LOUISE "TEDDY" DUDLEY LYNCH - SOCIETY CHANTEUSE and J. PAUL GETTY MISTRESS and ABSENTEE WIFE

After J. Paul Getty was through with marriage #4, he is said to have become a world class womanizer, possibly also hiring prostitutes, and his personal reputation was being trashed. So perhaps when he met LOUISE DUDLEY LYNCH, called Teddy, he was considering that he needed a high society woman as cover.  The man uncharacteristically rented a luxurious penthouse in New York that was already furnished by its socialite owner with antiques, after so often running home to live with mom after romantic disasters.  Along for a visit with an old friend came Teddy.  In the 1930's she was a "society Chanteuse," (Use the Google Search embedded on this blog to read about Little Edie!) and sang at upper crust dinner clubs like The Stork.  Teddy was 22 and legal.  Paul wooed her with regular attendance at her engagements, kind of like one of those wealthy "stage door Johnnys" who awaited a Ziegfeld Follies girl back stage.  He sent her flowers, bottles of champagne, and one might have thought - for a moment - that he'd back burnered business.  But he was just working hard and playing hard.

In the chapter called "Teddy Phoned, Miss Her So Much," in the book "The House of Getty," we learn that on August 16, 1936, Miss Lynch's New York Times engagement announcement mentioned her exclusive education and professional singing.  Paul was 42 and continued in his unconventional and adventurous personal and business life. This would be his fifth and last marriage. Also his longest.  And here with Teddy is where the J. Paul Getty story moves into the story of the beginnings of his museum in Malibu, the property which he called the ranch, for his is where Teddy would live out her life, after Rome, London, and New York City, while he lived in England.

Teddy's ambition at 22 as a Getty Mistress was to be an opera singer and Getty financed lessons in Rome calling money he never expected to be paid back a loan. Teddy leaned into her dream by having herself photographed dramatically.  As he had when married but seeing Ann Rork around town, though not yet divorced Getty was seen escorting Teddy.  Instead of the posh Hollywood nightclubs it was the Metropolitan Opera House and restaurants.  Still running his empire as Emperor, Getty used the telephone for hours every day and delegated, but was very mobile in his travels.

I found this interesting because I tend to think like this as well; "If you can trust a man, a written contract is a waste of time and if you can't trust him, a written contract is still a waste of paper," is how Getty thought.  (But he would this time insist on something futuristic for 1936, a PRENUP!  While he suited up every day for a day at his hotel room office, he liked to keep things simple - except in his personal life. 

In the spring of 1938 Teddy left New York for England to train her voice with a respected London teacher.  Paul kissed her goodbye.  By now he was considered a serious collector of antiques and antiquities (and loved a bargain) and spent much of his time touring Europe by car and visiting estates, museums, art galleries, and dealers.  He met other women along the way.  That June he met up with Teddy in London and they went out on the town, then off to Paris. But they both seemed content with their separate lives.  He saw little of his four sons and was to have yet another with Teddy, a sickly boy named Timmy who would not live into adulthood.-book page 54 of this chapter, "...Paul wanted Teddy to return to the United States with him after the marriage, whereas Teddy was determined to stay in Rome to continue her operatic studies..."  (World War II was soon to begin, already there were signs.)

As Hitler invaded Poland, they met up in Switzerland but during a visit to Berlin, Paul is said to have kept breakfast, lunch, and dinner dates with three different women friends.

Teddy went back to New York City because of the World War on European soil.
In 1940 the couple met up in Los Angeles and Getty used the trip to visit with ex-wives and sons. Once Teddy was back in New York, Paul began an affair with an actress, age 23, Joan Barry and would soon become embroiled in the scandal that involved her pregnancy, blamed on Charlie Chaplin!

Oh, Paul hated to testify, but the truth was he'd seen Joan frequently in 1941 and in November of 1942 and he gave her "loans," but since (primitive compared to what's available now) blood tests proved Chaplin was the father, why mention that Joan's son might be Paul's?!

