Edith Beale Research Paper

Edith Beale: The Color in Grey Gardens

With so much information to take in, I found it hard to know where to begin on the subject of Little Edie Beale, self-imposed prisoner of the mansion known as Grey Gardens. Largely infamous for her bizarre eccentricities being the reclusive cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis, dare I use that term as her own mother once said, “’Eccentric’ is a lack of money.” I came to know her as an artist. More importantly, I discovered that she was not delusional or schizophrenic as many think to this day. She was a vastly intelligent woman who dared to live a life unconcerned with money and opinions in a time when such behaviors were considered improper and unfeminine. Therefore she was branded as insane.

Born on November 17, 1917, in New York City, Edith Bouvier-Beale was the youngest of three children for Phelan and Edith Ewing Beale. Phelan’s side of the family had amassed much wealth on Wall Street and in the legal arena. Because of their financial prosperity, Edie and her two brothers spent most of their childhood bouncing between Manhattan and the Hamptons. While Edith Jr.,
who would later be known as Little Edie, was in her early twenties, her father moved the family into the 28 room mansion and summer home that had been dubbed Grey Gardens by its previous owner. As Little Edie explains in a documentary, named after the home and filmed by David and Albert Maysles, storms would come through and rip apart the gardens every year causing the former owner, a very accomplished female botanist, to bestow upon it such a gloomy name.

Little Edie was known as the beauty of the family. Her cousin, John H. Davis, once said that the charming young lady’s looks were “…surpassing even the dark charm of Jacqueline.” Largely influenced by her artistic mother, one of Edie’s poems was published in a local New York magazine at the age of 9. Her first love was being on stage; however, being published encouraged the blossoming writer within her. Her father, a stern and strict Republican, often objected to the free-thinking ways of his 2 Edie’s.

At the age of 11 Little Edie was taken out of school by her mother for a span of 2 years due to, what she called, a mysterious respiratory illness. Although Big Edie claimed that her daughter was far too ill to attend classes, she found her well enough to accompany her to the theater and cinema almost daily which ensured that Edie Jr. would grow up to be as star stricken as her mother. She also felt that her daughter was in good enough health to take a shopping trip to Paris. Being the only girl in the family, Little Edie became the center of her mother’s focus and was always at her side for luncheons in East Hampton.

At the age of 17, during her studies at Miss Porter’s finishing school, she modeled for Macy’s regardless of the fact that Phelan was greatly opposed to his daughter being on public display. He lived with the fear that such behavior would tarnish his family’s good reputation and status in the Park Avenue Social Register and Big Edie’s antics only added fuel to the fire. She loved to shock the snooty crowd at the ritzy Maidenstone Club by carrying on about Christian Science and singing operettas. She also took pleasure in shunning the garden parties that East Hampton women were expected to attend so that she could live, what she referred to as, “the artistic life.”

2 years after she began her modeling work with Macy’s, Little Edie was thrown a debutante ball so grand that it was covered by the New York Times. She was also taking to the catwalk in fashion shows earning herself the well-warranted nickname “Body Beautiful”. Meanwhile, Edie the Second was dating the likes of millionaires Howard Hughes, Paul Getty and Joe Kennedy Jr. who, were it not for an ill-fated accident while bombing the Nazis, would have been her husband and, very likely, president of the United States. Although she had a slew of men swooning over her, when it came to marriage proposals, Little Edie always turned her suitors away.

As the Great Depression took hold and money had begun to run out, the tension between Big Edie and Phelan continued to grow. He instructed his wife to hide the truth about their financial situation from their darling daughter by writing her a letter in 1934 which stated, “She will think we’re at the poorhouse. It will rob all her joy.” Around this time, Edie had a chance to escape her mother’s bohemian grip and the stifling Hamptons atmosphere. She left Grey Gardens to move into the Barbizon Hotel for proper ladies on the East Side. Being that the Barbizon was a residential hotel catering to young women who were aspiring actresses and models, she was finally surrounded by like minded peers making her far less reliant on her mother for creative influence.

