The 'Grey Gardens' Phenomenon

By Anne Brodie Jan 21, 2007, 6:18 GMT

From the Maysles’ brother’s classic 1975 documentary ‘Grey Gardens’

Nicole Kidman, René Zellwegger, Meryl Streep and Angelina Jolie are all rumored to have wanted a crack at the Beales.

However, Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore grabbed the plum roles of Big Edie and Little Edie Bouvier- Beale in Michael Sucsy’s feature film 'Grey Gardens' due out this year. Sucsy wrote, directs and produces the fifth film tribute to the oddest mother / daughter team in what passes for American aristocratic circles.

The Maysles’ brother’s classic 1975 documentary ‘Grey Gardens’ has just been released on DVD with The Bouvier- Beales of Grey Gardens, which Albert Maysles shot thirty years later.

Singer dancer Christine Ebersole has enjoyed a comeback as Little Edie in the hit Broadway musical Grey Gardens, which opened in October at the Walter Kerr Theatre and continues to draw raves.

Youtube offers a mash up of Madonna’s ‘Hang Up’ over Little Edie bravely dancing with an American flag in the front hall of Grey Gardens, called Madonna is Hung Up on Grey Gardens.

Rufus Wainwright wrote a love sick, lonely song called Grey Gardens in 2001.

In 2005, Liliana Greenfield-Sanders’s documentary ‘Ghosts of Grey Gardens’fed the mystique.

So what’s the fuss? Two old dears living in squalor in a seaside mansion?

Grey Gardens was a once magnificent seaside summer home of the Bouvier-Beale dynasty, an architectural gem with manicured grounds looking down into Long Island Sound. It was called Grey Gardens because of its inability to sustain color in the gardens.

The only inhabitants from 1952 to the late seventies were a mother and daughter, Big Edie and Little Edie Bouvier-Beale, the aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

They didn’t do much to keep Grey Gardens clean, organized or pretty.

It hit the papers in 1975, not as an upper crust hang out for Edie and her friends, but as a sad reminder of those days.

The East Hampton, New York Sanitation Department raided the house with its rotting walls, floors and windows, shorting wires and about 52 cats and raccoons. There was no water service and the house was filled with garbage.

Once the jewel of the ritzy, old money Georgica Pond, it had disintegrated into an overgrown eyesore where two eccentric women wandered, feeding their critters pet food, bread and ice cream, sometimes undressed.

Grey Gardens was never meant to be more than a summer home for the wealthy Bouvier-Beales, but the two Edie Beales moved in 1952 and stayed put.

The former Camelot social register pair shared a tiny room with two single beds, a hotplate and heaps of garbage. The rest of the reeking, 28-room mansion and its fine art and furnishings collected dust.

Imposing society portraits of the onetime beautiful women lined the walls, reminders of what they had been and done, as Camelot era Bouviers, but the Edies didn’t pay much attention.

‘Jackie O’s aunt and cousin living in squalor!’ screamed the papers

The raid and subsequent publicity shamed Jackie or some say Aristotle Onassis into writing a hefty check to clean it up.

That’s what David and Albert Maysles came to document in 1975.

They were surprised to discover that the Beales were the real attractions - spirited, lively, and resigned to lives of seclusion; a singer and a dancer sentenced to permanent hiding.

Little Edie wore different ‘revolutionary costumes’ and staged shows each day for her mother. Such energy and originality, alas – not much talent.

They bickered about all the men little Edie had to turn down, like Paul Getty and his fellow social register colleagues.

Big and Little Edie were at odds on these points. Did Little Edie just give up because Big Edie manipulated her or was she simply not able to sustain a normal relationship with a man?

Mother and daughter were each other’s only relationship, but it was a tight one, leavened with humor, gentle bickering, love and drama.

Albert Maysles released ninety minutes of unseen footage from 1976 in ‘The Beales of Grey Gardens’ in 2006.  It shows the strange effect their story had out in the world, a picture of Mick Jagger anxiously waiting to meet Little Edie ( no wonder – she bears a strong resemblance to Jerry Hall).

By that time, after her mother’s death, Little Edie had reinvented herself as a lounge singer. Apparently, she put on quite the show.

The second doco came out in conjunction with the Broadway musical Grey Gardens - which follows Edie Bouvier-Beale from a young, privileged and exceptionally beautiful girl (Erin Davie) to the surreal years at Grey Gardens.

Tony award winner Mary Louise Wilson plays Big Edie. From her life of beauty pageants and debutante balls to singin’ and dancin’ to win her mothers approval, in a mansion about to be condemned, Ebersole as Little Edie finds the joy and spirit so present in the Maysles’ documentary. 

Each day Little Edie vowed to wear a ‘revolutionary costume’, cobbled together from a lifetime of never throwing anything away. ‘Mother wanted me to come out in a kimono we had quite a fight’.  Ebersole has her flighty, but intimated manner nailed.

The other documentary, ‘The Ghosts of Grey Gardens,’ features interviews with designer Todd Oldham, writer Beauregard Houston-Montgomery, performance artist Johanna Went and current Grey Gardens owners Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee. 

The power couple shows us around Grey Gardens as it looks today - and somehow, we want to spend time with Big and Little Edie as the house implodes.

Bring it on, Drew and Jessica!

Drew Barrymore (left) will play Little Edie Bouvier-Beale (right).