Grey Garden Auctions Lives up to hype

If you’ve never seen the documentary Grey Gardens, just stop now, go watch it and run back here after. It’s about Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onnasis’ aunt and cousin, Big Edie and little Edie, respectfully.   The insanely reclusive mother and daughter team who lived in such curuious conditions, and so intensely removed from society, a group of men felt need to document it. And thank god.

By 1979, the late Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, of Watergate fame, and columnist Sally Quinn bought the 28-room, 6,000-square-foot estate, at 3 West End Road, for $225,000.

“Sally bought the house directly from Little Edie while the broker stayed quivering in the car — too terrified to go in,” a source close to Quinn tells the Post.

Quinn promised Little Edie that she would restore the house, which was built in 1897, and everything in it — and she did. Bradlee died in 2014, and Quinn put the house on the market earlier this year. Now, as the Hollywood film about her late husband, starring Tom Hanks, is about to hit the silver screen, Quinn is in contract to sell the estate for close to its $20 million asking price to an unnamed New York family, sources tell The Post.

While Quinn left all the furniture for sale, she did take all of the books, and is planning to have them archived and restored, along with some posters that had been in the living room.