said, “Oh my god, who are all these people?” I didn’t hear my father describe my friends as “riffraff,” but I’m sure that’s how he viewed them. He was even more shocked when in walked Jennifer Jones and Norton Simon. At one point the art dealer Nick Wilder sauntered up to Norton and said, “Norton, baby, I’ll suck you off whenever you want.” That was the night when Tom Wicker, the editorial columnist of The New York Times, had a discussion with Father about the Watergate hearings. Father had given a large contribution of approximately $160,000 to Nixon’s reelection campaign, but it looked as though Nixon was going to hell in a bucket. Father was heard saying, “How can I get my money back?” It seems that one of Father’s top executives, Taft Schreiber, had engineered for Hollywood to get a great tax break. Later in the evening, Bill Eggleston arrived from Memphis with a briefcase full of drugs. The next day when he came to, he believed he was out at sea on an ocean liner. “Where are we?” he asked. That was a good question.

  A year or so later, during the Pentagon Papers trial, I invited the defendants and their lawyers to a screening at our house. I’d gotten to know them by helping to raise funds for the defense. The trial had caused a serious rift between generations in the Hollywood community. Those who had lived through the blacklisting period felt very threatened by the issues that were at stake. After the guests departed, my father informed me that he didn’t want those people in his home ever again. I sensed something primitive in his attitude, as though the pogrom could return to get him.

  Even though we were often at odds, I was always terrified of angering my father. I went to great lengths to avoid getting on his bad side. Once I was in Paris and needed to get back to New York in time for a screening of The Miracle Worker that my father had organized to benefit his foundation, Research to Prevent Blindness. I got to the airport late and was told the plane was already taxiing. So I ran out on the airfield and stood in front of the plane. The Air France pilot must have thought I was a crazed American, but he stopped the plane, lowered the stairs, and let me board.

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  WENDY VANDEN HEUVEL: When I was about seventeen or eighteen, I wanted to get an agent. My mother called me and said that she had spoken to her friend Nancy Dowd, who had a possible movie role that I could try out for. So I called Nancy, and she gave me the name of the agent. I called Popop to tell him, and he said that he wanted to see me as soon as possible.

  When I walked in Nonnie looked extremely worried and said, “Where have you been? Come in here, sit down. Your grandfather has something very important to talk to you about.”

  They were in their bedroom, and I sat myself down, poured myself a glass of water. I had no idea what this was about. Maybe they had found the speed that I’d stolen. Popop looked very worried, and he said, “Young lady, have you ever heard of white slavery?” And I said, “What? What are you talking about?” “Well, young girls come to Hollywood in the hope of being movie stars, and they get kidnapped and drugged, and they’re sent overseas in Chinese boats and used as slaves. No one ever hears about them again.”

  Credit 5.7

  Wendy vanden Heuvel.

  I said, “Okay, but what does that have to do with me?”

  “Well, this agent you’re going to see, I want his name. I don’t know who he is. He could be a white slaver. No one knows.”

  He was kind of hedging about what exactly would happen, but it seemed like a prostitution ring. It reminded me of those Lily Tang movies from the forties. All I knew about prostitution was from old movies I’d seen on television. While he was speaking, I fantasized I was going to be abducted to Shanghai on a Chinese bark, with all the smoke and opium, and then taken down to the Lower East Side in some brothel, never to be found again. I had a vision of being chained to a rickshaw and whipped.

  I finally said, “What are you talking about? This is Mommy’s friend.”

  He said, “Look. Just tell them that Jules Stein is your grandfather and I am in control of your career. I just want their name.”

  I just said, “You’re crazy.” If I was going to tell them that, I might as well not go. What’s the use of getting a part if you’re going to say that? They’d think I was really strange. So finally we left it that I’d be careful and they shouldn’t worry about me.

