Jean Stone, 93; Novelist's Widow Did Research for His Biographies
Hyfler/Rosner
April 24, 2004 Saturday
Jean Stone, 93; Novelist's Widow Did Research for His
Biographies
Dennis McLellan, Times Staff Writer
Jean Stone, the widow of best-selling biographical novelist
Irving Stone, for whom she served as research collaborator
and "editor-in-residence" on all of his books since his 1934
"Lust for Life," has died. She was 93.
Stone, who also was a longtime cultural and educational
leader, died April 16 at her home in Beverly Hills.
"Jean was a very lively woman, very intellectually astute,
very interested in history and research," said historian
Kevin Starr, the recently retired state librarian of
California.
"She created a world for her husband in which he could be
productive. They had a tremendous partnership."
The San Francisco-born Irving Stone met Minneapolis-born
Jean Factor in the late 1920s in Jersey City, N.J., where
she was living at the time.
Educated at UC Berkeley and USC, Irving Stone had moved to
Paris to try his hand at writing plays in 1927. But he was
so deeply moved by an exhibition of paintings by Vincent van
Gogh that after returning to New York he felt compelled to
write a novel based on the Dutch painter's life.
Stone paid for a research trip to Europe by writing murder
mysteries for pulp magazines, and he wrote more pulp stories
to support himself during the six months it took him to
write four drafts of "Lust for Life."
Over a period of three years, 17 publishers turned down
Stone's fictionalized biography of Van Gogh. Then Stone
asked his fiancee, Jean, a secretary who shared his love of
books and the theater, to read his bulky manuscript and tell
him why it continued to be rejected.
As Jean Stone recalled in a 1984 Los Angeles Times
interview: "I read the manuscript and found a thickness in
certain places, and a great many obscure references, where
he knew more than he was telling, and where he assumed the
reader would simply understand. I suggested a series of cuts
and fixes. Irving agreed, and afterward I retyped the
pages."
The revisions did the trick: Stone sent his manuscript out
again and an England-based publisher, Longmans Green,
quickly offered him a $250 advance, which Jean Stone later
described as "a tremendous amount of money" during the
Depression.
Published in the fall of 1934, "Lust for Life" went on to
sell tens of millions of copies in more than 70 languages.
And with the $250 advance, the couple got married.
"My mother was not thrilled with the idea of me marrying an
artist," Jean Stone told The Times in 1993. "She asked me
why I thought it was a good idea. I told her that the best
of a man is in his work, and the closer I get to it, the
better my life. As for Irving, there was no talk of love or
affectionate words. He simply promised me that after a
number of years, I'd have very few areas of ignorance left."
From "Lust for Life" on, Jean served as Irving's
collaborator on a string of biographical novels on the lives
of such notable figures as Sigmund Freud ("The Passions of
the Mind"), Michelangelo ("The Agony and the Ecstasy"), Mary
Todd Lincoln ("Love Is Eternal") and many other books.
"I became indispensable," she told the New York Times in
1985. "It really takes two to do the job. And we've always
worked together, even after our two children came along. If
I was busy typing, Irving did the diapers."
While working on "The Agony and the Ecstasy," Jean Stone
studied Renaissance culture and the Italian language at UCLA
before she and Irving moved to Rome and Florence, Italy, for
an extended period.
For Stone's biographical novel of Charles Darwin ("The
Origin"), they were able to move into the scientist's home
in London, where they slept in Darwin's bedroom and Irving
wrote in Darwin's study. "I could feel and hear his pen
scratching on the paper as I sat at his desk," he later
recalled.
During the more than five years it took to research and
write "Depths of Glory," a biographical novel about
Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, the Stones lived in
a hotel on Paris' Left Bank and visited the country houses
once occupied by the Pissarros.
Jean Stone's name never appeared on the cover of her
husband's books, but he dedicated every one of them to her.
"She possessed a natural gift for editorial work," Irving
Stone told the New York Times in 1982, when his wife
received the Maxwell Perkins Award from the writers' group
PEN Center USA West.
Irving Stone died in 1989 at age 86, after a nearly 55-year
partnership with his wife.
"She was always a class act," novelist and critic Carolyn
See told The Times this week. "She was sort of in the Nancy
Reagan tradition, just following the traditional values:
dressing like a fashion plate, deferring to her husband with
respect. She always behaved with dignity, and she was a
tremendously generous philanthropist."
Among other charitable contributions, Jean Stone donated the
funds to build what is known as the Jean and Irving Stone
Seminar Room at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley for the
study of rare books and manuscripts.
Starr said that even though Jean Stone became increasingly
frail in later years, she remained "very engaged in life"
and interested in new developments, such as researching on
the Internet.
Starr recalled that "when you went up to their home in
Beverly Hills, her husband's studio was adjacent to the
house and you got a sense of a tremendous production center
for research that she organized."
Jean Stone devoted many years of leadership and service on
museum boards, cultural committees and educational councils.
She helped found the Arts for Communities in Los Angeles,
the Los Angeles Ballet and the Assn. of Ethnomusicology at
UCLA. She was a member of the first cultural exchange for
the State Department with the Soviet Union and Iron Curtain
countries.
Stone is survived by a son, Kenneth; a sister, Norma Seigel;
a grandchild; and a great-grandchild.
Donations may be made to the Jean Stone Memorial Fund, UCLA
Foundation, 10920 Wilshire Blvd., 11th Floor, Los Angeles,
CA 90024.
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: (LARG)JEAN STONE Irving and Jean Stone, in
1984, relax in their Beverly Hills home, surrounded by art
treasures they had collected. "She possessed a natural gift
for editorial work," the novelist, who died in 1989, said of
his wife. PHOTOGRAPHER: Los Angeles Times
JaneLFreund
for his wife and her efforts!