Daring (20 page)

There was no turning back.

“Mother?”

We whirled at the sound of the tremulous voice. A middle-aged woman was coming through the catalpa trees, dressed for church but most oddly: a sweater wrapped around her head, and her skirt—believe it or not—on upside down. Her face was oddly young, as if suspended in time, faintly freckled and innocent, but painted with thick dark lipstick and heavy eyeliner. It struck me that she looked strangely familiar . . . like . . . like who?

“Are you looking for Mother, too?” she asked, even more unnerved than we.

My little girl held out the box of kittens.

“Did you think we care for animals here?”

My daughter nodded solemnly.

“You see! Children sense it.” The woman clapped her hands in delight. “The old people don't like us. They think I'm crazy. The Bouviers don't like me at all, Mother says. But the children understand . . .”

My little girl said it must be fun to live in a house where you never have to clean up.

“Oh, Mother thinks it's artistic this way, like a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Don't you love the overgrown Louisiana Bayou look?”

Maura asked if there really were police on the place.

“Not really, but there are boys who come over at night sometimes and try to club the cats to death.”

I suggested the boys might just be prankish.

“Oh no, they're dangerous. I can tell what's inside a person right away. Mother and I can see behind the masks; we're artists, it's the artist's eye. Jackie has it, too.”

“Jackie?”

“I'm Jacqueline Bouvier's first cousin. Mother is her aunt. Did you know that?”

“No, we didn't.”

“Oh yes, we're all descended from fourteenth-century French kings. Did you like the Kennedys?”

Now it clicked. The woman before me was a version of Jackie Kennedy coming back from church on a Greek island, but this was Little Edie in the summer of her fifty-fourth year.

“You . . . resemble your cousin,” I stammered.

My daughter wanted to know if she knew President Kennedy well. Maura remembered having been introduced to the Kennedy clan when she was four years old, watching the TV image of a fallen Robert Kennedy and asking me, “Why is the lady in white bending over the man on the floor? Did something bad happen?”

“Jack never liked society girls,” Edie offered, “he only dated showgirls. I tried to show him I'd broken with society. I was a dancer. But Jack never gave me a tumble. Then I met Joe Jr. at a Princeton dance, and, oh my!” She swooned. “Joe was the most wonderful person in the world. There will never be another man like him . . .”

From then on, I was invited into the private world of the Beale ladies, two outcasts of a wealthy and famously dysfunctional branch of the Kennedy dynasty—the Bouvier-Beales—who were being hounded by county health officials threatening to evict them. Lee Radziwill, Jacqueline Kennedy's sister and a fashionable princess reputed to be worth more than five hundred million, wanted her relatives out and the house sold. When Little Edie led me through the decaying house that summer, it was a chilling version of Jackie's famous White House tour. The wood floors of this once-proud mansion were lumped and crusty with old cat feces; the roof was punctured with raccoon holes. Mother remained upstairs, summoning the services of her daughter by banging her cane on the floor and calling out in full operatic tremolo: “EeeDIE! Where is my champagne cocktail?”

Little Edie would then perform her secret act of subversion, spooning out cat food and shaping it into a proper mound, garnished with a twist of lemon. She winked at me. “Mother's pâté.”

ALMOST EVERY WEEKEND
for the rest of that summer, I went to the beach with Little Edie to hear more about her family and her own story. She would pick up exactly where we had left off in the last conversation, heartbreaking evidence of her isolation. Sometimes, I would see her come flying off the dunes with her long scarves waving.

Little Edie told me how attached she and her mother were all through her growing years. “I was my mother's crown jewel,” she said in a whisper of awe. “She even kept me out of school for a year, two years, and took me to the theater or movies every day.” Mother, having been a frustrated actress herself, assured that her daughter would be just as stagestruck.

As Little Edie grew into a voluptuous young woman, she told me with devilish delight, she had dived into the pool at the prudish old WASP Maidstone Club in a flimsy tank suit. When it slipped off, she brazenly paraded the full length of the pool, in the buff, hoping to be famous for something other than being Jackie's cousin. Desperate for attention, she ran away to New York and modeled for Bachrach. “I was just waiting to audition for Max Gordon [a famous Broadway producer]”—she was breathless with the memory—“and he told me I was a natural musical comedienne! But someone squealed to my father.”

