by Gail Sheehy
Little Edie would then perform her secret act of subversion, spooning out cat food and shaping it into a proper mound, garnished with a twist of lemon. She winked at me. “Mother’s pâté.”
ALMOST EVERY WEEKEND for the rest of that summer, I went to the beach with Little Edie to hear more about her family and her own story. She would pick up exactly where we had left off in the last conversation, heartbreaking evidence of her isolation. Sometimes, I would see her come flying off the dunes with her long scarves waving.
Little Edie told me how attached she and her mother were all through her growing years. “I was my mother’s crown jewel,” she said in a whisper of awe. “She even kept me out of school for a year, two years, and took me to the theater or movies every day.” Mother, having been a frustrated actress herself, assured that her daughter would be just as stagestruck.
As Little Edie grew into a voluptuous young woman, she told me with devilish delight, she had dived into the pool at the prudish old WASP Maidstone Club in a flimsy tank suit. When it slipped off, she brazenly paraded the full length of the pool, in the buff, hoping to be famous for something other than being Jackie’s cousin. Desperate for attention, she ran away to New York and modeled for Bachrach. “I was just waiting to audition for Max Gordon [a famous Broadway producer]”—she was breathless with the memory—“and he told me I was a natural musical comedienne! But someone squealed to my father.”
Her father, Phelan Beale, had reputedly marched up Madison Avenue and put his fist through Bachrach’s window. Scandalized by the theatrical behavior of both his wife and daughter, he divorced Big Edie—by telegram—and ran off with a young thing, leaving the ladies in the twenty-eight-room house a block from the sea.
“Did you ever go for the audition?” I asked, eager for the end of the story.
“Oh, no. Mother fell into depression, and she got the cats. That’s when she brought me down from New York to take care of them.”
Over the rest of that summer, Edie Beale would invite me to meet her at the beach (away from Mother) to hear about her many aborted attempts to escape. She talked about dating Howard Hughes and marriage proposals from Joe Kennedy Jr. and J. Paul Getty. But always, Mother drove her suitors away, she said. In a final act of negation, she tore out the faces of her boyfriends from the photographs she saved, so only her image remained, solitary and sad.
A fit of rebellion may have occurred shortly after Little Edie moved back to Grey Gardens. Her cousin John Davis told me about a summer afternoon when he watched her climb a catalpa tree outside Grey Gardens. She took out a lighter. He begged her not to do it. She set her hair ablaze. And in that act of self-immolation she sealed her fate as a prisoner of the love of her mother.
The resolution of the two discards was to become defiant iconoclasts. If they couldn’t have a public audience, they would live out the musical in their heads and use each other as their audience. Until, sweet revenge! In the 1960s, they were suddenly being indulged by a nervous White House. Secret Service cars were posted outside. The private family party after Jack Kennedy’s inauguration gave Little Edie a chance for her own theatrics. She reminded Joe Kennedy Sr. that she was once almost engaged to his firstborn son. And if Joe’s plane hadn’t gone down while he was bombing Nazis, “I probably would have married him,” she told her fantasy father-in-law, “and he would have become president instead of Jack and I would have become First Lady instead of Jackie!”
Guests told me that Joe Kennedy Sr. drank heavily at that party.
AFTER MY STORY WAS PUBLISHED in New York, it was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis who came to the rescue of the ladies of Grey Gardens with a $25,000 check for a cleanup, on the condition the town would allow them to remain in the house. In 1975, the Maysles brothers persuaded the Beales to vamp for a documentary they were filming. Little Edie told me she loved doing her Isadora Duncan dance and flirting with the two men. She and her mother also hoped to get money from the deal, she told me, but they never saw a penny. It did, however, make them famous.
When Big Edie died two years later after a fall, no one believed that Little Edie could survive their folie à deux by herself. But her optimism was only part delusional. It helped her to live another quarter century on her own. She held out against selling Grey Gardens as a teardown, until, in 1979, the Washington Post power couple, Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee, bought it for $220,000 with a promise to restore it.
