NEITHER Seymour Stein nor Danny Fields can remember when they first met. “It seems like forever,” says Mr Stein, now 76, sitting with his daughter Mandy in the London headquarters of Warner Bros Records. “Was he friends with Mommy first or you first?” asks Mandy. “No, I knew him before your mother,” Mr Stein insists.

“No,” Mr Fields, 78, says down the phone from New York. “I was friends with his wife, Linda.” In Mr Fields’s version, it was 1973 and he was the editor of 16 magazine—“a teenybopper fan mag”—and he was desperate to get Elton John in its pages. Mr Fields knew the Steins were friends with the musician, so he printed an agency photo of Linda Stein and Mr John, captioning Ms Stein as a “glamorous New York socialite”. “That got me on her party list and we became good friends,” Mr Fields says. “I used her to get to Elton.”

Messrs Stein and Fields are two Jewish, gay New Yorkers (Mr Stein’s marriage did not last) who between them nurtured much of the most exciting American…Continue reading
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