Little Compton, RI—American heiress, philanthropist, writer, and late-in-life Hollywood film producer Elaine Brookhants died October 11 at Newport Hospital at the age of eighty-one, a spokesperson for the family told the Providence Journal in a telephone interview. The cause was complications stemming from a fall at home.
Effortlessly elegant and never far from her sharp wit, Elaine Brookhants and her various exploits first captivated New York society pages, and then, for years after, the churning Rhode Island rumor mill. (Which certainly hasn’t been quieted by her death.) She was the most recent Brookhants to occupy the “cursed” family estate: Breakwater, in Little Compton—better known to locals as Spite Manor. The home was built by her eccentric great-grand-uncle, steel tycoon and Spiritualist Harold Brookhants.
She was born Elaine Elizabeth Bishop Brookhants in New York on June 21, 1934, to railroad heir Arthur Ryan Brookhants and his second wife, Valerie Bishop Brookhants. Arthur was a self-styled adventurer who sank much of his inheritance into wild and sometimes unlawful searches for objects of interest around the globe. Largely as a way to legitimize these pursuits, he founded the Brookhants Museum in Providence in 1939. He died of a heart attack in 1948, leaving his daughter with a rumored inheritance of $13.7 million. Valerie Bishop was a jet-setting photographer whose candid shots of her society friends would become some of the most iconic of the era. However, she is perhaps best known now for her series of stark self-portraits, taken while she was hospitalized after a suicide attempt in 1950, while Elaine was away at boarding school. In the coming years, Valerie would spend significant time receiving treatment for depression and neuroses in mental hospitals in New York and California. She died from an overdose of sleeping pills in Los Angeles in 1955.
Elaine was educated at the Wheeler School in Providence, where she was first nicknamed Lainey (a name she continued to use throughout her life) and garnered a reputation as both a gifted writer and a prank-playing troublemaker. However, despite the pranks—or because of them—she was wildly popular with her fellow classmates, occasionally hosting what she called “Spooky Weekends” away for them at her family estate. The caption in the school annual from her junior year describes her thusly: “The only curse our Lainey has to worry about is her mouth and what too often comes out of it.”
In 1951, Elaine entered Vassar, planning to study art history. However, she dropped out to be with her mother after completing only one academic year. Back in Manhattan at age nineteen, Elaine emerged as a youthful new addition to its shifting high society. She forged friendships (and rumored romances) with film stars and her fellow heirs and heiresses alike. Although he typically ran with a crowd closer in age to her mother, Truman Capote wrote this regarding Elaine’s reputation as a desirable match: “Lainey Brookhants might be catch of the day, but unlike a few others of which the same is said, she won’t stink up your kitchen come morning. This particular flounder won’t.”
For a time, Elaine seemed to enjoy mocking social customs as much as she did participating in them. However, after her mother’s suicide and the fervent publicity that followed, she withdrew from the social circuit and developed the reputation for fierce loyalty that she maintained throughout the rest of her life. She also used part of her inheritance to found the Valerie Bishop Clinic in Manhattan, which provided counseling and other psychological services to women of all means. In the 1980s, the endeavor expanded into the Valerie & Eleanor Foundation, with a mission to fund research in mental illness. When she was honored for this work in 2007, Brookhants said, simply, “It’s what my mother would have wanted. And what I wanted for her.”
In 1963, while on vacation in San Francisco, Brookhants met political cartoonist Taylor Behrens, who was then fifty-five to her twenty-nine. The two married just four months later and settled in Little Compton at the family estate. There, Brookhants wrote Mrs. Mittens Invites You to Tea, the first of three macabre (children’s) books of simple rhymes about the strange and guileful Mrs. Emily Mittens and her neighbor (and implied lover) Gladys Glovely. A sample: Mrs. Mittens had five kittens, but then she ate just one. Now Mrs. Mittens has four kittens—but Mrs. Mittens isn’t done. Taylor drew the fearsome pen-and-ink illustrations for the books, which were initially printed as amusing Christmas presents for friends. One of those friends, who was then an editor at Troubadour, convinced Elaine that there was a wider market for the books and published the first the following year. Mrs. Mittens Takes Up Fisticuffs and Gladys Glovely Isn’t Lovely followed. The books sold well for several years, despite often being panned (and banned) by those who felt their messaging wrong for children. (All three are now out of print.)
In 1977, Taylor Behrens died of colon cancer at the age of sixty-nine. Shortly thereafter, Elaine moved to the South of France and remained living there until the early 2000s. She disappeared almost entirely from public life during these years.
In 2011, Elaine purchased the film rights for the nonfiction book The Happenings at Brookhants, which details the history of the real deaths and supposed curse attached to the Brookhants School for Girls, a boarding school founded by Harold Brookhants and still remaining, though long abandoned, on the northeast corner of her Little Compton estate. The Happenings at Brookhants was written by then-sixteen-year-old wunderkind author Merritt Emmons, who credited Elaine with not only convincing her to write it but also significantly assisting in her research.
Horror film director Bo Dhillon became attached to the project in 2014, with rising star Harper Harper cast as one of the leads and Brookhants remaining on as executive producer. Principal photography began in September at the Little Compton estate, and almost immediately rumors began online regarding supposed bizarre or ghostly occurrences on set. Elaine herself commented on the rumors in an interview with the Providence Journal just two weeks ago, saying, “Everyone involved wanted to make the film here because it’s a place full of tricks like these, so we can’t act surprised now that they’re being played on us. But it’s also a place full of treats. When you see it all captured on the big screen, you’ll know what I mean.”