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Little Edie, if she were here, would be thrilled with all the fuss. Though touched by fame in small, anomalous ways during her life, she missed the flamboyant, romantic, almost dizzying legacy that now exists. A hit Broadway musical? A movie drama in production with Drew Barrymore as Little Edie and Jessica Lange as Big Edie? The press? The blogs? The buzz? She’d be ecstatic, but not at all surprised.
She was certain she was born to be famous. That was her destiny. The logic was impeccable, and there was never a question of escaping the inevitable recognition. The damn shame is that it came too late, she’d say. But fate also taught her to be philosophical about time. “It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present. Awfully difficult,” she said. There was, after all, no clock in Grey Gardens, no need for one.
Her famous family, her bizarre and fraught relationship with her mother, her years living in squalid conditions on Lily Pond Lane, the Board of Health raid, the Maysles brothers documentary and the subsequent publicity—all that is curious and interesting, she’d assure us, but the world would one day know her as an entertainer.
The last chapter of Little Edie’s life—a less tumultuous and presumably a happier chapter than the earlier ones—began on January 10, 1978. It was two years after the death of her mother and nearly a year before she left Grey Gardens for the last time, dates that would appear to be much more psychologically pivotal in the long strange life of a remarkable woman. But however strongly Edie was affected by the death of her mother and by finally moving from Grey Gardens, they were not as intimately personal and deeply existential as the night of January 10th. For that night truly belonged to her and her alone, right from the first moment she stepped on stage as a performer at Reno Sweeney, a famed cabaret on West 13th Street in Greenwich Village.
Little Edie always considered herself a performer—a singer and dancer, a storyteller and entertainer, and it was her fervent wish, undiminished over the years, to perform for an audience. But life had taken her in some strange directions. Grey Gardens had severely limited her options. However much she wanted to star, all she could do was improvise around the house and for the Maysles’ cameras. Nevertheless, she felt that life had earmarked more for her, that fate intended her to perform on a stage, for an audience that paid to see her, that she be dressed in dramatic outfits, that there be applause and flowers and champagne and encores and adoration.
“This is something I’ve been planning since I was 19 years old. I’m just going to have a ball,” she told me that night.
She did. And so did everyone else in the room. Edie sang—familiar songs like “Tea for Two” and “As Time Goes By”, and two songs she had composed for the show. She danced a little—that was her real talent, she used to say, and she had strong, toned legs from swimming. She answered questions and chatted with the audience. Whatever nervousness she felt earlier vanished. This was her element.
If this was show business, she understood the need to put on a good show. Some critics thought the whole idea of this 60ish woman, dressed in her homemade version of cabaret clothes, singing and dancing and bantering, was in a sense outlandish. But there was nothing outlandish in the connection between Edie and her audience. It was genuine and compelling. People liked her. Cousin Jackie sent her a note. Cousin Lee sent flowers.
After the initial audition at Reno Sweeney and before accepting the engagement, Edie had called Jackie to tell her. Jackie’s response was that she preferred Edie avoid the inevitable publicity and not perform, but if it were something so personally important to Edie, she would certainly not stand in the way. It was a wise and kind answer—and maybe the only realistic one.
Edie at this point was less odd and reclusive than she was in the Maysles documentary when she seemed so much a prisoner of her past and of her house, living on memories and grocery deliveries from Dreesen’s. Jacqueline and Lee had quietly paid for the repairs to the house and arranged for her bills to be paid. Mr. Onassis used to send packages. In her own way, Edie possessed a certain curious wisdom about her family and other people. She genuinely liked and respected her famous cousin Jacqueline and would explain away any faults by saying that Jackie was “just a nice society girl,” as if she, Edie, had overcome this particular obstacle. Once, when she wanted to send a thank-you note to Mr. Onassis for some big boxes from Bergdorf’s, but concerned about stirring up publicity, she invented her own form of encryption. To keep it from preying eyes, she wrote in tiny letters on a tiny sheet in a tiny envelope. But when she took it to the post office, the postmaster told her it was below minimal size for mailing. Though the execution was unsuccessful, you could not question the logic.
