Grey Gardens is a 1975 documentary film ranked number 2 by the World Film Academy in its 100 Greatest Documentaries of the 20th Century and by then Cornell University students. The film depicts the everyday lives of two women who lived at Grey Gardens, a decrepit 28-room mansion at 3 West End Road in the wealthy Georgica Pond neighborhood of East Hampton, New York.
Edith "Big Edie" Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edith "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale were the aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. The two women lived together at Grey Gardens in squalor and almost total isolation.
In the fall of 1971 and throughout 1972, their living conditions were exposed as the result of an article in the National Enquirer and a cover story in New York magazine after a series of inspections (which the Beales called "raids") by the Suffolk County Health Department.
The 28-room house was designed by Joseph Greenleaf Thorpe in 1897, and purchased in 1923 by Phelan Beale and Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale, uncle and aunt of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The Beales lived there for over 50 years. The house was called Grey Gardens because of the color of the dunes, the cement garden walls, and the sea mist.
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