When J. Paul Getty died, Teddy was the only one of his wives in his will.  She wrote a memoir entitled "Alone Together."


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MISTRESS MANIFESTO : DECEMBER 2014 HOLIDAY EDITION (with a JACKIE KENNEDY ONASSIS THEME) : MESSAGE FROM MISSY

My Dear Readers,

I'm going to be Out Of Town this month, but as far back as September I've been thinking about my December 2014 Issue of Mistress Manifesto.  December has become the month in which I don't choose a Mistress of the Month, but look forward to the holidays and sort of wrap up the year.

My question for you, if you're a Mistress, or not, is if you're going to go through these few weeks content with your relationship status, be that unmarried, married, never married, whatever, if you're going to begin, stay in or end a relationship when the New Year comes, or if you're going to choose to move on into another way of life.

Our modern life is so challenging, and while I think it's good to think positive, that's not to say it's good to be in denial.  Intelligent decisions are mandatory!  So while I think it's a good idea to check in with yourself from time to time and speak your own truths to yourself, if no one else, something about the holidays, this first push into winter, can push you to those thoughts, while at the same time distracting you because of social events and all that good cheer.

If you happen to the type of person who is more alone than lonely, you may actually be looking forward to staying home, cooking a favorite meal, setting a nice table for yourself,  listening to music, decorating for the holidays (or maybe redecorating your whole place just because), or maybe getting all dressed up and taking yourself out to dinner at a lux restaurant, and if you're like me, a favorite way to spend down time is reading a new book.

This month I'm going to excerpt from a book that came out a few years ago that is based on what we know of the life of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, called WHAT WOULD JACKIE DO?. This book is both fun and thought-provoking, and you just might want to ask yourself WHAT IT IS YOU DO when...  you're looking for a mate instead of a date, a man wants to take you out shopping, or you have to choose a man among men.  

Jackie wasn't perfect.  We put her up on a throne when she was First Lady of the United States.  But we can learn from her to this day!  Isn't she fascinating?  Her daughter, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg has decided to reveal some of her mother's personal papers years before her mother willed it.  The Kennedys have bought up letters that Jackie sent to a Irish priest she had befriended before she married detailing her loss of faith in God after her husband, our President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated. There are so very many books about Jackie, including new ones that reveal what a psychological mess (rather than pillar of strength) she was after that historic event.  She had the nerve to be human!

So I hope you will find this month lighthearted...

I'm wishing everyone the best for the coming year!

Missy


C 2014  MistressManifesto.blogspot.com  Missy Rapport  All Rights including International and Internet Copyrights.


UPDATE JANUARY 2017


  Just completed reading this book on Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, one of modern history's most fascinating women. You may find it interesting, as I did.  Subtitled, One Remarkable Year When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Defied Expectations and Rediscovered Her Dreams, you learn that, though she had many advantages, and being famous and having marvelous social and other contacts certainly helped, Jackie still had to push herself forward.  The Chapters are titled,  The Wife, The Writer, The Preservationist, The Widow, The Target, The Seeker, The Hot Prospect, The Working Woman, The Empty Nester.


All of us go through transients or phases, and these chapter titles are telling.  Also useful to us here at MISTRESS MANIFESTO BLOGSPOT, is a Chapter that includes much about Jackie, her sister Lee, and their eccentric relatives Big and Little Edie.  Little Edie was our Mistress of the Month a while ago, and  you can find her in these pages using the search feature embedded in the Blogger sidebar.  The relationship was this.  Big Edie was the sister of Jackie's father, nicknamed Black Jack.  So Little Edie was the cousin of Jackie and Lee.  Like Jackie, Little Edie had been a "Farmington debutant."


