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“There is something kind of sacred here,” Mr.

They had arrived at 5:15, with a bag of snacks and fresh coffee they shared with Mr. They had bonded with two other early birds, Astrelle Johnquest, 36, a gallerist, and Josh Klinghoffer, 38, the guitarist from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who had flown in from Los Angeles. Preston and David Bell, both 51, had arrived at 4 a.m., hoping to beat a crowd that didn’t materialize until well past dawn. They were mentally ill, but they were happy.” Tom Preston, an antiques dealer from Washington, D.C., said, “I consider it a cautionary tale and love story.

“My parents said: ‘When are you ever going to get a chance to see Grey Gardens?’” As Little Edie said, ‘It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.’” They lived in the moment, which is a good thing and a bad thing. Their discourse, their arguments, always ended in mutual respect. “They really lived on their own terms,” Mr. “She’s writing a friend about the sale of the house.” Vanhoozier said, bought on eBay for $350. “We have the last letter Edie wrote,” Mr. “I’m married to an obsessive collector,” he said The sale and this visit was a bucket-list item for him, said his partner, Ben Collins, 56.

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specialist from Charlotte, N.C., showed off photographs of his license plate, stored on his phone, which reads, “STAUNCH,” a piquant Little Edie-ism the Big and Little Edie dolls he’d had commissioned and the many contemporary Beale portraits he’d bought over the years. “It was chilling.”īehind him, Scotty Vanhoozier, 43, an I.T. Zee photographed Kristen Wiig there, in a story for Elle in 2014, he brought Mr. Zee drove him by Grey Gardens, and when Mr. Younkers, whose blue baseball cap was pinned at the brim with a Little Edie brooch, recalled how on one of their first dates, Mr.

Afterward, Little Edie, with her upside-down outfits, florid, looping drawl and naïf-savant proclamations, emerged as a campy philosopher and gay idol. Their cloister was lovingly, appallingly captured by Albert and David Maysles, the cinéma vérité filmmakers whose 1975 documentary about them became a cult classic. But despite the media couple’s 1980s-era salon luster, the house drew much of its fame - or infamy - from earlier stewards.Įdith Ewing Bouvier Beale and her only daughter, Edith Bouvier Beale, aunt and cousin to Jacqueline Kennedy and otherwise known as Big and Little Edie, spent half a century there enveloped in gothic scurf, attended by an army of cats and raccoons, and surrounded by the decaying accouterments of the social class from which they had exiled themselves. The once-squalid home of the most notorious mother-daughter dyad since Tennessee Williams poured his own family into “The Glass Menagerie” went into contract last month, and its contents were unloaded in a three-day estate sale.įor decades, Grey Gardens has belonged to Sally Quinn, the journalist, and Ben Bradlee, the longtime executive editor of The Washington Post who died in 2014. Grey Gardens gave up the last of its ghosts over the weekend. Filthy beyond belief,” she told Win 2009.EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. She made Quinn promise she wouldn’t raze the abode, and claimed the place simply needed a “coat of paint.” Quinn kept her promise, despite the home being in a state of complete disrepair. “There were cats everywhere and raccoons wandering around. At the time, she refused to sell the home, because everyone just wanted to tear it down. These new residents are surely having an easier time with this renovation than Quinn and Bradlee did upon purchasing the house from Little Edie in 1979.

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The building plans, per the Star, include demolition notes and additions about saving details like “decorative trim” and “existing bluestone.” If all goes according to plan, the new owners will have a 33-room house with seven bedrooms and eight bathrooms, plus a shiny new basement with wine room, rec room and a gym.

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The owners have hired Kevin Hummel of John Hummel and Associates Custom Builders to supervise the renovation, which is already in full swing-the front porch and chimneys have been removed, and the full home is set to be lifted off the foundation in order to remodel the basement. Quinn and Bradlee entirely renovated the home.

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