Happy Weekend!

More Grey Gardens slide show HERE

East Hampton Style 2 - Thank You Sally Quinn

I just got an e-mail newsletter from Architectural Digest with photos of Grey Gardens as it is now, and an article talking with Sally Quinn. Best of all it's photographed by my favorite guy Peter Vitale! So I had to hop to and share some of the photos with you all! You can go HERE to read the article and see more photos.

The house looks wonderful! A happy ending after all.

Rose chintz is used throughout, a nod to the roses planted in the gardens.

Simple coir rugs are used, that look very much like the kind you can pick up at Pier One, or Cost Plus World Market. I like that the house doesn't look overdone and over decorated. It looks like the houses I remember, including my own little Victorian cottage on Springs Fireplace Road.

This vintage newspaper poster kind of brings back the happy early days that the Beales spent in Grey Gardens, the 1930's.

What a pretty bouquet of cosmos! And the table setting is delightful too.

This is a little sitting room off the kitchen. I love the old stove! I had one like this in my house. I also love all the old quilts Sally Quinn uses throughout the house. This is something I saw alot of Hamptons ladies do, including Lauren Bacall.

The master bedroom is so pretty. The iron bed is making me smile. They are so out of fashion now, and I like that Sally uses one anyway! Again, my master had a white iron bed! I guess the houses in the Hamptons dictate all the tried and true touches that decorators have used for a zillion years ha ha.

Thank you all for taking so many trips to Grey Gardens with me. I can almost smell....the sea air!

Grey Gardens, The Last Word

Well I loved it. And I promise you this is the last post about it ha ha. If you were not able to see it leave a comment and email me, and I will take care of you.


Like many things one loves, and one digs deeper looking for things to use in a post, one goes down a delightful rabbit hole. One of the sites I found is Grey Gardens Online.
It is filled with so many wonderful articles. The exclusive interviews are the best. Please spend some enjoyable time there.



One of the things on my wish list is this book: Edith Bouvier Beale, A Life In Pictures. The Gray Gardens Online site will tell you where to get it. It's limited to an edition of 2000, so I hope Alberto is doing some early shopping for my birthday ha ha.



I want to thank Alberto for arranging the viewing of the movie for me at the home of our friends Jessica and Jon. Not only did they give up their evening, not talk during the movie, provide cocktails, etc., they also had the most delish crawfish boil for us for dinner. Thank you J & J!


The movie was all I hoped it would be. Some surprises regarding the sets, like the bedroom with the art deco bed turning out to be Edie's room at the Barbizon Hotel (and not her bedroom at Grey Gardens). I once considered living at the Barbizon! But I found a cheaper apartment on St. Marks Place on the Lower East Side.


I loved the scene when the two Edies dressed for JFK's funeral.
I loved Drew Barrymore's perfect patrician Bouvier accent.
I loved Jessica Lange - she was a perfect Big Edie. I think this rivals the role when she played Francis Farmer in "Francis".



I think the Maysles looked too clean cut in the HBO movie. They were definitely more hippie dippie looking, actually more hippie geek.
I also loved the scenes when Jackie came to visit. I almost howled with laughter when they offered her pate and ice cream.
I was reminded of a story my friend Michael Pelkey told me.
He was then a personal chef on for a wealthy important person. They were on the WIPs yacht anchored in Spain. Michael went to the local market to get the ingredients to prepare Salad Nicoise. He did not speak Spanish. The salad was declared delicious by the Spanish royalty attending the luncheon. The day help hired to do kitchen chores were hysterical. Michael had served them cat food! He thought he was buying tuna!
So I could imagine the Beales confusing all that cat food for pate and serving it to Jackie.
Oh how the mind goes off on tangents ha ha.



I'm showing some photos I've found of Little Edie as a young person. They are just enchanting. I also think Little Edie was enchanting as we saw her later in life.











Here are some family jewels.


After seeing the movie, I felt a sense of determination and hope. I'm so glad I spent my first summer in East Hampton with the Cat Ladies. Funny how in life we attract people like ourselves, how we find role models and mentors in the most unlikely of places.
Thank you all for indulging me in this Grey Gardens blitz.

What Will You Be Wearing To The Grey Gardens Premiere In Your Living Room Tonight?

Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange stars of Grey Gardens which premiered on Tuesday in New York at The Ziegfeld.


From Style.com HERE

The good news is that everyone was quickly won over by the film, which re-creates not only the documentary that turned the mother-daughter duo into cult heroines, but the earlier events that led them to such unique circumstances as well. We counted at least two standing ovations, one when Barrymore absolutely nailed the scene in the garden where Little Edie riffs on her skirt costume ("the perfect look for the day"), and another when Lange as Big Edie belts out a number from her filthy bedroom. At the after-party at the Pierre hotel—which happens to be where Little Edie had her coming out on New Year's Day in 1936—Barrymore looked very Old Hollywood in an Alberta Ferretti dress, net veil, and marcelled hair. "I really thought reactions could go either way," she smiled. "So I'm pleased everyone is saying they're liking it."

East Hampton Style

The set design for the HBO movie Grey Gardens is quite lovely. It captures the essence of Hamptons style perfectly. The great summer houses, called cottages, that were built in the early 1900's and many of which still stand today, evoke a gracious lifestyle that is captivating.