  Popop was lying on his bed. No shoes, just a shirt, pants, and tie. He had a little push-button control on the side, and as he was telling me about white slavery, he was pushing the button and gradually rising up as if to take control of me. It was very funny; I had to hold in my laughter. I felt that I had just been speaking with an extremely paranoid man. It was almost like dealing with a delusional king.

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  WARREN BEATTY: I knew him pretty well, you know. Anytime someone needed medical advice, I would call your father and he would leap to it as if it were the only thing on his agenda. I remember sitting with your father on the terrace at Misty Mountain when he was really sick. He was a tough guy. Do you remember when he had that thing about boysenberry? It was the only flavor that appealed to him. I remember his telling me he thought Ronald Reagan could become the president of the United States and my wondering if that just signaled an end to his clear thinking. It reminded me of a conversation I had with Sam Goldwyn when he was speculating about who the next president would be back in ’68. I was working for Bobby Kennedy then. Sam said, “What is his name, he came to see me the other day,” and he couldn’t remember the person but finally he said, “Nixon, Richard Nixon.” I thought, Well, Sam thinks Richard Nixon could become president. I guess that shows what kind of shape he’s in.

  And then the same thing happened with Jules. He said, “We have a guy out here we think would make a hell of a president.” He was sitting there eating boysenberry sorbet. I said, “Who’s that?” And he said, “Ronnie Reagan,” and I thought, Ohhhhhhh, well, that’s it for Jules.

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  JEAN STEIN: Even though Warren thought Father was at the end of his rope, he still devoted his time and energy to the Jules Stein Eye Institute, which he had founded. He wanted to be remembered for his contributions to the preservation of sight rather than for his business endeavors.

  Late in his life, my father enjoyed reading obituaries. He read them not to see who had died, but to see whom he’d outlived. Men like my father rarely have friends. He didn’t care much for most of my friends either. Walter Hopps came by one New Year’s Day, while Father was watching the Rose Bowl. Walter politely asked Father who was winning. And Father turned on him and said sternly, “It’s not who’s winning that counts, but who’s losing.”

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  WENDY VANDEN HEUVEL: In 1981 we found out that Popop had metastasized bone cancer, and Mommy, Katrina, and I went over to the hospital together to see him. He was in his bed and he looked really depressed. He said, “You know I love you,” and then he said, “Oh, I don’t know what kind of world this is going to be for you two girls. This is an awful world. I don’t know what’s happening out there, I don’t understand it anymore.”

  Then he turned to Katrina and he said, “I know that you’ll do great things. You’ll do wonderful things. I have complete faith in you.” Mommy stood up for me, and she said, “And Wendy, too!” He said, “No, not Wendy. You, Katrina.” I backed up about ten feet away from his bed, in slow motion, till I had my back to the wall, trying to get out. I was trying to hold in my tears as much as I could. Finally he said, “Well, you girls go. Come kiss me goodbye.” I was like, Oh, the fucking asshole. But I went over and kissed him goodbye and we left, and all the way downtown in the taxi I
was crying, telling Katrina that I was no good and that I was never going to be anything. I really believed it. It was mean of him. It still stays with me.

  Credit 5.8

  Wendy (left) and Katrina vanden Heuvel.

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  JEAN STEIN: I remember we were all standing around in the entrance hall at Misty Mountain before we left for Father’s burial at Forest Lawn, and I heard Edie Wasserman say to Lew, “Well, it’s about time.” Even though I was distraught, I thought, Now that’s too good to be true. Edie was wearing a diamond pin that said “Love.”

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  WENDY VANDEN HEUVEL: Popop is buried at Forest Lawn next to Mary Pickford because he wanted to be able to come up at night and dance with her. He talked to her about it before she died.

