Flower, the Mayles version can be rented from Netflix, which is how my husband and I saw it. You can probably get it off Amazon or ebay.

I haven't seen the musical or the recent HBO production. I don't know if they are trying to bring anythink new to the situation. The documentary was fascinating, but pretty exploitative and really didn't have a point, other than to show how tragic and these two women had become; they were obviously both mentally ill. Jackie Kennedy (Little Edie's cousin, I think) was embarrassed into helping them. I guess it showed how people can be "lost" to those around them and live in absolute squalor right in the middle of some of the richest real estate on earth.

Flowerpower,
I have a 2-disc set of the Maysles documentaries of the Beales of East Hampton. Disc 1, "Grey Gardens," was released 1976. The recent HBO version with Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange added fictional flashbacks to the years when both the Beales were young. Disc 2, "The Beales of Grey Gardens," was released in 2006 and contained unused footage left over from the 1976 documentary. (My set was a gift, but I'm sure it's available at Amazon.)

"Big Edie," Edith Bouvier Beale, was a sister to "Black Jack" Bouvier, father of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. "Little Edie" and Jackie were first cousins although Edie Beale was a decade older.

Privileged lives gone wrong, inability to surmount setbacks and tend to practical matters, mother and daughter becoming more co-dependent and delusional as the years go by....very sad.

I just saw the new HBO version, and will soon watch the 1975 Maysles' documentary.

Yes, the new movie is just wonderful. Very sad, sweet and beautiful.

The elder Edie is either absolutely deranged... or the sanest, most centred, liberated person you've ever met.

I do fear that the younger Edie lived a bit in a dream world... and eventually retreated into it, hook-line-and-sinker.

Lange and Barrymore are monstrously good in this film. Lange simply becomes a whole 'nother person entirely when she is portraying the old lady Beale. No THAT'S some real acting... she has all the weird "old lady" tics down perfectly. The actor's observation she must have done for this part!

And this is, for me, Drew Barrymore's finest moment ever. Really, it's the first time she's actually PORTRAYED a character, really acted, and not just relied on her own cute looks and personality to float a film character across. Brava!

And you have to love Jeanne Tripplehorne as Jackie O. Gawd, I loved her early-70's hair... kind of an "extended" version of the 60's flip... teased and lacquered. It's a very feminine, patrician look I think should be revived today.

As for Young Edie's performance in the Greenwich Village cabaret: sure, it was monstrously kitschy, awful even, and the audience are surely the kind of big city theater aesthetes who pride themselves on savoring kitsch in an ironic, nudge-nudge way. Maybe Young Edie was "in" on the joke... but I don't think she cared: she was thrilled to be onstage. She'd always thought it was her metier... and, by the end, we're tending to agree with her mother that perhaps she had no business going to NYC in the 40's for auditions.

Did you ever read that book called CLASS by Paul Fussell?

It's a very spot-on dissection of the American class structure. Don't read it unless you want to find yourself in its pages... pinned down like a butterfly.

Anyway, one of the things Fussell says-- after he has described all the various echelons of American society, from the absolute lowest to the absolute highest--- is this, in effect: "Do you want to change your class level? I'll let you in on a secret: you can't. No matter how your fortunes rise or fall in your life, you can never change the class into which you were born... This is because class has nothing to do with money."

I really thought about this as I saw Big Edie in the Maysles film, offering them some liver pate'... while she lived in relative squalor.

you know, watching the new 2009 movie, I feel that all parties making the film wished to elicit compassion for the characters.

I'm not sure I feel the same way about the Maysles' 1975 documentary, though.

Were they trying to inspire mirth with their expose'? Horror? Disgust?

For me, at this point, weighing the whole GREY GARDENS story, the $64 question is:

Did Big Edie in fact ruin Little Edie's chances in life by squashing her career and romantic ambitions?

What say YOU?

ras

Yes, Big Edie ruined Little Edie's life, but Little Edie bore some responsibility in it, too. Unfortunately though, I don't think she was capable at the time of a truly rational decision about her own future; she and her mother were already too co-dependent for Little Edie to really begin her own life. She chose to go home, ostensibly to take care of her mother, but was it also an excuse to absolve herself of making her way in the world, the easy way out? It's sad, because whatever illness they suffered from could probably be treated today.

