My Hero, Edith "The Body Beautiful" Bouvier Beale

Have you ever seen "Grey Gardens"?  If not, find it and watch it.  It is an experience you will never forget.  

Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and Edith Bouvier Beale (Big Edie and Little Edie, respectively) were two crazy ladies who lived in a crumbling East Hampton mansion (Grey Gardens) with about 35 cats and each other.  Once, they were promising socialites -- Little Edie was known around her high-class social circle as "The Body Beautiful" and, let me tell you, she was gorgeous.  Little Edie was a first cousin of Jackie O and Lee Radziwill, so her family was basically American royalty. 

Big Edie showed her crazy side pretty early.  She separated her hubby when Little Edie was 14 but didn't receive alimony, just child support.  They didn't divorce for a number of years, though.  However, she was allowed to keep Grey Gardens, which at the time was renowned for its lovely garden.  She was an aspiring singer gave several recitals, and showed up at her son's wedding dressed as an opera singer.  After being thoroughly embarrassed by his daughter, Big Edie's father cut her out of his will.  Big Edie soon had a kind of breakdown, became very depressed and gained a lot of weight.  She adamantly refused to sell Grey Gardens, though.

Little Edie was just as, if not more, eccentric than her mother.  Noticed for her beauty from an early age, she was a clothes model and a debutante.  She was looking for a husband who was a Libra, which she claimed was the best match for her.  Eventually, with no luck either being famous or finding a Libra husband, she moved back to Grey Gardens with her mother, where they eventually lived in poverty and filth.

In the 70s the Maysle brothers were doing a documentary about East Hampton history when they found the two Beales, Little Edie still living under the domineering presence of her mother.  They decided to focus the documentary on the Beales instead, and it became a cult classic.

I'm TELLING you, you need to watch it.  It's fantastic.  To imagine that these ladies literally were the belles of society in the 20s and 30s, and then they lived in complete isolation and poverty, not to mention their 35 cats that pooped and peed everywhere.  They had raccoons in their attic, for Heaven's sake, and Little Edie FED them!  I guess that once Little Edie finally sold the house -- with a provision in the contract that the owners couldn't demolish it, they had to restore it -- they found thousands of dollars worth of valuable antiques along with truckloads of garbage.

Little Edie is amazing.  I wish I would have known her.  And she is my hero, because even though things in her life usually leaned toward awful, she still would put on tap shoes and dance in the foyer.