Something in the wild nature and tragic vulnerability of these two creatures, who resisted capture at all costs, made them appealing to broader audiences in multiple mediums long after my article appeared. The Maysles brothers’ documentary Grey Gardens became a cult classic. In 2006, a mainstream Broadway audience made a roaring hit out of Doug Wright’s musical, starring Christine Ebersole and Mary Louise Wilson, which won three Tonys and played to enthusiastic audiences in London. The musical was a re-creation of Grey Gardens in all its glory, with Mother singing racist show tunes and the butler twirling a silver tray while Little Edie is breathlessly preparing for her fictional engagement party to Joe Kennedy Jr. HBO recast Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange as the pre-Camelot stars of the Kennedy clan.
To this day, when autumn riptides slash the shoreline and divots in the sand swallow the late-day sun in purple pools, I sometimes walk the beaches of the Hamptons and recall one of my last conversations with Little Edie. I imagine seeing her again, the prisoner of Grey Gardens, freed by the empty postseason beach to appear in her black net bathing suit, streaking down from the dunes trailing a long silk scarf and plunging into the embrace of waves. In our final conversations, she had moved back to New York City, at last. She was making a splash by singing in Manhattan cabarets. They paid her well enough to keep her in a hotel. I read critics mocking her, but Edie seemed to be oblivious of her detractors. Her exhilaration made her sound nineteen again. I loved her spirit.
CHAPTER 16
Fighting Irish Women
IN JANUARY OF 1972 I BEGGED Clay to send me to Northern Ireland to write about the fighting Irish women involved in the Irish civil rights movement. After the wholesale roundup of their Catholic husbands to be imprisoned without charge or trial, as suspected terrorists, women and children became the warriors, vowing to defend their civil rights to the death. My muted Irish ancestry was inflamed.
Margaret Thatcher had sworn to crush the movement. She had decreed the Special Powers Act that allowed British soldiers to launch the roundup of Catholic men. “It would be a perfect story for your St. Patrick’s Day issue,” I said.
“Why would that interest readers of New York?” he wanted to know.
“You’re kidding,” I argued. “New York City has the largest number of Irish Americans of any city in the country. And I have to believe a lot of them are fighting mad about the British stomping on the Irish Catholics—again! I am too!”
“You’d be crazy to get mixed up with the IRA.”
“I can get a great story from the women,” I said to placate him. They were out in the streets every night banging garbage-bin lids to warn their men before the British soldiers made a raid. And these were among the fiercest women on the planet—some of them fighting with guns. The women’s angle sold him.
IT HAPPENED SO FAST, I couldn’t believe it. Weren’t we just standing in the sun, relaxed and triumphant, after a peaceful civil rights march in Derry? Hadn’t we done all the script called for in these deadly games? Met the British soldiers at the barricade. Vomited tear gas. Dragged those dented by rubber bullets back to safety. Then a young boy and I climbed up on a communal balcony along a block of flats to survey the crowd.
Only seconds before the massacre started, I was asking the boy, “How do the paratroopers fire those gas canisters so far?”
“See them jammin’ their rifle butts against the ground?” the boy was saying when the slug tore into his face. I tried to think how to put his face back together again. Up to that moment in my life I thought everything could be mended.
This is a scene
from 1972 that I have relived hundreds, maybe thousands of times. I wrote about it in the opening of Passages; I have described it in lectures and interviews. I have struggled to write it afresh here—and failed. It is engraved on my brain as if on a gravestone.
There was no time to think. British armored cars were plowing into the crowd. Paratroopers jackknifed out with black gorilla faces behind gas masks. High-velocity rifle fire sang into the unarmed crowd. More fire coming from the roof—IRA sharpshooters? This was making no sense. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had sworn to crush the Irish Republican Army for good, but the IRA had not provoked anything today.
“Get down; cross fire!” A man grabbed my legs and pulled me down. I lifted my head to see the boy’s face. A bloody socket where one eye should be. What monsters shoot children? I crawled toward the boy, reached for him. The man shouted, “MOVE!” Dazed bodies pressed in on us. Entwined like a human caterpillar, we inched on our bellies up the steps of the exposed outdoor staircase.
