Bouvier Beale, Jr.'s father was Jackie's first cousin, and he often left his home in Glen Cove to spend summers with his grandmother, Big Edie Beale. Beale, Jr. is now the executor of his grandmother's estate.
Eva said as she kept reading through the journals and letters, along with the photos, she started organizing Little Edie's life into a timeline. Although this is her first book, Eva has an extensive background in communications, including an executive position with Air France. She studied communications at Boston College, and later moved to New York City, where she met her husband on a blind date. They married a year later in 1980, at a church in Bridgehampton, and had their reception at Gurney's Inn Resort in Montauk. They have two children, Tatiana and Maria, and divide their time between homes in Amagansett and outside San Francisco, where Bouvier, Jr. is a real estate investor.
In the stacks of memorabilia, Eva found every detail of correspondence, including letters from Bouvier Beale's father to the Edies about paying the taxes.
"There were letters between Big Edie and her husband about the money running out during the Depression years," recalled Eva. "It's a story that started out in 1928 when Big Edie and her husband bought Grey Gardens, when he was financially secure, and they lived in a lavish style, eating at all the best restaurants and joining the best clubs."
She said then, with the stock market crash of 1929, Big Edie's husband wrote letters to his wife asking her to stop spending money, and to cut back on her lifestyle.
Eva said she wanted to put this book together about Little Edie's life to show the kind of person she really was. "As I was going through this personal memorabilia, I thought that Little Edie deserved to have people know about her life, because the first Grey Gardens movie, made in 1976 by the Maysles brothers, portrayed the mother and daughter as eccentric characters with lots of cats and wild outfits - but there was more to them than that," she said. "Little Edie was talented in writing, fashion and dance. She took ballet as a child, and loved toe dancing. She felt dancing was her dream."
Her mother, Big Edie, was a singer, and in her diaries, Little Edie wrote about her singing abilities. Little Edie was also taken to New York City, as a child, to see theatrical performances with her mother and grandmother.
"As a young girl, Little Edie was sophisticated, brilliant and creative, and she learned how to dress with a unique style," said Eva. "She was proud of her family - but there was also a sadness in her dreams that never came true, like her dreams of falling in love. She said she didn't know if she could ever love anyone like she loved her mother."
Eva came across a yearbook from Miss Porter's, a private school in Farmington, Connecticut, which Little Edie and Jackie Kennedy attended. "In this yearbook, her friends wrote things calling Little Edie 'fun.' She was also voted 'Best Eyes.'"
In the book, there are photos that span the period from Little Edie's birth to when Grey Gardens began to deteriorate. There is also an aerial photo of Grey Gardens taken in 1928, when it was purchased.
"I found a photo of Little Edie in front of a Ford in the early 1950s, and she wrote in the book, 'The year mother sold the garage,' after she sold it for $11,000 to get cash to pay the bills."
This 192-page hardcover book has a foreward written by Peter Beard, of Montauk, who knew the Edies well. Eva found a letter Beard wrote to Little Edie when her mother died, expressing his sympathies. In his foreward, Beard wrote that of all the cocktail parties he'd ever been to, he'd never met anyone more interesting than the two Edies.
There is also a personal introduction by Eva's husband, Bouvier Beale, about Little Edie, his aunt, whom he was close to.
"I wrote the post-foreward, about why I wrote the book, and about how I felt there was someone pushing me to write it, like Edie was looking down from above," he said.
The book cover features photos of Little Edie posing for her mother on the porch of Grey Gardens, wearing an orange robe, with Spot, her dog. "This book is a collection that Edie herself left behind, and we edited it," said Eva.
Verlhac Editions, which published this book, also published books on Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe, Paul Newman, Jackie Kennedy, John F. Kennedy and John F. Kennedy, Jr.
"Those books are a chronology of lives in pictures, but my book also includes poetry and journals and other collections," Eva said.
The first printing will consist of 2,000 numbered copies, each of which will sell for $75. For more information about the book visit edithbouvierbealeofgreygardens.com. Eva has also launched an online store featuring a collection of vintage jewelry, art, home décor and, coming soon, china and fabrics, based on the Grey Gardens lifestyle of Edie Beale. For more information, visit www.greygardenscollection.com.
Grey Gardens
Grey Gardens
Grey Gardens &
Grey Gardens
The Beales of Grey Gardens
Grey Gardens
Grey Gardens 11" x 17" Reproduction Poster
BFI Film Classics: Grey Gardens
Wild Blue Yonder DVD
Grey Gardens
Soundtrack to Grey Gardens MP3s
My Life at Grey Gardens
Forty Years of Gardening
Edith Bouvier Beale of Grey Gardens
MemoraBEALEia
Little Edie Live! A Visit to Grey Gardens audio CD
A Maysles Scrapbook: Photographs/Cinemagraphs/Documents
Talk to Her: Interviews
Contemporary Film Directors:
Ghosts of Grey Gardens DVD
Grey Gardens the Musical
Grey Gardens
Grey Gardens: The Complete Book and Lyrics of the Broadway Musical
Grey Gardens Songbook
The Road Not Taken: A Selection of Robert Frost's Poems
The Marble Faun
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Gigi
Wings
Nashville
Andromeda and Other Poems (includes Lorraine, Lorraine, Lorree)
It's All in the Stars
Art by Pacifico Palumbo