Edie received movie offers from Paramount and M.G.M., met with Broadway producer, Max Gordon, who considered her to be a comedienne, and continued her work as a model. She was set to audition for the Theater Guild that summer and did some modeling for Bachrach while preparing. Somehow, Phelan got wind of what type of work his daughter had been doing. Partly because of her disobedience, but more so because of his experiences with Big Edie, he was so infuriated that he marched up Madison Avenue, saw Edie Jr.’s picture and put his fist straight through Mr. Bachrach’s window. Little did he know that his daughter was still honing her skills for the audition with the Theater Guild.

Unfortunately, the promising audition and chance of a lifetime never came to fruition for, at this point, the Gordian knot which bound the two Edie’s together took a far stronger hold. This is when Phelan, finances exhausted and fed up with his wife’s behavior, left her to be with a younger woman. He only added insult to injury by divorcing her via telegram from Mexico. Their separation resulted in a small amount of child support and Big Edie’s ownership of Grey Gardens. Money was now so scarce that the once wealthy Edie Ewing Beale had to rely on her father, Major Bouvier, for financial assistance as well as selling off priceless family heirlooms.

Having no funds left to support herself or the upkeep of the mansion she continually refused to sell against her father’s requests, Big Edie felt it was time to put a bug in her daughter’s ear about returning home to help out. When Little Edie was later asked by a friend if she had ever made it to that life-changing audition, she replied “Oh no. Mother got the cats. That’s when she brought me down from New York to care for them.” Having to make the decision any child would to help a parent in need, her adulthood as caretaker to everything but herself would soon begin.

Edie Sr. was still in good spirits regardless of her lack of tender as she no longer had to attend events such as the Hamptons cocktail parties she had always found a bore and discovered a renewed interest in her singing career. She sang in various clubs and even recorded a few tunes. Major Bouvier continued to urge her to sell the onus that was Grey Gardens, but she still refused which caused some level of resentment as he was financing much of her living expenses. Little Edie would become her great white hope for carrying on the bohemian lifestyle that she had always savored.

Soon thereafter, Big Edie arrived late to her own son’s wedding dressed up like an opera star. This was the last straw for major Bouvier who then cut his eccentric daughter out of his will. She then slumped into a depression which caused her weight to balloon so much that she could no longer care for the very things which helped her to pass the time. With no grocery money to send her daughter and even less for the maintenance of her mansion, Edie Sr.’s once charmed life at Grey Gardens fell into utter disrepair. Regardless of the many opportunities for success in the writing and entertainment fields, Little Edie felt that she had no other choice but to move back home to care for her mother. Unbeknownst to her, she would not leave Grey Gardens again until Big Edie’s passing in 1977.

Over the next 20 years the pair grew increasingly reclusive to the point of rarely venturing off their own property. What started off as a few cats to keep Big Edie content grew into estimates as high as 300 and raccoons ran amok inside and out of the mansion. Naturally, the chore of caring for all the animals fell upon Little Edie who had to follow her mother’s special recipe at feeding time which consisted of cat food, liver pate` and a twist of lemon. As unpaid bills continually stacked up, times came when money was so scarce that the pair had to sustain themselves on the same “luncheon” recipe that was prepared for the animals. Even though Edie Jr. loved and treasured them all, she knew a lifestyle of hermitage and putting the well-being of critters before her own would eventually have a negative effect on her. Toward the end of the Maysles brother’s documentary, “Grey Gardens”, she says, “Raccoons and cats become a little bit boring, I mean for too long a time.” Although mostly obedient of her mother’s wishes, Edie did have her moments of rebellion. Most often it was a simple quarrel or bickering between the two. On rare occasion, it was far more cataclysmic. Many thought Little Edie’s self-styled head wraps were just part of her homemade “costumes”. Others thought she wore them only to cover what little hair she was left with after battling alopecia in her early 20’s. Cousin, John Davis, recalled a fit of rebellion which forced her to wear a turban for a very different reason. In an act of frustration, Edie Jr. climbed up a catalpa tree just outside the property and, deaf to John’s pleas to not do it, pulled out a lighter and set her own hair ablaze. In less dramatic instances she would sneak out to parties where she found solace in dancing by herself; free of Mother, free of Grey Gardens and the critters in her care and with no one’s expectations to live up to but her own.

