Grey Gardens’ Darkest Secret: The Tragedy Of Edie Beale

By 1971, socialite Edie Beale had been living at Grey Gardens for decades. The house seriously disturbed her neighbors. When officers came by to investigate, what they found was so haunting, it’s unforgettable. Born in 1917 to a wealthy Manhattan family, Edie was the only daughter of Phelan Beale, a prominent New York lawyer, and Edith Bouvier Beale, a beautiful, glamorous socialite. In fact, Edith met Phelan through his work at her father’s successful law firm. With all this privilege, it looked like Little Edie was set for an extraordinary life, but extraordinary doesn’t always mean good. It wasn’t just that Little Edie was born into a wealthy family; her mother’s side of the family was also extremely influential in society, but it didn’t take long for the dark side of the family dynamics to come out.

Little Edie’s maternal line was also seriously suspect. Her uncle, Black Jack Bouvier, earned his nickname by being a notorious gambling lush, and he was reportedly even too drunk to walk his daughter Jackie down the aisle when she married John F. Kennedy. So, yes, there was definitely something in the water in Edie’s clan. Little Edie’s father was an imposing figure at the best of times. He was a distant and authoritative father, and as we’ll see shortly, he definitely wasn’t the best fatherly figure. As the only girl in the family, Little Edie was the apple in her mother’s eye. Big Edie, who loved pageantry of any kind, would dress her up in the finest velvets and lace, then have the little girl accompany her to socialite ladies’ lunches in East Hampton. She was, in other words, something like Big Edie’s little doll. As she got older, this identity grew to disturbing proportions. Now, when Edie was old enough to attend school, nothing would do but the best.

Accordingly, her parents sent her to the all-girls elite private institution of Spence in Manhattan. The eye-watering tuition fees were mere drops in the bucket for the Beals, and Edie looked set to take on the debutante world, and then it all started to go wrong. Before Edie could graduate, her mother made a fateful decision. She pulled Edie out of Spence in her 11th and 12th years. The reason was disturbing. Edie’s mother insisted that Little Edie had a respiratory illness, but there is little evidence of this, and Edie’s diaries from the time don’t indicate a large, long sickness in the slightest. Instead, Edie’s mother might have had a different goal in mind. See, now that Edie was out of school, it meant she could spend even more time with her mother. Despite the sickness, the pair went constantly to the movies or the theater. On special occasions, they even went on shopping trips to Paris, all while Edie was supposed to be learning alongside her peers. Aside from this, her mother wasn’t always the best influence. In these moments, Edie’s mother was obviously too attached to her daughter.

Yes, only that was the least of her issues. Big Edie had always lived with her head in the clouds. She had pursued an amateur singing career before she met her husband Phelan Beale, and motherhood had done nothing to her patently unrealistic ambitions. Reportedly, Big Edie still liked to ruffle the feathers of high society by singing operettas during polite lunches or would skip parties entirely to live the artistic life, and her daughter took note. With all her afternoons watching films and whiling away the lazy hours with her mother, it wasn’t long before Little Edie wanted to partake in the artistic life as well. Her most ardent dream was to become an actress, a longshot profession her mother was happy to encourage. Meanwhile, the old money circles they ran in were quick to look down on it, of course, though by then Edie had bigger issues than pipe dreams. As Edie grew into a young woman, she turned astonishingly beautiful. One of her cousins even noted that she was the beauty of the Bouvier family, surpassing even the dark charm of Jacqueline, only this presented a big problem.

With her good looks came a long line of suitors, and here her codependent relationship with her mother reared its ugly head. During this time, it became clear Edie was both boy-crazy and inextricably tied to her mother. In one diary entry, she wrote, “I have two great loves in my life. First, I love my mother, which will always go on, never be forgotten or forsaken. Second, my buzzing love for a boy.” As we’ll see, these two parts of Edie would clash in increasingly disruptive ways, but before that happened, her family would implode. Edie’s father Phelan had watched his wife and daughter gallivanting about, spending money willy-nilly. He watched them, and his stomach sank. Not only did his money take a hit after the stock market crash of 1929, making him reluctant to bankroll their pleasures, but Phelan himself was a by-the-books, rational man who didn’t like the thought of a flighty wife and daughter. So, he dropped a bombshell.

