The Real Marble Faun from Grey Gardens
The Real Marble Faun from Grey Gardens
MargoChanning
Broadway Legend Joined: 4/5/04
#1The Real Marble Faun from Grey Gardens
Posted: 11/11/06 at 7:03pm
From Newsday:
"Jerry Torre graduated from Sachem High School in 1974 and found a summer job as a gardener at an East Hampton mansion. The owner, a member of the New York Stock Exchange, set up Torre in a room above the garage and put him to work.
One afternoon, the long-haired teen rode his bicycle down Lily Pond Lane and made note of a property with a car in the driveway. The car windows were down, the keys were in the ignition, and vines were snaking through the interior. Torre returned later that week, his curiosity piqued, to knock on the front door of the cobweb-covered home.
The middle-aged woman who answered took one look at him and said, "Oh, it's the Marble Faun," a reference to a Nathaniel Hawthorne story about a Greek sculpture - not that Torre knew it. But he could tell from the tone of her voice that it was a compliment. "I was enthralled," Torre recalled last week at a restaurant near his home in Sunnyside Gardens, Queens. "I said, 'I'd be really glad to help you with the property if you need any work done.'"
The woman was Edith Bouvier Beale, a former Park Avenue debutante who lived in the decaying, raccoon-infested house with her mother, also named Edith Bouvier Beale, an aunt of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. "Little Edie," as she was called, asked Torre to come back to meet "Mrs. Beale," who was mostly confined to a room on the top floor. The next day, the elder woman welcomed him with a lecture about the benefits of a balanced diet and an offer of corn on the cob - cooked on a Sterno she kept at her bedside.
That same summer, the Beales and their volunteer handyman were filmed by brothers David and Albert Maysles as the subject of their 1975 documentary "Grey Gardens," named for the Beales' crumbling home. The film became a cult sensation, and 31 years later, an Off-Broadway musical, winning accolades last spring for star Christine Ebersole. She reprises her double role as Mrs. Beale in the first act and Little Edie in the second when "Grey Gardens" opens Thursday on Broadway.
Albert Mayles' long search
Torre, now 51, has lived in Sunnyside for 12 years and driven a cab for the past 19. About a year ago, he picked up a fare at Ninth Avenue and 43rd Street. The passenger had a tripod, so he asked if she was in the film industry. "I said, 'Oh, have you heard of the movie "Grey Gardens"? I'm Jerry the Marble Faun.'" The woman said, "Albert Maysles has been looking for you for 33 years. You've got to call his studio."
The next day, Maysles was waiting for Torre with a video camera. The pair drove around for two hours, with the legendary documentarian ("Gimme Shelter") filming the entire time. Says Maysles, "Seeing Jerry again brought me right back to the time when we were all in the same little bedroom together and he was eating corn cooked by Mrs. Beale."
During the making of "Grey Gardens," Maysles gravitated to the kid with the "funny kind of Long Island accent," he recalls. "He was very young, and he had a peculiar way of speaking."
On their cab ride, Maysles told Torre that Playwrights Horizons was developing a musical based on "Grey Gardens." He gave Torre the phone number of the socialite who rents the estate most of the year from former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and his wife, writer Sally Quinn. Torre made arrangements for him and Maysles to drive out to the place with a film crew.
Torre had spent two summers living in the library at Grey Gardens, where he recalls mother and daughter arguing over "ridiculous" subjects, like Little Edie's choice of clothing. (A popular song in the musical is Little Edie's "The Revolutionary Costume for Today.")
He remembered how the shingles had been bored through by raccoons. Cat-food cans were scattered everywhere; the women did not take out their garbage for years. The Suffolk County Board of Health tried to evict the Beales until Onassis intervened, helping to get repairs going. When Torre returned there last year with Maysles, "the house finally looked like it should," he says.
"Really honored"
Torre is "really honored" that his adolescence has been immortalized in what is now a Broadway musical. He saw "Grey Gardens" five times at Playwrights Horizons, listening intently to the new music. One of the songs is called "Jerry Likes My Corn." Actually, he didn't. He admits, "I was polite and just told her I did."
