The Jungians talk about “shadow projection,” the unconscious attribution of one’s negative thoughts or feelings onto someone or something else. If I don’t like myself, for instance, I might think you don’t like me. The United States has, for the past hundred years, shadow-projected onto Hollywood. Few who have ever been to Hollywood can tell you with unwavering certainty that Hollywood is all venality and exploitation by the pool. As a native Hollywood historian, I’m fascinated by this. (Some of my best friends have pools.)
I can see now that every book I write is an effort to better understand the people and workings of the greatest creative industry the world has ever known and its image in the American mind. I am biased with love only insofar as love is a bias. Unless I am the one shadow-projecting, or rather, light-projecting, a fantasy onto the dark side of the pool.
Julie Payne, who is gone now, was the best interview I ever had. The first time we met—to talk about Chinatown, written by her ex-husband, writer Robert Towne (with uncredited contributions from Edward Taylor); the Hollywood that made them; and the Hollywood that made her, born in 1940 to actors John Payne and Anne Shirley—we stayed up till four. Four in the morning: It is not the hour for labor or even love, but for the obsessed, the people who must know now.
This article appears in Issue 33 of Alta Journal.
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From her shelf of Hollywood history, so much of it books by and about her friends, living and not, Payne pulled down a thin red volume, its spine like a gash.
“Have you read West of Eden?”
“East…?”
“West. Have you read it?”
“No.”
This displeased her. “You have to.”
“Why?”
“You just have to.”
Written by Jean Stein, West of Eden is set in Los Angeles—“an American place,” as its subtitle reminds us—and is an oral history of five families linked by proximity and pathology: the Dohenys, an early oil family, haunted by an unsolved murder; the Jack Warner branch of the Warner brothers; the Garlands of Malibu, beset by madness, narcissism, and neglect; the actor Jennifer Jones, afflicted by depression, her daughter’s suicide, and her marriage to Norton Simon, whose son also died by suicide; and Stein’s own family. Her father, Jules, cofounded MCA, in its day the most powerful agency in the business.
West of Eden is the greatest book of its kind I’ve ever read, though I still don’t know what kind it is: history, memoir, anthropology of a lost or living Hollywood, or some amalgam of the above. For years, the question has veiled my vision. If I could classify the book, I could argue it to a permanent place beside Brooke Hayward’s Haywire—a book Stein admired—on the memoir shelf or, if it is valid as history, begin reckoning with its demons.
All three of Stein’s books are oral histories. American Journey: The Times of Robert Kennedy and Edie: An American Girl—both edited with George Plimpton—are tales of young promise denied. Model and Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick suffered from drug abuse and died at 28. R.F.K., at least toward the end, might have felt it coming. Stein quotes Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.: “I think no one would have been less surprised by the manner of his death than he.”
In all three books, the oral history format allowed Stein to tell stories of generational pain through her subjects. She worked on West of Eden for 50 years, though I would argue she worked on it her whole life, which she ended by suicide in 2017, not long after the book was published.
For reasons I understand, it was important to me to find out more.
Stein left her papers to the New York Public Library. Somewhere in those 200 boxes of research files, notes, drafts, and more than a thousand interviews, I hoped to find something of her own relationship to the material, something that—whether by calculation or self-deception—she had not disclosed in her final book. It wasn’t her subjects’ answers I was after, but Stein’s questions.
As I walked into the library, I felt myself arguing with her ghost. With a degree of frustration no historian should be proud of, I felt myself positioning against her; I was angry at her for abandoning us, her people north of Sunset.
Lifting the lid off my first box, I felt frightened and ashamed, as if sneaking into Stein’s apartment while she was away. So I lifted quietly. But I was in a hurry. Without time to examine every interview, draft, email, and notebook, I had to proceed by instinct. I requested Stein’s interviews with, among others, Warren Beatty (for his spectacular memory), Budd Schulberg (for his historical perspective), Bud Cort (for being Bud Cort), Joan Didion, David Geffen, Lew Wasserman, and, of course, Stein herself (she had another writer interview her). I followed along chronologically, beginning, as it turned out, before she even started formal research on the book that she knew, not always happily, she was destined to write.
I started with a tape from January 1975 and, for the first time, heard Stein’s voice—it was pitched high and speedy—in a phone call with her sister, Susan. Stein was in a panic, “inwardly shaking,” as she described it.
She had just had a horrible conversation with their father about his will. “He was telling me that I haven’t done anything that was worth anything in this whole world and the only reason I got the Faulkner thing was because I was living with him.” Yes, she had slept with William Faulkner before he granted her his Paris Review interview, but that was an awful thing for her father to say to her. Stein’s voice would abruptly fall, then fly up on wings of outrage. “He’s just disgusted with my political views. We finally got down to the basics, right?” He was threatening to cut Stein and her sister off if they or their lawyers made any moves against him. “He said he really didn’t trust me anymore. Really didn’t care to see me hardly any more at all. I said that’s fine with me.”
I turned off the tape. If I was seeing clearly, I could, in fact, see everything: Her father’s cruelty I extended backward through Stein’s life. Born in Chicago in 1934 and raised in Hollywood, Stein was educated far from her Beverly Hills home, at the Katharine Branson School, Wellesley College, and Sorbonne University in Paris. She met Faulkner (who was doing a rewrite for Howard Hawks on Land of the Pharaohs) and proceeded Zelig-like through the century, assisting Elia Kazan on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; popping up in Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic; marrying William vanden Heuvel, diplomat and adviser to R.F.K.; and living with Edie Sedgwick. She had charm, money, intelligence, curiosity, beauty, determination, and—what any reader of nonfiction would want in an oral historian—access. But could she write herself away from her father, who was Hollywood?
