Before she was the “broker to the stars” and moved in the same circles as Elton John and Madonna, Linda Adler was a humble schoolteacher from The Bronx.
Then a fifth-grader set her up on a blind date.
“He said, ‘Do you want to meet my uncle?’ ” recalled Stein’s friend, Steven Gains.
The boy’s uncle turned out to be Seymour Stein, an up-and-coming record producer who had just started his own label, Sire. Their first date was kismet, and they soon married. It was the early 1970s and the start of a unique New York story.
The Steins became music-industry powerbrokers, as Linda managed the legendary punk band The Ramones while her husband discovered acts like the Talking Heads and Madonna.
The Material Girl was among many who fondly remembered Stein yesterday.
“I had a great visit with Linda and Seymour backstage after my show last year at Madison Square Garden,” Madonna said.
“We, of course, reminisced about the good old days. I deeply admired her courage in her battle with breast cancer as well as her career.”
Stein moved easily in the rough-and-tumble world of 1970s punk rock because she cursed like a sailor and never lost her Bronx toughness.
She had a master’s degree in education and once said she found it easy to deal with rock stars because of her experience dealing with fifth-graders.
She eventually divorced Seymour and split with The Ramones.
“We were much better as best friends than husband and wife,” Seymour said in a statement yesterday. “We spoke almost every day . . . She had a biting sense of humor and we laughed most of the time.”
After the split, she reinvented herself as a real-estate agent to the glitterati.
“She was brassy like Bette Midler,” said Gains. “She was only 5 feet tall but she had a very big voice . . . you never knew what was going to come out of her mouth.”
She wasn’t afraid to tell the powerful what she thought of them, even if it earned her enemies. In 1991, New York magazine described her as “Buddy Hackett with t–s” and quoted her saying, “So I say, ‘F—‘. F—, I can’t help it.”
Her chutzpah knew no bounds.
Last summer, she attended a political fund-raiser where Bill Clinton was a guest speaker at the Southampton home of Dottie Herman, the CEO of Prudential Douglas Elliman, where Stein worked.
“Linda went right up to Clinton and was telling him she had great property for him and that he shouldn’t buy from any other broker and ‘Nobody’s better than me,’ ” Herman said. “And she’s giving him her business card and he’s trying to give his speech. But that was Linda.”
Stein’s real-estate client list included names like Angelina Jolie, Madonna, Demi Moore, Bruce Willis, Jann Wenner, Steven Spielberg, Sting and Michael Douglas. She became such close friends with Elton John – who was discovered by her husband – that she attended his London wedding to David Furnish in 2005.
When showing a city home to Sylvester Stallone, she became frustrated that he couldn’t make up his mind about closing. When he reached the point that he started talking about looking for a house in Connecticut, an exasperated Stein reportedly shouted at him, “Rambo don’t buy in Connecticut!”
She would go to almost any extreme to get her clients into the home they wanted.
“I remember when she was preparing Angelina Jolie to interview with a co-op board on Central Park West a few years ago,” said Herman. “Linda was a wreck. She had Angelina dress a certain way, told her what to say. She really coached her.”
Jolie got the apartment at 55 Central Park West in 2003, then sold the unit less than a year later for $2.8 million, Herman said.
Stein would often get people mad at her and could hold a grudge, pals said. But she was impossible to stop.
“She did it by force of personality,” said her friend Paul Morrissey. “If she liked a property, she said things that would make people like it, too.”
In the late 1980s, Stein went knocking on Billy Joel’s Central Park West apartment to talk him into selling his duplex apartment to Sting. “I wasn’t even thinking of selling at the time,” the Piano Man recalled a few years ago.
When breast cancer struck Stein in the late 1990s, her pals rallied around her and she served as an inspiration for how she faced the disease that she eventually beat. She left behind two grown daughters, Samantha and Mandy.
“She was in many ways their mentor and role model,” their father said. “I know Samantha, Mandy and I will be comforted by our many happy memories of Linda. She was one of a kind.”