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Stern, ex-reporter known for his war stories, dies at 98
He was also philanthropist, film producer
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Published: April 13, 2009
Michael Stern, a swashbuckling foreign correspondent who filed some of the first dispatches from Rome as Allied forces entered the city, and, in his later career as a philanthropist helped save the aircraft carrier Intrepid, died last week in Palm Beach, Fla. He was 98 and lived in Lake Worth, Fla.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, his daughter, Margaret, said.
Stern reported on crime, combat and international intrigue for such publications as True Detective Mysteries and True. His wartime adventures in Rome, which he entered a day ahead of the U.S. Army, led to a lifelong love affair with the city, where he lived for the next half-century until his return to the United States in 1994.
Stern became a confidant of the builder and philanthropist Zachary Fisher, helping him to rescue the Intrepid and turn it into a museum, and to start a foundation that supports research on Alzheimer's disease.
Stern was born on a farm in the far reaches of Brooklyn and attended Hamilton High School. Shortly before he was to graduate from Syracuse University, where he had been studying journalism and covering campus sports, he dropped out to take an entry-level reporting job at The New York Journal. He soon left to take a better-paying job at The Middletown Times Herald, in upstate New York.
In 1933, Bernarr Macfadden, the publisher of True Detective Mysteries, Master Detective and other true-crime magazines, hired him to write sizzling investigative articles at what was then the generous rate of 3.5 cents a word. Using pseudonyms, Stern wrote for other crime magazines for as little as a penny-and-half a word.
In 1934, Stern married Estelle Goldstein, who died in 1995. In addition to his daughter, Margaret, of New York City, he is survived by a son, Michael Jr., of Juno Beach, Fla., and a granddaughter.
Working part time for the Brooklyn district attorney's office in the 1930s, Stern gathered evidence that was used to convict the organizers of a prostitution ring. This experience provided the material for his first book, The White Ticket: Commercialized Vice in the Machine Age, published in 1936.
Under a pseudonym, he began writing feature articles for Fawcett Publications' True magazine, including a series based on interviews with Otto Strasser, a former Nazi official who fled Germany after a falling-out with Hitler.
The articles became a book that Strasser wrote with Stern, Flight From Terror, which impressed officials at Syracuse University enough to grant Stern a bachelor's degree. A series based on interviews with crew members of the bomber Memphis Belle, famous for flying many missions, became Into the Jaws of Death.
Stern joined the U.S. Army in 1943 as a war correspondent for Fawcett and the North American Newspaper Alliance. After being shipped out to Algeria, he traveled with U.S. forces through Sicily and up the boot of Italy. On June 3, 1944, he and another war correspondent, Fred Rosen, entered Rome a day ahead of the advancing American forces.
There he stayed, reporting on subjects as varied as the mobster Lucky Luciano, the Australian lady's man Freddie McEvoy and Maj. William V. Holohan, an officer with the Office of Strategic Services who was apparently killed by his own men during an operation behind Nazi lines in northern Italy. No Innocence Abroad (1953), a collection of his profiles, revealed him as "an adventurer, a bon-vivant, a crime reporter, a cynic," in the words of a New York Times reviewer.
In 1964, Stern recounted his Italian experiences in An American in Rome. "This is a tough boy, and he writes tough prose," Robert Ruark wrote in his foreword to the book. "He is also a legend in modern Rome," he added.
In addition to editing an Italian-language science weekly, Stern managed to get into film production. He was an executive producer of several Italian-made films, including a scandalous Satyricon that appeared a year before the Fellini version and Run for Your Life (1988), with George Segal and Lauren Hutton.
Stern, who traveled frequently to New York during his Rome years, ventured into philanthropy through the friendship with Fisher. Together, the two men started the Intrepid Museum Foundation in 1978, raising money to save the ship and turn it into the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York. The museum has attracted more than 10 million visitors since its opening in 1982.
"Mike let Zach take all the credit, appropriately, because it was his money," said Bill White, the president of the Intrepid museum. "But he was always there to solve the problems."
The men also created the Fisher Center for Alzheimer's Research Foundation at Rockefeller University and the Fisher House program to build houses where families of hospitalized military personnel could stay. In 2001, after Fisher's death, Stern started the Michael Stern Parkinson's Research Foundation.
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