With Romance, Ghosts, and Other Things: Inside the World of Grey Gardens

While watching Jacqueline Kennedy’s iconic White House tour, the first televised glimpse into the private world of American politics, I expected to learn more about how she transformed what she called the “dreary Maison Blanche”. Instead, I found myself tumbling down an entirely different rabbit hole — one that led me to Grey Gardens, the now legendary documentary capturing the strange, decaying world of Jackie’s eccentric relatives, ‘Big’ and ‘Little’ Edie. Their crumbling Long Island estate was a world unto itself, with its overgrown landscape, 300 cats, and theatrical one-woman dance performances. As Little Edie herself put it, it was a place “with romance, ghosts, and other things”.

Grey Gardens (1975), the cinéma vérité masterpiece by Albert and David Maysles, immortalised the lives of Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (Big Edie) and her daughter Edith Bouvier Beale (Little Edie), Jackie O’s wildly eccentric aunt and cousin. Once fixtures of New York high society, they were later found living in a collapsing East Hampton estate, trading debutante balls for cat-infested squalor. They didn’t just survive in their decaying kingdom; they performed in it. Their tragedy was a theatre.

The documentary captures a world that goes back and forth between faded aristocracy and absurdist drama. A Victorian portrait of a youthful, glamorous Big Edie is placed on the wall in the house, a relic of an era when she was a sparkling socialite draped in pearls. The camera lingers just long enough for you to wonder: How does one go from champagne soirées to arguing with a raccoon over dinner scraps? Big Edie, at least, seems unbothered: “The cat’s going to the bathroom right in back of my portrait. I’m glad he is. I’m glad somebody’s doing something they want to do.”

Little Edie, meanwhile, is fashion. Not in the way Jackie Kennedy was — perfectly tailored suits and pillbox hats — she reinvented clothing: skirts worn as capes, sweaters wrapped around her head. “This is the revolutionary costume! I never wear this in East Hampton!” She was a style icon before the world knew how to handle one like her, inspiring designers like John Galliano and John Bartlett decades later.

But Grey Gardens isn’t just an exercise in glimpsing oddity, it’s a portrait of two women locked in a codependent relationship. Little Edie, ever dreaming of an escape, watches over her mother with a mix of devotion and resentment: “We better check on mother and the cats. She’s a lot of fun, I hope she doesn’t die. I hate to spend another winter here though. Oh God, another winter.” Big Edie, on the other hand, revels in their shared exile, rewriting their downfall as a grand artistic statement.

Beyond their personal drama, the estate becomes a character in itself, decaying and overgrown. “Oh, Mother thinks it's artistic this way, like a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Don’t you love the overgrown Louisiana Bayou look?” Little Edie declares, gesturing to a landscape that would send a gardener into cardiac arrest.

Their existence was an exercise in survival, both theatrical and literal. They subsisted on an unusual diet, scraping together meals from whatever was available. Canned food, Wonder Bread sandwiches, and pints of melted ice cream were staples, often eaten with knives. The Beales even applied for food stamps through a friend to avoid public scrutiny. “I dine once a day at 5pm, mainly on fruits and vegetables,” Little Edie declares, though the ever-growing raccoon colony feasting on loaves of Wonder Bread in the attic suggested otherwise.

After Big Edie’s passing in 1977, Little Edie finally left Grey Gardens, selling it in what can only be described as the most dramatic real estate move in history. “After mother died, Jackie told me she’d hired all these people to renovate the house, but I didn’t want Jackie and Lee to grab the house, so I sold it quickly for mere pennies.” The estate found new owners in Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee and his wife, Sally Quinn, who lovingly restored it.

Despite its decay, Grey Gardens was never just about a house. It was a stage where life was lived on its own eccentric terms. Little Edie, despite years of hardship, never lost her theatrical spirit: “I had my cake, loved it, masticated it, chewed it, and had everything I wanted.”

Illustration by Holly Ward