“This is the best thing to wear for today, you understand,” says Edith Bouvier Beale in her broad, Mid-Atlantic drawl as a camera pans slowly up her legs to focus in on an assemblage of sweaters and shirts and — actually, it’s not clear what she’s wearing, but she’s happy to explain. “I don’t like women in skirts, and the best thing is to wear pantyhose or some pants under a short skirt, I think. Then you have the pants under the skirt and then you can pull the stockings up over the pants underneath the skirt. And you can always take off the skirt and use it as a cape. So I think this is the best costume for today.” She pauses for a moment, then adds with breezy pride, “I have to think these things up all by myself.”
For someone who became famous for never leaving her house, Little Edie Beale has had an outsized cultural impact.
In this moment, early in the 1975 documentary “Grey Gardens,” a style icon was born. Filmmakers David and Albert Maysles had initially visited the crumbling seaside mansion in East Hampton with Beale’s cousin Lee Radziwill, who hoped to make a film about the sleepy Long Island town as it began its transformation into an ostentatious, new-money summer showcase. After meeting Beale and her mother, also named Edith Bouvier Beale, the Maysles brothers knew they had stumbled on something far more fascinating. The aunt and cousin of former first lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis had once been high-society figures, but by the time the Maysles met them, they had been living for decades in a 28-room house gone shockingly feral. Trash was piled to the ceiling. There was no running water. Cats and raccoons roamed the dark hallways. Vines pushed through the roof and walls and weathered ceilings buckled precariously. Big Edie and Little Edie, as they were known, appeared to live contentedly amid the wreckage, and spent most of their days squabbling, sniping and frequently breaking into song. They were inexplicable. They were exhausting. They were magnetic.
(Tom Wargacki/Archive Photos/Getty Images) Edith Bouvier Beale, a cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, at home with her cats in Grey Gardens.
“Grey Gardens” celebrated its golden anniversary in 2025, turning 50 alongside other era-defining cult films with memorable protagonists: “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” “Dolemite,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Death Race 2000” — even “Jaws” merits consideration (that shark knew how to make an entrance). But “Grey Gardens” has had remarkable staying power, with perpetual cycles of discovery and rediscovery transcending the film’s place and time. And for someone who became famous for never leaving her house, Little Edie Beale has had an outsized cultural impact.
Little Edie’s improvised repurposing of clothing into capital-L looks has been celebrated in the fashion spreads of glossy magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue; designers Marc Jacobs and John Galliano famously designed collections with her image in mind. She’s been portrayed by Drew Barrymore in an HBO movie that dramatized the documentary and lovingly satirized by Bill Hader in the first episode of “Documentary Now!” On “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” Jinkx Monsoon handily won “Snatch Game” with an Edie impression that was both outrageously camp and utterly faithful. Most recently, Cole Escola, the Tony-winning writer and star of “Oh, Mary!,” channeled Little Edie for the cover of New York Magazine’s Hamptons issue, posing in front of the Grey Gardens that’s been restored to a version of its former glory by womenswear designer Liz Lange. When Escola first moved to New York City, they recalled, the documentary “was sort of my comfort movie. I would watch it over and over again . . . [Little Edie] just had a sort of sense, in a way that I did as well, that there’s something in New York for me. She just couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She couldn’t quite find the dream.”
(Hulton Archive/Courtesy of Getty Images) American socialite Edith Beale Jr. wears a fur coat while posing in front of her dilapidated East Hampton, Long Island, mansion.
On the internet, Little Edie is a meme, a mood and a vibe. Clips from “Grey Gardens” capture her philosophies (“Man changes and is variable, but nature remains the same”) and her faultless comic timing (“All I have to do is find this Libra man!”); impressionists recreate her iconic ensembles with fur coats and head wraps and black fishnets with white pumps. Pinterest brims with Little Edie inspiration boards. And TikTok has embraced Jack Schlossberg, John F. Kennedy’s only grandson and the family’s designated RFK Jr. heckler, as the spiritual heir to Little Edie’s legacy.
