Friday, April 10, 2009

What Became of Grey Gardens

The Editors' Blog at W Magazine has a fascinating interview with Sally Quinn, who, along with her husband, former Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, bought Grey Gardens, the ramshackle East Hamptons estate of Big and Little Edie Beale, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' most infamous kin. Quinn recalls that August day in 1979 when she first looked at the home, and Little Edie answered the door herself.

"Well, I thought she was nuts. I thought she had serious psychological and emotional problems. There was no question about it. She had just escaped into her own fantasy world. I didn't know the story that much and so honestly, I feel bad about Edie. Your reaction was to just laugh at her because she was such a character and so crazy, dancing in the hall, saying isn't it beautiful and this incredible outfit she had with safety pins and a turban and all that -- and later when I saw the Mayles documentary and the Broadway play and now the HBO movie, it's so heartbreaking. I wanted to rewind and go back to that moment and just put my arms around her. I wanted to help her, do something for her."

Quinn says she found a trunk of fascinating letters written in the 1930s ("the white, upper-class culture we don't have anymore") that she hopes to someday write about.

2 comments:

dit said...

Grey Gardens sounds like an amazing story. If those walls could talk? I am looking forward to seeing the HBO version, Thanks for the history you posted.

Greg said...

I just read the W piece. Wondering if there were photos of the house since the Bradlees have owned it, I did a quick web search, and found that HuffPo also has a short item directing to W's site.

I am not one for conspiracy theories, but the HuffPo blog closed Comments after only 11 comments, most of them critical of Sally Quinn for one reason or another (some thought she took financial advantage of Little Edie, for example). It does strike me as odd that they would shut down comments on such a benign topic.

Also, this past week Anderson Cooper appeared on Ellen Degeneres' show. I happened to catch a few minutes of it at the gym, close-captioned. But they were talking about all the cases of teen gay-bashing that have been in the news recently, including the one boy in Georgia who hung himself because of the taunts at school, and which AC has been reporting on his show.

For a moment, possibly b/c I was watching close-captioning, I had the thought: OMG, he's finally going to come out of the closet, and this is the forum that he has chosen. That, of course, did not happen.

The odd thing, to me, is that Danny Shea, HuffPo's media editor, reported on the AC appearance, but only mentioning that Anderson refused to dance when he came out, and that he was a fan of Real Housewives reality TV. The comments turned to AC's own life, and again, were shut down in short order.

Yes, good for Anderson Cooper for reporting these stories, but I couldn't help but think how much more influence and positivity he might bring to the situation as a role model, i.e., a successful out and proud gay man, for gay teens.

In any event, I smell something fishy at the Huffington Post with the Comments being shut down when the "media elite" (or Arianna's friends?) starts being criticized.