He appreciates how the creative team behind "Grey Gardens" has portrayed the "tenderness" of his relationship with the women. "Mrs. Beale was like a second mother to me," he says. "My mother and Mrs. Beale couldn't see eye to eye, and my mother would come and try to get me out of there, but Mrs. Beale was always like, 'Stay here.' She became very protective over me."
After Mrs. Beale died in 1977, Torre helped Little Edie out with a cabaret act. Little Edie stayed in the East Hampton house less than a year, eventually moving to Canada, then to Miami Beach, where she died in 2002. Torre had not seen her since she left New York.
His last memory of Maysles, until their reunion, was of declining an invitation to join the director and Edie Beale at Lincoln Center for the premiere of "Grey Gardens" in 1975, because he didn't think the elder Mrs. Beale should be left home alone. Maysles still kvells about that screening, where Little Edie dramatically tossed a bouquet of flowers from their loge seats.
A former delivery boy
When Torre was coming of age in Holbrook, he worked as a delivery boy for Newsday. Actor Matt Cavenaugh, who will reprise his role as Jerry in the "Grey Gardens" transfer, plays the young man as he might have dressed then, wearing a Newsday T-shirt and a painter's cap.
Cavenaugh's interpretation of Torre falls somewhere between hunk and doofus. Sighs the cabbie, "They have me looking a little dim-witted, and I don't understand why. I'm not a Harvard graduate, but I'm not a dopey man. I'm like, 'C'mon, let's bring this up a few notches.' But that's theatrical license, right?"
Torre says other parts of the musical take liberties with the facts. The script refers to how Jerry "ripped a washing machine out of the McAllister Mansion," essentially stealing it for the Beales. Actually, he says, it was the Geddes mansion, where he worked in 1974. "And I didn't 'rip' it out. It was given to me as a gift."
Not that Torre's holding a grudge. He says he's flattered by the attention he's received since the musical was launched. He's writing a book about his life, which also will cover his time working for the Saudi royal family in Riyadh, and a summer in Provincetown he spent in the employ of puppeteer Wayland Flowers.
On the Web, too
Eight months ago, Torre joined an Internet message board dedicated to "Grey Gardens," presumably becoming the site's most authoritative source. He'll soon head to San Francisco to address a group about the saga. With Maysles soon to debut "The Beales of Grey Gardens," a 90-minute film culled from unused "Grey Gardens" footage, and a cinematic update in the works, starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore, Torre is likely to be reveling in his youth for some time to come.
Many nights of late, Torre trolls for fares outside the Walter Kerr Theater, where "Grey Gardens" is in previews. Once he made eye contact with Cavenaugh, who was signing autographs. "I don't want to push myself on him. I just want to say, 'Do you want to talk to me so you know what I'm like a little bit more?'"
Two weeks ago, a woman who got into his taxi figured out who he was. "I said, 'What did you think of the show?' She said, 'It was a little bit of everything. A little sad, a little happy.' I dropped her over at Penn Station." Another evening, he picked up composer Scott Frankel, playwright Doug Wright and director Michael Greif.
Torre hasn't seen their pumped-up Broadway version of "Grey Gardens" yet, but he'll be in the audience when it opens Thursday night. He wants to represent Mrs. Beale and Little Edie and the people who knew him back when.
"I'm a little scared, a little nervous," he says. "I'm also thrilled. I'm honored. How could you not be honored? My mother would be proud. It's so personal. When I go to see the show, I'm watching them explain something I know a lot about."
