‘Staunch Characters’ Battle Over Painting of Jackie Kennedy

NEW YORK — Far from the glamour of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, her eccentric aunt and cousin, former socialites who were both named Edith Beale, lived in squalor in Grey Gardens, a sprawling house in East Hampton, along with cats, raccoons and the decaying trappings of their earlier lives in high society.

Among these trappings, the Beales’ heirs say, was an oil painting of the former first lady as a teenager, bequeathed in lieu of a financial inheritance to the elder Beale by her brother, John Vernou Bouvier III, who was Onassis’ father and a well-to-do stockbroker known as Black Jack.

The painting, lost to the Beale family for decades, is now at the center of a legal battle between them and an art gallery owner in East Hampton who bought the portrait years ago and who dismisses the Beale family’s claim to ownership.

Bouvier Beale Jr., a cousin of Onassis, has filed a lawsuit against Terry Wallace, who has owned Wallace Gallery on Main Street in the heart of East Hampton for 25 years and has a clientele made up of rich and famous buyers.

Beale’s suit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Central Islip, calls the portrait “a unique and irreplaceable work of art” and a stolen heirloom that the family has long been seeking.

As the plaintiff in the suit, Beale claims the painting was stolen from Grey Gardens. The estate became well known after it was featured in a 1975 documentary “Grey Gardens,” which depicted the two Edith Beales, a mother and daughter known respectively as Big Edie and Little Edie. The older woman was Beale’s grandmother and the younger one was his aunt.

Bouvier, who died 1957, hired a society portrait artist, Irwin Hoffman, to paint his then 19-year-old daughter, Jacqueline Lee Bouvier. The portrait depicts Jackie — her head tightly framed and wearing a white embroidered blouse and a navy vest — on the eve of traveling to Paris to study at the Sorbonne several years before she would meet and marry her first husband, John F. Kennedy.

The painting remains a link between the fallen socialites and their relative, Onassis, who became one of the most celebrated women in the world. And the suit involves a fascinating part of Bouvier family history that helped make the documentary a cult classic and later led to a Broadway musical and a 2009 HBO movie starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore.

Wallace has refused the Beale family’s request to provide proof of its ownership or else hand over the painting, and depicts the suit as an attempt to “steal” the painting rather than buy it.

He called its provenance “impeccable,” and said he bought it legitimately in the late 1980s from “a very reputable” art and antiques dealer. He refused to name the dealer but said he was prepared to do so in court and give a full accounting of the painting’s ownership history.

“It’s going to be part of my defense,” he said.

According to the lawsuit, the painting was likely stolen from Grey Gardens in the late 1960s. The two women never reported the theft because of a contentious relationship with local officials over the poor condition of their home, the lawsuit claims.

Grey Gardens was eventually cleaned up and somewhat restored with the help of financing by Onassis in 1972.

Two years after Big Edie’s death in 1977, Little Edie sold Grey Gardens to a Washington power couple, Ben Bradlee, then the executive editor of The Washington Post, and Sally Quinn, the journalist and author.

Little Edie’s flamboyant manner in the documentary helped make her a campy icon known for her memorable description of herself as a “staunch character” — “They don’t weaken, no matter what.” Before her death in 2002, at age 84, she asked Beale, the executor of her estate, to recover items stolen from Grey Gardens, he said.

Beale and his wife, Eva, who live in California, spent years after Little Edie’s death going through reams of letters and documents she had left behind, “in keeping with her wishes for the family to preserve her history and attend to her outstanding affairs,” Beale said in a statement, through his lawyer, Megan Noh.

“From these letters, we learned that Jackie’s father, ‘Black Jack’ Bouvier, had mishandled a family trust that would have provided Edie with financial security,” Beale said in the statement. “Before his death, he gave his prized portrait of Jackie to Edie to make things right.”

Around 2004, Eva Beale happened to see the painting at Wallace’s gallery “and had a feeling about it,” so she asked Wallace about its provenance, Beale said. He responded that he bought it from a dealer who was now dead but would not identify the dealer.

That feeling that the painting came from Grey Gardens was confirmed in 2016 when Beale and his wife found in Little Edie’s records a 1998 article from Hamptons magazine that showed the painting and described it as having “disappeared” from Grey Gardens and bought by Wallace from a dealer.

The article “led us to realize that the missing painting was indeed the one at Wallace Gallery,” Beale said.

The article mentioned that it was the only portrait of Onassis as a teenager. The article describes it as being painted shortly after she fell off a horse and incurred a scar that is visible in the painting.

The painting “has got a good story behind it,” Wallace said, but is not very valuable. The painting has been appraised, he said, but he would not disclose that figure.

The lawsuit claims that the painting “well exceeds the $75,000 threshold” necessary to bring a federal suit. Noh would not give an estimate but noted that memorabilia associated with the Kennedys has historically brought “a significant premium above its intrinsic value.”

Noh said that under New York state law, an owner cannot gain what is legally recognized as “good title” to a work of art if there has been a theft in its chain of custody.

And with the Beales’ “arguable claim” on the painting, “the burden shifts to the current possessor to prove that the work was not stolen,” she said.

But Wallace called it “a very strong possibility” that the painting was never even given to Big Edie.

“They’re just assuming it must be part of their legacy — these people don’t really know,” said Wallace, 70, a blunt-spoken former Marine who served in the Vietnam War. He called himself an honest dealer who had personally assisted local police and federal investigators working on theft and fraud cases over the years.

“I have a good clientele. Why would I risk my reputation for a painting?” Wallace asked.

Still, Noh said, “It is difficult to understand why Mr. Wallace refuses to disclose the provenance of the Jackie portrait.”

As for the painting’s provenance, which Wallace would be required to disclose for the case, if it is indeed impeccable, Noh said, “It is puzzling that he would choose to engage in that costly legal process, rather than voluntarily provide the information.”

Wallace said he would “gladly return the painting to the rightful owner, if it could be proven that the painting was stolen.”

Otherwise, he said, he would welcome an offer from the Beale estate to buy the painting, even while cautioning that the price might climb because “I’m getting more annoyed by the day.”

“They got a law firm to push me around, but I’m not that pushable,” he said. “Maybe they didn’t figure that into the equation.”