West of Eden

Starred review from December 14, 2015
This oral history delves behind the scenes of Tinseltown’s most illustrious bloodlines, providing rare insight into the lives of such Hollywood notables as the Warners, Dohenys, and Garlands. “I had the sense that my world was make-believe,” writes Stein (Edie: An American Girl), who grew up immersed in the company of Hollywood’s most elite families. She includes anecdotes about Arthur Miller, Warren Beatty, and Jane Fonda, as well as fascinating Hollywood stories about the crony-capitalist Teapot Dome scandal, affairs between starlets and studio executives’ wives during the 1950s, the vicious relationship Jack Warner developed with his son Jack Jr., how the Conference of Studio Unions strikes of 1945 led to the House Un-American Activities Committee’s Communist witch hunt, and Ronald Reagan’s transformation from liberal actor into conservative figurehead. Stein’s exhaustive research and brand-new interviews make this an invaluable resource for any student of pop culture, or indeed of 20th-century American history. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency.

December 15, 2015
Through interviews with remnants of a long-gone Hollywood, a vivid sense of some of the great formative families emerges. Readers of George Plimpton's Paris Review will be familiar with the interview structure of this compelling, occasionally gossipy, informative chronicle of the flamboyant personalities from a storybook Hollywood era and the great houses they inhabited in Beverly Hills and Malibu. Stein (Edie: An American Biography, 1982, etc.), formerly an editor at Paris Review and Grand Street, delves into the strange, incredible sagas of early Los Angeles oil baron Edward L. Doheny; Warner Bros. founder Jack Warner; schizophrenic teenager Jane Garland (and her coterie of male handlers); actress and wife of David Selznick, Jennifer Jones; and the author's father, Jules Stein, founder of Music Corporation of America--all of whom were more or less neighbors and party acquaintances in the area. The speakers, aside from their names, are not otherwise identified; readers have to scan the "biographical notes" in the back, a structure aiming no doubt to maintain a fluidity to the narrative. Indeed readable, this work, through its gradual fleshing-out of the biographical portraits, depicts these larger-than-life legends who were vulnerable to scandal and heartbreak. Doheny, one of the richest men in the country in the 1910s, endured the suicide of his first wife and the death of his son following the Teapot Dome trial of 1929. Warner, remembered by his son Jack Jr. early on as a lovable man before success corrupted him, did not live to see his grand house on Angelo Drive bought by David Geffen in 1990. Actress Jones became the ultimate Hollywood hostess while weathering tremendous emotional instability. Jules Stein, the son of Lithuanian immigrants in South Bend, Indiana, left his career as an ophthalmologist to start a band-booking business and created an entire empire. Slips occasionally into hearsay and grievance but rivets readers with "a kind of fascinated horror."

COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

October 1, 2015

Grand Street editor Stein, author of the enduring Edie, tells the stories of five families and how they ambitiously shaped and reshaped Los Angeles in the 20th century. Among them is her own family; her father, Jules Stein, founded the Music Corporation of America (MCI) and moved it west from Chicago in 1939. Stein started interviewing Hollywood greats decades ago, when she was still in high school, and has continued to perfect the art of oral history through Edie and beyond; hundreds of interviews helped frame her newest book.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.