David Maysles, Albert Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer (1975)
Grey Gardens is a fourteen-room mansion in East Hampton, New York. Designed in 1897, the house and its surrounding estate were bought in 1923 by a married couple, Phelan and Edith Beale. After they split up, the wife was left to look after the place and the couple’s children, including their one daughter, also named Edith. According to Wikipedia, the house and grounds are in the neighbourhood of Georgica Pond, ‘a 290-acre … coastal lagoon (‘…the East Hampton Trustees … monitor a cycle of draining the lagoon and replenishing it with Atlantic Ocean water’); the mansion was named for ‘the color of the dunes, the concrete garden walls, and the sea mist’. By the early 1970s, the place had fallen into such unsanitary disrepair that its remaining occupants – the two Ediths – were facing eviction and the razing of their home. In the summer of 1972, relatives stepped in to fund structural improvements to the property, enabling the impoverished Beales to remain there. The celebrity of one of these relatives, nieces of the elder and cousins of the younger Edith Beale, increased the publicity surrounding Grey Gardens. The bill for repairs was paid by Lee Radziwill and her sister, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.
The Maysles brothers begin their documentary[1] with a montage of newspaper articles about the parlous state of Grey Gardens, where Jackie O spent summers as a child, and the financial lifeline that she and her sister threw their poor relations. The camera then moves onto the property and indoors. It doesn’t venture beyond the estate again, except in a sequence where the junior Beale swims in the nearby lagoon. Otherwise, fifty-something ‘Little Edie’, as she’s known, is hardly less housebound than ‘Big Edie’, her nearly octogenarian mother. Human visitors to the property are few and far between – the gardener, a teenage handyman whom Little Edie calls the Marble Faun (after the Nathaniel Hawthorne novel), a well-dressed elderly man and a fortyish woman who call in to drink a toast and eat cake on Big Edie’s birthday. Animal companions are more numerous. The place is full of feral cats, some decorating the bed where Big Edie spends most of her time. In the basement, raccoons eat food that the Beales have chucked away there. You don’t need to see the insect life inside Grey Gardens to know it must abound.
Both women are fond of sunbathing and unworried about exposing their flesh to the camera which, in Big Edie’s case, is part of what makes the film tough viewing for the squeamish. Little Edie, though not exactly toned or slender, is easier to watch – or would be if she didn’t flirt so blatantly and awkwardly with the Maysleses and their camera. When the brothers arrive at the start of the film, they introduce themselves as ‘gentleman callers’ and that famous phrase from The Glass Menagerie seems to give Little Edie her theatrical cue. A quick-change artist, she appears in many outfits in the course of Grey Gardens, from fur coats to shorts and halter-neck tops to improvisations like ‘pantyhose … under a short skirt … then you can pull the stockings up over the pants under the skirt – or you can always take off the skirt and use it as a cape’. Her headgear is various, too – turban, headscarf, bathing cap, what looks like an adapted balaclava – but she’s never without it.
The information that Little Edie developed alopecia (in her late thirties) is something else gleaned from Wikipedia rather than explained in the film. I also learned from online reading that Phelan Beale departed the scene in 1931, leaving his wife dependent on the monthly allowance he paid her; that, after their eventual divorce in 1946, John Vernou Bouvier III (Jacqueline’s father) took over paying the allowance; that Little Edie, after living and working away, moved back to Grey Gardens in 1952; that her two brothers, both professionally successful, ‘refused to pay for the home’s utilities and upkeep in order to cause the women to leave the dilapidated mansion’ – a plan stymied by their cousins’ intervention. It’s fair enough that the film-makers don’t supply this factual background. They’re presenting rather than exploring who the Beales are.
