The Garden of Edie
"Grey Gardens" at 50
“We’ll be raided again by the village of East Hampton,” Edith Bouvier Beale, “Little Edie,” says to Edith Bouvier Beale, “Big Edie,” in that unmistakable voice of hers: mid-century, mid-Atlantic, upper-class, New York. “You know, they can get you in East Hampton for wearing red shoes on a Thursday and all that sort of thing.” Shots of cars driving by trim houses on manicured streets. Neat windmills, neat beaches, neat ponds with neat reflections. Neat mansions, neat lawns. Roses twine symmetrically, artfully rustically, around a wooden paling. Grass is green and short and swept. Not a stray twig or branch peeps out of the bushes that dot the landscape like little green puddings. Then there is another house. Half-hidden, ambushed (pun intended) by shrubbery, encroached upon by the green growth that springs and spreads and chaoses around it like a suburban jungle, it nevertheless has an unassuming dignity about it, the dignity of old things gone half to seed. In large white letters appear the words “Grey Gardens”: the name of the house, the name of the movie.
The raid whose repetition Little Edie so feared occurred in 1971. Complaints had been coming in from neighbors, so one October day a team of twelve inspectors sallied forth to see what kind of double trouble the witches of East Hampton had been getting up to in their haunted house. They were greeted by feral cats and cobwebs, fleas and raccoons and garbage. The water didn’t run, the furnace didn’t work. The Suffolk County Health Department issued an order to the Beales: Clean up. Clean up—or face eviction. This story would have been content to remain just an interesting little piece of neighborhood lore, a mere local curiosity, had the two women not been aunt and first cousin to Jacqueline Lee Kennedy Onassis, née Bouvier, former First Lady of the United States.
When the media got wind of the fact that the relations of one of the richest, one of the most glamorous, one of the most elegant women in the world were living in such poverty, such filth and such squalor, they took the story and ran with it. To her credit, Onassis, along with her sister Lee Radziwill, contributed tens of thousands of dollars for the house to be cleaned and repaired and made inhabitable. Radziwill, moreover, introduced the Beales to the Maysles, the Maysles to the Beales. She had the idea that a documentary should be made about East Hampton, about the world of her childhood, a world of debutantes and the Maidstone Club and homemade peach ice cream. As they started shooting some footage, the filmmakers realized that the real fascination lay not in Jackie and Lee but in Edie and Edie. It was they who were the more stylish, the more “staunch,” the more stupendously, starrily stagy. So Jackie and Lee left, but Albert and David came back, came back to shoot the film that would grow in stature and in influence over the next five decades to be voted by the public as the best documentary ever made.
Documentary: “The Sublime is a documentary technique,” says Anne Carson. When the strange Sublime of the Beales reached its critical mass, documents came fast and thick. The order issued by the Suffolk County Health Department was a document of one kind, the newspaper and magazine articles that began to appear were documents of another. What the Maysles brothers were creating was also a document—document, from the Latin docere, “to teach.” What kind of Sublime is it we are being taught through this documentary? It is a documentary thin on plot and fact. No narrator, no nondiegetic music. Instead, there are little sunny slices of this odd life, like slices of an orange: bright, zesty, there to be sucked to the rind. If you saw someone lecturing on an orange, you would roll your eyes. The best way to learn about an orange is to eat it.
But in Grey Gardens edibility is questionable. You may not even notice the oranges because of all the rubbish; I didn’t. When I first watched the film I was appalled by disorder and disintegration; a visceral sense of disgust furred through me like mold. I shuddered when I saw raccoons abscond with half-eaten slices of Wonder Bread; I shivered as Little Edie went up those dark horror-movie steps in her high heels to the damp, dank attic. Yet the more times you watch the movie, the more all of that melts into the background. You let the raccoons have their slices, and you come to enjoy your own. You can start to taste the beauty, the zest. And you realize that perhaps this is what has happened to the Beales, this is maybe why they can stand to live like this.
