INSIDE THE CURSE OF 10 GRACIE SQUARE P
Heartbreaking suicides, gruesome murder: Shocking history of Obamas’ new building
PAGE Six broke the news last Monday that Barack and Michelle Obama have been viewing an apartment at 10 Gracie Square, an exclusive, white-glove apartment building on the Upper East Side, situated at 84th Street and the FDR Drive. Sources now tell The Post that the couple are merely awaiting co-op board approval to purchase the unit — which is reportedly in the $8 to $10 million range — in the 1931 enclave, whose residents have included designer Gloria Vanderbilt, exiled former first lady of China Madame Chiang Kai-shek, media mogul Steve Ross and socialite Brooke Astor.
Author Tom Wolfe once deemed 10 Gracie, with its East River views and private driveway, as one of only 42 “Good Buildings” in New York City.
The address also comes with the distinction of being, perhaps, the unluckiest in town.
Among the unsavory and tragic events that have transpired at 10 Gracie are the suicides of Vanderbilt’s son and acclaimed author Jean Stein, both of whom jumped from their penthouse apartments, and the sensational arrest of a tenant who plotted the murder of her multimillionaire father.
“I don’t know of any buildings with two suicides,” said Dolly Lenz, CEO of Dolly Lenz Real Estate. “It almost says that there is a cloud on the building.”
Jonathan Coleman, who wrote a book about the murder, told The Post, “The building does have an underbelly. My first response was to wonder whether [Obama’s] people did their due diligence.”
THE most recent high-profile leap of death marked a sad end for Jean Stein. Said to be worth $38.5 million at the time of her death this past April, she was heiress to a Hollywood fortune: Her father, Jules Stein, founded Music Corporation of America (MCA) in 1924, eventually turning the concert-booking operation into one of the world’s top talent agencies. Among his clients were Frank Sinatra, Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford.
Jules’ daughters, Jean and Susan, grew up in the lap of luxury in Beverly Hills, Calif., in a mansion called Misty Mountain. Jean would eventually move to New York and make her own mark alongside her boss at the Paris Review, George Plimpton, as the two collaborated on the 1982 book “Edie: American Girl,” a lauded oral history of the life of Warhol star Edie Sedgwick.
Stein palled around with Joan Didion, Diane Keaton and Sedgwick, who lived with her for a while; she had an affair with writer William Faulkner, and her first husband was friends with Robert F. Kennedy.
According to an insider, Stein’s father set up both his daughters “with very large trust funds. Jean went through all the money and asked the father for more. But he was angry about her spending all of it . . . and he cut her out of his will. But Doris, Jean’s mother, was a prominent col- lector of English antiques, and she owned a million acres of ranch land. When she died [in 1984], Jean inherited enough that she was rich.”
In 2016, Stein’s second oral history, “West of Eden: An American Place” — detailing the early days of Hollywood — was a critical smash. But her daughter, the Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, has said that Stein was suffering from depression when she jumped from a 15th-floor balcony at 10 Gracie. It was, reportedly, her second attempt at suicide. And it was particularly tragic.
According to David Patrick Columbia, a former building resident and the editor of New York Social Diary, “Jean made a miscalculation when she jumped. She [fell] to the eighth-floor terrace” rather than to the ground.
Reports from that day maintained that Stein’s leg was severed in the fall. According to Columbia, her body came down at an unfortunate angle, wedging shut the eighth-floor terrace’s door. In the end, “they had to take the doors down to get her out.” THE other suicide that has helped make 10 Gracie Square notorious was that of dashing 23-year-old Carter Cooper. The son of fashion designer and heiress Gloria Vanderbilt and her fourth husband, Wyatt Cooper, Carter was also the older brother of CNN host Anderson Cooper. In the 2016 HBO documentary “Nothing Left Unsaid,” Anderson remembers seeing his brother — a Princeton alum — at the family’s 10 Gracie penthouse not long before he died and suspecting that something was awry. “It was like he was scared,” he said. “[Then] he started seeing a therapist. I ran into him on the street in [early July 1988]. He said, ‘Last time I saw you, I was like an animal.’ ” That was the last time Anderson would see Carter alive. As Vanderbilt has recalled of his fateful death, “It was hot. [Carter] did not want the air conditioner on and seemed dazed . . . he ran through the hall and ran up the stairs.” Her son exited onto the terrace and sat on the wall. “He started looking up at the sky, and there were planes coming over,” Vanderbilt continued. “He looked at one, and it was . . . a signal. Then he jumped and he hung onto the ledge, hanging down. I said, ‘Carter come
The building does have an underbelly. My first response was to wonder whether [Obama’s] people did their due diligence. — Jonathan Coleman, author of a book about a murder at 10 Gracie Square
back.’ And he just let go.”
