The process was an "archeological expedition? Ben Bradlee, the former executive editor of the Washington Post who died in 2014 at age 93, has a long list of accomplishments to his name. He fought the federal government over the publication of the Pentagon Papers and oversaw the Post's exposure of the Watergate scandal, to name a few. A lesser-known, but still pretty amazing fact about Bradlee: He and his wife, journalist Sally Quinn, were the ones who restored East Hampton's famously decrepit Grey Gardens estate.
Built in 1897, Grey Gardens was made famous by the 1975 documentary of the same name starring then-owners Edith "Big Edie" Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edith "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale, who were the aunt and first cousin, respectively, of former U.S. First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. After the squalor and isolation they lived in was exposed in the early '70s, Jackie O made a famous visit to the house to clean it up, and to save her relatives from eviction. The film, which took place a few years later, found the incorrigible Edies living still-impoverished lives in their once again filthy mansion. Flirting openly with the cameramen while handling dozens of indoor-outdoor cats in various stages of non-domestication, they became America's first and most fabulous cat ladies. The documentary was later adapted into an acclaimed Broadway musical, and after that, an HBO film starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore as the Edies.

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