“Can’t we get into somebody’s house?” I shouted. No response. Someone would have to crawl out in the cross fire and bang on the nearest door. I heard a man wail, “My son! It’s my son!” His voice propelled me across the balcony. A bullet whizzed past my head—time floated—and stupefied, I watched it penetrate the brick wall and throw out spalls of plaster. I hurled myself against the nearest door. We were taken in.
After the massacre, all exits from the city were sealed. Anyone inside the Catholic ghetto was officially under the authority of the IRA. An IRA commander politely explained he would have to confiscate my film. “Otherwise, the Brits’ll strip you and throw you in the lockup for forty-eight hours.”
I told him my tape recorder was running the whole time. I had a story to write. “Good lass!” He put an arm around my shoulders. “I’ll have one of the boys escort you uphill to a safe house.”
Climbing the hills from the Bogside, we were pressed into a huddle of thousands of protesters scrambling to hide within the bungalows of the Catholic ghetto. One man carried his son, his still limbs dangling. Could it be the boy who was shot beside me? I tried to ask, but the father was too distraught. Armored cars rumbled past us through the narrow streets. The warning pfffttt of rubber bullets punctuated the air. My escort dropped me off at the house of an older couple proud to say that their son, a priest, had fled over the border with a carful of his Provo pals—IRA volunteers. Mothers shooed their young ones into the bathtub to stay out of trouble. The wee voice of a child came from somewhere: “What were they marchin’ for today, Mum?”
The old woman offered me tea. I could hear soldiers kicking open the door of a nearby house; their shouts did not ruffle her. She turned up the volume on a recording of men singing Long Kesh Prison songs. Some safe house.
“What will you do if the soldiers come in here firing?” I asked her.
“Lie on me stomach!”
I started to shake. What happened to the boy with the bloody face? Surely, he died. What will happen to us? Fears gurgled up past the taut chest where I trapped my feelings. My throat burned. I was not a reporter now; I was a frightened child. Please, God, throw me a lifeline. I asked the old woman if I could use the phone. Yes, one call. I called Clay. My love would say the magic words to make the horror go away.
“Hi! How are you?” His voice was breezy; he was in bed in New York.
“I’m alive.”
“Good, how’s the story coming?”
“Fourteen people were slaughtered here—”
“Hold on. CBS News is talking about Londonderry right now—”
“They’re calling it Bloody Sunday.”
“Now look, you don’t have to get in the front lines. You’re doing a story on Irish women, remember that. Just stick with the women and stay out of trouble. Okay, honey?”
I was dumbstruck. For the first time, Clay didn’t get it. My last wish for deliverance was squandered. As I joined the others lying on their stomachs, a powerful idea took hold: No one is with me. No one can keep me safe. There is no one who won’t ever leave me alone.
BEFORE BLOODY SUNDAY, I had driven out of Belfast to look up my great-aunt Sarah. Actually, I was driven by an IRA commander who worked under Martin McGuinness, second in command of the Derry IRA. Once my guide realized we were going to Lisburn, he yelped, “That’s the bloody headquarters of the British army!” Slamming on the brakes, this hard-bitten car bomber dove to the floor of the car. I couldn’t help laughing. Taking over the wheel, I eventually found the ancestral home on Waterloo Road, a seventeenth-century stone farmhouse with a parlor draped in company slipcovers. At the kitchen door, the very fantasy of my great-aunt Sarah emerged from the scent of baking biscuits: a raspberry-cheeked, blue-eyed woman of considerable stature. Long widowed, she managed the modestly successful farm with paid farmers of her own.
“Och, it’s Lillian’s daughter, aren’t you now?”
We were immediately family. As we sipped strong tea and nibbled her sweet biscuits, I was shocked to see a photograph of her deceased husband dressed as the leader of the local Orange Lodge. This is the Protestant-loyalist organization that perpetuated British rule and kept a boot at the throats of native Irish workers, treating them as the equivalent of blacks in the American South. With great trepidation, I asked my great-aunt if she was a supporter of the Orange Lodge.