She added: “I thought of going over with him . . . almost did, really.”
Vanderbilt told People how she and Anderson — who had already suffered the loss of the boys’ father, Wyatt, following heart surgery in 1978 — spent their first Christmas after Carter’s death. “We went to the movies,” she said. “And then we went to the automat, and from then on we’ve never done anything about Christmas.”
Soon after the awful incident, Vanderbilt moved from her expansive penthouse at 10 Gracie Square. She now lives on Beekman Place. IN 1982,
NYPD cars surrounded the building, poised to arrest a most unlikely murder mastermind.
Resident Frances Schreuder was the youngest child of Franklin Bradshaw — a cheapskate who wore secondhand clothes, lived in a falling-apart house in Salt Lake City and was tight with cash to the point that he eschewed buying a briefcase and, instead, carried work documents in a Coors beer box.
But Bradshaw was also an industrialist who’d built an empire of auto-parts stores so profitable that by the late 1970s he was worth some $50 million. Some say he was Utah’s richest man.
Despite his miserly ways, he’d paid good money for his four children’s education, sending Frances to the tony Pennsylvania liberal arts college Bryn Mawr. But the girl was suspended for stealing and forging checks. Soon, she moved to New York City, married a pearl merchant and gave birth to sons Lorenzo and Marco; after divorcing, Frances rechristened the boys Larry and Marc.
She remarried, taking her second husband’s last name, Schreuder, and had a daughter, Lavinia. Unlike her dad, Frances refused to work but liked to spend.
So, she wasn’t happy when Bradshaw tightened her cash flow. At one point, her teen sons spent the summer in Utah working for Bradshaw and reportedly stole $200,000 from him. Then Frances decided to escalate matters, involving her boy Marc in a plot to kill his grandfather so she could access her inheritance. First, she had the teen snap a photo of Bradshaw, which she gave to a hit man — who took her $5,000 and disappeared. Then, Marc allegedly poisoned Bradshaw’s breakfast, but that plot also failed.
Finally, Frances convinced 17-year-old Marc to masquerade as a burglar and to shoot and kill his grandfather during the 1978 “robbery.” This time, he succeeded.
The crime went unsolved, and the inheritance flowed. In 1980, Frances bought a $525,000 pad at 10 Gracie — and achieved her dream of becoming a socialite, joining the board of the New York City Ballet with a $360,000 donation.
Her plotted patricide seemed like a perfect caper — until it wasn’t. In December 1980, Marc was arrested and later convicted of the murder. Then, a friend ratted out Frances and produced the murder weapon that he had been stashing for her.
In March 1982, NYPD officers entered the lobby of 10 Gracie to apprehend Frances. According to author Coleman, she had been tipped off to the raid by Marc’s attorney.
“She said that she would not let them in . . . they broke in and found her trying to climb out the window” of her sixthfloor apartment, with 8-year-old Lavinia pulling her back in.” One day later, Frances was indicted. She posted $500,000 bail, funded by her mother, Berenice, who also reportedly paid some $2 million in legal fees. Frances was found guilty of capital murder and served 13 years in prison. (Marc served a dozen years at the same Utah facility.) She was released in 1996, inherited $1 million upon Berenice’s passing and died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in 2004.
While Frances was behind bars, Coleman, who wrote “At Mother’s Request” about the case, met with Berenice at the duplex at 10 Gracie. He described the overall vibe as “Shakespearean.”
“Berenice was happy that the floodgates [of money] opened in the wake of her husband’s death, but what did she have? It was hard to see the apartment as anything other than a place with very good bones and an East River view. The overwhelming feeling was one of palpable tragedy with untasteful furniture.”