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  CHARLES HARRIS: You know, after they closed your dad’s coffin, I said he should have been holding The Wall Street Journal and have his other hand propped up with his magnifying glass on it. But they got the casket closed too quick. I was there in the slumber room with him before his burial. It was little whispers going on all over, little tears here and there. But I think the tears were mostly dried. Swanee, who had always worked as a laundress for them, was the only one who was hysterical. And I think it was real, too, it came from the heart. I thought it was Wasserman who went over and grabbed Swanee, but it may not have been. I heard that your dad’s former secretary, Glenda, watched the whole thing from up in a tree. She hadn’t been invited to the funeral. If I wrote about my time with the Steins, it would only be funny to the few people who would know who I’m talking about. In Iowa or Kentucky, Jules Stein would only be a Jew. But in Beverly Hills they actually would think it was funny.

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  WENDY VANDEN HEUVEL: Right after Popop’s funeral, I wanted to have certain mementos of him. So I went into his closet and got one of his tuxedos. I tried on the jacket and it fit me perfectly, because Popop was such a small man: five foot seven or five foot eight. He actually had six or seven tuxedos, and I think I may have taken two or three. I also took a bunch of old Persian-tailored jackets because I was a teenager then, and it was a cool thing to wear to school. I think I was eighteen at the time. I thought, Nobody is going to know that I took these, there are so many of them. Popop had sixty or seventy jackets: he had three closets full of them. Most of them were made in Paris, because they had Paris labels, but they were all tailor-made. The fabrics were so beautiful: linens, silks. They were beautiful colors, too. There were also tweeds, but I didn’t want the tweeds.

  I took the tuxedos and jackets into my room and hid them in my cupboard. I wasn’t going to wear these clothes anywhere until I got to New York and then I was going to flaunt them all over town. But it wasn’t as easy as I thought to take them. Either Nonnie was going around in my drawers, or one of the maids was putting away some clothes and said something. All I know is that I was in the bathroom, blow-drying my hair before I went out, and Nonnie started pounding on the bathroom door and saying, “Come out here. Come out here, you naughty girl.” I came out, with my hair wet, and she had one of the tuxedos in her hands. I literally froze.

  She said, “What is this? What is this? Where did you get this?”

  I said, “I don’t know.” I didn’t know what to say. “I just wanted to have something to remember Popop by. That’s all.” I was half crying to get out of it.

  She said, “I know what you are up to. I know why women wear these kind of clothes. Young ladies should not wear pants. If you wear these kind of clothes, you must be a lesbian! I know about Marlene Dietrich. I know about these things.”

  I said, “Listen, I just like to wear jackets and things, and I wanted some clothes of Popop’s. It is what everyone is wearing, and I’m not a lesbian!” Then I got angry at her. I was so terrified that I had been caught. She was a little hysterical, I think, because of the funeral. What happened eventually is that she let me keep one of the jackets but I wasn’t allowed to keep any of the pants. I have one tuxedo jacket, and I still wear it sometimes.

  Nonnie was as social as ever after Popop died. She was always either getting driven to a cocktail party or hosting one at the house.

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  JEAN STEIN: My half brothers, Larry and Jerry, paid Richard Gully—do you remember him?—to organize movie parties at the house for Mother. That was just one of various ways in which everything was propped up for her at the end.

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  WENDY VANDEN HEUVEL: I went out to visit Nonnie just to try to get closer to her in some way. She had just turned eighty. I was sitting in her mirrored bathroom, which was a bad replica of the hall at Versailles, and she was putting on her makeup, and I thought to myself, God, this is so weird. She must have been doing this every night for sixty years or more. And I thought how bizarre it was to have this ritual of putting on your makeup every night. It affected me a lot to see her so old and out of control of herself more than usual.

  She looked like a painted doll with all that caked-on makeup: she put on huge amounts of foundation and rouge. Her eyeliner would be askew because her hand trembled. I remember standing next to her at these cocktail parties when I was sixteen or eighteen and thinking, You have got to be kidding! She was like something out of Madame Tussauds—it was a little scary. Then there were the black lace girdles that she wore to shape her figure under some boxlike dress. I remember her standing in front of the mirrors in her bathroom where you could see your reflection from every angle. That bathroom was phenomenal. I think there was even a mirror on the ceiling above the tub. She’d stand there in a black girdle with her silver-white hair, applying makeup. Last came the lipstick, always red—red, red, red lipstick. It was just an amazing ritual for her—the preparation, the makeup, the dress, the shoes.