I think the Maysles' film was just voyeurism.

I saw the documentary, but have not seen the movie. I probably will not see it because watching the documentary was heart wrenching for me and I felt like a peeping tom. It seemed oddly intrusive to me.

Someone said Jackie Kennedy was shamed into helping her aunt and cousin - but, really Jackie didn't have money of her own. Her father was broke when she was just a kid and they basically lived off relatives until her mother divorced Black Jack and remarried. Jackie didn't have her own money until she got a million or two from Joe Kennedy for not divorcing his son (back in the early 50s when that was a lot of money - smart lady).

I agree with Mambo Deb, Big Edie did ruin Little Edie's life, but Little Edie allowed her to do it, most likely because she knew she couldn't cope with life in the real world.

I am reminded also of how John-John Kennedy-- when he was dating Dary Hannah, remember?-- also wanted to go to Hollywood to be a movie star. He did not want to go into politics and law. His mother had raised him in NYC, going to the opera and to the theater, seeing all manner of splendid performing arts... and that's what he'd wanted to do all along.

But Jackie put the kibosh on that idea. Basically the lad's surname made all the decisions for him. It was thought that a young man of his social class and ethnicity shouldn't go into show-biz... too déclassé.

So he went into Law. And we all know that his heart was really not in it; he failed that bar-- what?-- about three times before passing?

I think that Big Edie also harbored these ideas... that a Bouvier/Beale should not go into showbiz.

That brings to mind Pete, and his Dyckman family background. Even though I love the idea of Pete with his snobbishness and arrogance working as a junior acct exec at SC (and how we love to hate Pete), it has never really rung true to me. Why would someone with his pedigree want to work in a middling ad shop? If he had a burning desire to work in advertising, he could probably start higher at the top in a bigger firm, due to his family connections. What do you all think?

I think Pete had no real money of his own, like Jackie. Remember when he asks his dad for $ to buy the condo or co-op or whatever it was his wife had to have? He was turned down flat. After Pete's dad died, they found out he had lost the fortune.

I also think there are some correlations between the Grey Gardens story and Mad Men - Little Edie was seen by her father only as either wife material or a secretary. He never saw her as a person. Very typical of the stereotyping of girls in that era. Both Edies were "different" so they did not fit into the roles society had for them and they paid the price. Even the sons/brothers turned away from them.

They also became their own victims of the stereotyping because they expected somebody else to take care of them, instead of earning their own money. Even when they are at the end of their trust and have no food or heat, they resort to manipulation to get money flowing again, not honest endeavor. That was so much the tool of women then.

I question whether BOTH Edies were bonkers. Wouldn't it seem strange for both of them to be mentally ill at the same time? It's not contagious. I do think there was a ton of denial going on.When Jackie visits and Big Edie tells Little Edie to fetch some pate - there is no pate, obviously. She seems genuinely suprised that the chairs are dirty. And when Jackie points out that the cat is peeing on the portrait, it is again blown off in
some vague way, as if it were not really happening.

We saw this kind of denial in Mad Men, too. Kitty, Betty, Peggy, Pete's mother, even Joan. They seem divorced from reality in some ways. Are we like that now? Or have our eyes been opened?

The more I think about the Grey Gardens story, the more I perceive that Big Edie was not so crazy at all... she was a queer kind of "survivor". As you so well point out, flowerpower, she hadn't dfit into the role that society had prepared for her.

I get the impression that Big Edie was furious at being dumped by the rich Mr. Beale, furious at having been given the care of an irresponsible-- maybe even schizophrenic--- daughter.

Letting the mansion go to ruin was Big Edie's bitter way of staging her own big protest against her class, ethnicity.

Both women say a whole lot of things in both versions of these movies.... but Big Edie does not, to me, say things that would brand her as schizophrenic.

But Little Edie does, I'd say.

For instance: in both films we see Little Edie explaining to the camera her elaborate philosophy of wearing a skirt. (You female readers, did you have any clue as to what she was trying to convey, vis-à-vis the careful layering of pantyhose and so forth?). It was this scene more than any other that convinced me that Little Edie was in fact schizophrenic. My work in psychiatric wards has shown me what they're like, and this is very much what they're like: often explaining some relatively unimportant detail in great, abstruse detail.

