THE MARBLE FAUN.(The Talk of the Town)(Jerry Torre)(Biography)

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 shit 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 pate 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 ...