High Society Drop Outs

Creative intellects and reclusion seem always to have gone hand in hand. Sometimes there even seems to be a kind of inverse relation between a person’s artistic genius and their need to share it, whereby interesting people tend not to give much of hemselves away and, conversely, those with precious little to impart on the world unfortunately do very little else. While many expressive and visionary minds manage to find an outlet for their creativity and leave behind a legacy of literature, films or paintings, there are still a great many brilliant brains – quite possibly on the more loopy side of things – that owing to their reclusive natures, we will never receive any sort of access to. But it is precisely this rare insight that the Maysles’ 1975 documentary Grey Gardens allows us. There are of course many reasons that Grey Gardens continues to fascinate and inspire so long after it was first made: the costumes, the bizarre mother-daughter tensions, the cats, racoons, and the beautiful but ruinous backdrop of the Grey Gardens mansion itself, but ultimately it is the privileged look into the interior and otherwise entirely inaccessible lives of two genuine eccentrics that has made it such a unique film.

Over six weeks, Al and David spent around five days a week at the Beales’, capturing the women going about their day which consisted of doing nothing much albeit with a lot of verve and a captivating volubility.

Edith ‘Big Edie’ Ewing Bouvier Beale and Edith ‘Little Edie’ Bouvier Beale were born into American aristocracy and were the aunt and cousin respectively of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. Little Edie enjoyed a gilded upbringing and seemed to possess all the qualities needed to become a successful socialite: the right ancestry, an excellent education and last but not least, awe-inspiring beauty. As fate would have it though, the Beales rose to national attention not by a high profile wedding to Howard Hughes or J. Paul Getty, from whom Little Edie claimed she’d had proposals, nor by successes on the silverscreen of which she dreamed, but rather in the early seventies when the Board of Health made a raid on the Bouvier Beale East Hamptons estate, Grey Gardens, and the National Enquirer ran an exposé on the deplorable conditions in which they lived.

Mrs Beale had separated from her husband in 1931 when Little Edie was 14 years old. Though she was given child support, she received no alimony and was left to rely on her family. Obviously, Big Edie in one way or another did not live up to the family’s expectations and was mostly cut out of her father’s will, leaving her to support herself, her daughter and the running of Grey Gardens on a small trust-fund. After disappointments in New York (both personal and professional) and on the request of her mother, who suffered depression and had undergone numerous eye operations, Little Edie, aged 35, moved back to Grey Gardens in 1952. It was about two decades later that the ‘raid’, as Little Edie chose to call it, was carried out and the Beales were ordered to clean up the property or face eviction. Following the publicity, Jackie O – now the wife of one of the richest men in the world, Aristotle Onassis – donated some thousands of dollars in order to clean the house, install a new plumbing system and furnace, as well as cart away thousands of bags of rubbish.

In the 1970s, Lee Radziwill, the younger sister of Jackie O, began discussions with David and Albert Maysles about creating a documentary on Jacqueline Kennedy’s childhood in the East Hamptons. In this context, the brothers visited the two Edies and quickly came to the decision that this mother-daughter duo would make a more interesting subject for their film. Over six weeks, Al and David spent around five days a week at the Beales’, capturing the women going about their day which consisted of doing nothing much albeit with a lot of verve and a captivating volubility. In an interview Albert Maysles has confessed it was originally thought they would live in part of the house during filming but that the smell created by the dozens of cats and racoons in the house was simply too overwhelming.

But a film depicting two women – aristocracy or not – living in sequestered squalor would be much too dire to garner the kind of following that Grey Gardens has. And so we get to the duality of Big and Little Edie, for as much as they chose a life in seclusion, both were performers at heart. Big Edie had pursued a singing career, giving recitals in her home and at local functions, while Little Edie wanted to be a dancer. Another definite hallmark of the documentary is Little Edie’s great sense of fashion. That she didn’t have access to the latest and most expensive fashions is clear, but nevertheless she manages to put together one dramatically stylish ensemble after the other using tablecloths, drapery and refurbished clothing many sizes too small – often claimed to be the hand-me-downs of cousin Jackie O. Her incomparable style has served as inspiration for fashion spreads in Italian Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar among others, and most recently Galliano’s 2008 spring/summer collection was in direct homage to the unlikely style icon. In the film she is never seen without some sort of headwear, sometimes a sweater or a towel fashioned into a turban with a giant brooch. We are left to speculate over the state of Edie’s hair, lack thereof or the possible causes, and though it would be pure speculation it’s nonetheless interesting to note that in some esoteric medical opinions (see, for example, Thorwald Dethlefsen) alopecia is linked to social inhibition.

They simply could not be themselves as Bouviers and the only way to escape this was to go off and become recluses.

Of inhibition there is however little trace in the Maysles brothers’ documentary, and much of its genius lies in the way that it pulled these women out of their seclusion, but in a way that was obviously acceptable to them. Upon its release, Grey Gardens met with fierce criticism, most of it based on the belief that the film is exploitative. A Mr Walter Goodman of the New York Times complained at the show of so much “sagging flesh” and dismissed the Beales as “grotesque” and a “freak sideshow”, criticism that Little Edie took issue with in a very eloquent letter to the newspaper, explaining that her mother and she were certainly no victims, that they were proud of the film, regarded it a work by pioneering filmmakers and “a breakthrough into something very beautiful and precious called life”. The response was unfortunately never printed, the New York Times instead claiming Ms Beale to be a schizophrenic. Grey Gardens is no doubt an intense piece of filmmaking, but equally as entertaining. It eschews the use of voiceover or other formal narration. This, in combination with the very intimate camera work of Albert Maysles, makes the viewer feel absolutely present in each scene. Scenes that are littered with Little Edie’s gems of unwitting camp (“I am pulverised by this latest thing…” or “Racoons and cats become a little boring, I mean for too long a time…”), and impromptu song and dance performances, in between which a very complex mother-daughter relationship is being revealed. The nature of this relationship is what lends the documentary a story line and ultimately its climax. It is also source to endless hypothesising and theorising: Is Mrs Beale to blame for her daughter’s ‘arrested development’? Does Little Edie use her mother as an excuse for her own inability to deal with the reality of life? The answers to these questions seem to lie – very fittingly – in a ‘grey’ area somewhere between both possibilities. The two women seem to both benefit and not benefit from the relationship. When asked on the matter in an interview, Albert Maysles gives his opinion that Edie and Edie were held together by the fact that they had this common heritage – the Bouviers, an American aristocracy – which was really a bind to them both. The mother wanted to be a singer, the daughter a dancer, and whether by professional outlook or just the nature of who they were, they simply could not be themselves as Bouviers and the only way to escape this was to go off and become recluses. And strangely, a mutual respect and unmistakable admiration for each other does seem to prevail over the pair’s endless bickering and frustrated tension.

From first meeting with outrage and disbelief, the Grey Gardens film and the Beales themselves have gone on to inspire a horde of productions and publications. In addition to various fashion features there has been – most recently – an HBO film starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange, but also a Broadway musical and numerous memorabilia scrapbooks from people with a real, or at times tenuous, link to Little Edie or the Beale family. The mystique and aesthetic of the Beales and Grey Gardens is very addictive and so this abundance of additional material, even that lacking in quality, comes as a welcome fix for all Big and Little Edie junkies. Just try it once.

Documentary: Grey Gardens
Directors: Albert Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer
Produced by: Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Susan Froemke
Distributed by: The Criterion Collection
Release date: USA 27 September

Book: Grey Gardens
Albert Maysles / Rebekah Maysles
Published by: Free News Projects
Publication date: 5/01/2009