After selling Grey Gardens, and with the money in trust, she lived mostly in Florida, first on Indian Creek Road in Miami Beach, and later in Bal Harbour. Life there suited her. For one thing she was able to swim everyday in the ocean—a lifelong love. She lived in small apartments—without cats. After Big Edie died, she gave away all the cats except for two favorites named Sonny and Cher, and they were gone by the time she moved.
She kept up with at least one friend from the Hamptons in her Florida years, and that was Lee Schrager. Schrager owned Torpedo, one of the first popular clubs in the newly chic South Beach, and Edie performed there at a sellout AIDS benefit with a Grey Gardens theme. Around this time, she met Gianni Versace, his partner, Antonio, and Paul Beck, who was then married to Donatella. “They were wild about Edie, and she reveled in the attention,” said Schrager, who introduced them.
Sadly, with no one to guide her—and she was not equipped to do it on her own—her show business career did not continue. She died in Florida on January 14, 2002, exactly 24 years—to the night—after her final curtain at Reno Sweeney.
Until recently the public’s interest in Little Edie was as a player in a melodrama. Grey Gardens itself was the star, Edie a supporting actress. Except for a small group of mostly gay men who could identify with her rebellious, outsider status and the improvised, oddball fashions, the world took little interest in Little Edie as a person once she left Grey Gardens.
It seems remarkable, now that the story has taken on mythical qualities, that she was mostly ignored in those final years of her life, that there were virtually no interviews, nothing archived for the future. For she had a lot to say. She was a perceptive woman and she loved to talk about her life and family history. At Grey Gardens she possessed an extensive collection of old letters and diaries and photographs of the Bouviers and Beales.
Edie was an accomplished storyteller. She was articulate. Her long stories had a beginning, middle and end, a rhythm and a pattern, sustained digressions and asides that were divulged in tones and styles different from the main narrative, sometimes in accents or stage whispers, always with a theatrical flourish. And she knew a good sound bite. After the raid on the house, she told the local newspaper that it was “engineered by henchmen of a mean, nasty Republican town” and that “they can get you in East Hampton for wearing red shoes on a Thursday.”
Her voice still possessed the drawn out plummy edges of a pre-war debutante. She and Big Edie both retained a slight lock-jaw propriety that must have been heard at society garden parties decades before, referring to “my-onaisse at luncheon” or to the husband and father who had walked out decades before without looking back and gotten a Mexican divorce, as “Mr. Beale.”
Sensitive enough media portrayals might yet uncover the unconventional humanity of Little Edie. But even such portrayals romanticize the reality and create a kind of cordon sanitaire around the dreadful conditions, the very real dirt and smell of Grey Gardens, and the stagnant, stifling lives of its inhabitants.
Though trapped for many years in a filthy, garbage strewn house filled with cats and raccoons, fleas and cobwebs, with a vine-covered 1932 Cadillac parked outside, though drawn into an increasingly claustrophobic mother/daughter relationship, though shielded from most news and social contacts, Little Edie managed to come through, bent and damaged certainly, but whole. Though she wore sweaters on her head, she walked to Guild Hall on election day to vote. One element of the current fascination is that she was an unabridged version of us all. She said and did things people sometimes are tempted to say and do—but repress. She tantalizes our appetites for nonconformity.
Little Edie was a woman who could have become crazy but was merely unorthodox, whose mind could have surrendered but stayed alert. Her grip on reality was not always steady, but given the circumstances of her life, she maintained an unexpected balance. Looking back now, we can see that her resilience and the way she clung to her innate intelligence are as important as her eccentricity and the loopy way she dressed. Looking forward, we can hope that her legacy will include that balance.
Posthumously, she triumphed. The wistful longing, it turns out, was not far fetched. The desperate dream that eluded her in life is now reality. Little Edie is a big star.