The Maysleses are nevertheless intent on conveying the regretful retrospection that pervades the Edies’ present. (It’s another connection with The Glass Menagerie: ‘The play is memory’.) Before and during the early years of her marriage, Big Edie was a successful amateur singer, performing at parties in her home and at local functions. When she launches into ‘Tea For Two’, ‘You and the Night and the Music’ and ‘Night and Day’, her recall of the lyrics is shaky but her voice still tuneful enough to suggest how good it might once have been or, with further training, might have become. In her youth, Little Edie was a fashion model in New York City and Florida, and in the early post-war years a dancer in Manhattan. As if to prove it, she does a couple of little solo routines for the Maysleses’s benefit, to embarrassing effect. Whereas Big Edie is in no fit state to compete with these, Little Edie briefly trespasses on her mother’s singing territory – ‘People Will Say We’re in Love’, ‘Lili Marleen’. This irks Big Edie – especially her daughter’s pronunciation of ‘love’ as ‘laahv’ in the former song: ‘What d’you mean “laahv”? You’re not Czechoslovakian or something.’ That gets Little Edie extending the vowel sound even further in the next verse.
Squabbling is the Edies’ routine form of communication. Whether or not this is how they normally behave when they’re not being filmed, it becomes – with occasional exceptions like the ‘laahv’ spat – boring. So does their playing to camera more generally, even allowing that aborted performing careers may have intensified their appetite for doing so. When I first saw Grey Gardens (I don’t remember exactly how long ago) I knew the scenario but was unprepared for the startling details. With its shock value reduced, the film hardly rewards a second viewing. The squalor of the house is still nauseating and serves to express how the Beales’s fortunes and hopes have decayed but ninety-five minutes is a long time to watch the same point being made in the same disagreeable way.
That’s not the view of BFI member Jenny Newman (the film was shown as this month’s offering in the ‘Member Picks’ slot), who describes Grey Gardens on the programme note as ‘The most incredible documentary of all time’. Although I obviously don’t agree, Jenny Newman’s accolade does make me wonder what the point was of dramatising the material. In the years after Little Edie’s death (in 2002, twenty-five years after her mother), Grey Gardens became a stage musical then a TV film, both of them award-winning. I can’t imagine how either preserves one of the most distinctive things about the documentary – that it shows real people behaving like people in a play (especially Little Edie, stage whispering to the Maysleses that she’s got to get away from the life she now has). Turning the Beales into actual characters in a drama robs them of a crucial dimension – or, at least, removes a crucial dimension of how they perform.
On its original release Grey Gardens was controversial. Walter Goodman in the New York Times objected that the Maysleses presented the Beales ‘as a pair of grotesques’, asking ‘why were they put on exhibition this way?’ One straightforward, practical answer was supplied by Little Edie herself, who said she ‘made Grey Gardens in order to get some food for my mother’. In an interview in 2014 Albert Maysles claimed the Beales’ ‘behavior was just their way of asserting themselves. And what could be a better way to assert themselves than a film about them asserting themselves?’ Walter Goodman was right that the Maysleses made a bizarre spectacle of the Beales and their degradation but it’s hard to believe they intended to make fun of them. To the extent that both Edies address remarks to the brothers and their own voices are sometimes heard, the Maysleses are involved in Grey Gardens rather than merely observers. They may well have developed an affection for their subjects. They clearly regret the women’s fall from social grace: why else is the camera repeatedly transfixed by photographs or portraits on the mansion walls that show younger, more beautiful versions of Big and Little Edie?
It’s doubtful anyway that many newcomers to Grey Gardens in 2022 will find it offensively exploitative. The BFI programme note for this screening also quoted a more recent and enthusiastic review, by Jane Giles in Sight & Sound (September 2014): ‘It’s fingernails-down-the-blackboard wonderful … a cult classic, wildly entertaining and camp as Christmas. … But it’s also a film that allows women to speak in their own crazy voices …’ Giles’s effortless switch from levity to right-on overstatement encapsulates how the film is now likely to be seen – as anticipating the era of I-am-what-I-am, of DIY construction of ‘identity’ (particularly female ‘identity’) through the dressing-up box. When Big and Little Edie move beyond bickering with each other to shouting in parallel in the camera’s direction, they’re harbingers of look-at-me-listen-to-me culture. As such, they’ll appeal to plenty of present-day viewers but not to anyone oppressed by competing media and social media voices so insistent that you want them to shut up. You want it all the more when the noisy, blinkered self-assertion seems – as it often does seem, and as the Beales’s surely was – a front for desperation.
29 July 2022
[1] As shown above, Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer share the directing credit but Grey Gardens is usually thought of as a Maysles brothers’ film. This note will reflect that.
