Grey gardens mansion biography of abraham lincoln

  • This mansion was called Hildene, and another great American family owned it -- the descendants of President Abraham Lincoln.
  • The 1975 documentary 'Grey Gardens' the depiction of the lives of two reclusive relatives of Jackie Kennedy so fascinating.
  • The authors take us through the immediate aftermath of the assassination; the private memories of those closest to the slain president; the difficult period.

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    Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln


     

    Michael Burlingame, The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln
    (University of Illinois Press, 1994)
     
    Mary Todd Lincoln was an original. “Mrs Lincoln is like no human being I ever saw. She is not easy to get along with, though I succeed pretty well with her,” wrote one Federal official who had frequent dealings with her. 1 Mary Todd Lincoln was described at the time she made her home in Springfield in 1839: “She was of the average height, weighing about a hundred and thirty pounds. She was rather compactly built, had a well rounded face, rich dark-brown hair, and bluish-gray eyes. In her bearing she was proud, but handsome and vivacious; she was a good conversationalist, using with equal fluency the French and English languages.” This observer wrote: “When she used a pen, its point was sure to be sharp, and she wrote with wit and ability. She not only had a quick intellect but an intuitive judgment

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    "My mother gave me a completely priceless life." -- "Little Edie" Beale, 1917-2002


    Last night I was lucky enough to get see a screening of the new HBO film Grey Gardensstarring Jessie Lange as 'Big' Edie Bouvier Beale and Drew Barrymore as 'Little' Edie. Since I don't have HBO, this was the only way that I was going to see the film until it came out on DVD.

    As a native New Yorker, I was aware vaguely of the story of Jacqueline Onassis' relatives out on Long Island, and the documentary that was made about them, but I had never actually seen the film until two years ago after I had seen the Broadway musical of their live starring Christine Ebersole.

    After seeing the documentary and the musical, I wasn't sure that the world needed another depiction of their lives unless it was in book form (so far there has been no real biography written about these two women apart from a book by the Mayles and reminiscences from people who worked for them). I'm glad to say that I was proved wron
  • grey gardens mansion biography of abraham lincoln

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    The recent HBO movie Grey Gardens has been justly praised for its depiction of the squalid lives of "Big Edie" Beale and her daughter, "Little Edie," the eccentric aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. The movie fleshes out the brilliant 1975 bio made bygd the Maysles Brothers, generally regarded as one of the greatest documentaries ever made.

    But did you know there was another Grey Gardens? This mansion was called Hildene, and another great American family owned it -- the descendants of President Abraham Lincoln.

    Lincoln's son, Robert Todd Lincoln, built Hildene in 1903, in Manchester, Vermont. Robert Lincoln had served as sekreterare of war and minister to the Court of St. James. He made a fortune, as a lawyer and then as president of the Pullman Company.

    Hildene had twenty-four rooms. Lincoln called it his "ancestral home," but as his father had been born in a log cabin in the backwoods of Kentucky, people wondered what ancestry Robert Lincoln was