How did one of the most beautiful, gentle women in America end up in “a house full of garbage, dirty, with 28 rooms and 8 cats, and fleas, and no running water?” The place there, according to the Washington Post in 1976, “the smell invades and dominates.”
A predictable answer might be “drugs” or “a really bad man.” But the birth of Edie Bouvier Beale from the public page to the famous Gray Gardens was owed to her mother, “Big Edie.”
This fall did not seem possible when Edith Bouvier Beale was born in 1917. His mother was the sister of Jack Bouvier, making Little Edie Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy a cousin of Little. And, like Jackie, little Edie seemed born with all the possibilities. Their home, Gray Gardens, was bought for Big Edie by her husband, Phelan Beale, four years after their wedding in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The East Hampton mansion served as the perfect home for Big Edie to host parties, where, as an aspiring singer, she often entertained guests with songs like these. As Time Goes On again Tea for Two. Little Edie was educated at Spence and then Miss Porter, where she enjoyed a lively social life. He then enters the party world of the Hamptons, which his brother, Phelan Jr., says he resembles I The Great Gatsby boisterous gatherings. There, he was known as “Body Beautiful Beale.” He was written about him in the book Community Viewer alongside a picture of a “full-lipped panther shamelessly twirling the brim of his beach hat.” There, she recalled, she “stopped the Princeton Prom. That’s when you want to dance with yourself, and men form rings around you.”
After landing the men at Princeton, she began her modeling career in New York City while hoping to make it as a professional dancer. His family was not happy. Little Edie remembered“I modeled for Bachrach while I was waiting for the summer to audition. Someone called out to my father. You know, he came up Madison Avenue and saw my picture and put his fist in Mr. Bachrach’s window?”
The young men were very enthusiastic. When she was a teenager, little Edie was in love with J. Paul Getty and (probably) Joe Kennedy Jr, whom he met at one of those aforementioned Princeton dances. Howard Hughes reportedly asked her to marry him, but Edie turned him down because “he was very secretive.”
“France has fallen,” quipped Edie’s mother in 1975 Gray Gardens documentary, “But Edie didn’t fall.”
In 1952, though he reportedly had a request from MGM to come to Los Angeles and dancing in films, little Edie returned to Gray Gardens. By this time, she was suffering from alopecia, which caused her hair to fall out and caused her to wear headscarves. That was six years after his father divorced his mother; he informed the family by phone from Mexico. Phelan Beale left with most of the money that had saved the house, and the home quickly began to deteriorate. But Big Edie, who felt she had the happiest memories there, didn’t want to move.
According to why he gave up what seemed to be a promising life in New York, little Edie would later say, “Mama got cats. Saying this, a New York Magazine The reporter said in Edie Encane’s book, “We had reached the end of human life.”
Little Phelan, Edie’s brother, must have felt that Edie’s return to Gray Gardens was a disaster—that her commitment to Big Edie meant she couldn’t get out and live her life. To this, Edie replied, “Oh God, I never met the man I was going to marry . . .”
However, this commitment did not stop little Edie from accusing her mother of preventing her from ever getting married. It was complicated—as love and devotion are often complicated.
Phelan Jr. he really hoped the two of them would move somewhere, somewhere in Florida, or East Hampton or “any nice place”. One relative thought of kidnapping the two, drugging them, and taking them to a “good rest house.”
But they did not move. And they would have over three hundred cats while the house collapsed around them.
“Can I tell you what I did for twenty years?” Edie said New York Magazine in 1971. “Cats eat. My mother didn’t want me to go out with American men; they were too rich and fast. She was afraid I’d get married. Nothing happened in twenty years, so I haven’t changed in any way.”
That same year, public health officials camped out on the lawn of Gray Gardens, reminding the Beales that they had no heat. There is no running water. No food except what they ate in cans. The Mayor of the City said, “This house is not fit for people to live in—animals don’t live like this.” When sanitation workers and a member of the ASPCA searched the home, they found human feces on the stairs and empty dog food cans littered. The house had no working bathrooms and was infested with fleas. Sewerage was privately provided in East Hampton, so rather than pay to have their trash disposed of, the pair simply began storing it in the basement and in empty closets. The smell didn’t stay hidden.
But still, the Beales refused to leave. In the end, it was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis who offered $25,000 to the city to clean up the property, on the condition that the couple be allowed to stay in the home.
The tragedy of Little Edie and the home they lived in was a tragedy. They did not move into the future. To almost any reasonable person, Edie should have had a job, married and had a family of her own. His mother should have accepted old age gracefully and gone to live… wherever her sons chose. They did nothing. And the result proved to be a disaster. Until.
The two were noticed when, in 1975, the Maysles brothers began filming a documentary that would become. Gray Gardens. The story first came to their ears when the brothers were making a film about Jackie Kennedy and wanted to meet her single cousins. The result would be a film that was not only one of the most influential documentaries of the 20th century but would also launch a number of fashion collections (and spread among Italian Vogue again Harper’s Bazaar). From the moment little Edie came down the stairs in a one-piece bathing suit, high heels, and a sweater pulled over her head, announcing that it was her “outfit of the day,” the Beales became icons. Critics said the film exploited the Edies, but little Edie responded, “For me and my mother, Gray Gardens it is a beautiful and precious way called life.”
But that new life was no more than a new act. After Gray Gardens was released, little Edie resumed her cabaret actsinging numbers like “As Time Goes On.“
Big Edie died in 1977 at the age of 80. Two years later, little Edie sold the house. As his brother had been suggesting, he moved to Florida.
