Grey Gardens
That name always rang a bell, but I don’t recall ever really knowing to what it referred. Then, today I got a typical mailer from Esquire magazine, one of my vestigial subscriptions which I am forever threatening myself to allow to expire, but am never quite ready to allow to lapse. That email was recommending to me 38 great documentaries to watch. Many of the suggestions like March of the Penguins, Free Solo, Man on Wire, The Times of Harvey Milk and Won’t You Be My Neighbor, I had seen along the way and quite enjoyed. Many others were not recognizable in any way to me. But there were some like Grey Gardens and I Am Not Your Negro and The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara, that seemed like something I should have watched but hadn’t yet. So, I went onto Amazon Prime and promptly rented Grey Gardens to see what this name that range so familiar to me was all about.
It seems that this is a 1975 documentary that has become a cult classic, especially in the Gay community. It chronicles the life and times of an old, offbeat aunt of Jackie Kennedy Onassis and her quirky maiden daughter (then 56 years old), who live in an old derelict house on the beach in Easthampton with more cats and litter (both types, pun intended) than could be healthy. Strangely, their names are both Edith Bouvier Beale (“Big Edie” and “Little Edie”). I watched twenty minutes of this film which just seems focused on letting these two screwball women speak randomly about whatever is on their mind and to do so in the most imperious and haughty “Locust Valley Lockjaw” accents you’ve ever heard. They are the picture of kooks that you might find attached to a definition of that word in the dictionary.
The story reminded me of an article I read last year in The New York Times called The Jungle Prince of Delhi about the weirdly iconoclastic “royal” family of Oudh, who lived in a derelict mansion in Delhi with strange animals, no money and tons of intrigue. They were a mystery because they were headed by a mother who claimed to be a displaced member of the royal family of one of the great Maharajis of Delhi, who had lost her way during the post-independence displacement that occurred in 1947 when the northern part of the country was torn apart between Hindus and Muslims. She had two children, a boy and a girl, who stayed by her side during her travails until the government of India for some reason chose to acknowledge her rights and claims and give her this old palace in the capital city of Delhi, which they had no other particular use for. The family has lived there ever since in the ruins of this old palace, scraping by on a few rupees here and there to make ends meet.
I am not clear about what is so fascinating to us about this broke-down faded-glory story of wealth and prominence fading into the lunacy of clinging societal hangers-on that must truly consider themselves better than the rest of us. That seems to be an intoxicating story that while not really understandable is tolerably fascinating to us. These are truly emperors with no clothes. The fact that they associate with near feral cats, a classic symbol of pet royalty, is all part of the illusion and mystery.
In the case of the Beale’s, the insanity of the two is on display for 95 minutes non-stop and the videographer roams the tangled bushes of the overgrown seaside estate. Little Edie bears a remarkable resemblance to Norma Desmond of Sunset Boulevard, wearing every imaginable type of headgear fashioned out of other pieces of clothing. She dresses up in her off-beat style, combining skirts, pantyhose, shawls and pants and then proceeds to spend some of her screen time explaining the utilitarian and stylish nature of her wardrobe. Big Edie meanwhile is often shot with barely any clothes on at all and using the excuse of sunbathing and the further fallback of being old and uncaring of any external validation or opprobrium.
I couldn’t watch the whole 95 minutes of this craziness, but I did skip through the film and listen in occasionally to see if sanity returned, and it did not. The cult nature of the film is such that it is so crazy and there are enough crazy sound bites (like the fact that the town of Easthampton will give you a ticket for wearing red shoes on Thursday) that mostly refer to these wacky women trying to make sense out of a world that is racing by them and their old world ways. Big Edie died in 1977 and Little Edie, the veritable end of the line of the Bouvier Beale lineage finally sold the house to Ben Bradlee of Washington Post fame and took up residence in Bal Harbour, Florida until her own death in 2002. The house was gradually cleaned up and recently sold at market for $20 million, but not before there was a very well-attended Grey Gardens Yard Sale that was crawling with fans who picked over and took away every conceivable piece of memorabilia, the most valuable being those pieces that figured memorably and prominently in the documentary. I don’t dare check, but there is probably a very brisk market for this junk (at least that which can be authenticated) on E-Bay.
As I try to make sense of this phenomenon, I think about the iconic idols of the Gay community; people like Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli and Cher. They were all flashy entertainers who stood for extreme feminism and an attitude than put them squarely into Diva territory. I have gone to see several iterations of Cher’s last performances (one in Las Vegas fifteen years ago and one more recently in Madison Square Garden). In Vegas, she started the show by telling the audience that she had been “a fricken’ Diva for forty years” and that others like Madonna and Britney needed to step up to take over for her. She then really started her show by saying, “Follow THIS ya bitches!” Now that is the quintessential nature of attitude.
Well, the Bouvier Beale’s certainly had attitude, but there was nothing about them that made them flashy entertainers or models of extreme feminism. Grey Gardens was more iconic the way that Downton Abbey has fascinated American women and Gays. They represent a fading world that cannot keep pace with the march of modernity, but whose inhabitants hold their heads high with undying belief that they are above the fray and will always prevail.