Summer job of a lifetime
"What a story........ everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end." -- Birdie
[http://margochanning.broadwayworld.com/]
"The Devil Be Hittin' Me" -- Whitney
MargoChanning
Broadway Legend Joined: 4/5/04
#1re: The Real Marble Faun from Grey Gardens
Posted: 11/11/06 at 7:11pm
And here's an earlier article on him from The New Yorker that's a bit more revealing about his private life:
"One afternoon last year, a woman got into a taxi lugging a video camera and a tripod. The driver, a stocky middle-aged man with close-cropped hair and a goatee, asked her if she was in the film business and if she had ever seen the movie “Grey Gardens.” She said yes. “Well,” the driver said. “I’m the Marble Faun.” The woman gasped and told him, “Albert Maysles has been looking for you for years.”
“Grey Gardens,” Albert and David Maysles’ 1975 cult documentary, chronicled the lives of the eccentric socialite Edith Bouvier Beale (Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s aunt) and her middle-aged daughter, Little Edie, who lived together in gothic isolation in a decaying, cat-ridden East Hampton mansion. As aficionados will recall, the only regular visitor to the Beales’ self-contained world was a sensitive teen-age handyman, with delicate features, big hair, and a Brooklyn accent. Little Edie nicknamed him the Marble Faun, after the Nathaniel Hawthorne novel, but his given name was Jerry Torre. No one had heard from him since 1979.
Not long after the encounter in the taxi, Albert Maysles (David died in 1987) and his long-lost subject were reunited. Torre learned not only that he had become a camp icon but that he was about to be portrayed onstage in a musical based on the film. (It opens next month, at Playwrights Horizons.)
Torre grew up in Brooklyn, the son of a sanitation worker and a school custodian. (He claims that Joe Torre, the manager of the Yankees, is a distant cousin.) He ran away when he was sixteen and found his way to East Hampton, where he worked as a gardener on an estate next door to Grey Gardens. One afternoon, Torre decided to explore the seemingly abandoned property. “I had no idea that anybody actually lived there—there were cobwebs all over the vestibule,” he recalled. “But I knock on the door, and, sure enough, Edie comes walking down the stairs in one of her turbans. Frankly, I **** a brick, because I thought she was going to report me for trespassing. Instead, she embraced me, stroked my hair, and said, ‘Oh, my God—the Marble Faun has arrived.’ I had no idea what she meant, but I was enthralled.”
Despite the moldering furniture and the raccoons that fell through holes in the ceiling, Torre found a second home at Grey Gardens. He also found a second mother in Mrs. Beale, who, he recalled, used to lecture him on the importance of a balanced diet and then serve him liver pâté and undercooked corn. Torre says they became close after he persuaded E.M.S. workers not to take her to a hospital, during a raid by the health department. He remembers his relationship with Edie as more of a “sibling rivalry.” He said, “The Beales showed me a life where you could be yourself, explore, take chances. Who was I to ask them why they chose to live in such filth and squalor?”
In the film, Mrs. Beale says, “Jerry’s out every night with a different girl.” In fact, Torre’s life outside Grey Gardens centered on local gay night spots, such as the Attic. And he often drove into the city to spend evenings cruising bathhouses in a towel (he says he was voted Mr. Club Baths 1977) or dancing in his jockstrap on the bar at the Anvil.
Though she didn’t appear in the Maysleses’ movie, Jacqueline Onassis turns up in the musical, as the young Jackie Bouvier. Torre recalls meeting Onassis when she visited Grey Gardens. He says that she used to call the house occasionally, to check on her aunt and cousin, and that she once asked him to take her out clubbing. He remembers bringing her to the Anvil, where they watched a fire-eating drag contortionist perform. Afterward, Onassis’s driver took them back to her building, where she invited Torre up for a drink. “I said no thanks,” he said. “I went back to the Anvil.”
After “Grey Gardens” was released, Torre says, he helped Edie out with a cabaret act that she had put together. But after Mrs. Beale died, in 1977, Edie sold the house, eventually moving to Florida (she died in 2002), and they lost touch. Torre took a job with the Saudi royal family, tending a two-and-a-half-acre tropical garden in Riyadh. He had his own villa, with a pool and a personal chef, but he found life lonely.
