In 1976 Walter Newkirk came to East Hampton to interview Little Edie Beale for his college newspaper at Rutgers. They became friends and with some interruptions stayed in touch until Edie’s death in 2002.
Newkirk seems to have spent much of his time since then expanding on that interview. On the one hand you want to say to him, get a life, or at least get a pet. On the other you want to congratulate him for making an astute career choice now that we are about to go into an all-Edie, all the time, phase of popular culture.
The 1976 documentary, Grey Gardens, brought wide attention to these relatives of Jacqueline Onassis and created a cult following for the fashions and antics of Little Edie. These followers preserved the legend when few other people cared, although at times it seemed like the same known material was analyzed and pored over repeatedly the way archeologists might try to project a culture from a handful of fragments found in a tomb.
The Tony award winning musical, also titled Grey Gardens, brought the story of Big and Little Edie into the mainstream media last year, encouraging people—some real friends, some who once might have strolled by the decrepit mansion—to share their intimacies on a global scale. It is entirely possible that 2008 will be the year that the misbehaving Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears and Tatum O’Neal are overshadowed by a mother-daughter bad girl team with real style. Ironically, it might take those Beale women—who strayed here and there from what some call sanity but were infinitely more compelling and certainly more original than pretty blond starlets with messy lives—to bring a touch more sanity to our celebrity culture.
Newkirk was well prepared for this new wave of interest, and he has released the original taped interview on a CD and has published a grab bag of a book called “MemoraBEALEia” that includes reminisces, copies of letters, artwork and photographs. It looks a bit cobbled together but turns out to be well written and extremely informative.
Lois Wright, a local artist, television host and Tarot card reader, lived for thirteen months at Grey Gardens, and recorded that experience in a memoir called My Life at Grey Gardens, She is exhibiting paintings inspired by the Beales at The Gallery in Sag Harbor. Wright knows her material. The book is a reliable source and the paintings have a mystical quality suitable to their subjects.
Verlhac, a French publisher, is due to release Edith Bouvier Beale: A Life in Pictures this fall. Compiled by Eva Beale, wife of Little Edie’s cousin Bouvier Beale Jr., it is an archival collection of letters and drawings as well as some memorable photographs of Edie as a young beauty.
Collectables with the slightest whiff of a connection—a reproduction of a brooch worn by Christine Ebersole in the musical is an example—are marketed on a number of Internet sites devoted to the Grey Gardens legacy.
I keep hearing about projects in the works, but the biggest and most public contribution to the flood of Beale materials is a long awaited HBO film drama starring Jessica Lang and Drew Barrymore, called, of course, Grey Gardens. You can expect a tsunami of commentary on the family after the release. The casting is perfect, and if the treatment turns out to be intelligent it should add to our understanding of these legendary ladies.