Rufus Wainwright, a man who knows something about the weight of family dynasty, used one of Edie’s existential reflections — “It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present” — to preface the song “Grey Gardens” on his 2001 debut. Breathy but swollen with melancholy, this was one of many musings, non sequiturs and cockeyed bons mots that Edie regularly tossed out during her time with the Maysles. As she leads the brothers and their recording equipment through squalid halls and weed-choked grounds, the parallel between her improbable pride in Grey Gardens and her cousin Jacqueline’s stilted televised tour of the Kennedy White House a decade earlier is impossible to ignore.
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Jackie doesn’t appear in “Grey Gardens,” but her presence is one that regularly breaches that line between past and present. The improbability of Jackie O. being connected to a pair of bickering Miss Havishams was the only reason, critics charged, that the Maysles were interested in them, and her cousin seems to be Little Edie’s sole sore spot. Still, though Jackie had style, what Little Edie had, with her skirt capes and swimsuits as daywear and bath-towel headwraps anchored with gold brooches — well, that was fashion; creative self-invention that existed not in spite of her threadbare surroundings, but because of them.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that she’s an icon to queer people and to drag queens,” says Tom Fitzgerald, one half of the long-running mini-empire of fashion criticism Tom and Lorenzo. “She had a very drag-like ability to basically just pick up trash and detritus from her own life and spin it into an outfit that literally no one else would even think of. That is something queer people respond to on a profound level.” Lorenzo Marquez concurs: “She’s wearing the same stuff over and over again, creating looks based on whatever she has. She had very little to work with, yet she looks fantastic every single time.”
Though Jackie had style, what Little Edie had, with her skirt capes and swimsuits as daywear and bath-towel headwraps anchored with gold brooches — well, that was fashion; creative self-invention that existed not in spite of her threadbare surroundings, but because of them.
This was not the prevailing opinion when “Grey Gardens” premiered. Viewers and critics alike panned the film as tasteless exploitation of a mother and daughter locked in suffocating codependency and shared delusion. An outraged New York Times review likened the documentary to a circus sideshow of “sagging flesh and ludicrous poses,” while a Vogue contributor disdained Little Edie’s ad hoc draping and pinning and reduced her “best costume for the day” to an ill-fitting diaper. Those who believed that the Maysles were mocking two crazy old cat ladies invariably described Grey Gardens’ occupants in the same horrified terms as they did the house itself: decrepit, grotesque, pitiable and desperately sad.
(Tom Wargacki/Archive Photos/Getty Images) Edith Bouvier Beale at home in Grey Gardens.
The robust afterlife of Grey Gardens has been maintained by audiences who saw something else entirely: the tenacity and determination of two women who had paid a steep price for refusing to live the lives assigned to them — and who were willing to be seen in ways that women of their upbringing and social station would normally move heaven and earth to avoid. “Grey Gardens” was — and remains — a filmic Rorschach test with multiple readings: Some viewers see a riches-to-rags tragedy, some a Southern Gothic tale transplanted to Long Island, some a screwball cinema-verité sitcom. (Those readings, in turn, can evolve with time: In my first viewing, as a twentysomething, the Edies registered as an undifferentiated mass of Old; with subsequent ones, that reflexive ageism very predictably boomeranged right back at me.)
Still, there’s no way to watch “Grey Gardens” — or “The Beales of Grey Gardens,” or “That Summer” — without hearing echoes of those critical accusations. Little Edie’s style influence couldn’t have existed without Little Edie herself, and the ethical question of what’s erased or ignored in those memes and clips and headscarf homages remains thorny. Fitzgerald has a cheerier outlook: “Whenever fashion pulls from the disadvantaged or the tragic, it’s always a little . . . you have to take a step back and really engage with it. But I think Edie would have loved to know that there was someone in Vogue taking inspiration from her.”
And celebrating Little Edie’s ongoing influence doesn’t preclude also engaging with the film as a rich text or looking at it through the lenses of whiteness or class or mental illness. What keeps “Grey Gardens” a perpetual site of homage is the same thing that has appealed to those who embraced it from the start: it makes viewers themselves feel seen. The legacy of “Grey Gardens” is inextricable from the misfits, outcasts and “staunch characters” who embraced its divine weirdness. So here’s to the next 50 years.
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