Life was not always like this for them. Everywhere are remnants of past glory, like the tatters of a silk taffeta ballgown. Early on in the film, Little Edie—her instincts as an artist are unerring—brings out some of this memorabalia (how my more fallible artistic instincts itch to type “memoraBealeia”!) for the camera. In the world’s and in the Beales’ history, these poignant black-and-white photographs document another era. Here is Big Edie’s wedding picture, here is her husband and his handwritten scrawl (“So we did love each other”), here are the children when they were young, here is an old, old picture of Big Edie, a soft sepia profile in an oval. “It’s just a girl from a good French family… It’s a very beautiful face,” says Little Edie.
The same description does very well for Little Edie herself, and it is hard not to compare her to her more famous cousin. Wealthy, beautiful, stylish girls, twelve years apart, from the same “good family.” Little Edie was known then as “The Body Beautiful.” From photographs of her at fashion shows, she seems to have been a natural model, not only beautiful but poised and interesting, the kind of body that knows in its bones how to wear clothes. Throughout the film, she names rich men who proposed to her, men like the men Jackie actually married. Both are fashion icons today, one a byword for elegance, the other for eccentricity; with her retro bathing suits, Edie seems perpetually frozen at the end of a diving board, forever about to leap off into the life Jackie actually lived out.
So what happened? While Big Edie lives in a world of protesting “had”s (“I had everything I wanted,” “I was a great singer,” “I had a perfect marriage”) and Little Edie lives in a world of pregnant “could have”s (could have stayed in New York, could have become a star dancer, could have married this man or that man or that man or that man), one wonders if they really had or could have, given their family circumstances. John Vernou Bouvier Jr., patriarch of that “good French family,” was a New York stockbroker and a lawyer. Edith Ewing Bouvier, his daughter, was a New York eccentric and a singer. She married Phelan Beale, a partner in her father’s law firm, in 1917. In 1924, they bought the 28-room Grey Gardens, and in 1931, after they had had a daughter and two sons together, Phelan left her, left her dependent on her father for resources. But her father was no more tolerant of her love for singing and piano-playing, her artistic, theatric quirks, than her husband had been. After she turned up late to her son’s wedding, making a grand entrance in operatic costume, her father neatly trimmed her inheritance down from $825,000 to $65,000 in his will, doled out at an allowance of $300 per month, controlled by her sons. This was a document clearly intended to teach something. But it is very well neither Edie bothered to learn the lesson.
Fathers, brothers, husbands, sons—they all recede, or remain as spectral presences, either revered or feared. Little Edie recalls the rattling knees and dry mouth that were the symptoms of entering her father’s orbit: “Take that hat off, take that lipstick off, take that nail polish off.” Nom du père, indeed! Ever speculating about the past, she muses, “I needed training, where was I to get the training?” Then she remembers. “My father was alive, that was it. Mr. Beale would’ve had me committed.” Big Edie, meanwhile, is “crazy about” the sons who left, drives crazy the daughter who stayed behind.
The world of Grey Gardens is thus a feminine world, a matriarchal world. How to characterize the relationship between Big and Little Edie, except to say that the mother-daughter relationship, in all its fraught, tender intricacies, has never been so well-documented? Here is affection, and here is resentment; here is attachment, and here is reproach. Sharing the same name, the same house, the same unfulfilled artistic yearning, the same disregard for convention, the same taste for performance, mother and daughter overlap, blur, clash. Mother is who daughter might become, daughter is who mother could have been. Mother suffocates daughter, while daughter alternately resists and bends willingly to mother.
