How does one of the most charming and gentle women in America end up in a “garbage-filled, dirty, 28-room house with eight cats, fleas and no running water?” A place where, according to THE Washington Post in 1976, “the wind strikes and prevails”.
The predictable answer would probably be “drugs” or “a really bad man”. But Edie Bouvier BealeHer descent from the page of society to the infamy of Gray Gardens owed much more to her mother, “Big Edie.”
This fall didn’t seem likely when Edith Bouvier Beale was born in 1917. Her mother was Jack Bouvier’s sister, making little Edie Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy’s cousin. And, like Jackie, little Eddie seemed to have been born with every opportunity. Their home, Gray Gardens, had been bought for Big Edie by her husband, Phelan Beale, four years after their wedding at St Patrick’s Cathedral. The East Hampton mansion served as a perfect home for Big Edie to host parties, at which, as an amateur singer, she often serenaded guests with tunes such as As time passes AND Tea for two. Little Eddie was educated at Spence and then Miss Porter’s, where he enjoyed a lively social life. And then she entered a world of partying in the Hamptons, which her brother, Phelan Jr., said she resembled of the great gatsby entertainment. There she was known as “Body Beautiful Beale”. It was written about him Social spectator alongside a photo of “a full-lipped blonde brazenly vamping the brim of her beach hat.” There, she recalled, she “stopped by the Princeton Prom. That’s when you’re the one they want to dance with and rings of men form around you.”
After turning down the Princeton men, she began a modeling career in New York City, also hoping to make it as a professional dancer. Her family was not very happy. Little Eddie remembered“I modeled for Bachrach while I was waiting the summer for the audition. Somebody yelled at my dad. You know, he marched down Madison Avenue and saw my picture and punched Mr. Bachrach’s window?”
The young men were more enthusiastic. During her youth, little Ed was faced with J. Paul Getty and (probably) Joe Kennedy Jr, whom he met at one of those aforementioned Princeton dances. Howard Hughes he reportedly asked her to marry him, but Eddie turned him down because he was “too weird.”
“France has fallen,” Eddie’s mother said in 1975 Gray Gardens documentary, “But Edie never fell.”
In 1952 though she reportedly had an offer from MGM to come to Los Angeles and dancing at the movies, Little Eddie returned to Gray Gardens. By this time, she was afflicted with alopecia, causing her hair to fall out and prompting her to wear her famous headscarves. This was six years after her father divorced her mother; he notified the family with a telegram from Mexico. Phelan Beale took with him many of the funds that had sustained the mansion, and the house quickly began to fall into disrepair. But Big Edie, who felt she had her happiest memories there, would not consider moving.
How much for why SHE gave up what seemed to be a promising life in New York, Little Eddie would later claim, “Mother took the cats. That’s when she brought me down from New York to take care of them.” As she said this, a New York Magazine the journalist claimed that in Little Edie, “We had come to the dead end of a human life.”
Phelan Jr., Edie’s brother, certainly felt that Edie’s return to Gray Gardens was something of a tragedy – and that her devotion to Big Edie meant she would never be able to get out and live her own life. To this, Eddie replied, “Oh my God, I never saw a man to marry … People couldn’t understand that I cared for my mother. They were very rude to my mother. Finally, I said, ‘They can all go to hell.’
However, this commitment did not stop little Eda from accusing her mother of ever preventing her from marrying. It was—as love and commitment often are—complicated.
Phelan Jr. desperately hoped the two would move to another country, somewhere in Florida, or East Hampton or “wherever it’s nice.” A relative thought to kidnap the pair, drug them and transport them to a “nice holiday home”.
But they didn’t move. And they would have over three hundred cats as the house crumbled around them.
“Shall I tell you what I have been doing for twenty years?” – said Eddie New York Magazine in 1971. “Feed cats. Mother wouldn’t let me go with American men; they were too rich and fast. She was afraid I’d get married. Nothing has happened in twenty years, so I haven’t changed in any way.”
That same year, public health officials stationed themselves on the lawn of Gray Gardens, reminding the Beales that they had no heat. There is no running water. No food except what they were eating from a can. The town’s mayor declared: “The house is unfit for human habitation – animals don’t live like that.” When paramedics and a member of the ASPCA investigated the home, they found human feces on the stairs and empty dog food cans scattered around. The house had no working bathrooms and was infested with fleas. Sanitation was privately provided in East Hampton, so instead of paying to have their junk removed, the couple just started storing it in the basement and empty closets. The smell did not remain hidden.
But still, the Beales refused to leave. In the end, it was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis which provided $25,000 for the city to clean up the property, on the condition that the couple be allowed to stay in the home.
The tragedy for little Eddie and the house where the pair lived was one of stagnation. They never moved into the future. In almost any sane person’s mind, Edie should have had a career, married, and had a family of her own. Her mother should have accepted old age gracefully and moved to… wherever her sons chose. They did nothing. And the result seemed to be disastrous. Until.
The pair came to attention when, in 1975, the Maysles brothers began filming the documentary that would be Gray Gardens. The story first came to their attention when the brothers were working on a film about Jackie Kennedy and wanted to meet her reclusive cousins. The result would be the film that was not only one of the most influential documentaries of the 20th century, but would also launch countless fashion collections (and spread to italian Vogue AND Harper’s Bazaar). From the moment little Edie came down the stairs in a one-piece bathing suit, high heels and a sweater hanging over her head, declaring it her “suit for the day,” the Beales became icons. Critics claimed the film exploited the Edies, but Little Eddie responded, “For my mother and me, Gray Gardens it is a discovery of something beautiful and precious called life.”
But that new life was never more than an act of innovation. after Gray Gardens was released, Little Eddie again began performing in a cabaret actsinging numbers like “As time goes on.“
Big Edie passed away in 1977 at the age of 80. Two years later, little Eddie sold the house. As her brother had long suggested, she moved to Florida.
