I was plowing through one of Joseph Epstein’s harrumphing columns (Jill Biden wants to be called “Doctor”? Harrumph!) in The Wall Street Journal a while back when suddenly it struck me: Has there ever been as magnificent, accomplished, and nefarious an extended family as the amazing Epsteins?
Think of it: They gave us the Beatles (Brian Epstein); the greatest American movie of all time (“Casablanca,” by twin brothers Julius and Philip Epstein); and two heaven-sent World Series victories for cities on the verge of baseball hara-kiri — Boston and Chicago — delivered by Theo Epstein.
The Epsteins are simultaneously great and commonplace. “The Epsteins among Jews are pretty much like the Joneses among the folks who live around the corner,” Leslie Epstein, oft-decorated novelist (“King of the Jews,” “San Remo Drive”), told me in an email. Leslie is the connective tissue that links his son, Theo, to his father, Philip, the coauthor of “Casablanca.”
Brian Epstein may have rivaled Theo for managerial acumen. He is credited with fitting the scruffy roustabout Beatles into those slim, gray lookalike suits that set teenage hearts afire in the early 1960s. Epstein took on the delicate task of firing the popular-but-not-super-ept drummer Pete Best, paving the way for the beloved Ringo Starr.
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“Harsh, but probably the right call,” said Gady Epstein, a former Globe intern, now a senior editor at The Economist.
Those names merely represent the tip of the Epstein iceberg. A few years ago, I had some dealings with the whip-smart Jason Epstein, a legendary book editor credited with inventing the “quality paperback” when he founded Anchor Books in 1953. Ten years later, he came up with the idea for The New York Review of Books, launched with the help of a loan secured by poet Robert Lowell’s trust fund.
There’s more. Jason’s then-wife, Brookline’s Barbara Epstein, became the Review’s first co-editor. She was a prodigy in her own right. She edited Anne Frank’s diary at age 24 and is suspected of having ghost-written Eleanor Roosevelt’s introduction that helped promote the American edition. When Barbara died in 2006, a Who’s Who of the American literary establishment lined up to eulogize her. Lucy Sante remembered: “When I was writing for her, I used the word ‘ilk’ in a piece. She struck it out. When I asked her why, she said, ‘It always makes me think of milking an elk.’ ”
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“There have been quite a few Epsteins who haven’t worked out that well for us,” Gady Epstein reminded me. Don’t I know it! One thinks of the notorious Rabbi Mendel Epstein, dubbed the “Prodfather” by the New York tabloids because he used a cattle prod to “convince” men to leave their wives otherwise bound by religious marriages. Mendel fell victim to an FBI sting and was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2015.
Closer to our time, we have the astonishing-in-a-different-sense Jeffrey Epstein, the extroverted financier-pedophile with whom almost no one ever spent time, despite ample documentary evidence — photos, etc. — to the contrary. As if in unison, I hear Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, and others saying: “Jeffrey Who?”
I read in The New York Times that Jeffrey, who died in his jail cell in 2019, “palled around” with the talented and industrious writer Edward Jay Epstein, whose warts-and-warts biography of businessman Armand Hammer I remember enjoying.
Then there is the run-of-the-mill Trumpian schnook, lawyer Boris Epshteyn, who just last month pleaded not guilty to election subversion charges in Arizona. This was not Epshteyn’s first brush with the law. He was arrested for allegedly groping two women in an Arizona nightclub in 2021 and later pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct charges.
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Get familiar with his name. The way things are going, he’ll probably be the attorney general in 2025.
Alex Beam’s column appears regularly in the Globe. Follow him on Twitter @imalexbeamyrnot.
