Grey Gardens

During an outing with my boss the other day, she began to tell me about her 

weekend in the Hamptons. It included a screening of the HBO movie Grey 

Gardens and a tour of the actual home.

While on the subway this morning a got a little sneak peek of the 

New York Times Home & Garden section from the woman sitting to my left. 

Low and behold there it was, Grey Gardens of today.

"LIMELIGHT, at least the reflected kind, is again shining on Grey Gardens, 

a 10-bedroom 1897 house near Georgica Pond here. Thirty-four years 

after its former residents, Edith Bouvier Beale, known as Big Edie, and 

her namesake daughter, who was called Little Edie, were introduced to the 

world in the Maysles brothers’ classic documentary, and three years after their 

life in the tumbledown raccoon-infested mansion on a wildly overgrown lot 

became the basis of a Broadway musical, HBO is rolling out a feature-length 

movie about them, also called “Grey Gardens,” this weekend."

"The two Edies have become famous for the way they lived at Grey 

Gardens — the squalor of their home was especially striking given that 

Big Edie was an aunt and Little Edie a first cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy 

Onassis — and they will soon be even better known after being 

portrayed by Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore in the HBO film."

"The house’s current owners, who restored it after buying it from Little Edie 

in 1979, are celebrities themselves: Sally Quinn, the writer and Washington 

hostess, and her husband, Benjamin C. Bradlee, the former editor of The 

Washington Post. The couple have taken up residence at Grey Gardens every 

summer for decades, and have used it to entertain friends like Lauren Bacall 

and Norman Lear."