What would it be like to own property there for near 50 years and to grow up with assurances that your endless summer would never end? To smell the salt air and to run down a path from your yard to the sea and dive in to swim every summer day?
Then, I thought of one of the most famous, if not infamous, residents of East Hampton there ever was, Little Edie, otherwise known as Edith Bouvier Beale and the cousin of the other Bouvier's, Jacqueline and Caroline Lee, who grew up with Great Expectations and Hope and then spent about a third of her life in a cat and critter infested pile of a house first named Grey Gardens by its original owner, a landscape designer.
Can anyone out there not know who "Little Edie" is?
From "Victorian Bullshit and Co."Blog/Tumbler
LITTLE EDIE - EDITH BOUVIER BEALE
(November 7, 1917 – approx.* January 9, 2002)
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My take is that both Big Edie and Little Edie were the evidence and result of sexism that sabotaged all women, but perhaps elite women most of all.
These women who were bred to breed and depend on men for the roofs over their head as well as the children in their bellies, perhaps had less chance of an independent career than most women since they were supposed to be Kept in a Grand Manner as wives who lived around their husbands. Grow up poor and there was no question you would work, maybe quit school to be a nanny or washerwoman as well as do all the women's work of being a wife and mother. Grow up to graduate high school and maybe you would work as a secretary - until you got married. Go to high school and an actual college - work at a little this or that - maybe teaching - maybe volunteer work - and expect to meet your husband in college. Very few women could both afford to be college educated and actually use their education to have a career in a "man's job" and remain independent.
Didn't everyone get married?
Page 250 of the book "The Bouviers" by John H. Davis:
"By 1941 Edith's children were attractive young people who had already distinguished themselves in various ways. Young Edith, "little Edie," the oldest at twenty four, had graduated from Miss Porter's and was one of the reigning beauties of East Hampton. A tall, blue eyed blonde with a superb figure, she was known at the resort as "Body Beautiful Beale" and was the envy of her girl cousins for her vast following of boy friends."
For all the talk of their "nonconformity" as a kind of rebellion against the established order that then resulted in eccentricity, I thought the Big Edie Mom and Little Edie Daughter Duo actually both conformed quite a bit. Certainly they were not going to go out and work for a living at a steady dreary job when they were expecting the chauffeur, the maid, and the nurse to show back up and help them! To do so might be practical but it would also deny that they were To The Manor Born!
Little Edie Beale becomes Mistress of the Month because of her years long affair with a married man, Julius Albert Krug, who at the time was United States Secretary of the Interior under President Truman! (Why not a show business Mogul you might ask? How about because the women in her family liked lawyers, stock brokers, and political men?) According to Edie Beale's diaries and letters that she left to the executor of her estate, a nephew Bouvier, she had the affair in the late 1940s, perhaps as her last affair in New York before she was summoned home. The films suggest that she was called home because of the affair, to save her reputation, or perhaps her sanity.
Photo from US Department of the Interior
(He was born in 1907, ten years earlier than Little Edie.)
This affair ended when the married Krug broke with her. Then, from stress, her hair started falling out, though she might have had alopecia and she may have finished the process of going bald by setting fire to her own head after she returned home for good. I think she was head over heels with Krug, that he was the love of her life, and that she had a bit of a (fashionable) nervous breakdown as a result!
From then on Little Edie kept her bald head covered in long scarves.
I believe that Krug probably kept Little Edie for a while, perhaps by buying her clothes, fur coats, jewelry, and presents, and possibly paying her rent at the Barbizon when her mother and father could no longer do so, while she continued to seek her Big Break in Show Business in New York City or hung in there to be near Krug. She was not capable of supporting herself. She may have been truly in love with him but he intended to keep his wife and keep his wife in the dark.
Little Edie was dramatic like her mother and had aspirations to be an actress, perhaps a comedic one.
Phelen Beale, Little Edie's father, may have been infuriated that his ex-wife, who he married when he was 38 and she was the 18 year old boss's daughter, had allowed Little Edie to show herself off as a model.
Phelen Beale may have been infuriated that his ex wife had not succeeded at getting Edie married off to a wealthy man because he felt that was her prime responsibility.
Little Edie may have been called home because she was beyond her prime and was making a fool of herself and harming the family reputation.
But My Lord! He certainly didn't seem to care what Society might think of his behavior!
Phelan Beale had taken care of himself, abandoning his wife and children, pleading poverty, and going off to Mexico for a cheap divorce. He sent his wife a telegram telling her they were divorced. The Catholic Church didn't agree. Then he married another, much younger, woman. He seems to have encouraged his ex-wife to sell Grey Gardens and live off that, but he and his sons must have never checked in to see it for themselves.
Deal?
I believe Big Edie felt that her daughter needed someone to take care of her, maybe because she was in her mid thirties and old for modeling, she had not married, she was partial to being a Mistress, she had not won the affection of her father or her brothers, she was perhaps deluded that she had talent enough to get a Big Break in show business, and at least a spinster daughter taking care of her mom and inheriting the house was respectable.
