[Radio Newscaster](spoken)
In a statement released today, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis confirmed that her eighty-year old aunt, Mrs. Edith Bouvier Beale,
and her adult daughter Edie are living in squalid conditions in an East Hampton estate known as "Grey Gardens."
The house that once played host to Howard Hughes and the Rockefellers is now a refuge for fifty-two stray cats, a few rabid
raccoons, and its two reclusive inhabitants, all living in an environment the Health Department calls "unfit for human
habitation." Mrs. Onassis described the situation as a private, family matter.
[Edith](spoken)
I've simply got to get my voice exactly back the way it was when I made this record-
[Edie](spoken)
You can't, Mother darling.
[Edith](spoken)
-Exactly the way it was when I was forty-five years old!
[Edie](spoken)
Face it, kid; time is a thief. You can't get it back.
[Edith](spoken)
Oh yes I can! My voice is beautifully trained.
[Edie](spoken)
You can't!
[Edith](spoken)
And I never strained it, ever in my life.
[Edie](spoken)
"I never strained it"? With all that yelling and screaming... What is the matter with you? It's a miracle you can even
speak...
[Voice of Younger Edith on recording]
Candy cane trees,
Lemonade seas,
Sweeten the breeze
In Toyland.
Pandas and clowns,
Dolls in gay gowns,
Frolic in girl and boy land.
[Edith](overlapping)
...Clowns!
...Gay gowns!
...Frolic in girl and boy land.
(spoken)
You hear that, Edie? Exactly the way it when summer was endless... and the parlor was our show-place... and we had music all
the time!
[Voice of Younger Edith on recording & Edith]
Now I am grown,
Ere, time has flown,
Lost in my childhood's
Joy land...
(Time reverses. Old Edith recedes as lights rise on Younger Edith, singing by the piano in her parlor in 1941, accompanied
by George Gould Strong.)
[Edith]
Wouldst I could see
Innocent glee.
Wee ones,
Dream sweet for me.
Oh, wee ones,
Dream sweet for me.
[Gould](spoken)
Brava! I'm weeping already. Now, here's your reward.
[Edith](spoken)
Ah! Isn't it gorgeous! Look how handsomely it's typeset! "A musical recital in honor of Miss Edith Bouvier Beale and Mr.
Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Jr., the twelfth of July, 1941."