“Och, no, it’s a wicked way to run down your own kind,” she said. Aunt Sarah abhorred the long civil war in the North. She employed both Catholics and Protestants on her farm and fervently wished to live to see the Republic united, North with South. I was relieved that at least one of my forebears had rejected the path of violent repression. A woman, of course. But back then, in 1972, at the height of confrontation between Derry’s Irish revolutionaries and Prime Minister Thatcher’s militaristic response, I couldn’t imagine that peace would ever end this centuries-old religious war. Martin McGuinness was twenty-one years old at the time of Bloody Sunday. Who would have thought that forty years later he would be deputy first minister of the parliament of Northern Ireland? The fearless women of Northern Ireland, like Aunt Sarah, would be the peacemakers. They would shame the men into giving up their guns and sitting at the table until they reached the Easter accord. But who could have foreseen that one day, in 2012, Queen Elizabeth herself would visit Northern Ireland and Martin McGuinness would take her white-gloved hand in his and bless her in Gaelic, “Slan agus beannacht: Good-bye and Godspeed.”
AFTER BLOODY SUNDAY, I escaped Derry in a bumpy getaway car over pastureland and was more than grateful to see signs to Dublin. So was my photographer, Rima Shore, a Zionist at heart, who kept saying, “How the hell did I get mixed up in your war!” We checked into the Shelbourne Hotel and Rima disappeared into the bathtub. I met with our IRA contact in the lounge. Heavyset as a bar bouncer, he was all business. Given that I had a tape recording of Bloody Sunday, I was a valuable asset. In the seven-hundred-year war between the British and the Irish, there was no possible way of talking to both sides. Once under the protection of the IRA, one had to stick with the IRA. And after Bloody Sunday, the Republic was roiling with revolutionary fever.
The contact whispered in my ear. “Yer’re not wantin’ to stay here.” It was an English-owned hotel. “We might be doin’ the Shelbourne tonight.”
“Doin’” meant bombing. I raced to the room and called to Rima in the tub. “I don’t mean to torture you, but it’s not over. We’re on the run again.” While she scrambled to dress, I ran out to buy a bottle of strong Irish whisky and a chocolate cake. One always needs articles of appeasement. The next days and nights were a blur of mounting paranoia. We were led far out of town to another “safe house,” a deserted school with drawn shades. This was the hideout of Rita O’Hare, a young Belfast mom who shot a British soldier in her backyard.
“Rita Wild.” She introduced herself with her code name. Short with swirls of ginger hair and a rosebud smile, she looked harmless. She was a great interview. I heard the story of
how she’d been protecting her husband while he made a getaway. She was shot in the hip, stomach, and head. As she lay in her backyard, she heard a British soldier shout, “Here’s one of the bastards here, dead!” Another soldier cocked a rifle at her skull. All she could think to do was pull back her hood and say, “I’m a girl.” The soldiers kicked her in the head and dragged her into their vehicle and took her to Armagh prison. Awaiting a show trial certain to end in a severe sentence, she escaped and fled into the Republic.
Her nuclear family now consisted of her five-year-old son, Rory, and two IRA goons for protection. For our evening’s entertainment, mother, child, and goons sang their favorite rebel songs:
The night was icy cold I stood alone
I was waiting for an army foot patrol
And when at last they came within my sight
I squeezed the trigger of my armalite
Oh Mama, oh Mama, comfort me
I know these awful things have got to be
But when the war for freedom has been won
I promise you I’ll put away my gun.
It was Rory’s birthday. I brought out the cake. Rita Wild told her little son to fetch a big knife. Moments later, I saw the boy sneaking up on Rima’s back with a carving knife held like a dagger.
Oh Mama, oh Mama, comfort me
I know these awful things have got to be . . .
“Rory!” His mama stopped the boy but did not scold him. She was homeschooling him as a child soldier. When the goons showed us the room where we would all sleep together on the floor, I asked if they worried that Rory might get hold of their guns. Oh, no, they said, they slept on their guns.
“But the boy’s always getting into the gelly,” one says.
Gelly?
Gelignite, the explosive commonly used by the IRA.
The appeal of a “safe house” was lost on me. I tried to sound polite in suggesting that we find a nearby inn to stay the night. Checking in did not go well. When I produced the license-plate number of the rented wreck, I was told I must see the manager. A dour man, he noted that the car had been rented from outside of the Republic. “You’ll have to take it back to Belfast.”