When Edie was just 14 years old, her father separated from her mother. The ramifications were cruel. He gave Big Edie only a little money and no alimony in the split, leaving her to fend almost entirely for herself. One of the things she did get was a little beachfront property Phelan bought in East Hampton back in 1923, Grey Gardens. With her father gone, there was almost no sober influence directly in Edie’s life, and she began trying to make her dreams of stardom a reality. When she was 17 years old, she became a model for Macy’s, but it lasted almost no time at all. As soon as her strict father found out, he kached the whole thing, insisting that his daughter not put herself on display. Behind the scenes, however, he was keeping a ruinous secret. In 1934, Phelan wrote his estranged wife a rare letter. Its contents were heartbreaking. In it, he confessed to Edie’s mother that he was now completely broke; the money had run out. However, he insisted that she keep it a secret from their daughter, saying, “She will think we’re at the poor house; it will rob all her joy.”

In 1936, money or not, Edie had her coming out ball at long last. True to form for her cheek family, she debuted to society on New Year’s Day at the lavish Pierre Hotel, wearing a white dress decorated with silver and topping it off with a wreath for her hair. It was such an event that the New York Times reported on the proceedings. Edie was finally out. She wasted no time reveling in her freedom. The next years of Edie’s life were her heyday. Attracted to her beauty and wealth, all kinds of admirers knocked at her door. Accordingly, she dated some of the most promising young men of her day. Among her intrigues were dalliances with notorious Hollywood lothario Howard Hughes and even a probable proposal from the gas tycoon J. Paul Getty, but her biggest conquest remained her most controversial. Around this time, Edie claimed she not only dated Joseph Kennedy Jr., the eldest son of the prominent Kennedy clan, but she also insisted that Kennedy’s scion also proposed to her during this time. Although there’s some doubt about this, it would mean that Edie got to the Kennedy family long before her cousin Jackie did. Still, with all these suitors, why didn’t Edie settle down into married life? The answer is tragic.

Marrying someone would almost certainly mean diminishing the role her mother Big Edie played in her life, and Edie realized she could never betray her mother like that. It led to one disturbing moment when she decided she was through with suitors forever. Edie tore all her boyfriend’s faces out of any photographs she had with them. But if you think Edie had family problems now, just wait. By 1946, the last vestiges of Edie’s happy family fell away. That year, her father finally had enough and got an official divorce from Big Edie, only he announced it to his wife and daughter in the most heartless way imaginable. He sent Big Edie a telegram from Mexico informing her of the news. Unfortunately, his cruelty was just the beginning. It wasn’t long before Phelan Beale cut ties. He also ran away with a much younger woman in the process, and this despite caring so much about his family’s reputation. All hope of a reunion was now utterly lost. In some ways, this was also the final straw for Little Edie. Soon, she struck out. Just after her father’s divorce announcement, Little Edie seemed to wake up from her dream world, look around, and realize a life under her mother’s wing was going to make her desperately unhappy. Her solution was scandalous. She tried several times to run away from home, the first time making it all the way to Palm Beach.

It was here she learned just how caged she was. Edie’s father Phelan may have been out of the picture and a total philanderer, but he did still care about how his daughter looked to the world. The first time Edie ran away, her father somehow tracked her down and plunked her right back into her mother’s lap. Her other attempts were equally unsuccessful. Exhausted from her efforts, she came up with a new plan. Since running away illicitly in the middle of the night wasn’t working, Edie tried a more legitimate route. She moved out and began living in the famous Barbizon Hotel in New York. Surely her father couldn’t complain about this, but Edie still found ways to get in trouble. During her time at the hotel, Edie began acting and modeling again and even had an audition for the Theater Guild lined up. This, of course, was putting herself on display once more and expressly against her father’s wishes. So, when Phelan, none the wiser, happened to see his daughter’s face in an ad for a clothing company, his response was explosive. According to Edie herself, when her father saw the advertisement, he wasted no time getting revenge. Phelan marched up Madison Avenue, saw Edie’s picture, and put his fist right through the clothing shop’s window. Still, no amount of fatherly disapproval could stop Edie from trying to make it. What did stop her was much more tragic.

One of the few things Big Edie had left to her name was still the seaside house of Grey Gardens, but this too she was barely hanging on to. Little Edie’s grandfather, Major Bouvier, hounded the woman constantly to sell the estate, insisting she get a reality check and stop living in the clouds. But then Edie’s mother made a fatal mistake. Clearly, no one could tell either Beale woman what to do, and Big Edie reacted with the same defiance her daughter once exhibited. Digging her heels in, Big Edie showed just how little she cared about what her father thought and attended her own son’s wedding dressed in full-blown opera gear. But this act of rebellion had a disastrous fallout. It was the last straw for Major Bouvier, and he retaliated by cutting Big Edie entirely out of his will, and this would change Little Edie’s life forever.