It is easy to read Big Edie as villain and Little Edie as victim. Big Edie limited her daughter’s life simply because and in the same way her own was limited. Big Edie unleashed her revenge for her life’s regrets upon her daughter. Big Edie subsumed her daughter’s needs and desires into her own. There were men Little Edie liked, but Mother didn’t like them. There were proposals Little Edie got, but Mother rejected them. There was an audition Little Edie had, but Mother pressured her all from March through July of 1952 to come back home—come back home and stay there for a quarter of a century. Abandoned by everybody, Big Edie has tightened the umbilical leash (or noose, if you ask Little Edie) on the only person who will stay. When Little Edie sings, Big Edie screeches at her to stop, even though when Little Edie leaves the room, Big Edie confesses to the Maysles that her daughter sings beautifully: “Better voice than I have.”
As for Little Edie, the environment of her mother’s home is both fertile womb and airless tomb. Maybe it really is all because of her mother that she never married, never had children, never had a career. Then again, you get the feeling that it is the dream she cherishes and not the realization, the possibility, not the fulfillment, the “road not taken” (she quotes from Frost’s poem at one point in the film), stretching on and on to who knows where. In contrast to the unreal unlived life, Grey Gardens is the real realm of make-believe; in their odd Eden, Edie and Edie need never curb their Edie-osyncrasies.1
So as much as Grey Gardens suffocates, it also protects, serving as the walled garden that shelters its inhabitants from the outside world, which is ever threatening to break through the thick green tangle that envelops the house. “You’re in this world, you know, you’re not out of this world,” Big Edie tells Little Edie. But the viewer doubts the veracity of that statement as it applies to both Edies. They are constantly losing their grasp of time. Little Edie doesn’t wear a watch, has to ask for the date. The way she sees the world is metamorphosed through magnifying glasses and binoculars. Things get lost around the house, outside of the house in the “complete sea of leaves.” A book is found in the attic that Little Edie doesn’t remember putting there, setting off a chain of increasingly paranoid conjectures. Men—the Maysles brothers; the gardener Brooks; Jerry “the Marble Faun” Torre, a teenager who helps the women around the house; Norman Vincent Peale, who thunders out an ethos of “No emotionalism, never give up”; the absent Mr. Beale, whom Little Edie recalls for his unforgiving punctuality; the longed-for “Libra man” who might provide “an ordered life” by acting as “a manager”—are the outside world’s representatives. They are trappers and escape hatches, controllers of time and money and chances. They could organize the chaos but could also destroy the creativity it engenders. They threaten the women with order, sex, washing machines.2
“It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present. You know what I mean? It’s awfully difficult,” says Little Edie. But between them, the women are content to be two ghosts drifting between passed present and present past, speaking their own private language of memories and songs and squabbles that repeat so often they become like lines from a play. “Tea for two / and two for tea / Me for you / and you for me,” Big Edie sings. The words become tenderly touching as they wrap around this intimacy both tragic and sublime.
In one corner of the yellow bedroom the women share is a beautiful painted portrait of a young Mrs. Beale, classically, startlingly lovely in her gilt frame. A little black cat pokes out his naughty head; he’s been using it to screen his potty time from the world. “Oh, isn’t that awful?” asks Little Edie. “No, I’m glad he is,” replies Big Edie. “I’m glad somebody’s doing something they want to do.” And indeed, where else can they encourage the free run of a thousand cats, where else can they write lines of poetry on the walls, but Grey Gardens? With whom else can they sing old songs while wearing big stripy floppy hats, dance old dances while wearing wild headscarves and makeshift skirts pinned over tights, but with each other?
One gets the feeling that they were performers in search of a camera, waiting, readying, steadying themselves for their closeup. Proponents of what they called “direct cinema,” cinéma vérité’s North American cousin, the Maysles were a camera in search of performers. They were not exactly flies on the wall, though; you can hear the Beales talking to them almost as if they were close friends, and near the end of the film, panning away to give Mrs. Beale some privacy in her dishabille, they land on themselves in the mirror, decked in their filming equipment. This lends the movie a peculiar warmth: “It’s the Maysles!” “Hi Edie, gentleman callers.”
