8 Fascinating Facts About Grey Gardens

There was a time when the Long Island estate known as Grey Gardens was just another Hamptons mansion slowly going to seed—albeit one with a colorful history and a famous visitor or two. That changed forever in 1975 with the premiere of Grey Gardens, the documentary by direct-cinema pioneers Albert and David Maysles. The film was an unflinching and often uncomfortable look at the lives of Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (“Big Edie”) and her daughter, Edith Bouvier Beale (“Little Edie”)—aunt and cousin, respectively, of former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

For 50 years, Grey Gardens has captivated audiences with its eccentric charm even as it has inspired debates about the ethics of documentary filmmaking. Here are a few things you might not know about the must-watch, can’t-look-away cult classic and the house it immortalized.

1. The estate now known as Grey Gardens was in the news before it was even built.
2. Grey Gardens was famous (or at least infamous) before the film.
3. The filmmakers started out making an entirely different movie.
4. The Beales were paid to appear in Grey Gardens, but not as much as they expected.
5. The filmmakers have been accused of exploiting their subjects.
6. The Beales loved Grey Gardens.
7. Grey Gardens wasn’t the filmmakers’ first landmark documentary—or their first controversial one.
8. Grey Gardens is allegedly haunted.

The estate now known as Grey Gardens was in the news before it was even built.

Grey Gardens was designed in 1897 by Joseph Greenleaf Thorp, an architect best known for Gilded Age summer homes. Thorp had been commissioned by F. Stanhope Phillips and his wife, Margaret Bagg Phillips, daughter of a wealthy newspaper magnate. Construction was initially delayed by a property dispute, and by March 1901, Phillips was dead and his widow was embroiled in a lurid court battle with his brother, James Ralph Phillips.

According to a report in The Owensboro Messenger, James and his attorney maintained that Margaret had “exerted undue influence over her husband,” somehow forcing or coercing him to name her as the sole beneficiary in his will. The report included this colorful accusation: “She had the trunk of her husband’s body dissected and from it were taken the diseased organs and the head she had burned in the crematory at Fresh Pond, together with the skeleton.” The Wichita Eagle reported James’s theory was that “the cremation was hastened so that none of the relatives might get possession of the head for the purpose of an autopsy.”

James apparently hoped an examination of his brother’s brain would provide some evidence that Stanhope was “incompetent to make a will,” but the judge was unconvinced. The court sided with Margaret, and construction of the house finally began.

Grey Gardens was famous (or at least infamous) before the film.

Today, practically everyone who knows about Grey Gardens and its eccentric former residents owes that knowledge to Albert and David Maysles’s documentary. But it wasn’t the brothers who first aimed a spotlight on the decaying estate. In late 1971—four years before Grey Gardens premiered at the New York Film Festival in September 1975—newspapers all over the country published sensational stories detailing the home’s deterioration.

Years of complaints from neighbors had finally spurred Suffolk County Health Department inspectors to pay the Beales, who had lived in the house since 1923, a visit. According to a UPI report, inspectors declared the house “unfit for human habitation,” citing a lack of running water, unsanitary conditions, and “12 diseased cats.” A health department official reportedly gave the Beales an ultimatum: clean up or clear out. Reports touted the Beales’ connection to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, which turned the Beales’ potential eviction into tabloid fodder.

The Beales pushed back, claiming their home had been “raided” and that plans to renovate the mansion were already underway. (Little Edie also insisted there were eight cats, not 12, and they were all fine.) Onassis reportedly visited Grey Gardens in May 1972. By September, repairs had been made, with Onassis and her sister, Lee Radziwill, picking up the tab, and the county dropped its efforts to evict the women.

The filmmakers started out making an entirely different movie.

In the summer of 1972, Radziwill hired a pair of filmmakers to work on a hazily defined documentary about her summers in the Hamptons. The filmmakers were Albert and David Maysles, who were already well known for their work in a new style of documentary filmmaking known as “direct cinema.” This fly-on-the-wall approach eschewed narration and encouraged filmmakers to record their subjects as unobtrusively as possible. Radziwill knew the brothers through their work on the Rolling Stones documentary Gimme Shelter—Bianca Jagger was one of the scenesters who frequented Radziwill’s summertime Hamptons hangout, along with Radziwill’s photographer boyfriend Peter Beard, writer Truman Capote, and artist Andy Warhol.

Radziwill introduced the brothers to her eccentric aunt and cousin, Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and Edith Bouvier Beale. She hoped her aunt might narrate the film, but instead the Maysles brothers were so captivated by the Beales that they insisted the two women should be the film’s focus. Radziwill could not be convinced, so the project was shelved. The brothers handed over the footage they had shot and started from scratch the following year with what would become Grey Gardens. The footage they surrendered would resurface decades later in the 2017 documentary That Summer.

The Beales were paid to appear in Grey Gardens, but not as much as they expected.