  In the last years of her life, Nonnie had a woman in the house who would help her dress and apply her makeup. She’d prop Nonnie up in a chair like a little doll, ready for the evening’s activity. There was something vacant about her. I remember her having to ask, “Where am I going tonight?” She reminded me of Billie Whitelaw in Beckett’s Rockaby—an elderly woman sitting there in a rocking chair living in the past, existing only in her memories.

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  DOROTHY STEVENS: I was very fond of your mother and I think we worked well together. I was her social secretary and I think your mother had quite a great deal of confidence in me, I felt that she did. She would ask me to write letters for her, and I would ask if she would like to dictate something. “Oh no, no, you write it.” I picked up some of her little regular sayings, like “I must say,” and put them in so it sounded like she herself, of course. On some of them when I thought it might be necessary, I would take a rough draft in and read it to her or ask her to read it. I’d say, “There might be something you would like to add.” Very seldom was there a change. “No, that’s fine, that’s fine.” Then I’d go back and put it on her stationery.

  Things weren’t all happy, you know? But she handled things so well. I tried to help her all I could. She’d sometimes ask me to come down and sit in the library with her, especially after your father passed on. I knew she was terribly lonely. Yet your mother was one who didn’t want to let her feelings out. She didn’t want anyone even to indicate that they may have known her loneliness, so I never did. I felt great sympathy for her, but I never talked about it with her.

  Then when your mother got really sick near the end and had to go to the hospital, I went to see her very, very often. I was at the hospital when she died. I was holding her hand. And she was holding mine.

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  BETTY BREITHAUPT: Your mother really pushed your father to keep going into the office towards the end of his life. I credit her for being responsible for a lot of his success, only because she kept pushing him. She would call in the morning and say, “He’s on his way. He didn’t want to come, but I told him he had to. He has to make his presence known.” I sometimes felt like saying, “You know what he does when he gets here? He sits in his chair and sleep
s.” I was your father’s secretary for many years, and after he died, I went to work for Mr. Wasserman, who was not very friendly. The MCA men all might have been that way when they were agents, but as they got older they kind of mellowed a little. Wasserman never mellowed. He was a big yeller. There was one fellow who left his office after being yelled at and went home and had a heart attack. It was a high-stress work environment. I was still working there in 1993 when a former employee fired shots at the building. I was sitting at my desk on the sixteenth floor outside of your father’s old office. The shooter was in the park across the street with a rifle. I just remember we heard a ping, and then, you know, a bullet came through the window right behind me. We were told to crawl on the floor towards the center of the building and lie there until the police came. Several people got hit.

  I remember when Matsushita bought MCA in 1990, Wasserman thought he ought to show his Japanese side, so he decided to put in a big koi pond at his house. Wasserman fed the fish every day, but they had such trouble with the fish, and the fish were dying, and they had to actually call SeaWorld to help them get his pond up and running again.

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  WENDY VANDEN HEUVEL: Wasserman told me a story once about poverty. We were out on the street waiting for a car to come, and I asked him, “Did you always want to do this? What is it for you? What do you love about it? Did you always want to make movies, Lew?” He said, “No, but I always knew that I wanted to have money.” He told me how he had been a movie usher for years in Cleveland. “Once you taste poverty, you know that you want money, and I didn’t want to live that way anymore.” That was very clear to him. I wanted to know what his passion was, basically. Why was he so passionate about what he did? And that was the answer I got, basically: power and money. I was kind of interested by that. To think that would drive a man to where he was today, that kind of motivation. But I don’t think he was really fessing up. I think on some level he meant what he said, for sure, but I would be curious to know what his real passion was. But, maybe it was the money and the power. He was definitely into a whole king trip over there.