After these gentlemen callers “toss[ed] the rind and skate[d] away,”3 what happened? In 1977, Big Edie died of pneumonia. Little Edie moved to New York City and starred in her own campy cabaret show, performing to her own songs and songs of a bygone era, including “Tea for Two.” Then she moved to Florida, where she could pursue to her heart’s content another of her favorite passions—swimming. She died in 2002, having kept sporadic contact with Albert Maysles.4 As for Grey Gardens, the house was sold first to Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, who then sold it to Liz Lange, a fashion designer. As for Grey Gardens, it has found an afterlife in parodies and in musicals, on runways and in books. Nothing, however, beats the original. “There’s nothing more to say, it’s all in the film,” Big Edie reportedly told Little Edie on her deathbed when asked if she had any last words. There is a truth, then, after all, to what she says in the film—“I did, I had my cake, loved it, masticated it, chewed it… I had everything I wanted.”
All good works of art are like the river of Heraclitus; you can swim in them again and again and find them different again and again, offering up different facets, different lessons, different glints and glimmers. Being capacious, they can hold your Protean shifts of self, expanding with you, growing with you. Grey Gardens especially so. This, I think, is what chiefly lies behind its popularity and its staying power. Depending on who you are or where you are in life, it could be a reminder to give your living space a good scrubbing. A portrait of the love and pain, the push and pull, the million tensions and emotions and complications that underscore the relationship between mother and daughter, parent and child. An exhortation to move out, a warning to live life according your own laws, on your own income, in your own home. A gentle nudge to move in, to spend more time with an aging parent, to hear their stories, which will soon pass out of memory like the stories of us all, so that the past may find a continuance in the present. A lookbook, an endless fount of fashion at its most resourceful, a masterclass in personal style. A radical vision of the animal world coexisting with the human, an acknowledgement that we are all God’s creatures. A raid. An homage to S-T-A-U-N-C-H women. A comedy with a great double act. A tragedy. A camp musical, staged domestically. A gothic horror story. A reality show, precursor to both Hoarders and Keeping Up with the Kardashians. A house tour, a strange lesson in interior design. A gathering up of the tatters of a faded aristocracy. An anthropological study. A feminist argument for women’s financial independence. An interesting way to spend an afternoon on Mother’s Day. An ode to aging, to the joys of growing older, to wrinkled sunwarmed flesh.
Most of all, I suspect, Grey Gardens owes its success to the fact that no one has yet devised a medium that can transmit smell. “We couldn’t take it. The smell was too pervasive” is the reason Albert gives for why the Maysles didn’t live in the house while filming. What is preserved instead is a series of images, moments, amber-colored dreams. The film’s first shot is of the house’s porch from the inside, a screen door and two windows that glow with greenery, and then the camera turns around to zoom in on Big Edie talking, rocking on a chair from behind a railing. The film’s last shot is of Little Edie dancing with zest and abandon, crooning to herself, also from behind a railing. The camera is just a guest in this ghost realm that teems with life, just a visitor to the Garden of Edie. But even a glimpse, even a slice of sight can be enough to see someone clearly by, if our minds and our hearts are open. “Mother used to say there’s good in everybody,” said Albert Maysles. “I make sure to get that.”
Dear Readers, last week was the 50th anniversary of Grey Gardens, which prompted me to rewatch it, which prompted me to write this essay! I hope you enjoyed. If you did, please like this post, restack, share with a friend, subscribe to Soul-Making, or tell me your thoughts in the comments—I always love hearing from you!
Nor I my penchant for puns!
Little Edie: “the Marble Faun is moving in. He just gave us a washing machine — that cements the deal. I gotta get out of here. I can’t spend the rest of my life washing clothes.” — relatable
Anne Carson again, from “Foam.”
David died in 1987.
Superbly written. Nice play on words in places.
A case study of fabulism and pathological narcissism and classist hauteur. Great writing, Ramya!