Grey Gardens!

Goodness it has been over a week since I last wrote you! In the New Year I had thought that my blogging would get back to a regular routine but not off to a good start as you can see.

You have been in my thoughts though these cold rainy days. In my part of Texas the sun has been hiding so well that at times I thought maybe I had surely moved up North and I had failed to remember the move.

My hat goes off to you up North where the snow is a daily occurrence and freezing temps never let up. As much as I love love Maine I guess God knew something when he had me delivered to this part of the country.

 NO! This is not me hidden upstairs waiting on the Sun to shine. It could be though and that is what has me scared! My son Chad ask me if I had ever seen the documentary Grey Gardens. I did not know anything about it so he filled me in and then we watched this together and it is one of those things that after you watch it you can not erase it from your brain no matter how hard you try.

It is a film released in 1975 about Jackie Kennedy's aunt and  first cousin, Big Edie and Little Edie Beale. The film is entirely of footage shot of these two women at the Beale estate in East Hampton.

 The film captures their eccentricity in manner, dress, squalor. It traces back during the interviews the history of Edith Bouvier Beale and her marriage, her divorce, her feeling abandoned. It also focuses on Little Edie and her ambitions to be a singer, the treatment by her father, her living a reclusive life with her mother. 

The film is a shocking  look at a wealthy American family and its downfall. It shows how they went from being very wealthy to  their reclusive life in decay.

I myself keep asking how does something like this happen to people. Especially if your neice was Jackie Kennedy.

Big Edie loved cats and housed up to fifty cats even though they had no running water and at times no electricity. All the bathroom facilities were broken, along with the sinks in the kitchen. Huge piles of trash scattered in every room but the worse thing of them living there was the cat feces on everything. I noticed in the film that it was even on their beds.

Raccoons chewed giant holes in their ceilings and it shows the younger Beale"Little Edie" feeding the animals bread in the upstairs area. Yet they barely had food for themselves.

The mansion was eventually condemned by East Hampton public officials and Jackie Kennedy stepped in to have the plumbing, roof and heating fixed where these two relatives of hers could continue to live.

One of the men in charge of fixing the home said it was the worse thing he had ever seen in his life. The stink from the home was beyond words.

You must google the Grey Gardens of 1975 and see pictures of just how horrible these two lived. I can't imagine that relatives did not step in and get these women the obvious therapy they needed to help them.

It was not until after Big Edie died that her daughter finally sold this place for $225,000.00 and she moved to Florida to make I hope a better life for herself.

The reason I shared this with you is after watching it I can't stop thinking of this film. Sad but scary too. The daughter calls her Mother in this film Mother Darling and since then Chad has been calling me that. haha I have been signing my emails to him Mother Darling. 

It has made me think I need to get out more and stop living like the hermit I seem to be turning into. lol

Especially when now I have up to three cats and letting two of them hide out from the cold inside my bathroom. The other morning I looked in the mirror and I swear I saw Big Edie looking back at me.

Love to all

Maggie