6. Little Edie Set Her Hair On Fire After Moving In With Her Mother
Little Edie Bouvier’s cousin, John H. Davis, who documented many of the family’s quirks in a biography recounted a strange episode involving the young woman. Shortly after moving back home to Grey Gardens to care for her ailing mother and cats, Little Edie climbed a tree and pulled out a cigarette lighter and set fire to her own hair. John recalls begging the young woman not to light it.
While Little Edie began developing stress-related alopecia in her 20s, the journalist Gail Sheehy claims the act of self-immolation was both a protest of her new confinement away from the life she had begun in New York City and also sealing of her “fate as a prison of her mother’s love.”
One cannot even begin to imagine the frustration of going from believing you are a wealthy socialite who is entertaining offers to star in movies and perhaps even marriage offers from wealthy young bachelors to being called home in poverty to care for your ailing and increasingly unstable mother and her horde of cats. While it is not clear how much of Little Edie’s New York success is true and how much is fanciful imagination, the Bouvier women’s fall from luxury is still indeed the stuff horror tales are made of.