Her father, Phelan Beale, had reputedly marched up Madison Avenue and put his fist through Bachrach's window. Scandalized by the theatrical behavior of both his wife and daughter, he divorced Big Edie—by telegram—and ran off with a young thing, leaving the ladies in the twenty-eight-room house a block from the sea.

“Did you ever go for the audition?” I asked, eager for the end of the story.

“Oh, no. Mother fell into depression, and she got the cats. That's when she brought me down from New York to take care of them.”

Over the rest of that summer, Edie Beale would invite me to meet her at the beach (away from Mother) to hear about her many aborted attempts to escape. She talked about dating Howard Hughes and marriage proposals from Joe Kennedy Jr. and J. Paul Getty. But always, Mother drove her suitors away, she said. In a final act of negation, she tore out the faces of her boyfriends from the photographs she saved, so only her image remained, solitary and sad.

A fit of rebellion may have occurred shortly after Little Edie moved back to Grey Gardens. Her cousin John Davis told me about a summer afternoon when he watched her climb a catalpa tree outside Grey Gardens. She took out a lighter. He begged her not to do it. She set her hair ablaze. And in that act of self-immolation she sealed her fate as a prisoner of the love of her mother.

The resolution of the two discards was to become defiant iconoclasts. If they couldn't have a public audience, they would live out the musical in their heads and use each other as their audience. Until, sweet revenge! In the 1960s, they were suddenly being indulged by a nervous White House. Secret Service cars were posted outside. The private family party after Jack Kennedy's inauguration gave Little Edie a chance for her own theatrics. She reminded Joe Kennedy Sr. that she was once almost engaged to his firstborn son. And if Joe's plane hadn't gone down while he was bombing Nazis, “I probably would have married him,” she told her fantasy father-in-law, “and he would have become president instead of Jack and I would have become First Lady instead of Jackie!”

Guests told me that Joe Kennedy Sr. drank heavily at that party.

AFTER MY STORY WAS PUBLISHED
in
New York
, it was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis who came to the rescue of the ladies of Grey Gardens with a $25,000 check for a cleanup, on the condition the town would allow them to remain in the house. In 1975, the Maysles brothers persuaded the Beales to vamp for a documentary they were filming. Little Edie told me she loved doing her Isadora Duncan dance and flirting with the two men. She and her mother also hoped to get money from the deal, she told me, but they never saw a penny. It did, however, make them famous.

When Big Edie died two years later after a fall, no one believed that Little Edie could survive their folie à deux by herself. But her optimism was only part delusional. It helped her to live another quarter century on her own. She held out against selling Grey Gardens as a teardown, until, in 1979, the
Washington Post
power couple, Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee, bought it for $220,000 with a promise to restore it.

Something in the wild nature and tragic vulnerability of these two creatures, who resisted capture at all costs, made them appealing to broader audiences in multiple mediums long after my article appeared. The Maysles brothers' documentary
Grey Gardens
became a cult classic. In 2006, a mainstream Broadway audience made a roaring hit out of Doug Wright's musical, starring Christine Ebersole and Mary Louise Wilson, which won three Tonys and played to enthusiastic audiences in London. The musical was a re-creation of
Grey Gardens
in all its glory, with Mother singing racist show tunes and the butler twirling a silver tray while Little Edie is breathlessly preparing for her fictional engagement party to Joe Kennedy Jr. HBO recast Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange as the pre-Camelot stars of the Kennedy clan.

To this day, when autumn riptides slash the shoreline and divots in the sand swallow the late-day sun in purple pools, I sometimes walk the beaches of the Hamptons and recall one of my last conversations with Little Edie. I imagine seeing her again, the prisoner of Grey Gardens, freed by the empty postseason beach to appear in her black net bathing suit, streaking down from the dunes trailing a long silk scarf and plunging into the embrace of waves. In our final conversations, she had moved back to New York City, at last. She was making a splash by singing in Manhattan cabarets. They paid her well enough to keep her in a hotel. I read critics mocking her, but Edie seemed to be oblivious of her detractors. Her exhilaration made her sound nineteen again. I loved her spirit.