After returning to the States, he moved to the East Village and opened an art-moving company, called AAA All-Boro Trucking. He ran the business with his boyfriend, who died in the late eighties. Despondent, Torre went into seclusion. He eventually moved to Sunnyside, Queens, where he lives now. He drives a taxi three days a week, and he spends most of his free time chatting on the Internet, working out, and carving nude sculptures out of marble. He recently bought a copy of “The Marble Faun” on Amazon, but he hasn’t got around to reading it yet.
The other day Torre attended a preview of “Grey Gardens,” the musical, in which the role of Jerry is played by a square-jawed young actor named Matt Cavenaugh. He wears a Newsday sweatshirt and a painter’s cap, as Torre did as a teen-ager, and what looks like a Beatles wig. Torre’s eyes teared up several times during the show, particularly when, after a song called “Jerry Likes My Corn,” the stage Jerry said, “You be good now, Mrs. Beale—you take care of yourself.”
“It’s actually a relief to see somebody playing me for a change,” Torre said later. “He portrayed me as a little dimwitted, but otherwise it was pretty accurate.” He added, “The depiction of Jerry’s hair—that wig he sported—it didn’t quite work.”
THE MARBLE FAUN
"What a story........ everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end." -- Birdie
[http://margochanning.broadwayworld.com/]
"The Devil Be Hittin' Me" -- Whitney
#2re: The Real Marble Faun from Grey Gardens
Posted: 11/11/06 at 7:40pm
great stuff!! I had no idea he was gay!!
he must be very pleased that they changed the line about the washing machine.
#3re: The Real Marble Faun from Grey Gardens
Posted: 11/11/06 at 8:26pmI would love to get into his cab! He seems like a very interesting guy and I am looking forward to reading his book, and to seeing the new unreleased grey gardens footage.
...What happened next, was stranger still, a woman breathless and afraid, appeared out of the night, completely dressed in white. She had a secret she would tell, of one who had mistreated her. Her face and frightened gaze, my mind cannot erase...But then she ran from view. She looked so much like you...
#4re: The Real Marble Faun from Grey Gardens
Posted: 11/11/06 at 8:44pm
I think I remember him from the Anvil... 
"It's not so much do what you like, as it is that you like what you do." SS
"Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana." GMarx
"Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana." GMarx
TheatreDiva90016
Broadway Legend Joined: 4/10/04
#5re: The Real Marble Faun from Grey Gardens
Posted: 11/11/06 at 8:49pm
Wow! What a trip it must be for him to see his youth as part of a Broadway musical!
'Jerry Likes My Corn' gave me a good laugh as well.
"TheatreDiva90016 - another good reason to frequent these boards less."<<>>
“I hesitate to give this line of discussion the validation it so desperately craves by perpetuating it, but the light from logic is getting further and further away with your every successive post.” <<>>
-whatever2
Broadway Legend Joined: 12/31/69
#6re: The Real Marble Faun from Grey Gardens
Posted: 11/11/06 at 9:04pm
FoscasBohemianDream
Broadway Star Joined: 1/20/06
#7re: The Real Marble Faun from Grey Gardens
Posted: 11/11/06 at 9:48pmThe article refuting Jerry's comments from the first two articles Margo posted is interesting and unexpected. I still would love to meet Jerry regardless. It's funny that Big Edie thought of him as a casanova when he was gay in reality.
#8re: The Real Marble Faun from Grey Gardens
Posted: 4/11/07 at 5:51pm
What a fantastic article. Thank you!
Happy...Everything!
Kaye Thompson
#9re: The Real Marble Faun from Grey Gardens
Posted: 4/11/07 at 6:08pm
he was voted Mr. Club Baths 1977
Oh. My. God. That was HIM?!?
#10re: The Real Marble Faun from Grey Gardens
Posted: 4/11/07 at 6:14pmWow. That was very interesting.
One time, Patti LuPone punched me in the face...
It was awesome. - theaterkid1015
It was awesome. - theaterkid1015
