She was proof that money and success can’t buy happiness.
Acclaimed author Jean Stein, who spent her life chronicling Hollywood’s elite, was worth $38.5 million when she jumped to her death from her Upper East Side high-rise last month, court papers show.
The 83-year-old Gracie Square resident, who suffered from depression, left a trove of precious possessions and a 25-page will that reads like a who’s who of America’s cultural icons.
“I give my pair of French mirrors in the shape of butterflies that belonged to Truman Capote to Diane Keaton, if she survives me,” Stein wrote in the 2015 will, filed in Manhattan Surrogate’s Court.
Stein left her collection of letters, drawings and signed books from writer William Faulkner to the New York Public Library.
The interviews, manuscripts and tapes from Stein’s acclaimed oral history of John F. Kennedy went to the late president’s library.
Literary agent Bill Clegg received a shot the photographer William Eggleston took of Stein’s desk at her parents’ home.
Stein, whose father, Jules, founded the media giant MCA, saved some of her most treasured belongings for her daughters — The Nation magazine editor Katrina vanden Heuvel and actress Wendy vanden Heuvel — and their daughters.
Stein left one granddaughter, Lila Blue Coley, her Steinway piano, and the other, Nicola Cohen, a piece by the sculptor Ed Kienholz titled “Kitchen Sink.”
To her daughters, Stein bequeathed her jewelry, including “the 18th-century diamond necklace stored in my vault,” as well as books and more Eggleston photos.
Stein had divorced twice and was unmarried when she died on April 30.
The bulk of her fortune will go to her cultural charity, the JKW Foundations.
The will also makes contributions to UCLA, the Jules Stein Eye Institute and the Whitney Museum.
Stein’s assets include her $10 million co-op, $15 million in personal property and $13.5 million in security investments, papers show.
Her daughters asked a judge to grant them access to Stein’s apartment, which was sealed by the NYPD, “to search for missing information” related to her estate.