Letters of Little Edie Beale: Grey Gardens and Beyond

Letters of Little Edie Beale: Grey Gardens and Beyond, collected and edited by Walter Newkirk, is a sequel to memoraBEALEia: A Private Scrapbook About Little Edie Beale of Grey Gardens. For more information, visit the website www.greygardensbook.com The book has approximately 100 transcripts of the most engaging and entertaining cards and letters written to Walter Newkirk by Edie Beale from 1977-1987 and from 2000 until a few months before Edie's death in 2002. In her letters Edie discusses politics, 9/11, Cher, Elian Gonzalez,the Grey Gardens documentary and musical, Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Lee Radziwill, politics, and more. Miss Beale is best known for her participation in Grey Gardens (1976). In the early 1970s, Edie and her mother Edith Bouvier Beale -- cousin and aunt of Mrs. Onassis s - were living in a filthy, crumbling estate called Grey Gardens in East Hampton, NY which was raided by health authorities. The documentary inspired a Broadway musical in 2006 by Doug Wright, Michael Korie and Scott Frankel, which nominated for 10 Tony Awards, and won 3 awards. A "new" Grey Gardens, starring Drew Barrymore as Little Edie and Jessica Lange as Big Edie, was broadcast on HBO during April and May 2009 and is now available on DVD. The film was nominated for 17 Emmy Awards and won the Television Critic's Award for Best Television Movie. On April 22, 1976 Walter Newkirk traveled to Grey Gardens, to interview Edie Beale about t Grey Gardens, for his college newspaper, The Rutgers Daily Targum. Newkirk and Beale kept in touch for several years, by phone and by mail. After and her mother died, Beale moved to New York (1980-1983) and the author escorted her to luncheons, and special events. Little Edie moved to Florida in 1983, and died there in January 2002.