In an interview that appeared in a 1978 edition of The New York Times, Little Edie revealed that she and her mother were paid $5000 each for their participation in Grey Gardens. They desperately needed the money, though it fell far short of what they expected to receive. “We actually thought we were going to make profits,” Beale told the Times. “Famous last words.”

The women were reportedly promised 20 percent of the film’s net earnings, but those profits never materialized. Despite its status as a cult classic, Grey Gardens made less than $40,000 at the box office. It’s been reported that the Maysles brothers spent as much as $500,000 to make the film, meaning the Beales likely never saw any money beyond their combined $10,000 advance.

The filmmakers have been accused of exploiting their subjects.

Grey Gardens is considered one of the best documentaries ever made. It has been named to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, marking it as “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” and “to be preserved for all time,” and it’s a mainstay on curated lists of the medium’s most outstanding achievements.

But the film has plenty of detractors who consider it exploitative and question whether the Beales were mentally healthy enough to give informed consent to have their lives filmed. A New York Times review published in February 1976 summed up the controversy, calling the film’s treatment of the Beales “distasteful enough ... to call their whole enterprise into question” and asking why the women were “put on exhibition this way.”

The film is still controversial 50 years after its release, but the Maysles brothers always defended their approach and insisted the Beales understood the implications of inviting a film crew into their home. “As someone with a background in psychology, I knew better than to claim they were mentally ill,” Albert Maysles told The Hollywood Interview in 2014. “Their behavior was just their way of asserting themselves. And what could be a better way to assert themselves than a film about them asserting themselves? ... They were always in control.”

The Beales loved Grey Gardens.

Despite the controversy surrounding the film, the Maysles brothers had two staunch defenders: Edith and Edie Beale. According to a 2011 interview with Albert Maysles, Little Edie called the movie a “classic” and wrote an eloquent letter to The New York Times after the paper’s critic accused the filmmakers of exploiting the women. Maysles claimed the paper’s editor told him they wouldn’t publish it because, as far as he was concerned, Edie was “schizophrenic.”

The Beales seemed to worry that the Maysles brothers would be hurt by the allegations. Ellen Hovde, who co-edited the film and is billed as a co-director, claimed the Beales would call them to reassure them. “[I]n the months when there was a lot of controversy about it, it was Mrs. Beale and Edie who called us and said, ‘... It’s all right. We know that it is an honest picture. We believe in it. We don’t want you to feel upset,’ ” Hovde told Alan Rosenthal in an interview for his 1980 book The Documentary Conscience. “That was their attitude and they never wavered from that.”

Grey Gardens wasn’t the filmmakers’ first landmark documentary—or their first controversial one.

Albert and David Maysles first earned widespread acclaim in 1969 with the documentary Salesman, which followed four Bible salesmen going door-to-door in Boston and Miami. It was their next film, the 1970 Rolling Stones documentary Gimme Shelter, that would give the brothers their first real taste of controversary. The film documents the last leg of the band’s 1969 tour, including the now-infamous Altamont Free Concert, where an 18-year-old concertgoer was stabbed to death by a member of the Hells Angels. The Maysles brothers’ cameras captured the killing on film, and it appears in the movie.

Famed film critic Pauline Kael excoriated the brothers in her New Yorker review, essentially accusing them of contributing to the conditions that led to the fatal stabbing. In the same review, Kael claims they staged aspects of Salesman as well, including drafting a roof-and-siding salesman to pose as a Bible peddler.

The Maysles brothers, particularly Albert, long denied those accusations. In 1970, they wrote a point-by-point rebuttal to Kael’s New Yorker review. Years later, in a letter to the editors of MovieMaker magazine following Kael’s death in 2001, Albert accused the critic of “gravely deceitful character assassinations.”

Grey Gardens is allegedly haunted.

In 1972, Edith Beale told New York’s Daily News that she was concerned that renovations had upset the house’s ghosts, who were noisier than usual. She even worried that workers would seal off part of the house and shut in the ghost of a sea captain who preferred to roam the house freely. Big Edie warned of a “fire or a disaster” if the ghost became confined. 

She wasn’t the only one who insisted Grey Gardens had otherworldly residents. “There’s a spirit in the mansion,” Jerry Torre, who worked at Grey Gardens as a caretaker, said in a 2018 interview with PhillyVoice. “One summer morning, I was in the kitchen cleaning up, and I felt a person in the kitchen with me. I definitely felt someone in the kitchen standing near me.” Torre says Big Edie suggested the presence may have been the ghost of Tom Logan, a handyman who worked at the estate sporadically for nearly 10 years starting in the mid-1950s. Logan supposedly died of pneumonia in the house’s kitchen.

Sally Quinn, who bought the house from “Little” Edie Beale in 1979, also claims Grey Gardens is haunted. Besides the “sea captain” who had so concerned Big Edie, Quinn also believes Anna Gilman Hill—who, with her coal-magnate husband, owned the mansion from 1913 to 1923 and created the gardens that inspired the house’s name—still calls Grey Gardens home.

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