C 2017  Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot

EDITH BEALE NIGHTCLUB ACT AGE 60

FRANK SINATRA and DINAH SHORE : TEA FOR TWO

COSY TO HIDE IN - TO LIVE SIDE BY SIDE IN

SINEAD O'CONNOR : SACRIFICE

GREY GARDENS ORIGINAL DOCUMENTARY TRAILOR (1975) THE MAYSLES BROTHERS

The entire film may be on YouTube. I got it on CD. There is a second documentary by the same film makers. There is a film staring Jessica Lange as Big Edie and Drew Barrymore as Little Edie, there's a television show, there's a Broadway Musical...

BEAUTIFUL DEB WANTS TO BE AN AUTHOR... and her cousin JACKIE became an EDITOR OF LITERTURE.

MAYSLES FILMS OFFICIAL SITE

On the internet a number of reports about the pay the ladies received conflict.  Some day they were told they would get $5000 each but it was never paid.  Some say they got $5000 each but not film percentages.  While the film is now a "cult classic" I'm not sure that when it came out in 1975/6 it had much audience.

EDITH "LITTLE EDIE" BEALE ON MARRIED MEN

"I've sworn off bachelors.  They're boring, inconsiderate, pig-headed, stubborn, spoiled mama's boys who think they have a premium on women, which unfortunately they have - there being so many of us girls around.  But one has got to make the most in a difficult situation and that's why women in desperation have turned to married men.  Married men are generous and discreet.  They don't make a fuss, they don't stick around, and they let you have a career if you want one."

Edith Bouvier Beale in the 1940's

LITTLE EDIE'S FASHIONABLE NYC ADDRESS : THE BARBIZON HOTEL FOR WOMEN

140 East 63rd Street, New York, New York

 

1927 PHOTO OF THE 23 STORY BARBIZON HOTEL FOR WOMEN

A FASHIONABLE ADDRESS

from THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

THE ROARING TWENTIES were raging female liberation as this building, designed by Palmer H. Ogden, was built.  The style was considered to be part Italian Renaissance, part Gothic, even part Islamic. 

When Little Edie went to New York to live as a young graduate of Miss Porter's School, she was conforming to Society's desire that young women in the city be protected from sweet-talking strange men physically and preserve their reputations as chaste.  Young women who applied to live at the hotel had to have three letters of reference!  You couldn't just walk in.  Parents could request that their daughters be given chaperons.  Men were allowed only in the lobby.  If a woman wanted to have an affair with a man, she had to sneak around and meet him elsewhere.

LITTLE EDIE'S DIARY WRITTEN 1929 WHEN SHE WAS TWELVE : WEARING A LONG SCARF EVEN THEN

 

When she was a little older her mother pulled her out of school

in New York City and kept her home for a couple years.

It is not known if this was a financial decision,

as her father was having difficulties, or about her

parent's divorce or if she really was ill.

Could it be that Big Edie

wanted Little Edie to

take care of her

even then?

EDITH BOUVIER BEALE : SHE WAS EVIDENCE AND THE RESULT OF SEXISM AMONG THE ELITE : MISTRESS OF THE MONTH AUGUST 2014

As the surf rolls in on summer beaches everywhere this August, I began to fantasize what it would be like to live right near the sand with the sound of the ocean waves a constant and in an aristocratic oasis on the east coast, an exclusive suburb of New York City, a city that is usually thermal in August, a city that needs to be vacated as in "going on vacation" before the summer season is over! 

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)

 

 ;      

 

After watching the original and follow up documentaries by the Maysles brothers, seeing the terrific fictive film staring Drew Barrymore as Little Edie and Jessica Lange as Big Edie, her mother, and wading through dozens of Internet sites and commentary posts, I had to go back to my first impressions of the documentaries.  Hadn't I been just as delighted and devastated as so many other viewers when I first discovered the Beales, even years after those documentaries first came out?  Did I agree with so many ventures of opinions rarely housed in journalistic fact checking as well as so many departures into questions of mental health?

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."