Life At Grey Gardens
Beale had two live-in male companions at various times at Grey Gardens: her accompanist George "Gould" Strong and handyman Tom "Tex" Logan. In July 1952, her daughter Little Edie returned after five years in Manhattan to live permanently at Grey Gardens when Beale was age 57. In 1960, when Beale was 65, her niece Jacqueline Kennedy became First Lady. After a 1968 theft of antiques while Beale was at a party in East Hampton, she began to leave the house less frequently.
In the 1970s, Jacqueline Onassis's sister Lee Radziwill discussed creating a documentary with Albert and David Maysles about her and Jacqueline's childhood in East Hampton. At about the same time, the Edies received national attention when the National Enquirer ran an exposé on the deplorable conditions in which they lived. The Suffolk County, New York, Board of Health made an inspection, ordering them to clean up the property, which was falling into disrepair and contained various cats, raccoons, an opossum, et cetera. The once-elegant grounds were a tangled jungle; 25 of the 28 rooms were unused; in the dining room, they found a three-foot mountain of empty cans; in the upstairs bedrooms, it was said they saw human waste; and the fleas were so thick that the filmmakers wore flea collars around their ankles during the filming. After the publicity, Jacqueline Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis donated $32,000 to clean the house, install a new furnace and plumbing system, and cart away 1,000 bags of garbage. Beale did not have the funds for trash removal and house repairs. Beale's sons agreed to pay the back taxes on the property, which they had hoped for decades their mother would sell. After the stressful raids by county officials, Beale never left her home again in fear that she would lose permanent legal access to her house.
In 1973, the Maysles Brothers accompanied Lee Radziwill on a visit to the Edies, and David Maysles decided that the women would make better subjects for a film than the ex-First Lady's childhood friends. Maysles and Susan Froemke quickly edited the footage of the women and showed it to Radziwill, who balked and ultimately confiscated the film. The Maysleses returned, however, and the focus of their documentary was the Edies, instead of Jacqueline Onassis. Beale and her daughter were each paid $5,000 for the documentary, which featured their daily lives, songs and dances included. The film was screened for the two Edies in the upstairs hall of Grey Gardens in 1975. Little Edie declared it "a classic!"
The Grey Gardens documentary was met with critical acclaim. The film also inspired a Tony-award winning stage musical and a 2009 Emmy-award winning HBO film by the same name, starring Jessica Lange as "Big" Edie and Drew Barrymore as "Little" Edie.
Read more about this topic: Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale
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