"They're the only thing I can digest at lunch when I'm working," Stone, a vigorous 72, confesses.
Critics have suggested that Stone's "biographical novels" are to literature what cheese sandwiches are to haute cuisine. But the 23 volumes he has published in the last 42 years have been translated into 55 languages—including Slovak, Bengali and Icelandic—and have sold more than eight million copies.
Now there's another, The Greek Treasure, a jazzed-up story of Heinrich Schliemann, the 19th-century father of archeology, and his young mail-order wife, Sophia. In 472 pages the couple seeks out and unearths the ruins of ancient Troy, in addition to conducting a notably tepid May-December romance.
A few days ago an interviewer in Seattle asked Stone what he would call a "biographical novel" about himself. He'd never been asked the question before, and his answer, Books are Forever, sounded like a guaranteed loser. His life, as a matter of fact, has been fairly fascinating. It began in San Francisco, where he was the child of a broken home. Though he earned a master's degree in economics and taught at Berkeley for a while, he set off in 1926 for Paris and a writing career after winning a $25 prize for a one-act play. A year later he was in New York grinding out hack mystery and confession stories while supporting himself with odd jobs such as movie ushering.
While Stone was running a small community theater in Jersey City in 1933 he met Jean Factor, who at 18 was 13 years his junior. She auditioned, won the role, needless to say, and he proposed soon after. Her well-off mother was unenthusiastic. "She had visions of frayed cuffs and garrets," Jean says. To help persuade Jean, Stone showed her his manuscript of Lust for Life, which spun out the tortured saga of painter Van Gogh. Because 17 publishers had already rejected the manuscript, Jean suggested wholesale rewriting, then fiercely edited the revisions.
"The next time we submitted the manuscript, it sold," she likes to recall.
"What's your next line?" Stone straight-lines.
"And I became indispensable" is his wife's comeback.
They married almost as soon as he received a $250 advance for the book, which became a 1934-35 best-seller and is one of five Stone novels made into movies. The Stones then moved to California, which has been their base of operations ever since.
He briefly tried his hand at playwriting. After one critic called a 1936 production of his Truly Valiant "one of the most acutely embarrassing theatrical misadventures known to this department," Stone never tried again. He also wrote an autobiographical novel, which he says was "so terrible I threw the whole manuscript away."
As expected, critics have started carving up the new book, one saying Stone "has a tin ear and a ham fist." The author claims he has learned to shrug. "In the early years," he says, "I was hurt and puzzled. It didn't seem to me that they had read the same book I'd written. In the latter years, well, I don't read reviews anymore."
Stone has just signed a lucrative three-book contract with Doubleday, which at his pace of four years-per-book will take him to age 84 ("They never blinked an eye," he says proudly). He has not yet settled on a subject for the next book, but he knows it will center on the development of the natural sciences. He and Jean have already begun the grueling research. (They spent two years amassing material for The Greek Treasure.)
The Stone teamwork—he writes, she edits—has brought them an elegant way of life and a home decorated with art works collected during their almost constant traveling. When their children, Paula and Kenneth, were growing up, the Stones' work schedule when at home was so rigorous that Paula once crawled under her mother's desk and said, "I wish Daddy was a butcher so you and I could play down here together." Jean recalls, "After that I never worked during their waking hours." Paula is now 31 and a parole officer, while Kenneth, 28, is a graphic artist. Their parents are still hard at it by 7 a.m., toiling through to 5:30 with time-out only for a lunchtime swim—and that creative cheese sandwich.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