I think the deterioration of the house and the women came down to that the money had run out by 1952 and that they were isolated. If someone in the family had checked on them even once every few months there is no way the cat food tins and feces would have built up. In particular Bud Beale, a son and brother, had become a rich man in his early thirties. Certainly someone could have paid for the trash to be picked up!
In the Maysles brothers' documentary her mother, "Big Edie (Edith Ewing Bouvier) mentions that Little Edie's married man wasn't going to "do it" for Little Edie. She insinuates that instead, she herself did do it, meaning provide for her. Obviously this wasn't so true considering the conditions they lived in year after year, freezing by the sea in the winter, hungry, eating pate while the cats ate cat food (or did the cats eat the pate while Big and Little Edie ate the cat food?)
Little Edie (and some of her relations) claimed she had in youth received proposals of marriage from Joe Kennedy Junior, the son of Senior, who might have run for President of the United States some day rather than his younger brother John Fitzgerald (JKF) if he hadn't been blown up in a plane on a secret mission in WWII, J.Paul Getty of Getty Oil and Museum fame, and maybe Howard Hughes. Whatever the case, Little Edie was one to get rid of pictures and such of old boyfriends. She followed popular astrology and claimed to have a thing for Sagittarius while needing a Libra.
Men like Kennedy, Getty, and Hughes, were men of her crowd, and I believe that Little Edie had a social life with and acceptance by that crowd beginning with her youthful years at the expensive Spence School. Little Edie graduated Miss Porters (where cousin Jackie eventually went also) in 1935. From there, rejecting marriage proposals (maybe because she wanted a better marriage than her parents had), she moved into her days as a model for department stores in New York and at local charity benefits walking the carpet, and then into her long stay at the Barbizon Hotel for Women.
When Little Edie was called home in 1952, a much younger Marilyn Monroe was just beginning her rise to stardom. Little Edie said her mother pressured her for months and she gave up going on the audition that would have been her Big Break. Whatever was going on, I think Big Edie made Little Edie feel guilty. Everyone else had abandoned Big Edie and now how could she?
Little Edie could have easily commuted to New York for the audition for the Big Break from Grey Gardens!
In 1971 the Suffolk County Health Department had shown up and wanted to evict them. The house wasn't always as it became in the 1970's when the National Enquirer put the family to shame and cousin Jacqueline, now Jackie Onassis, stepped in to save them from eviction. Her sister Lee was supposed to supervise and decorate but it seems that mostly what happened was that rooms were painted one color - all yellow or all blue - everything the same. By then it had been Big Eddie's home since 1923 and in those 50 years the plumbing, wiring, heating, cooking, running water, and garbage pick up had ceased and it had been years since they had a running vehicle or drove.
Little Edie would remain there for two years after her mother died, to save estate taxes, and then sold it and walked away, with furniture and other precious antiques still in the attic with the raccoon holes in it. Finally she returned to New York City and her dream of being a Night Club singer at the age of 60, and lived another 22 years as an independent and normal woman moving from place to place to experience life a different way.
For years, Little Edie continued to be the "Body Beautiful," her bald pate wrapped artistically in long scarves clipped with an expensive piece of jewelry, and swam every summery day... In Florida she would swim every day into her 80s!
Missy
*Edie was found dead at her last home, an apartment in Florida, by approx. 5 days.
C 2014 All Rights Reserved including Internet and International. Missy Rapport/ Mistress Manifesto
UPDATE JANUARY 2016!
Over the Holidays I read, via e-book on Overdrive, a book called JACKIE AFTER O by Tina Cassidy, subtitled "One Remarkable Year When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Defied Expectations and Rediscovered Her Dreams" which was well worth my time to read. There is a small portion of the book that's about Big and Little Edie. The way it was written to describe them and their relationship was creative and humorous, though I don't know if that was the author's intentions. I will post a bit more from this book on the month I dedicated to Jacqueline Bouvier, not because she was a mistress, but because I think she would have made a good one, if she had not had to play her life out on the world stage.
Concerning Little Edie, I learned in Chapter 9, The Empty Nester, that it was Jackie's sister Lee, having spent some time writing her own memoir, who went to spend time with the two Edies, and seeing that the two women were "like the house itself, were falling apart, in spectacular fashion," had decided their way of living would make a great film. Unable to finance it, along with her neighbor Peter Beard, the photographer, they passed the idea on to the Maysles Brothers, who did make the documentary, "Grey Gardens." The film debuted in 1975.
Quoted, "Mother sees me as a baby, I see myself as a little girl, the Maysles see me as a woman," Little Edie.
I learned that JACKIE and Lee HAD NOT ignored the Beales. In 1972 they and some other relatives had spent $4000 on the clean up and another $30,000 on repairing the mansion just as local health officials threatened to condemn it.
"If Jackie saw the movie debut, she didn't let on."
Hello,
ReplyDeleteI, too, loved the documentaries and the Beales.
Thank you for taking the time to express your thoughts and write this interesting article.
Best wishes,
Tina