Day 32/34 - Grey Gardens (1976)

By 1975, when Albert and David Maysles were filming “Big Edie” Ewing Bouvier Beales and her daughter “Little Edie” Bouvier Beales for their documentary, the women had become recluses, living among crumpled newspapers, discarded packages, dirt, and cats and fleas. The two women were by then inhabiting only a few rooms of the East Hampton 28-room grey hulk of a mansion (named for “the color of the dunes, the cement gardenwalls, and the sea mist”) which gave great irony to its name, Grey Gardens. From 1971 to 1972, their living conditions had been so deplorable and infamous, that a series of “raids” from the Suffolk County Health Department almost led to their eviction and the razing of the house. In 1972, former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and her sister Lee Radziwill (Big Edie’s nieces) stepped in and had provided enough funds to keep them in the home, which was repaired barely enough to meet village codes.

The Maysles film, Grey Gardens, begins with Big Edie’s discovery of a hole in one wall where a cat may have disappeared. A raccoon has taken up residence in the attic. Little Edie later feeds it loaves of bread and boxes of cat food, and it in turn tears down a whole section of the wall. That sense of invasion of the Beales’ world runs throughout the film.

It is easy to feel that the Maysles brothers have taken us to a Tennessee Williams world of loss and decay. Our views of the two women, who are obviously flattered by the male attention, seems to prompt intimate and highly personal insight into their lives. It seems immediately ironic that the opening remark from David Mayles is that they are “Gentlemen Callers.” The two women are always aware of the team and perform together and separately for them. Each woman reveals more and more of insights into their lives, past and present, while bickering, chatting, and speaking in Williamseque monologues that the other cannot always hear because she is speaking her own monologue.

Mother Big Edie sings “Tea for Two” while propped up in bed with wearing a large floppy beach hat, her thick glasses, a filmy nightgown and blue open smock. She declares with satisfaction that she still has her voice. Daughter Little Edie sings and dances, finally performing a flag march routine in a bathing suit, top, and scarf.

It would be easy to mock the two women, but the longer I shared time with them, the less I was inclined to do that. 
Little Edie blames her mother for her not being married or having had a career. “She wanted the people she wanted to live here,” she says. Then she finishes her thought with, “I had animals, but after awhile the raccoon and the cats become boring.” Both women have powerful regrets about lives not lived.

Still attractive at 50, Little Edie’s eccentric fashion sense at first shocks us. She appears in a tight brown sweater, navy sweater gathered on her head like a loose  turban with huge gold brooch to pin it on, clearly visible panty hose under a shortened and pinned brown skirt “which you can always take off and use as a cape,” and high heels. The ubiquitious scarf or sweater turban on her head hides the loss of hair she experienced in her 30s from alopecia universalis.

Later, as Little Edie goes through pictures of the beautiful women they once were, using her magnifying glass to counter the effects of her cataracts, we get a sense of who the two once were.

One of the ironic moments deals with a beautiful large oil portrait of Big Edie in the 1920s propped on the floor beside her bed. One of the cats stands behind it and pees on. This has obviously happened before, and no one considers hanging the portrait out of harm’s way.

At one point, Edie performs a dance routine to a patriotic march, wearing a white high heels, a black bathing suit, over a black sweater, with a navy and red scarf turban, carrying an American flag. She dances coquettishly for her “caller.” At the end, Little Edie again dances for the Mayles brothers while wearing a black lace dress hiked up into a short skirt. The cameraman stands up the stairs cut-off and she seems lost in her own world. At that moment, she becomes Williams’ Amanda Wingfield.  I feel great sadness knowing that her mother would be die within a year and that Little Edie would go on to become an unsuccessful cabaret singer before her own death in 2002.

This is a powerful film and by the end, I found myself under their spell. Hope Lange and Drew Barrymore portrayed the two for an HBO Grey Gardens docudrama, but the two powerful actresses reach none of the personal charm and eccentricities of the real women.

Grey Gardens, part of the Criterion Collection on Hulu Plus, is a definite must see. *****