In 1983, a year after Edie was published, Stein taped a conversation with a close friend, curator Walter Hopps. She agonized over her next project. Hopps told her it was “time to do family.” Shortly after, she took to her notebook: “The black hole at the center is your father.” She wanted to write obliquely, and Hopps advised her to; the real subject, the black hole, would scarcely be mentioned. But she reconsidered: Why write about something by omission? Why not look at it directly?
Swirling in a surplus of voices, stories, and emotions, she interviewed friends—some potential subjects—hoping to discover what was important to them about her work. Stein spoke many times with Didion, who was often accompanied by her husband, John Gregory Dunne. They brainstormed what Didion called “a golden cast of characters” that included Jerzy Kosinski, Henry Jaglom, Morton Halperin, Jane Fonda, and Barbara Warner Howard, Jack’s daughter and Stein’s childhood friend.
But the black hole remained. Her working title was Misty Mountain, named for the house at 1330 Angelo Drive where she grew up. Stein spoke with Katharine Hepburn, who had rented the place before Jules Stein bought it in 1940. “Did you ever see any rattlesnakes?” Hepburn asked. In her day, Hepburn would shoot them when they slithered through the living room. Stein remembered rattlesnakes too. One, she said, killed her dog. “A very distinguished man,” Hepburn called Jules, with the respect common to her generation. Hepburn did not criticize her Hollywood, Stein noted. Neither had Stein. She did not see herself as one of the rebels that all of her friends, it seemed, had been.
Stein, for instance, had not done drugs. She had not, as she wrote, “lived on that critical edge that divides creativity from self-destruction.” That was the people in her book.
Having signed in 1988 with Farrar, Straus and Giroux to write “an oral history of the 1960s through the 1980s,” Stein flew to Los Angeles to interview Geffen at the old Jack Warner mansion, which Geffen then owned. The meal his chef had prepared was, she thought, a work of art: mesquite chicken with a yellow pepper in the cavity, followed by tangy apricot sorbet and cookies. “The man knows how to live,” she reflected. Out in the gardens, a macaw whistled.
Geffen had known Stein’s parents. He would visit Misty Mountain and find Jules in the library, rewriting his will. Geffen asked Stein about her father, his relationship with Wasserman, and how much MCA stock Jules had left her.
“I don’t really know,” Stein said, which Geffen could not believe. On second thought, Geffen had seen this before. “You grew up like Barbara Warner. As soon as you get out of this hell, you just run away. You to New York and she to Paris.”
In fact, it wasn’t quite that. Her parents had run her out of town to fancy schools for status (their own). And yet, Geffen was right—she had stayed away.
She interviewed Wasserman, the most powerful Hollywood figure of his time, whom her father had made president of MCA when he became chair in 1946. “Who is this book on, by the way?” he asked.
“Hollywood and L.A., and it’s not one main character,” Stein improvised. “It’s a kind of collage.”
The truth was, she still didn’t know. I recognized in Stein the symptoms I never can in myself, of not seeing fascination as procrastination. By 1994, her agent, Andrew Wylie, was writing with concern, telling Stein that editor Roger Straus was “eager to cancel the contract.”
“What’s this interview about, Jean?”
By 1995, it was the director Alex Cox asking. That she was interviewing a British filmmaker in his 40s for her project indicated some confusion.
“See, instead of doing my own story, which is kind of pathetic, I’m taking other people’s stories because I can’t do…”
“You said you’re doing three,” Cox said. “Who are the three characters?”
“One is a childhood girlfriend, Barbara Warner, who, in her own way, became a little rebel.… So then the other one would probably be Jane Fonda, and the third one might be Anjelica Huston, but it might not be.”
If she had no interest in her story, why focus on Warner, Fonda, and Huston? In many ways, they, as the daughters of Hollywood legacy, had lived her story. “This book, however, is not a personal memoir,” she wrote in 1995, “but a social history” of “the savage world” of Hollywood.
In 1996, Straus—a figure like Stein’s own father—wrote her agent asking for Stein to return her advance, orphaning her again. She would recall, “Barbara Warner said [that] as a child, I used to always be outside the group, sort of observing it at a distance.”
All historians are vulnerable to the hermeneutics of history; we can see only with our own eyes, even if we are looking through others’. Memories, to the historian, are an orchard of overgrown fruit trees. Our job is cutting. But who cuts us?
In 2011, four decades after the start of her project, Stein interviewed her daughter Wendy about Wendy’s grandfather Jules. “My image of Popop at the end of his life is locked in his little study at the top of Misty Mountain, where he is going over things and isolated, in a kind of sad way. I mean, living on top of that hill, being king, and then what?”
Her aunt Susan, Wendy remembered, had been denied a coming-out party for being too fat.
“What kind of values are those?” Wendy asked. “That’s insane.”
“She wasn’t presentable.”
“That’s insane, you know, it’s your daughter, it’s your flesh and blood.… And I will say, Mommy, I think you suffered plenty in that family.… You were not a happy camper. No, I’m sorry. Even though you may have been a winner on the outside, you were not well, and you were missing something that was fundamental in relationship to something that was there for you in a whole way, and loving and nurturing, and I know that.”
I recalled listening to a recording of Stein talking to her uncle David 27 years earlier. They discussed her great-uncle Myer, who committed suicide, as did his daughter. Stein remembered asking her father,
“Is there mental illness in our family?” And then he said, “It’s better you don’t know.” So, he knew. Anyway. That’s neither here nor there. A lot of the best families—a lot of the best families have that in them. It’s just—you just accept it.
But had she accepted it? I wanted to ask her. But like those of Jack Warner, David O. Selznick, and Jules Stein, I’ll never get that interview. I’ll get the ghost.•
L.A.-based writer Sam Wasson is the author of several acclaimed works of nonfiction, including Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman; Fosse; The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood; and most recently The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story.
