“That’s right, you were a good friend of Linda Stein’s,” The New York Daily News columnist Joanna Molloy said greeting me during the midday recess in Manhattan Supreme Court on Monday. “Tell me about her?”
My most resounding memory of Linda Stein is an all-nighter with her beginning at the Ritz hotel in Paris in the early 1990s. My most immediate memory is the last time I saw her on the upper East Side a few days before she was murdered in late October 2007 in her one-bedroom Fifth Avenue apartment, allegedly assaulted repeatedly by her assistant Natavia Lowery, who is on trial now charged with her murder. I considered where to go with memory. What to say about Linda Stein?
Courts and trials aren’ t my usual beat, are they? When I saw two interesting looking men walking in our direction and, looking down, noticed the silver bracelets on the shorter man’s wrists, I thought of the handiwork of a young, popular with the fashion set jewelry designer Philip Crangi, or Verdura, only to snap out of my silly association and focus. Time and place. The man was handcuffed and being led by a detective. I told Joanna where my mind had just gone. She laughed.
Linda Stein was a well-known real estate broker whose clients famously included Madonna, Sting, Edgar Bronfman, Jr. and Angelina Jolie. She had been a Bronx-born schoolteacher who, matched by one of her student’s, met and married Seymour Stein, a founder of Sire Records and a colleague of the late Ahmet Ertegun. In the course of her career, or careers as we heard the assistant district attorney Joan Iluzzi-Orbon say in her opening statement on this first official day of Linda’s murder trial, she had “reinvented herself,” over and over. She had managed musical groups, including the Ramones. She had “reinvented” and gone into selling real estate when Edward Lee Cave, the real estate legend and former Sotheby’s bigwig, had met Linda during her days as a collector of art and antiques. Much later, she had become “our New York Auntie Mame,” the young social figure and fashion editor Lauren Santo Domigo has described her, when her daughter Mandy went to the Kent School in Connecticut and, among her suite mates, was Lauren, as well as the gallerist Amy Greenspon. On breaks from Kent, as Mandy’s guests, they frequently assembled at Linda’s Central Park West apartment.
Linda was a true New Yorker, someone who lived the Manhattan dream you see in Preston Sturges movies recast in a Warhol film. In the mid-1980s, when people drew great distinctions between “uptown” and “downtown” in New York, she was the queen, the elegant hybrid of both worlds plus a lot of Paris tossed into her crazy salad life. She spoke French fluently and included among her nearest and dearest not just Elton John and Madonna but also the French interior designer Jacques Grange and decorator Mica Ertegun, wife of the late Ahmet.
At the time of her death, she was working for Douglas Elliman’s real estate shop, one of their highest earners. Douglas Elliman had provided, through an employment agency, Natavia Lowery, this very pretty young woman, whose checkered employment history they failed, alas, to check. Now Natavia is accused of Linda’s brutal murder–bashing her head in six times with a yoga stick–as well as identity theft and stealing $30,000 from Linda. A lawyer for Natavia conceded that his client was guilty of theft, but not of murder. Although she had confessed, it was a false confession, the defense attorney is claiming on his client’s behalf because, while Linda might have spent her life “reinventing,” Natavia had spent her life “telling people what they wanted to hear,” so her confession to the authorities was false, fatally false. Despite the objections of the prosecutor, the defense lawyer continues to speculate overtly and covertly about who might have committed the murder, suggesting it might even have been one of her two daughters.
Despite the grueling playing of Mandy’s 911 calls to try and get help for her mother who lay “cold and hard,” Linda and her life is now on trial, her “feisty” nature, her battle with breast cancer, the privileges of the Fifth Avenue apartment itself, her perhaps over-use of medically-intended marijuana, her inability to use her arm fully to blow dry her hair or button a sweater as a result of the aggressive surgery to treat her breast cancer, and more.
Mandy, who found her mother in a pool of blood that cold October night, spent the day on the witness stand describing the scene of the crime, Linda’s one-bedroom Fifth Avenue apartment, how it worked, its services, elevator men and deliveries, and identifying the body we saw in photographs face down dressed for a walk in the park. How her mother’s last words before she went to work that day, editing footage of “Burning Down the House,” a film this documentarian made about the club CBGB, which she had to of course describe for the uninitiated, was to wear Linda’s scarf, it was cold outside. But Mandy didn’t want to take it because “it was too good” a scarf. Having once been a client of the couture, and Azzedine Alaia, Linda’s wardrobe in her later years was decidely Loro Piano chic, not cheap, and casual.
On the night I remember most in Paris all those years ago, it was mid-July. I was there to report on the couture shows. Linda Stein was traveling with her friend, and client, Sylvester Stallone, who had a fierce crush on Naomi Campbell, in Paris modeling in the shows. After a dinner given by Gianni Versace–the Milanese-based designer had covered the pool at the Ritz for his first Paris couture show, a big deal for Gianni, and for Paris–Linda Stein organized for Naomi and Linda Evangelista, and Christy Turlington, the three graces of the era, to have a nightcap in one of the grand suites of the Ritz with Stallone and after a ton of laughs we all went off to a disco and there is a famous Roxanne Lowit photograph of Naomi, Linda and Christy walking down the Champ d Elysee at dawn.
Like an unhappy wedding, the courtroom is seated with Linda’s family and friends on one side and Natavia’s on the other. One thing is already evident. Two families have been forever heartbroken. Linda’s daughters, Mandy Stein and Samantha Wells, have their mother and tender memories to a violent crime and horrific trial.
Natavia Lowery, facing up to life in prison, idles in Riker’s Island except for the daily commute to court, where, at Riker’s, she gave birth to a daughter whom she now rarely sees.
The trial is expected to continue for at least six weeks.
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