A
Manhattan author, whose best-selling oral history of Hollywood and Los
Angeles just went paperback, died on Monday in a suicide plunge from an
Upper East Side building, officials said.
Jean Stein, Author of 'Edie' and 'West of Eden,' Jumps to Her Death 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.
The spokesperson did not reveal the cause of death, but 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.
A spokesperson at Random House, which published her most recent book, the well-received “West of Eden: An American Place,” issued the shortest of statements in response: “Random House is deeply saddened by the death of Jean Stein.”
Friends who knew her said she had been unhappy in recent years.
“We were very close friends,” said Robert Scheer, a Los Angeles journalist and editor of the political website Truthdig, who had known Stein since the ’60s. “I saw her last month or so. Every time I went to New York, I saw her. And she would come here.”
“She was pretty depressed,” he said. “We were all worried.”
But even in shock, he recalled a small, soft-spoken woman who harbored an incredibly sharp mind.
“She had the respect of the heavy hitters,” he said, “people
who weren’t interested in the small talk — people like Joan Didion,
Jules Feiffer. It was a circle of people who were very tough and
demanding.”
Her 2016 book “West of Eden,”
her most recent oral history, tracked the development of Hollywood and
Southern California through the lives of five powerful Los Angeles
families, such as the Warners and the Dohenys — individuals for whom
roadways and movie studios have been named.