The Eccentric Lives Of the Edie Beales

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

Drew Barrymore is little Edie in HBO film Grey Gardens

SOME houses are haunted, but Grey Gardens simply haunts. Located where Lily Pond Lane meets West End Road in prime south-of-the-highway East Hampton, the 28-room mansion was home to Big and Little Edie Beale, mother-daughter extraordinaire, aunt and cousin respectively of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and her sister Lee Radziwill, who used to live down the road at Lasata.

One can imagine the parties and the picnics of these truly privileged, not merely monied, but well-born little girls.

By 1976, however, the house had become well known, even notorious. Condemned, infested by raccoons and fleas, stinking of cats, enshrouded by overgrown privets and raging weeds, the dilapidated structure and its eccentric occupants achieved a flicker of fame as the subjects of a documentary, ''Grey Gardens.'' The film has now returned for a brief run in New York before being re-released nationally.

The film came about in the early 70's when Ms. Radziwill asked the Maysles Brothers to make a documentary about her childhood. ''Of the 40 items that could go into it,'' said Albert Maysles, ''No. 34 was her eccentric aunt and cousin.''

Read on ... http://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/19/nyregion/the-eccentric-lives-of-the-edie-beales-gets-new-viewing.html