The ladies of Grey Gardens were mostly left to themselves, allowing the outside world to pass them by until being relations to first lady and fashion icon, Jackie O., brought much unwanted attention to their living conditions. In the fall of 1971, county officials appeared on the doorstep of Grey Gardens, search warrant in hand. They threatened the Edies with eviction citing that the mansion was “unfit for human habitation.” The pair felt that it was an unfair “raid” brought upon them for being bohemian non-conformists who shunned the Hamptons lifestyle and spoke out for themselves in a time where women who did so were a disgrace. As Little Edie so eloquently put it, “We’re artists against the bureaucrats. Mother’s French operetta. I dance, I write poetry, I sketch. But that doesn’t mean we’re crazy.”

Much like they do with celebrities of today, the press ran wild with the story. The headline of the New York Post read, “Jackie’s Aunt Told: Clean Up Mansion.” Soon thereafter, Cousin Jacqueline cut a check in the amount of $25,000 for the restoration and clean up of the home under the stipulation that the 2 Edie’s would be allowed to remain there. Sadly, by the time the Maysles’ began shooting their documentary in the fall of 1973, the mansion had nearly reverted back to its previous state of squalor.

“Grey Gardens” was released in 1975 to wide acclaim of critics and audiences alike. Although the Edie’s had hoped the documentary would bring them some much needed financial relief, they never saw a red cent from it. It did, however, finally bring the fame for which the duo had always yearned. In fact, Little Edie’s quirky sense of style had quite the impact on the world of fashion which still lingers today. She was the influence for many designs of Calvin Klein’s and, in 1997; Harper’s Bizarre magazine devoted a photo spread to her which was inspired by her improvised ensembles. For Edie Jr., everyday was dress-up day.

These sort of curiosities lingered with fans of the Beale woman. The documentary’s endurance resulted in the 2006 release of “The Beales of Grey Gardens” which included 90 minutes of material that had been cut from the original Maysles film. Their lives also inspired a Broadway musical that earned 3 Tony awards in 2007. April of 2009 saw the release of the H.B.O. movie “Grey Gardens” starring Jessica Lange as mother to Drew Barrymore’s Little Edie. In the true spirit of the Beale woman, the tag line reads “True Glamour Never Fades”. In 1977, 2 years after the documentary’s release, Big Edie passed away.

Many assumed that Little Edie would not be able to make her way in the world without her mother.
Naturally, she proved that false as she was finally able to make a life all her own. She held out on selling Grey Gardens for demolition until 1979 when Washington Post editors, Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, purchased it for a little over $220,000 and restored it to its former glory. At long last the remaining Edith Beale returned to New York where she recaptured the exhilaration she once had as a young woman. She had a short run as a cabaret singer in Greenwich Village and took questions from the inquisitive audience at the end of her show. Some people felt that she was being exploited. Luckily, Edie wasn’t one of them. In her own words, “This is something I’ve been planning since I was 19. I don’t care what they say about me – I’m just going to have a
ball.”

She eventually moved to an apartment in Bal Harbour, Florida where she took up swimming once again and continued to do so everyday up until her death at the age of 84. She rose to every challenge that came her way with true dignity and grace. She saved the childhood home that had meant so much to her mother and became a part of history. She also discovered the fame for which both Edie’s had always searched. Little Edie was always true to the artist within her which is why her life became exemplified by the title she gave her childhood composition book: “Edith Beale, Celebrated Poet, Author and Artist”