The current owner of Grey Gardens, Liz Lange, will be the first to tell you that the storied history of the place was certainly a selling point when she moved in back in 2015, but to not read too much into the fact that the mother and daughter who once resided there experienced a familial fall from grace.
She says as much in the first episode of an eight-episode podcast by The New Yorker’s Ariel Levy and Sony that tells the story of Lange, the fashion designer who famously revolutionized maternitywear in the ’90s. She’s also a member of the Steinberg family, a tabloid fixture in the last few decades of the 20th century. Levy and Lange are close friends, and talk as close friends do, revealing a discussion of wealth from the first-person perspective that feels like eavesdropping. We usually have to watch HBO for that kind of thing.
“I wouldn’t have done this if it wasn’t with Ari, just like I wouldn’t go on a reality TV show understanding that the producers—and I’m not saying they’re doing wrong—that our interests aren’t aligned. They need good TV,” Lange told me over the phone in late August. “So they’d need to like, you know, dice and splice my words to make me look completely bonkers, saying terrible things about people.”
There had been conversations around potential memoirs between the two, but the idea for the podcast solidified when Lange told Levy of her childhood fantasy of the “The Just Enough Family,” which lends the podcast it’s name. The Just Enough Family, as she explains it, is an invention that she indulged in when she was a kid, writing stories, or simply making them up in her head, about a family that was getting by with just enough.
In reality, at the time, her own family was doing much more than just getting by. They were the Steinbergs, a Jewish New York family that made their mark on the city thanks to Lange’s uncle Saul, who ran Reliance Insurance Company with the help of Lange’s father, Robert, which eventually went into liquidation. Remembered as one of the first corporate raiders who upended Wall Street and the city’s social world from the ’70s up to the ’90s, Saul took his whole family along for the ride, both up and then down. He died in 2012.
“To me, I felt like the world was fascinated by us,” she said of her formative years, the ’70s and ’80s, when she was in grade school, then college. “I’m not saying that was the way it was, but I felt like I couldn’t open up the New York Post or Page Six and not see something about my uncle or something in my family. I just felt like it was so out there. And to live in New York City during that time felt like we were sort of at the white-hot center of that world.”
Lange with her sister Jane.
Courtesy of Liz Lange.The hyper-rich spending conspicuously is a forever fascination of this country, but, more so even, the “rich family loses it all” is a story that’s always in vogue. This one was told, to the family’s displeasure, in Vanity Fair in a retelling of the Sotheby’s auction where Saul and his third wife, the magnetic Gayfryd Steinberg, sold off their collection of museum-quality antiques (New York magazine contributed its own narrative, marveling at the gold-plated Camelot on Park Avenue lost). It was called “Vanished Opulence,” and it stung.
It was Lange’s side of it, however, that preserved a kind of childlike wonder toward growing up Steinberg. The story told through the podcast is less about the bad year when all the funds were gone, and more about the absurdities of their world and, perhaps more relatable, the messy dynamics that might be familiar to anyone so fortunate as to have a family. Whose cousin’s house was more fun, which parent favored which child, which child favored which parent. This or that traumatic moment from when they were little. Who’s significant other is a spot on the family name, and whose was a boon to the family.
And Lange’s is not the only side told—Levy hears from Lange’s mother, Kathy Steinberg, a real estate broker and Olympic-level shopper; her father, Robert, Saul’s number two; and Gayfryd, the fascinating outsider coming in from New Orleans who party-planned her way into the hearts of New York’s social set at the time, including that of Tina Brown. Each share their own memories, and help to color in what might look cartoonish given the time lapse and likely wealth gap of its listener.
Lange is a wonderful narrator of the experience because she keeps a childlike pitch about it, preserving somehow an incredulousness that it all had happened. “I remember once traveling with my parents, and somebody came over to my father and said, ‘Oh, hey, if I lived in your apartment, I’d probably never leave it,’” she said. “And I was like, ‘Dad, has that person ever been to our apartment? What are they talking about?’ And he was like, ‘No, but I guess they’ve seen pictures of it.’”
The enormous pull of that narrative—the ups and downs of a family fortune—can overshadow some of the dramatic arcs of Lange’s life, including finding her own hole in a market, like her uncle did, but with maternitywear that didn’t turn women into large babies themselves; surviving cervical cancer; her own marriage to the late, brilliant Jeff Lange, strained under the weight of his mental health issues; and 9/11, which happened on the day of her first runway show.
Kathy Steinberg, Liz Lange, and Robert Steinberg in New York City.
By Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images.Lange has a refreshing take on her own business, Liz Lange Maternity, of which she sold a majority stake in 2007, a few years before every woman entrepreneur had to have their woman-entrepreneur story lined up. Any Silicon Valley–engineered girlboss gloss one might try to apply to her history is just that: cosmetic. “If I’m being really honest, at the beginning, it was just an idea about cute clothing for pregnant women,” she said. “It’s not just the feminist part [that people get wrong about it]. There’s all this entrepreneur stuff where they’re like, So, you know, you bravely took the entrepreneur plunge, you disrupted the space, you saw a white space. And I’m like, You don’t understand. In 1996 we didn’t use those words. I would never have spoken about myself that way. I didn’t feel brave. I was—I was rich. So I had family money. So it wasn’t really brave.”
That is the kind of refusal to dip into overarching narratives that makes the podcast worth listening to, whether the family is talking about their runaway wealth or about how they treated one another or even the secret family that Robert kept. It’s not as though nobody has a horse in the race to retell it, but it is a product of those looking back more than 20 years later a little more gimlet-eyed than before. It’s not an unbiased history. It’s way more fun that that; it’s a conversation with a supportive friend who is both one who’ll roll their eyes at you if you go rewriting the past a little too favorably and a great gossip.
“I don’t know that I could have done the podcast while I was in the middle of it, nor would I have. It only works in my mind because it’s no longer true,” she said. “It doesn’t feel to me like I’m bragging because I’m not like, Hey, my name is Liz. I’m 13 years old. We have a private plane, a private helicopter.”
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The True Story Behind the Rise and Fall of One of New York’s Great Families, Told by Those Who Were There - Vanity Fair
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