10. Big and Little Edie Always Had an Unhealthy Relationship
Journalist Gail Sheehy who wrote extensively about the Bouvier women documented the unhealthily co-dependent relationship that existed between Big and Little Edie. Sheehy reported that, as a child, Little Edie and her mother were inseparable. Big Edie even took Little Edie out of school for two entire years due to an undocumented respiratory illness. In those years, the two Edies traveled extensively together with Little Edie often accompanying her mother to clubs or the movies.
Eva Beale, a relative of the Edies, said of their bond, “I think it was a safe haven for her always to be with her mother. They had such a wonderful bond that nobody could break.” Little Edie signed all of her letters to her mother with the closing, “With ladles and ladles of kisses, loves & hugs – your ever precious, ever loving and ever darling and kissable Edes.”
When Little Edie was only 11, she penned a diary entry in which she even put her mother above her budding romantic interest in boys. She wrote, “I have two great loves in my life. First, I love my mother, which will always go on, never be forgotten or forsaken. Most children think that mother love is a thing taken for granted, isn’t it? Second, my buzzing love for a boy, no mere crush, but a true, steady love.”