Grey Gardens, once the home of “Little Edie” Beale and her mother, Edith Bouvier Beale, is now on the market for nearly $20 million, reports The Wall Street Journal.
The home’s current owner, journalist Sally Quinn, bought the property in 1979 with her late husband, former Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee. When the couple bought the property—which they used as a summer home—nearly 40 years ago, they paid only $220,000, according to the Journal. They restored it for an estimated $600,000 over the years. The home is currently listed for $19.995 million.
Quinn, 75, whose husband died in 2014 at the age of 93, told The Wall Street Journal that living at Grey Gardens is not the same without Bradlee.
“It’s a magical place and we had a magical life there, but that part of my life is over now,” she said. “I want to move on.”
The home, which is roughly 6,000 square feet and sits on 1.5 acres of land near East Hampton’s Georgica Beach, was built in 1897. It served as the setting of the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens, which showed the Beales living in poverty as their house fell into disrepair around them. The story was also made into a 2006 Broadway musical and a 2009 HBO film starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange .
Many belongings of the former socialites, who were relatives of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, remain at the home, the Journal reports, including furniture and a collection of Little Edie’s glass animals. Quinn kept the collection in her office.
Secrets of Grey Gardens remained even after the property changed hands. Edie Beale, who died at the age of 84 in January 2002 in Bal Harbour, Florida, left a diary, photographs, and poetry to her nephew Bouvier Beale Jr., the executor of her estate, New York magazine noted in 2007. Her accounts detail the peculiar maternal hold that her mother had on her life and filled in several blanks in their story.
Once Quinn and Bradlee bought the property, they began to fill it with their own memories, often entertaining notable guests including Lauren Bacall and Norman Lear. Quinn will share those memories of life at Grey Gardens in her upcoming memoir, Finding Magic.