IN JANUARY OF
1972
I BEGGED
Clay to send me to Northern Ireland to write about the fighting Irish women involved in the Irish civil rights movement. After the wholesale roundup of their Catholic husbands to be imprisoned without charge or trial, as suspected terrorists, women and children became the warriors, vowing to defend their civil rights to the death. My muted Irish ancestry was inflamed.

Margaret Thatcher had sworn to crush the movement. She had decreed the Special Powers Act that allowed British soldiers to launch the roundup of Catholic men. “It would be a perfect story for your St. Patrick's Day issue,” I said.

“Why would that interest readers of
New York
?” he wanted to know.

“You're kidding,” I argued. “New York City has the largest number of Irish Americans of any city in the country. And I have to believe a lot of them are fighting mad about the British stomping on the Irish Catholics—
again
! I am too!”

“You'd be crazy to get mixed up with the IRA.”

“I can get a great story from the women,” I said to placate him. They were out in the streets every night banging garbage-bin lids to warn their men before the British soldiers made a raid. And these were among the fiercest women on the planet—some of them fighting with guns. The women's angle sold him.

IT HAPPENED SO FAST,
I couldn't believe it. Weren't we just standing in the sun, relaxed and triumphant, after a peaceful civil rights march in Derry? Hadn't we done all the script called for in these deadly games? Met the British soldiers at the barricade. Vomited tear gas. Dragged those dented by rubber bullets back to safety. Then a young boy and I climbed up on a communal balcony along a block of flats to survey the crowd.

Only seconds before the massacre started, I was asking the boy, “How do the paratroopers fire those gas canisters so far?”

“See them jammin' their rifle butts against the ground?” the boy was saying when the slug tore into his face. I tried to think how to put his face back together again. Up to that moment in my life I thought everything could be mended.

This is a scene from 1972 that I have relived hundreds, maybe thousands of times. I wrote about it in the opening of
Passages;
I have described it in lectures and interviews. I have struggled to write it afresh here—and failed. It is engraved on my brain as if on a gravestone.

There was no time to think. British armored cars were plowing into the crowd. Paratroopers jackknifed out with black gorilla faces behind gas masks. High-velocity rifle fire sang into the unarmed crowd. More fire coming from the roof—IRA sharpshooters? This was making no sense. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had sworn to crush the Irish Republican Army for good, but the IRA had not provoked anything today.

“Get down; cross fire!” A man grabbed my legs and pulled me down. I lifted my head to see the boy's face. A bloody socket where one eye should be. What monsters shoot children? I crawled toward the boy, reached for him. The man shouted, “MOVE!” Dazed bodies pressed in on us. Entwined like a human caterpillar, we inched on our bellies up the steps of the exposed outdoor staircase.

“Can't we get into somebody's house?” I shouted. No response. Someone would have to crawl out in the cross fire and bang on the nearest door. I heard a man wail, “My son! It's my son!” His voice propelled me across the balcony. A bullet whizzed past my head—time floated—and stupefied, I watched it penetrate the brick wall and throw out spalls of plaster. I hurled myself against the nearest door. We were taken in.

After the massacre, all exits from the city were sealed. Anyone inside the Catholic ghetto was officially under the authority of the IRA. An IRA commander politely explained he would have to confiscate my film. “Otherwise, the Brits'll strip you and throw you in the lockup for forty-eight hours.”

I told him my tape recorder was running the whole time. I had a story to write. “Good lass!” He put an arm around my shoulders. “I'll have one of the boys escort you uphill to a safe house.”

Climbing the hills from the Bogside, we were pressed into a huddle of thousands of protesters scrambling to hide within the bungalows of the Catholic ghetto. One man carried his son, his still limbs dangling. Could it be the boy who was shot beside me? I tried to ask, but the father was too distraught. Armored cars rumbled past us through the narrow streets. The warning
pfffttt
of rubber bullets punctuated the air. My escort dropped me off at the house of an older couple proud to say that their son, a priest, had fled over the border with a carful of his Provo pals—IRA volunteers. Mothers shooed their young ones into the bathtub to stay out of trouble. The wee voice of a child came from somewhere: “What were they marchin' for today, Mum?”