How interesting. I will definitely put Grey Gardens on my summer movie viewing. I want to see both.

I recall hearing the JFK, jr. was in a play once and was quite good. His Mother was not enthused. I think JFK, Jr. would have mad a terrifice actor. He had it all especially in the charisma dept. I think he would have eventually gone into politics maybe in his 50's. You also have to be an actor for that. Didn't his sister fail miserably.... bless her heart for trying.

Rasputin, interesting angle that Big Edie would deliberately let the house go as a kind of passive-aggressive protest. It must have really frosted the cajones of those folks in the Hamptons to have that near them. Very effective!

From the HBO presentation, I did not think Big E was angry at having to be saddled with Little E. Quite the opposite. But that was a dramatization. I saw a controlling, fake Bohemian mother ruining her daughter's life with her dependency issues. But if you put it in the perspective that Big E was desserted by her husband and left to cope with an increasingly out of reality daughter, that makes a lot of sense and so does the condition of the house. I think the HBO show would have been far more interesting in that light.

Drew Barrymore said it was about a love story between a mother and daughter. Well, ok but the rest of the layers would have made this so much more intriguing. It's kind of like saying MM is about the early 60's - well, it is but with much more depth.

And your statement: "My work in psychiatric wards has shown me what they're like, and this is very much what they're like: often explaining some relatively unimportant detail in great, abstruse detail." My work in education had lead me to exactly the same conclusion! Times 1000.

The GG story is a very timely meme for us nowadays.... as we are all collectively pondering questions such as "What is rich?" "What is poor?"

A darkly funny (to me) aspect of the GG tale is how the subject of liver pate keeps coming up...

....and all the while we see cats crapping all over the house.

(Urgh!)

(-:

Did you notice when "Jackie" was visiting and they were sitting in the garden-Jackie dropped her scarf and the camera followed it as though that were important. But nothing came of it. I wonder if i t was anything significant or just a bit of errant camera work?

Big and Little E. also crapped in the house.
What amazes me is that Ben Bradlee actually brought the house back to life. The smells alone must have been very hard to get rid of.

@ flowerpower:

I'll watch GG again today, and look for the scarf scene....

You know, near the beginning of the 2009 dramatization, during a 1936 flashback, Little Edie's father says, "Your only task this summer is to find a nice fella from the Maidstone Club."

"But father darling, they're all so DULL!" comes the reply.

Why would Little Edie say such a thing, I wonder? Surely in her circle there were men who were very rich, rich handsome, very clever/smart/lively, and surely some who even had show biz interests/ambitions of their own.

Just what kind of excitement in a man WAS she looking for? Later she tells Jackie O. "I could've been First Lady!" Was that her goal?

Now let's turn our laser-beam on the character Gould... Big Edie's blond, debonair pianist friend and companion.

Am I off-base, or is this character obviously gay? He seems like it to me in the dramatization... and the genuine photographs of him in the 1975 documentary surely set off my "gaydar".

Was Big Edie aware of this, do you think? Or was she "barking up the wrong tree"? Did she have romantic designs on him?

Or maybe I'm wrong, and Gould was, in fact, her lover?

What say you? Does it matter?

I re-watched GG (2009) tonight.

And yes, no doubt about it: Big Edie had been in love with a gay man.

That's her tragedy, perhaps.

She's certainly not the first, or last, woman ever to fall in love with a gay man; but it appears she was literally won over by him, smitten...

and she never bothered to formulate a "Plan B".

)-;

Wow. I really learned a new word tonight.

Remember in GG (2009) when Phelan Beale comes home on the Friday to see the house devoted to a party... of which Big Edie is the star?

He growls: "Get them all out of here! Especially HIM!"

(referring to Gould).

Then, sotto voce, snarls: "Goddamn ganymede!"

I had to look this one up on the InterWeb! Yes, "ganymede" is a now-archaic synonym for a male homosexual.

I'd forgotten in my Bulfinch's that Ganymede had been a beautiful young boy who became one of Zeus's lovers.

I felt a real empathy for the the Edies of Grey Gardens. Let's face it, not everyone's life turns out as expected. I enjoyed watching the characters act as though they were still on-top-of-the-world . In the end, I felt that they maintained their dignity inspite of the obvious problems of their environment and their relationship.