Being summer houses, the homes were furnished in a more casual way, often reflecting the "fun" side of the socially prominent and wealthy people who inhabited them. These houses were places to let your hair down, to relax, to play.


The Beale ladies who owned Grey Gardens were two such people. Their summer cottage in East Hampton was their play house.
Production Designer Kalina Ivanov depicts this with lovely attention to detail. There is another interview with her HERE and is well worth the read.


As you look around this living room, you see such a wonderful collection of art objects like the little sculpture of the torso, the faded oriental carpets, the precious little side tables, the plant placed in a bird cage, odd little decor touches that are very feminine and very bohemian, very much like the ladies of this house.


The wall paper used throughout the house is oriental in feeling, hand painted perhaps. The floral draperies are very much like the type used in English country houses, very Colefax and Fowler if you will.
What's so hard to imagine is how the house got to the squalor those ladies lived in. Like when was the first empty cat food can thrown in a corner, and who threw it there, and why didn't anyone pick it up and put it in the trash? Where did the furniture go? Did they have to sell their lovely things to survive? How do you go from wearing lovely clothes and jewels, from being so beautifully groomed, to becoming those unkempt tragedies? How many years did it take for a house to die?


And all those cats! The day I pulled into the driveway on my bicycle, and listened to the house to tell me if anything alive was in it, I did not see one of those cats! It was only after Edie spoke to me, did they start to appear from every corner, almost as if summoned by this magic good witch. She really did look like she stepped out of an enchanted forest in a Grimm fairy tale.

Did this glimpse of the remnants of the draperies help inspire
the set design of Kalina Ivanov?

Edie kept this list of the names of all the cats

I love the lipstick red Chinoiserie dining room chairs, again a great pop of bohemian pizazz.


It is so heart wrenching to see the house as imagined by Kalina Ivanov for the movie. Filmed mainly in Toronto, she says creating the outdoor sets of the house was a huge accomplishment. There aren't many existing old photos that depict the house as it was in its happy days, still intact, perhaps as intact as the minds of the women who lived there were then. So Kalina used her imagination, creating a charming and layered feminine and bohemian atmosphere.

That lovely dining room as it was when the Beale ladies lost their minds

Each detail is lovingly attended to. There are signs of lives lived, of pretty things accumulated, but without overt ostentatious displays of wealth: Hamptons Style - or at least as it was before the influx of newly created wealthy people of the last twenty years to this once exclusive playground.
My favorite rooms in the set design, are the bedrooms (there are 14 of them at Grey Gardens!). These are the rooms every woman could live in. The colors, the wallpaper, the bedding, the lamps, the rugs - its all so charming.
I wonder if this is meant to be Little Edie's bedroom.


Maybe it's meant to be the mother's room, Big Edie's room,


Again, the hand painted wallpaper is exquisite without screaming a rich girl lives here. I love the detail of the kimono hanging.
The headboard is posh, and I am just loving the draperies again.


The sweet tufted headboard never showed up again in the photos taken of Big Edie as she took to her bed in the squalor.


Here's another bedroom. Maybe this is meant to be Little Edie's. It has a younger feeling.
I love the art deco bed, again something a little fashion forward for its time, something an artistic person would purchase for an otherwise traditional home. The Chinese lantern and poster to the right of it are very bohemian touches, as are the colors of the pillows on the bed. The skirted side table is lovely.


The needlepoint chair is spectacular! And I love peeking into the wardrobe.


Little Edie may have lived in a demented house near the end of her time at Grey Gardens, but she still kept up with the social graces of writing notes, making little presents for people, and also of getting notes from people.
Here's a note she got from Jackie along with a clipping telling how mad Jackie was when Edie sold the house to Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee.


It just confuses me that the whole Bouvier clan neglected those ladies.
Lee Radziwell was interviewed somewhere recently, maybe Vogue, about this movie coming out. She said she loved and accepted the two Edies, was not ashamed of them. But I still don't understand why they didn't provide basic housekeeping for them.

Kalina Ivanov, brilliant designer of the sets for Grey Gardens

The Set Design for Grey Gardens - Dear Sally Quinn

I think the set design for the HBO movie Grey Gardens is breathtaking.

I Spy the detail of the magazine with Jackie on the cover!

Kalina Ivanov is the production designer, and the rooms she has put together are so layered and gorgeous, they become a co-star of the movie.
You can read more on this terrific blog dedicated to Grey Gardens HERE

This is the foyer. Classic Hamptons style all the way. The staircase is beautiful.

This is the living room. I love the layering of the furnishings and accessories, and the color of the walls.

Here's another view of the foyer. The little bench is so sweet.


Here is Big Edie, as she lived the last thirty years of her life, with her portrait as she lived the first part of her life.

Here's how Kalina Ivanov used the portrait in the set design. Isn't this room just lovely? I especially love the draperies, which look like a linen fabric by Kravitz.

Here's the portrait again, very much as it was seen in the photo above with Big Edie. I love the faded colors of the walls. They are so nuanced and rich, much more so than the dreary palette you discern from all the black and white photos we see of Grey Gardens.


Here's Little Edie in the house in the 1970's.

Dear Sally Quinn,
If you are reading please, please let a photo shoot happen at Grey Gardens soon! We all would love to see the magic you've worked there. xo xo