How does one of the most glamorous and attractive women in America end up in a “dirty, garbage-filled 28-room house with eight cats, fleas, and no running water?” A place where, according to The Washington Post In 1976, “Smell Attacks and Dominates.”
The expected answer might be “drugs” or “a really bad guy.” But Edie Bouvier Bell’s descent from society page to Gray Gardens infamy owes much more to her mother, “Big Edie.”
This fall didn’t seem likely when Edith Bouvier Bell was born in 1917. Her mother was Jacques Bouvier’s sister, making Little Edie Jacqueline Bouvier a Kennedy cousin. And like Jackie, little Eddie seems to be born with every opportunity. Their home, Gray Gardens, was purchased for Big Edie by her husband, Phelan Bell, four years after they were married in St Patrick’s Cathedral. The East Hampton mansion served as the perfect home for Big Edie to host parties, where, as an amateur singer, she would often serenade guests with tunes like Over time and Tea for two. Little Edie was educated at Spence’s School and then at Miss Porter’s School, where she enjoyed a lively social life. She then entered the world of Hamptons parties, which her brother Phelan Jr. said was similar to her the The Great Gatsby Celebrations. There she was known as “Body Beautiful Beale”. He wrote about it in Social spectator Along with a photo of a “full-lipped blonde shamelessly pouting through the brim of her beach hat.” There, she recalled, she “stopped the prom at Princeton. That’s when you’re the one they want to dance with, and there’s circles of guys forming around you.”
After stopping the men from Princeton, she began her career as a model in New York City while also hoping to become a professional dancer. Her family was not very happy. Little Eddie remembers“I modeled for Bachrach while I was waiting for the summer to audition. Someone yelled at my father. Did you know he walked down Madison Avenue and saw my picture and put his fist through Mr. Bachrach’s window?”
The younger men were more enthusiastic. During her youth, Little Edie was courted by J. Paul Getty and (possibly) Joe Kennedy Jr., whom she met at one of the aforementioned Princeton dances. Howard Hughes reportedly asked her to marry him, but… Eddie rejected him Because he was “so eccentric.”
“France has fallen,” Eddie’s mother quipped in 1975 Gray gardens documentary, “But Eddie never fell.”
In 1952, though, she received an offer from MGM to come to Los Angeles And dancing in the movies, Little Edie is back in Gray Gardens. By then, she had developed alopecia, which caused her hair to fall out and forced her to wear her distinctive head covering. This was six years after her father divorced her mother. He told the family about this via telegram from Mexico. Phelan Bell took with him a lot of money that was used to maintain the mansion, and the house soon began to fall into disrepair. But Big Edie, who felt she had her happiest memories there, did not consider moving.
As for Why she He gave up what seemed like a promising life in New York, as Little Eddie later claimed, “My mother got the cats. That’s when she brought me over from New York to take care of them.” While she said this A New York Magazine One reporter claimed that in Little Edie, “we have reached a dead end in human life.”
Phelan Jr., Edie’s brother, certainly felt that Edie’s return to Gray Gardens was a tragedy—and that her devotion to Big Edie meant she would never be able to go out and live her own life. To this Eddie responded, “Oh my God, I’ve never seen a man I’d marry… People didn’t understand that I cared about my mother. They were so rude about my mother. Finally, I said, ‘Anyone can go to hell.'”
However, this commitment did not prevent young Edie from accusing her mother of preventing her from getting married. It was complicated, as love and devotion often are.
Phelan Jr. was desperately hoping the two would move somewhere else, somewhere in Florida, or East Hampton or “somewhere nice.” A relative considered kidnapping the duo, drugging them and taking them to a “nice rest home.”
But they didn’t move. They will have more than three hundred cats as the house collapses around them in chaos.
“Shall I tell you what I did twenty years ago?” Eddie said New York Magazine In 1971. “Fed Cats. My mother wouldn’t let me go around with American men; they were too rich and fast. She was afraid I’d get married. Nothing had happened in twenty years, so I didn’t change in any way.”
That same year, public health officials camped out in Gray Gardens Park, reminding the Bells that they had no heat. There is no running water. There was no food except what they ate from canned food. The city’s mayor stated: “The house is not fit for human habitation. Animals do not live this way.” When health workers and an ASPCA member investigated the home, they found human feces on the stairs and empty cans of dog food strewn around. The house had no working bathrooms and was infested with fleas. Sanitation was especially tight in East Hampton, so instead of paying for garbage disposal, the couple began storing it in the basement and in empty closets. The smell was not hidden.
But the Bills still refuse to leave. In the end, it was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis who provided $25,000 to the town to clean up the property, on the condition that the couple be allowed to remain in the house.
The tragedy of Little Edie and the house in which the couple lived was the tragedy of the recession. They never moved into the future. In the opinion of almost every reasonable person, Edie should have had a career, been married, and had a family of her own. Her mother should have accepted old age gracefully and moved to… wherever her children chose. They did nothing. The result appears to have been disastrous. until.
The duo gained attention when, in 1975, the Maysles brothers began filming the documentary that would be… Gray gardens. The story first came to their attention when the brothers were working on a film about Jackie Kennedy and wanted to meet her reclusive cousins. The result would be a film that would not only be one of the most influential documentaries of the 20th century, but would also launch countless fashion collections (and spread around the world). Italian Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar). From the moment little Edie came down the stairs in a one-piece bathing suit, high heels, and a sweater slung around her head, declaring that this was her “outfit of the day,” the Biles became icons. Critics claimed the film exploited Edie, but little Edie responded: “To my mother and me, Gray gardens It is a breakthrough into something beautiful and precious called life.
But that new life was never more than a new job. after Gray gardens He was released, and Little Edie once again began performing a cabaret showsinging numbers like “Over time.“
Big Eddie died in 1977 at the age of 80. Two years later, Little Eddie sold the house. As her brother had long suggested, she moved to Florida.
