From an online review:
In 1972, in their January 10th issue, New York magazine published a personal essay by Gail Sheehy recounting her strange encounters with the ladies who lived at Grey Gardens. Events that are only hinted at or briefly mentioned in the film are detailed in Sheehy’s piece. For those of you who wonder why Mrs. Beale described her daughter’s younger days as wild (when it seemed Edie only wanted to be on her own for a while), Edie regales Sheehy with the tale of how she ran away from home three times before Mr. Beale abandoned her mother. And what of that abandonment? Apparently Mrs. Beale was so bored with the strictures of society that she hired an accompanist and started singing in New York nightclubs. This simply wasn’t done, especially by a woman from a prominent family with a husband and children. Instead of reining her in, Mr. Beale threw up his hands and moved out to his hunting lodge. Mrs. Beale’s father was less aloof. After threatening several times to disown her for her bohemian behavior, Major Bouvier finally cut her out of his will after she showed up, outrageously dressed, halfway into her own son’s wedding. Upon Bouvier’s death, she received the sum of $65,000 in a trust fund to be administered by her sons. Needless to say, the money was long gone by the time Sheehy or the Maysles got to Grey Gardens. The tragic fable of the Beale women is this: by turning their backs on society, they paid the price of their freedom by having society turn its back on them.
8 comments:
Well, this raises a couple of questions for me:
1. How the mother and daughter seem to be "crazy" in exactly the same way. Did Little Edie inherit a mental illness from Big Edie? Or did she just learn to emulate her eccentricities growing up?
2. How big a factor is their wealth in making this story so interesting? Would the same characters saying basically the same thing in a shack down by the river (vs. a seaside mansion in the Hamptons) be as interesting? Would we be more likely to disregard them as "nuts"? Would we be less sympathetic?
Ooh, very interesting questions. My first reaction is that, yes, it would be less interesting if they were random poor people. The "hook" of GG is that they are Bouviers.
I do wonder whether I'd be more likely to pity them. Occasionally you hear stories about old ladies found living in deplorable conditions with 25 cats. I always find those stories so sad.
Thanks Erin for tracking this info down. While watching the movie I kept wondering about how these two women went from being in society to being holed up in that big old house. I’m not sure I agree that all so much hinges on the famous name—at least for me, anyway, I’ve never been into that whole watching the rich and famous thing. But I think their background is important because their circumstances at the time of the movie are very changed from what they were in earlier decades.
The Beale women fell (were pushed?) out of one world, and landed in another. In fact, the world they landed in had no other occupants but themselves. I kept wishing that there could have been some footage from, say, ten and twenty years earlier.
DW said, "I kept wishing that there could have been some footage from, say, ten and twenty years earlier."
That would have been cool. But would it have upset the enterprise in any way? The filmmakers thought they had to show the old newspaper clippings of the house cleanup for background. But they limited "outside references" to that. They made a deliberate decision to not elucidate the story beyond that and what the women themselves had to say. Was that a good decision?
Also, I kept hoping to see something from the neighbors. What did these hoity-toity types think of their eccentric, messy neighbors? But including that would have made it a different kind of documentary. It would have taken away from the focus on the Edies.
I thought of that, too. You know all the neighbors would have had LOADS to say. But that, too, would have introduced judgment into the film, which the Maysleses obviously were trying to avoid.
I agree. There was some footage that showed some of the neighboring spreads. Don’t you find it somewhat surprising that those uber-rich and very image conscious types didn’t force them out? They certainly could have engineered a way to do so if they wished. Instead it seems that took the opposite tact of pretending that they were not even there. So I think it appropriate that the film ignored the neighbors too.
And I think the movie wouldn’t have been as good if it had footage from an earlier time for just the reasons you advance, kc. I guess what I’d really like is some sort of “7 Up” series where the filmmakers did another documentary every decade for say thirty years. Of course, thirty years earlier, would anybody ever have thought that such an interesting story was going to develop?
Well, there was some speculation that the neighbors were the ones who engineered the "raids" in the first place, when the Edies were told to clean up or get out.
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