Up until now, it looked like Little Edie, safe in the Barbizon Hotel, had finally gotten away from her family’s gnarled clutches, but after this feud, her mother had precious little money to support her daughter. One day, she wrote to her at the hotel and informed her that she had to come to Grey Gardens for good to support her. It was the end of a golden era and the beginning of a slow decline. Soon after leaving the hotel, Edie began experiencing a horrible symptom: her hair started falling out. Most of her family believed it was stress-related, but whatever the cause, Edie soon realized she was suffering from alopecia totalis. Before she was even 40, all her body hair had fallen out. Eventually, she began wearing head scarves to cover her baldness, a fashion choice that turned iconic after her appearance in the Grey Gardens documentary. From the outside, life at Grey Gardens probably looked idyllic, especially at first.

Edie and her mother had the run of the enormous place, and Edie spent her days writing poetry and drawing while her mother lived out her favorite musicals to her captive audience of one. They were finally together forever, as they always should have been. Yet, the entire time, their cheery demeanors were hiding a grim truth. As the years passed, Little Edie and Big Edie almost got lost in time. They were not, however, lost to the tax man. Their funds continued to dwindle, and in desperation, they systematically sold off much of their personal belongings. As a family member put it, “They were very brave. They sold off their Tiffany pieces item by item.” When the time came for the Beale women to reemerge into the world, it was under a glaring spotlight. In the 1960s, another strange twist of fate showed up at Edie’s doorstep.

Her cousin Jacqueline Bouvier married John F. Kennedy, a younger scion of the family Edie might have once married into. More than that, Jackie became First Lady when Kennedy became president, and suddenly the Beals had a lot more than they bargained for. The administration understood that the Beale women’s eccentricities over in Grey Gardens might negatively affect the image of the sitting president. Unsurprisingly, they kept a close watch on the house, with service cars frequently swinging past and posting up at Edie’s window. Then again, they were right to worry. Edie was about to make a big splash for all the wrong reasons. When they got invited to John Kennedy’s inauguration, the Beals finally got to come out to play once more in high society, except they showed just how rusty they were. Edie didn’t react well to the attention. Reportedly, during the event, she leaned over to the Kennedy patriarch Joseph Senior and bragged loudly about how she could have married his firstborn son once upon a time. If that were true, it might have been the peak of Edie’s life. Instead, she was due for a downfall. By 1971, the Beals had been living at Grey Gardens for decades, and their neighbors noticed that something was seriously off. For one, there were cats everywhere on the property, and for another, their landscaping had developed into a half-grazed Louisiana bayou look. As Edie herself once put it, in the Hamptons, this was unacceptable, and locals ended up calling officers to check out the property. And what they found was haunting.

After seeing Grey Gardens, officers came to a brutal decision about Edie’s home: it was such a public safety hazard, they wanted to evict both Edie and her mother from the property and likely eventually tear down the house. They even initiated the proceedings to do just that, until a guardian angel swooped in and saved them. Once it got around that the Beals were living in abject poverty, suddenly much of their better-off family came to the rescue, hoping once more to do damage control to the family name. Jackie Kennedy, now going by Jackie Onassis, paid a hefty sum of money to help local authorities clean up Grey Gardens, only on the condition that Edie and her mother could stay. So what did the police officers see that made them want to evict the Beals? When officers opened the door at Grey Gardens, they were greeted with just how far the Bouvier Beals had fallen. There was cat litter everywhere, a foul odor drenching the air, and more decaying artifacts from another life than they could name. The house was, in a word, unlivable, and yet here these two socialites were living in it still. Few people know what happened to Little Edie after the 1975 film Grey Gardens made her famous. Still relying on the success and word of mouth of Grey Gardens, Edie Beale parlayed the public interest in her into a career in cabaret starting in her 60s. Eventually, Edie gave up on her cabaret life and sold off Grey Gardens, albeit to people who promising not to tear it down, in order to move down to Florida. It was there in 2002 at the age of 84 that she passed from either a stroke or heart attack. Disturbingly, no one found her for around five days. The lost socialite had been forgotten once more. Now, that was the turbulent life of Edie Beale. If you enjoyed listening to this story, make sure to hit the like button, and if you’re interested in more celebrity and socialite stories, make sure to subscribe.