Grey Gardens Sunroom
by Ed Weidman
Title
Grey Gardens Sunroom
Artist
Ed Weidman
Medium
Digital Art - Photo Painting
Description
Grey Gardens is a 1975 American documentary film by Albert and David Maysles. The film depicts the everyday lives of two reclusive, formerly upper class women, a mother and daughter both named Edith Beale, who lived in poverty at Grey Gardens, a derelict mansion at 3 West End Road in the wealthy Georgica Pond neighborhood of East Hampton, New York. The film was screened at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival but was not entered into the main competition.
Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (1895–1977), known as "Big Edie", and her daughter Edith Bouvier Beale (1917–2002), known as "Little Edie", were the aunt and the first cousin, respectively, of former US First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The two women lived together at the Grey Gardens estate for decades with limited funds in increasing squalor and isolation.
The house was designed in 1897 by Joseph Greenleaf Thorpe and purchased in 1923 by "Big Edie" and her husband Phelan Beale. After Phelan left his wife, "Big Edie" and "Little Edie" lived there for more than 50 years. The house was called Grey Gardens because of the color of the dunes, the cement garden walls, and the sea mist.
Throughout the fall of 1971 and into 1972, their living conditions—their house was infested by fleas, inhabited by numerous cats and raccoons, deprived of running water, and filled with garbage and decay—were exposed as the result of an article in the National Enquirer and a cover story in New York Magazine after a series of inspections (which the Beales called "raids") by the Suffolk County Health Department. With the Beale women facing eviction and the razing of their house, in the summer of 1972 Jacqueline Onassis and her sister Lee Radziwill provided the necessary funds to stabilize and repair the dilapidated house so that it would meet village codes.
Albert and David Maysles became interested in their story and received permission to film a documentary about the women, which was released in 1976 to wide critical acclaim. Their direct cinema technique left the women to tell their own stories.
Albert and David Maysles initially came into contact with the Beales after Lee Radziwill suggested they make a documentary on her childhood in East Hampton and brought them with her on a trip to Grey Gardens. According to Ellen Hovde, the initial film was being funded by Radziwill; when the Maysles attempted to show her their early footage of the Beales to convince her that a documentary about them was a better idea, Radziwill confiscated their negatives and withdrew her funding.
The Maysles brothers shot and recorded all the footage themselves. Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer received co-directing credit for their editing work.
"Big Edie" died in 1977 and "Little Edie" sold the house in 1979 for $220,000 ($726,000 today) to Sally Quinn and her husband, longtime Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, who promised to restore the dilapidated structure (the sale agreement forbade razing the house). "Little Edie" died in Florida in 2002 at the age of 84. A 2003 article in Town & Country confirms that Quinn and Bradlee completely restored the house and grounds.
Jerry Torre, the teenaged handyman shown in the documentary (nicknamed The Marble Faun by "Little Edie"), was sought by the filmmakers for years afterward, and was found by chance in 2005 driving a New York City taxicab. A 2011 documentary, The Marble Faun of Grey Gardens by Jason Hay and Steve Pelizza, showed that he was then a sculptor at The Art Students League of New York.
Lois Wright, one of the two birthday party guests in the film, has hosted a public television show in East Hampton since the 1980s. She wrote a book about her experiences at the house with the Beales.
Grey Gardens, an HBO film, stars Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore as the Edies, with Jeanne Tripplehorn as Jacqueline Kennedy, and Daniel Baldwin as Julius Krug. Directed and co-written (with Patricia Rozema) by filmmaker Michael Sucsy, filming began on October 22, 2007, in Toronto. It flashes back and forth between Little Edie's life as a young woman and the actual filming/premiere of the 1975 documentary. First aired on HBO on April 18, 2009, the film won six Primetime Emmys. and two Golden Globes.
Shoppers and voyeurs journeyed from across the country over the weekend to purge Grey Gardens of its every last drinking glass and cloth napkin, items that once belonged to the infamous “Big Edie” Bouvier Beale and her daughter, “Little Edie” Beale.
As relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and subjects of the 1975 documentary named for the estate in which they lived, the Edies developed an obsessive following due to their bizarre, cloistered lives spent almost entirely in their ramshackle East Hampton home. This weekend, hundreds of visitors donned blue surgical booties and paraded through that home, eager to scoop up ephemera and check the place out for themselves.
Vito Brullo, 73, carried photos he took of the estate in the 1960s, when he also spent summers in the area. Brullo said he became fascinated by the Beale family and their “sad story.”
“Curiosity would come up to the fact ‘why is this house a shambles among these beautiful estates? Something must be wrong,’ ” Brullo said.
Inside the house, visitors took selfies, re-enacted scenes from the movies and tried to picture what had been in the rooms before they were emptied.
Big Edie died in 1977, and Little Edie sold the house in 1979 to Sally Quinn and her husband, the longtime Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee. The two restored the dilapidated mansion and remained its owners for several decades—until October, when it was sold to an undisclosed buyer.
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December 8th, 2017
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